Abstract This article explores the future(s) of undergraduate research in writing studies through representative words of the undergraduates themselves. It reveals their social justice motives, as well as their desire to undertake research that can have real impact. It also questions whether inclusion in our disciplinary community supports—or blunts—those motives, highlighting the need to treat their work as an embodied act that may not be fully activated within traditional definitions of “contributions to knowledge.”

AbstractThis article examines a required undergraduate empirical methods course in writing, rhetoric, and literacy to assess how well it introduces humanities students to empirical research methods. The common curriculum contains a commitment to affordable learning as well as to making students agents of their own learning. Student work artifacts, pre- and post-course surveys, and course evaluations were collected and analyzed to examine the impact of the course on student understanding of and engagement in undergraduate research. Initial results indicate that students are gaining skills that will enable them to function as researchers going forward.

Abstract This article showcases a guided research project that explores Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer (2015) as an adaptation of Hamlet. A digital component to the project further visualizes the reach of Shakespeare's work into that of contemporary writers of color. The discussion underscores how an undergraduate research experience in canonical English literature opens new connections to contemporary depictions of a globalizing world, as well as how digital tools can visualize those connections and grant the student a valuable set of skills.

Abstract This article seeks to contribute to our understanding of the challenges and opportunities afforded by undergraduate research in the context of changing English departments in international contexts. English has been witnessing unprecedented growth in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region thanks to globalization, the Internet, and the internationalization of higher education. In this article, I reflect on my experience with undergraduate research in the MENA region, focusing on the challenges I had encountered and strategies for engendering a successful undergraduate research experience.

Abstract This article develops a theory of postcolonial queer pedagogy through reflections on teaching nineteenth-century literature at the National University of Singapore. Students draw on their experiences living in a culture torn between liberal and illiberal tendencies and recognize that such contradictions exist in both the Western and non-Western world.

Abstract This article examines the construction of and contestation over the idea of the nation through contemporary popular cinema in India. Building on his experience of discussing the Bollywood spy thriller Raazi (2018) in an English class, the author proposes that “reading” the film in terms of gender and genre can not only help students apply modes of textual analysis to narratives in other media but also alert them to the location of such narratives within larger discursive frameworks of defining national identities. Raazi presents a critical and ideological counterpoint to the generic conventions of the spy thriller within the increasingly polarized sociopolitical context of the Indian subcontinent. The film presents an unlikely female protagonist as both the physical agent and the psychological subject of the violence integral to the “action” of an espionage film. It also interrogates the oppositional relation between the patriotic “self” and the foreign “other” that lies at the basis of the militaristic conception of the nation and ultimately reveals the shared human vulnerability of both to the traumatic effects of pursuing the idea(l) of nationalism at the expense of individual moral integrity. Thus a close reading of the film's narrative structure and conventions, as well as a critical engagement with the historical context of its production and reception, can be pedagogically fruitful ways of understanding and critiquing the processes through which a nation is collectively imagined into being.

AbstractThis article offers a critical and personal reflection on the role of curiosity, fragments, and play in creating meaningful encounters with archives in the college classroom. Drawing on play theory, poetics, media studies, and pedagogical theory, the essay reimagines archival collections as formal and material playgrounds open to spontaneous experimentation. Through reflections on the finding aid, logistical media, Curious George, and other subjects, the essay finds in the archive an elemental play that can be harnessed to create a radically spontaneous pedagogy organized around student curiosity. By cultivating the curiosity inherent to archival play, teachers can actively shape the playful dividend that arrives when students enter the archive and begin to search, find, and discover meaningful patterns in the fragments of history.

AbstractThis article identifies in contemporary literary theory a new optimism about the power of literary texts. The medium of this power is not language, ideology, or form but readers open to being changed. Drawing on phenomenology, the article discusses methods for making literary theory students open to and aware of such change, suggesting that hope is the grounding condition for any effective teaching act as well as an effective ground for reading in an era of globalization.

