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Dear engaged scholars, 

   First, Dr. Coles, a warm note of concern in these impossible times, yet full of possibility. Please convey to your son that entire strangers, not only his mother, think his existence wonderful, beautiful and necessary. To believe that without fail.  Nor should a mother bear the awe full/awful work of parenting without similar recognition. It is possible to see all that in you from your words. 

   Second, in New England, we are just beginning a reckoning with myth and fact in Atlantic trade writing and history.  It is prompted by two dedicated scholars, one an historian and the other literary. 

https://www.mainepublic.org/post/maines-role-slave-trade-little-known-history-slave-trading-new-england

    While history and literature can be simply abstractions in our lives, they need not be. Recently, our neighborhood began struggling (neighbor work must be holy it is so hard) on how and why to change our seaside street name. We learned it memorializes a suspected triangle trade shipbuilder.  It’s a small, small thing yet work of consciousness with some ripples. 

    What is that to the Spenser list? As Ibram Kendi guides us in his works, unraveling the race story—which requires huge efforts from literary scholarship—is still there to do if structural policies are to be weakened and dismantled. It is heartening to read how some do that now in the classroom. Can there be more?  What story does the FQ ultimately tell? 
    Not only was colonialism underway, 1590 was the dawn of serious British engagement with the African coast and a vile economy was launched. The lead up to it might have had great impact on minds trying to express alternatives and consequences. We understand now that staunch abolitionists existed only in the midst of virulent need for them.  Is there a place to introduce related AfAm studies/enslavement archives? They are rich resources. 

https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/blackhistory/africa_caribbean/africa_trade.htm

     Thank you for the Folger statement circulation.  Those of us on local arts & humanities boards need this example of leadership. 

Kind regards, Paula C. 
(Nonacademic attorney who fell head over heels decades ago for FQ—someone a bit like Dr. Warkentin’s business student. 
We exist.)





On Jun 2, 2020, at 2:31 PM, Kim Coles <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Thank you for your kindness, Margaret. 

Best,
Kim

On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 1:46 PM Christian, Margaret <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

We are all here to learn from each other. Thank you, Kim, for entrusting us with the gift of your pain.

 

I am among those who have too often exercised the ability not to see/attend to the racial structures that affect us so disparately. The horror of police brutality is that “they” are doing it on “our” behalf. If we (“people of good will”) want things to change, we have to do more than find someone else to blame. We have to do more than ask someone else to do the work.

 

Thank you for inviting us to be more human, Kim--

 

Margaret

 

Margaret Christian, Ph.D.

Professor of English

 

Penn State Lehigh Valley

2809 Saucon Valley Rd.

Center Valley, PA 18034-8447

610-285-5106

 

From: Sidney-Spenser Discussion List <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Kim Coles
Sent: Monday, June 1, 2020 6:52 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Spenser and Sidney as endangered species

 

Colleagues, 

 

I wish that I could respond to this gracefully—because Dan Lochman, at the very least, knows how much affection I hold for him. And I know that you wish to be productive: there is a time for that discussion. But yesterday, my 13-year-old son wondered why the police want to kill him. And today I am not OK. I don’t actually care if Spenser goes extinct. I only hope that my child does not. Please hold space for your black colleagues on and off this list, who are grieving on so many levels.

 

We can resume important questions of culture, and of race--and how we teach both—at a later time. Right now, collectively, we have to mourn. Tomorrow, we have work to do. 

 

In solidarity, 

Kim 

 

On Mon, Jun 1, 2020 at 5:06 PM Lochman, Daniel T <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Donald,

 

Thanks for the lamentation, thoughts, and suggestions: these are the days for the elegiac, in many respects. It is time for Tears of the Muses.

 

Let's hope there is a resurgence in interest in literature generally and early modern literature specifically, but the constant barrage calling for utilitarian education works against us, as well as now social disintegration. At least there are those few rebels who, as you write, frequently take creative writing. You are correct that we need to show that early modern texts are also creative, delightful, important -- and, I might add, relevant, if,  for instance, a case could be made for study of texts composed in a culture led by someone like Henry VIII.

 

A few thoughts:

 

At least in the near term we are going to have to teach online courses more often, making reliance on traditional textbooks more complicated and difficult. We may need to think about developing good, scholarly but teachable online editions of works like the Fairie Queene (or parts thereof): sadly, the Scholars' Bank Grosart text of FQ lacks basic navigational information such as stanza numbers as well as apparatus and annotations. There is an e-text of Hamilton's edition, but it is not especially inviting to a student encountering the work for the first time. Online texts/resources would be ideal for the richly illustrated, easily accessed texts you mention that aim at the beginning undergraduate -- perhaps, too, we could jointly develop a pool of legally accessible teaching resources that could be established and housed on a list-serv or website.

