Hey folks! In response to Evan's first blog post on his course design, I'll write a few words about how I've set up my introduction to poetry course. When Evan and I met at a cafe to discuss our syllabi with the introduction to poetry faculty course director, it became apparent that we were taking provocatively divergent paths to organizing our courses on—our introductions to—poetry. The differences in our course designs are particularly compelling in light of recent large-scale changes in Ohio State's undergraduate literature courses: from 40-student historical surveys (for example: American literature, colonial period to Civil War) taught by a graduate student or faculty instructor to 240-student lectures with graduate students assisting a faculty member; from an admittedly bloated, yet generous offering of literature courses to an asceticism brought on by, we were told, an impending drop in enrollment rates. To wit, I feel that Evan and I are working through some urgent questions in light of a sea change in how universities, colleges, and departments think about literary studies. The questions that Evan poses for me at the end of his post are more than sufficient for me to begin with here.
What's the organizing principle of your arrangement?
I agree entirely with Evan in that the "key difference" between our course designs is that his "will emphasize narrative history as an organizing principle of comparison and contrast." While I don't mean to jettison history at all (class meetings will often engage focused historical narratives, for example: how the Victorian dramatic monologue responds to the Romantic lyric), I'm avoiding the chronology of literary history as an organizing principle for the chronology of our reading assignments. In my syllabus course description, I define the major goal of the course as a cultivation of "a critical appreciation of poetry," which "leads us to articulate our experience of a poem with an incisive understanding of what that poem attempts to do and how it attempts to do so: a connoisseurship, cleansed of the prejudice and pretension that haunt such a word." Comparison and contrast indeed presents useful ways for students to understand poems as unique artifacts; I assign various poems from various historical situations for a class meeting. For example, one of the class meetings on ekphrasis features readings from Homer, Wordsworth, Keats, the Rossettis, Williams, and Auden.
How does your arrangement direct students to engage with the texts?
Here I'd like to elaborate on what I mean by "unique artifacts." As a sort of sloppy philosophizing, I want students first and foremost to engage the thisness of poems as unique instances of art. The course is an introduction to poetry, and I take "introduction" seriously in the course design (not that Evan doesn't, of course). History, to me, is one of several major ways that we can understand and appreciate how a poem—indeed, how any art object—works. A huge part of my thought here has to do with audience. Scholars of literary history are invested in placing literary artifacts as both forces in and reflections of their historical moments. Historicism is our dominant theoretical perspective and research methodology. My students, though, aren't literary scholars. Only one or two are English majors, and most of them are not in the humanities. They come to the course with diverse wants and needs.
I certainly don't mean to imply that we ought to structure our classes based on what students want them to be. This sort of thinking presents a slippery slope down which we're already tumbling in our increasingly consumer-oriented postsecondary educational system. At the same time, I'm trying to keep in mind that what might be a meaningful way to engage with texts for me as a scholar of literary history might not be a meaningful way to engage with texts for a student in a sophomore-level, general education course called "introduction to poetry." Thus, while historical narratives still play an important role in my course, I don't foreground them as aggressively as I could. As I write in the prompt for the poetry event response assignment, "poetry is a living, breathing thing." I don't want to consign it to the mausoleums of history.
In full disclosure, I've been having a lot of doubt recently as to the usefulness of the undergraduate introductory survey course. I also did my Masters in creative writing (poetry), so I'm predisposed to approach poetry in ways beyond the historical, especially in terms of forms, modes, and themes.
How does your arrangement anticipate students' responses?
I have tried to arrange my readings in ways that establish and then challenge assumptions so that students are faced with conflicting understandings of how poetry works. For example, during the mini-unit on personhood and identity, we spend a class meeting thinking about how poetry and race intersect in the works of Langston Hughes, Audre Lorde, and Terrence Hayes. However, the next class meeting challenges the lyric as an index of race with readings from Angels of the Americlypse, an anthology of Latin@ writing explicitly engaging the experimental and avant-garde traditions and rejecting the pigeonhole of romanticized racial otherness (not that Hughes, Lorde, or Hayes embrace this, of course). Or, after discussing closed form and its affordances, we leap into free verse with Whitman and Ginsberg and eventually land in some prose poetry. In other words, I want each class to say: "here's one way that poetry can be understood, but it certainly isn't the only way, and other ways might even disagree with it." This might not be what Evan means by response, especially considering that he'll be asking students to brainstorm alternate traditions towards the end of the semester, but it is the primary way that I considered reactions to ideas and texts.
Perhaps our next posts might detail our experiences teaching for the first few weeks? Who knows. Stay tuned!
Trey Conatser
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