We began our seminar where many deep thoughts and conversations start, with one question: Why? Why Dickens? Why these texts? Why does the NEH fund such projects? We then moved to more questions: What can Dickens do for our curricular goals? How is it effective for students? Our questions were fairly simple, yet complex enough to drive a conversation that spanned history, pedagogy, literature and theory.
Why teach Dickens?
- Comic elements
- Insights into human nature and character
- Sympathy, emotion, empathy, human connection
- Getting students to read beyond the plot
- Dickens’s texts as historical documents; products of their time and fiction as history
- Nostalgia
- Know the tradition to teach the canon
- Value in struggling with difficult texts; to make students slow down in their reading
- Self discovery, finding one’s own voice within social class and forging community
- Closing cultural gaps – common issues
- Texts and words in transition (rapid pace of social change
- Language, discourse, today in multiple purposes
- Escapism form our life
- Figure out a puzzle
What are the challenges when teaching Dickens?
- Student’s short attention span
- Too much detail
- Different sense of time
- Syntax, complexity of language
- Background of 19th Century life
- Classical, cultural, Biblical allusions
- Confidence and ability to read
- Connecting to today’s diverse cultures
- Administrative pressure to teach more modern/understandable and accessible texts
- Negative reaction to the sentimentality
- Limitations of class time; strict choices of what to teach
Why teach Hard Times and A Tale of Two Cities?
- social structure
- oppression/resistance
- historical context
- contemporary concerns
- theory
Why does the NEH fund such programs? What are the goals of the NEH?
1. Humanities and the Common Good
- What is the common good? (Does Sydney Carton contribute to a better world?)
- Individual and community contribute to common good
- Story of literature to advance citizens of nation and world
2. The Experience of War (class conflict)
- Terror in A Tale of Two Cities as terrorism
- What does life under that threat do?
What is happening in the 1850s that influences Dickens?
- 1850 – Telegraph und the English Channel, connected with the continent
- 1850 – Search for Franklin Expedition in the Arctic, cannibalism?
- 1851 – Great Exhibition, First World Fair in London, ½ of the space for England and ½ for rest of the world
- 1851-3 – Australian Gold Rush, convict transportation ends
- 1854-6 – Crimean War, England and France united together against the Russians, Journalists embedded with the soldiers and able to get news back to England quickly
- 1854 – Preston Strike, starvation of works, Dickens visit Preston
- 1856 – Bessemer Process, cheap steal, railroad crop up
- 1857 – Indian Mutiny
- 1859 – Victoria is Empress of India
- 1850 – Death of Wordsworth (ending of Romantic era), Tennyson becomes Poet Laureate, The Prelude and In Memorium appear at the same time
- 1851 – Death of Mary Shelley
- 1853 – Bleak House
- 1854 – Hard Times
- 1857 – Little Dorrit
- 1859 – Tale of Two Cities/Origin of Species
(Bazzy/Gascon)
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