by
Annette Debo (AD63@UMAIL.UMD.EDU) and
Catherine Dauterman (CC116.UMAIL.UMD.EDU)
University of Maryland at College Park
Presented at the 1994 SAMLA Conference, Session:
"Teaching Textuality:
Pedagogical Applications of Textual Studies"
You may well wonder what prompted the organization of a session called "Teaching Textuality" in the first place. Three factors--as a response to a particular need, an effort to suggest new directions in the undergraduate literature classroom, and an attempt to bring our research and our teaching closer together--all three of these influenced our approach to the subject of today's session. The "canon" as we once knew it is either expanding or disintegrating, depending on your perspective. Students seem to be spending less time mesmerized by the beauty and complexity of a text and spending more time making sure they get their money's worth out of every credit. In addition, caught between shrinking budgets and ever-expanding demands, we as scholar-educators often find ourselves spending less time on research and more time teaching. While a single change in teaching methods certainly cannot completely meet each of these new challenges, we think that bringing textual studies into the classroom can help us address them in productive ways.
Our approach to teaching poetry involves bringing manuscripts, historical materials, and other primary texts usually reserved for graduate study into the undergraduate classroom. This approach accomplishes several things at once: first, it teaches students critical thinking skills that will be useful long after they've left our classrooms, skills which help them begin to explore the many texts that we cannot cover in a brief survey course. Second, this approach addresses the needs both of students seeking a "liberal education" in the humanities and those who want skills to increase their marketability in business, science, or even engineering; it introduces English majors to fundamental aspects of their field. Third, it gives us a chance to do "field research," to allow the theoretical models we work with in our research to come to life, as it were, in the classroom.
Perhaps most important, bringing manuscripts and multiple historical contexts into the classroom helps students develop "critical literacy": it establishes a framework within which the students can operate (by providing them with more than a "text" and "the answers"), it provides materials for creative thought (by giving them problems to solve and multiple avenues along which to explore them), and it allows the students to explore those materials freely. These skills are invaluable for English majors and business majors, for engineering, pre-med, and pre-law students alike. These students are flattered and challenged by being introduced to a real scholarly tool like manuscripts, and as they develop this "critical literacy" by working through the materials with which we provide them, we expect them to learn how to think through the complexities of multiple texts and editing politics rather than become repositories for pre-packaged information about manuscripts and variant editions.
Before we begin explaining our approach in detail, we should briefly outline our theoretical models. We began this project with Jerome McGann's discussions of textual criticism in his book The Textual Condition. When we refer to "textual studies," we refer to the idea that books, in their final form, are not the product of a single person, but are in fact created by an interactive process involving the author, the cultural context, the publisher, the editor, and the reader, creating what McGann calls "a laced network of linguistic and bibliographic codes" (Textual Condition 13). Our goal is to give undergraduates access to as much of this "network" as we possibly can given constraints of time and availability of materials. We are more concerned with the sociological aspects of textual studies and less concerned with the archaeological ones like watermarks, handwriting analysis, presses, extant editions, and so forth. We also call our approach "new historical" for the simple reason that it juxtaposes text and context and encourages students to question and explore the cultural contexts and the ways in which those contexts interact through time. Again, we want to give students access to as much cultural background as possible to show them that "cultural context" is by no means a seamless, unified, transparent background.
And now to our approach: we are in the process of producing a textbook based on Emily Dickinson's fascicle 24--a collection of twenty poems in manuscript form that Dickinson tied together in a booklet. Drawing from the concept that Martha Nell Smith argues for in Rowing in Eden--that Dickinson self-published in her fascicles, occasionally sending them to friends --we present the fascicle and accompanying apparatus to show students one way in which poetry gets produced. As supplemental resources, we also give students access to biographies, histories, manuscript histories, and critical reception information. We show them the many myths that have been put forward over the years in the guise of biographies of Dickinson--spinster aunt, girl disappointed in love, eccentric nun, recluse, feminist self-publisher--so that they can see the dilemmas involved in constructing biographies. We provide students with a variety of historical contexts--the civil war, the women's movement, technological developments--to show students how different contexts can inform different readings of a poem. We give them detailed histories of the manuscripts to help them become aware of the politics of editing and publishing and to make them interrogate the concept of a final version. We also explain the history of critical reception so that they can begin to see how critical views are culturally situated and how it is impossible to arrive at any one, authoritative reading of a poem. Finally, we supply them with reproductions of the entire fascicle in its manuscript version (along with print translations) so that they can see how Dickinson herself "published" her work. They can then explore the many variant words, handwriting details, order of poems, and lineation. Giving students access to all of this material allows them to draw conclusions--some that we usually teach anyway and some real surprises--and it allows them to learn how to draw those conclusions on their own.
