Having a Graduate Seminar “with” Rather than “from”

Abstract

More than once upon a time I, like you, took some graduate seminars that were not taught at all (never mind taught badly). Mine were in English. Our professor lectured us as a group ; we worked alone, es tranged from the ideas of our fellows until, late, we read each other our lonely papers, dug out and written up in isolation. Our relationship or responsibilities to the sem inar were so vague that we managed only to bore each other. A graduate seminar not only should not be handled this way, but need not. If a seminar is anything, it is a shared study of a common problem. And it can be a lively, mutually profitable adventure in scholarship. It can advance knowledge, provoke inquiry, supply experi ence in working closely with other budding scholars, and provide the stimulation of a common cause. So saying to myself, I mapped out a seminar to do the job, and conducted it. What follows is a record of what I planned, how it proceeded, and what success (or failure) it seems to have had. At last I shall speculate with you on what the experience suggested to me about seminars for graduate students, yours and mine. To begin one needs a subject for a seminar, a subject determined in part by one's training, interests, and de sires, but also by the needs of one's Department and its students. We had need of a seminar offering in my area of concentration, 17th century English nondramatic lit erature. We had more than enough students who were interested in the period. I was beginning a large project on John Donne, to be called A Donne Dictionary, and beyond that had a book in my head called The World of John Donne. I had, of course, already read the published materials on Donne and had read widely in the period. So I knew the problems and their dimensions. It might not have been so; moreover, it might not have been well to have been so, for not all topics one is schooled in make good seminar choices. They are too narrow or special or dull. But, as I said, one need not have been working in detail on the topic, and indeed new ground breaking for professor and students can be more lively. The key to good selection of a topic is its capacity to provide significant knowledge, to function as a mean ingful part of the students' general field of study, and to offer exercise in a variety of scholarly problems. Of course the topic should be small enough so that it can be explored reasonably in the time available. The World of John Donne was indeed significant, encompassing 1572-1631, the years not only of Donne but of Shakespeare's plays, the Spanish Armada, the first telescope, of Rubens, Drake, William Harvey, Ra leigh, Sidney, Franz Hals, of the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, of the founding of Virginia, of constant visitations of the plague. And the writings of those years included, to name but a few, The Lusiads, Euphues, North's Plutarch, The Arcadia, Doctor Faustus, The Spanish Tragedy, The Faerie Queen, Astrophel and Stella, Richard III, Every Man in His Humour, Hamlet, Don Quixote, The Alchemist, Chapman's Homer, The Duchess of Mai ft, the Novum Organum, and The Anat omy of Melancholy. And Donne was a man involved in the center of that world, as courtier, soldier, poet, schol ar, politician, theologian. If a student could know the world of John Donne, he could very nearly know per haps the most significant period of English literature. Moreover, the events of those years straddling the year 1600 turned much that was medieval to what we call modern in science, politics, religion, philosophy, and literature. To a student of literature it was a vital part of his study. The trouble was that the Donne years, if a seminar tried to study them in full prospect, would be too full to provide in one semester or quarter more than a shared survey. And that would not be graduate study. The focus would have to be on Donne; more specifically, it would have to be on how Donne's literary artistry developed out of the world he lived in. Even this was going to prove too large for the time we had, but no seminar worth its salt seems to fit a so-many-weeks academic term. The more important thing is that the seminar place its mem bers in contact with problems with which they can work together toward understanding of the seminar's topic, an understanding which will not be complete by term's end ing but whose later pursuit will have been planned for and made attractively possible by the seminar.