Spreading the Work: Introducing Eighteenth-Century ‘Derivatives’ in the Classroom

Abstract

The article reflects the experience of teaching an interactive seminar on the topic of rewriting the history of eighteenth-century literature through non-canonical texts. As such, the article considers firstly how to introduce graduate students to the revisionist scholarly debate recasting eighteenth-century literature and secondly how to adapt it in a way that is more relatable to them as digital natives with their concomitant mediatic skills. Attempting a participative literary historiography where students put together a new body of literature based on ‘derivatives’ (excerpts, abridgments, unauthorized imitations, or continuations of originals found on online databases) calls for a systematizing frame. The article proposes to achieve this through the preparatory reading of a choice of canonical works that reflect the contemporary critical responses to the proliferation of print. Not only does this first step avoid the dispersion of participants’ findings, but it also helps participants toward an easier understanding of the Foucauldian dynamics of discourse and how they inform his key notion of the author function and, ultimately, of the literary canon. By the time participants turn to choosing a derivative text in the second half of the course, the article argues, they have a clearer sense of the revisionist importance of such an endeavour.