Love, Death, and the Nineteenth-Century Americanist: ESQ Scholars Reflect on the Year of the Pandemic
2021; Washington State University Press; Volume: 67; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/esq.2021.0003
ISSN1935-021X
Autores Tópico(s)Modern American Literature Studies
ResumoLove, Death, and the Nineteenth-Century Americanist:ESQ Scholars Reflect on the Year of the Pandemic LuElla D'Amico (bio) It's March 2020, a week before spring break. I sit in a faculty forum at the University of Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Texas that addresses the Covid-19 pandemic. The meeting was called quickly; most faculty are not there. A philosophy professor asks if there's a possibility the campus will be closed, and it seems from the murmuring during and after this question as if this statement is slightly alarmist but necessary. I am already on high alert. I am awaiting a tenure decision, and the process has been unexpectedly tumultuous; I learned too late that a few senior colleagues were unhappy with me. These senior colleagues are in the room, too, knowing I'm awaiting this decision that can happen at any moment. I cannot show fear about the pandemic or the upcoming tenure determination. All feels strange, heavy, unknown. The meeting ends. I leave the room, chatting with a colleague about—what feels odd then—handwashing and bats. I lather myself up to my arms with the antibacterial gel I have in my purse, then head to the next building to teach Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868–69). The class I conduct after this meeting is permanently etched in my brain. It was the last one I held prior to our [End Page 119] university shutting down completely. Like so many others across the country, my university operates for the next year and a half via remote teaching only. Students in my Children's and Young Adult Literature class on that day, like me, are on high alert, and we discuss sentimentality. The tenseness we feel as we begin reminds me of the moment when the March girls prepare for Marmee's visit to their sick father during the Civil War: "The rattle of an approaching carriage made the [sisters] all start and listen. That was the hard minute, but the girls stood it well; no one cried, no one ran away, no one uttered a lamentation, though their hearts were very heavy."1 The pandemic is like that approaching carriage arriving to pick up Marmee, and we experience together this liminal, fraught period, one where we all feel as if the world is changing but can't quite ascertain what that means. So, we talk about the sentimental genre, particularly emotions' import in literature and in eliciting social change. As we discuss these feelings intellectually, our anxieties abate. We end the period going over Catharine Stimpson's "Reading for Love: Canons, Paracanons, and Whistling Jo March," a critical essay in the back of the Norton edition we're using for class. To be perfectly clear, we end that class talking about love. Stimpson argues against the scholarly tendency to divide works into the nebulous categories of high- and lowbrow, pointing out that such an approach eschews a third categorization, that text which is simply beloved, which she dubs as paracanonical. She affirms that "when we love a book, we read energetically. We believe that if the book were human, it would embrace us. Our feeling is more intense than easy pleasure, more dashing and ferocious than delight, more gorgeous than distraction."2 This quote, and the concept it emphasizes, bears full inclusion here because both I and my students return to it throughout the semester. Yet, it is not only in relation to the course material that we find Stimpson's argument pertinent. The idea of reading [End Page 120] for love and responding to textual matter with fondness, absorption, and passion in mind first becomes intertwined with my pandemic-influenced pedagogy. Likewise, in our class throughout the rest of the semester, the concept affects how the students react to one another and to me. Once we go remote, for instance, I include self-care assignments that ask students to locate material that they love and immerse themselves in it, whether that material derives from our class or otherwise. Spend an hour reading for love, I tell them. Then they share what they read on a discussion board and include an accompanying...
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