Romantic Futures 2023 Curran Symposium Workshop I- Classes
By Shruti Jain and Kaushik Tekur, SUNY Binghamton
Followed by an inspiring set of discussions and talks on the morning of 28th October 2023, the second half of the “Romantic Futures: 2023 Curran Symposium” began with a roundtable session with editors of leading journals and forthcoming companions to eighteenth-century and Romantic studies. The fruitful discussions about the innovative ways in which these scholars are guiding the future of our discipline left the room energized and inspired. This was followed by three concurrent workshops: ‘commons’, ‘classes’, and ‘publics’.
Widening the Romanticist Classroom
The ‘classes’ workshop was moderated by Dr. Karen Swann and the conversation began with introductory remarks by Dr. Rosa Elizabeth Schneider, Dr. Shelley AJ Jones, Shruti Jain, and Kaushik Tekur. The conversations largely revolved around the ways to teach a wider syllabus of Romanticism that moves beyond the Big Six keeping in mind the cultural capital that canon enjoys and teaching students with changing attention spans and preferences for engagement. Syllabi, course material, and sample assignments of the classes designed and taught by these instructors were circulated among all participants beforehand. Jain’s and Tekur’s courses titled ‘British Women Write the World’ and ‘Policing and Culture’ respectively, place familiar romantic-era texts in contexts that extend beyond the period’s traditionally defined temporal bounds and/or beyond the geographical space of European romanticism. Dr. Schneider teaches Shelley’s Frankenstein to high school students in a course in which it is the only Romantic text. Dr. Jones’ course teaches Romantic literature in an asynchronous online course to a student population that is “non-traditional” (including many older, working adults). She had circulated the assignment document that she uses in her class while teaching Frankenstein. Dr. Jones shared the value of relying primarily on the anthology Poems for the Millennium,Volume Three: The University of California Book of Romantic and Post-Romantic Poetry. He spoke about the haptic value of being able to hold the entirety of the syllabus, both the texts and the writing about the authors’ lives in one collection. This choice was particularly interesting given his own research and pedagogical emphasis on the idea of ‘editing’ undoing the myth of a Romantic ‘genius’. The anthology with its varied selections helps Dr. Jones bring the conversations about expanding the canon into the class in the very form of the textbook. He shared how enjoyable and useful this is for the students. These diverse courses and teaching scenarios opened up room for reimagining pedagogy and Romanticism itself in newer contexts.
The discussion that followed was driven by forces both within and outside Romantic studies. ‘The crisis of the Humanities’ globally - with continuing reduction in funds, attack and closure of departments, and the pressure to be ‘resourceful’ was a major underlying current that shaped the course of the workshop. Further, the decline in interest in Romanticism and the supposed decline in attention span among the current generation of high school and undergraduate students added to the concerns that enthusiastic Romanticists and eighteenth-centuryists were trying to address in the workshop. In addition to these institutional pressures, the workshop’s discussion was driven by the overwhelming need to rethink the canonical regimes of teaching and scholarship.
Beyond the Big Six
Expanding and widening the literary canon of romanticism has been important to scholars for decades now. However, a knowledge of or at least familiarity with the ‘great texts’ makes one conversant and legible in several academic and non-academic settings. With the well-recognized need to widen the canon beyond the Big Six, questions about what teaching within the field would look like occupied the participants. Given the aforementioned decrease in interest in these classes, one concern that emerged was that if we cannot get students to be enthralled by the Big Six, how would we inspire them to pursue other non-canonical writers? This led to a conversation about whether pursuing a widening of the field needs to be dependent on the Big Six in the first place. The group discussed how there is a tendency among students from marginalized backgrounds to be more interested in courses taking non-traditional approaches to Romanticism and literature in general. Given the nature of conferences, professional networking, and scholarship, canonical texts and writers of the period continue to hold an important role in the field. Not introducing students in these classes to the canon might inadvertently replicate hierarchies that define and shape access to the Big Six and the conversations around them. If classrooms are major spaces where most marginalized students become conversant in scholarship about the canon, attempts to decenter the canon should not come at the cost of making it harder for marginalized students to find their space professionally in this transitional phase. This part of the discussion highlighted the cultural capital that the canon continues to hold in academia, despite the urgent need to rethink and dismantle its centrality to our field.
Emphasizing Institutional Contexts
Another important and productive topic of conversation was reading load. Assigning readings can be a tough decision, especially at a time when time and attention spans seem to run short. Given the diverse institutional backgrounds that the participants came from, this conversation needed immense contextualizing. Professors and instructors teaching at community colleges and similar institutions had approaches that differed from those working at private universities. With an acknowledgment of the disparity in the system of higher education, it became overwhelmingly clear that the strategies employed to ensure students did the readings would have to differ from context to context. In fact, sensitivity to the students and institutional contexts would mean that it is how one reads Romanticism that becomes more important than how many pages of a Romantic text one reads.
Dr. Schneider, Jain, and Tekur spoke about using adaptations of Romantic texts as a common way to meet students mid-way given their changing interests. Dr. Schenider has used adaptations of Frankenstein in classrooms, whereas Jain has used recent shows like Bridgerton and Queen Charlotte along with global adaptations of Jane Austen such as Bride and Prejudice: The Bollywood Musical in her class on British Women Writers. Tekur has used movies, TV shows, and music videos about police power such as Narcos, Underbelly, and Paul Blart: Mall Cop to return to conversations about eighteenth-century developments in artistic, legal, and social forms. Students have responded well to these pedagogical strategies and have at times come to see the point in appreciating not just these texts in a Romantic context but even reimagining the temporal boundaries of Romanticism itself. In some senses, students see that we continue to live in and respond to Romanticism and build Romantic Futures.
Similarly, students also see that Romanticism is not merely a European phenomenon. Coming to understand the globality of Romanticism, even as we pay some attention to the Big Six, has been made possible by working carefully with institutional requirements such as the general education requirements. Tekur offers ‘global interdependencies (G)’ for his course on policing that touches upon different countries across continents. Jain offers the ‘Composition (C)’ credit for her course which additionally draws students to the course on British Women ‘writing’ and ‘adapting’. Working with institutional requirements on one hand and students’ changing interests on the other, even as we continue to push and engage with productive friction with them both came up as effective ways of making Romantic era texts and conversations interesting to undergraduates and high-school students.
This generative discussion concluded with participants suggesting possibilities for crowd-sourced resources on pedagogy to be collected and archived by the KSAA for scholars, instructors, and students to use. Such an open-source archive of teaching materials would be housed on a platform facilitated by the KSAA through a potential seed grant. This conversation about the future projects that the Association could undertake was carried over to the bigger group in the next collective session. Here participants from different workshops shared ideas from their respective rooms. In the face of the seemingly bleak future of Romantic Studies in particular and the Humanities in general, this symposium and its participants held up a beacon of hope for the future of our field.
About the Authors
Shruti Jain is a PhD candidate at SUNY Binghamton. Her dissertation focuses on the networks of caste and race in the global eighteenth-century. She is also the co-host and co-producer of the podcast “Immigrants Wake America”, which helps her explore the role that podcasts play in digital archiving in the Eighteenth century and beyond.
Kaushik Tekur is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at Binghamton University. For the academic year 2024-’25, he’s a visiting assistant professor in the Department of English, Ashoka University. His research and teaching interests include long eighteenth-century English writing, British Romanticism, literary forms, police and surveillance studies, human rights, Black studies, and caste in South India. His recent work has appeared in Literature/Film Quarterly, The Keats-Shelley Review, Eighteenth Century Fiction and The LA Review of Books.