On the Common Core, Naughty Books, and Ambiguity

A piece I've written over at The New Republic is getting lots of attention, so I thought I'd just expand on a few things here. I think the ambitions behind the Common Core are good ones, but I agree with Dianne Ravitch and co. that the whole thing was rushed and probably needed more input from those on the ground. Most troubling, I think, is the general tendency in education "reform" right now to reduce everything to some quantifiable metric, including literary complexity. It is a frightening assumption, in so much of our society right now, that if an experience can't be reduced to data it really isn't worthwhile. When we bring this assumption to bear on books or art it compromises the "human" experience at the center of the humanities. In short: it makes our teachers, and our children, less human.

Yes, I understand that some of the metrics used to measure reading complexity are primarily intended to improve comprehension -- and I agree this is a worthy goal for at least one part of our literacy education. I also understand that the standards carefully explain that students should also learn more nuanced reading skills. But the emphasis and the energy behind the Common Core points more in the direction of "comprehension" and quantifiable data than it does in the direction more broadly defined "reading." The CCSSO documentation repeatedly makes it clear that the final goal is better algorithms and metrics, better testing regimes, more failproof systems.

We must recognize that such systems, in both their conceptualization and implementation, often disempower and devalue teachers. The best teaching systems in the world -- like Finland's -- treat teachers as experts in their field and demand their expertise. They then trust teachers to match reading materials to children in a holistic fashion. This is the way it used to be, in some places, in America too.  At least that was my lucky experience, growing up in a small, rural school, in a poor community in far western Oklahoma.  I was a loudmouth, smartass kid, who was always in trouble for disrupting class. In my 7th grade year, I literally spent every day of the first month in after school detention. But in my 8th-grade year, I got lucky. That's when my English teacher took me aside and said: "you know what, you seem to get this literature we're reading pretty well. Why don't you go over to my bookshelf -- the one over there behind my desk -- and find something else you might like?" She particularly suggested I might want to take a look at The Catcher in the Rye, or maybe Clockwork Orange.

Clockwork Orange? What Jr. High kid today gets to read that book in school? But that teacher let me read all the naughty books -- the books that I, at least, felt like were just a little bit forbidden -- and I loved it. That semester I not only read Clockwork Orange and Catcher in the Rye, but also most of Steinbeck, On the Road, and everything I could find by Kurt Vonnegut. These books gave voice to some of the social discontent I'd begun to feel but never been able to articulate. They resonated with me, and in some very real sense they saved me, or at least saved my teachers from some of my disrupted disaffection.  

I never stopped reading, although I did eventually get into Shakespeare and Milton too.  I became an English professor so I could teach them all the time. And I hope that some of my students become teachers in a system where they're treated like professionals who can figure out what students would like to read -- what they need to read -- without using some stupid algorithm. 

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How to COPY a Book Proposal

Over at the Chronicle of Higher Education, Rachel Toor explains "How to Write a Good Book Proposal," and she offers some excellent advice, especially for nonfiction writers and novelists. I'd like to chip in here, though, with something for writers of academic books -- and for writers who'd rather copy a form than construct one from a set of instructions.  I probably fall into that later category: give me a formal model (newspaper article, book review, personal essay) and I can usually adapt to it pretty easily, although my eyes glaze over within a paragraph of any guide about "how to" write this or that. It may be a weakness, but it's my weakness. 

So, for those of you who share that weakness, I'm posting the book proposal that I sent to Cambridge University Press and that led to my recently published book. Is it a perfect model? I doubt it. But I did copy it from some pretty good models! One caveat: my final book changed quite a bit from this, both in terms of content and organization. But this was good enough to get me in the door.

Childish Things: The Poetics and Politics of Youth in Milton’s England

Book Proposal

Blaine Greteman

           

            Childish Things argues that coming of age in seventeenth-century England was a uniquely poetic and political act.  Early modern authors used childhood and maturity to address contentious questions of political representation – about who has a voice and who can speak on his or her own behalf.  Writers since Aristotle had described children as creatures of pure mimesis.  Naturally embodying the poetic impulse, children imitated the voices of others as they cultivated more authoritative speech and ultimately left childish babble behind. Early-modern educators, playwrights, and poets repeatedly staged this drama, and if we accept Jacques Rancière’s suggestion that the central problem of all politics is knowing “whether the subjects who count in the interlocution...are speaking or just making a noise” it could not fail to be political. 

            In seventeenth-century England, after all, consent was explicitly figured as voice.  Electors “gave their voices,” shouting assent to select their parliamentary representatives, while those whose age or behavior made them incapable of consent were deemed legal infants, from the Latin infans, “voiceless.” Historians like Mark Kishlansky and Derek Hisrt have shown that government by consent became the new paradigm during this dynamic period, and I argue that the threshold between infancy and adulthood accordingly became the focus of special scrutiny and enormous creative energy. Childish Things focuses on printed and manuscript works by Ben Jonson, John Milton, Thomas Hobbes, and their contemporaries that ask how voice emerges from infancy and how childish speech before that moment complicates ideas of human agency and obligation.  In each case, the ability of poets and dramatists to produce and reproduce powerful voices provides an important part of the answer. According to many humanist pedagogues and the men who learned the dramatic arts in their schools, poetry was a discipline that could “embowlden our youth and try their voices,” as one educator put it.  This disciplinary function encouraged antitheatrical critics like William Prynne to rail against the similarities between infantilizing dramatic representation and a political system where children could become members of Parliament.  But more radical reformers seized on the child’s unruly nature and mimetic responsiveness as a radical resource, a voice of innocence and channel for the divine.   

