Ptacek's blog

Digital Romantics: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and "Radiant Textuality" in the classroom

Ptacek — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 19:38:20 +0000

Author:

Jake Ptacek

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I’m teaching E 314L: “Reading Poetry” this semester, with a fantastic set of students of all levels of proficiency who really like to dig into the big issues motivating our poems. Early in the semester when we read Donne and other metaphysical poets, our classroom discussions often coalesced around two or three centers of gravity for each poem. Though opinions and readings about what the poems are up to might be divergent, we could normally, as a class, agree on a few choice passages as the cruxes for making meaning.

For the past few weeks, however, coinciding with our reading of Coleridge and Wordsworth, our discussions have been full of wildly divergent readings, where even coming to a consensus about where the poem’s center of gravity is up for (often exhilarating) debate. Part of this, of course, is my students’ increased confidence in utilizing their close-reading skills and navigating emergent classroom relationships, as well as our focus on some longer texts. But sometimes it seems that they’re not even reading the same texts. And with good reason—they’re not.

I’ve tried assigning “works” (that is, novels, plays or poems) without assigning “texts” (specific editions) before, to mixed success, but this semester’s adventure into something close to Jerome McGann’s radiant textuality was the result of a few happy accidents. The first is that I ordered for the course, sight unseen, a version of Lyrical Ballads that combined a reputable academic publisher with the siren-song of affordability. But when the text arrived it rapidly became apparent to me that this particular version of the text didn’t work for my classroom needs, reprinting only the 1798 poems in their unrevised state, providing little introductory material, no bibliography, and no annotation to help curious students. A fine book for a graduate course, but for an introductory class it simply didn’t suit our needs.

The second happy accident was our good fortune to be using a DWRL classroom equipped with state-of-the-art technology, which meant that I could encourage students to ditch this text while easily disseminating pdfs through our class website. But a funny thing happened to those pdfs—while some students diligently printed out their packets and came to class with the traditional underlined and marked-up text, other students showed up with just laptops, iPads, even Kindles. It quickly became apparent, too, that not everyone was reading from the pdfs I’d posted: some students were simply grabbing the text online from a variety of resources. While this at first made my somewhat-compulsive inner bibliographer cringe at first, in the spirit of adventure I decided to play along, and even to encourage students to look at digital versions or editions of the poems. Overall I think the experience has been salutary, though not without a few pixelated pitfalls. What follows, then, is an initial report on the pleasures and pains of digital reading in the Romantic classroom.

Though McGann confidently argues in Radiant Textuality that physical archives are quickly being replaced by digital ones, in reality the process has been slower and less unilateral than theorists of the 1990s imagined. While there are great hypertext editions of poems here and here (largely overseen by McGann himself), most authors still haven’t received any kind of extended bibliographic treatment as digital texts, despite the obvious power of the internet to assist Anglo-American, and especially genetic and social-text editing. This means of course that caution has to be exercised about the accidentals—misspellings or misprints that creep in through transcription or by utilizing “faulty” editions. The Victorian Web’s “Tinteren Abbey,” for example, is a place unmarked on any map. But more than that, the web—or at least this iteration of browsers—levels out the distinctions between the various iterations of a text, as our class discovered when we read Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Coleridge’s poem, of course, exists in at least two quite different forms: the archaic ballad of 1798 and the much-revised poem published in 1834’s Sibylline Leaves. Over the course of 36 years Coleridge modernized the diction, added and removed a subtitle and argument, pruned the poem of some overt gothic material (the hand-of-glory sequence), and added those famous, inscrutable glosses. Online texts aren’t always particularly good at identifying which version one is reading—and the glosses pose a particular problem in a digital layout. For our class a serious downside to reading Ancient Mariner digitally was just this lack of identification, as students would read out line or point to passages that were missing, altered, or renumbered in other versions of the text. At the same time this pandemonium of texts allowed us to talk about revision and problems of “authorial intent” in concrete and specific ways.

But what about relatively stable texts, like “Tintern Abbey”? Our classroom discussion of the poem helped bring home to me the importance of context in constructing meaning. A student confronted with the version presented in the very fine The Penguin Book of Romantic Poetry, replete with headnotes, author biography, and sound annotation confronts the poem in a very different context than a reader who finds it on, say, the Victorian Web. Even apart from the lamentable (if pardonable) misprint in the poem’s title, by encountering the poem on a website devoted to Victorian literature one gets a very different perspective on the poem’s content and influence. One sequences the poem next to its temporal contemporaries in the useful but arbitrary back-construction of “romanticism,” while the other puts the poem into a constellation that includes Sterne, Tennyson and Hardy—a no less arbitrary placement, but one that reveals different facets of the poem’s meaning and influence. Similarly, a reader who comes across Rime of the Ancient Mariner here can see the poem in dialogue not only with other poems by Coleridge (as in our in-class reading) but with contemporary poets across a wide range of categories.

