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Editorial Ricochets
- English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920
- ELT Press
- Volume 21, Number 1, 1978
- pp. 6-8
- Article
- Additional Information
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EDITORIAL RICOCHETS [Note: The following is the first of a series of editorials dealing with some of the practical problems teachers, researchers , students, editors and publishers who are interested in the literature of the ELT period often face. The editor will contribute some of these gadfly columns; others will be solicited from commercial publishers, university press directors, general editors of reprint series, in fact, from various persons who influence what we do and how we do it in our classrooms and in our libraries. - HEG] Students, Teachers, Publishers, and the Literary Text Survival or Extinction. No one in our profession need be reminded that the inflationary trend of the past ten years has crucially affected what we do and how we do it. Here I shall not be concerned about what some legislators, some regents, some citizens, some alumni, and some doners from the business community call the more exotic and uneconomic activities of students, teachers, and publishers: the production and publication of research materials. Here I shall be concerned with the fundamental tools of our trade: textbooks. Even more specifically, I shall focus on the literary text. Of composition handbooks, grammars of various kinds, rhetorics, even Gesammtwerk anthologies we seem to have a plethora. This general species is not. endangered. This species survives not because it is especially fit but because it adapts to circumstance with remarkable ease. The OP Crisis. In recent years most teachers and thus their students have experienced the annual OP epidemic, which seems to strike about one week before classes begin. During the early spring, under pressure from our university book stores, we hurriedly prepare our textbook lists and thus our syllabi for our fall semester courses. During the summer we read, annotate texts, prepare lectures, and by mid-August, if all has gone well, we settle back contentedly in the knowledge that we are prepared. We persuade ourselves that we have some exciting fare to offer, a few authors and titles that have not been pre-digested and cribbed for the student and, of course, a few "classics" that will attract sufficient numbers of students to justify the course. Suddenly the little pink slips begin to arrive - out of stock, out of print, shipping delayed. "Well," we say, "one title can be sacrificed." And we adjust our notes accordingly. Within a week, however, we may find ourselves sacrificing two or three out of eight titles and we begin to make frantic calls to see what is in print - anything - or we desparately borrow copies and scour the library or we compile lists of individually assigned texts and forego class discussion of texts read in common. In a course in the nineteenth-century English novel one can always substitute another novel by Dickens or another novel by Hardy. In a Victorian Thought or Victorian Prose course one can always resign oneself to accepting the conventional established canon and not attempt anything more imaginative. The "canned" course becomes an easy way of life: no new annotations and no new syllabi to prepare and no lecture notes to revise. There is little to be gained from seeking out the villain - the publisher and his profit motive, the professional "good old boys" who aren't about to revise anything at this stage of their careers, the teachers too busy hunting down gastronomical references in Dickens' works for the article that must be published before the next meeting of the personnel committee. There are, I'd like to think, many of us who prefer to reflect in the texts we use the inevitable changes in perspectives on cultural history, changes in emphases, the rise and fall of reputations, the discovery of new evidence. Some of us even believe that there may be some value in exposing students to "minor" literature and to giving students an opportunity to discover for themselves an author who has not been monumentalized and gilded and presented as an icon to be revered by "any intelligent reader." Those of us who are particularly interested in the period in English literature from about 1880 to about 1920, despite the recent recognition it has received from the MLA in a Division with about 1200 members, are...