Showing posts with label pedagogy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pedagogy. Show all posts

Monday, August 17, 2015

Summer Digest 2015: Digital Publics, Diversity, Disability, Donuts

by JONATHAN HSY

[First, read all about JEFFREY's two new collaborative projects!]

 NOTE: UPDATED with a few more links on August 31, 2015.

 Summer is coming to a close and a new academic year approaches. It was productive and eventful summer for me, but the downside was I never got around to writing any new blog posts here at ITM.

In the spirit of trying new things, I present what I'm calling an ICYMI (In Case You Missed It) Summer Digest 2015: my own idiosyncratic listing of some interesting links and noteworthy things that happened over these summer months. (This list also gives you a vague sense of "What Jonathan Did Over Summer Break.")

ICMY Medievalist Summer Digest 2015


Conference Roundups:


May: International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI (#Kzoo2015):

  • This #Kzoo2015 blogroll is my earlier compilation of blog posts and links [last updated May 30]; the 2015 conference also marked the emergence of the silly but somehow oddly compelling #MedevalDonut meme. JEFFREY also played a big part in all this. (A brief resurgence of #MedievalDonut also occurred on World Donut Day; check out these tweets archived by Sjoerd Levelt!)
  • N.B. Leila K. Norako's writeup after Kalamazoo about the "Public Medievalist" roundtable and a lively session marking the 25th anniversary of the publication of Carolyn Dinshaw's Chaucer's Sexual Poetics.

June-July: The Middle Ages in the Modern World, Lincoln, UK (#MAMO15):

  • "Diverse Pedagogies of Medievalism" Roundtable (org. Helen Young). Presenters: Helen Young, Kim Wilkins, Molly Brown, Carol Robinson [virtually via recorded presentation], Dorothy Kim, and Jonathan Hsy. The full videorecording is available online (includes a link to Robinson's presentation and a link to the slides from my talk), and there's also bit more info at Medievalists.net.

July: International Medieval Congress, Leeds, UK (#IMC2015):

  • Panel of public medievalists (org. by the Grad Student Committee of the Medieval Academy of America). Presenters: Matthew Gabriele, Andrew James Johnston, and Erik Kwakkel: see Peter Konieczny's curated archive of live-tweets.
  • "Queer Manuscripts" thread: two sessions (orgs. Roberta Magnani and Diane Watt); check out Watt's archive of live-tweets from these conversations.

July: London Chaucer Conference ("Science, Magic, and Technology"), University of London, UK (#Chaucer2015):


Online Conversations and New Communities:


Public Medievalists (forum):

  • Open access (i.e., FREE) postmedieval forum on "The Public Middle Ages" (featuring Holly A. Crocker, Marion Turner, Brantley L. Bryant, Kathleen E. Kennedy, Matthew Gabriele, Bruce Holsinger, Leila K. Noriko, David Perry).

#ILookLikeAProfessor (twitter hashtag):

  • This twitter hashtag was created to combat stereotypes in academia and started a number of conversations about gender, race, class, disability, and the "public face" of university instructors and educators. Read accounts by co-creators Adeline Koh, Michelle Moravec, and Sara B. Pritchard; see also this piece by Kelly J. Baker (addressing gender as well as disability). The meme was also picked up by Buzzfeed, Colorlines, and Mashable (with a few medievalists featured each time).

The Lone Medievalist (community):

Society for the Study of Disability in the Middle Ages (SSDMA): 

  • The SSDMA launched a Facebook group that is open to anyone interested in the study of disability, impairment, and varied modes of embodied difference in medieval culture.

Various other things (for academics on and off the tenure-track):


New Open Access Publications:


  • Interfaces: A Journal of Medieval European Literatures. Entire inaugural (2015) issue "Histories of Medieval European Literatures: New Patterns of Representation and Explanation" is available online; among a stellar international array of contributors are Simon Gaunt, Karla Mallette, and David Wallace.
  • The Medieval Globe (edited by Monica H. Green). The inaugural (2014) issue "Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Plague" features a range of interdisciplinary and international contributions. Green's essay on "Making the Black Death Global" is well worth your time.


