Back in golden days of yore, when everyone walked ten miles to campus in whiteout conditions (barefoot!), professors assigned a different Victorian novel every week. And the students (they were real students then, in golden days of yore), smiled gratefully and read. Every. Single. Word. In fact, they read every single word while walking ten miles to campus in whiteout conditions (barefoot!).
This utopian vision has been provoked by a thread at VICTORIA--see #5, 6, and 7--on students' inability, or sheer unwillingness, to read long novels. Some contributors have already offered their own skeptical observations, noting that students have resisted long books since, if not the Dawn of Time, then at least most decades in recent memory; indeed, some faculty of my parents' generation (including, come to think of it, my parents) have confessed that while different books often were assigned every week, many students (dare I whisper it?) failed to read them.
To be somewhat less snarky, I'm going to offer up a depressingly dull observation: confronted with, say, Bleak House or Middlemarch, my undergraduates tend to dig in and read. I'm sure that they grumble when safely out of earshot--but yet, the reading gets done. I've never yet had anyone come up with a creative (or merely dishonest) explanation for his or her inability to finish a long novel; if anything, some of the students seem to feel as though they've actually accomplished something by getting through nine hundred pages of Victorian prose. These undergraduates are surely as TV-, film- and web-oriented as any other undergraduates in the USA; shouldn't they break out in hives when confronted with The Way We Live Now? (Not that I've ever confronted undergraduates with The Way We Live Now, but you get the idea.) This is not to deny that other people have students who try to wiggle their way out of anything longer than a short-short--merely to note that not all students respond to the Great Visual Age in the same way.
It's true that I don't expect students to exist solely on a diet of Bleak House-length fiction. When teaching any Victorian novel-related course, I do my best to vary novels according to length and difficulty. For example, Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret--besides being a good example of Victorian sensation fiction--reads so quickly that students have reported finishing it off in a couple of nights; it thus offers a helpful breathing space before, say, Middlemarch. But the students know perfectly well that they're getting into something that will require anywhere from 150-300 pages of reading per week, and most appear to survive the experience. This cannot be all that unusual. (Either that, or I'm just so intimidating that students tremble at the thought of the vengeance I might wreak should they fail to do the reading on time. Granted, at 5'3'', I'm not really capable of wreaking anything especially drastic, but one never knows.)
Are you sure they haven't relied on the many plot-summaries, some surprisingly detailed, available everywhere?
Posted by: Jonathan | July 01, 2006 at 11:32 AM
Yeah, I'm aware of the phenomenon--but if they can answer detailed close-reading questions in class, then they're doing the reading.
Posted by: Miriam | July 01, 2006 at 01:21 PM
What do you mean by "detailed close-reading questions?" That sounds like the kind of thing that only eidetiker could answer without returning to the text and that could also be answered by turning once to it by the skimmer-along.
I'm not sure that there's any reliable way of determining who's actually read a much-documented book in the undergraduate classroom. It's similar to the old joke about the person who writes a doctoral dissertation about Hamlet without ever reading the play. I don't think there's any doubt that such a thing could be done, and I think there's a logic engendered by the multiple-choice tests of yesteryear that entices some to spend more time preparing via cribs for quizzly expectations than they would actually reading the book.
I've sometimes wondered if there have been situations--surely this happened at least once somewhere--where neither the professor nor the students have read the book being taught, and no one realizes.
Posted by: Jonathan | July 01, 2006 at 01:34 PM
I'm with you, Miriam. My students do balk a bit when confronted with Bleak House or Middlemarch, but generally, the ones who are in an upper division lit class are game to give it a try and most of them end up liking it (and I teach at a state school where the students are not particularly well prepared and often aren't asked to work terribly hard; I find that the majority of them rise to the occasion). The ones who are trying to get by on the summaries stand out like sore thumbs (in discussion and on quizzes--which are not multiple-choice, but mini-essays to get us ready for discussion). And, when they've done it, they are pretty proud. Plus, reading a long novel gives those who fall behind a real incentive to stay caught up--or to work harder to catch up if they fall behind. If you fail to read a novel you're discussing in one weekly seminar, it will most likely never get read. But if you're spending three weeks on a novel, you can't afford to miss the first third.
That said, I have a colleague who has taught ten Dickens novels in one semester, and I do have a hard time believing that his students are reading them, since--given our own 4-4 load--I can't imagine prepping them myself.
Posted by: Nicole | July 03, 2006 at 12:54 PM
I teach Middlemarch, along with a couple dozen other Victorian works (none so hefty as MM, I admit, but the reading list is not slim) every fall when I teach Victorian Lit, and *most* of my students not only journey with me through its length, they end up loving it.
Same as Little Professor, though -- my students know what they're in for when they take one of my classes: lots of reading, every day. They claim (most of them) on the evaluations to like this. To quote one student, "I like dr. delagar's classes, not because they're easy, but because they aren't."
Posted by: delagar | July 05, 2006 at 08:01 PM