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PAPER
From deep within the discussions of those basketball teams that will or will
not receive invitations to participate in the annual NCAA championship
tournament, a new science has evolved: bracketology. While the stakes are
not exactly the same, bracketology and syllabusology share some common
questions: who among the perennial favorites will yet again be included,
and who will be snubbed (and why); who sits on “the bubble” between
inclusion and rejection as the bracket is being filled out; and which “Cinderellas” (the
term comes from the bracketologists) will make a surprise appearance in
this year’s version of the tournament/course? While I do not rank
the authors for a given course or pit them against each other as the NCAA
does with the teams in its regional brackets, I have grouped writers for
a survey course into categories that are quite similar to those employed
by the bracketologists: those authors who, within the context of a given
course’s objectives, receive “automatic bids” and those
who are “on the bubble.” Drawing on the specific example of
a recent survey course of nineteenth-century French poetry, I hope to highlight
the reasons – some practical, others emotional and nostalgic, and
still others seem, in retrospect, completely arbitrary – that came
to play as I filled out my syllabus bracket one recent semester.
Even before putting my syllabus together, I felt overwhelmed with all that
I had to consider, pulling me in this way and that. Besides the obvious constraints
of time (a fifteen-week semester), there were certain guidelines, either explicit
(via the description in the course catalog) or implicit (colleagues insisting
that we simply had no business producing French majors who had never read Madame
Bovary). I felt caught between, on the one hand, respecting the curriculum
(created by my predecessors and senior colleagues) and, on the other hand,
making a contribution to the course based on my own expertise (something I
felt I had been hired to do).
Of course, the next issue I had to consider was just how much coverage each
of the canonical movements would receive: How much treatment should le Parnasse
receive? Where does Gautier fit in, both chronologically and with respect to
these major poetic trends? What about Baudelaire? And the vers libristes? For
Romanticism, should we read Lamartine and Vigny and Musset and Hugo? And what
about Marceline Desbordes-Valmore? A more well-rounded presentation of romanticism
might include Lamartine, Hugo, Delacroix and Mme de Staël, but here I
begin to stray from my goal, this course already defined as a poetry survey.
And with fifteen weeks for this obviously flawed course, we have so much to
cover and so little time.
So I returned to my choices. Let a canonical author drop here and there so
that I can include some lesser-known poets. (Here I will readily admit that,
having devoted half of my doctoral dissertation to Marie Krysinska’a
poetry, I wanted to include her in the course for my enjoyment, for the interesting
questions her work raises about poetry, and for the sake of introducing students
to a writer they might not otherwise read. The next time I teach such a poetry
survey, I’ll be further tempted to include her so that students will
be required to buy my critical edition of her work…). I won’t lose
sleep if my institution graduates a French major who has never studied Vigny
or Musset; it’s not as if it were Baudelaire… but why? This personal
choice is based not only on taste, but just as much as on my experience. Perhaps
if I had already taught this kind of course several times, I would feel comfortable
enough moving poets and poems onto and off of the syllabus, but for a junior
faculty member – for this junior faculty member, anyway – it seems
wise to stick to one’s comfort zone (texts and writers one knows best),
in order to save a little time for other potentially important matters (conference
papers, publications, committee work, perhaps even a social life).
My “comfort zone,” it occurred to me, is a direct function of the
courses that I took when I was a student. This realization was of great comfort,
as it allowed me to shake off the guilt I was feeling when I removed Musset
from the syllabus and place the blame squarely on the shoulders of those professors
whose poetry courses I had taken. I wasn’t exactly blaming anyone, but
this line of thinking got me to wonder: if my choices are influenced in large
part by what I was taught, then how much of what I was taught was influenced
by what my professors were taught when they were students? If they left graduate
school and took employment and, like me, stayed within or near their “comfort
zone” for the same reasons that I was drawn to mine, then there is the
potential for a generations-long approach to teaching a poetry survey course
that I have unwittingly inherited. I had the good fortune to work with three
poetry scholars who received their training at Stanford, Yale, and Cornell,
and a quick trip to Dissertation Abstracts International might tell me who
my dissertation director’s dissertation director was. Rather than finding
my poetry-survey ancestors, though, I realized that I was getting further from
the answers I sought, and that I really needed to make some hard choices (plus,
my professors’ professors didn’t have the good sense to leave poetry
survey syllabi on the Internet before they retired, so I realized that I would
have to go it alone).
