Miriam’s derailed my earnest desire to avoid heavy lifting for the time being with an entry (cross-posted to her blog and Cliopatria) on how best to incorporate historical information into English classes. The traditional approach to history in an English course is typically uni-directional. For pedagogical reasons, English-types presume history an unchanging stable scrim onto which they project the complexities of a literary text: “Look, children, look! Labor trouble at the turn-of-the-century! What does Looking Backward say about it? How does Bellamy’s novel allegorize, reflect, register, represent, symbolize or otherwise transmogrify that dull dry history into a capital-A work of Art?"* As Miriam points out, “it’s very easy to slip into the habit of presenting historical background stripped of its own disciplinary signposts--especially when we don’t actually know the debates surrounding our history of choice.” She further “suspect[s] that many of us--[herself] included--present the history as somehow denuded of disagreement, while emphasizing the complexity of the assigned literary works.” Her suspicion’s justified.
When teaching a novel as influential as Looking Backward the problem becomes even thornier: to stick with the scrim-metaphor, now the complex literary work isn’t merely being projected on the scrim, it’s altering its molecular composition. The dim pinks become bright reds and the dark purples pale to lavender as the advent of an evangelical Christian socialism sweeps across the country. Should an English professor foreground the novel-as-impetus-for-cultural-change or the cultural-moment-ripe-for-an-impetuous-novel? (Yes, I desperately need to refresh my German. Or forget it entirely.) Short of resorting to a clumsy New Historicist leveling of all discourses, I’m curious as to how you, dear readers, confront (and confound) these dilemmas in the classroom or your own work. Or do you consider historical and formal questions utterly divorced and English professors only qualified to speak to the latter?
*Could I come up with a clunkier and more unartistic novel to stand as my exemplar of an aesthetic interpretation of an historical moment?
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