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.