Greetings, everyone.  During the past year, my department, in response to a recent program review, has substantially revised its curriculum.  As part of that revision, we more carefully have defined the difference between 300- and 400-level courses.  I’ll spare you all the gory details of the revision, save one:  at the 400-level, we decided to strengthen our emphasis on student scholarship, so that our students can learn firsthand what it’s like to participate in authentic research and in the ongoing critical tradition of works and authors.  Because we will require all of our English and Creative Writing majors to take at least one 400-level course, we now have a need for many more such courses than we have offered in the past. 

I have taken advantage of this need to petition the department to add to its curriculum a course call “John Donne and his Critics,” a ten-week seminar devoted entirely to Donne’s life, poetry, and prose.  The course will provide a comprehensive introduction to Donne; but it also will give a thorough introduction to his critics—us—as well as the critical history of Donne studies.  In fact, as the title suggests, Donne’s critics will receive equal billing.  While we study Donne’s writings, we also will study what Donne scholars have written about them, and in this way, students will acquire both models for their own research writing as well as conversations in which to participate.  They also will develop (I hope) an understanding of why Donne scholars are so passionate about their subject matter. 

I think the course will be great fun to teach.

But it also will present challenges—the availability of texts and sources, for instance.  Our university library, while it has improved dramatically over the last few years especially, still contains noticeable gaps in Donne scholarship.  It has never subscribed to JDJ (a battle I continue to fight) and it lacks certain seminal volumes, like The Eagle and the Dove, one of the four or five Dearborn volumes that I also lack in my personal collection.  Of course, missing material can be obtained through our excellent interlibrary loan service and through a university library consortium called Summit.  But special orders are hardly an optimal way to furnish students with what amounts to a course text.  I shall have to decide how best to make available the scholarly work. 

Other challenges will be re-envisioning assignments (should I have a series of short skill-building papers before the final research project?  Should I have students do oral reports on various critics and/or debates?), deciding on a balance between Donne’s writings and the scholarship (how much scholarship can I expect my students to study during ten weeks?), and developing strategies for teaching students how to identify and then participate scholarly conversations as conversations.  These challenges prompt me to write to you today.  Whenever I create a new course, I start from the ground up and question every one of my assumptions.  For this reason, I am interested in hearing anyone’s suggestions about any aspect of this course.  If anyone has any great ideas, strategies, suggestions, or stories (both the triumphal and horror varieties) to share, I’d appreciate them.  Thanks.