18thC Pedagogy: Surveying the Survey Course

This semester I have my first ever chance to teach an American literature survey course, beginnings to 1865. While I have read a fair amount of these texts in the past, many of them are new to me. Prior to the course, which is a sophomore-level survey, I had never read any of William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation or Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative. I ended up enjoying both of them, as well as the beautiful poetry of Anne Bradstreet, the haughty rants of Cotton Mather, the polite and loving letters of the Adamses, as well as the irony and wit of Benjamin Franklin.

 The transatlantic approach to literature is a growing trend in literary studies, especially in eighteenth-century studies. Looking at traditional literary anthologies, however, you’d rarely know it. When I taught eighteenth-century women poets, Roger Lonsdale’s anthology did not contain Phillis Wheatley. Conversely, there is no mention of Aphra Behn in American lit anthologies. Yet really, these should be rather obvious inclusions.

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano is possibly one of the few works featured in both British and American literature anthologies. Otherwise, these different literatures are quite compartmentalized.

Also of note is how easily the Norton anthology (which I have to use for the American Literature survey) includes texts that were originally written in Spanish until it is no longer useful or “necessary” to do so. The anthology introduction explains that there were many languages spoken in the early American colonies—yet the anthology itself contains few other translated texts once the English show up.

These issues are miniscule when we consider that global literary and transnational approaches to literature and culture rarely make it into the undergraduate classroom. A colleague of mine who teaches African and Asian history as well as courses on Islamic Civilization has pointed out how consistently “World Literature” or “World History” are ghettoized in college curricula. Students in the US rarely have to consider other (Other?) civilizations and world developmental narratives outside the Western one, to our detriment.

On a smaller scale, I always noted, as the daughter of Polish immigrants, that Eastern European history rarely made an appearance in my high school European history classes. It was as if Poland never existed, despite that nation’s dominance on the continent during the 17^th century. Omissions such as these are merely symptoms of larger issues relating to colonial histories that are often at the forefront of our class discussions in the American literature survey.

While preparing lessons for the course has been, in many ways, challenging because it is not “my” area of study, I not only enjoy this opportunity, but I welcome the challenges it brings with it. If nothing else, it has made me more aware of the missing pieces of the puzzle when we teach “British” literature courses.

In English departments, we often consider “survey” courses to be the steady foundation of further literary study. At many universities, students must take a certain amount of sophomore level surveys to get their BA in English or before they can take upper-level courses in literature. I wonder, however, how useful the traditional survey is. Perhaps it would be better to come up with sophomore surveys dedicated to the idea of “surveying” the many different literatures of a smaller time period or, rather than sticking to time period, surveying the development of a literary theme across time and space? Such flexible approaches to foundational literary study may actually encourage greater critical thinking skills in our students while engaging them in ways that the usual chronological approach may not.

Queer Vision(s)

This year, I’ve proposed a roundtable for ASECS 2015 on “Queer Vision(s)”:

Eighteenth-century plays, novels, memoirs and even art and poetry are often concerned with what we know and how we know it. Vision plays a key role in defining and understanding knowledge in this period, especially with regard to knowledge of the gender and sexuality of eighteenth-century persons and characters. Consider the moment in which Fanny Hill looks through the peep hole and watches two young men engaging in a homosexual act only to fall over and faint before she can report them, or how actresses in breeches roles were admired and desired by both men and women for the spectacle they provided on stage. This roundtable solicits papers that will examine the various ways in which vision is queered in the eighteenth-century as well as how vision and the ability to see “queerly” affects who or what is understood to be “queer.”

In the spirit of shameless plugging, I’ve decided to dedicate a whole blog post to the topic in the hopes of promoting the roundtable. I’m hoping to get a really great discussion going at ASECS on the intersections of desire, perception and sexuality. These issues are, after all, deeply tied together.

My own research on female cross-dressers led me to the idea of “queer vision.” So often, the bodies of these women would give them away. A flash of boob, for example, and the jig was up—or was it? In Henry Fielding’s The Female Husband, Mary Hamilton’s breasts are exposed at a town dance—yet she retains her male disguise. According to Fielding’s narrator, the Doctor (Hamilton) enters into a dispute with a man at a local dance where she has been wooing her newest conquest, Mary Price. During the scuffle, the man “tore open her [Hamilton’s] wastecoat, and rent her shirt, so that all her breast was discovered, which, tho’ beyond expression beautiful in a woman, were of so different a kind from the bosom of a man, that the married women there set up a great titter” (46-47).

How Hamilton hides her superlatively perfect breasts in the guise of a man is left to the imagination of the reader. According to our narrator, “it did not bring the Doctor’s sex into an absolute suspicion, yet caused some whispers, which might have spoiled the match with a less innocent and less enamoured virgin” (47). It seems that Mary can only see what she wants to see; Fielding, by contrast, is coy as to what exactly he wants his readers to see: do we see Hamilton as a villain? a rake? a misguided criminal weirdo? a beautiful and attractive female husband?

The issue of perception and desire, however, is not limited to issues of cross-dressing or same-sex desires. These same issues play out in various ways on the eighteenth-century stage and in novels where concerns about disguise, class fluidity, “passing,” and masquerade show up again and again. For example, how could Clarissa not “see” Lovelace for what he was? Or could see it, but still desire him despite it?

It seems, perhaps, that despite innovations in visual technology, such as the microscope and the telescope, eighteenth-century writers were still quite concerned with how to see others, and how these various queer visions affect how others see us and whom we desire. The purpose of this roundtable will be to take a look at these issues from a variety of perspectives and through a variety of texts and artefacts. Artists as well as writers explored the notion of vision and desire in visual media such as paintings and cartoons. Other studies in material culture, such as costume studies, might also make some interesting interventions into this discussion.

For more info on submitting a proposal, go to the CFP. Paper proposals are due by Sept. 15, 2014.

For more on boobs, see my article on Maria Edgeworth's Belinda.