Teaching James and the Ethics of Fiction: A Conversation on The Spoils of Poynton James Phelan The following conversation took place only in my head, which partially explains why, despite the few gestures toward verisimilitude, it sounds so artificial and moves with unrealistic smoothness. I’ve adopted this mode because it seemed better able to convey first, some of the internal debates I conduct about my teaching, and, second, a model of what I hope to achieve in the classroom—some of the time. The scene: The English Department Commons Room at a large midwestern state university. The characters: JIM, a middle-aged full professor (Ph.D. circa 1975); BETTY, a young Associate Professor (Ph.D. circa 1988); KATIE, a middle-aged graduate student, currently ABD (B.A. circa 1975); MIKE, a new M.A. student (B.A., 1995) JIM: Help! BETTY: What’s the matter, old man? JIM: My head hurts. BETTY: That’s what you get for thinking at your age. JIM: You want I should stop altogether? ( The other three grin.) JIM: Ah, very funny. But, no I haven’t already stopped. When you’re done laughing, perhaps you’ll take pity on this old man and give me your thoughts about something. KATIE: Sure, what? [End Page 256] JIM: Teaching Henry James to undergraduates. Mike, did you read James in any undergrad courses? MIKE: Yeah, The Turn of the Screwin a fiction course and “The Beast in the Jungle” in an American lit survey. JIM: How’d it go? What did you and your classmates think? MIKE: Well enough. Some of my classmates seemed to like The Turna lot, and a few were very high on “The Beast.” Others thought “The Beast” was boring. I was sufficiently intrigued to try some James outside of class. BETTY: What kind of approaches did your teachers take? MIKE: With The Turn, we read the Bedford Casebook and with “The Beast” the teacher gave us Sedgwick’s queer reading and we spent a lot of time discussing that. KATIE: Sounds like pretty standard stuff and sounds like it worked. Anything in that for you, Jim? JIM: Well, I suppose. But I can’t get too excited about it. I think there’s something artificial in the way the Bedford texts separate the approaches from each other. More than that, it seems that there’s so much James we’re not teaching undergrads these days. Katie, what did you read when you were an undergrad? KATIE: The Ambassadorsin a modern novel course. It was a struggle, but I stayed with it because it was HENRY JAMES. BETTY: Interesting; I don’t think many students would do that today. ( Mike nods.) They’re less impressed than we were by the fact that some writer on the syllabus is canonical—a change for the better, I think. Our attitudes made us too slavish to the so-called Greats; our now standard questions like “great according to what standard?” and “great for which audiences?” just didn’t get asked. JIM: I agree that it is a change for the better. But perhaps we—and our students—have also lost something by abandoning the attitude that led Katie to read late James with such persistence. Anyway, I still have my problem of selecting something from the less-commonly-taught part of James’s corpus that would work well with our students. BETTY: Well, tell us more. What’s the context in which you’ll be teaching James? JIM: A course in the rhetorical theory of narrative—probably in the section on ethics. KATIE: Before we go further, I’d like to know more about your pedagogy in the undergrad classroom. Do you lecture, lead discussions, give a lot of responsibility to the students, or what? BETTY: And I’d like to know more about the course and how the unit on James and ethics contributes to the whole thing. JIM: OK, fair enough. The pedagogy first—but I have another question for you. I’ve experimented with the decentered classroom, but I haven’t been happy with the results. Do any of you use it? KATIE: Yes, I’ve found it to...