Class Notes- Tuesday, July 12, 2016

Reflection: What have we accomplished?   How can it be brought into the classroom?

• Contextualizing Dickens
• Victorian Paternalism
• Use of Household Words and serialized publications with students
• Dickens as artist--providing an analytical hook
• The balance of joy and “fact” as a teacher (instructional delivery)
• Dealing with ambiguity
• Hard Times as a tool to teach satire, rhetoric, grammar, style, etc.
• Contemporary applications of Dickens--role of unions, social strike, class/race conflicts

Dickens’ “A Preliminary Word”

• Intention of  Household Words--to expose and uplift

• Masthead (Henry V)
• Dickens’ construction of himself--credibility/ethos
• Qualities of the epic
• Intertextuality through illusions and exploration of where the British belong globally?
• Wonder in the present -Browning

How do we read Hard Times?  What is Hard Times? What kind of text is it? How does it work?

• Hard Times as circus (Clausson) or as factory (Johnson)

• Using and breaking conventions
• Still developing the idea of what a novel is in the 19th century
• Impact of serialized publication and the time constraints on the development and structure of the novel
• Parallel to circus: everything happening at the same time
• Political implication exist whether intended or not
• Industrial novel parallels physical structure of the factory
• Stephen and Louisa as parallel characters --shift to a focus on character
• Many stories being told at once→ Which or whose story do you look at as a reader?
• Which lens or paradigm do you use to read the novel?  Fantasy vs. Reality
• Victorian “realism” contains heavy doses of fantasy
• What choices would influence adapting the novel?

• Harrison: Compiling a pattern of images in the novel to create an aesthetic unity
• Familiarity versus novelty
• Sense of Time -> mechanical approach; shift in pace to publish weekly versus monthly
• Role of writer versus role of reader:  finding the intended reader in the text
• The reader who challenges the text must understand it first

Periodical Research

• Exploring the purpose and the process of using periodicals (as teachers and students)
• Multi-genre
• Opportunity for evaluation of commentary and synthesis
• Tactile task...Physical size, paper quality, reader’s interaction with the text
• Digital approach (Mussell) and classroom implications
• teaching digital literacy
• students as creators of digital content
• access to technology and its limitations
• creating multimodal essays or products
• Plagiarism of Dickens work (lack of copyright laws)
• Share Out of Periodical Research Findings
• Pleasure gardens--entertainment, value of money contextualized
• Language/discussion around divorce (Artemis as tool for linguistic analysis)
• RSA, agricultural schools
• Gender roles and education (Punch)/ Pestalozzian education
• The Cornhill Magazine- Eliza Lynn Linton, working conditions of maids, written from two differing points of view
• Classroom use of research-emphasis on what ifs,  understanding character/voice, point of view, social class.
• Hard Times as a feminist novel
• Active versus passive characters
• Dickens is calling attention to a flawed system