Upcoming Dates and Deadlines:


  • Sep 15 (early registration ends): BABEL Meeting “Off the Books” in Toronto, ON, Oct 9-11, 2015 (featured speakers: Micha Cárdenas, Malisha Dewalt, David Gersten, Alexandra Gillespie, Randall McLeod [aka Random Cloud], Whitney Anne Trettien).
  • Oct 15-16: “The Provocative 15th Century” at the Huntington, CA (orgs. Lisa H. Cooper and Andrea Denny-Brown). Presenters: Anthony Bale, Anne Bernau, Jessica Brantley,  Lisa H. Cooper, Andrea Denny-Brown, Shannon Gayk, Alexandra Gillespie, Robert Meyer-Lee, Jenni Nuttall, Catherine Sanok, James Simpson, Daniel Wakelin).
  • Oct 30: “Futures of the Past” Conference at GWU in Washington, DC. Presenters: Kim Hall, Patricia Clare Ingham, J. Allan Mitchell, Julie Orlemanski, Coll Thrush, Henry S. Turner.

  • Nov 1 (proposals due): “Method and the Middle English Text” at UVA (plenary pairings: Alexandra Gillespie & Patricia Ingham; Andrew Cole & Kellie Robertson; Steven Justice & Emily Steiner), Charlottesville, VA, Apr 8-9, 2016.
  • Nov 1 (proposals due): “Romance in Medieval Britain” at UBC in Vancouver, BC (plenaries: Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Corinne Saunders), Aug 17-19, 2016.

  • Nov 2 (proposals due): Vagantes Grad Student Conference (including keynote by Diane Wolfthal on “Occupy the Middle Ages: Representations of Household Help”) at Rice University, Houston, TX, Feb 18-20, 2016.
  • Jan 31 (submissions welcomed from Fall 2015 term): Digital Medieval Disability Glossary, Society for the Study of Disability in the Middle Ages (see the CFP here; if you you have difficulty reading the image file, try this link).
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Wednesday, January 21, 2015

Why Chaucer Now? #MLA15

My daughter made me this for MLA
by J J Cohen

I had the honor of participating in a lively roundtable at the most recent MLA on "Why Chaucer Now?" Emma Lipton put the roundtable together and moderated the session so well that the conversation was prolonged and lively. Audience participation and MLA seldom go hand in hand. Inevitably papers go far too long (senior scholars seem especially bad at timing themselves; at least I'd like to think it's a timing issue rather than presumption). Chairs often exhibit a "What can you do?" attitude -- forgetting that some people have traveled very long distances for the conference, and would rather have engagement with the speakers than the live delivery of a performance that could have more comfortably been viewed via video at home.  Admittedly, we also lost two of our Chaucer speakers to the hazards of travel -- but I liked that instead of filling in the opened space with longer presentations the audience was invited to prod and provoke.

Patricia Ingham started the session with an enormously helpful historicization of the question that had brought us together as a panel: should the MLA combine divisions like Old English, Chaucer, and Middle English Exclusive of Chaucer? She ruminated over a long archive of the MLA pondering such bureaucratic and institutional questions embedded within historical ones, and emphasized the public pedagogical outreach that the organization used to do (eg, being involved with the teaching of Chaucer in the high school curriculum). Nicole Nolan Sidhu spoke of the flourishing of supposedly surpassed racism and misogyny within internet porn (so easily accessible, yet "private" and thereby not amenable to intervention or challenge) and used Chaucer to drawn an alternative history of obscenity as a public and reconfigurable discourse.

I'd decided that my own contribution would be about the teaching of Chaucer, and that I'd involve my students in its composition. I'm happy I did. One more quick note and then I'll post it. Emma asked me before I presented how important Chaucer is to my work, and not that long ago I would have said not all that much. I realize that isn't true though. Yes, I've written a few essays, contributed to handbooks, have a Chaucer chapter in one of my books, and so on. But doing the index for Stone and seeing the sheer number of references to Chaucer permeating a book that is in no way about him made me realize that even when I don't think I'm engaging his work, I often quietly am.

Why Chaucer?