Abstract The author interrogates creative-critical writing assignments from an introductory literature course (ENG 125: Literary Narrative) for concerns about “truth,” arguing that writing and reflection, especially when informed by a theoretical vocabulary, alter the way students construct and understand both their own stories and the stories of others.

Abstract Five graduate students reflect on their experiences in multiple roles to address the question, What does a good teacher do now?—during a pandemic, in a moment of reckoning with white supremacy, in the face of uncounted griefs and challenges. We contend that good teachers craft communities of care for students, colleagues, and themselves. We advance trauma, accessibility, surveillance, and labor as particular sites for that project.

Abstract Graduate students must learn to read as professionals who move their reading work into spoken and written discourse. This study borrows Deborah Brandt and Katie Clinton's description of transcontextualizing moves to examine how graduate students use social annotation to develop as readers. Specifically, the study examines graduate reading practices through think-aloud protocols and archived annotations of three readers enrolled in a doctoral literacy seminar. Findings suggest that graduate readers may benefit from opportunities to reflect on how the technologies of annotation contribute to the transcontextualization of their reading across time and space.

AbstractAlthough much has been written about the history of commonplacing, there is a lack of evidence-based research to show the extent to which this historical practice may still be valuable today as a pedagogy that educates citizens in critical reading for democracy. This article describes an institutional-review-board-approved, experimental study to answer this question. Three sections of the same first-year reading and writing course were compared: one section did not use commonplace books, a second section used commonplace books that included quotations only, and a third section used commonplace books with reflective writing. We expected to find that students who used commonplace books would perform better in end-of-study assessments than those who did not. Instead, we were surprised to find that many of the students who were not required to use commonplace books created their own note-taking methods that performed a similar function. In essence, they developed their own commonplace book culture and methodology using Google Docs and other social reading practices. Their performance was as strong as the students who used commonplace books.

AbstractReferencing current research in neuroscience, this article argues that although knowledge about logic and evidence are important for helping students become critical thinkers, teachers should devote attention to the nonrational biases currently being evoked for persuasion, plan additional class time for students to reflect on their own emotional biases, and encourage students to self-identify as critical thinkers, so that they will continue to think critically in other courses and contexts. To attain this goal, approaches involving performance and reflection should be given further attention to help students develop the habit of questioning the credibility of information.

Theme courses are a common practice despite their limited presence in composition scholarship, which contributes to a fractured understanding of the theme course’s purpose and place in the discipline. This article offers an aggregate picture of theme (or topic) based courses based on disparate scholarly publications and affirmed by data collected through an online survey of writing instructors and program administrators. To trace the theme course within our disciplinary tradition and as a continuing practice, this article defines the theme course, distinguishing between writing as subject matter and theme content as a form of reinforcement. It furthermore historicizes the theme course’s limited life in scholarship, synthesizing key features of theme course practice, reinforced by survey responses. Ultimately, this article offers a framework for reflective practice that all theme course practitioners can use for developing, implementing, and evaluating their teaching methods. The underlying argument is that theme courses can support learning about writing, so long as theme selection and implementation work in purposeful support of the course’s learning about writing goals.

This article analyzes two of the inevitable messes of translingual scholarship and teaching in composition studies: the criticism that arose from cross-disciplinary conflict with second language writing and the semantic ambiguities that result from the–ism in translingualism. The article reviews a variation in uptakes of translingualism, while arguing that specific strands—translingualism as a disposition and praxis—are the most fruitful in pushing English studies toward a more collective pursuit of language awareness and justice.

Using a classroom experience teaching Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing alongside a contemporary controversy over racial identity, this article explores the value of literary study for intervening in student attitudes toward core curriculum requirements. The author argues that literature is uniquely situated to teach the skills colleges most want students to acquire in their general education curricula, in turn providing a crucial method for responding to the “crisis” of the humanities in higher education today.

