British Literature

So I'm teaching this literature class in the fall. (Meaning, the week after next. Eek!) It's the first half of the British Literature survey--the course that, when I took it as an English major, made me decide to go to graduate school and focus on the Early Modern period. (Note: "Early Modern" is what the cool kids are calling the Elizabethan/Jacobian period these days. Shakespeare 'n stuff. In my undergrad days, every now and then students would show up on the first day of an upper-division Early Modern class expecting, like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.)

So, there's no pressure or anything.

I'm cautiously optimistic about the class. I haven't met any of the students yet, so I don't have the foggiest idea what to expect. Unlike everything else I teach, it's not a required-for-everyone class. It's not exactly a free elective, either--most students completing an Associates degree have to take at least one course from what they call the Humanities Core. If they're able to drive to the main campus for a class, they have lots of choices. If they want to (or have to) take all of their courses at our branch campus, they have a much more limited range of options--we do one literature class a semester, usually one or two music classes, something called Humanities, which is basically art history but with some extra stuff thrown in, maybe a couple of other things that I haven't heard about. And then there's the internet/video courses, which most students prefer not to take for a variety of mostly-good reasons. So there isn't a lot of choice, but there's some, and my class is what they've chosen. So far I have 16, which is well under the cap, but is a good size for something like this--enough to get a discussion going. I could get more--they can register up until the second weke of classes--but it'll probably stay about that size.

We're working out of the Norton anthology--the school picked that book for me, but it's probably what I'd have chosen anyway, so that's fine. My undergrad survey used the Norton--the edition where the Shakespeare play was one of the Henry's. I want to say Henry IV part I, but I can't swear to it. I'm glad Steven Greenblatt changed that--I like the history plays, I do, but I don't think they'd be a good choice for community-college non-English majors. The new Norton has King Lear and 12th Night. I picked 12th Night. It's a little bit less complex, and I bet many of the students haven't read a Shakespearean comedy. I think the schools around here still do Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, and then one of the big-name tragedies--Hamlet or Othello. The classes that do Shakespeare at all. (Julius Casear has to be the worst possible choice for 9th grade--how did that tradition ever get established? I honestly can't think of a single Shakespearean play that would be a worse choice for teenagers.) It'll be interesting to show them how the romantic-comedy form has lasted. Lear is good too, but it is a lot harder, and is also kind of samey-same with what they've probably already been exposed to. 12th Night is a bit of a screwball comedy, plus it'll give us an opportunity to talk about gender and sexuality.

But before we get to Shakespeare, we have the Anglo-Saxon and Medival stuff. Probably my weakest area in the period! We're doing Dream of the Rood on the first day, then jumping into Beowulf. Norton has the Seamus Heany translation, which I think is really good. And I just checked tonight--I'm in a wired classroom, so I can play sound clips and show slides easilly. If you're an English teacher, check out Norton's web page--they have quite a bit of material to easilly turn your crap lesson into a multimedia extravaganza. For Beowulf alone, I've snagged some sound clips of Heaney reading passages from his translation, a map showing where the Danes and the Geats actually lived, and some pics of Anglo-saxon bling. I also have an audio clip of a passage being read in Old English--that's not from Norton, but it's pretty cool too. I got a video from the media center, too, but I don't know yet if I'll use it. For some reason they can't send it to the branch campus for me to look at until this coming week. If it's not total crap, I have that, too.

But I don't know how much of the class we're going to have to spend just on understanding what's happening in the story, as opposed to talking about the larger themes. I've prepped based on spending half the time on comprehension, half on analysis. If they're swifter than I'm expecting with regards to comprehension, I might find myself underprepared. On the other hand, if the comprehension is really bad, I don't have a clear idea of how to scaffold them up to understanding it on their own, as opposed to just telling them what happens.

Then comes Canterbury Tales. Norton has it in Middle English, which I'm a little dubious about. I've bookmarked a couple of web sites that have side-by-side translations of the parts we're reading, so if it ends up being just impossible, I can make copies of that. I hope they can manage reading it in the original--for one thing, if they can do that, I shouldn't have much bitching to deal with when we get to the Early Moderns. One thing I'm not doing, however, is oral reading. We definitely don't have time to both learn to pronounce Middle English and to actually understand it. In fact, oral reading in a Middle English accent actually makes the language harder to understand than just reading it phonetically based on modern pronunciation. Plus, I never got the hang of reading the Middle English out loud. More Norton sound clips to the rescue! They'll get to hear a little bit of how it sounds, then we'll focus on what it means. We're doing the general prologue, Miller's tale, and Pardoner's tale. The Miller's Tale is a really filthy one--sort of the medieval version of American Pie--so I can be fairly confident that they haven't encountered it before. Again, I have the same worries about comprehension versus analysis--but by the time we get there, I should have a fair idea of what the class is capable of.

And that's as far as I've gotten in my prep. I know I'm doing miracle plays next, but I haven't even really looked at what Norton has, except to figure out what pages to put on the syllabus. I pity any student who signs up thinking, "Oh, we'll read some lovely literature from old-timey people who were so much more pious and just generally nicer than people today!" Violence, crude sexual humor, and viscious anti-semitism, that's the first five weeks of my class.