[Milton-L] Seventeenth-Century Brit Lit Textbooks

[Jason Kerr]

I want to return Margaret's compliment. I realize that my approach is best
geared to the class I have: 10 upper-division students in a seminar. For a
larger class, or a survey, an anthology is sometimes the most practical
solution, though, as Margaret rightly suggests, we can teach against it to a
degree.  Of course I want my students to leave class with an appreciation of
what they've read (which isn't always the same as liking it), but I also
want them to appreciate the material form in which the text has come to
them, in all it's mediated glory. This is sort of the same as the ethic
behind caring about what's in our food instead of just blindly eating it
(see Peter Herman's earlier query about whether a list member made her own
prosciutto, though I suspect that if Adam and Eve had been, as Peter signed
himself, members of the Slow Food movement, none of us would be here).

Jason

On Tue, Sep 23, 2008 at 2:35 PM, Margaret Thickstun
<mthickst at hamilton.edu>wrote:

>  I like Jason's approach, as it raises students' awareness of manuscript
> circulation.  The internet certainly opens up the possibility of creating a
> syllabus without having to depend on a particular printed text.
>
> I have taken to ordering two anthologies in my courses--requiring that each
> student have one of them--and then supplementing the anthologies with online
> materials.  (This takes a bit of work, because you have to let students
> reading the Norton know what the Longman's has that they don't, etc.)
> Everyone reads the same material, but in different orders, with pauses to
> jot down impressions.  I want to make them suspicious of anthologies--what
> are the principles of selection and exclusion?  Anne Ferry's *Tradition
> and the Individual Poem* has excellent discussions of how anthologies work
> and what makes "an anthology piece."  I also make students get older
> anthologies out of the library to see what was deemed worthy to read or
> representative of a particular writer in different contexts.  (This all
> started when I began teaching women writers, but it works with male writers,
> too.  There are quite a few 17th-century writers who were famous and
> anthologized fifty years ago that get no attention now: tastes change, and
> there is only so much room.)
>
> On a side note, I just found online an 1807 edition of Shakespeare's poems
> that has the sonnets all (to us) higgledy-piggledy and organized by topic:
> "the advantages of friendship," "an invitation to marriage," "injurious
> time," etc.  Interestingly, #20 ("A woman's face") is somewhere near the end
> of the collection and labelled "The Exchange."  The editor has erased any
> sense that this might be a sequence that tells a story, that the speaker
> might be an actor in that story.  Instead, the reader is invited to dip into
> the collection according to mood.  Sort of explains how Marianne and
> Willoughby can think of the sonnets as "so romantic."
>
> With upper-level students and graduate students I would also recommend
> Margaret Ezell's *Social Authorship and the Advent of Print.*  I still use
> excerpts from Wendy Wall's *The Imprint of Gender* to unsettle students'
> belief in the lonely-garret theory of authorship and to reinforce the role
> of patronage, advancement, and general performance of social status in
> Renaissance writers' lives.
>
> Sigh, planning courses is really the best part of the job!--Margie
>
>
>
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-- 
The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.

—Czeslaw Milosz, from "Ars Poetica?"
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