This article examines student experiences of studying Shakespeare’s first tetralogy through viewing and writing about Seattle Shakespeare Company’s 2017 Bring Down the House, a successful two-part adaptation of Henry VI parts 1, 2, and 3 directed by Rosa Joshi and the upstart crow collective, a Seattle theater company dedicated to producing classical works with diverse all-female and nonbinary casts for contemporary audiences. Through reflection on students’ responses to the adaptation’s all-female cast, as well as the analytical work they produced for an upper-level course titled Shakespeare: Context and Theory, this article articulates the pedagogical value of students’ experiences of representation in live theater performances of Shakespeare. The author argues for both the ethical imperative of introducing students to radical, inclusively cast productions and the enlivened learning that emerges in the literature classroom from students’ creative and analytical engagements with the diverse voices of modern all-female and cross-gender cast Shakespearean performance.

As digital tools radically alter the ways instructors teach and students learn, the material resources of special collections offer an opportunity to reflect on the pedagogical differences between online and material instruction. The authors theorize that an embodied learning experience with physical materials engages students’ intellects, bodies, and emotions in ways that encourage critical thinking about information formats.

This article uses a contemporary literature class titled Alternatives to Realism that the author taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as the basis to argue for the special value of experimental, speculative, and otherwise antirealistic literature for introductory-level undergraduate literature pedagogy. The author argues that, rather than choosing realistic narratives that students are likely to understand and relate to on first pass, professors should deliberately seek out works students are likely to initially find confusing or strange and then endeavor to help them understand those texts. The article suggests that the difficulty associated with such texts, rather than intimidating students, actually invites them to engage with the reading process more actively and enthusiastically. The article discusses the premise and overall structure of the class and the rationale behind it; delves into specific examples of discussions and assignments based on such texts as Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves and Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow; and examines students’ own ultimate responses to the class as presented in their final exam reflection essays. Ultimately, the author argues that teaching (seemingly) difficult, idiosyncratic literary works helps students appreciate the unique intellectual work of reading, strengthens their self-confidence, and leads them to a keener appreciation of the humanities more broadly.

This article explores the pedagogical efficacy and learning outcomes of an archive-based undergraduate research project in which students digitally transcribed a nineteenth-century woman’s diary and then reflected on their transcription work.

In many ways, the transformative character of developing critical consciousness reflects the dynamics of acquiring threshold concepts. Drawing from research into threshold concept acquisition, the author argues that critical first-year composition instruction can more effectively scaffold students into critical perspectives by linking critical pedagogy more closely with efforts to develop students’ rhetorical meta-awareness of writing.

This article considers the all too common experience of precarious employment in higher education, but under a unique set of circumstances: a three-year postdoctoral fellowship and residency in a stately home in the English countryside. The author explains how she harnesses the pedagogical possibilities of her precarity by operating a policy of radical honesty with her students, both inside and outside of the classroom. As a Victorianist, she petitioned to teach texts, including Jane Eyre, that allowed her to explore contingent academic labor with her students and compare the plight of the nineteenth-century governess—poorly paid, forced to lead an itinerant existence, and subject to dismissal when she outlived her utility—to the conditions that many academics currently face. She invites her students to share their struggles, and for her part, she frankly shares the difficulties of being a precarious academic, in the hopes of creating a place of mutual understanding, support, and solidarity.

This article argues that the primary role of the instructor is to help students understand and work with the difficult emotional states that arise from struggling to learn. Drawing on Sianne Ngai’s theorization of “ugly feelings” and using his own experience with digital humanities instruction as a case study, the author offers ways to center emotional work, especially work involving frustration and anxiety, in the classroom. Asking students to develop failed prototypes and reflect on the process, for example, can provide them with a better sense of what it might mean to succeed. Giving the same exercise twice, with artificially imposed difficulties the second time, might help them learn concrete steps for working through mounting irritation. In short, frustration and anxiety are not things that emerge from time to time—they are ever-present. The author argues that it is the job of instructors to develop ways to prepare students not for the unexpected failure but for the inevitable frustration that comes even with success.

This article examines the intersection between the feelings of anxiety and love. The author looks at how the affective labor she performs professionally has shifted as she has moved from a contingent faculty role to a faculty development role. This shift, while necessary, highlights the power imbalance within academia, as well as the devaluation of affective labor. She examines how her anxieties as a faculty developer differ from the anxieties that faculty are bringing with them in their interactions with her.

