Month: August 2014

Andreá N. Williams
The Ohio State University

I taught The Factory Girl in an undergraduate survey, Colonial and U.S. Literature to 1865. Given my own research interests in class and labor in nineteenth-century U.S. fiction, as in my book Dividing Lines: Class Anxiety and Postbellum Black Fiction (Michigan, 2013), I wanted to draw my students’ attention to a number of nineteenth-century texts that both highlight and obscure labor. Elsewhere in the class, we read Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and “The Tartarus of Maids,” Rebecca Harding Davis’s “Life in the Iron Mills,” and slave narratives that expose African American labor exploitation. Savage’s text was a useful addition to the course. In the introduction to The Factory Girl, editors Ed White and Duncan Faherty immediately note the text for its “lack of industrial details.” This observation led our class to consider two opening questions: How do authors write about work without showing it? If the text’s major setting isn’t the workplace, where does the titular factory girl perform her most central work? Using a more liberal understanding of “work,” our class traced the various forms of labor that the protagonist Mary performs, including factory work, teaching, childrearing, and the affective labor of producing moral sentiments in her friends and neighbors. Overall, the book was well-received by students, and I would teach it again. Continue reading “Representing Women’s Work”

Max White
Northeastern University

Allow me to begin with a digression – an overview of my teaching circumstances, and how I managed to “just teach one” – before I present some of my students’ responses to Sarah Savage’s The Factory Girl. As a graduate student at a large institution without a sizeable population of English majors, my teaching opportunities are abundant in quantity, but limited to composition classes. Thus, I taught The Factory Girl in a course not usually associated with literature – at all – let alone early nineteenth-century novels: Advanced Writing in Business Administration. The course fulfills the second of the university’s two undergraduate writing requirements, and “focus[es] on the writing skills necessary for creating effective documents and presentations in the business world,” according to my syllabus. However, the course really is more complicated than a paint-by-numbers approach to memo writing: students “develop expertise in audience analysis, critical research, peer review, and revision” and “generate and pursue lines of inquiry and search, collect, and select sources appropriate to their writing projects,” again, according to the syllabus (here, a combination of my own course description and the Writing Program Learning Goals). Student research and writing provides the vast majority of the course materials, and class meetings consist of lectures, workshops, and roundtables that emphasize research conventions, audience, genre, and style as analytical categories through which students can better understand scholarly and professional writing in their fields. In other words, the course is informed by analytical, rhetorical, and discursive skills that are foundational to the humanities, even as it trains future business professionals. Continue reading ““The Business of ‘The Factory Girl’””

Thomas Hallock
University of South Florida
thallock@usfsp.edu

We hate directives that come from above. The Provost attends some conference on educational leadership, maybe reads the latest pedagogical trend, then then asks faculty to revamp an entire curriculum. A few years back, faced with accreditation woes, my campus buzzed with assessment talk. The terms felt like factory education. The acronyms threatened to crush my soul: Academic Learning Compacts (ALC’s), Student Learning Outcomes (SLO’s).

But my department did something smart: we worked ahead of deadline. Facing budget cuts, we took the opportunity to justify our own relevance and framed Student Learning Outcomes around courses we already taught. I drew up this SLO for early American literature: develop a knowledge of literary or artistic conventions, rhetorical or metaphorical figures, or forms characteristic of specific modes, genres, or traditions. Continue reading “Factory Teaching”