            To the question “Why Chaucer?” my response not long ago would have been historicist, emphasizing inertia and disciplinary conservatism. Because we’ve been teaching him in classrooms for so long, one of the few single author courses still on the books at many institutions. Because his London dialect became ascendant, and does not require the depth of special training needed to read other medieval works like the poems of the Gawain poet or anything in Old English. Because the academy is conservative. Because we are inheritors of the pronouncement that Chaucer is the father of English poetry, and even though we know we don’t need a primal father we continue to canonize him through our specialty societies, our publications, our MLA divisions. Because most of us teach in English rather than Literature Departments (and some strong challenges to Chaucer’s supremacy have come from scholars attempting to restore to the British archipelago its roiled diversity of cultures and tongues). Feminism and postcolonial studies can buttress Chaucer’s position at the generative center of medieval English literature, but they have also made us see that Marie de France was just as sophisticated a poet (too bad she wrote in French), and that trilingual John Gower conveys the polyglot truth of late 14th century literature better. We teach and study Chaucer because that’s the field we have been trained to teach and study. Chaucer will vanish as medievalist jobs in English Departments do (followed most likely by English Departments themselves: it's interesting to think who will be coming to these MLA meetings a hundred years from now).
            Why Chaucer? My answer is more complicated now than it would have been last summer. This semester, my twentieth at George Washington University, saw me teaching the Canterbury Tales to undergraduates yet again. Three things occurred that changed how I teach and think about Chaucer’s works. First, the Cengage-owned Riverside Chaucer is now so expensive even in paperback that no professor can reasonably ask students to purchase the volume. For the first time I ordered Jill Mann’s edition of the Canterbury Tales (Penguin Classics, $14). That change in text meant I taught the class from a fresh, clean book lacking the decades of marginalia that have accrued on my Riverside (an amply glossed hardcover held together by duck tape). It was liberating to let those textual predeterminations go, an inscribed history of my normative training as a medievalist. Second, during the fall semester of 2014, it was impossible to close the door of any classroom and expect to bar the entry of the aftermath of the racism and violence in Ferguson, or the growing awareness of the depth and persistence of rape culture on college campuses. Theformer president of GW made some victim blaming remarks about drinking andsexual assault just before I taught the Wife of Bath’s Tale, with its casual narration of a knight who rapes a maiden “maugree hir hed.” I teach that text on day three of the course, so our concerns were clear from the start. Third, I was fortunate enough to have 24 extraordinary students in the class, and they were diverse. Two of them changed the class profoundly, at least from my point of view: K., a student who declared on the first day that they would like to be referred to by third person plural and thereby gender indeterminate pronouns (I took it as a good sign that all the students in the room simply nodded to the request, registering no surprise; and that they were later happy to find in the Pardoner and John/Eleanor Rykener medieval genderqueers); and C., a student who had taken a previous class with me, who emailed me after reading the Wife of Bath’s tale to ask if sexual assault would be a frequent topic in the class because she would likely not be able to sit through discussions. I arranged it so that C. knew in advance what classes would probably touch upon rape – and with Chaucer, that is quite a few. She sat near the door, and if she felt the need, she left. I assured her that was no problem. We had three GW studentscommit suicide in the spring and one more publicly attempt it in the fall semester: those deaths took a toll on my students, and made me realize we need to be more vigilant to signs of distress. I told C. that if leaving class is something she needs to do as an act of self-preservation, then I applaud her for speaking to me and choosing not to endure an unbearable topic. I never understood the recent furor over trigger warnings. They don’t limit discussion, they simply respect the fact that not every one of our students has had the life we wish them to have had.
            Keeping C. in mind, I dreaded discussion of the Reeve’s Tale, with its vengeance rapes. I always teach it with the Cook’s Tale, so we started there, and using the work of Paul Strohm and David Wallace to talk about London, community making, exclusion, and violence directed at those identified as foreign bodies (the Cook’s Flemish proverb as invitation to speak of the murder of the Flemings in 1381 in Chaucer’s boyhood neighborhood). We circled around the edges of the Reeve’s Tale, speaking of dialect and humor, the animal noises and animal desires, the glimpses of rural life, the fabliau structure. But we did not speak directly of the sexual violence at the center of the tale, the events that within my glossed Riverside are given a long contextual history as pranks and topoi, with the aubade supposed to be especially funny. Instead I told my students when we reached the bedroom scene that they know what comes next, that rape is not entertainment, that I did not want to participate in a long history of making light of sexual assault. I asked them to leave thinking about the source of humor in the tale and the essential conversation about rape culture that college campuses are having now. They departed in an uncharacteristically somber mood.

            And that’s all too the good. As I brought the class to a close in December, I asked my students the “Why Chaucer?” question that we are pondering together today. Their answers surprised me. Because he is someone to disagree with as well as be inspired by. Because he is difficult, complicated, artful. Because of the problems he conveys. Because his idea of fellowship as an unlikely gathering of the diverse gets enacted when we read his works together. Because having to learn Middle English together reduces every student in the class to the same starting point, to the same position of shared vulnerability. Because the pilgrims never exactly arrive in Canterbury, and the conversation they start is worth carrying on.
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Saturday, January 03, 2015

Scale of Catastrophe: Draft Syllabus

click to enlarge
by J J Cohen
[read Karl first!]

