One thing I've noticed is that, when I started teaching Vic Lit c. 2010, students seemed mostly still to believe in "progress," in some version of its American ideology / liberal-Victorian form-- at least, that was my impression. + washingtonpost.com/magazine/2020/…
So we wd often discuss it together, in Mill or Dickens or whatever: track the metaphors, work to separate claims abt temporal duration from socio-political ideas of civilization on the one hand, individual life-plots on the other, etc etc. It was work, & it was fun.
But now --weirdly to me, since I've built whole lesson plans on it-- that whole complex of ideas abt improvement is, I think, self-evidently absurd to basically everyone @ the outset: structurally & materially unavailable, I think, to our students now. It seems like bullshit.
The twist for me is that this generates something almost like nostalgia for those obviously fallacious & easily critiqued whig histories & upwardly trending plots, the conviction that tmw would FOR SURE and OBVIOUSLY be better. Strange moods ensue, including maybe jealousy? idk
But Eliot's faith in "the growing good of the world," e.g., hit me & I think the students like a ton of bricks this past term. Like: how wonderful it would have been, to believe in that; how pure and kind of awesome --if also naive and for many reasons probably wrong.
So I don't know that "emphasi[zing] personal responsibility & empowerment," as this essay says, will do the trick & I think our students know it. But then, what to do? How to approach the old mythologies of bourgeois life when they have in effect produced their terminal crisis?
Anyway next time I do On Liberty or even Middlemarch, I might pair it w short parts of Cruel Optimism & see what happens. Maybe also the essay linked above. Everything feels new & especially the past. A time of monsters. Any ideas? (/end)
[FYI, I guess i should have linked the syllabus I was thinking of while blabbing about this--thanks so much to everybody for the good suggestions, which I will *absolutely* be including next time, & thinking of in my own attempts at writing abt it] blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/engl-596-fall2…
