Introduction: Teaching Tough Texts

Abstract

Introduction:Teaching Tough Texts Anne Greenfield (bio) In this era of attacks on the humanities and dwindling numbers of liberal arts majors, many faculty have had to market their courses aggressively and pique student interest by highlighting the sexiest qualities of the eras and genres we teach. Courses like "Jane Austen and Zombies" or "Sex, the City, and Restoration Comedy" will likely drum up easy interest, but what are the other effects of syllabi and reading lists that are redesigned chiefly to increase enrollments? And what of the other important authors and texts that may be omitted for their archaic language, their unfamiliar subject matter, or even their length? In other words, what is lost in excluding texts that now seem laborious to students and that no longer carry immediate appeal? Indeed, how do we respond to the tension between 1) the need to attract students to our courses, programs, and disciplines; 2) the need to remain rigorous, to include texts and course content that are not simple or tidy, and to help students gain knowledge and skills that do not come easily; and 3) the particular problem that arises in our field (and others) that some of the most valuable texts we have are also tough—that is, complicated, ambiguous, and unfamiliar. The pressure to resolve this tension gains force as administrative pressures for recruitment and retention rise. And things get messier and more interesting when we ask why we should include "tough texts" at all, what their value is (aesthetic, political, etc.), and where our values should lie. The two essays that follow emerged out of a March 2019 panel at the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies [End Page 215] in Denver, Colorado. Titled "Teaching Tough Texts," the panel asked its participants to "examine the opportunities, drawbacks, and ideas associated with teaching 'difficult' long eighteenth-century texts in the university classroom." While the scope of the papers solicited was not limited to any particular discipline within long eighteenth-century studies, both of these presentations focused on teaching literature within English departments. Despite the disciplinary continuity, the two essays featured here take very different approaches. In the first essay of this cluster, "Balancing Relatability and Alterity in Teaching Scottish Restoration Literature: A Case Study," Holly Faith Nelson and Sharon Alker describe the successful strategies they have employed when teaching a notoriously difficult group of texts: Restoration Scottish works in Scots dialect. Using the poem "Maggie Lauder" as an example, Nelson and Alker explain how one may use a lively performative reading to pique interest and make the dialect less intimidating—and how connecting it to modern-day texts may imbue "Maggie Lauder" with relevance and relatability for students. Equally, however, Nelson and Alker emphasize for students the differences that make a poem like this one so alien and unfamiliar today, a task of particular importance when studying works of the past that were shaped by cultural, political, linguistic, and rhetorical contexts other than those that our students experience today as readers. Ultimately, Nelson and Alker remind us that fruitful engagement with tough texts can involve not only discovering the relatable elements, but also encountering the "foreign and the strange." In the second essay, "Teaching Paradise Lost: Radical Contingency, Comparative Studies, and Community Engagement," W. Scott Howard highlights the ways in which great and difficult texts can be dynamic, ungraspable, collaborative, and ever-open to new strategies for engaging them. Using Milton's great poem as an example, Howard points out the ways that its many layers of discontinuity and complexity—which include the textual, the rhetorical, the historical, the formal, and the political—resist reification and ready explanation for scholars and students. Ultimately, Paradise Lost offers a fitting example of the reasons to embrace what Howard calls the "radical contingencies" of the poem that lie "beyond our interpretive control" and the opportunities therein for new forms of interpretation and engagement with new voices. While offering very different approaches to teaching tough texts, what these essays share is an earnest desire to meet the needs of students, to challenge them, and to honor and improve our field in the process. [End Page 216] Anne Greenfield...