Recent interest in reflective writing in the classroom is tied to the suggested links among reflection, metacognition, and learning transfer. There is still a limited understanding, however, about the distinguishing features of reflective writing and how teachers might identify and use these features to teach effective reflective practices and to interact with student reflective writing. This study uses Gorzelsky et al.’s (2016) taxonomy of metacognitive behaviors to examine the end-of-semester reflective essays of undergraduate students enrolled in a first-year writing course at a large midwestern university. The authors identify and describe a feature of student reflective writing involving the use of emotional language and, working from their findings, suggest a teaching strategy and set of classroom activities aimed at leveraging students’ emotive expressions in ways that foster metacognitive awareness.

Using methods from corpus linguistics, the author argues that the practice of making knowledge in composition studies is bound with the discursive act of representing students. Students are represented both in ways that align with disciplinary knowledge about writing and in ways that align with major intellectual shifts in composition studies.

This article theorizes the potential contours and impacts of faculty “resilience” within increasingly corporatized contexts by examining the strategies for resilience and persistence among international, multilingual, and nontraditional students who maneuver among various academic and cultural contexts.

Review Article| April 01 2019 "Stories People Tell" Myths of American Masculinity From Boys to Men: Rhetorics of Emergent American Masculinity, by Jones, Leigh Ann. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2016. Christopher M. Parsons Christopher M. Parsons Christopher M. Parsons is assistant professor of English and the coordinator of secondary English education at Keene State College. His current research interests include the circulation of ideologies about identity and literacy in English classes and the relationship between teacher education coursework and site-based fieldwork. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2019) 19 (2): 359–367. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-7296036 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Christopher M. Parsons; "Stories People Tell" Myths of American Masculinity. Pedagogy 1 April 2019; 19 (2): 359–367. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-7296036 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2019 Duke University Press2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

This study compares two different groups of readers—college English majors and a community reading group—in how they engage food-centric stories by Anzia Yezierska and Lara Vapnyar. The groups' polemical responses etch a rhetorical space between the worlds inside and outside the classroom for authentically transacting with literature.

Despite increased enrollments of multilingual students at US colleges and universities, many composition faculty lack specialized training to support second language writers. This article offers a framework through which faculty and administrators can begin developing knowledge about applied linguistics that is relevant to the teaching of multilingual writers.

A vertical reading of the Commedia exposes Dante's practice of continually revising his text, such that it looks back on itself as it moves forward. The poet accomplishes this in part through dramatic contrasts and reversals. One way to follow these “repetitions-with-difference” is to observe their relationship with a theme that Dante explores throughout his career: loss. The loss of Beatrice in the Vita Nuova becomes the loss of Florence in Dante's works written in exile. It then becomes the spiritual desolation explored among those in the Inferno who have lost “the good of the intellect.” Looking back from the end of the Commedia, however, reveals that what has been lost is eventually found in a new form. In the beatific “white rose” of Paradise we recall the “dark wood” of the poem's opening; when Beatrice is no longer by the pilgrim's side in the Empyrean we remember the tragic disappearance of Virgil on the top of Mount Purgatory; anticipating the joys of the City of God not only mitigates the pain of Dante's Florentine exile but also gives the poet a foretaste of true citizenship.

This essay considers the importance of nonstandard English to fostering a more inclusive and incisive Shakespeare classroom. Grady focuses on his experience as the instructor of a Shakespeare course that occasionally employed African American Vernacular English in its analysis of texts. His reflection considers how taking such language seriously encourages more genuine participation from a wide range of students. While this pedagogical approach offers one manner in which the field of early modern studies might expand points of access and foster cross-cultural dialogue, it also stands to deepen the analytic possibilities of the Shakespeare classroom. Grady uses the example of African American Vernacular English to demonstrate that nonstandard English can offer particularly nuanced means through which to investigate and discuss Shakespeare's works.

