Periodicals to Pedagogy to the Profession of Literary Studies

Abstract

Periodicals to Pedagogy to the Profession of Literary Studies Teresa Mangum (bio) Perhaps the worst kept secret about teaching is that innovation in the classroom fulfills the longing of most academics to remain lifelong students. As the essays in this volume suggest, all of us have found that in the actual teaching of periodicals, instructors as well as students learn far more than any of us anticipated as we designed our various syllabi and assignments. Many of the contributors discuss imaginative attempts to weave periodical assignments into undergraduate courses in the novel, drama, transatlantic literature, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. Others describe graduate courses that offer periodical vistas of readership, print culture, serialized time, conversations between literature and science, interchanges of image and text, battles for cultural supremacy, and painful histories of British imperialism. Both the increasing variety of critical approaches we are bringing to bear upon periodical culture and the diversity of the serial press provide exciting opportunities to teach our graduate students about nineteenth-century texts but also about the discipline of literary studies. Moreover, the particular constellations of resources available to scholars of periodical studies grant a rare opportunity for experiential learning, that is for a thoughtfully staged introduction to the discipline but also engagement with the discipline. And this distinctive pedagogical practice offers those who teach periodical studies the uniquely rewarding role not only of covert student, but also of teacher-mentor. Here, drawing upon the experience of students from two different versions of a graduate course, "Victorian Periodicals and Their Readers," as well as from a seminar titled "Victorian Inscriptions of India" in which I included periodical assignments, I make the case that periodical pedagogy offers a particularly promising path to professionalization.1 Specifically, I reflect on the way my students have [End Page 438] fashioned methodologies, developed dissertation topics, comprehended conferences, and published rather than perished. For several decades now, many of us have debated the best way of teaching critical methodologies and critical theory to graduate students. Through sheer serendipity, many members of my current graduate seminar are also taking an introduction to critical theory. Repeatedly, we are finding that magazines provide an excellent laboratory in which to test assumptions that are fundamental to the discipline of literary studies as well as the uses and limits of methodologies. As an example, specialists in periodical form demand that we reconsider the very unit of literary study. As we all know, the most fundamental question – what is a text? – is deeply vexed in periodical studies. Is a text one installment of a serialized novel, the issue in which an installment appears, a single issue or volume of a magazine, the full run of a journal? The very consideration of these questions plunges students into the throes of critical theory. Like many of the other contributors to this issue, I balance my syllabus among three types of activities. Within a given three or four week period we read a novel that raises interesting issues about a particular decade and periodical publication. Next, we focus on secondary studies that discuss individual periodicals, methods for studying periodicals, more general contextual work on culture and literary taste, and scholarship on the novels we are reading. Each unit culminates in a day when students present reports based on their own primary research in periodicals. As a class we develop a list of questions to take to the stacks, but as the semester progresses, I strongly encourage students to pursue topics that will enable them to experiment with a specific methodological approach and to consider topics they can develop into a final paper or even a future dissertation project. The sheer challenges of managing the material, of considering what constitutes foreground and background, of resituating a novel so that one has to rethink the "center" of research and writing demand uniquely self-conscious analyses of what the discipline of literary studies is today, of where we have points of contact with historians and art historians, and of when and how critical theory serves or obstructs analysis of print culture. The class culminates in a conference that we hold on the Saturday between the close of classes and the week of...