The plan: Students would present annotated poems from their chosen poets that fit one of Backscheider's three categories of important secular women's poetry (retirement poems, friendship poems, elegies). We would use these case studies to illustrate and test Backscheider's conclusions about the ubiquity and significance of these kinds of poems.
The goal (behind the curtain): To draw on students' growing interpretive skills by having them "teach" the poems in question, to get students to engage critically with Backscheider's ideas, to explore the question of just what constitutes "representative" or "characteristic literature."
The problem: a sampling of 24 poets will probably yield a significant number of "friendship," "retirement," or "elegiac" poems--enough that a handful of poems that don't quite fit the bill will lead to an interesting side-discussion. A sampling of 8 poets may well present a different situation: a fascinating array of poems that make for interesting conversation but together offer little critical purchase either on Backscheider or the broader problems of finding a coherent way to examine "C18 Women's Poetry" as a literary entity.
What do you suggest? Would it be better to:
- Let everyone present the particular poem(s) by their poets that they find most interesting and find some other way to connect the poems to Backscheider's critical frameworks (and if so--how might we do that?)
- Require everyone to consult again the volumes published by their poets and locate something--anything--that fits into one of those categories, at the risk of sacrificing the interest of individual poems to the larger critical project?
- Develop an alternative critical taxonomy to Backscheider's--some other way of grouping woman-authored poems of this period--so that we can use the reading of individual poems to arrive at useful insights about this poetry as a whole? If so, what might that alternative taxonomy look like?
Or to put the question another way: how can Backscheider help us (or not!) to get a handle on a universe that includes, in addition to the poem's we've read thus far, Isabella Kelly's epitaph for her tame chicken, Mary Barber's advice to her son on wearing pants, and Susanna Blamire's Scottish-dialect verses on...well, we're not really sure what a "siller" is. What new plan can help us meet the goals specified above? Or should we stick with the old plan?
???
Respond here with your thoughts. Or start a post of your own if that's more conducive to your ideas.
Deadline: Friday (2/20), noon.
4 comments:
I think that using Backscheider as a backbone or scaffolding for the assignment is a good idea. It gives us a frame of reference so we're not being pushed off the deep end into 18C poetry,but may be we could find a few poems by our poets, some that fit very well in to Backscheider's categories and some that do not. This would possibly give us a more comprehensive look at what material is out there .
I agree with Liz in that we should continue to use Backscheider for the framework of the assignment. The annotated poem should strive to remain within the framework of the three types of poems, for sense of coherence and continuity, even if we are only sampling eight different poems. A possible solution at the lack of breadth of our sampling would be to take whatever poem we're exploring and try to tie it into one of the poems we've already dissected and see how they work together in a larger framework to support or refute Backscheider, or to use one of the examples that she provides within chapters 5-7. Although she is the authority within this context, it is not to say that we cannot challenge her claims. I run the risk of being strung up by my classmates because this adds a bit more work to our project, but will add depth to discussion and dissemination of our respective poets.
I don't think that forcing a poem to be within the context Backscheider condones is an ideal solution. Personally I prefer poems that do not fit within the 'excepted' range, and find them the more fascinating reads. Perhaps the student should be expected in some way to justify his or her text, either in its relevance to Backscheider, or in the reasons they chose a text that bends the rules. Discussion could then focus on either the meanings of the poem within a framework, or the reasons the poem should exist outside a framework. This could also help open up discussion on whether the framework created is broad enough, or why it is limited.
Granted I might be biased because I do have a poet who does not conventionally write in the three categories set by Backsheider but I too think that the poetry we discuss should not necessarily be confined to the “laws of Backsheider”. I think it would be interesting to see what differences can be found in 18th century literature. I think it might be worthwhile to see how 18th century poetry connects to Romanticism and vice versa because a lot of the poems that don’t quite fit into Backsheider’s categories seem to have some sort of tie to Romantic literature. Just an idea.
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