{"id":8234,"date":"2010-02-16T00:00:38","date_gmt":"2010-02-16T04:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca\/?p=8234"},"modified":"2010-02-16T00:00:38","modified_gmt":"2010-02-16T04:00:38","slug":"teaching-with-frye-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2010\/02\/16\/teaching-with-frye-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Teaching with Frye (1)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"perkin\"<\/a>
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

With this post, I am inaugurating a series documenting a year of teaching English, in which I plan to highlight the part played by Northrop Frye\u2019s ideas.\u00a0 For me, Frye has always been more important for my teaching than for my scholarly research and critical writing.\u00a0 I am beginning now, rather than in September, because I have already had to do some thinking about my courses for the next academic year, which were assigned late in 2009.\u00a0 Entries for the department Handbook were due last week, and that means I had to decide on at least the main focus and the assigned textbooks for the courses that I will be teaching.\u00a0 If I find I have enough to say, and the energy and commitment to keep it up, I will post in this series until the end of classes in April, 2011.\u00a0 (Academic life certainly keeps you planning ahead!)<\/p>\n

First, a few words of introduction.\u00a0 Teachers often keep journals for personal use, and there have been numerous publications such as James Phelan\u2019s Beyond the Tenure Track: Fifteen Months in the Life of an English Professor<\/em> (1991), a detailed account of events both professional and personal in the life of a professor moving into the mid-career phase. More recently, many students, professors, deans and other administrators write blogs in which academic life is a major focus.\u00a0 I was partly inspired to start this series by the example of Rohan Maitzen\u2019s regular feature \u201cThis Week in My Classes\u201d<\/a> at her blog Novel Readings<\/a>. I do not plan to write a detailed diary about my teaching, and I will not provide regular commentary on what goes on in the classroom.\u00a0 The plan is to write about some of the decisions I make, especially about what texts I choose and how I teach them.\u00a0 In so doing, I will consider in what ways and to what extent Frye is a vade mecum for my work as a university teacher of English.\u00a0 I hope that these occasional journal entries will be of some interest and use to other teachers and to students in the discipline.<\/p>\n

To set the scene, I teach at Saint Mary\u2019s University<\/a>, a former Jesuit college that is now a medium-sized public university.\u00a0 (I once taught Joyce\u2019s Portrait of the Artist<\/em> in a panelled classroom that had formerly been the Jesuits\u2019 dining room).\u00a0 We have an English department of 19 full-time members and offer a wide range of courses for a department of our size.\u00a0 In 2010-2011, I am scheduled to teach a section of the first-year Introduction to Literature, the second-year survey course English Literary Traditions (6 hours), a third-year course on British literature from 1900-45, and an advanced course on the novels of the Bront\u00eb sisters.<\/p>\n

In the survey course, along with the usual Norton anthology, I have decided to teach Measure for Measure<\/em>, Sense and Sensibility<\/em>, Frankenstein<\/em>, and Hard Times<\/em>.\u00a0 These are all comfortable choices for me, and usually popular with the students.\u00a0 The British course is a new one.\u00a0 Thinking about my plans, I realize that they involve historical context and cultural studies to a fairly large extent, and also the dialectic between modernism and realism.\u00a0 In spite of my love of at least some of the masterpieces of modernism, I have a fondness for the alternative poetic tradition that was championed by Philip Larkin, and for the English tradition of fictional realism that continued through the modernist period.\u00a0 I will be teaching novels by E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, and Graham Greene.\u00a0 Frye\u2019s discussion in the Anatomy<\/em> of realism and symbolism as two opposing literary poles will be useful in mapping the literature of the first half of the twentieth century, along with David Lodge\u2019s The Modes of Modern Writing<\/em>.\u00a0 The influence of Yeats and Eliot, and then of Auden, can also usefully be described in the terms set out by Harold Bloom in his books on poetic influence.\u00a0 As for the Bront\u00ebs, another new course \u2013 thank goodness I am on leave at the moment! \u2013 my entry for the Handbook does little more than list the books, noting that there were three sisters, not two, and that Charlotte wrote more than just Jane Eyre<\/em>.\u00a0 The psychological and the sociological will figure prominently in this course, I expect, as will a kind of comparative phenomenology of the sisters\u2019 novels.\u00a0 Of course, I will go back to Frye on romance, and I recall a number of entries on Charlotte Bront\u00eb\u2019s Shirley<\/em> in the notebooks.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s it for my first entry, and I imagine that I will add to this journal infrequently until late in the summer, when preparations for the academic year begin in earnest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With this post, I am inaugurating a series documenting a year of teaching English, in which I plan to highlight the part played by Northrop Frye\u2019s ideas.\u00a0 For me, Frye has always been more important for my teaching than for my scholarly research and critical writing.\u00a0 I am beginning now, rather than in September, because […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[154],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-teaching-with-frye"],"yoast_head":"\nTeaching with Frye (1) - The Educated Imagination<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2010\/02\/16\/teaching-with-frye-1\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Teaching with Frye (1) - 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