Caught In The Course Hairs

      Oh, it's that time again, as the Not-So-Good Doctor has to put together sample syllabi for specific applications to less-than-specific academic instimahtutions. Over the years, I've drafted several of these, whether as corollaries for active courses or as proposals for my own, particularly in relation to Shakespeare and Genres courses. This time, though, I'm putting together a whack of them, as much as they are genuine pains in the arse to do. Survey courses (in Canada, generally those courses done in second year), in my estimation, are the worst, mainly because such courses are so broad that one can very easily end up stymied by the questions of what to keep and what to omit, questions that can only be answered, however tentatively, once one selects an approach to use, which I'm pretty much loathe to do. (As much as students need structure, teachers, or good ones at least, need flexibility.) The nag on my shoulder for the past little bit has been coming up with a course for a survey course in poetry, a puzzle indeed because there are very few historical boundaries to ensure one stays inside. But, finally, I came up with a preliminary response to the nag, at least for what is best described as a "comprehensive" course in which one desperately tries to cover most of the significant bases. I still have yet to decide on an "intensive" course, in which one admits one can't do everything and so one decides to focus on a few particular authors or themes or genres. Argh. Never one, however, to trust my own judgment on such things-- at least not until I see them in action-- I figured I'd open up for your perusal my draft (and keep in mind, it is just that, a draft) for the comprehensive course and see what any of you think, even though it seems comments around here have been as rare as Bushian wisdom. So, if you're curious, you can check it out right here. Feel free to say whatever you think, including "I'd sooner French kiss a hippopotamus than take that course." And before anyone says it: Yes, it's a highly canonical course, Yes, there are almost no women on it, Yes, there's no Post-Colonial stuff in there, and, Yes, there are some notable omissions. Guilty, as charged. It's my thinking that the kids these days need more of the canon than they're getting. Goodness knows, most of the students who graduate with English degrees these days do so without any knowledge of what happened before 1900, save what they get in their mandatory Shakespeare course.

      Other courses currently in design: a survey on Modernism; various freshman introductions; a Shakespeare course; a version of RK's Writer/Critic course; third-year courses on a few poetic periods (the Renaissance, the PreModerns [Hardy, Housman, Hopkins, etc.], the Moderns); an American literature course; a Canadian literature course; a Shakespeare and his contemporaries course; a film and literature course; and a few senior-level seminars on specific topics and authors, including ones on Graham Greene, Tom Eliot, and Wallace Stevens. It's tempting to think of designing a fourth-year seminar called "Literature and the Academy" which would examine the often sneering relationship between the two, though I'm sure that course would dub me too subversive by half. But with all of these courses, my tack would be to emphasize close reading as much as possible. As people like Vivian and MD may recall, it does precious little good charging through texts as if they were dummies on a jousting course. Reading should be like love-making, I've always said: take your time and don't hurry, because there's a lot more to it than getting it all over with. Right? Right.