This article introduces a roundtable on teaching long poems by British women writers, presented as a special session at the 2014 Modern Language Association conference in Chicago. The articles in the roundtable provide teaching strategies that are pertinent to the writers under review but can easily be extended to many more writers and works. The resistance of students to long poems by any poet, much less by women, reveals that professors still have much work to do in establishing lesser-known women writers as coequal with their better-known male contemporaries. This resistance is a teaching opportunity to address issues of genre, gender, and canonicity. In a larger sense, the articles argue for the potential of pedagogical practice to reconstitute the canon.

This article depicts a multimodal approach to teaching Charlotte Smith's Beachy Head that has proved successful in a sophomore-level survey. As a greater romantic lyric fragment of twenty-one blank-verse paragraphs with sixty-four footnotes and two embedded rhyming poems by the “stranger” poet, Beachy Head poses many difficulties for students. Ruwe identifies student difficulties with the poem's form and content and suggests practical methods for overcoming these barriers. She provides a reading guide to the poem's various sections and suggests ways to help students experience the poem's auditory, visual, gestural, spatial, and linguistic design through a process akin to reverse engineering. The article includes student responses, handouts, and links to useful websites for a multimodal approach.

Research Article| April 01 2001 Syllabi Constructions, Imaginary Canons, and the Impact of the Extraliterary Donelle Ruwe Donelle Ruwe Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2001) 1 (2): 355–360. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1-2-355 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Donelle Ruwe; Syllabi Constructions, Imaginary Canons, and the Impact of the Extraliterary. Pedagogy 1 April 2001; 1 (2): 355–360. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1-2-355 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2001 Duke University Press2001 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Articles You do not currently have access to this content.