One panel of the Prufrock project
At an art exhibit on campus last Friday I encountered an old friend: the ghostly presence (or absence?) of J. Alfred Prufrock in a collage of torn paper and string. Leaning closer, I saw lines from T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" adhering to each panel. Here were the words "I have measure out my life with coffee spoons" near an image of a steaming cup of coffee, and alongside a swirling black hole was the eternal question, "Do I dare disturb the universe?"
It's no surprise that this work of art was created by a student with dual majors in Art and English. She encountered the poem some time ago in my American Lit Survey class, where Prufrock pops up every spring like clockwork just before midterm. I was touched to see that a hundred-year-old poem could inspire such creativity and insight, especially since Prufrock often evokes very different responses from students--confusion, boredom, anger. "Why can't he just say what he means," they ask me, and I say, "That, in a nutshell, is the problem." They are not amused.
But amusing students is not my primary purpose here. Lately I've been thinking more deeply about that purpose, not because I'm at a loss for things to think about but because I'm fighting off the perception that I'm an old stick-in-the-mud resistant to change--or, as a colleague told me succinctly last week, "Maybe your courses would attract more students if they had more interesting titles." Would more students be attracted to American Lit Survey if it were called Love Songs with T.S. Eliot? I don't think so!
And this persistent accusation that I am resistant to change does not hold up under scrutiny. When I was hired here 22 years ago, the department had no African American Lit class, so I created one. There was no Postcolonial Lit class, so I created one. It's interesting to look through the course listings and see the number of courses that are now a permanent part of our curriculum that I've designed, proposed, and taught: Concepts of Nature, Concepts of Comedy, Concepts of Place (taught as Cal Lit and Florida Lit), Creative Nonfiction, Life Writing--and in addition I've designed special topics courses on Flannery O'Connor, Stephen Crane and Kate Chopin, Colson Whitehead, animals in film, machines in film, Nature Writing, Comedy Writing, plus capstone classes on postmodernism, Garbage Theory, and 9/11 Literature. To fill a need in the curriculum, I developed and taught an experimental Sports Lit class that was linked with a developmental writing class. And I'm not done doing new things: next spring I'm slated to teach a special topics class on the ambiguous zone between fact and fiction, if anyone registers for it. That's a pretty wide variety of classes to develop and teach over a 22-year span.
But one class remains constant: every year, usually in the spring, I teach a sophomore-level Survey of American Lit since 1865. Sure, I tweak the syllabus to introduce more recent authors (because the Norton Anthology only goes so far) and I've changed the assignment structure significantly over the years, but if you look at the syllabus for any one semester, you'll get a pretty good idea of what the course covers and what it's trying to do. Somewhere near midterm during the unit on modernism we'll spend a whole class period discussing Prufrock, and that's not going to change, no matter how many students complain.
Why? Because Prufrock still has something to offer today's student--and so do I.
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| The full project. It's more impressive in person. |
5 comments:
Bev
American Lit and Brit Lit survey courses are low enrolled everywhere!!! Your specialized courses look fabulous: we, too, have tried to boost enrollment with those types of courses.
And we moved the Surveys online: that helped.
If YOU are old stick in the mud, that makes me really quite muddy indeed!
Stacey
Thanks for the support. I know enrollments are falling everywhere, but our enrollments have followed a very clear trajectory that can be traced back to our new general education curriculum. We used to require every student to take a literature course and two writing proficiency courses, which could be taken in any department but were more prevalent in ours. All of my sophomore-level literature courses also fulfilled the writing proficiency requirement, so I always had waiting lists of students wanting to enroll in those courses. The new general education got rid of both the literature requirement and the writing proficiency requirement, and when it was approved four years ago, I predicted exactly what has happened: declining enrollments across the board in the English department. Somehow, being right about this does not make me happy. But maybe changing the names of the courses will fix everything!
How wonderful. I love the exhibit! That's also one of my favorite poems, introduced in a high school poetry unit. I think of it every time I eat a peach or enter an art gallery...
Prufrock is well worth the time and effort!
We renamed our surveys "perspectives" and told people they didn't have to do it as a survey, but could be more limited, and they fill pretty well. But students don't get an overview at all.
I can see the advantage of requiring less "coverage" for Gen Ed students, but it seems like English majors ought to get a broad overview of literature in addition to deep dives into individual topics. But maybe grad school has changed so the broad overview is not as necessary? I don't know.
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