I announced it here a year ago (and check out the drowned world pic from the Holkham Bible I used to illustrate the post): beginning later this month I will be teaching a seminar at the Folger Shakespeare Library on The Scale of Catastrophe: Ecology and Transition, Medieval to Early Modern. I'm very much looking forward to working with so many materials outside my scholarly comfort zone, and participants from across the US who have far more knowledge of much of the early modern archive than I possess.

Here's the draft of my syllabus, aided immensely through crowdsourcing some discussion of course texts via Facebook and Twitter. A heartfelt thank you to everyone who offered suggestions. At this point I've cut about 50% from what I had crammed onto the original: we have only so much time, and it is going to take some marathoning to get through what's here already. I'm very happy to hear suggestions for augmenting the course biography (primary as well as secondary sources) -- and if anyone want to point out that a work I've chosen is not going to work as well as I am anticipating, please let me know. I'd also really love to have advice on specific editions of Raleigh and Heywood to use (or avoid). To download the draft syllabus as a nice PDF, click here.

The Scale of Catastrophe: Ecology and Transition, Medieval to Early Modern
Medieval and early modern texts imagined the world as intercatastrophic: precariously flourishing between a Flood that only Noah and his family had survived and a fiery apocalypse to come, the purging of the mortal world. Although the Deluge was in the distant past, divinely promised never again to arrive, medieval and early modern writers share a vocabulary for transition in which both fire and flood are invoked to mark historical breaks and anxious moments of transition. This seminar will pair medieval texts fascinated by survival in the face of cataclysm with early modern texts that carry the stories they offer into new realms. Participants will investigate how the scale of catastrophe is narrated, where scale is size (local, global, cosmic) and structure, a ladder [scala] that arranges nature into hierarchy. We will consider the gender of catastrophe, mapping whether women tell different stories against and within catastrophe from men, and contemplate the frequent linking of disaster narratives to stories of race. The schedule of readings frequently pairs medieval texts with early modern ones that reinterpret them. Participants are expected to bring their own research to discussion and assist in the creation of a course archive. The seminar meets Thursdays 1–4:30 p.m., 29 January through 23 April 2015, excluding 12 March, 2 April, and 9 April. Participants are asked to attend the GW MEMSI symposium "Transition, Scale and Catastrophe" on Friday March 20 in lieu of the Thursday March 19 seminar meeting.

January 29
Promise/Threat
Genesis chapters 1-25 in the Douay-Rheims or King James translation (both if you have the time; the Latin Vulgate as well if you have the skill)
Holinshed’s Chronicles: Britain and the Flood (“of Noah & his three sonnes”):
Laurie Shannon, Accommodated Animal chapter 1 (“The Law’s First Subjects”)

February 5
Fire/Water
Beowulf (in Old English if you can; otherwise Seamus Heaney’s postcolonial Irish translation, including his foreword)
“The Londoners Lamentation” (on the Great Fire)
Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism (pay special attention to chapter on “Apocalypse”)

February 12
Between Deluge and Deluge
Chester play of Noah’s Flood
Chaucer, “Miller’s Tale” “Franklin’s Tale”
“True report of certaine wonderfull overflowings of waters, now lately in Summerset-shire, Norfolke, and other places of England” (disaster pamphlet)
Albrecht Dürer, “Dream Vision” [of deluge]
Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Introduction, chapters 1, 4, 6, Epilogue)
Sharon O’Dair, “Slow Shakespeare: An Eco-Critique of ‘Method’”

February 19
Foundation or Apocalypse
Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain
Des Grantz Geanz and De origine gigantum
Karl Steel, “Woofing and Weeping with Animals in the Last Days” postmedieval 1 (2010):187-93
Anne F. Harris and Karen Eileen Overbey on Lush Ethics (“Field Change / Discipline Change”)

February 26
Not Sustainable
William Camden, Britannia (“Author to Reader” “Britaine” “The Name of Britaine” ‘The Downe-Falle or Destruction of Britain” “The English Saxons” “The Danes” “The Normans” “The British Ocean”)
William Shakespeare, Cymbeline
From PMLA 127.3 (2012): Eleanor Johnson, “The Poetics of Waste: Medieval English Ecocriticism,” Tobias Menely, “The Present Obfuscation”: Cowper’s Task and the Time of Climate Change, “Sustainability” cluster short essays by Stacy Alaimo, Dan Brayton, Stephanie LeMenager and Stephanie Foote, Steve Mentz

