Texts, Revisions, History: Reading Historically in the Undergraduate Survey

Abstract

As instructors rise to the challenge of historicizing the undergraduate curriculum, we struggle, not only to accommodate contextual materials in an already bulky syllabus, but to provide the theoretical articulation necessary to escape a naively mimetic model of texts and contexts. Furthermore, by making ourselves the source of so much material and apparatus, we risk diminishing our students' own "textual power" (Robert Scholes). Taking two of Wordsworth's poems as examples, I argue that working from multiple versions of a poem, a student more readily recognizes the historicity of the poem itself, not as the hermetic artifact of some seamless historical moment but as a site of conflict and ambivalence. Understanding the poem as a work always "in progress," the student naturally assumes a more active role, negotiating among competing impulses within and among the various versions. The aim is not to turn a survey course into a course in textual criticism, but to introduce genuinely historicist reading habits that will inform students' readings of subsequent texts with or without the poet's revisions.