In addition to the obvious limitations of a fifteen-week semester, there were
the pressures of getting the written word in front of my students, who do not
appreciate buying a collection of poetry if we intend on studying only a handful
of its poems in class. Rather than navigate the increasingly hazardous and
expensive route of coursepacks, I decided to bite the bullet and ask my students
to purchase an anthology of poems. Certainly, the two-volume Gallimard anthology
(see Leuilliot and Décaudin in Works Cited) offers something for everyone,
or almost. But even these books – which caught my eye thanks to the comprehensiveness
that the number of pages per volume suggests (504 and 433, respectively) – should
be considered carefully, if not scrutinized, for their inclusions and omissions.
(I was heartened to see that others were also searching for suitable anthologies;
Dr. Martin Hurcombe, in an email sent to the Francofil listserv, was looking
for a poetry anthology that would cover a much greater period than just the
nineteenth century: “15th century to late 20th century”.) After
all, I remind myself, the editor of Gallimard’s Poésie series
is none other than André Velter, who, despite the impressive career
he has enjoyed in poetry (detailed on his web page, http://www.andrevelter.com),
sent me one of the numerous rejection letters I received when trying to get
my critical edition of Krysinska’s poetry published. My project was rejected
for the quality of the poems themselves (or so I was told), and yet I planned
on using some of those same poems in this course. It was in part because of
his rejection that I was taking my time in purchasing a copy of Velter’s
edited collection, Les Poètes du Chat noir (Gallimard, 1996). Petty?
Yes; but making up my syllabus, I realized, was becoming increasingly personal.
Having chosen my anthologies, I returned once again to the question of the canon.
With a quick glance at www.espn.com, I saw excitement building before my eyes,
as bracketology morphed into syllabusology, when:
With just 10 days until Selection Sunday, […] ESPN.com’s projections
show 10 of the 34 at-large bids have yet to be “locked up.” That
number will continue to shrink between today and March 16, with teams on the
bubble today even switching places with teams “locked” into the tournament
today. (“Big night”)
became:
With just 10 days before turning in my syllabus, […]10 of the 34 at-large
poems have yet to be “locked up.” That number will continue to shrink
[…] with poets and poems on the bubble today even switching places with
those seemingly “locked” into the syllabus.
I searched for more tips on filling out one’s bracket, hoping that bracketology
strategy could further help me with my syllabus; after all, “Bracketology
101” always seems to rate quite highly in student evaluations: “A
month into the new semester, the most exciting class of the year is finally about
to commence. […] Of course, this course will not be found in a Spring Semester
course catalog. It is simply known as Bracketology 101 […]” (“Brackets
101”; emphasis added). A website devoted to sports of the University of
Virginia also offers Bracketology 101 and promises “Ten steps to winning
your office pool” (“Bracketology 101”). Before I got carried
away by the hopes that these same ten steps would win me points with my colleagues
and the Dean’s office for coming up with an innovative syllabus (and, frankly,
I was willing to consider tip #1, “Work backwards”), I’m wasn’t
sure what I could do with tip #9, “When in doubt, pick the team with the
better point guard.” So perhaps bracketology wasn’t the way to go
after all. Nevertheless, I chose to group poets into two groups: those who would
receive significant coverage and those to whom I could feel comfortable devoting
a class period, or even part of class period. The groups went as follows:
Group
1: Lamartine, Hugo, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine,
Mallarmé
Group 2: Vigny, Desbordes-Valmore, Gautier, Nerval,
Banville, Leconte de Lisle, Krysinska, Kahn, Laforgue,
Verhaeren
While
there is certainly room for discussion as to why
some poets aren’t included in the first group,
I would argue that the distribution more or less reflects
the traditional distinctions between “major” and “minor” poets
of the century (here, I might add, even bracketology
is less harsh with this distinction; college basketball
avoids using the condescending term “minor” altogether,
preferring to refer to teams from schools that are
not nationally recognized as basketball powerhouses
with the more politically correct label “mid-major”).
Choosing Desbordes-Valmore hardly marked a radical
departure on my part; perhaps the only personal stamp
I was leaving on the reading list was that of including
Krysinska, a decision that was motivated by reasons
largely personal in nature. And yet, Krysinska’s
presence marks less a stroke of genius than a response
to the recent increase in attention her poetry has
received.
