"Why Am I Reading This?" Finding Literary Relevance (NeMLA)
Newport, RI
Organization: NeMLA
Event: NeMLA
If you’ve taught older literature recently, you’ve probably heard students ask the question "Why am I reading this?" They’ve got a point. Why should we read Shakespeare’s plays, or Paradise Lost, or (god-forbid) “The Rape of the Lock”? We might be able to coax students into reading a Jane Austen novel or even Huckleberry Finn because they are still part of our cultural imagination, but it’s less easy to coax students into reading Beowulf or Tom Jones—texts that are less familiar in form and content. As we jettison the canon and the timeless truths of literature, what do we expect reading older texts will give our students that they wouldn’t otherwise understand? How do we explain our reasoning to students about why they should read texts from earlier literary periods? How do we present these earlier periods (or periodization) and their culture and ideas as relevant to our undergraduate students in our English, writing, or humanities programs? Or is relevance the problem? How might we redefine older literature in our classes, or what we (can) do with these texts? I’m particularly interested in position papers that take into consideration practical pedagogical and theoretical concerns: arguments about curricula, course development or assignments that do different things with this literature. Papers are welcome on any kind of literature/texts or periods prior to 1800.
http://cfplist.com/nemla/home/S/22355
Patricia Comitini