Staying the Course

Staying the Course Rohan Maitzen (bio) It may seem perverse for my contribution to a forum focused on change and novelty to emphasize continuity instead. Yet, looking back over the nearly three decades I have been teaching Victorian literature—reflections that have perhaps unusual specificity because for around half of that time, I have maintained a blog series1 about what goes on in my classroom—what stands out to me is that (to paraphrase Simon and Garfunkel), after changes upon changes, my courses are more or less the same. To be sure, "more or less" is doing a lot of work here. In some respects, my long experience of teaching is actually one of near constant modifications motivated by factors both external and intrinsic to my individual classroom. We are incessantly revising our departmental curriculum, with outcomes that affect both which particular courses I offer and the relationship of those courses to the rest of our program. Details of the courses themselves are affected by developments in English broadly speaking, in Victorian studies specifically, and in my own research: over the years, different texts, topics, and critical approaches have become more or less interesting or urgent. Students' needs and expectations evolve; so too, for better and for worse, does technology. For all of these reasons, I am constantly playing with my reading lists and varying my assignment sequences, which over the years have included reading journals and class blogs, letter exchanges and collaborative wikis, annotation exercises and research papers, group presentations and Pecha Kuchas, along with many variations on more traditional essay assignments. And yet the real work of my classroom, as I see it, has not changed much at all since 1995, although I have become more purposeful in planning for it and (thanks in large part to my blog series) more articulate in explaining and [End Page 29] advocating for it. At the heart of my teaching is the conviction that, as Aurora Leigh puts it, "the world of books is still the world" (Barrett Browning 26). This does not mean that my highest priority is engaging with Victorian novels in the spirit of what is sometimes called "presentism," tying their value—and thus the value of our attention to them—to their relevance to problems in our current world.2 It means that I focus on them as modelling ways of being in the world, and on the significance, in that respect, of their form—of what the contemporary novelist Ali Smith calls "the shape the telling takes" (21). To serve these goals, I need and want our attention to be primarily on the page. Indeed, my main goal for all of my courses, not just those on Victorian literature, is (as I wrote on my blog in 2018) "to engage and train [students] as readers": the vast majority of the students I teach at every level (now, really, including graduate students) are not going to enter the academy as professional literary scholars—but they are (I very much hope!) going to keep reading. My goal is to foster both the skills and the commitment they need to carry on reading as well (as intently, curiously, and critically) as we ask them to in our classes. ("Readers and/or Scholars") For me, this attention to reading as a portable, practical, and ethically significant skill is an extension of the underlying premise of most of the nineteenth-century novels I teach, which were never intended to be treated as static aesthetic artifacts but were meant rather as provocations to both thought and action—or, keeping in mind my interest in form, to thought as action. "All of our books," I wrote in a 2008 blog post summarizing my closing peroration for my nineteenth-century fiction class, in their own ways ask us to get worked up about "the way we live now"—using fictional techniques (intrusive narration, direct address, thematization, multiple narrators, sensationalism, comedy, pathos) and artistry to engage us. . . . A further, and related, feature of these novels, and one that seems to me of increasing importance, is the imperative they communicate that we, as readers, have a lot of responsibilities: to read well, to judge...

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