March 5
Rough Seas / Bookwreck
William Shakespeare, King Lear
Lear story and its aftermath in Holinshed
Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea chapter 8 (environmental history without catastrophe)
Steve Mentz, At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean

Friday March 20
Symposium on "Transition, Scale and Catastrophe" @ GW

March 26
Material Elseheres
John Mandeville, Travels
Walter Raleigh, Discovery of Guyana
Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, “Stories Come to Matter” (Material Ecocriticism)
Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures chapter 1 and 4
Drew Daniel, The Melancholy Assemblage, “Introduction”

April 16
To Weather
Thomas Dekker, The Wonderful Year
John Heywood, The Play of the Weather
Lowell Duckert, “When It Rains” (Material Ecocriticism) and “Maroon” (Prismatic Ecology)
Tim Ingold, Being Alive: “Earth and Sky,” “The Shape of the Earth,” “Earth, Sky, Wind and Weather,” “Landscape or Weather-World?”

April 23
Presentations. Retrospect. Prospect


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Friday, September 26, 2014

Teaching the Prioress, again: Shock, Awe, and Innocence

by KARL STEEL

Obviously, read Jonathan Hsy first, below, before you read me. His stuff on Vikings is great. And do your darndest to get your paws on Inhuman Nature!

Now, my post.

I've just commented, with some befuddlement, on two classes of short papers on the Prioress's Tale. I had introduced the Tale with, yes, a Trigger Warning that went something like this: "As this is a class on race and racism focused on medieval texts, many of the readings will, or at least should, horrify you. Chaucer's Prioress's Tale is one of them. It's antisemitic. For the last 50 years or so, the main debate has been whether Chaucer or the Prioress is to blame for its antisemitism. But there's no way around it: it's awful."

Despite all that, about half the papers said something like "I think this story is antisemitic," "it seems unfair to Jews," "it seems to be trying to say Christians are good and Jews are evil," "it tells us that antisemitism is really old," or, the variant, "the antisemitism in the Prioress's Tale is still around today."

I warned them, but they're still shocked. I'm befuddled but I'm also delighted, because the tale really is that horrible.

I've tried to push them towards more direct, more specific engagement, not only with the tale's antisemitism, but also with the anxieties, concerns, and assumptions that antisemitism requires to have any force at all. When a student says "this shows that medieval Christians were antisemitic," I, of course, say "the earliest written account of this kind of tale is the 1170s; they're confined to northern Europe; so we have to get more specific"; but when a student just condemns the tale's antisemitism in the broadest possible terms and walks away, then I have to lean on their good conscience. At the least, I have to teach them to close read. My main questions:
  • What's the relationship between ignorance and holiness? In other versions of the tale, the boy's 10 years old; here he's 7, just before the age of responsibility, killed before he learns how to read. The nun herself wants to become like a child of 12 months old, unable to speak even. The Prioress herself snarks at the monk, and even the 'holy abbot' in the tale is, in a way, the one to kill the boy. And what does this suggest about the way that 'simplicity' and 'goodness' tend to be equated? Is there something sinister about this?
  • Similarly, why do you assume that the Prioress's intense feeling for the Virgin has to be faked? Why do you assume that simplicity and simple expression are more authentic than fancy talk?
  • The central myth of Christianity is a martyred god who resurrects. This is the story Christianity needs to tell. While the tale blames the Jews, sort of, for killing the boy, Christianity, especially medieval Christianity, needs martyrs. The tale itself, I'll remind you, is an antisemitic fiction. So, who killed the boy? Not the Jews. The tale did. And why was the tale told? Christianity. Or to get a free dinner. One or both of these, I'd argue, is what actually killed the little boy. Think of the way that detective shows chase after killers, but need to kill women, especially women, to start the story...
  • The tale blames Satan for inspiring the Jews to murder; or it thinks Satan makes his nest in Jews' hearts. Are the Jews responsible or not? Unlike other versions of the tale, the Jews don't murder the child out of a sense of religious duty. The Prioress's Tale isn't a Ritual Murder case, but rather a random, unthinking act of violence. Also: the tale has a pure little boy who -- as a sign of his pureness -- sings a song he barely understands and who tends towards intellectual neoteny. The Jews do what they do because they have to; the boy does what he does without understanding. They're both machines, objects not agents, the one evil, the other good. Why does Chaucer strip agency from both Jews and boy?
In the next class, I'm also going to talk about this painting:



This painting, by or based on Edward Burne-Jones, appears regularly in my students' presentations on the Prioress's Tale. Probably yours too. No wonder: it illustrates the Wikipedia page on the Tale, and dominates the Google image search results. Though I've recommended ArtStor for images, the students go with what's most readily at hand (probably yours too). I imagine, though, that even if they'd gone to ArtStor, they'd find much the same stuff (but as the Brooklyn College library website is shockingly down....).

