Today’s post is geared toward foreign language instructors, who are tasked with finding creative ways to make things like grammar and vocabulary come alive for their students. In language classes, it’s common to have students try to describe things like their ideal outfit or favorite food to build their skills. Why not use digital collections as material for such assignments to challenge students and expand their vocabulary?

You could project or give out copies of the images – should we ever see the inside of a classroom ever again – and have students work in groups to describe what they see to the class, but I suspect that only works at advanced levels and can easily overlook shy students. In an introductory language course, I would make this a take-home writing assignment, so students can take the time to look up and absorb new vocabulary. This means they can “write-to-learn” rather than write for evaluation by their instructor; another component to this assignment would be to have the students read what they’ve written to the class, so they can practice pronunciation and so forth. In a remote learning situation, I would send the students a folder with images culled from these digital collections, have them write a description of what they see, and hand it in to me or read it to the class as part of their nebulous participation grade. I could also see this working as an extra credit opportunity.

I would assign a few of these over the course of a semester, and try to align the images I choose with the material from the unit we’re covering, so students can build on a type of vocabulary and hopefully create mental associations for themselves. So, for example, if a language unit deals with nature or animal-related vocabulary, I would try zoological illustrations: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/collections/birds-of-eastern-north-america-with-original-descriptions-of-all-the-species#/?tab=about&scroll=15

For a unit on clothing, I would use midcentury fashion illustrations: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/collections/andr-fashion-illustrations-from-nypls-picture-collection#/?tab=navigation

For a unit on cities, try this collection of vintage photos of New York:   https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/collections/collection-of-photographs-of-new-york-city-new-york-state-and-more-by-max#/?tab=navigation&scroll=42

On this rainy spring day, I want to bring your attention to NYPL’s collection of American book posters from the turn of the century; the ones available online belonged to the collector Anna Palmer Draper and are dated between 1895 and 1911.

Literature instructors could use these posters to talk to students about the literary field of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The majority of the posters in this collection are advertising so-called popular books that are forgotten today. Looking at these posters in class could be a way to reflect on the differences between “serious” and “popular” literature, the legitimacy of these classifications, and how such distinctions continue to affect media today.

Another possible activity would be to have students go through this archive at home, choose a book poster, and write a short essay (no longer than a page or two) about their impression of it. What can they glean about the book from studying the advertisement? Who might be the intended audience? etc.

The full collection can be accessed here: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/collections/posters-american-book-posters#/?tab=about&scroll=3. 

Today’s post is a short one to highlight the Morgan’s online exhibitions, some of which could be useful for literature instructors, particularly as we continue to exclusively teach online during this pandemic. I’m not teaching this semester but, if I were, I would be thinking about ways to teach poetry without the communal reading experience the classroom provides. 

One of the Morgan’s offerings is part of a 2017 exhibition on Emily Dickinson, who is probably my favorite poet to teach. The online exhibitions can be found here: https://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/online/emily-dickinson. I would have students read or listen to the poems in the slideshow outside of class and then write about their experience encountering one of the poems.

One way to talk about an author’s positionality is by highlighting the material conditions around the dissemination of their writing. Did their work circulate informally, through salons or a similar system, or was it formally published? What advantages did they or did they not have, and how did this impact their success or lack thereof? Jane Austen, as is well known, published all her novels anonymously, although her authorship eventually became an open secret. Her brother, Henry, was a successful London banker, and he played an important role in getting her novels published as well as spreading the word about her writing to influential people. Austen earned a decent income from her writing but remained dependent on family for housing. The shift from aristocratic or patron-supported writing to writers who made their living through writing is important to understanding the development of the novel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Focusing on the publishing industry helps students appreciate the economic limitations placed on women of the time, especially those with writerly ambitions.

Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey is a great option for thinking about this because of the unique circumstances around its publication. There were a few options for writers trying to publish their work in the early nineteenth century. When Austen sought to publish Northanger Abbey in 1803, she sold the copyright to Crosby & Company for 10 pounds with the understanding that it would soon be published; however, Crosby never actually published it, and Austen’s brother was unable to recover the copyright until 1816. Because of this, the novel wasn’t published until after Austen’s death in 1817 (http://jasna.org/austen/works/northanger-abbey/), by which point its critique of the sexist discourse around novels was less relevant. Because of Austen’s early negative experience selling the copyright to her work, the four novels she did publish within her life were all done on commission. This meant that the publisher would advance the costs of publication, first repay itself as books sold, and then charge a percentage-based commission for the rest of the books sold, with the author getting the rest of the profits. If a novel did not make a profit for the publisher through sales, the author was responsible for repaying the publisher; this was of course a financial risk for the author, but it at least guaranteed the book would be published. A third possibility was to sell by subscription, in which a group of people would agree to buy a book in advance, whether it was published serially or in its entirety. However, only writers who were already known or who had influential friends could benefit from this option. 

I’ve used this “business of publishing” approach with my students with success, particularly for those studying business and marketing. My proposal for an in-class writing assignment is the following: have students choose a character from whichever Austen novel they’re reading, imagine that this character wrote a book, and think about which publishing option they might choose and why. To make this more challenging, have them choose minor characters only. This is a great way get them thinking about class in these novels beyond the confines of marriage.

In literature survey courses, I typically teach slave narratives like Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) or Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) as part of my unit on the nineteenth century. As The New York Times Magazine reported this summer, {https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/19/magazine/slavery-american-schools.html}, there is “widespread slavery illiteracy” among American students. Therefore, instructors must take care to historicize and contextualize slave narratives and other abolitionist literature as the radical texts that they were, rather than the canonized texts that they now are.

One way to provide this necessary context is to show students fugitive slave advertisements like these, which were both sourced from NYPL’s digital collections. These documents portray the orthodoxy of the time period and what abolitionists were fighting to change.

As an in-class writing assignment, I would give students one or both of these ads and ask them to respond to the following question: What are the assumed sympathies of the reader of this advertisement? I would also ask them to reflect on the differences between the two documents.

While doing research for this assignment, I came across Freedom on the Move {https://freedomonthemove.org/}, a database that will compile newspaper advertisements for enslaved people. Although the database is not yet completed, it should be a great resource for anyone teaching the history of American slavery.