Reply to comment

Hi Alice,

Of course, when I teach my students something about 18c lit, I try to incorporate their first-hand observations of their initial encounters into class discussion, for all the reasons of engagement you cite. I always tell them (echoing Empson, I think), "your response is a critical fact," and telling them not to neglect their gut feelings about certain characters and situations. And I don't think that refining vocabularies actually involves telling them that "certain questions" are irrelevant. I'm delighted to hear that they have any opinion or question aboutthe material. So this goal of elaboration is not about silencing views, but teaching them how to recognize patterns in what is otherwise a very, very alienating set of texts.

The regularities involve the responses that they regularly exhibit in their responses to historical materials (why doesn't Pamela just run away from Mr. B?). The ideologies of present-day Houston are all on display when male and female students of various ages and classes read about a young woman who is being "harassed." My classes regularly split into pro- and anti-Pamela camps when they discuss her reactions, and they argue vehemently about P's choices.

The regularities also involve 18c ideologies of class, gender, etc., which my students also find baffling: they read Roy Porter's social history in my novel class, and find out that the English men and women so described were often violent, drunken, and impolite (a clear comment on their assumptions about Englishness in the present). They find patrician and pleb attitudes toward public executions repulsive, and they are fascinated by the open hostility to certain forms of religiosity by aristocratic or would-be aristocratic writers like Fielding or Behn. And to many of my (married or unmarried) female students, the mores of Jane Austen's characters are as remote as those of Catherine of Aragon. So I have no illusions about the universality of these plots or the societies they sprang from.

I really have no argument with your notions of openness and multiple perspectives in the classroom, but I think we keep returning to Willingham's lesson of medium range inferences and its implications for student boredom. (See my exchange with Paul). Students need to feel that they are grasping one thing before they can grasp multiple things. This is why storytelling is so important, because it sets up hierarchies and priorities that are easily intelligible to even the beginning student.

DM