I posted a blog last month about re-instating Frankenstein into my British Literature Survey course 1800-present. With most of our blogs here, that one was more fully formed than what I'm about to post. So, this constitutes my foray into brainstorming blogging rather than essaying blogging:

Since I clearly didn’t come through with the “regular updates” on my Keats and Contemporary Poetry seminar I promised back in the fall, maybe now I can at least post some highlights of the semester that (as of today, with grading at last done--hooray!) was.

Among the great things this semester were the class presentations—knowledgeable, informative and fun—in which students introduced contemporary poems, not on the syllabus, with some relationship to Keats; I made some discoveries this way. We had a fascinating discussion for example about “This Living Hand” from Dean Young’s collection Skid, a book I hadn’t read (sadly, word is that Dean Young is himself very ill right now...). I like the idea of having students bring in their own discoveries (sort of like show-and-tell) rather than presenting on a text I've assigned (where we're both conscious of the fact that I, as the instructor, have a stake in the material and take on the material they're not fully aware of until after their presentation).

I’d been wondering at the start of the semester how the mix of MA and MFA students in the course would work out. The two groups had different styles of reading and different knowledge bases (when talking about a poem, for example, the MFAs tended to start with form and technique, and the lit. students tended to start with interpretation; the MFA students were more comfortable voicing evaluative judgments on poems, and of course had a much greater familiarity with the world of contemporary poetry they’re a part of). There were some moments of tension around the sense that there really were two communities of readers in the class, but for the most part I think these got resolved productively, and overall the class had a very strong collaborative spirit. Those moments of tension were instructive, too, reminding me as well as the students that not only do different texts demand different reading strategies, but different readers in the same classroom approach the same texts with differing techniques, goals, and expectations—a point that’s now just a given of our theory, of course, but that’s nonetheless (perhaps because of its obviousness to us on the level of theorizing about reading) sometimes difficult to plan for and manage in the classroom. And such a conflict in approaches to texts happens less often, in my experience, in undergraduate classes in the major, where all the students tend to have very similar training.  Maureen McLane’s engaging essay “Romanticism, or Now: Learning to Read in Postmodern”  proved helpful to me and my students in thinking about these issues, and in dealing with the frustration experienced by some of my students when their trusted critical tools didn’t work on certain poems (postmodern poems, or even Hyperion—which to some students was among the most foreign things we read!). (Following up on Deidre’s earlier post about note-taking, by the way, Maureen charmingly reproduces in the essay her own undergraduate notes on a poem).

And certainly one of the semester’s highlights was a delightful visit from the poet Stanley Plumly, who very generously traveled around the Washington Beltway (no easy feat, given all the traffic) to talk with us about Keats and contemporary poetry, and especially his recent Posthumous Keats. Now that’s a pedagogical strategy I strongly recommend: get a distinguished poet and gifted raconteur like Plumly to come dazzle your students with an extraordinary store of insights and anecdotes! Even if it’s anticlimactic when your visitor leaves and it’s just you in front of the classroom again, your students will be buzzing with ideas and comments, as mine were. Plumly’s visit got us thinking especially about the role of biography in the classroom and in our relationship to poetry more generally; that’s a topic worth a post of its own, coming soon (I hope)!

These posts on Teaching Romanticism have been intriguing and thoughtful. Thank you for putting this together!

I always find that Romanticism and textual studies are good segue into Digital Humanities for teaching and research.  I began teaching at San Jose State University 5 years ago and opened with a very traditional Romantic-era survey of Romanticism.  We followed the timeline, began with Blake and ended with Mary Shelley. We ranged over the slavery issue and working class poets, though there were very few of those poets being printed.  The Mellor & Matlak anthology was my guide because it offered thematic arrangement of materials while still including the women poets who, I felt, were integral to the understanding of collaborative creative moments among our canonical Big 6.  But, the course wasn't satisfying. The only assignment where students actually engaged with the material at some depth was the recitation, and even then they were fearful instead of fearless and playful.  Considering who I have become as a researcher and how involved I am in Digital Humanities work, I wanted to bring a sense of passion and engagement to my teaching.  Textual studies and Digital Humanities seems to do that for me, allowing me time to play with the material, see patterns, extrapolate theses that haven't been otherwise contemplated in the field.  In constructing this type of course, I had to first determine what would be considered playful by my students.

In Digital Humanities circles, we often talk about collaboration between disciplines, among scholars, and with technologists. While progress in the field is nurtured certainly by this type of research, what of our students? How are we shepherding Digital Humanities to those undergraduates who could most benefit from exposure to collaborative tools or humanities computing strategies? Happily, HASTAC has been addressing pedagogy, most specifically with Cathy Davidson's post "Research is Teaching" and the wildly successful forum "Teaching with Technology and Curiosity."