More generally speaking, however, Krysinska’s case is unremarkable in
that she is but one a small group of non-canonical writers that have quickly
become a canon in their own right. If the term of “major poets” of
nineteenth-century France is best represented by Hugo, Baudelaire, Rimbaud,
Verlaine, and Mallarmé, the relatively new designation of “minor
poets” (for the term “minor” in a different context, see
Hourcade) – variations including “non-canonical poets,” “less-studied
poets,” and, of course, “woman poets” – is largely
made up of Desbordes-Valmore, Ackermann, Siefert, Mercœur and Krysinska
(for examples see Paliyenko, “(Re)Placing” [studying Desbordes-Valmore,
Siefert, and Ackermann] and the cited works by Greenberg [both focusing on
Desbordes-Valmore, Siefert, Ackermann, and Mercœur]; an exception is the
cited work by Paliyenko and Boutin). As recent conference proceedings, dissertations,
and article- and book-length publications attest, these five women receive
nearly all the scholarly attention given to women poets of the century, forming
as it were a Pléiade of neglected writers. These “B-list All-Stars” deserve
the attention they receive, certainly, but someday we will no longer be able
call them “les inconnu(e)s,” “les oublié(e)s,” “les
raté(e)s” (see Lefrère et al.), or other traditional titles,
as they will have become too well known to be unknown or forgotten. Then, scholars
will no doubt dig even deeper into the troves of the little-known writers and
discover other forgotten gems, only to keep the cycle going and study previously
forgotten poets, until they, too, become household names (or at least subjects
worthy of critical studies). And perhaps these former “inconnu(e)s” will
even slip onto someone’s poetry survey syllabus, someday, somewhere.
But the twenty-odd other poets will be, almost always, the same, and the bracket/syllabus
will invariably always be filled out with the same familiar names in the top
slots. Such is the limitation of a survey course, which favors the big names
over the “B list” when time is short, coverage is the name of the
game, and institutions have no business producing French majors who have never
studied the poetry of Hugo, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Mallarmé – to
mention but a few.
Postscript:
Most recently, the NCAA has even expanded its “Bracket
Buster” Saturday, increasing from eighteen to
forty-six the number of teams that will vie for a chance
to participate in the championship tournament (see “18
Mid-Majors,” “Butler Joins,” and “Proven
Mid-Majors.”), so it would seem that the general
preference to make more room for more participants
is another tendency that brackets and syllabi share.
Also, as I reread this paper in preparation for its
September posting online, I am following yet another
expanded playoff system, that of professional baseball,
whose addition of a “wild card” team from
each league has allowed second-place (perhaps even
second-rate) teams to advance to the playoffs. While
there is no doubt in my Boston Red Sox fan’s
mind that this is a good thing, it seems to me that
college basketball and major league baseball are playing
the same numbers game that I was playing as I was putting
together my syllabus: there isn’t enough room
for everyone, we have to draw the line somewhere (unlike
in professional hockey and basketball, where almost
everyone makes the playoffs), only a chosen few will
represent the best of the best.
Also, I’m beginning to think that what I eschewed
at the outset of this paper – the notion of ranking
authors for a given course or pitting them against
each other – might be precisely what I should
do. Let the games begin, and damn the discussions of
historical and cultural contexts and the differences
between literary movements, all information that students
don’t seem to retain anyway. What if a course
were designed specifically so that poems’ strengths
and weaknesses could be considered against each other?
It would be easy enough to find the quantitative data
on which to fill out the brackets: “hits” in
a keyword search of the MLA International Bibliography,
over the last twenty years (see Appendix I for the
results of such a search).
Over a fifteen-week semester, then, the first week
could be spent determining the criteria that would
be used. Weeks two through six could serve as the first
round (1 vs. 32, 2 vs. 31, etc.), during which the
field would be whittled down to sixteen; weeks seven
through ten would host the second round (from sixteen
down to eight); and the last five weeks could be devoted
to the finalists, concluding with a final few that
would be discussed at length, and in detail, at the
culmination of the semester. A final project would
be for a student to produce a detailed analysis of
any two poems that have been discussed, responding
to the decisions of the class or offering new insights
not thought of during class discussion. I would hope
that the results of such a course would not be the
determination that a given poet or poem is better or
worse than another, but rather that its imagery is
more vivid, it is somehow more creative or more evocative,
that it speaks to a student more than another, that
is more technically complicated, or that it is more
successful based on other criteria that students will
create for themselves. Measuring a work by how it speaks
to us is, after all, how and why we read literature
in the first place.