            Childish Things suggests that we must understand the distinction between youth and age as a power relation constructed in historically specific discourses and social contexts. Over the last forty years, historians have carefully revised Philippe Aries’ claim in Centuries of Childhood (1962) that childhood did not exist as a distinct phase of life before the later seventeenth century, while retaining his sense that concepts of childhood are culturally determined. I draw on this work as I focus on the tendency of seventeenth-century writers to define children in terms of their mimetic capacities and poetic responsiveness, but I shift the center of gravity to explore the seventeenth-century idea that childhood could persist long after sexual maturation.  The cases I examine lie at the outer limits of childishness and extreme precocity, where voters elected twelve-year-olds as Members of Parliament before they could legally vote and theatre impresarios advertised child actors who were actually twenty, thirty, or forty years old.  Historians like Paul Griffiths and Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos describe many of these figures as “youths.”  But Childish Things demonstrates the many ways they continued to be conceptualized as children and focuses on the moments when they became subjects, speaking their own adult status into being.  Poetic and political representation meet in the figure of the child on the cusp of adulthood – the grown boy still playing the woman’s part on stage, the young girl performing as The Lady in Milton’s Maske, the newly-created Adam and Eve making their way through the wider world at the conclusion of Paradise Lost.

            As those examples make clear, the poet, pedagogue, and polemicist John Milton is a pivotal figure in this study. “Shall we never grow old enough,” he asked in one of his final political tracts, “to be wise?”  It is a typical expression of Milton’s perpetual anxieties about his own maturity and that of the British people, and this book draws broadly from his poetry and prose to parallel Milton’s own development from budding poet to national tutor with the troubled birth and growth of consent in the English polity. At the same time, I show how such development looks back to and arises out of models of childhood staged by Jonson, Shakespeare, the humanists, and the antitheatrical critics who attacked them. For these writers, to speak as a child may simply mean to speak nonsense or to parrot others, but it may also enable one to channel something more powerful than oneself.

Status of the Manuscript

            The completed manuscript is approximately 90,000 words, including endnotes, and is ready to be reviewed by the press upon request. A version of the first chapter, “Coming of Age on Stage” is forthcoming in English Literary History (ELH) and a version of the third chapter “‘Perplex’t Paths: Youth and Authority in Milton’s Work,” was published in the Summer 2009 issue of Renaissance Quarterly.  I do not plan to publish additional chapters.  As a tenure-track professor at the University of Iowa I have ample time to devote to revisions, and as a former writer for TIME magazine I am experienced and efficient at working through the editorial process.

Readership

            Childish Things will appeal broadly to students and scholars of early modern English literature, drama, and history.  In a recent volume of Renaissance Quarterly the historian Margaret King assessed the existing histories of childhood and noted the need for work that would address “the demarcations made on the spectrum from conception to maturity.”  Problem Children helps fill that void.  The book’s argumentative spine, tracking the development and definition of consent, will also engage intellectual historians and scholars of the Civil War and legal historians, while its theoretical engagement with Hobbes, Hanna F. Pitkin, Philip Pettit, and John Rawls, will be of interest to students of political philosophy.  Shakespeareans and students of the theatre will attend to the new research on child actors, which significantly alters our understanding of the seventeenth-century stage.  Finally, with three chapters on John Milton’s poetry and prose, I expect the book to find a particular audience among Milton scholars and be reviewed in journals like Milton Studies and Milton Quarterly.

Related Works

            Michael Witmore’s Pretty Creatures (2007) and Edel Lamb’s Performing Childhood (2008) have recently developed the ground Leah Marcus broke with Childhood and Cultural Despair (1978). These books focus on the literary representation and aesthetics of very young children and neonates, establishing the child as central to early-modern poetics.  None, however, explores the strange territory at the outer bounds of childhood, and perhaps for that reason no other literary study develops the relationship between the poetics of childhood and the question of consent. Likewise, promising works like Su Fang Ng’s Literature and the Politics of Family (2007) have focused on patriarchal and anti-patriarchal metaphors with an eye to gender and hierarchy, but without attending to children and their conceptual link to issues of mimesis and voice. Likewise, individual authors in my study, especially Milton, have been richly contextualized in terms of their revolutionary moment in works like David Norbrook’s Writing the English Republic (1999) and David Loewenstein’s Representing Revolution in Milton and His Contemporaries (2007).  But it is safe to say that none of these works have considered the politics of childhood.  Although Holly Brewer’s legal history, By Birth or Consent (2008), focuses largely on the American context and does not include literary analysis, it shows that such a consideration is due.  Childish Things unites discussions of the poetics and politics of youth.  It does not simply use poetry and drama to illuminate social movements or testify to a broader discursive moment, but argues that children in form a nexus between poetry and politics, a singular locus for poetry’s disciplinary and transformative power.