This article discusses the convergence of the perspectives of literary, gender, and regional studies in the implementation of an oral history project as a service-learning requirement in an upper-level southern women's literature course, providing information about the model and examining learning outcomes as presented through the final projects and student reflections.

The introduction provides a broad overview of the occasion for this collection of essays that stem from a National Endowment for the Humanities institute in Florence, Italy, in 2014. In addition to giving a summary of the six essays that follow, it offers a rationale for reading the Comedy retrospectively and prospectively as well as vertically, in other words, reading forward and backward in a recursive process.

This article examines how the popular television series Downton Abbey, functioning in tandem with twentieth-century novels, provides students with a cultural forum that opens up a cultural, literary, and historical period that would otherwise remain distant. By encouraging students to perceive television as participating in what Horace Newcomb and Paul M. Hirsch call “public thinking,” the article highlights the way the PBS period drama offers students the means to engage critically and empathetically with a historically distant cultural moment. Ultimately, the author argues that incorporating Downton Abbey and related social media to the study of novels of the early twentieth century enlivens the material, motivating students to enter into a period of history through its literature in service of not only increased historical and literary knowledge but also a more nuanced understanding of the importance of the humanities in examining society and its values, the very elements television both shapes and reflects.

This essay compares and contrasts the first edition of In Memoriam, Tennyson's elegy for his friend Arthur Henry Hallam published in 1850, with more recent editions that distort the original by dramatically compressing the text to fit it onto fewer pages. In this light, I consider the negative impact that such editorial choices may have on students reading the poem for the first time and the benefits of presenting them with the text in the format first encountered by Victorian readers (accessible today thanks to the British Library). The blank space following many of In Memoriam's 131 lyric sections is an integral part of the mourning process that Tennyson unfolds before us. Relatedly, I describe my multiple attempts to teach the poem to undergraduates, as well as a talk on this topic that I gave on a pedagogy panel at the Northeast Victorian Studies Association's 2000 conference, “Victorian Breakdowns.”

This article applies the idea of pivoting to teaching British history and cultural studies, both by focusing on a pivotal year's watershed events and by artfully telling a before-and-after story about a less noteworthy event. My teaching tool in this case was the year 1874, which was pivotal in the first sense of the word owing to Benjamin Disraeli's defeat of William Gladstone and the subsequent decline of laissez-faire and rise of imperialism. I discuss how I use that event as a pivot by referring back to the culture of voluntarism that had promoted Gladstone's popularity and to blind spots in Gladstonian liberalism that rendered him politically vulnerable in 1874. I then turn to my experience teaching a one-week unit on the British annexation of Fiji, which also occurred in 1874. In this unit I assigned some students to report on the career of the first governor of Fiji, Arthur Gordon, who governed five other British colonies before and after 1874, and I asked other students to pre sent group reports on four different perspectives on Fiji that accompanied annexation, by a company promoter, a tourist, a missionary, and an adventure novelist.

This article explores the benefits of bringing museum education into the composition classroom to help students develop confidence and skill in oral presentation. Drawing on current scholarship in object-based learning and engaging museum audiences, it outlines a project in which students closely observed objects at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and critiqued a museum tour before presenting on their objects on-site at the museum. As well as teaching students new skills, the project also encouraged them to use their own experiences as audience members in the classroom and the museum to create more engaging and coherent presentations for their peers. The article explains the logistics of the project and students' reactions, concluding with students' own reflections on the benefits of presenting in a museum setting.

This article presents a three-stage critique of the “schools approach” to teaching literary theory at the undergraduate level. First, it demonstrates the continued dominance of this approach both in teaching programs and in the textbook literature. Second, it discusses the approach's pedagogical shortcomings. Third, it presents a teaching approach better suited to encourage active theoretical reflection.

Corley argues that college faculty can more effectively instruct student veterans by renewing their commitment to widely acknowledged hallmarks of excellent instruction: welcoming all students; giving clear and direct feedback; approaching self, subjects, and students with moral seriousness; teaching with integrity; relating the subject matter to everyday concerns; and holding all students to high standards. Through classroom anecdotes and descriptions of military life, Corley demonstrates numerous points of connection between military culture and the best instructional practices described.

