“I am emailing to inform you that another member of my family has passed away”: A Response to Restoration’s Special Issue on COVID/Defoe

Abstract

“I am emailing to inform you that another member of my family has passed away”: A Response to Restoration’s Special Issue on COVID/Defoe Al Coppola I began teaching Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year at the start of the pandemic, because I didn’t know what else to do. On March 10, 2020, when the reports coming out of Wuhan and Lombardy were terrifying, and I already had students missing weeks of class because of a lingering, pernicious flu, I spent my Tuesday classes getting students to download Slack and Zoom onto their phones and practicing how to use them. I told them we’d likely have to shift to remote instruction if the coronavirus situation got any worse. I thought we’d have a little more time to prepare, but I was wrong. CUNY went online the very next day, as one by one the businesses and institutions of New York City went into lockdown. I was teaching a 300-level general education literature course on crime and punishment in eighteenth-century London at John Jay College. The students had just spent six weeks researching cases in the Old Bailey online, and we were slated to start reading Moll Flanders the following week. Only there was no way in hell any of my students—or, if I am being honest, even myself—were going to be able to think about anything except the pandemic as COVID-19 scorched a horrendous path of fear, suffering and death through the New York City communities where my students were sheltering in place when they weren’t venturing out as “essential workers.” I threw the syllabus out the window and decided that for the rest of the semester we’d just read Defoe’s Journal and try to survive. Drawing from the Project Gutenberg files, I quickly assembled an etext of the Journal on CUNY Manifold, a Mellon-funded open educational resource publishing platform that produces clean, easy-to-navigate, web-accessible etexts that work great on the mobile [End Page 77] phones my students would be depending on to stay connected.1 Assuming that the shift to remote learning was going to raise serious technological barriers, I polled my students and the results were just as grim as you’d expect from an urban, public, Hispanic-Serving Institution where 64% of the students receive Pell grants. Barely half of respondents said they had access to a laptop/PC for their sole use, 50% didn’t have high speed internet at home, and just 20% reported they had a “comfortable private space in [their] house, no significant distractions.” I went with Manifold because our etext would be freely and easily accessible to all, and I would be able to set up a private reading group where students could collaboratively annotate the text in a space that was only viewable by others in the class. I also “improved” Defoe’s text like some smug Victorian with artificial chapter breaks—“Theft at His Brother’s House,” “The Poor Piper,” “H. F.’s Experience as a Plague Visitor”—because in that moment my allegiance could not be to Fredson Bowers. I knew my gen ed students would need some guideposts in the unwieldy text. From an “outcomes assessment” perspective, I don’t think we accomplished much of anything the rest of that spring semester. But I kept holding Zoom sessions and reaching out on Slack to let them know that we were still a community who cared for each other. And the work was there for those who had the ability—the time, the space, the technology, the quiet, the viral load—to take refuge in it. What my students had to say about their lives, and about how they could see their lives reflected in Defoe’s Journal, will always haunt me.2 “Thanks professor, I’ve been on bed rest. If things don’t get better by tomorrow I will be going to the ER.” –DU, March 12, 2020 “My father and I have been sick for over a week and I am not sure what it is we have, the COVID- 19 test won’t be done until the...