I'm going to tell them this: the image, featuring a standard pre-Raphaelite pose for Virgin and clergeon, is itself antisemitic, and just a little more subtle than the images, just as popular in presentations, of hooked-nose Jews (there, usually, to show the continuing force of antisemitic stereotypes). I thank the St Louis Museum of Art (warning AUTOPLAY) for making some of this clear to me: the image invites us in, opening the gate to let us join the virgin and boy. The Jews and the murder are in the background, cut off absolutely from the virgin by the garden wall, barred from this innocent paradise. Now, the St Louis Museum seems perfectly fine with this, and perhaps my students too, though far more innocently. As I'll argue next week, the painting is as antisemitic as the tale itself to the degree that it reproduces without condemning both the tale's hatred of Jews and its saccharine logic of sanctity.

I'll say the painting, in fact, aims to become like the Litel Clergeon. It pretends not to understand the tale. It just presents the encounter between boy and (virgin) mother -- the virgin mother who can belong to the boy entirely precisely because she remains a virgin1 -- as the tale's actual content, while forgetting, as much as it can, how the tale proves the boy's innocence by hating Jews and by murdering the boy. The painting pretends to be a holy fool and is all the worse for it.

 For more on the painting, see Eileen way back in 2007, who saw it in St Louis, and writes well about:
all the ways in which various anti-semitic discourses and even meta-anti-semitic discourses [whether in the form of apocryphal stories, reductively stereotypical tropes, satire, etc.] are made to kind of "disappear" in or move into the background of our "readings" of various texts.


1 The psychoanalytic readings come automatically, don't they? The Jews, Satan, and even the Abbot are all men who want to interpose themselves between the boy and his mother, cutting him off. The boy, refusing to learn to read, doesn't want to enter the Symbolic or doesn't want to give up on the good object of his virgin mother. The Prioress wants to be a like a child of twelve months old or less. It's basically fill in the blanks by this point, yeah?↩

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Saturday, August 30, 2014

Teaching Literature in the West Virginian Ecotone

a guest post by LOWELL DUCKERT

 [I invited Lowell to compose this post for ITM because his innovative ways of teaching ecology and environmental theory as part of graduate and undergraduate classes deserves emulation, tying global crises to local histories and rethinking pedagogical space. It's been an honor for me to have been collaborating with him for the past few years. I've learned a great deal from both his creative praxis and his generosity of living and writing. Lowell is an assistant professor of English at West Virginia University. He taught GW's very first environmental literature course while here as a graduate student. I hope this piece inspires you as much as it did me. -- JJC]

 Teaching Literature in the West Virginian Ecotone
So let’s get fated and outcast together. Not as an experiment in reckless fatalism or as a collective abandonment of our hopes, but as the crafting of a more heightened sense of the co-melancholic implication of pretty much everything…This is a civic project. And it is a hopeful one. (Eileen A. Joy, “Blue,” from Prismatic Ecology)
It’s hard to believe that two weeks ago I began my third year at West Virginia University. I was hired to teach Shakespeare, and so far I’ve taught him every semester, but I’ve also been given opportunities to engage my other research interests in environmental criticism, ecotheory, and travel literature. (Or all at once: I’m teaching “Ecology without Shakespeare?” right now.) On every syllabus I include a statement that reads something like this: how can past works of literature not only resemble the present, but influence it, and consequently bring about livable futures for as many human and nonhuman beings as possible? Lately I’ve been thinking about how premodern descriptions of ecological ills, whether or not written by authors we would now deem “writer-activists,” might actually invigorate environmental justice and health movements today. These ethical thought experiments are often unsettling for my students, which is the point; opinions are freely given, some more passionately than others, which typically lead to (respectfully) stimulating discussion. I’ve always been inspired by Lynne Bruckner’s article “Teaching Shakespeare in the Ecotone,” an ecocritical effort, she says, that “requires something new from us—a deliberate heterodoxy, a willingness to take risks and break rules, a commitment not only to examining our own historical, material, political selves as we really live in the world, but also asking our students to do the same.” (A requirement, to be sure, that doesn’t just apply to Shakespeare.)

