Syllabi Constructions, Imaginary Canons, and the Impact of the Extraliterary

For her essay "How It Is: Teaching Women's Poetry in British Romanticism Classes" Harriet Kramer Linkin (2001) asked prominent Romanticists to reflect on the state of pedagogy in British Romanticism after the almost universal inclusion of women poets into Romanticism course syllabi. The thirteen scholars who responded share stories of classroom successes and failures, chronicling the institutional practice of Romanticism as a risky but exciting endeavor. These scholars have taught writers for whom there are no adequate critical editions, no headnotes, no footnotes, and no thick teaching files gleaned from two centuries of critical practice and interpretation. Without a critical apparatus underpinning their early teaching efforts, they turned to feminist, Marxist, New Historicist, and other critical methods to provide textual readings and to inform their approaches. Some have found ways of incorporating women poets into traditional course configurations: genre or thematic arrangements, biographical studies, comparative analyses in which women poets are paired with canonical male poets. For some, the inclusion of women poets calls into question periodicity and aesthetic formations; for others, it foregrounds the political and social elements of Romanticism.

In short, what these scholars describe is exhilarating, not only because course designs have been challenged and invigorated but also because the dynamic between student and teacher has been realigned, with important consequences. In narrative after narrative the respondents show how their students have been empowered by the inclusion of noncanonical women: they have challenged faculty to defend their selections, have criticized these texts' aesthetic value, have questioned their relevance to Ph.D. exams and the Graduate Record Examination (GRE). At the same time, the respondents discuss how the courses that openly include a substantial number of women poets draw the best graduate students (those who are more interested in the material than in distribution requirements or Ph.D. exams). The dearth of scholarly work on these poets means that the graduate students have the crucial opportunity to turn their coursework into publishable articles, for they can say new things about these writers.

As I read the respondents' comments, I remembered being a student not unlike the ones they described. As an undergraduate, I had read only one Romantic-era woman writer, Mary Wollstonecraft. In 1991, in my first graduate course in Romanticism at the University of Notre Dame, I studied critical editions of male poets for eleven weeks; the works of women writers were clustered into the last three weeks of the semester. They were presented to the class in an enormous photocopied packet of poetry and prefaces taken from nineteenth-century editions. I had no idea how to read these texts, who these women were, or, at the end of a long and grueling semester, if I even wanted to read them. I found the smooth surfaces of their poetry impenetrable, so I focused on their prefaces. In time, however, I found the texts of women writers welcoming to me as a young woman and a junior scholar. I could say things about them that were new and useful, because they had not yet been discussed in contemporary academic circles, and my growing professional connections with other scholars who were dedicated to the recovery of women writers energized my commitment to Romanticism and women writers. Eventually, I wrote my dissertation on women Romantic poets, and my first Romanticism professor, Greg Kucich, became my dissertation adviser. That course was Kucich's first rough attempt to integrate women poets into his Romanticism syllabi, and, as he and I have often discussed, we grew into our scholarly and pedagogical understanding of women Romantics together. It seemed clear to me that the introduction of women poets into the canon was most often achieved through pedagogical decisions.

When I became a junior professor, however, I learned that I must answer to the extrapedagogical each time I decide to incorporate women poets into a course. Unlike many respondents in "How It Is" who work at larger universities or private colleges, I...