RETHINKING INTRODUCTIONS (AGAIN)

I have written here at least twice about introductions. Back in 2011 (how time passes!!), I wrote a post about the introductions to British drama, which I was then teaching, and then in 2017 another post about Scottish literature. My point was similar and it is still similar today: no matter how brief the introduction, they are always too crowded with information.

I’m thinking again of introductions because, after being horrified because my fourth-year BA students had never heard of Joseph Conrad or Heart of Darkness, I realized we have a serious problem. Our teaching is based on the assumption that the texts we teach every semester (four novels or the equivalent) are read against the background provided by lectures and independent study. The fact, though, is that students can hardly cope with reading the texts and have stopped studying their background, if they ever did. I myself did a lot of background reading (I read the complete New Pelican Guide edited by Boris Ford, all 9 volumes), but I’m well aware that few of us in my class did that. I was one of the extreme Literature nerds. Still, we do need introductions today.

Yet, I don’t know if it is my misguided impression, but I believe that introductions are disappearing, except for the Very Short Introductions series by Oxford. I refer here in any case to the introductions to specific periods. We have been recommending for Victorian Literature Maureen Moran’s excellent handbook (2006), whose second edition (2009) coincided with the beginning of our new degree in English. There is, however, no third edition or further (or so I think), which is a sign that interest in introductions must have started waning by them. The series to which Moran’s book belongs, Introductions to British Literature and Culture, by Continuum and later by Bloomsbury, is still available, but the editions seem to stop in 2010. I’m not speaking, by the way, of companions, which are for more advanced students, but only of introductions, which is what we need at BA level.

Anyway, back to Conrad. After my colleagues and I shared a series of emails bemoaning how little students know and what we can do to solve this problem, I proposed that we write new basic materials for them. As happens, a very kind Finnish professor emailed me recently to ask whether he could use my chapter on post-WWII in the volume Introduction to English Literature, which Andrew Monnickendam, Joan Curbet, Felicity Hand and I wrote back in 1999. This was for a subject in the BA degree in Humanities of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya that I ended up teaching until 2008. Thanks to the interest of the Finnish teacher, the book, which is extremely clear and didactic, as UOC required, is now online. Taking that clarity and didacticism as our referent, I proposed to my colleagues that we write new updated materials for our students, which could be gathered into a book, or a series in UAB’s digital repository. I really believed this would be easy, just a matter of a few pages per subject/chapter. How naïve of me…

To offer my colleagues a model they could use, I started writing my own materials for Contemporary Anglophone Literature, the new compulsory subject which covers the period from 1990 to the present. The students are reading fiction and non-fiction from the whole Anglophone area, which means that the focus is wide-ranging. At the same time, this is a period of intense globalization, which means I need not explain in detail what has been going on in a particular nation. Even so, my basic materials extend to 40 pages, about 13000 words, most of them consisting of lists, with some notes.

There are two main sections, ‘An Overview of the Contemporary World’ and ‘Authors and Works’. The first section is subdivided into ‘Politics and economy’ (with a timeline), ‘Scientific and technological innovation’ (with another timeline), ‘Social and personal life’ and ‘Arts and culture’; this fourth section includes lists of indispensable films, series, pop and rock albums (with lyrics in English) and videogame franchises. The ‘Authors and Works’ segment has notes on ‘What Do We Mean by Literature?’ and ‘The Publishing Market: Main Trends’, followed by four lists: ‘The Literary Novel in the UK and the USA: A Selection’, ‘The Literary Novel in Other Anglophone Areas: A Selection’, ‘Popular Anglophone Fiction: A Selection’ and ‘Anglophone Non-fiction: A Selection’.

