The faculty and graduate student authors of this article taught English Literature before 1660 -"Beowulf to Milton" -in the fall 2010 semester to about 120 students at the University of Michigan. Students in this course are supposed to learn to read literature written in unfamiliar genres and verse forms, originally composed in several languages (Old English, Anglo-Norman, Middle English, Early Modern English) across a historical span of over 900 years. This wide historical range makes the course challenging to conceptualize and teach, as no one person can be equally competent across its chronological breadth. Our typically diverse instructional team included a medievalist, an early modernist, an early Americanist, and a British ninetheenth-century-ist, reflecting, furthermore, that graduate students in fields entirely outside the scope of this course are often assigned to teach it. A recent article describes Stanford University's innovative approach to literature survey courses like this one: such courses are taught by a team of faculty specialists in each of the fields covered, ensuring that students are exposed to advanced knowledge of the course content. 1 The major problem the present authors have with this design is that it relies overmuch on an "apprentice model" of instruction, namely, one in which the faculty lecturers demonstrate knowledge, and the undergraduates partially replicate that knowledge through exams and essays. 2 One notable weakness of such a top-down model is that it places Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture
Over the past decade, several academic studies have taken nineteenth-century ageing as their topic, including Devoney Looser’s Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain (2008), Karen Chase’s The Victorians and Old Age (2009), Kay Heath’s Aging by the Book (2009), and Alice Crossley’s special issue of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies (2017). Following the publication of two significant new monographs — Andrea Charise’s The Aesthetics of Senescence (2020) and Jacob Jewusiak’s Aging, Duration, and the English Novel (2019) — the time is ripe for a synthesis of this dynamic cluster of scholarship, with special attention to where nineteenth-century perspectives on ageing is going, and ought to go, from here. Recorded in January 2020, this roundtable is a curated compilation of conversations with key scholars in the field: Devoney Looser (Arizona State University), David McAllister (Birkbeck, University of London), Ruth M. McAdams (Skidmore College), Jake Jewusiak (Newcastle University), and Travis Chi Wing Lau (Kenyon College). Edited by Andrea Charise, this roundtable assembles new perspectives on the present and future of nineteenth-century studies of age(ing), including: What’s next for age studies’ approaches to reading and teaching nineteenth-century texts? How might a better understanding of ‘old’ models inform our current day concerns with ageing populations and intergenerational discord? Can age studies research help make a case for the enduring role of the arts and humanities in a STEM-dominated culture? And how might attending to the old, ageing, and obsolete help address newly emergent global crises, including the rise of populism and climate change? Accessible in both audio format and textual transcription, this roundtable interview offers a timely resource for researchers, students, and a broader public interested in the literary present and futures of ageing and older age.
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