Contents

Introduction

            “Childhood,” wrote Henry Cuffe in a hugely popular text of 1607, “is the first part and age of a man’s life, wherein their generation and growth is perfected, and this lasteth (for the most part) untill wee be five and twenty.”  Cuffe draws on the best authorities, but his parenthesis reflects a fundamental ambiguity about the boundaries of childhood shared across the legal, religious, and educational writings examined in this introduction.  Although they often bore full adult responsibilities, no amount of good behavior, maturity, or intelligence could guarantee adult status to children in their teens, twenties, and even thirties.  One trespass, however, could do the job instantly. The legal principle of “malitia supplet aetatem,” or malice supplies the age, removed the uncertainty, allowing even the youngest children to be executed as adults if they, like Adam and Eve, possessed the knowledge of good and evil.  My introduction traces the overlapping political, religious, and poetic concerns that make malitia supplet aetatem a fundamental pattern in early modern culture from Erasmus to Locke.  As individuals enter adult society, they reenact man’s fall with each generation, compromising their newfound voices.  The book’s recurring dilemma is the struggle to escape that double bind, to seize the ability to speak without seizing the inheritance of sin.

Chapter 1: Coming of Age on Stage: Jonson’s Epicoene and the Politics of Childhood in Early Stuart England

            The same qualities that made the child incapable of rational consent made him the ultimate exemplar of poetic response, and Chapter 1 explores the implications of this dynamic in Epicoene, a play that held its popularity both before the revolution and after the restoration.  Discussions of children’s theatre companies have reached a consensus view that the plays’ aesthetic power derived in some part from the boy actors’ diminutive size – an estrangement effect noted by Michael Witmore, Peter Stallybrass, Michael Shapiro, and others.  But my research shows that by the time James I took the throne, the actors in London’s children’s theatre companies were often fully grown men performing as children, and in Jonson’s play we can see how their liminality facilitated Stuart theatre’s exploration of the Jacobean subject’s vexed political status.

            As grown men performed childhood on stage, they testified to theatre’s disciplinary power even as they enacted a fictional freedom not available outside the theater walls. The young man dressed as the titular “silent woman” of Jonson’s play emblematizes this predicament perfectly: he speaks loudly and constantly as long as he performs his female role, lapsing into true silence only when he is finally revealed as a mature but infantilized man and the play ends.  At a time when James countered parliamentary unrest by adopting and expanding the rhetoric of the firm but benevolent father-king, works like Jonson’s asked whether it was possible, or even desirable, to leave childish things behind.

Chapter 2: Minors No Senators: Children, Literature and the Problem of Consent

            In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was surprisingly common for children under the age of majority to serve in Parliament, where they illuminated in stark relief the same crisis of agency dramatized in plays like Epicoene.  In this rarefied space, an infant could legislate for the nation, although outside of Parliament he had no legal authority to speak for himself, an irony the MP for Lichfield, Richard Weston highlighted when he complained “it is not fit, that they should make Laws for the Kingdom, who are not liable to the law.”    This chapter shows that for many, like the self-described “scourge” of stage plays William Prynne, such facts revealed disturbing similarities between dramatic and political representation in a country poised between tyranny and liberty.  In Minors No Senators, a tract published both early in the Civil War and at the Restoration, Prynne attacked child MPs with strikingly anti-theatrical language that illuminates the broader debate over education, poetry, and politics.  Theoretically, the child’s ability to channel the voices of others might offer a vehicle for the people’s will, but the practical effect of using Parliament as a finishing school for elites also indicated the disciplinary and symbolic purpose of England’s chief representative body.        Accordingly, as the principal of representation became central to discussions of English governance, the presence of children on the public stages of Parliament and playhouse forced a fundamental question:  did the type of representation embodied by the mimetic child demonstrate a failure of agency and consent, or did it indicate of a kind of representation that could operate successfully in the absence of consent? This is not just a political question that can be illuminated by literature, with poets and playwrights shedding light on their culture’s attempts to conceptualize the basis of obligation.  Instead, it is a fundamental crux that troubles contemporary claims for poesy’s shaping power and forms a recurring theme in the works of John Milton and his contemporaries in the following chapters.

Chapter 3: ‘Perplex’t Paths’: Youth and Authority in Milton’s Early Work

           

            Not all reformers attempted to sever the link between poetic and political representation.  The kind of authoritative consent Prynne envisioned was problematic, in part, because the period’s broad conceptualization of childhood made it difficult to explain when youths became properly adult.  Prynne dodged the question by declaring that legislators should be “Old Men” of at least fifty. But Milton was never one to step lightly away from a limen, and in early works like Comus he takes up the question of how children on the cusp of adulthood become free individuals with the authority to shape their own destinies. In works that prefigure his educational tracts and play a performative role in his own maturation, Milton suggests that only a daring engagement of the child’s passionate and sensuous nature allows a powerful, adult voice to emerge. 

            This is a peculiarly poetic process, immersing the child in a world of delights that she echoes, resists, and transforms; as the voice becomes authoritative, the human will comes into its own.  This proleptic moment, in which voice outstrips the will, generates the central anxiety in Milton’s early works. The youth who speaks before gaining the right to judge his own words may echo the wrong things, recognizing the malice of his will only after innocence cannot be recalled.   As I demonstrate this dynamic in early works like Ad Patrem, Sonnet 7, and Comus, I also address a lacuna in Milton studies. Recent revisionary biographical work by Gordon Campbell and Thomas Corns has suggested that Milton began his career as a conservative with high-church leanings, embracing “Laudian Arminianism and Laudian style” before gradually becoming radicalized.  But until Childish Things we have had no clear discussion of the role Milton’s poetry itself played in this developmental process, as a young author found his voice through a process that generated his later radicalism.

