Yesterday I finished TAing a seven-week interdisciplinary course for incoming first-year students. There is no greater academic high than the experience of 18 students focused almost exclusively on your course for 10 hours a week, but the pressure of that concentrated attention threatens to explode through cracks in the syllabus.
The pressures on these students are extreme: if a student tunes out and fails the class, he loses his scholarship and falls out of higher education before his fingers grip the windowsill. To invite students’ engagement, the professor—Larry Edgerton—designs the syllabus as an intellectual slalom: from sonnets and short stories to a play (Midsummer Night’s Dream, script and performance) to a novel (Jane Eyre) to movies (a full week of Hitchcock) to orchestral works and paintings.
This is an unusual course, and a rare crucible for new ideas about the arts education canon. According to the usual rules, 18-year-old students should learn Charlotte Brontë alongside Emily, Jane, Charles, and George in a windy, wordy tour of the second century of the English novel, or in a Blake-to-Tennyson survey of a 19th-century English letters. But what happens if those same 18-year-olds discuss Jane Eyre on Thursday and the next Friday watch The 39 Steps? (One of Hitchcock’s early masterworks, 1935: like JE, set in the desolate north; like JE, concerned with the persecution of the innocent and the mechanisms of redemption.)
Three things happen:
- Students don’t drift, or at least not in the quantities you would expect 4 long weeks into a summer course that began mere days after high school ended;
- Students can’t ghettoize analytical reading as a technique relevant only to 19th-century novels, and begin to find thematic associations in the larger world;
- Because they trace thematic movements across media and across eras, students become comfortable anchoring cultural signifiers in historical and cultural contexts.
Not all students exhibit all symptoms, of course—I don’t hold up intermedial instruction as a pedagogical panacea—but these effects suggest to me that if the goal of an introductory course is to inculcate students in the habits of analytical reading we might be doing them a disservice by organizing 100-level literature courses by medium, nation, and period.
