{"id":112,"date":"2015-01-18T21:53:13","date_gmt":"2015-01-18T21:53:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johncmulligan.net\/blog\/?p=112"},"modified":"2019-10-23T04:40:30","modified_gmt":"2019-10-23T04:40:30","slug":"2014-wordsworthian-student-projects","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.johncmulligan.net\/blog\/2015\/01\/18\/2014-wordsworthian-student-projects\/","title":{"rendered":"Wordsworthian Student Projects"},"content":{"rendered":"

2014 was busy: teaching at URI, moving to Houston, writing like mad, and teaching at Rice — Romanticism\u00a0and<\/em> Shakespeare, so thanks both to the Romanticists back at Brown and to the Shakespeareans James Kuzner and Jean Feerick, without whom I wouldn’t be able to teach a spider to weave a web.<\/p>\n

My Romanticism students here did some very\u00a0<\/em>interesting work and, conveniently, they both worked with the same subject material: the working relationship of Dorothy and William Wordsworth. That relationship has become something of a pedagogical touchstone for me (displacing even Blake!), after two years of on-and-off dissertation engagement with the subject.<\/p>\n

And so in Fall 2014, I gave students a crash course in Wordsworthianism, walking them through Homans<\/a>, Levin<\/a>, Mellor<\/a>, Woof<\/a>\u00a0(and Woof<\/a>), Fay<\/a>, and Newlyn<\/a>.\u00a0I’ve adopted, as a means of addressing the canonicity problem, the resolution never to\u00a0teach William without Dorothy. I’m more in Fay’s camp than anywhere else, and try to do justice to the complexity of their working relationship, but as one student (I can’t remember who) assessed my terrible poker face rather fairly during office hours, “You weren’t going to let William get away with it.”<\/p>\n

And I love what they did. Dorothy, in their renderings, isn’t an appendix, or a pretext, or an index. Their representations make us think of the writer’s relationship in terms of intertextuality, with interesting and productive differences between their readings.<\/p>\n

———–<\/p>\n

1.<\/strong> Jessica, Chas, and Daniel made a video reflecting on William and Dorothy’s biographical and literary relationship. In a reading (Daniel) of an excerpted “Tintern Abbey”, they allow William only to go so far in his approach to the poem’s closing address to his sister (see Fay’s “address-to-maiden”). At a certain point, Dorothy insinuates herself into this poem as though she were refusing to merely be imagined by her brother, and retroactively changes the film we’ve just watched.<\/span><\/p>\n