Chapter 4: ‘Children of Reviving Libertie’: The Radical Politics of the Well-Disciplined Child

            Milton’s career usefully complicates the dominant account of Renaissance humanist education as a disciplinary, conformist force popularized by scholars like Lisa Jardine, Anthony Grafton, and Richard Halpern.  This chapter begins by exploring the ways that Milton, Comenius, and other mid-century reformers adapted humanist pedagogical theories and concepts of childhood to revolutionary use.  Both Comenius and Milton develop the humanistic goal of willing submission into a radical discipline, but while Comenius attempts to purge his program of the poetic error that had long troubled humanist pedagogues, Milton insists that these dark materials are the very stuff of virtue.  Milton’s singular departure from the pedagogical tradition drives not only Of Education, but also polemical works including Eikonoklastes, Areopagitica, The Readie and Easie Way, and his epic First and Second Defense of the English People.  

            In such works, he draws on metaphors of childhood and wardship as he encourages his countrymen to prove that their liberty is not, as he puts it in the Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, merely “a ridiculous and painted freedom, fit to coz’n babies.” Milton describes a people who lack a voice but who possess a radical capacity for growth and change, and a more complete understanding of his pedagogical model forces a reassessment of his infamous elitism.  Milton certainly believes that the nation in wardship needs “a potent tutor, an overseer, a faithful and courageous superintendent of your affairs.”  But whether he sets himself or Cromwell up in this guardian position, he clearly intends it to be temporary, and I conclude by arguing that his prose works both describe and constitute a poetic education that can make the people “fittest to chuse” for themselves. The phrase is taken from The Readie and Easie Way, written on the eve of Restoration when Milton’s estimation of the people’s actual readiness is at its nadir. Even here, however, Milton continues to suggest that his own words may raise them up as “children of reviving libertie.”

Chapter 5: ‘Something of Gratitude’: Hobbes’ Prodigal Fictions

            While Milton employs concepts of childhood and development to construct a model of political change, Hobbes uses the child’s vacated agency as the model subjectivity for a system of political stasis.  Almost no critical attention has been paid to the role of children in Hobbes’s system, although in Leviathan and elsewhere the philosopher makes it clear that “the Child’s consent” to receive nourishment from its mother precedes all other social agreements.  How and when does the child demonstrate this consent?  Such questions go to the heart of mid-century debates over obligation and whether social relations derive from consent and contract or altruism and patronage. 

            Critical neglect of Hobbes’ children started early.  In De Cive, Hobbes suggests that to understand how contract operates in the state of nature we should “consider men as though they were suddenly sprung from the earth (like mushrooms) as adults right now.” Beginning from such a position, Hobbes can explain with almost mathematical precision how obligation arises from conquest and contract as men make rational choices to preserve themselves.  But children lack a fully developed rational faculty, and both Royalist and Republican critics attacked Hobbes for eliding them from his account.  Surely their obligation to parents demonstrated the principal role of love, nurture, and lineage in the state? I argue that Hobbes developed his answer over the course of his career, fundamentally altering his definitions of “reason” and “choice” as he reconfigures parental nurture and filial gratitude as a contractual exchange.  Mimetic and irrational, the child who can become obligated through no rational decision or act becomes a perfect figure for theorizing the obligation of the masses of men who never exercise a real voice in the political system to which they owe allegiance.

Chapter 6: ‘Unexperienc’t Thought’: Filial Affect and Education in England

            Through Satan, Milton depicts the failure of the Hobbesian psychology of contract and of the static worldview it requires; Satan attempts to elide filial ties by proposing that the angels may be “self-begot,” and when he finally does acknowledge the Father’s gifts he can only experience gratitude as debt, love as a system of exchange.  I argue that Adam and Eve demonstrate Milton’s alternative, their experience of obligation drawn from humanistic conceptions of childhood and the poet’s own radical pedagogy.  This final chapter not only offers a new way of reading Paradise Lost in the context of the many contemporary works depicting Adam and Eve as children, but also refigures our notion of the poem’s notorious disciplinary and hierarchical tendencies. 

            Paradise Lost has earned a reputation for bullying, from Stanley Fish’s depiction of the poem as a hectoring schoolmaster to Mary Nyquist’s influential argument that it enacts a form of female subjectivity that will be endlessly reiterated in future novels where heroines learn “the value of submitting desire to the paternal law” (123). But Milton leverages notions of childhood and familial nurture to elucidate forms of obligation without subjection, suggesting that a society of truly paradisal freedom might be constructed on the filial principal of fealty to God’s image written on the heart.  The difference from Nyquist’s model is subtle but essential, as Milton himself recognized as early as The Reason of Church Government, where he argued that God is no “schoolmaster of perishable rites, but a most indulgent father governing his Church as a family of sons in their discreet age.” Paradise Lost depicts and enacts such governance, an education via echoes and mirrors that serves as a revolutionary resource and a path to adult voice.  As Adam and Eve wander out of Eden with the world all before them Milton suggests that, for God’s children, this education is never complete.

