Assessment of Literature in Context of History and Society (Rubric Discussion)

What does it mean to “understand” works/genres/literary movements? What do “history” and “society” mean for us? Or should we use a term such as “culture”? And what statements of outcomes could we use that would apply to a typical set of papers from both an “early” course (170, 142, 213) or a later course (i.e., 310 or 358?)
For me, historical and social context are very important.  Since I approach many of my courses from the perspective of "these texts/authors/styles have been marginalized," the context is as important as the text itself.  So it's important to ask continually, why have these things been marginalized or ignored and what does that mean?  Understanding film movements, for example, such as American avant garde cinema means to understand the place of formal experimentation in relation to dominant media. Why would someone make a slow zoom across a room for 45 minutes?  This seems the antithesis of entertainment or classical Hollywood cinema.  Why did this filmmaker make this film?  Is it significant that it was done in the 1970s?  It means questioning assumptions of what cinema is and what it's for, the difference between profit making media and artisanal or personal cinema, not that these two examples of cinema are mutually exclusive.  Also, industrially, many of these filmmakers knew each other and helped each other distribute work.  Without artistic coteries and artists gathering around certain ideas and politics of particular periods, certain films would not be made.  Many, not all of these experimental films are in reaction to social and political currents and this is essentially to the understanding of why.

Hope that helps Graham.

I echo Jun's opening comments and would draw my examples from teaching courses focusing on American women writers ("scribbling women") and Native American authors.  As in the Underground Cinema example, the contexts are important to formal analysis, to interpreting meaning, and to understanding the ways that the texts are engaging and contesting other traditions.  Rather than adding other examples from my own courses, I've pulled a few course objectives from my syllabi that take a stab at articulating outcomes. To create the rubric, it might be helpful to look at the outcomes on syllabi for courses like 237.  But I don't think this is limited to courses examining marginalized writers, as I know historical context is just as important, say, to Rob when he is teaching Yeats and Irish literature. I've personally found these objectives difficult to articulate and would be interested in seeing how others have grappled with the language.

From Engl 339 American Ways: Plotting Women

Students will: 3) be able to situate literary works by American women writers in larger traditions, movements, historical, and cultural contexts; 4) be able to demonstrate an understanding of the theoretical and critical debates surrounding the interpretation of literature by American women writers.

From Engl 237 Voices & Perspectives: Native American

Students will: 1) think critically about the role of language and literature in Native American and American cultures, recognizing and understanding connections/distinctions between oral and written literary traditions; 2) demonstrate knowledge of the ways that Native American authors negotiate complex moral, social, aesthetic and political issues in creating a written literary tradition within/against Western generic conventions and American cultural myths.

"understand individual works, genres, and literary movements in relation to history and society." As broad a brush as this statement is, it describes more accurately than anything I could say about how I organize literature courses, so I am happy to see us focus on this outcome. (Disclaimer: I am teaching no English courses this semester -- HUMN and HONR).   I tend to be relatively proscriptive (even authoritative, at times) about the terminology and fundamental information about literary periods and movements about date ranges and basic "definitions" of literary periods and movements, but fortunately most of these terms (and even date ranges) are sufficiently flexible, imprecise, subject to scholarly debate, so I can sometimes engage students in discovering/playing with the loose ends and frayed seams of "Romanticism/Romantic Era," or "The Renaissance," etc.

I tend to use the term “culture” as an all encompassing  contextual term that, eventually, leads to more particular considerations of “political history” (rulers and governments), “social history” (gender, race, class, economics, ethnography,), and arts & intellectual history (state of theater, publishing, art or aesthetics, literary or theatrical movements, philosophy).  For me, the term “culture” supports these (somewhat) more specific concepts.

While the context of texts is important to any course or specific discussion of texts, ultimately I emphasize textual analysis (against relevant context(s)) in having students engage in analysis, interpretation, and ‘original’ responses and reflections.

I'd like to see us keep this simple. We might look for some very basic indicators of whether students, in their essays, discuss texts in isolation from historical and social contexts or go some ways towards contextualizing the works. The scheme for evaluating the essays on this outcome could be as simple as this:

It should take no longer than about 15 seconds to decide, for each paper you grade, which of the four numbers above applies to it. Fifteen seconds times 35 papers comes to 8.75 minutes. Are you capturing all the rich complexity of each student's strengths and weaknesses as a writer? No. When the results from multiple classes are combined, do we as a department have some kind of handle on whether our students, in the aggregate — no matter whose course they're in — "get" what we mean when we tell them that texts don't exist in a vaccuum? I think we do.