 

We need to find ways to make the study of English early modern literature important and interesting to a diverse student body: if we cannot access many texts in English by writers outside Britain, perhaps we need to find ways to link world exploration / exploitation to our texts more directly and consider the value of assigning some relevant early modern international texts to broaden the appeal and significance of an early modern world that must seem more alien to our students than it did  when we first encountered it.

 

Our fall undergraduate classes here are presently under-enrolled --perhaps because many students are waiting to see what formats of classes we offer and what living situations will be, given the ongoing pandemic.

 

Surprisingly, our graduate literature classes here are full for fall, including my Spenser one -- at least for now. For the spring I am perhaps foolishly offering for the first time a single-author undergraduate course titled "Spenser Teaches Us to Read" -- not sure how that will go, but if it makes I plan to spend the semester with just a couple books of FQ and other poems to try to nurture interest on a smaller, less daunting scale.

 

Unfortunately, we are in the midst of a major social realignment and have limited control over the outcome. We can only do what we can and try to persuade those in charge to keep delight and imagination well and thriving in humanity.

 

Dan Lochman

Professor, Department of English
Texas State University
San Marcos, TX 78666-4616
512-245-2163
[log in to unmask]

From: Sidney-Spenser Discussion List <[log in to unmask]> on behalf of Donald Stump <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, June 1, 2020 1:43 PM
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Spenser and Sidney as endangered species

 

In a review of Gordon Tesky's new book and my own in the May 15 issue of the Times Literary Supplement, Andrew Hadfield raised the issue of low student interest in, and exposure to, major writers such as Spenser. 

 

As I wrote to Andrew in response, we are seeing the equivalent of species extinction on a scale almost as widespread we are for trees. It's going on in all periods of literature, and it's alarming. To miss Spenser is like never having seen a live elm or a 300-foot American Chestnut. Someday, I'm afraid, we in the early modern period will be down to Shakespeare, the one hoary giant that our students can drive their electric cars through on their way to Silicon Valley.

 

I know there's been a lot of general discussion of this, but I think we need to take practical steps. Here are three I've been thinking about:

  1. We could work to reduce the barriers to a first encounter with Spenser and Sidney by preparing modern-spelling, deftly introduced and annotated, and fantastically illustrated on-line starter excerpts fromThe Faerie Queene and Arcadia and the two sonnet sequences (set over against Shakespeare's Sonnets?) for all of us to have available for introductory classes. When the building is on fire, fussing about old spelling and arcane information--much as I love both--isn't the first step.
  2. We could send an English Department representative to talk each year with our University admissions counselors to get them to stop talking about English as the place to learn 'critical thinking.' This isn't the 60s, and this generation hasn't been raised to long to be free and challenge norms--though, of course, they need to learn to do that in fresh ways as much as ever. In an age of financial crises, pandemics, race riots, and helicopter parents, so many of them just want order, security, safety.
  3. In our departmental publicity, we could stress the delight and value of learning to imagine one's way into fascinating worlds crafted by great minds as places to play and, in playing, to find ways to negotiate the challenges of life.

What fascinates me is that, in a time of fewer English majors, so many are coming to my department to study creative writing, and bless them for that. They live in imaginary social and gaming worlds every day, and I wonder if they aren't drawn to CW because they want to be left alone to dream, to explore people on their own terms, and to prepare to negotiate what seems to them a threatening world in quiet ways that they never had time for in their relentless rounds of adult-controlled after-school activities and sports. 

 

Imagination alone with a text is what English lit teachers do best--though that has its own problems, of course. In claiming that high ground, though, we can also point out to prospective students that, whatever roles they go on to play in society, the parts will come easier if they are used to playing in imaginary worlds where the characters have been crafted by wise observers of human nature and the consequences of words and actions are traced out concisely, without the static of unrelated data.

 

Donald Stump

Professor of English

Saint Louis University

314 494-3247 (cell), [log in to unmask]

 

Vice President and Director of Program    

       Development

The Green House Venture

 

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--

Associate Professor, English

(she/her/hers)

Editorial Board, Renaissance Quarterly

3127 Tawes Hall
University of Maryland

301-405-9662

 

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--
Associate Professor, English
(she/her/hers)
Editorial Board, Renaissance Quarterly
3127 Tawes Hall
University of Maryland
301-405-9662

  


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