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School's in, Book's Out!

My own kids head off to their first day of school tomorrow...and my book about children and the history of using literature to educate them just came out today. How's that for a segue? And how's this for a marketing pitch, oh loyal reader (for I suspect you are fit, though very few)? Cambridge University Press has given me a link to a 20% discount code for the book, which you can find here. That's right -- using that link, the book will only run you a cool $76! It's not cheap, but if you buy a copy, and bring it to me, I will sign it with my standard-issue Renaissance-scholar feather quill.

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Cloudy With a Chance of Pain...

Illustration from our article in THE, August 15, 2013

I have a new article on MOOCs in today's Times Higher Education. 

This was a new kind of publication for me -- I co-wrote it with my old friend from Oxford, David Roberts, who now works in international development for the U.S. Government. It started off as a brainstorming session about where MOOCs could take the university, then evolved into a Swiftian satire of higher ed, and then finally took its printed form as an opinion piece. As it makes it clear, MOOCs still have a lot to learn -- but we also think they could add a nice shot of innovation to a system that could use it.

The process of writing it, on the other hand, was another confirmation of an idea my network research has been emphasizing a lot: that authorship is nearly always complex, multiple, and in some ways bureaucratic, rather than singular and romantic!

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Amazon.edu

(cross posted at Stanford CMEMS)

I seem to have a special skill for choosing doomed professions.

In my first real job, I was a journalist, writing for Time magazine in London, and each Monday we'd eagerly check out the news stands on the Strand so we could see how our cover stacked up against our chief competitor, Newsweek.

Now Newsweek exists only as a digital ghost, sold yet again, last week, to a new machine, while the magazine's former owner, The Washington Post, has been snapped up by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos.
 
I got out just in time, leaving the newsroom for the classroom while Jeff Bezos still looked like a loveable Muppet rather than a demented bond villain.

Now MOOCs threaten to do to universities what Amazon and Co. did to print. In a previous blog, I suggested that the humanities needed to go local to survive and thrive in the age of MOOCs.  Since then, I've taught a Shakespeare class that was essentially an anti-MOOC. It was tiny, rather than massive. It was local rather than global. And we mostly went offline and into the archives, the theatre, and the workshop, to understand how Shakespeare's works continue to live in our communities.

These are my reflections on what happened, what worked, what could be improved, and why such a model will be more necessary than ever once Amazon.edu starts granting degrees.

A little background: I've taught study abroad classes at Cambridge and Oxford, and I always tried to root them deeply in a sense of place, so that we weren't simply transplanting a class from a U.S. campus to a more distant one. As a student, though, I never really had the money to take such trips, and so this summer, I had an idea: what if I offered the equivalent of a study abroad trip right here in Iowa City, where I teach at the University of Iowa? The class would be Shakespeare -- but we would try to study Shakespeare in a way he could only be studied here.

So we read the plays -- but rather than spending all our time in the classroom discussing them, we spent most of our time learning about how they lived in our community. When we read Romeo and Juliet, we took a trip to the University's Center for the Book, where we met Emily Martin, a book artist whose pop-up edition of the play won a prize this summer at the Designer Bookbinders International Competition, hosted by Oxford's Bodleian Library. Emily showed my students how to make a book, and they asked her questions about why she chose Romeo and Juliet, what it meant to her, and how she interpreted certain key moments. When we read The Merchant of Venice, we visited the Iowa Women's Archives, where my students found evidence from the various early 20th century Women's Shakespeare Clubs who had read the play, and how their readings changed before and after World War II. For Hamlet, we held a round table discussion with the director and actors of the local Summer Shakespeare Festival, who were staging the play and who were still working through interpretive issues in their rehearsals.  For other plays, we visited Special Collections to look at early editions and fine press republications, and along the way my students made some fantastic discoveries, some entirely unrelated to Shakespeare.

At the library of Salisbury House, in Des Moines, for example, we found a first edition of Newton's Optics, annotated by his contemporary and fellow Royal Society member John Harris.
 
(courtesy Salisbury House, Des Moines, IA)

The class worked beautifully for keeping the students, and their professor, engaged and inquiring. With finds like the Newton edition, it probably also worked as my most effective integration of research and teaching.

And this was enhanced by collaborative projects, such was a class wiki page where we documented our findings and maintained our bibliography (I pulled these photographs off the Wiki page, where my students had curated them).

(courtesy Salisbury House, Des Moines, IA)

This is also where I saw some room for improvement. In teaching the class again, I would want to make the collaborative class project a larger part of the grade and the focus. But this requires establishing criteria for grading and evaluation that are far outside our normal paradigms. I can usually spot an A paper, or a C, within the first few paragraphs. But evaluating a student's contribution to a wiki page or a visit to the archives is a good deal trickier. Grading, I think, might need to shift to a more holistic portfolio approach -- such as some honors programs have already implemented -- and I'll admit that I'm not exactly sure how that would work. Finally, a class like this really needs to be made anew each year; it is impossible to work from a standard syllabus if you must organize interviews, round table discussions, and artist visits, because even within a single community the available resources will constantly change.