Appendix I: Results of a search of the MLA International
bibliography, 2 September 2003, using the poet’s
full name and “poetry” as the descriptors.
Rank Poet Number of hits
1 Baudelaire 1101
2 Mallarmé 717
3 Rimbaud 675
4 Hugo 252
5 Verlaine 164
6 Gautier 111
7 Nerval 95
8 Laforgue 78
9 Lamartine 63
10 Vigny 48
11 Banville 46
12 Lautréamont 45
13 Desbordes-Valmore 31
13 Musset 31
15 Verhaeren 28
16 Leconte de Lisle 22
17 Corbière 21
18 Nouveau 18
19 de Hérédia 15
20 Vivien 15
21 Bertrand 14
22 Maeterlinck 11
23 Cros 9
24 Jammes 8
25 Saint-Pol Roux 7
25 Samain 7
27 Ackermann 6
28 Coppée 5
28 Krysinska 5
28 Siefert 5
31 Mendès 3
32 Gay (de Girardin) 3
32 Kahn 3
32 de Villard 3
Works Cited
“18 Mid-Majors Will Meet On Bracket Buster Saturday.” http://www.collegesports.com/sports/m-basekbl/stories/080802aaq.html.
9 September 2003.
“Big night for bubble teams.” http://espn.go.com/ncb/buubble/watch/index03.html.
6 March 2003.
“Brackets 101 Class in Session.” The Review
(U of Delaware) 126.37 (10 March 2000). http://www.review.udel.edu/archive/2000_Issues/03.10.00/index.php3?section=2&article=5.
6 March 2003.
“Butler Joins Expanded Bracket Buster.” http://sports.espn.go.com/ncb/news/story?id=1612289.
9 September 2003.
Décaudin, Michel, ed. Anthologie de la poésie
française du XIXe siècle. De Baudelaire à Saint-Pol-Roux.
Paris: Gallimard/Poésie, 1992.
Greenberg,
Wendy. “Mentoring in Four Nineteenth-Century
French Women Poets.” Nineteenth-Century French
Studies 22.3&4 (Spring-Summer 1994): 450-65.
---. Uncanonical Women: Feminine Voice in French Poetry
(1830-1871). Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999.
Hourcade,
Philippe, ed. Les « Minores ».
Littératures classiques 31. Paris: Klincksieck,
1997.
Hurcombe, Martin. Email to Francofil listserv. http://listserv.liv.ac.uk/archives/francofil.html.
22 February 2002.
Lefrère, Jean-Jacques, Michel Pierssens, and
Jean-Didier Wagneur, eds. Les Ratés de la littérature:
Baudelaire, Boucher de Perthes, Thomas Corneille, René-Louis
Doyon, Hugo, Lautréamont, Georges Matisse, Gustave
Mathieu, Marcel Millet, Miret, Rictus, Pierre des Ruynes,
Marcelle Tinayre, Toupié-Béziers, Vollard,
etc. Actes du deuxième colloque des Invalides,
11 décembre 1998. Tusson: Du Lérot, 1999.
Leuilliot,
Bernard, ed. Anthologie de la poésie
française du XIXe siècle. De Chateaubriand à Baudelaire.
Paris: Gallimard/Poésie, 1984.
McCormack,
Kevin. “Bracketology 101: Ten Steps
to Winning Your Office Pool.” The Sabre: The
Mecca for Independent Coverage and Discussion of UVA
Sports. http://www.thesabre.com/mccormack/mccormack11.html.
6 March 2003.
Paliyenko,
Adrianna. “(Re)Placing Women in French
Poetic History: The Romantic Legacy.” Symposium
53.4 (Winter 2000): 261-82.
Paliyenko, Adrianna, and Aimée Boutin. “Nineteenth-Century
French Women Poets: An Exceptional Legacy.” French
and Francophone Women, 16th-21st Centuries: Essays
on Literature, Culture, and Society with Bibliographical
and Media Resources. Spec. issue of Women in French
Studies. Ed. Catherine Montfort and Marie-Christine
Koop. (October 2002): 77-109.
“Proven Mid-Majors in Nine-Game Men’s
Event.” http://espn.go.com/ncb/news/2002/0808/1415628.html.
9 September 2003.
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