Junior Faculty: Visit Mark Schoenfield’s english class at next week’s teaching visit
A Teaching Visit involves a small group of faculty who observe a colleague’s class (on a selected day), followed by an hour of conversation about what was observed, particularly shared teaching challenges. The Center for Teaching has hosted Teaching Visits for many years and they have been among the most productive and helpful events we offer. They are wonderful opportunities for Vanderbilt teachers to observe directly and then discuss various forms of teaching across the disciplines, building collegiality and expertise around inquiries into teaching and learning.
Mark Schoenfield, Professor of English and Department ChairENGL 231: The 19th-Century English NovelFrom the French Revolution to the start of the 20th century, Europe underwent revolutions in economics, psychology, aesthetics, trade, marriage, law, and personal identity. In every case, the British novel, with its evolving notions of character, narrative, and representation, influenced (sometime by endorsing, sometimes by resisting) these social transformations. Experiments in genre, inventions of distribution mechanisms, and theorizations of the imagination all contributed to the novel’s ascendency as a social phenomenon. In this course, we will explore some of the most remarkable of the novels, ranging from William Godwin’s Caleb Williams, an early crime thriller, to George Eliot’s sweeping Middlemarch, to Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, in which the stirrings of modernism peek through amidst mayhem and wit. Reading novels that vary in hue from the realism of daily life and manners to the absurd and sensational, dripping in blood, we will consider the emerging middle class, with its class consciousness and money concerns; the geographies of the novel, from teeming metropolis to close-knit provincial communities; the dynamics of gender as refracted through the novelistic interest in psychology and memory; and the strange ironies in which fiction becomes a form of truth.
Date: Wednesday, November 7th If you’d like to attend this visit, please:
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We endeavor to organize visits across the university in various disciplines, but visitors do not have to be in the same discipline as the course they are observing. Indeed, many faculty members have found it helpful to encounter teaching styles and strategies different than their own, which they can then discuss with colleagues after the observation and adapt to their own use.
If you are interested in hosting a Teaching Visit or have any other questions about the program, please contact the CFT’s Joe Bandy.
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