Once the students have made their way through the background information and manuscripts, we suggest strategies for reading the poems and leave them to figure out what and where they think a particular poem really is. They are at once pleased and a little frightened by being given so much power over the texts. On a recent evaluation in an Introduction to Poetry course, one student commented that: "to be honest with you, it was more difficult to read and interpret Dickinson's poems even in the typescript. . . . I felt challenged and it was nice to feel like you trusted us with that challenge, that we were adept enough." Students begin to think through the issues and complexities themselves. For instance, they start considering the impact of variant words in a poem and start working out ways to account for them: some think of them as chords, others chalk them up to multiple poems, still others read the variants as a purposefully destabilizing device, and a few insist on ignoring them. They begin looking closely at Dickinson's handwriting and summon all their graphology skills in an effort to figure out what the long, wide capitals, the long, short, and curvy dashes, and the wavey w's might purport. They think about biographies and poems together, and some begin to imagine themselves in the poet's place and feel all the anger and resentment that they imagine the poet would feel at being so blatantly misrepresented.
We'd like to show you an example. Let's take a look at the handout. The first page is Dickinson's poem "The Spider holds a Silver Ball" in manuscript and print--a print translation we created using PageMaker 5.0 to try to accurately represent Dickinson's spacing, punctuation, and placement of variant words. This poem is particularly interesting because of the many variant words and the substantial changes they make to the poem. Dickinson refuses to make the final word choices or even to indicate her preferences in these variants. Substitute or replacement words are marked with "+" marks: for example, she gives a choice in line 3 between "And dancing softly to Himself" and "And dancing softly as he knits." As you can see, there are many other such options in this poem alone. Because Dickinson chose to use "+" marks instead of, say, numbers or letters to indicate substitutions, the reader must reason out the replacements herself. In this poem, the substituted words and phrases are relatively clear. Please follow along as I read two versions of the poem--first, the words as they appear in the lines, and then, with variant words substituted. [Read the two versions aloud.] As you can see, the variants make substantial changes: "knitting" as opposed to "dancing," "perishing" instead of "dangling," sophistries" in place of boundaries."
Once students have reasoned through the variants and have begun to explore the many possibilities they offer, we provide "Reading Strategies" which help give their exploration further direction. If you look, for example, at the first Reading Strategy on the second page of the handout, you can get some idea of what students can do with these variants. We ask them to think of the variant words as those that could be lit up in a pinball machine, changing the poem at each player's turn, in order to get them to reason out how the different versions of the poem might work, to begin to look at the poem as a fluid text instead of static printed words on a page. Instead of telling them how we might read the replacement words or explaining some "correct" way to interpret them, we give them the tools--the manuscript, the print text, and some very open-ended questions--and let them decide how to handle all the variations.
On the midterm I gave recently, I put the students in the position of being editors faced with publishing this poem. I asked them how they would handle the textual complexities, and I got many thoughtful answers--some I agreed with and others I didn't. Some students made arguments to ignore the variant words because they would distract and annoy the casual reader--a position still accepted by most editors producing editions of Dickinson's poetry. Others chose to retain the variant words in respect for authorial intent and the reader's intelligence, but they thought only scholars would bother to work through manuscript pages. Still others chose to print the manuscripts as well as type translations because then "you are in the mind of Emily Dickinson... It's almost like a little mystery that one must unfold--deciding where to put those variant words." One student added, "My first responsibility goes to the author. I am going to publish her work the way she presented it." A particularly astute student set up his argument to retain the variants around the effect that the variants have on the character of the spider: without the variants, the student argued, the spider is a victim of the housewife's room, but the variants make him into the aggressor. The spider becomes crafty and sneaky, a devilish character who is weary of the sophistries the housewife cleans from her home.
