Dreaming a Course or Two

Dear Readers,

I follow up my teaching philosophy with something even more near and dear to my heart--my imaginary course descriptions.  I really love the process of developing a course, creating its narrative and formal patterns.  I have come up already with 5 different course ideas in my field.  Below are the two that I submitted for my pedagogy course.

The first is a full-year survey course (1st or 2nd year) for what in our department is paper one of the comprehensive exam (basically up to 1700).  My hope here was to give a general introduction to the broader field, but also giving it a frame or thesis to help focus discussions.  My model for this was Jeffrey Cohen's Myths of Britain course at GW.  I have also organized the papers so that they are somewhat progressive.  The students will write a lot and should get tons of feedback.  I end with Beowulf in hopes of at least mentioning Anglo-Saxon history since there is not enough time to take it on fully.

The second course is a 4th year, half-year seminar and is basically my dissertation.  I love it so much.  I want this course is to stretch the definition of what we might consider the literary, showing that even devotional texts are literary.  Besides, we get to read Julian of Norwich (and I love her so)!  I would hope it would run much like two seminars I had in my fourth year of undergrad - the undergraduate book history course at the Folger taught by Sarah Werner and a English honors seminar on time taught by Jonathan Gil Harris.  Both gave us tons of reading and really started to model something closer to a graduate seminar.

Clearly, GW has influenced my pedagogy more than I had assumed!

Obviously, these are imaginary courses, developed for an ideal world.  But still, your feedback is always wanted and appreciated.  Do they seem feasible? Any huge, glaring faults?  Could I actually get a department to let me teach these?

Your Humblest Author.

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Writing England: Nationalism and English Literature from The Canterbury Tales to Paradise Lost

In his The Regiment of Princes, Thomas Hoccleve calls Chaucer the “first finder of our fair language.” Hoccleve’s Chaucer is not just a good poet, but rather the source of English—an English that represents a language, a literature, and a nation. Hoccleve's reading of Chaucer refigures him as the father of English literature, an image that still is often maintained today. In this course, we will explore the establishment of an English literary canon from the late 14^th-century to through the English Restoration. We will focus our attention on how these three Englishes - the language, the literature, and the nation – function together in the texts we read. Particularly, we want to explore the role of literature in the development of an English nationalism.

The first half of the course will focus on the late medieval. We will look at Chaucer, Gower, and Langland and more specifically their own articulations of Englishness. We will follow this up with Lydgate and Hoccleve, who are Chaucer’s first literary descendents, asking how they formed a canon out of those who came before. Midway through the course, we will turn to the early modern period. Here we will see Wyatt, Sidney, and Spenser struggling with what they see as a very unfamiliar past. Chaucer becomes, for them, a literary father that makes them uncomfortable. Finally, we look at the later 16^th-century through the 17th. These authors, particularly Milton, will help us see what it means to deal with an extensive literary canon to help develop a nation. We will end the course with Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, hoping to open up these concerns of nationalism in a more contemporary context.

What is a nation? How is a literary tradition built and understood? These are just a few of the questions we will pursue in the course.

Students should gain from this course:

1. A familiarity with the "big hits" of medieval and early modern English literature through the Restoration

2. Improved writing skills through the drafting and workshopping of three majors papers

3. A vocabulary to discuss issues of nationalism and nation formation in medieval and early modern England.

Major Texts: Beowulf; Chaucer, Canterbury Tales; Gower, Confessio Amantis; Langland, Piers Plowman; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Book Of John Mandeville; Book of Margery Kempe; Hoccleve, Regiment of Princes; Lydgate; Siege of Thebes; Wyatt, Selections; Sidney, Arcadia; Spenser, Faerie Queene, Book 1 and Ruines of Time; Shakespeare, Henry V; Donne, The Anniversaries; Milton, Paradise Lost; Marvell, Selections

Tutorial Participation – 20%

Paper 1 (5-7 pages) – 15 %

Paper 2 (8-10 pages) – 20%

Paper 3 (10-12 pages) – 25%

Final Exam – 20%

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On Loving God: English Vernacular Theology in the Late-Medieval Period

Did the English love God differently? Perhaps this seems an absurd question, considering the universal nature of the divine. However, in the late-medieval period, English writers started to imagine a relationship with God that was no longer written in the Latin of the Church, but rather in English. Looking at devotional and secular literary texts from this period, we will explore this process of making God English. While our approach will include concerns of nationalism and politics, we will focus primarily on the increase of texts written in English during this period. We will ask: is the rise of a uniquely English literary canon linked to a change in the way English people began to imagine their relationships with the divine?

We will explore conduct books for lay believers, such as The Ancrene Wisse, as well as texts written for clergy and other members of the Church, typified in Richard Rolle and Walter Hilton. Then we will move to texts written by the laity, such as Julian of Norwich’s account of her mystical experience with Christ. We will end the course with more secular or explicitly literary texts, such as Piers Plowman, to try to understand how this growing output of devotional texts influenced more secular works. We will end the course looking towards the early modern period and the Reformation. Here, Thomas More will be our guide, helping us discuss how the rise of an English devotion in the late-medieval period helps structure the Reformation.

Major Texts: Augustine, The Confessions; Ancrene Wisse; Richard Rolle, English Works; Walter Hilton, Scale of Perfection; Julian of Norwich, Revelation of Divine Love; Pearl; Cloud of Unknowing; Langland, Piers Plowman; Mankind; Croxton Play of the Sacrament; Assembly of the Gods; Thomas More, The Sadness of Christ

Informed Participation and Short Responses - 25%

Presentation – 25 %

Research Proposal and Bibliography - 10%

Research Paper (20-25 pgs) – 40%

Teaching: A Philosophy

Dear readers,

Sorry for the hiatus.  I have no real excuse.  But I am back.  This term I am taking our department's pedagogy course.  I wanted to share some of my work as teaching is really important to me.  I have not done much of it, sadly.  I got my first tutorials this year, and they have been a bit of a whirlwind.  I love every minute of it, but I am also barely swimming sometimes.  So when it came to our first assignment for pedagogy I had a hard time.  We were asked to writing a teaching philosophy, and it was not as simple as I thought it would be.

