Response to Williams

I believe strongly in Williams’ ideas for the most effective way of organizing anthologies, even though it is not something that I have necessarily thought of before. While I am not planning on assembling an anthology on my own, I think that the concepts behind his argument are very applicable to the courses that I am currently teaching. His ideas for moving away from texts, and by extension courses, that are focused only on individuals or individual concepts within a given area of study fit well with my own beliefs on teaching. This belief is most clearly seen in my American literature class.

I have taken courses in American literature that have focused on the “classic” American authors, if we can even begin to use that term to describe such a young group of authors. These courses would move through the authors that the instructor deemed worthy of study. We would read several texts written by this person and discuss how he, as most of them were usually men, had contributed to the grand design of American literature, and then we would move on to a completely new individual. That’s how the semester would progress, individuals plucked out of their context and examined based on their literary merit. Rather than providing a complete understanding of American literature, this approach only served to highlight a few contributors to the overall image. These professors believed that by showing us a few examples, we would get all of the information that we needed to understand the complexities of such a diverse picture. It was like trying to understand the grandeur of Mount Rushmore, but you only got to see the noses.

When I began teaching an American literature course of my own, I decided that I wanted to approach it in a different way. Much like Williams, I wanted to show more of the connections between different aspects of the topic, rather than a series of isolated names or categories. When I work with my seniors, I try to give them a more comprehensive look at how what they read and write today was influenced by individuals who came before them. We start with the earliest forms of literature that we have available – Native American texts – and progress through the modern literature that they are most familiar with– usually a magazine of some sort. As we look at this progression, I emphasize not just the different movements, but also how these movements are related to one another. We follow the repetitive pattern of one group rejecting the previous movement and trying to break away from what came before them. By looking at authors and literary movements in context to one another, students are better able to understand each group. They can better understand the Romantics by relating them to the Puritans. I also explore what was going on in history during these important changes. I don’t think it is possible to understand a movement in literature, or a school of criticism, without understanding how the world around it was influencing it.