The results, as you know, were remarkable.
One group drew a topographical map, with readings serving as water features clustered around key thematic features of the period. Another group came up with three different variations on a theme: a map of the later C18 as a river. Two other groups came up with flow charts, one of them emphasizing a few key relationships between concepts with pictorial aids, another displaying a more text-heavy conceptual weave. Finally, one group sketched out a Facebook page for the later C18.
Part of the exercise also involved identifying those areas of later C18 literature that seem particularly unknown or unmappable at this point. Some sample responses:
(from one of the creators of the Facebook page): "We kind of copped out on the interests of '18th Century Joe.' I think I don't know a lot about what an individual was like beyond his/her role as a reader."
"The Frye essay still doesn't make much sense to me and I would like to look more closely at the Literature of Process"
"[I am] curious about better deining some of the conceptual relationships and how they connect to individual works/authors."
"I'm still not clear on what the consuming public expected out of literature. It feels like we know what authors wanted to give them, but I'm inteerested to see what trends found the greatest audience in the day."
"The 'Survivors' don't fit into any one category, not do they encompass all categories. I'm interested to study where t hey would be mapped and what role that has in making them 'The Survivors.'"
"I am interested in exploring the concept of revolution and dissatisfaction with society more than we have so far."
"where fideism fits into the structure; how Gothic is different from Romanticism"
"I have a fairly good grasp on the different aspects but I would like to learn more about making connections."
Now that you've had a chance to look over the way your classmates reflected on and responded to this exercise, how is your map of the later C18 changing? What seem like the important dimensions of the century to focus on in your independent units? What gaps in your knowledge do you perceive, and how can the upcoming work in the course help to fill them in?
Deadline: Friday (2/27), 10am.
4 comments:
My independent unit is Children's Literature. And I think given the excerpts that were mentioned in the blog that it would be interesting to focus on how authors such as Samuel Johnson and others interpreted children's literature. How much should children know? What types of topics should they be taught? I think it would be interesting to see how much of an effect the Northwest Passage had on children's literature and education. Also if towards the end of the century if you can see the beginning of the movement away from the church and towards reason manifesting itself in children's literature.
I think that through the Independent units perhaps, we can clear up what the later 18C reader was like outside of their roles as reader. The facebook page group brought up an important point. It is hard to understand how the literature was consumed by different populations if we do not conceptually understand the specifics of each of the populations. For my independent study, we are covering the sublime, and we are the last group going. With this in mind, I want to go though and listen to the questions most students have in class about the period as a historical moment and discuss these questions on the blog and in class and tie them back to the sublime hopefully.
My map of the later eighteenth century is focusing more on how different texts are affecting individuals. How does the average person in the eighteenth century feel about the British empire, changing land use or even the new form of the novel? I feel like many of the works we have read are still reaching back to different times and have not focused on the C18. The Butler essay spent a fairly good amount of space talking about how people felt a dissatisfaction with their time period- I'm interested in knowing why that dissatisfaction existed at an individual level. My independent unit focuses on the rights of women, and through that topic I'm sure I'll find plenty of reasons why women were dissatisfied.
I was in the facebook group and I agree with my partner's sentiment of not knowing what the individual was like during this time period. With such a shift away from small cliques of aristocrats circulating manuscripts, to more of a popular reading audience, the individual seems to get lost somewhere. We see the individual as part of a group of collective readers but have no real idea of what he/she expected from the literature of the time.
My independent unit is slavery and abolition, and I think this issue ties into this topic in the way that Caitlin previously described; how does your average 18th Century Joe feel about slavery and/or abolition? We never seem to get a clear idea of readers' responses in this era.
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