Towards a meta-survey of English literature pt. 2

In the last post, I spent a fair amount of words saying what is wrong with canonical surveys of literature, such as the Harvard Classics. It's one thing to reject the canon, it's another thing to move from protest to an alternative. The alternative to the canon emerges from the rejection in two steps: first, the rejection invokes some higher values that should be relevant to the alternative; second, the values should point to a set of skills that students can practice in response to the canon.

What are the values of post-canonical protest? Based solely on the first part of this series, I'd identify at least five values:

• diversity of both demographics and beliefs
• empowerment of students to participate in scholarly conversations
• openness to discourse, change, and improvement
• responsiveness to students' experiences of the text
• truth, especially in the representation of evidence and argument

 Already, I'm beginning to express how students can participate in each of these values:

• discovering and accounting for diversity in the historical archive
• participating in scholarly conversations as a mode of empowerment
• discoursing upon, changing, and improving an open canon
• responding to literary texts
• evincing and arguing for some truth relevant to literary texts

It just so happens that I believe that writing is one of the most powerful activities for all of the above skills. Skills will inspire scaffolded assignments in my next post.

Towards a meta-survey of English literature pt. 1

This morning I discovered that "All 51 Harvard Classics are now available as free ebooks," which reminded me of my old plan to write a syllabus for a survey class in English literature, origins to 1800. Such classes usually get a bad rap because they're rightly or wrongly characterized as:

• insufficiently inclusive, especially on the basis of demographics
• The Harvard Classics are exclusively by white men except for the "Holy Books" volume, The Mill on the Floss, and The Devil's Pool.
• unrelated to the work of contemporary scholars
• The Harvard Classics are 105 years old and precede the emergence of "close reading" as the dominant scholarly activity among humanists
• overly specific to one person's perspective and context
• The Harvard Classics claim, alternately, to represent world literature or the western canon. If it represents world literature, there's a startling lack of non-European or pre-modern literature. If it represents the western canon, then there's a startling lack of classics, such as Horace or The Illiad.
• superficially engaged with literary affect
• The Harvard Classics may present readers with primary and secondary sources, but may not present them with a clear invitation to respond to the texts and to process the reader's personal encounter with literary texts
• ambiguously defined relative to the historical archive
• The Harvard Classics are not engaged with the problems of defining a culture or a canon, researching the transmission of canonical texts, or editing the text for an audience.

But the obstacle becomes the path: in the next part, I'll describe the way to transform each of these weaknesses into a strength of course design.

Writing Journal 1107.12.3.2014

Before:

I have to transcribe students' annotations into a web version. Part of the trick is developing a pattern of juggling widgets, which I've frankly forgotten since the last time that I did this. So I'll develop a list of actions to follow. At that point, I'll be able to do this robotically.

In Praise of Bureaucratic Punishment

Sometimes I rage at bureaucrats. Bureaucratic offices, even in the most mundane encounters, fill me with anxiety and self-suspicion. Did I remember my XYZ documents? Have I missed a secret deadline? The only saving grace of bureaucracies is that they have no investment in my anxiety or self-suspicion; they are exclusively interested in my XYZ documents.

The terror of bureaucracy resembles the terror of Kantian ethics: agents interact through the bulletproof glass. Or worse, emotional and fallible bureaucrats regard their own actions as impartial, categorical imperatives.

Yesterday I participated in two bureaucratic events that gave me some hope in the ideal of bureaucracy. Without addressing the details, these events were punitive. In very loose terms, in one case a professor "punched down;" in another, a student "punched up." In both cases, bureaucrats responded with punishment.

Punishment, of course, can be retributive, rehabilitative, deterrent, and incapacitating. Educational punishment leans towards incapacitating and rehabilitative punishment. Deterrence violates student privacy in current US law, and academic institutions have little authority for retribution. While academic institutions--as legal bodies--have little interest in deterrence or retribution, professors have the full range of human social sanction. Scorn, shame, intimidation--professors can, with relative impunity, punish students beyond the acceptable limits that are granted to academic institutions.

When professors punch down, bureaucrats can offer recourse to people who have no personal power. When students punch up, bureaucrats can offer consistent and dispassionate rehabilitation and incapacitation. The faults of bureaucracy in one situation can become the strengths of the bureaucracy in another situation. When the powerful want recourse against the weak, the bureaucrats are dispassionate and consistent. When the weak want recourse against the powerful, the bureaucrats are dispassionate and consistent. Even if this is lacks the ethical subtlety for personal behavior, it has virtue as institutional policy.

Writing Journal, 1025.3.3.2014

Before:
The task today is to revise a letter from its current state of word salad. I have a loose outline of what I want to do, but I'm relying mainly on my internal sensor of style to assess progress. I also have a short amount of time, so I'll have to choose a small section. I think I'll try to write a body paragraph so that I can repeat the style throughout. The challenge of that will be re-organizing at the end to emphasize the conclusion in the topic sentence. The good part is that I'm relatively free of distractions for the writing period.