Like many places, West Virginia is a precarious ecotone, and it’s been a challenge getting to know my new home in- and outside the classroom: it’s the second-poorest state in the country; chronically divided over energy production and consumption (coal keeps the lights on, but coal also kills); red politically but blue psychologically; predominantly white with racism directed towards other whites (“trash”) as well as persons of color; glorified historically as a sacrifice zone for the nation’s industries but a resource colony in reality; whose workers’ demands for unionization led to the only time in history (so far) that the U.S. military has bombed its own citizens (The Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921). Every week the amount of explosives used in the surface-mining technique known as mountaintop removal (MTR) equals the amount of force that leveled Hiroshima. A chemical spill in the capital city of Charleston earlier this year left three hundred thousand people without water. My university is supported by funds from environmentally harmful companies. And yet my students are often the first in their family to attend college and bring with them an enthusiasm for change; the region is astoundingly beautiful, containing some of the oldest mountains and rivers on earth; a deep-rooted Appalachian identity has compelled many to stay and improve the lives of both human and nonhuman residents, together.

In the fall of 2013 I took my graduate Shakespeare class to Kayford Mountain, an active MTR site just south of Charleston. We read King Lear and selections from the PMLA “Sustainability”cluster to think about how (and even why) to carry on in a post-sustainable, eco-catastrophic world. Standing on the brink together with our guide, an environmental lawyer and organizer for the Keeper of the Mountains Foundation, we witnessed the destruction firsthand. I was surprised when the visit didn’t have the impact I expected. Many (but not all) of my students were frustrated with the experiential learning requirement of the course, the unusual nature of the subsequent assignment (to put Lear in conversation with the rhetoric of post/sustainability and their own feelings atop the mountain), and the idea that I was forcing them to become “activists.” I was downtrodden, to say the least, to the point where I honestly reconsidered having any environmental engagement in future courses. But I talked through it with others (thank you); I gleaned (what little I could) from my course evaluations; I revisited some of my favorite sections of the state; and I added details from the trip to “Earth’s Prospects,” my contribution to the Elemental Ecocriticism volume Jeffrey and I are co-editing. Most importantly, I prepared myself for a new class I had proposed for the spring semester: “Environmental Criticism,” an introduction to ecology and literature for undergraduates.

I paired each primary text with a style and a color of ecotheory: think of a “Pink” and “White” Frankenstein with a queer-ecological bent. This time, however, I tweaked the experimental learning component: because all (five) of my students were native West Virginians, I assigned them colors one would commonly associate with the state: “Blue,” “Black,” and “Grey”—a palette of struggle. “Blue” granted us the optimism of empathy, of cohabiting another’s melancholia as a way forward; “Black” the denigrated color of coal and of skin, but also a presence that speaks of inextricable absorption within a “wilderness” of relations; “Grey” the ashen bodies of abject laborers, zombie miners, the objects of dehumanization. One of my students was (and still is) an activist in the southern coalfields, and with his and his friend Catherine’s help, I arranged a daytrip for us to the abandoned mining community of Nuttallburg along the scenic New River. Nuttallburg was like many boom-and-bust coal towns: founded in 1870, its citizens manufactured coke (a high-carbon fuel made from coal) until diminishing demand closed the mine once and for all in 1958. But what makes Nuttallburg more unique, and more troubling, is the fact that it was racially segregated. I had designed the course to ask precisely this question about which beings are allowed into the oikos of ecology, and what’s at stake when the commons is de/limited: why are certain human and nonhuman voices unquiet and others are quieted, why are some heard and others ignored? To help us dwell on this (unapparent or purposefully forgotten) aspect of the river gorge’s history, we stopped at the African American Heritage Family Tree Museum in Ansted and met its curator, Norman Jordan. Not only was Carter G. Woodson, he told us, the founder of Black History Month, but he was also a West Virginian who mined Fayette County as a young man. Before we left, Norman read us a few of his own poems, after which I asked him why he thinks many people (myself included) are unaware of the area’s (and even the state’s) African American ties. He replied through his art: “Poetry,” he said, “is about telling stories.”
Telling stories. My students and I, guided by Catherine, thought about Norman’s response as we stood next to the foundations of Nuttallburg’s “Black School” and “Black Church.” It was a beautiful early spring day; the wind was the only noise we could hear. We talked about the interpretive sign’s disturbing language: African-American miners had a tough life, but “slavery was worse.” When we crossed Short Creek, the trickling line that separated the camps, it felt ridiculous to us that something so small could divide races, and at the same time we thought about the real danger that the small stream would’ve posed. We passed the coke ovens and imagined what the heat and smoke must have felt and tasted like, and how fragile, how illusory, the romanticized notion that men went into the mines different colors, but they all came out the same truly was. The coal tipple led our eyes hundreds of feet up the hill to the mine. About an hour later we stood, sweating, next to warped and rusted pieces of metal with leafy offshoots, vegetable-mineral machines of no more use. Pieces of coal littered the ground. We peered into the mine’s mouth as far as we could, trying to look beyond the boulders that were deliberately placed there to block our entry. It was cold. And although together, it felt lonely. Fated and outcast.