The emphasis on timelines and lists has to with two things: first, I just love them…; second, I can’t stand the kind of introduction that offers two very clever sentences about each literary work. This is what happens in most introductions, which means that I end up writing my own lists of works as I read them. You can only truly get familiar with literary works if your read them, so my view is that it makes no difference whether you have a list with no comments or comments with no list. I initially though of testing my students by means of a quiz, but in the end they will have a tutorial for which they need to choose ten events they find relevant (this is a subjective choice) and ten books they would like to read. I might eventually gamify the materials using Kahoot, if I manage to learn how it works. The materials are not only yet, because I need to get feedback.

I was reasonably satisfied with the materials, but when I sent them to my colleagues I got nothing in reply. This is clear sign that they will not follow my lead… Then I started writing the materials for Victorian Literature, as a way to say goodbye to the subject for good, and leave some kind of trace behind. This is when I realised that there is something else to consider. The usual practice is to distribute introductions into different matters, as I have done for ‘Contemporary Anglophone Literature’. This is what Maureen Moran also does for Victorian Literature. However, re-reading her handbook I realised that this is wrong, or not practical enough.

In both subjects (Victorian, Contemporary) my approach is to subdivide the period into units, so that each unit begins with an introduction to one or two decades, or just eight years in the case of Contemporary. The introductions, however, despite warning that the Victorian Age was 64 years long, in practice treat it as a single period, perhaps subdivided into early, mid and late. The result is that neither teachers nor students can differentiate the 1840s, when the Brontës published their most brilliant work, from the 1860s (Great Expectations), the 1880s (King Solomon’s Mines) or the 1890s (Dracula). Imagine mixing the 1960s hippies with 1990s grunge… So, to begin with I’ve put together my booklets with selections of scenes from novels, poetry, and essays and I’m working now on detailed timelines for each decade (about two pages each), which I will accompany with about two pages of comments. Beautiful things are happening. For instance, I learned yesterday that Dracula was published the same year the mechanism by which malaria is transmitted was first described. Both have to do with blood…

The Victorian timelines by decade have made me see that I also need to include comments on the decades in my materials for Contemporary, describing the essence of the 1990s, 2000s, 2010s and 2020s. It’s funny how one may think 1990s ‘collapse of the Communist block’, 2000s ‘aftermath of the 9/11 attacks’, 2020s ‘effects of Covid-19’ but the 2010s may draw a blank (‘Arab Spring’, ‘Trump’s first mandate’…). With the Victorians, I find that the 1870s seem to be particularly unexciting, though the decade brought the telephone and generalised the first uses of electric light.

This mismatch between what we know and what happened might have to do with a disconcerting surprise I’ve had while working on the timelines. Using the Victorian Web’s lists of best-selling fiction, I realised that we no longer read the writers that dominated sales. I mean, I knew that but even so I didn’t know our view is so biased. Just check. Have you read any of these: Edward Bulwer Lytton, W. H. Ainsworth, Captain Frederick Marryat, Charles Kingsley, Charles Reade, George Meredith, Henry Kingsley, Ouida, Rhoda Broughton, James Payn, Harrison Ainsworth…? The canonical novelists were also best-selling authors, by the way, this is not a matter of our preference for non-commercial authors.

So, before I lose my thread: we cannot ask students to read 20 books in each subject to guarantee that they are exposed to as many significant names as possible. I worked out that, taking the four years of the degree into account, they read a selection of about 60 authors at most (we teach nine core subjects only and they may take up to five elective subjects). This is a very low number considering the amazingly large panorama of Anglophone literature, which means that some other strategy needs to be followed regarding the authors they don’t read but should know about (e.g. Joseph Conrad).

Gone are the times when students were willing to read handbooks, introductions, companions and guides, which requires that we prepare more accessible materials. As YouTube shows, Indian teachers have become very proficient at making videos based on PowerPoint presentations and perhaps podcasts would be advisable today. I am very reluctant, believing very much as I do in the efficiency of the written text, but I’ll have to accept that some kind of gamification is called for. Not for the content of the literary works, but for their background.

I’ll finish writing the materials and then will rethink matters. One thing I can say is that I am indeed learning a lot…