At 9:56 AM +0100 4/15/06, andrew zurcher wrote:
> In the pluralistic interpretative world of the Googlian age, is it not time to experiment again not only with the 'unedited' text, but the 'unannotated' text? I don't mean to suggest a new practical criticism, but rather, as David Miller reminded me recently, to restore the thrill and pleasure of the reader's own itinerary of discovery. Annotated editions can be *deflating*, where the experience of *growing* to love a poet like Spenser or Milton should be, I'd have thought, *invigorating*. My students often feel overwhelmed by Spenser, which I think is partly a response to the *edition* in which they encounter him, rather than to the poems themselves; they are never given the opportunity to latch onto and love the poetry for its successively-revealing simplicities, before being whelmed and clobbered with its complexity, allusiveness, philosophical depth, and so on.
On the WordHoard project, we had a group of four undergraduates spend
last summer checking the computer-generated part-of-speech tagging
for The Faerie Queene. Their job could be described as spending the
day in front of a spreadsheet-like web page, labeling the body parts
of a dismembered Spenserian text. But we had them start each day
reading aloud to each other the canto they'd be working on that day.
Of course reading aloud offers no time for consulting notes, and the
work schedule did not permit more than the most cursory conversations
about Reformation theology, poetic traditions, Elizabethan politics,
and all the other things that need explaining.
Their linguistic work got them well past the sheer terror of odd word
forms that confronts most newcomers to Spenser, and I think by the
end of the summer they had a level of confidence with Spenserian
language that is probably seldom found in students taking their first
-- or even second -- Spenser course. They seemed to genuinely look
forward to reading aloud, and while some of that might have been its
relative pleasantness compared to the tedium of word identification,
I think they did get a taste of the "successively-revealing
simplicities" that Andrew is talking about. They may have even
developed some affection for Spenser. However, I'm not sure any of
them could pass the final exam in a Spenser course. We simply didn't
give them time to learn about all of the things for which the notes
in a good edition provide the starting point.
I don't think we can have it both ways given the curricular
constraints most folks work under. Probably the best thing we can do
is to use Spenser to teach Spenser and talk about concepts like
dilation, progressive elaboration, and revisionary play, while also
being up front about the fact that we are horrendously compressing
the process of discovery in order meet a 10-week or 14-week deadline.
--
________________________________________
Craig A. Berry
mailto:[log in to unmask]
"... getting out of a sonnet is much more
difficult than getting in."
Brad Leithauser
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