That would be a challenge. But if faculty really are going to argue that what we do can't be replaced by a massive, standardized, computer class, it is probably time to put up or shut up. In short, most of us already do some version of this localized, anti-MOOC teaching every time we lead a robust class discussion. But going forward we will actually probably need to work a lot harder to make sure what happens in our classes really can't happen anywhere else.

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De Doctrina Mellifera

Initially, one of the most initially terrifying components of my degree at Oxford was the prospect of working with John Carey -- the legendary Merton Chair of English who translated Milton's De Doctrina Christiana and wrote books on John Donne and many others.  Fortunately this was only terrifying until our first meeting, where I found him warm and helpful -- if a little bemused by the ragged and jet-lagged Okie who had wandered into his office. He eventually became my thesis supervisor, and for years now I've enjoyed the chance to catch up with him on return trips to England, where I hear about the next book he will publish (forthcoming fall 2013: a memoir). He has always been a model of academic engagement that is never narrow, that always pushes past the little bubble that always threatens to engulf your life when you find yourself writing about seventeenth-century hermeticism or the Socinian heresy.

But until this summer, I've never had a chance to visit his home from home, the cottage in the Cotswolds where he maintains a fantastic garden and keeps bees.  And so, until this summer, I didn't know of his fantastic double life as a purveyor of fine foods!

If you look closely at the label of that "Cotswold Honey," you'll see it's produced by author of John Donne: Life, Mind, and Art, and William Golding: The Man Who Wrote the Lord of the Flies. John tells me he produces around 200 pounds of honey in a good year, and his garden is truly a thing to behold -- far from the weedy, Darwinian survival of the fittest that goes on in my plot. 

Eat your heart out, Harold Bloom!

 

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Summer of Shakespeare

It seems everyone's talking and writing about Josh Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing, so I got into the act too, with my colleague Adam Hooks. You can find our discussion about Shakespeare, Superheroes, and Sequels, here.

In any event, it has been very much a summer of Shakespeare for me. I've just finished a summer course with the theme "Study Abroad in Iowa," which took us around the state and the town, meeting book artists, curators, and actors. And we discovered the all important Grant Wood connection!

No, not THAT, Grant Wood connection ---->

But a real one: Grant Wood designed the original entrance to the Shakespeare Garden in Marion, Iowa (now part of Cedar Rapids). Unfortunately, the pavilion he designed is gone -- but the garden is still there, as one of my fantastic students discovered for herself, with a project documenting Shakespeare's flora. 

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A Blog About Crayfish, Bacon, and Wine (But not about Food)

(crossposted at Stanford University CMEMS)

 I hate the name "locavore," perhaps because its so often used by foodies -- who generally seem to me like slimmed down versions of Ben Jonson's Sir Epicure Mammon. But in principle, as another character in Jonson's play notes, "the motion's good, and of the spirit." And if locally sourced food is a good idea, then why not locally sourced scholarship too?

For the last few years, at least, that's been my principle, and so while I continue to make my yearly pilgrimage to the British Library and Bodleian, I also try never to miss an opportunity to duck into libraries and special collections that lie off the beaten path. 

This partly reflects Thoreau's idea that we should be "the Lewis and Clark and Frobisher of [our] own oceans." I've written about how this has inflected my teaching of Shakespeare, because such collections allow us to understand how such authors have shaped the histories of our institutions and communities. But beyond this, it really is possible to find hidden treasures in smaller, regional collections. Such collections were often cobbled together with limited resources, meaning that the books are less likely to be the pristine copies we're used to seeing in the Bodleian, and more likely to be battered, well-used, and bibliographically more interesting.

[Fig. 1: Courtesy of Special Collections, LSU Libraries, Louisiana State University]

So when I was giving a talk at LSU recently, I made my way over to the lovely Hill Memorial Library, where the collections did not disappoint on either local or bibliographical interest. Where but Baton Rouge could one find "The Rendell Rhoades Crayfish Collection?" And what, pray tell, would one find in said collection?

The answer, in short, is that the collection holds basically every book that's ever mentioned a crayfish, crocodile, or crustacean, from (pseudo?) Ovid's fragmentary poem on the art of fishing, Halieutica, in a lovely 1556 edition, to Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum (1651). Rhoades was an aquaculture pioneer and obviously something of an eccentric (he also collected thousands of books on croquet, which are held at the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center, in Ohio).

[Fig. 2: Conrad Gessner, Halieuticon, hoc est De piscibus libellus, multo quam ante hac emendatior & scholijs illustratus (Zurich, 1556), title page, Courtesy of Special Collections, LSU Libraries, Louisiana State University]

It only takes a single mention of crustacea to make the collection, and in fact Ovid's fragment doesn't contain any, but it is part of a polyglot edition that includes treatises on fishing and marine life in German and Latin, including the wonderful De Piscibus Marinus by Gulielmus Rondeletius (Guillaume Rondelet), a professor of medicine at Montpellier. Rondelet, who dissected his own infant son to determine the cause of his death, was an often controversial figure. But before his death in 1566 (supposedly from a surfeit of figs) he was responsible both for the anatomy theatre in Montpellier and for the fields of ichthyological and botanical research as they developed into real sciences, led by his students. From a literary perspective, it is fascinating to see Ovid's fragmentary poem paired, in the same edition, with Rondelet's taxonomic approach.

