Teaching Romanticism: An RC Pedagogies Blog

The other day I took students to see prized items at the E.J. Pratt Library.  As others have noted on this blog, students really seem to love Blake.  Luckily at Toronto we have an impressive Blake collection.  Because the students were so excited about Blake in class and seemed eager to write about him in their papers, I had expected that they would be most excited about seeing items such as electrotype plates of Songs of Innocence and Experience and copy M of “A Song of Liberty.”  The seminar took a pleasant but unexpected turn when one student, admiring the third edition of Darwin’s The Botanic Garden containing Blake’s engraving “The Fertilization of Egypt,” said that the paper seemed “cool.”  This prompted a series of questions about papermaking and printing in general.  The students did not know much about book production beyond Blake’s unique illuminated printing process.  This is perhaps not surprising, since Blake’s methods are so integral to understanding his texts.  Plus, sources such as The William Blake Archive give students easy access to Blake’s works, revealing them to be much more than printed words in the pages of their modern editions.  Though Blake is exceptional and deserves our and students’ attention, I do wonder if it might be worth spending some time in our classes discussing how, as one student put it, “normal books were made.”

While there is a danger, as Crystal Lake voiced in an earlier post, of overwhelming students with information that takes valuable time away from primary texts themselves, I still think students of Romanticism would benefit from knowing more about how those primary texts were made.  I’m admittedly biased when it comes to such issues.  In addition to being a Teaching Assistant for the English Department, I am a Teaching Assistant for the undergraduate Book and Media Studies Program where I lecture about the hand-press period.  While I wasn’t surprised to find that the students in my Material Bibliography and Print Culture course are fascinated by the history of printing, I was impressed to find how much interest in book production my literature students expressed.  Once we covered the production of paper, they wanted to know how Blake’s illuminated printing differed from the examples of his commercial work I showed them (including his engravings of gallstones in James Earle’s Practical Observations on the Operation of the Stone).  They also wanted to know about the differences between copperplate engraving and the steel-plate engravings found in literary annuals.  In the context of these other “normal” books, Blake’s methods became even more exciting.  Moreover, providing students with an overview of Romantic-era book production brought home some of the ideas discussed in class, such as the fact that most books were expensive and that different social and economic classes bought and read different literature.

I am interested to know if others teach undergraduates about the material production of texts in addition to their socio-political contexts.  And, if so, how is this information introduced in the classroom?  I have come across an impressive number of YouTube videos about printing.  Many are poorly made, yet there are a few interesting ones that have helped book history undergraduates I’ve taught see printing in action.  (One decent short video I’ve come across includes superfluous puppets.)  I’d be interested if anyone else has similar videos or other tools that they either use in lectures or post on course websites for students to view on their own time.

Diedre, Eric and Crystal have all given compelling reasons for a contemporary “in” to Romantic literature. Diedre’s stunning example of a student connecting “The Negro’s Complaint” to poets in Singapore was complemented by her admission that she is “(still) a historicist critic.” Crystal’s argument that we should not let contemporary texts replace the focus of the course on “primary sources themselves,” is an important rejoinder to keep historicism at the core of what teachers of the Romantic period do.

How do we, though, justify a Romantics course when we aren’t primarily teaching survey or period courses? Is there, in other words, a purpose to teaching Romanticism that isn’t contained within a historical survey?

Here’s my reasoning.

At Georgia Tech, we are tasked to teach topical courses as what our program director calls a “vehicle” for introducing multimodal composition. We don’t just teach writing at Georgia Tech, we also teach other modalities: oral, visual, electronic and non-verbal. Part of my interest in collaboration is the way that social media applications can provide exciting challenges to the traditional image of the English student isolated at a desk, reading poems and writing alone. I am convinced that teaching multimodality can open up new ways of approaching Romantic texts that are collaborative and creative.

As I prepare my Spring sections of “Blake 2.0: William Blake and Digital Culture,” I am struck by the different projects that Blake helps to inspire in Twentieth-Century culture both within and without digital culture. In the collection I edited for the journal ImageTexT on “William Blake and Visual Culture,” I found a comic artist named Joel Priddy who wanted to create a short comic on both the visionary travels of William and the relative sense of isolation Catherine felt during his reveries. He called his short “Mr. Blakes Company.”

Similarly, the do it yourself (DIY) magazine Make recently published an article where Gareth Branwyn researched Joseph Viscomi’s work to conduct a series of “Relief-Etching Experiments” designed to allow people to make prints using a close approximation of Blake’s method. I find each project refreshing alternatives to the standard academic essay. Furthermore, I feel that each provides innovative ways to discuss the conjunction of participatory culture and collaboration, and the individualism embodied in both the myth of the Romantic genius and the DIY movement.

But I also feel that, should I engage in projects like these, I need to conceptualize the purpose of such projects. Do I really feel that the technical projects offered by Branwyn and Viscomi get me closer to Blake’s technique and, thus, to Romantic-era printing? And if so, to what end? I’m not a commercial printer or a graphic designer. Do I have my students read Priddy’s comic to get a better sense of how comic artists envision his domestic life? Why?

Obviously, I have many questions here. I do feel that the organization of my department, and its emphasis on creating multimodal forms of response to literary texts provides new opportunities for understanding just what we do when we teach Romanticism. I also like my students to feel that they are not simply critically analyzing a work, but that they are also actively engaging in a constructive response to the work. On some level, I like my students to get the sense that Romantic authors can give a set of practical guidelines for students’ own work. At the same time, I’m not an MFA teacher.

I feel that Blake, along with many other artists in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, can provide an interesting case for a practical or a pragmatic pedagogy for the Romantic period. In my pragmatic model, the history of the period is only one part of Romantic education. Another part is finding a way to understand the reason why Blake inspires creative responses, and to engage in such responses in a thoughtful and critical way. I want my students to do something with William Blake, or other Romantic visual and literary artists.

