The Critical Companion to ENG 140 @ Clark showcases literary criticism by students in Dr. Justin Shaw’s ENG 140 – “British Literature I” course at Clark University. As this is an introductory course to the study of early British literary history and culture – a span of time ranging from the 8th to the beginning of the 18th Century – these essays showcase thematic introductions to the texts studied in the course.
As of Fall 2022, this course does not employ a standard textbook or anthology. Instead, we source texts and materials from openly accessible resources online and in the public domain to guide our syllabus. As part of this endeavor, we center students’ voices and scholarly interests as essential to the contextualization of early British literature. This site represents those conversations. In its pilot year, the course was redesigned as part of a Clark University Academic Innovation Grant-funded project titled: Open Educational Resources for the Promotion of Excellence, Equity, and College Affordability: A Robert H. Goddard Library Project in Support of Clark University’s Strategic Framework.
Why Open Access?
We understand that many college students in the early British Literature survey course struggle with access on a variety of fronts. Students sometimes find difficulty comprehending the antiquated language, syntax, and dialects of English and its related Germanic and Romance languages. Students often find traditional textbooks and anthologies in all disciplines generally unaffordable. Students from historically marginalized backgrounds often find themselves underrepresented in and traumatized by representations of ableism, racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and violent heteronormativity in this literature. Open Access allows us to have more balanced and inclusive discussions and debates about canonical and marginalized texts and writers in the wide British literary tradition. Open Access allows for a greater number and diversity of students to feel included in the process of reading and writing, i.e. knowledge-making, about these texts and histories. Open Access removes some barriers to acquiring texts, and allows seamless inclusion of a variety of contextualizing resources, thus allowing for innovative assessment, deeper engagement, and continued expectation of rigor from all students. We concede that Open Access is not the only solution in every context as it may create new concerns and barriers (i.e. the need for digital devices, or the expanded labor of locating credible and legible texts), but we encourage more creativity in the wide employment of open access resources in the college literature survey class.
The Essays
All students are asked to write short essays as part of their final, culminating assignment in the course. Once done, a selection of these essays is chosen by the professor, revised by the students, and presented on this site. Over time, these commentaries contribute to a larger conversation about the contours of British literary history, the array of texts on the syllabus, and the extent to which these texts speak to modern concerns.
Inspired by scholarly work in the Milton Edifice Project at the University of Alabama and The Open Access Companion to The Canterbury Tales, this site is constantly evolving with new, innovative student work and perspectives. While the Fall 2022 class represents the pilot group, discussing a text in relation to a chosen theme, each subsequent group of students contributes to a broader conversation by citing and engaging with the work of their predecessors. The ideal purpose of these essays is to provide a general historical introduction to a text, to a theme the text is engaged with, and to why the text matters to modern readers. The suggested audience for these introductory essays is undergraduate students, but we hope that students and scholars at all levels might find some value and enjoyment in them.
Image Credit: Map of the World by Abraham Ortelius, 1606. (Wikimedia Commons)