[Fig. 3: Conrad Gessner, Halieuticon, hoc est De piscibus libellus, multo quam ante hac emendatior & scholijs illustratus (Zurich, 1556), sig. F3v, Courtesy of Special Collections, LSU Libraries, Louisiana State University]

On a side note, "crocodili" is the closest the book comes to the gators that I was told, by my gracious but perhaps malingering hosts, inhabit the University Lakes. Who knows: they do have a tiger, which you can watch here.

[Fig. 4: Conrad Gessner, Halieuticon, hoc est De piscibus libellus, multo quam ante hac emendatior & scholijs illustratus (Zurich, 1556), sig. B3v, Courtesy of Special Collections, LSU Libraries, Louisiana State University]

Bacon's Sylva Sylvarum also made the collection for its brief discussion of whether crustaceans were insects or fish.
 

[Fig. 5: Francis Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum (London, 1651), 189, Courtesy of Special Collections, LSU Libraries, Louisiana State University].

A book on the subjectivity and sexuality of early modern crayfish would seem to be in order. But the most interesting thing about the Bacon volume had nothing to do with crustaceans or fish of any kind. The Bacon book is well used -- it contains pasted-in pages, some torn pages, and a big, bold, stain:

[Fig. 6: Francis Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum (London, 1651), 9, Courtesy of Special Collections, LSU Libraries, Louisiana State University].

What is that? I might normally guess ink, except there are no ink marks anywhere else in the volume -- no sign that a reader was pouring over it with pen poised. Might the text itself offer a clue? Here, Bacon describes an experiment in which one sets a candle inside a shallow bowl of "spirit of wine," or aqua vita -- probably a highly distilled, and flammable, brandy.  This allows Bacon to observe the effect of one flame upon another. And did a reader, following along at home, replicate the experiment? Perhaps I'm being fanciful, but I can't help but think that stain looks about right for a drop of distilled wine, hurriedly wiped from the page (the wipe mark goes down and from left to right, so that the stain tapers off at the word "remains").

Besides being of obvious local interest, in other words, the Rhoades Crayfish Collection is also a great resource in the history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century science, perhaps offering us a chance to see how books not only recorded that history, but participated in it.

Thanks very much to all the fantastic people in the LSU English Department, and the Department of Women's and Gender Studies, for showing me such a fantastic time!

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The End of Affirmative Action as We Know it? (And I Feel Ambivalent)

This Spring the Supreme Court will rule on two affirmative action cases that may end affirmative action as we know it. For those of us unabashedly liberal professorial types committed to increasing diversity on college campuses and reducing inequality in our educational system, this may in fact be a moment of great opportunity, as I argue at The New Republic. 

In the classroom as in the courts: never waste a crisis!

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Why the Humanities Must Go Local in a Global Age

(Cross posted at Stanford CMEMS)
Why, in the age of MOOCS and the Internet, should students continue to enroll in my courses and others like them? Why pay tuition for a Shakespeare class at Iowa when professor from a shiny Ivy league school will teach it to you for free? These were some of the questions I tried to answer this weekend at the first Annual Des Moines Humanities Festival at Salisbury House in Des Moines. It was a great day, with Jim Leach, a native Iowan and the chairman of the NEH, in attendance to discuss his own education in the humanistic three-R's ("In Iowa," he deadpanned, "that's readin', writin', and wrastlin'").

 [Courtesy University of Iowa Women's Archive]

The theme was "Collectors, Collections, and Collecting," and my own talk was called "Why the Humanities Must Go Local in a Global Age."  As we've all heard by now, MOOCS are going to put us all out of a job.  A single course can enroll 100,000 students or more, and when it comes to delivering information, traditional lecture courses simply can't compete, no matter how large we make them or how often we teach them: if I taught large lecture classes with 120 students, twice a semester, it would take me 208 years to teach as many students as one Coursera professor can reach with a single course. In terms of delivering information, that's a productivity increase of 83,000%; by comparison, a modern John Deere tractor, compared to plowing with a team of horses, increases efficiency by a factor of 1,500%. 

So it seems inevitable that students wanting such an education will soon seek it online.  But before humanities professors pack up our jalopies and head to California, like John Steinbeck's Joads did after the tractor took their land, I suggested that we might take another lesson from the family farm -- which has recently found new life thanks to the booming "locavore" movement taking root in restaurants and farmer's markets across the country.

When teaching Shakespeare, for example, what can we offer locally that's totally unique?  The answer goes to the nature of the humanities themselves, sending us into the archives, not in search of some unchanging Shakespeare whose "eternal summer shall not fade," but in search of a Shakespeare that has put down roots, and grown, in the Iowa soil.

As an exercise in discovering this local Shakespeare, I'm teaching a class this summer called "Study Abroad -- in Iowa," in which students will research the local archives, curate exhibitions on their findings, and hold panel discussions with local book artists and performers who draw on Shakespeare's work. To get some idea of the kinds of materials they'd be working with, I took my own trip to the University of Iowa Special Collections, where I pulled up various works, old an new.

Above, for example, is a picture of the scrapbook of the Marion, Iowa, Shakespeare Club, founded in the 1890s  for the "Intellectual improvement" of Marion's citizens. 

The women, who hailed Shakespeare as "The Bard of the Cornfields," gathered to have tea, to read Shakespeare, discuss the plays, and compose their own original poems, as well as  debating the duties of citizenship. In other words, Shakespeare was (and is) part of their broader civic engagement. 