Collaboration, shared knowledge, open access, extra-disciplinarity. These are the major tenets of Digital Humanities. However, what is missing in this list is something required of all digital projects: play. Roger Caillois qualifies this type of unstructured activity as “an occasion of pure waste: waste of time, energy, ingenuity, skill” (Man, Play and Games 2001; 6). This lack of structure, leads to exploration, discovery, and production of knowledge in ways that were only imagined twenty years ago. Typically though we don't allow our students this sense of play in their traditional studies. Especially in literary studies, we supply students with the end-product but don't expose them to the theories and the methodologies always.  We separate those kinds of issues into other courses (e.g., Introduction to Literary Criticism or Introduction to Research Methods). When faculty bring a particular perspective, for example textual studies or feminist theory, to a classroom setting, the methods for exploring and discovering aren't exposed to students. Instead, we're offering them the one big major tool, close reading, for their arsenal.  Students then live with some anxiety that there's one way to read a text and, more often, ask "how does the professor want me to read this?"  It becomes a guessing “game” instead of an exploration and discovery of the literature. In the final essay, we expect students to offer a discovery, a research paper, or an analysis.  But, if we haven't exposed them to the methodology and the theory, how can they adequately achieve a true exploration of the literature? In this way, the course becomes a game with an outcome, consequences, and rigid rules. Using Digital Humanities strategies, I want to instill a sense, even if it's artificial, that literary studies are a “free and voluntary activity, a source of joy and amusement” as Caillois defines “play” (6).

To this end, I combined textual editing with technology in my Romantic Literature Survey course. We had the use of a spectacular room, filled with hardware and software everywhere:

TechnoRomanticism: We created our own digital edition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Along the way, we created a collaborative timeline using MIT's SIMILE & Timeline script. We didn't even begin to create a website until some of the preliminary assignments are done -- assignments that look at the construction of this novel, both linguistically and bibliographically. Every 2 weeks, we held a workshop on some digital assignment and acquired 1 new skill, not even necessarily a new tool, but a skill. We practiced radial and ergodic reading by taking on only 2 chapters of Frankenstein each week.  However, we read other literature into the novel.  For instance, at one point "... Tintern Abbey" is quoted in the novel, but if students haven't had a chance to read or study this particular poem, they would have a difficult time understanding its interruption of the narrative.  So, we studied the poem as we were studying that very chapter. By not overloading undergraduate students with readings, we were really able to spend an entire class meeting on both the poem and the novel's page.

That strategy gave way to self-interruptions in constructing their digital editions -- what did it mean to provide a hyperlink in the middle of a paragraph? How does it interrupt the musings on Nature, the soul and science?  All of it, all of it went back to Romanticism's major ideas.

Is anyone else performing these kinds of interruptions and collaborations in their own courses?

Diedre, Eric and Crystal have all given compelling reasons for a contemporary "in" to Romantic literature. Diedre's stunning example of a student connecting "The Negro's Complaint" to poets in Singapore was complemented by her admission that she is "(still) a historicist critic." Crystal's argument that we should not let contemporary texts replace the focus of the course on "primary sources themselves," is an important rejoinder to keep historicism at the core of what teachers of the Romantic period do.

How do we, though, justify a Romantics course when we aren't primarily teaching survey or period courses? Is there, in other words, a purpose to teaching Romanticism that isn't contained within a historical survey?

Here's my reasoning.

At Georgia Tech, we are tasked to teach topical courses as what our program director calls a "vehicle" for introducing multimodal composition. We don't just teach writing at Georgia Tech, we also teach other modalities: oral, visual, electronic and non-verbal. Part of my interest in collaboration is the way that social media applications can provide exciting challenges to the traditional image of the English student isolated at a desk, reading poems and writing alone. I am convinced that teaching multimodality can open up new ways of approaching Romantic texts that are collaborative and creative.

As I prepare my Spring sections of "Blake 2.0: William Blake and Digital Culture," I am struck by the different projects that Blake helps to inspire in Twentieth-Century culture both within and without digital culture. In the collection I edited for the journal ImageTexT on "William Blake and Visual Culture," I found a comic artist named Joel Priddy who wanted to create a short comic on both the visionary travels of William and the relative sense of isolation Catherine felt during his reveries. He called his short "Mr. Blakes Company."

Similarly, the do it yourself (DIY) magazine Make recently published an article where Gareth Branwyn researched Joseph Viscomi's work to conduct a series of "Relief-Etching Experiments" designed to allow people to make prints using a close approximation of Blake's method. I find each project refreshing alternatives to the standard academic essay. Furthermore, I feel that each provides innovative ways to discuss the conjunction of participatory culture and collaboration, and the individualism embodied in both the myth of the Romantic genius and the DIY movement.

But I also feel that, should I engage in projects like these, I need to conceptualize the purpose of such projects. Do I really feel that the technical projects offered by Branwyn and Viscomi get me closer to Blake's technique and, thus, to Romantic-era printing? And if so, to what end? I'm not a commercial printer or a graphic designer. Do I have my students read Priddy's comic to get a better sense of how comic artists envision his domestic life? Why?

Obviously, I have many questions here. I do feel that the organization of my department, and its emphasis on creating multimodal forms of response to literary texts provides new opportunities for understanding just what we do when we teach Romanticism. I also like my students to feel that they are not simply critically analyzing a work, but that they are also actively engaging in a constructive response to the work. On some level, I like my students to get the sense that Romantic authors can give a set of practical guidelines for students' own work. At the same time, I'm not an MFA teacher.

I feel that Blake, along with many other artists in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, can provide an interesting case for a practical or a pragmatic pedagogy for the Romantic period. In my pragmatic model, the history of the period is only one part of Romantic education. Another part is finding a way to understand the reason why Blake inspires creative responses, and to engage in such responses in a thoughtful and critical way. I want my students to do something with William Blake, or other Romantic visual and literary artists.

Despite my attempt at a definition, I don't really have my pedagogy fully worked out. I would welcome any suggestions for improvement, either by making my project more historical or by making my project more "practical."