Through a classroom moment in a graduate course in the teaching of writing, Particelli explores ways in which pointed inquiry into genre—satire, in this case—allows for a lesson design that encourages critical exploration of culture without burdening students with essentialist discussions. Using an inquiry-based approach to genre study, the students in this classroom explore many kinds of “text”—from stand-up comedy to fiction and narrative nonfiction—with an unavoidable eye toward critical theory but without the traditional approach that pushes students to apply a “critical lens” to a text in the way that a tool might be applied to an object. Particelli argues that those often didactic approaches push students to learn a specific script for a specific situation and can even push students to experience the world polemically and thus to become less willing to see complexity of argument, power, and position. Through this classroom example where the cultural habits and expectations of genre remain at the center of conversation, Particelli hopes to spark conversation surrounding the possibilities of expanding our approaches as we develop discussions at the intersections of cultural power, social politics, literature, writing, and students' personal experience.

This essay discusses the personal experiences of a US Army soldier transitioning from military life to academia, focusing on lessons of isolation learned from the author's experiences teaching foreign soldiers and then international students. These lessons can inform our approach to successful veteran integration into our classrooms and into our broader campus communities.

This article uses Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy to explore how literature instructors can use eighteenth-century novels, many of which bring attention to themselves as creations of the writing process, to encourage their students to reflect on their position as writers in the twenty-first century. Gulya proposes teaching Tristram Shandy and other self-referential texts within the context of writing studies. This approach helps our students recognize the close relationship between writing and cognition and, by so doing, brings their attention to writing as a process as well as a product. Gulya also outlines some of the major benefits of encouraging students to think about writing as a process, including more vibrant peer-revision sessions and an increase in students' tendencies to take intellectual risks in their writing.

English has a peculiar way of redefining the selves and locations of readers, especially in countries where Anglo-American texts are studied with a multicultural awareness. Ernest Hemingway's “Hills like White Elephants” creates a world elsewhere not only for the couple who travel elsewhere but also for the students who read their story in Kerala (India) when they explore the “elsewheres” they create together as a class by translating it into Malayalam. The student-translators are apt to discover that there is more to Jig's unspoken anguish and the largely unspeakable differences that surface between the two lovers. While Hemingway's lean style is understood for what infinite suggestions it evokes in English, students surprise themselves with meanings—pregnant possibilities that suggest themselves in Malayalam, and unbeknownst to English/monolingual readers. Translation, like the extremely sparse exchanges between Jig and her lover, must exercise extreme caution, however, in committing no more words than must essentially be committed. Concealing what no longer needed concealment, or was soon to be found too big for concealment anyway, is a worrisome theme here whose reflection in translation is hard to sustain unless the Malayali translators match Hemingway's superior command of language. Besides such knowledge, a translator's intertextualities are as invisible as, and perhaps much harder to share with others than, a teacher's challenges and excitement of teaching “Hills” in English in a multilingual classroom. Perhaps from such dreams begin the responsibilities of reading a story as yet unwritten in Hemingway's classic every time we read it elsewhere.

While other students were planning their moves to big universities across the nation, Micah Wright had a different post–high school plan. He wanted to join the Marine Corps. He left for boot camp in September 2002 and started a four-year life-changing experience that resulted in him earning a Combat Action Ribbon and a Purple Heart. After his active service, he decided to start another venture: college. Though his resolve had been tested many times before, attending a university, where the halls were filled with unfamiliar college students and the classes were led by professors whose teaching styles did not match his Marine Corps training, was more difficult than he anticipated, until he realized that his identity as a Marine could be a formidable force in achieving his degree.