Of course, this approach, like any, has its disadvantages. The most difficult one to deal with is that it is time-consuming. It's much easier and quicker simply to tell students what the poems mean, where they came from, and why we're reading them. Giving students all the materials and showing them how to figure it all out for themselves takes longer. We all know that survey courses are overloaded to begin with as we compile syllabi under the conflicting pressures of canon, diversity, and our own interests. So, while teaching students these critical literacy skills seems sensible in the long run, in the short run, it means sacrificing other texts. Time pressures become less of an issue in upper-division courses devoted to a few authors, but as instructors we must still allow more time for manuscript and contextual work than we might otherwise allow for a segment on a particular poet. The second drawback to this approach is that it radically decenters the classroom. Suddenly giving students freedom to explore the materials as they like, asking them to figure it out for themselves, can lead the classes in directions that we, as instructors, would really rather not go.
However, these disadvantages notwithstanding, it seems to us that the benefits greatly outweigh the hazards. Giving students power in a classroom seems risky, but our experience has been that almost all of the students eventually rise to the occasion; they are flattered by this new authority, and they do their best to live up to the instructor's expectations. And covering Dickinson's manuscripts early enriches the rest of the course; students not only know how to interrogate texts on a much higher level, but they also have a new vocabulary with which to discuss them. If they decide to write a paper on an author other than Dickinson, they know to question biographies, to look for publication and manuscript histories, and to think about the contexts of the different critiques they read. They learn how to learn about texts, and these new skills help them not only to get more out of whatever courses they happen to be in at the moment but also to question and examine any texts they encounter in the future, be they legal documents, technical papers, speeches, plays, philosophy. They learn how to think about the status and nature of every text they encounter, and they learn how to look at cultural contexts.
The benefits for English majors are perhaps even greater, for not only does this approach give them new ways to think about texts, but it also gives them a preview of the kind of work they'll be expected to do later in their careers. They learn the same critical methods that academics use, albeit without reading McGann and Greenblatt, and this cannot but help them become more comfortable in playing with texts and questioning them as they progress in their studies. They begin to apply the theories that they'll learn later on, so that when they take their first theory class and learn about textual studies and the new historicisms, they hopefully will recognize something in that theory that resembles what they've been doing all along.
We have had great success using Dickinson's manuscripts in this approach; the manuscripts themselves are rich in textual complexities, the publication histories are convoluted and sometimes even racy, the biographical myths are so absurd that even the most hesitant student will eventually be forced to admit that there is some editing going on, and the 1880's in America is a period with which most students are already familiar. We also see potential for similar approaches with a number of different authors as well. William Blake's poetry has an unusual publication history, the cultural contexts are volatile and conflicted, and his reception continues to wax and wane. Oxford has recently published editions of Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The Book of Urizen, and others that include reproductions of the watercolored prints in which Blake originally presented his poetry. These new editions allow students to explore how the visual images and poetry interact in Blake's own versions of his poems. T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land is available in a facsimile version which includes Ezra Pound's extensive editing, providing a wealth of material for a textual/contextual approach to Eliot in an upper-division course. Many manuscripts from the Renaissance are being discovered and sometimes published, making these available for classroom use as well, and the new historicists have made volumes of contextual material from this period available in recent years as well.
Everyone in this room can doubtless add other names to this list. We're hoping to talk to some of you, either in the discussion time now or later in the conference, about other writers whose work has interesting textual conditions. In order to use them in the undergraduate classroom, these textual conditions should be relatively easy to demonstrate with available manuscripts and/or variants, with biographies that take more than the usual amount of artistic license in constructing a persona that is, like most of the Dickinson myths, at once intriguing and socially acceptable, and with complexities in publication or editing history. The biggest challenge in preparing material like this for classroom use is finding manuscripts, biographies, and reception/publication histories that are easily accessible and decipherable for undergraduates.
We see great opportunities in our approach to teaching both Dickinson in particular and poetry in general. It addresses concerns that students and instructors share, concerns about providing students with skills they can use both in the field of literature and beyond, by teaching students how to think about the status and nature of every text they encounter. It gives us new ways to talk about literature in the classroom, ways which have much more to do with the kinds of things many of us do in our own work, and it gives students, especially English majors, a head start on the more sophisticated reading techniques they will need to learn later. We chose Dickinson because her fascicles are available and because the history of the poems themselves contains so many rich examples of publication politics, but we see opportunities for similar work with other authors as well. Giving students access to Dickinson's own manuscripts and to as many of the complexities of biography, history, and publication that class time will allow has opened up new possibilities for both student and instructor, both in the classroom and far beyond.
Annette Debo Catherine DautermanReturn to beginning...