Eventually, club members built a “Shakespeare Garden” in Marion’s Ellis park, which became a focal point for community restoration efforts after the historic floods of 2008. In a newspaper article about the rebuilding, one club member said that the group had moved away from their original insistence on plants that grew in Shakespeare's own garden in Stratford, and that their plantings now included flowers that thrive more readily in Iowa's own climate.

Here's another example of a locally remade Shakespeare, by the book artist Emily Martin.

 [Courtesy University of Iowa Special Collections]

This is an edition of Romeo and Juliet, but as you see in the picture below, it is an unusual one. Martin specializes in pop up books, and here she's chosen one line of text selected to represent each act of the play.

[Courtesy University of Iowa Special Collections]

On these side leaves (the pillars of the castle) we find variations of the Chorus' opening lines:

            Two households, both alike in dignity

            In fair Verona where we lay our scene.

            From ancient grudge to break new mutiny

            Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean. (1-4)

As she moves through the play, Martin inserts modern equivalents for Verona:  "fair Bosnia," "fair Israel," "fair Rwanda," "fair America," as well as her own commentary.

In brief, I hope to facilitate such experiences of adaptation and reclamation for my own students, too.  With our emphasis on historicizing and analyzing early modern works, scholars like myself sometimes hesitate to embrace such heritage, or fail even to see it. But taking our students into the archives in this way can help demonstrate the great insight of humanism and the humanities -- that when we're reading Shakespeare we're not really processing information (in a way that we can broadcast over the web) so much as discovering ourselves and our relationship to others, past, present, and future.

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First Annual Des Moines Humanities Festival

This Saturday I'll be speaking at the first annual Des Moines Humanities Festival, at Salisbury House in Des Moines.  Organized by the Olberman Center's Teresa Mangum and Salisbury House's Director, Eric Smith.  The Des Moines Register writes about the event and interviews Eric here.  The event's theme is "Collectors, Collections, and Collecting," and the picture of Native American artifacts reproduced here comes from Salisbury House, which also holds a wide array of Shakespeareana and early books.

I'll be talking about the way Iowans have read, collected, and remade Shakespeare from some of the earliest settlers to 2012, when Iowa City book artist Emily Martin produced a fantastic pop-up version of Romeo and Juliet to enter in a bookbinding competition sponsored by Oxford University's Bodleian Library.  If you happen to be in Des Moines -- and why wouldn't you be!? -- you should get a ticket and check out the festival, which includes a lunch, reception, and brilliant talks by all us "big thinkers" (as the Register describes the speakers!). 

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Hell is for Commuters and Kings

"I can smile, and smile, and park while I smile" -- those, or something like them, were the famous words of Shakespeare's villain Richard III.  As you may have heard,  archaeologists recently discovered his bones under a municipal parking lot in England, and I've just co-written a newspaper article with Jeff Porter and Adam Hooks, my colleagues at Iowa, on the discovery here!

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Reckoning with Big Data in Little Classrooms

(cross-posted at the Stanford CMEMS)   

How much do we know about the students we teach? How much should we know? Our optimistically named "Spring" semester has just started at the University of Iowa, and this semester I asked my students to complete an online pre-course survey (through Surveygizmo.com) to find out more about their goals, their preparation, and their reasons for taking my Milton class. Some of the results were really surprising, others were disheartening, and all of them challenged me to rethink my syllabus and my approach.

Which raises a question: literary scholars like Franco Moretti have proclaimed that the age of "big data" will change the way we do literary research -- but should it also change the way we teach? It strikes me that the typical university English classroom is in many ways a data poor environment. Or rather, it is an environment rich in data that we never quantify: we constantly gauge our students' reactions -- we even collect their evaluations at the end of the semester -- but then after gaining an impressionistic sense of those evaluations, they usually go into a drawer.

 So what do you learn from surveying an incoming class like mine and then crunching the numbers?

In this case, that most of my students (63%) feel their research skills are their weakest academic area, as well as that 51% of them have never had a university class in early modern literature, including Shakespeare.

And then there's this: 

Remember, these are mostly English majors, in Iowa City, the only UNESCO City of Literature in the United States, a place where we erect sculptures of books and literally have poems engraved into the sidewalks. Yet a third of my students read books for less than 30 minutes per day -- and this led to a frank and, hopefully, productive discussion with them about how they'll have to change their reading habits to do well in a class on Milton.

Now for another unexpected result, but one that will be less likely to depress your spirits:

When asked what would improve the English courses they've taken so far, more students said "More theory discussion" (34.3%) than any other category -- although "more discussion of close reading" was a close second. I think the conventional wisdom in my department is that students have lost interest in theory (after all, it's pretty tough to digest Heidegger in 20 minutes a day!). But that response was strong enough to revise my syllabus: as I told my students, the critical history of Paradise Lost is in some sense the history of critical theory, and it is a history I'll be happy to explore with them.

I know that many of us probably consider teaching to be a bit like dancing or conducting an orchestra -- an art exempt from the age of big data. Of course, we used to think of baseball like that too, before Billy Beane showed what could be done with sabermetrics.  And this makes me wonder what might be gained, and lost, if we mined our classrooms for data in the same way we're beginning to mine the archive. 

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