At 10,938 lines, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh would seem unsuited for the present-day classroom, with its focus on short, simple texts adapted for readers with little experience of long poems. Yet it teaches quite readily and, indeed, is often a student favorite. This article emphasizes the multigeneric quality of Browning's epic and the advantages of presenting its successive layers. The poem functions as a veiled autobiographical narrative of development, a fast-paced novel plot centering on gender and class relationships, and a closet drama utilizing features of the contemporary stage. Other aspects of the poem include its appeal as a travel narrative, as Aurora responds to European sites still unfamiliar to many of Browning's readers, and its self-reflexivity as a critical treatise on poetics, as Aurora attempts to enunciate the principles that have guided the poem's author. Certain aspects of the poem's imagery and characterization are especially effective in prompting classroom debate; among these are the ideologically laden symbols of a burned aristocratic manor, a blinded hero, the final vision of a New Jerusalem, and the remarkable portrayal of the aggrieved seamstress Marian, who protests her victimization by rape and rejects marriage with an upper-class suitor.

Students in freshman composition classes often assume that the goal of college writing is to sound like someone else, so they struggle to frame their own questions in response to the world around them. This article analyzes the potential for student-driven learning to redress this problem. It focuses on a team-taught freshman composition course that asked students to collaborate in designing a section of their curriculum. The article argues that control over the curriculum inspired many students to push themselves intellectually and adopt the roles of teachers. On the other hand, increased autonomy sometimes disempowered students who had not yet acquired skills to assess their own strengths and weaknesses and who thus reverted to oversimplified ideas or avoided actively taking on responsibilities. If agency constitutes the power to carry out effective action, this course illustrated the capacity of autonomy both to foster and to subvert student agency.

Caroline Bowles's long narrative poem Ellen Fitzarthur (1820) offers a seduction tale reminiscent of Amelia Opie's The Father and Daughter (1801), tracing the seduction of a cloistered young woman by an unscrupulous military sailor taken in by Ellen's widower father after a shipwreck. Deceived by the sailor, Ellen follows him but is abandoned, pregnant, and subsequently travels home with her infant daughter, arriving repentant and exhausted at her ancestral home after a long and difficult journey. There she discovers her recently deceased father's grave, upon which she dies in shock, leaving her daughter to be taken in by the family of a villager who turns out to be Ellen's foster brother. Pairing Bowles's poem with Opie's novel allows students to explore the roles of genre (and generic conventions) in the presentation of similar tales and to examine both the technical and the aesthetic effects and consequences of authorial choices grounded in these different literary genres.

This article addresses the teaching of Amy Levy's “Xantippe” (1880), a poem 279 lines long, in an upper-division survey of British literature from 1800 to the present focused on life stories. Though the poem is short enough to be read in a single sitting, it is also long enough to pose the pedagogical challenges common to teaching all long poems: asking students to read both closely and at length, to discern unifying tropes or themes across manifold details or narrative episodes, to engage in sufficient discussion commensurate with the long poem's complexity, and to discover the pleasures of the long poem (deep immersion, sweep of vistas, narrative propulsion, and more). Since Levy is not anthologized in most survey textbooks, the article also concerns teaching noncanonical poetry. The methods presented include prompts posing questions and explaining the work's poetic and cultural contexts, and student reading diaries listing what students found challenging and what they learned. The article thus incorporates real-time student responses, as well as discussion of teaching strategies.

“The Fairy of the Fountains” is one of Letitia Landon's most enigmatic and disturbing poems. It makes for particularly difficult reading because Landon sought in this poem to translate the forms of ballad and medieval lay into her own nineteenth-century poetic idiom. Her replication of the ellipses and abrupt transitions common to folkloric forms renders the poem both demanding and powerfully suggestive. These significant challenges to a coherent reading of the poem are magnified by its length. Based on the author's experience of teaching “The Fairy of the Fountains” in an upper-division course on gothic and supernatural literature, this article elucidates how placing it in the context of other, better-known Gothic texts significantly enhances students' appreciation of this long poem by helping to illuminate the most puzzling aspects of Landon's narrative. This approach implicitly asserts that Landon's poem is worthy to be read alongside these equally enigmatic canonical poems and also offers students two much more accessible prose versions of the Melusine legend. Through this comparative, intertextual approach, students gain a rich sense of the variations possible on an ancient folkloric motif and develop an understanding of the place of these texts in nineteenth-century literary history.