I can't stress enough that the point of this isn't to prove anything to anyone. This is why I couldn't care less whether someone in Erwin or Albany has a response to the information we gather. I want to know whether our students "get it." If they don't, or only get it minimally, I want us to do something about it. If it took a lot of time and effort to get this information, I might resent having to do it, even though I'm the beneficiary. But it doesn't.

I assume all of us, no matter what our critical and theoretical interests and assumptions are, want students to be aware of the relationship between literary texts and some of the most relevant historical and cultural contexts. I say "relevant" because the larger area of "context" is so broad as to approach infinity . . . One can't really, for instance, understand and appreciate the poetic revolution proposed or defined in Wordsworth's famous Preface to Lyrical Ballads unless one understands his new poetics in their relationship to the French Revolution. As some of his contemporaries already noticed (especially Hazlitt),  there is a clear (if not necessarily cause and effect) connection between the two (political and poetic) revolutions. Because students often lack even the rudiments of the necessary historical and cultural background, they need to be made aware of it in some fashion or other. For instance, when I have taught D.H. Lawrence's (much anthologized) story, "Odour of Chrysanthemus" in English 170, I've found that even some of the best students are initially clueless about the importance of the early-twentieth century setting of the story and the cultural context of gender and social class (in this case, English working class) that define much of what happens in the story.

Having cited two of my favorite authors, let me also note that historical-cultural context should include the author's biography or life: in Wordsworth's case, the young radical poet's animus against the aristocratic regime in England was partly grounded in his childhood--the fact that his father, who worked as a political agent for the leading aristocrat-politician in he North of England, had not received his salary for several years, and when he suddenly died and left his five children orphans, Lord Lowther refused to pay the debt he owed to the Wordsworth family/children. The adult poet's fervent support of the revolution in France is clearly grounded in part in the traumatic experience of his childhood. In the case of Lawrence, the connection between his life and his work is so immediate as to be impossible to ignore (the first part of Sons and Lovers is, as he acknowledged, almost entirely autobiographical). So  biography is also or actually an important part or sub-unit of "historical context." 

At the same time, historical context is in many ways  a slippery and tricky and uncertain category, as well as one that can easily be oversimplified and turned into a kind of pastiche. As Goethe points out in his satire on the scholarly life in Faust, the spirit of the past that historians think they see is mostly a reflection (or construction?) of their own minds. . . . you know, the flattened out "the Elizabethan world view" sort of thing. Historical and  cultural context is especially difficult and challenging an issue with respect to complex works, like Shakespeare's plays. For instance, ghosts appear in some of them (as in Hamlet and Macbeth), and are seen (or not seen, as the case may be) by several characters, but how relevant or important to our understanding of the play(s) is it to know what Shakespeare's culture believed about ghosts? When we are dealing with non-Western cultures, this issue becomes even more difficult--for instance, Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girldhood Among Ghosts." When I was in China, I actually consulted with some Chinese graduate students about the Chinese belief in "ghosts" and found what they told me somewhat helpful but not interpretively decisive. Thus I tend to be leery or suspicious of generic pronouncements about cultural norms and practices in other times and places . . .  like the role of women in  the early modern period, when these statements are made, for instance, without reference to crucial factors such as social class, country, etc. 

Having rambled on, let me close by saying that I like Paul's 1-4 rubric or formula above, though it could even be simplified:

3. Essay shows a sophisticated and nuanced awareness of the importance of the significance of the relevant historical and cultural context(s) to the work(s) in question;

2. Essay shows some awareness etc.

1. Essay shows little or no awareness etc.

Graham,

You and I met earlier to talk about the rubric, but only now am I joining the discussion.  I like Paul's rubric, but I'm wondering whether only the site of PRODUCTION of the text should be emphasized...  Isn't it equally important for students to attempt to characterize this historical moment and, as far as possible, their ideological standpoint?  Reception Studies shows that there's no such thing as "the text itself"-- there are as many Great Expectations as reviewers and critics have constructed the novel since publication -- not to mention film adaptations...    Just a thought.

As usual, I volunteer my three classes this semester.

Happy Easter/Passover/Sunday!