How we define and teach literary texts--论文代写范文精选

对于教育学来说,已经有其他迹象表明,在现代语言协会的教学方法中,通常专注于特定的文学文本,是第一批收集论文讨论实际的课堂实践，为了鼓励新教学方法。许多早期的集合包括简短的、重实际的描述,忽视理论范式。这篇essay代写范文进行讲述。

Introduction 
As a result of these ever-shifting critical and cultural perspectives about how we define and teach literary texts, a new field devoted to the study of teaching literature has developed. While the teaching of composition has always produced engaged discussions of the intersections between theory and practice, literature faculty have been slower to participate in such conversations. George Levine points out that “One doesn’t have to look too far to notice how many university English departments are divided into two nations: the part that teaches writing and is therefore also likely to be concerned with the teaching of teachers, and the part that ‘does’ literature” (2001, p. 8). The academic journal Pedagogy, which published Levine’s essay in its inaugural issue, set out to “create a new way of talking about teaching by fusing theoretical approaches and practical realities” (Holberg and Taylor, 2001, p. 1). 

In the years following the launch of Pedagogy, there have been other signs that the “two nations” Levine denounces are beginning to productively merge. Books in the Modern Language Association’s “Approaches to Teaching” series, usually focused on particular literary texts, were among the first to collect essays that discuss actual classroom practices in order to encourage new approaches to teaching key works such as George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1990) and Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (2009). While many of these early collections include brief, practically-oriented descriptions of classroom practice that neglect theoretical paradigms, these volumes were a crucial first step toward valuing pedagogical scholarship and remain an important model. 

The proliferation of guides on Victorian literature that are now flooding the market further highlight the increasing attention paid not only to canonical authors and texts, but also to entire fields and genres of study. The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel (2000) as well as The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (2002) and The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction (2003) were quickly followed by Blackwell’s “companion” series, which includes A Companion to the Victorian Novel (2002), and Continuum’s latest books Victorian Literature and Culture (2007) and The Victorian Literature Handbook (2008). Such guides are intended to introduce students to important issues related to their field of study and to make teaching the literature of those fields easier by providing trustworthy contextual and background information. Responding to the turn back towards historical and cultural approaches to literary study, these guidebooks aim to recontextualize nineteenth-century fiction. 

However, they do not complete the process of pedagogical engagement because they do not usually directly address classroom practices. Even more promising are the increasing number of books that attempt to wed pedagogical approaches in the classroom to movements in the field of literary studies, such as Elaine Showalter’s Teaching Literature (2003) and Tanya Agathocleous and Ann C. Dean’s Teaching Literature: A Companion (2003), which explore teaching practices across the whole spectrum of the literature, with some attention to nineteenth-century British fiction. In his foreword to the latter book, Levine proclaims that “the best indication that this book will have done its work effectively would be the publication fairly soon of similar books, concerned with the problems of teaching literature, not by the Modern Language Association” but by major university presses since “the profession (and the institutions that publish its work) has not taken teaching as the sort of ‘contribution to knowledge’ that makes for a major entry on the ‘CV’” (vii). 

It is hoped that Teaching Nineteenth-Century Fiction is yet another sign that the state of the profession Levine describes is beginning to change and that we are providing a new example of “the way in which we can, at last, begin to restructure the system of paradoxes and self-contradictions that have made the teaching of literature such an oddly anomalous activity – the work we faculty get paid to do, but the work that remains, in the structures of university compensations, most ignored institutionally” (p. xii). Teaching Nineteenth-Century Fiction attempts to address a more focused topic than other collections of its kind. The essays examine what is taught in nineteenth-century fiction courses in the light of the constantly changing canon; indicate how key critical approaches can be taught effectively through nineteenth-century fiction; and discuss the relationship between the literary text and the literary, cultural, and historical contexts surrounding it, and its importance for students. 

