But the persistence of biography is regrettable, it seems to me. JD Fleming
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From: "Hannibal Hamlin" <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Friday, February 6, 2009 3:57:34 PM GMT -08:00 US/Canada Pacific
Subject: Re: Notes on the Education of an English Major
One further thought -- the stock in authors today seems to a large degree tied to biography (witness the number of Milton biographies in the past year, or the number of Shakespeare bios almost every year). Where is the biography of Spenser? Does this not seem a curious lack? There are multiple biographies of far lesser literary figures, and there is certainly much of interest in Spenser's life (witness all the attention to Spenser in Ireland -- Thomas!). Who knows not Edmund Spenser? Too many, but that might change with an authoritative life! Perhaps someone might even suggest that he wrote the works of William Shakespeare!! (That would be sure to get coverage in the New York Times and on PBS.)
Hannibal
On Fri, Feb 6, 2009 at 6:04 PM, James C. Nohrnberg < [log in to unmask] > wrote:
Notes on the Education of an English Major out of the past.
We are preaching to the converted when we on the Spenser-list are told that
Spenser is definitely a Hold. The question is thus what might make him a Buy.
But people are afraid to enter the market for the first time, and to there to
buy a stock for the first time, even though its price has dropped below its
book value and/or the value of its known assets. The question is one of
attracting investors, and there I think the key is indeed education, meaning
perhaps knowledge of what's in the the portfolios of established investors.
These last are represented by the Universities and the curricula.
Freshman Year at Kenyon College (1958/9) all entering students (about 125
males) took Freshman English, and all read Paradise Lost (entire, at least
in my class), as well as Henry IV Pt. 1, King Lear, Gulliver's Travels,
Walden, Huckleberry Finn, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and
selections from Charles Coffin's chronologically arranged anthology of major
English and American poets, which was dedicated "To the men of Kenyon
College." This anthology ended with Eliot, and included a generous
selection from Spenser's lyrics; the subsequent Roeloffs edn. added only
Stevens and Kenyon alumnus Robert Lowell, at the end. The other assigned
anthology was the 10 Modern Masters of the Short Story (e.g., Mann).
Senior Year at Harvard College (61/2) Honors students read FQ I-II in the
Kellogg-Steele Odyssey Press edn. A bit later: the five 3 hr. written PhD
exams at Toronto (1964/5), taken over the course of 5-6 days, expected the
graduate student to be able to translate anything selected from the first
500 lines of Beowulf, for the Medieval Exam, and to know The Faerie Queene
entire, for the Renaissance Exam. An enforced investment program, no doubt.
A bit later still: Freshman who had tested out of English 15 at Yale
College, in 1968, took English 25 (or else English 29, Western Epic and
Drama: Homer to Brecht, including the entirety of Ulysses in the last four
weeks). English 25 studied six poets: 1-Chaucer, 2-Spenser, 3-Milton,
4-Pope, 5-Wordsworth or another Romantic, and (6) a Victorian (Tennyson or
Browning) or a modern (Yeats or Eliot -- or even Stevens!). This course was
understood to be the educational and traditional backbone supplied by the
Dept. to the College generally. It was suddenly threatened by a new and
trendy course called Lit. X, taught by comparativists and in translation
(e.g. Kafka and Borges), as well as shadowed by its younger rival English
29, taught by English Professors, starting with Giamatti, professing to know
something impart-able about Homer's two epics and 5th Cent. Athenian drama
(4 dramatists, 1 play each) and Virgil and Dante and Cervantes and even
Moliere, Goethe, Ibsen, Chekhov, Beckett and Brecht--along with a comedy and
tragedy by Shakespeare.
This last course went beyond what English Majors typically might have done
in my day (end of the fifties), a fair idea of which is given by Harcourt
Brace's Major British Writers in 2 vols. (and also the parallel volumes of
Major American Authors). The 22 MBWs were edited individually by various
Anglo-American scholars, several with whom I studied the very texts they had
edited (e.g., Milton with Douglas Bush, Prometheus Unbound with I.A.
Richards, Man and Superman with Reuben Brower; the only female author was
Emily Dickinson--in the American set-- she was edited by Northrop Frye).
C.S. Lewis was the editor for Spenser—he was the second of the canonized 22
(the last was Eliot; no novelists were represented; Boswell was ganged with
Jonson, and Coleridge with Wordsworth).
Spenser got 13 pages of introduction, and 75 more pages of text (out of vol. 1's
982, Chaucer to Boswell-Johnson); in the Spenser part, besides the
Epithalamion, Lewis' selections were entirely from the FQ and Mut.Cantos (28
of these pilgrims from the poem, spanning its length sequentially, along
with Lewis' connective, narrativizing headnotes, though only Isis Church was
given from Bk. V). The seriatim selections ended with "The last
word"--Lewis' title for the final two stanzas of MC. Everyone will have his
or her own opinion about how well served Spenser might have been by this
recourse. English Renaissance Poetry anthologies nowadays are perhaps as
likely to go for a single whole book, uncut: especially Book III.
I didn't cite David Lodge's inescapable novel deliberately, but I did cite
George Lukas, and one of that novel's devices which derives from the romanzi
pre-appears in the elusive white convertible (a T-bird?) in Lukas' American Grafitti --
think Florimell's white palfrey. I went off from California to study in
Canada the same year as Kurt (= Richard Dreyfus) did, and Mel's Drive-In was a
few blocks from my high school -- think Satyrane's tournament. I wasn't an
honorary member of the fraternal order of the Pharaohs, but one of my
friends was President of the similar Athenians -- think the Knights of
Maidenhead. (Lodge's novel went uncited for a reason alluded to in the
book's title: it's actually a very large world, yet has very narrow orbits
–- but these things all become part of one's education, or one's life of
allegory.)
The Shakespeare part of Last Action Hero (think Guvenator=Talus) could owe
something to I think A.D. Nuttall's remark that if Othello had been in
Hamlet Claudius wouldn't have lasted past the second act, and if Hamlet had
been in Othello Desdemona would still be alive. I.e., Shakespeare's genius
lies in turning a revenge tragedy into a stalemate, and a love story into a
revenge tragedy (and Iago's genius lies in turning a brawl in the streets
into one in the bedroom). The Last Action Hero seeks some of the same
intergeneric ironies upon or at the expense of genre. (Cinema is inevitably
an ironic commentary on Theatre; for another campy Renaissance example,
Bedazzled.)
A bit after the release of Animal House, when I arrived to give my last Milton
class for the semester, there was a large, shiny red apple sitting on the
teacher's table. One wonders how many such classrooms this got repeated in.
The argument of Milton's Satan has a certain resemblance to one I heard second-hand. A student at the beginning of the seventies objected to his teacher, a colleague of mine, that he Madame Bovary was relevant to him. The teacher told him that it would be relevant to who he was after he had read it. Lewis said that he had not heard of people who said they *used* to like The Faerie Queene, and his last note in the introduction to the Major British Writers Spenser section cites A Subject-Index to the Poems of Edmund Spenser (1918) with this note: "Those who are likely to become lifelong readers of The Faerie Queene will find this book a great convenience." Who exactly does he mean, who is the likely target? -- Jim N.
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James Nohrnberg
Dept. of English, Bryan Hall 219
Univ. of Virginia
P.O Box 400121
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121
--
Hannibal Hamlin
Associate Professor of English
The Ohio State University
Burkhardt Fellow,
The Folger Shakespeare Library
201 East Capitol Street SE
Washington, DC 20003
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