The Work We Do: Expanding Territories in Undergraduate Education

Session Organizer: Angela Vietto
Eastern Illinois University
cfarv@eiu.edu

Session B

Beyond the Conventional Classroom: Study Abroad and On-site Learning

On a recent study abroad program from EIU to Cape Town, I discovered afresh the power of context in teaching literature. For students who had read and discussed Long Walk to Freedom stateside, a sleepover on Robben Island brought home vividly the deprivation Mandela and others endured to end apartheid. Seeing the barren acreage left by an infamous forced removal after reading Richard Rive’s Buckingham Palace made real the loss of community that was once District Six. After studying the new Constitution and touring Parliament, students met with the director of the “watchdog” organization, the Human Rights Advocacy Project, as well as to visit former townships under the aegis of veterans Umkonto We Sizwe, the military wing of the ANC. Through such activities, students gained a nuanced picture of how far South Africa has come and how far yet to go in implementing the most liberal constitution in the world. In this presentation, I argue that while reading literature can extend the boundaries of the imagination no matter where one reads, reading literature in situ can be transformative, especially for students whose personal experience may be limited to either the suburbs of Chicago or the cornfields of central Illinois.

Dagni Bredesen
Eastern Illinois University
cfdab@eiu.edu

Terrains of Memory in Early British Literature

This paper addresses the challenge many medievalists face in teaching early British literature courses in which we feel the need to introduce our students to texts ranging from Beowulf to Everyman while still maintaining some sense of coherence. This paper outlines a strategy for doing so by having at the course’s center a study of medieval mnemonic strategies and theories about memory. While non-linear, the course maintains coherence through considering the ways texts reference one another both synchronically and diachronically. In brief, this course takes as its premise that medieval conceptions of the self were deeply informed by theories of memory and strategies of memorization. The class moves from a study of medieval mnemonic strategies to consider how texts such as select Canterbury Tales might themselves be structured mnemonically. From there, the course considers works referenced in these tales in conjunction with texts theorizing memory so we can ask what social, political, or philosophical work the texts are engaged in through such referencing. As the course moves toward more abstract discussions of memory, the emphasis can shift from literary connections to the ways in which memory serves both to delineate and obscure what it means to have or be a “self.”

Francine McGregor
Eastern Illinois University
fmcgregor@eiu.edu

Using Electronic Resources to Teach Book History in a Survey Course

This essay will discuss the value of book history in a survey course at a medium-sized comprehensive public university without local access to a significant collection of rare books. The course to be described is a survey of all of English and American literary history (in one semester). A senior-level capstone course required of English majors at my institution, the course is challenging for both students and instructor. Using the history of books as material objects as a parallel to the traditional survey’s history of ideas approach made the course more meaningful on a number of levels. The approach could, however, be usefully adapted to other, more narrowly defined surveys.

Angela Vietto
Eastern Illinois University
cfarv@eiu.edu