Together, these essays offer a partial chronology of nineteenth-century fiction writers and texts together with an exploration of issues relating to text selection and course design. Also included at the end of chapters are sample syllabuses, the inclusion of which is intended to give a (very) brief snapshot of how nineteenth-century literature courses are currently being organized in different institutions across the globe. The chapters which follow thus focus on a number of recurrent issues that regularly crop up in relation to the teaching of nineteenth-century fiction, though teachers working in other periods may also recognize some of them. In Chapter 2, Janice Allen discusses the changing shape of the canon – from Walter Scott and Jane Austen, publishing in the 1800s, through Newgate fiction and the emergence of realism and sensationalism, to the “New Woman” fictions and imperial romances of the fin de siècle. 

Given these changes it is clearly useful for English Studies students to have a sense of how their discipline has altered, how notions of aesthetic value regularly shift and the roles that the “canon function” plays “in the production, circulation, classification and consumption of literary texts” (p. 23). It is not simply the texts which change. Feminism, colonialism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis and the deeply held interest in the relation between literature and other forms of discourse underlie a whole host of readings and re-readings of nineteenth-century fiction over the last twenty years. Inevitably there has arisen a sense on the part of teachers that students need to know about these developments. Julian Wolfreys provides his perspective on the use of theoretical approaches to nineteenth-century fiction in Chapter 3, analysing the impact of theory on students. 

Wolfreys explores the difficulties in talking about “theory and the novel” at the same time as highlighting some of the benefits to student – and teacher – of re-thinking what it is to read with theory and what might take place in teaching a nineteenth-century course in which “theory” is supposed to figure. Wolfreys argues that “it is not a question of learning a theory so that “practically” they can “apply” something “useful” to a novel, as though the novel were soft jelly being poured into a mould” but rather “the close and patient reading of “theory” can serve to illuminate ideas already at work in the novel, which in the drive for narrative content the student might otherwise overlook” (p. 37). 

The acknowledgment of the novel’s place within the history of nineteenthcentury ideas has been one of the most positive developments in recent criticism, even if it has meant that critics have perhaps spent too much time trying to link its proponents to Darwinism, Comtism and a whole variety of other “isms” that make the study of the novel a heavily academic pursuit. More accessible for students perhaps are concepts relating to empire, imperialism, and the deeply held interest in the relations between literature and forms of colonial and postcolonial discourse. 

These underlie Patrick Brantlinger’s essay which forms Chapter 4. Brantlinger explores some of the ways in which British imperialism serves as a backdrop to several of the nineteenth-century novels commonly taught in literature courses, before suggesting some of the ways students might be encouraged to deal with this topic. The idea of reading nineteenth-century fiction in an interdisciplinary context is one of the themes taken up by Teresa Mangum in Chapter 5. Mangum discusses two approaches to teaching Bram Stoker’s Dracula that ask students to become engaged interdisciplinary scholars. The first outlines a moot court project that involves students in “the overlapping practices of literature and law,” while the second asks them to consider the “survival, reinterpretation, and critique of nineteenth-century literature and culture in the world of the graphic novel” (p. 64). 

The questions of context and text selection are part of the discussion taken up by Talia Schaffer in Chapter 6. Taking up the issue of canon formation discussed by Janice Allen, this chapter focuses on the challenge of including women writers on a crowded syllabus. It begins with canonical figures – Jane Austen, the Brontës, Elizabeth Gaskell – with whom most teachers – and some students – have had experience – but those are also authors who bring considerable baggage with them. In a recent article, “Reader, I Triumphed: Complicating the Appeal of Jane Eyre” Simon Dentith has written of the (understandable) “popular simplification” of nineteenth-century novels by women on the part of twenty-first-century readers and the tendency to read them “as narratives of heroic women ‘beating the odds.’” As Dentith points out, recasting Jane Eyre as a “triumphant liberal narrative” is not implausible and is clearly what makes it appealing to many contemporary readers (2005, p. 19). In a discussion of what she terms “over-identification,” Schaffer takes up this issue and suggests possible solutions. She then moves on to focus on less-well known writers and the benefits of making their inclusion part of one’s pedagogy.（essay代写)

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