In all, I’ve been pleased with our attempts to pursue poetry on both a physical and digital front. Though using unspecified digital texts of canonical poetry can cause a bit of confusion that takes precious class time to straighten out, at the same time it can help to break down the monolithic appearance of the canonical text by providing multiple avenues of access and context. Perusing the text online, or in a variety of formats, can help bring back the strangeness and the newness of great works of literature, helping students see them not as dusty urns on a shelf but a vital and living part of our culture, and making students new readers.

Learning to Let Go: My Friday Non-interference Pact with my Students

Ptacek — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:42:51 +0000

Author:

Jake Ptacek

Image Credit:

The Internet

I think virtually every newcomer to collegiate teaching realizes early on, with varying degrees of dismay, that “teaching” and “parenting” are closely related functions. I find my students often find it hard to think outside of a kind of parental relationship: they are legitimately shocked when I tell them, for example, that I don’t care why they missed class, or that their C (or B, or A-, even) is neither a reflection of my personal feelings about them nor assigned punitively but rather my best assessment of their performance on an assignment ruled against some form of index. But the thing is, I find myself at least as often somewhat neurotically embodying a “parental” role. I reward my students for good behavior (“We’ll have cookies next class to celebrate your revised papers!”), scold them for bad (“Why did no one show up for cookie day?”), feel a general anxiety about how they perform in front of strangers or in statistical comparison (“Please let them behave well on evaluation day!”), and worry about their health, happiness, class attendance, and a million other small things.

So part of my goal this semester has been to try to let go of some of this parental anxiety, as well as to cede some pedagogical control over my class to the students. I teach a 314L course on Banned Books, which means it’s a relatively small class (I have 22 students) that is required for English majors and encouraged for most humanities students (through interdepartmental flagging). The goal of the course is to introduce students to reading critically at a collegiate level and the fundamental goals of literary research; so a good deal of the class is devoted to teaching how to close read (and, more challengingly, teaching students the rationale behind choosing a passage to read closely), how to use theoretical models when making an argument, and resources for developing those arguments. Though my students are finding the texts we’re reading (texts like Lolita and Beloved) by turns bewildering, challenging, exciting, and ultimately rewarding, I often have that “new instructor” / “parental” anxiety: are they getting this? Are they taking away from the text the right stuff? I have so much to say, and teaching literature is so genuinely exciting, that I feel that all too often, in my anxiety over their progress, I’m steamrolling what they have to say, forcing them to talk only about what I’m interested in.

So to my solution: beginning now, with the second half of the semester, every Friday is given over to my students. We don’t have any readings assigned by me, and I don’t plan any material for the class. Instead, small groups of 3-5 students are responsible for determining the day’s content and executing that. Against all better judgment, I haven’t given the groups much more definition than this: you need to plan some sort of activity that will last at least 30 minutes; it must engage the whole class; and it must relate in an immediate way to the text we are currently reading. Otherwise, you are free to plan what you want, and I won’t interfere.

This was initially—and remains—somewhat anxiety-producing to my students. The initial response was universally, “Part of my grade depends on this and you won’t tell me what to do?” After the anxiety wears off, though, my students often seem to engage with the activity remarkably well. It encourages ownership of the material, it provokes them to think in depth about a week’s worth of reading, and the discussion that have come out of it (so far) have turned out to be really enlightening.

This was—and remains—anxiety –producing for me as an instructor, as well. It’s hard to give up directing the conversation, steering students towards thinking about thematic meanings or linguistic questions that resonate—but of course, I still do that Mondays and Wednesdays. And what I discovered is that this group of students, at least, generally comes around to the right questions and interpretive moments, anyways. Today one of the group members asked about tree symbolism in Beloved. “Perhaps it’s coincidental,” one student said—and this is the moment where I’d normally jump in with a long-winded talk about the painstaking construction of the novel, or about the often futile hunt for symbolic meanings. “Well,” another student answered, “it’s hard to imagine that it would be coincidental—think of all the planning that went into the novel.” And from there they were off, debating the symbolism and even debating the value of reading for symbolism, thinking about intentionality and narrative structure and a whole host of interesting ideas that I almost cut off with a well-meaning interjection. Though their arguments often lacked an advanced theoretical vocabulary, my students were really thinking at high levels with great rigor.

The pedagogical point of all this, if I have one, is not that everyone should take one weekday off from teaching. Every class is different, and what works for your 10:00 class may differ wildly from what works for your 11:00 class that same day. But it is that there is a real value in letting go of control of the classroom for a while. Let your students make mistakes, and see if they can sort them out on their own. Let your students talk about what they’re invested in, what they find compelling about the topic at hand, what they don’t care about, and why. Let go of being a classroom “parent” and let your students take responsibility for themselves.