Despite my attempt at a definition, I don’t really have my pedagogy fully worked out. I would welcome any suggestions for improvement, either by making my project more historical or by making my project more “practical.”

I very much enjoyed the conversation about William Blake’s contemporaneity that Roger and Crystal commenced in the “comments” section that follows her posting “Wordsworth in a Math Bubble.” Further evidence supporting Crystal’s remarks on Blake’s power to inspire the present is offered in this rather charming series of interviews with contemporary musicians that the Guardian newspaper has put together to celebrate National Poetry Day in the U.K (today). (Yes, “Bard Reputation” is a terrible title. And I admit that “contemporary” is not quite the right word, given that the interviews include one with Neil Peart from Rush, who is even older than I am!) Anyhow, Blake, Coleridge, and Percy Shelley’s Mask of Anarchy all get a shout-out.

I think of myself (still) as a historicist critic, and I consistently bring that historicism into the classroom: in part as a context for reading Blake (he’s on all our minds right now!) and reading the Songs, my students have learned in the last week about late eighteenth-century chimney-sweeping, about the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, about the Sunday School movement, etc. But I agree strongly with what Crystal and Roger say about how contemporary writing can provide students with openings onto Romantic poetry, and it has seemed increasingly important to me to make time amidst the contextualization for that writing. I have been seeking to make room in particular for poetry from later eras, our own included. (I’m prompted by my sense that traditional English department curricula like my Department’s own sometimes seem to present poetry as though it were something that faded from the scene along with horse-drawn carriages.) In the past Marianne Moore (“Poetry”) has helped me introduce some of the Lyrical Ballads; Wallace Stevens (“Anecdote of the Jar”) has given them, or at least me, a way into “Mont Blanc,” and I am looking forward to seeing what happens a couple weeks from now when I bring in Robert Pinsky’s amazing, troubling “Last Robot Song” as a contemporary analogue to “The Eolian Harp.”

The contemporaneity of Romantic poetry has been on my mind, as well, thanks to a student in my survey class who last week educated me on how the issues that had been raised in our discussion of William Cowper’s abolitionist ballad “The Negro’s Complaint” are also at stake in (astonishingly) the poetry that poets in Singapore have written to protest the lot of the workers on Malay oil palm plantations. (She is just back from an exchange semester at the National University of Singapore–and she has promised me a reading list.) There’s something depressing about hearing this–hearing that the global idiom of feeling-at-a-distance developed in the age of Britain’s Second Empire retains its relevance. But also something exhilarating about the moments when our students make those connections.

As a scholar and a teacher, I enjoy experimenting with both individual and collaborative projects. I tend to feel that the humanities are unique in their ambivalence about collaboration. On the one hand, the web is offering humanities scholars many opportunities for collaboration; on the other hand, I always find myself wondering how much a collaborative article, project, or book will “count” when it comes to hiring or tenure.

The topic is especially interesting for someone who teaches the Romantic period, since Romanticism is often associated with individualism. And yet, Romantic authors also expressed collectivist sentiments. As Beth Lau points out, even famously individualistic male Romantic writers struggled with individualism:

In a number of poems, Wordsworth describes his initial penchant for solitary nature worship giving way to love of other human beings. [...] Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner is one of the most powerful works ever written on the horrors of solitude and the problems inherent in overwheening individualism, and Shelley’s Alastor is also a cautionary tale about the dangers of solopsism. John Keats increasingly wished to do ‘some good in this world’ instead of merely writing lush, escapist poetry. Even Byron, whose early poems featured such gloomy, misanthropic, solitary heroes as Childe Harold, the Giaour, and Manfred, ended his career with the comic satire Don Juan, which is very much concerned with people in society. (224)

I feel that a similar argument could be made about William Blake. While he frequently celebrated his individual vision and the originality of his work, Blake also stressed the importance of “self-annihilation,” elaborating in his poem Milton that “We are not Individuals but States: Combinations of Individuals” (32.10; E131). And we must not forget the frequent, though often unmentioned, participation of Catherine Blake in the production of William Blake’s illuminated books.

The problem with emphasizing collaboration and collectivity in Romantic courses is not only the historical association of Romanticism with individualism, but also the institutional makeup of the humanities. Most humanities courses still overwhelmingly favor individual success and failure. As David Parry recently noted on the blog AcademHack, collaborative projects are extremely difficult to assess but enormously important to teach. “I want to encourage and evaluate students for who they are,” Parry explains, “but on the other hand I see as part of my job to teach students how to work in groups.”

Parry’s proposed solution to this delimma is to give each group the ability to fire one of their members. The rejected member is then required to complete the group assignment alone. While I feel that Parry’s plan could work quite well for his course, I would like to move in a different direction that I feel is more conducive to the ambivalence many writers had with individualism during the Romantic period.

I’d like to use this blog to plan a course around digital culture and Romantic Individualism. My central focus in this course will be William Blake, since I am primarily interested in the artists and critics who have transmitted Blake’s work from the Romantic period to the present and their impact on the image of Blake as an individualist writer. I would also like to use the course to experiment with collective subjectivities: in the content of the course, in the course’s exploration of the William Blake’s subjectivity, and in the makeup of the assignments and their assessment. Future posts will chart possible assignments, readings, ideas for discussion and class projects. I would also like to hear suggestions and criticisms from teachers, scholars, or anyone who visits this site. What are your thoughts about the usefulness of collaborative projects? Do you have any successes or failures to share?

Reference
Lau, Beth. “Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice.” A Companion to Romanticism. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. 219-26.