I have thought about teaching for years, but I have only tried to articulate it in aphorisms and horrific metaphors.  Of course, I want my students to engage critically.  I want literature to mean something.  But when trying to state exactly what I meant by that I found I had no words.  I did some digging (also part of the assignment) to find other teaching philosophies.  I particularly liked this one from David Clark at McMaster.  But finally I went to In The Middle (I should have just went there first), and Mary Kate Hurley proposed an interesting idea.  She tried to imagine a medieval model for her pedagogy.  So I used her proposal to get my philosophy started.  I am still not happy with it, but I think it is a great start. Enough preamble, I leave the rest for you to decide.

Your humble author.

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O you possessed of sturdy intellects,

observe the teaching that is hidden here

beneath the veil of verses so obscure

- Dante, Inferno IX.61-3 (trans. Mandelbaum)

Reading is hard. Dante leads himself through the whole divine cosmos just to teach this simple lesson. The obscurity of Dante's allegory, even his choice of allegory itself, points to a very interesting pedagogical strategy - reading. He does not tell his readers what to think, rather he asks them to think for themselves. He demands that his students critically engage with the text and, in doing so, interpret it. As a teacher, I always strive to do the same. My goal in every class is to teach my students to read in this Dantean sense. I want them to explore the figurative terrain of the text and not just vaguely grasp its topology, but rather dig underneath. I want them to explore, to seek a fuller, more intimate knowledge of the literary. I may be a teacher of literature, but first, I was a student of literature. As such, I strive in my classroom to give my students access to the same teachers that taught me ---Spenser, Donne, Julian of Norwich, Chaucer, and, of course, Dante.

I often tell my students there are two approaches to reading literature: the Oprah's Book Club model and the literary scholar model. Of course, there are a multitude of ways to read, but this over simplification helps to get across a point. For Oprah and her book club, reading is something we do in our spare time. It is a hobby. In this type of reading, the text is a means towards our own ends, a kind of literary therapy. I tell my students that this can be a very fun way to read; I indulge in it myself all the time. But for literary scholars, the texts must take the lead. They all become our own individual Dante's helping us through their terrain. I spend much time on the formal aspects of the text, showing my students how the text structures its concerns. I like to begin my courses with an extensive model of close reading. I will pick two or three lines of poetry and show students how much we can get out of those lines. I continue to model this process throughout the course.

Modelling, however, is never enough. I also have my students fumble through the text themselves. My students are asked to take risks, to trip, and to even fall down in their readings of text. To read in this way, students must feel that they can make mistakes. I am a very demanding teacher, and I recognize how this could stifle this learning process. Students will not want to take risks if they believe that I will punish them if their final product is not successful. To assuage this, I emphasize the importance of the process over the product. For instance, I always give my students the option to send me drafts in advance of a deadline. I have them meet me in office hours to go over the drafts, where I can help them work out the problems of their papers before they are marked. This allows them to take risks, but without major consequences. I also give students examples from my own undergraduate and graduate papers. I ask them to critique and edit these samples. They quickly learn that while I expect the best from myself and from them, I also know that we all fail at perfection. Showing my students my own fallibility allows them to be more comfortable with their own. Reading is hard, and it is important that my students know that even I am trying to master it (and will continue to for the rest of my career).

I want to treat my students as intellectual peers, sharing in the classroom experience.  I will often ask them questions that I do not know the answer to (and I will let them know this as I am asking). Perhaps this points to the more optimistic side of my teaching.  I believe that all my students are capable of being A students, even if in reality, they will not be. This does not mean that I teach all my students in the same way. Everyone learns slightly differently, and as such, I must tailor my approach to give each the potential of being their best. In the classroom, I will give students many options for engaging---through presentations, group work, written responses, and discussion. I bring into the classroom visual aids and often read poetry aloud. I also offer my students as much one-on-one time as the course permits. I encourage students to use my office hours, to send me questions, and to run essay drafts by me. I never want my students to think I am not available just because we are not in the classroom. I hope most my students will learn more outside of the class from reading the texts than I could ever give them. I just want to equip them with the right tools to get the most out of their explorations.

More importantly, I want them to be changed through their explorations. Here Dante and I agree and disagree. We both think texts have formative powers. He is a bit more prescriptive that his texts should effect certain types of individuals. I, on the other hand, would never to want to decide how my students change. I just believe that an engaged encounter with literature is never one way: we are redefined as we interpret. Derek Attridge articulates this in his The Singularity of Literature: "In the reading of the writing that is literature, one might say, meaning is simultaneously formed and performed. The words mean, and at the same time they show us what it is to mean.”[1] As Attridge starts to outline here, literature, if we are reading properly, is a transformative experience; I want to give my students the critical tools to have this experience. Specifically, I want literature to help them gain a sense of context and meaning for their many identities and thoughts that they have been developing throughout their lives. When I have to conceptualize who I am, such as what kind of teacher I am, I have a wealth of texts and authors who I can consult, who have helped to give my thoughts definition. My goal in the classroom is to give my students the tools to read texts in this way. I want them to ask those big, impossible questions, like who am I, and have Dante to guide them through the unending process of finding an answer.

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[1] Attridge, Derek. The Singularity of Literature. New York: Routledge, 2004. 109.