I think that the crucial aspect of teaching Spenser is to give him enough time.  I teach Book I in the first half of a survey course, where I give it two weeks (six usually seventy-minute classes) and Book III in a Sixteenth Century course where I also give it two weeks (and occasionally a seventh day).  The Renaissance Lit course also has four days on (selections from) the Amoretti and Epithalamion--2 on Amoretti, 2 on Epithalamion).  As David says, a lot of the work of teaching is showing the student how the book teaches you to read it--for instance, in Book I the repetition of certain motifs (e.g. monsters; wood/trees; cave/dungeon) with their meaningful differences. For students to learn how to do this simply takes time, and nothing makes up for looking hard at the language, and living with it, over and over again.  

What this means is that I've decided to do fewer works more slowly and fully than I used to and to give up on coverage.  That's a loss, but I figure that students, once they get a taste for something in Spenser--or the Renaissance for that matter--may go on to read more for themselves.  Perhaps only a pious hope for those (the overwhelming majority of those we teach) who won't work with these authors professionally.  

One other thing I've done regularly, and  which works with the Epithalamion, a great, strange poem, is to teach a half-class before starting  the poem proper on Catullus 61 and 62. I've found that describing the norms of a genre to students rarely bears fruit: you have to read examples to internalize a sense of what a kind is like.  But inoculation with the Catullus poems (especially 61) gives a real sense of how different Spenser's internal, meditative work is, and provides students with some small sense of the shock that sixteenth century readers coming to it for the first time may have felt.  This takes time again, but it's worth it.  Bill







 

William Oram
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>>> David Miller <[log in to unmask]> 02/07/09 6:58 AM >>> 
I've had some success teaching Spenser to undergraduate majors at  
state universities in the south.

Given the time and the right approach, students tend to become big  
fans, feeling that reading the FQ has been a transformative  
experience.   They just have to get past the hard begin that waits  
them in the door.

I typically try to each only the first three books in a semester.   
There's a short critical paper early on--usually I ask them to read  
antecedents of the Fradubio episode in Virgil, Dante, and Ariosto and  
then see what Spenser is doing with the thread.

But then instead of a longer critical essay in the standard mode, I  
ask the students to form working groups, select a particular passage  
or episode, and become its editors.  They select a particular imagined  
audience for their work (Amoret in Busyrane's custody, edited for  
middle school girls, was my favorite last time around), and they  
prepare an "edition" for which they supply the introduction and  
editorial commentary.  One class from a few years back was fortunate  
enough to publish their "editions" online at the University of  
Kentucky, and if anyone is actually interested enough to contact me  
off-list I'd be glad to send the URL for this web site.

This assignment does sometimes reveal weaknesses--it's not all triumph  
all the time.  Here, you say to the students, is a whole lot of  
rope . . .   But it does seem to provide a way into Spenser that  
involves them closely with the language and the allusive range of the  
poem; it asks them to think about what they themselves, as well as an  
imagine audience, need to know in order to understand the poem; and  
for that reason it gets them thinking critically and collaboratively  
about what actually counts as understanding with a text so multifarious.

There are many ways to teach Spenser.  Mostly, I think, you have to  
tune the students in to the way Spenser's text is itself already  
trying to teach them how to read.  Then you have to let them make lots  
of mistakes, since Spenser does solicit a pedagogy of error.  Patience  
with their wandering is key.  You have to keep them close to the text,  
even if that's only possible with carefully selected moments, and you  
have to be careful never to "solve" the text form them prematurely.

Sorry, I'm starting to prescribe, and all I meant to do was describe.   
It's as much fun as I have, teaching, to do the FQ with a class of  
undergraduate majors.  And it does blow their minds.

David

David Lee Miller
Carolina Distinguished Professor
   of English & Comparative Literature
Director, Digital Humanities Initiative @ SC
University of South Carolina
Columbia, SC 29208
(803) 777-4256
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