Read on Twitter
This event is starting now! I will try to livetweet, at the hashtag #GettingStartedwithSpenser https://twitter.com/SpenserSociety/status/1331733009347784705
Prof. Ramachandran starting off: welcoming people, and thinking about how to move from talking about "inclusive pedagogy" to actively practicing it, and introducing the five speakers (see also the poster at the top of this thread). #GettingStartedwithSpenser
First speaker: @DennisBritton3 on teaching Spenser in the survey, the place where most people encounter Spenser for the first time. He gets started with the letter to Raleigh, and tracking metaphors of *darkness* in the letter, and in the poem itself. #GettingStartedwithSpenser
@DennisBritton3 : I ask my students to think about who is *in* the dark -- and who *is* dark. #GettingStartedwithSpenser
@DennisBritton3: See, e.g., Error. Prof. Britton rarely brings in secondary lit in the survey, but Hall's Things of Darkness ( #ToDat25!) perfectly describes what is happening in the "father Nilus" epic simile, with fantasies of African fecundity. #GettingStartedwithSpenser
@DennisBritton3 : There is a specificity to what Africa represents in the poem: the simile (I.i.21) tells us not just about Error, but also about the conceptual links btwn the Nile and monstrous fecundity. #GettingStartedwithSpenser
(interesting closing salvo at the end by @DennisBritton3 : what might it mean to think about how desire and embodiment get folded together in the description of Lechery) #GettingStartedwithSpenser
Sorry, got distracted by the fascinating chat discussion! Catching up here: next, Ross Lerner of Occidental College thinking about Spenser and questions of order (allegory) and disorder (romance), w/ order a way of establishing hierarchies. #GettingStartedwithSpenser
Lerner: "Not all allegory is racist, but allegory can work like race-making as a way of establishing hierarchies." (hierarchies with consequences) Also want to record the joke that Una is "una-dimensional" for the record. :) #GettingStartedwithSpenser
Lerner gives example from Book 5: allegory works differently there than in Book 1; Artegal is an allegory maker, whose justice turns characters into allegorical signs or types. Think about re. policing, stereotypes, profiling. #GettingStartedwithSpenser
next up, @debapriya__s on Teaching Spenser in the Anthropocene. Coming at it through environmental studies given the context of her dept. and student interest. Anthropocene def.: ways of thinking abt human pop.s and nonhuman environments together. #GettingStartedwithSpenser
@debapriya__s : discussions of allegory offer a productive way in to thinking about humans activities and nonhumans environments. See Gulf of Greediness, Bower of Bliss, etc., as environments that reveal the struggles of allegorical figures. #GettingStartedwithSpenser
@debapriya__s is citing Kathryn Yusoff's _A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None_, ways to think about how concepts of the anthropocene must necessarily include race as well. "Who is included in the anthropocene, and who is excluded?"
#GettingStartedwithSpenser
#GettingStartedwithSpenser
@debapriya__s: If you look at II.xii via Yusoff, you can see the enslaved figures (c. stanzas 35-37) being racialized and marked as disabled even as they are not humanized or individualized. This moment shows the alchemy of race and geology. #GettingStartedwithSpenser
@debapriya__s : Though Guyon quickly moves on from these figures and turns his attention away, do *we* necessarily also need to turn away with Guyon in this moment? It can help us ask questions about who and what we are trained to pay attn to. #GettingStartedwithSpenser
Really interesting response from @debapriya__s in Q&A, about thinking about practices of reading--maybe when we are teaching ourselves to read, we are also teaching ourselves (and students) to value different things in narratives. Don't follow Guyon! #GettingStartedwithSpenser
Next up, Morgan Souza, thinking about what it means to be bold when reading (in) the FQ, and how this boldness is not just epistemological but also gendered. #GettingStartedwithSpenser
Assignment Souza offers: ask students to work out which actions are permissible and which are taboo, based not on general ideas about gender in history, but on how the poem itself is describing them. Bring in Tilbury speech as hist. context on gender. #GettingStartedwithSpenser
Souza: shows a Kamala Harris headline on how she negotiates female leadership, and uses that to frame a question that might also structure a class discussion: what does it mean to be both defined by and above gender? #GettingStartedwithSpenser
Final talk in this event: Susanne Wofford! <3 Her prompt was to think about *class* (though she notes that she sometimes tells her students to think about a word other than class when addressing Renaissance lit). #GettingStartedwithSpenser
Wofford: I teach the FQ as a bit like the Matrix (there is a reality, and another reality outside that) -- if the world of the FQ is like the Matrix, then both class and race are bugs in the system. How can class fit w/ chivalry? #GettingStartedwithSpenser
Wofford: what is Malbecco's class? He is not courtly or generous; he has money but has hoarded it. There is a tension in this episode btwn chivalric norms and private enclosure. Malbecco is figure for early capitalism, not just jealousy.
#GettingStartedwithSpenser
#GettingStartedwithSpenser
This reading of Malbecco by Wofford shows especially how deeply intertextual the Malbecco scene is, esp. if we are thinking of teaching in a survey course: move from Chaucer's Merchant's Tale (old husband, love younger; mercantilism) to this FQ scene. #GettingStartedwithSpenser
Wofford: The question of potency in the Malbecco episode is not just about sexual potency, but economic potency as well. #GettingStartedwithSpenser
Very interesting discussions in the Q&A about swarms! For figures of plebians, dehumanizations, disorder (in the generic sense discussed by Lerner in his paper). #GettingStartedwithSpenser
I didn't Tweet the Q&A, but I've decided that helped me achieve the best possible mixture of recording the papers, *and* making you feel like you missed out if you weren't there. Thanks @SpenserSociety for this event, and thanks speakers! #GettingStartedwithSpenser
