Darren Howard
I see teaching and learning about literature not in terms of achieving mastery but of initiating a process. An English major does not master a body of knowledge so much as cultivate an active critical faculty and an ability to express ideas clearly and powerfully. Because critical reading requires the use of many skills at once, however, it is all too easy to confirm some students� preconception that analyzing literature is synonymous with ruining it. In my classes we overcome this difficulty by branching out from the pleasures of a text to the process of interpretation. Using exercises that draw attention to aspects of texts that students often find either grating or ingratiating, students focus on the various skills and methodologies that aid literary analysis one at a time, so that by the end of a course they have accumulated a broad range of tools and ideas for exploration. Class time is spent primarily in discussion, giving each student the opportunity to develop his or her own approach to a text and to the process of interpretation. We often structure our discussions around exercises that break interpretation into discrete tasks, so that reading itself becomes a process of exploration.
My research interests center historically on the literature of British Romanticism and branch out into the surrounding eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by exploring the causes and the effects of the extraordinary social upheavals that constitute the Romantic moment. I have two projects that I am currently working on. One is developing into a book my dissertation�s analysis of depictions of animals in the poetry, children�s literature, popular science, and political philosophy of the 1790s. While continuing to work on this project, I am also continuing another line of research that has always fascinated me: the divergence in the Romantic period between authors who write self-consciously �difficult� and �easy� texts. This phenomenon reveals much about the changing politics of reading and writing in a growing commercial marketplace and about the changing relationship of authors to their reading public. I am especially interested in the gendering of difficulty and clarity, the association of difficulty with the Orient, and the contrasting epistemologies of difficult and clear texts.
Interests
British Romanticism