Posts in category: Teaching

Two years ago, I designed and taught a graduate seminar on approaches to Literary Data. I was invited to contribute an essay on the course to Debates in the Digital Humanities. The essay was some time in the writing, and it will be some time longer in the publishing: the next DDH volume is now due to appear at the start of 2018. But by kind permission of the editors, I am able to share a preprint of my essay: Teaching Quantitative Methods: What Makes It Hard (in Literary Studies). If you quote it, please cite its forthcoming publication.

The essay explains the rationale of the course, which combined a practicum in computing with literary data using the R language with theories of literary data from structuralism to the present. My own evaluation of the course is quite mixed, and I offer my materials and my experience not as a model but as evidence for an argument about the conditions of possibility for a successful quantitative methods pedagogy in literary studies. Pedagogy, in this case, also raises serious questions for research; and I also hint at what I take to be the conditions for fruitful quantitative methodology tout court.

I couldn’t have wished for better students—that condition of possibility is indeed already realized. The major lessons I draw are (this is from the essay):

1. Cultivating technical facility with computer tools—including programming languages—should receive less attention than methodologies for analyzing quantitative or aggregative evidence. Despite the widespread DH interest in the former, it has little scholarly use without the latter.

2. Studying method requires pedagogically suitable material for study, but good teaching datasets do not exist. It will require communal effort to create them on the basis of existing research.

3. Following the “theory” model, DH has typically been inserted into curricula as a single-semester course. Yet as a training in method, the analysis of aggregate data will undoubtedly require more time, and a different rationale, than that offered by what Gerald Graff calls “the field-coverage principle” in the curriculum.

Some more remarks on the essay and the course follow after the jump.

Descriptions of my Spring 2017 courses are now up on the teaching page. I am offering a new course geared to non-majors, Introduction to Twentieth-Century Literature, which will hone in on a few chosen works of fiction, poetry, and drama from across the century and across the English-speaking world. I am also teaching Principles of Literary Study: Fiction, as I have in past years; for the first time I am teaching an Honors section. When I was a first-year in college I took a Shakespeare course which had honors sections for English majors; as a non-major I could only look on in envy at all the cool extra stuff they got to do. Well, my 359:202:H1 is open to majors and non-majors, and I will be aiming to provide cool extra stuff for all. I will add links to reading lists and syllabuses as soon as they are ready. I’m always happy to hear from students who are interested in either course.

My department asked me to meet with our first-year Ph.D. students to talk about “Using Digital Media” in their scholarly lives. It was interesting to try to sketch an outline of what I thought a starting English Ph.D. student should hear on the topic, and I thought I’d post a copy of that outline here. There’s also a pdf version. I also thought there are one or two people who might be amused by my sketch of research in digital humanities.

Descriptions of the courses I’m teaching next semester are now up on the teaching page. I am offering Early Twentieth-Century Fiction, as I have in past years, as well as a new course, a seminar on “Science Fiction in Print from Pulp to the Present.” I’m very excited about both courses. I’m still working on the syllabuses, which will be linked from those pages as soon as they’re ready. In the meanwhile, my Early 20th-Century Fiction syllabus from 2014 is online; this year’s course will not be identical, but it will be broadly similar. I taught science fiction as a 300-level course in 2013; the 400-level seminar will have different readings and requirements but quite a bit of overlap in terms of themes. I’m always happy to hear from students who are interested in either course.

I’ve updated the Teaching page with descriptions for my Spring 2015 courses. I’m always glad to hear from interested students at my Rutgers e-mail.

In the undergraduate program, I’m teaching Principles of Literary Study: Prose, one of the English major requirements. There’s nothing quite like having the chance to be the pied piper introduce the great intellectual pleasures of my subject. (This was formerly “Principles of Literary Study: Fiction,” and I really teach the course as a principled introduction to fictional narrative. A course goal: students will be able to explain the distinction between prose, fiction, and arrative.) This syllabus is forthcoming.

My graduate course is new, and very experimental: Literary Data: Some Approaches. It’s about quantification and data in literary studies, an issue current discussed in and around “DH” but really part of the long dance of literary studies with the other human sciences. We’re going to learn enough programming (in R) to start in on analyzing data. I hold no particular brief for “coding” or “making,” but I think this is the best route into the quantitative at the moment, as well as an important way to concretize the theoretical and methodological debate about literary data.

Now that fall 2014 course registration has started, I have put descriptions of my fall courses up on the teaching page. I am offering Early Twentieth-Century Fiction (formerly known as Twentieth-Century Fiction I), my take on literary modernism and literary modernity in English; for more about that course, take a look at the syllabus of the 2013 version. I’m also very excited to be teaching a literary theory seminar. Here’s the brief description (the full syllabus will be posted in the summer):

The Social Construction of Literature

Where does literature come from? Many discussions about literature proceed as if this question hardly matters: the text, say the teachers and the critics, is there, and we only need to read it closely enough to discover its meaning. But who put the text there, who said that it was literature, and who is this “we” who is doing the reading? Once we ask these questions, we have begun to think of “literature” as a social construction. The goal of the course is to enrich the way we think about literature by understanding the arguments in literary studies’ debates, from the early twentieth century to present, about the relationship between literature and society. Central themes of the course include: literary form and the rejection of social context; literature as socially oppositional force; literature and political power, especially the power of the European empires; the debate over the literary canon and the role of educational institutions; and sociological theories of the literary field. The readings in this course are challenging but highly rewarding. Seminar discussion concentrates on patient engagement with theorists including John Crowe Ransom, Theodor Adorno, Raymond Williams, Edward Said, Pierre Bourdieu, Mary Poovey, John Guillory, and Pascale Casanova. We also work with the theories in literary case studies, which may include poetry by Langston Hughes, W. H. Auden, and Elizabeth Bishop; short stories by James Joyce and R. K. Narayan; an exploration of the history of Rutgers course catalogues; and an analysis of literary prizes. Requirements: active class participation, regular informal writing, two short papers, and a medium-length term paper, which will be submitted in both draft and final forms.

I cannot forbear remarking that this course is also a requirement-fulfilling bonanza: English majors can simultaneously fulfill the theory and seminar (400-level) requirements; they can also fulfill the WCr Core requirement. The course requires English 219 or 220 as a prerequisite.

Edit 8/15/14: course name change.

I’ve posted a draft syllabus as well as a one-page course description for my Spring 2012 graduate seminar on the sociology of twentieth-century literature. Click here for the course website. All very much under construction.

The websites for my fall courses are now online with preliminary syllabuses: 350:355 Twentieth-Century Fiction I and 350:437 Popular Reading: Low to Middling Genres, 1890–1945.

The descriptions of my course offerings for the fall—my first semester as a member of the Rutgers English faculty!—are now online on the English department website. I am teaching 350:355 Twentieth Century Fiction I, an introductory course on early-twentieth century novels and stories from James to Hurston to Anand. I also teaching a seminar, 350:437 Popular Reading: Low to Middling Genres, 1890–1945, which surveys the key genres—like mystery and thriller—of that period of widespread pleasure reading.

I am hoping some interested students may find this page. I’ve added descriptions of these upcoming courses to my teaching page, which shows what kinds of courses I’ve taught in the past. I invite any interested student to contact me at my personal e-mail address with questions about my courses.

I’ll soon be updating this site with some preliminary information about my courses for the next academic year, when I’ll be joining the Rutgers English Department. I’ll be developing syllabuses and course websites through the spring and summer.