On the way down the hill, the New River looked as scenic as ever, and yet I could tell that our relationships with the riverscape had gained unexpected, and necessary, complexity. Later that evening the mood lightened as we enjoyed dinner together in the nearby town of Fayatteville. The trip set the tone for the rest of the semester – one of my favorite classes – for it helped us think about the stories that are told and are yet to be told, their potential to intervene in our lives (including our policies), and who cares, or is willing, to listen. It was a long two-hour drive back to Morgantown. I like to think that it was a hopeful one.

May we all offer something new from ourselves this semester, in every tone and any form imaginable.

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Thursday, December 05, 2013

When is the when of the Physician’s Tale?

Still more Richard Serra at Gagogian
Yet more Serra at, of course, the Gagosian. When is the when of a piece that corrodes?
by KARL STEEL

Great comments below in response to my little post on sympathy and anthropomorphism. Read them. I hope to respond to them soon. Today, though, is grading and drafting a grant proposal.

In re: grading, just wrote this comment in response to one of several paper proposals on the Physician’s Tale and what it says about gender relations in Chaucer’s time:

The question here is which time : after all, Chaucer is writing historical fiction, as were his sources. Livy, who wrote the original story in the 1st century, himself set it in Republican Rome, centuries before he lived. Then some 1300 years later, the Romance of the Rose translated the story into French verse, and then 150 or so years still later, Chaucer used that story to write his tale, while citing Livy, who had lived roughly 1400 years before him.
So when is the when of the Physician’s Tale? What era is this story talking about?
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Thursday, November 21, 2013

A Rabbit Post for Rebels

Image from the Morgan Library.
by KARL STEEL

Obviously, you should read Eileen's post below first, and then Jeffrey, and then have mine only for dessert.

Here's one for Fumblr, the Academic Failblog:

Some years ago, while chatting with my students about hunting, I told them that medieval badgers were ferreted out of their holes and then bashed, as they emerged, with clubs. "Like Whack-a-Mole?," they asked. "Yes. Precisely."

And the next day I had to confess I'd made it all up, and not even deliberately.

Nets, not clubs: nets are the thing if you want to hunt a badger.

And then last night: I realized we'd slogged through nearly an entire semester of The Canterbury Tales without once mentioning the risings of 1381. The Nun's Priest's Tale ("Certes, he Jakke Straw and his meinee" &c, VII.3394 ff.) gave me my entrance, and the animal theme led me to my grand finale: the story of the St Alban's rebels, who, to show their contempt for the poaching laws, crucified a rabbit.

My students immediately understood the significance. "Is that where the Easter Bunny comes from?"

"I'm...I'm not sure." I offered what I knew: "The French, they have an Easter bell. Instead of a rabbit."

"Yes, but they crucified a rabbit. Maybe that's why we have an Easter Bunny."

"I'll ask my friends."

My friend, in this case, is Thomas Walsingham. And forgive my Latin, because neglect. Feel encouraged to correct me.
Ceperunt quemdam cuniculum vivum, inter eos in plano campi per multitudinem populi vi captum, et in quadam hasta coram se ferri statuerunt, et super collistrigium in villa Sancti Albani, in signum libertatis et warrenae sic adeptae, difixerunt (303)
They seized a certain living hare, taken by force by them in the open field by a great crowd of people, and had it carried among them on a spear and fastened it upon a "collistrigium" (a pillory) as a sign of the liberty and warren thus obtained.
Something quite other than a crucifix.

Still, while searching for collistrigium, I found this odd bit of, I hope, forgotten child-rearing practice:



From here.


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