(*Chronicle of Higher Education*, March 19, 1999, B 11)
We recognized a dozen years ago the problem lamented by James Shapiro in his February 12 editorial: “When Brevity Rules the Syllabus, ‘Ulysses’ is Lost.” Shapiro lamented that, more and more often, faculty assign short works like “Daisy Miller,” “Heart of Darkness,” and *Hard Times* instead of important long works like *Wings of the Dove*, *Nostromo*, and *Our Mutual Friend* simply because the latter are longer than our students’ time for reading. In several forums, we made a similar assertion: “Many long novels, in fact, are often simply excluded from syllabi in favor of shorter, more manageable, but often less important works. We read Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" instead of the longer classic David Copperfield; we teach George Eliot's "Silas Marner" instead of her masterpiece, *Middlemarch*; students are assigned Dostoevsky's "Notes from the Underground" instead of the incomparable *Brothers Karamazov*.” But we also advocated a solution: “these famous works of long fiction and poetry can be brought back into the canon and, thus, to the common knowledge of educated Americans; we simply need to return to the original serial format in which they appeared.”
In a
March 18, 1987 *Chronicle of Higher Education* "Ideas for the Classroom"
feature, we admitted: "Because of time constraints, major works are
often left out of introductory [literature] classes." But we were
already adopting
"the serial-reading method to teach large works of poetry,
such as Byron's *Childe Harold* and Tennyson's *Idylls of the King* . .
. originally published in serial form, over a period of several years"
(17).
Serialization is one of the most often mentioned but perhaps least measured facts that account for how some works of literature, particularly long ones, achieved canonical status. Even *Ulysses* began its U.S. publication as a serial in the *Little Review* (1918-1920) until installments were abruptly terminated when the U.S. Postal Service deemed that it violated obscenity laws. Also in America, Harriet Beecher Stowe's *Uncle Tom's Cabin*, Twain's *Pudd'nhead Wilson*, James's *Portrait of a Lady*, and William Carlos Williams’s *Paterson* were first absorbed by reading audiences in installments. Installment publication was also widespread in European literature in the nineteenth century. Flaubert's *Madame Bovary* and Tolstoy's *Anna Karenina*, for example, originally appeared in parts.
Several studies have examined how authors adapted to the serial format, making sure each number provided entertainment enough to be read by itself and yet also crafting the novel to fit into a larger work of art. Some general assumptions about the serial audience's experience are also frequently maintained--that readers, for instance, were always eager to find out "what happens next" in serial stories. Even more frequently, academic scholarship analyzes fiction without reference to this temporal dimension of the text's publication and readers' consumption of it amidst regularly scheduled interruptions.
As Shapiro’s essay implies, contemporary course offerings also tend to approach distinguished long works within foreshortened time frames, refusing to acknowledge installment structure. Typically, university literature curricula insist on compressing the many parts of serial stories into a single unit, a giant pill to be swallowed whole (or gag the patient). Modernist critical tenets dictated that works of art should be read and taught as autonomous, whole entities, and the influence persists even into a post-Modernist era. Works are traditionally assigned to be read in their entirety before class discussion or lecture, or in three or four large chunks, as we assume was the case with Shapiro’s unsatisfactory effort to teach Eliot’s *Daniel Deronda* (which first appeared in eight monthly half-volumes from to February-September 1876). Long stories can add depth and substance to courses from the freshman level to the graduate program, however, when read in installments over an academic term, semester, or year.
Of course, the academic schedule does not run in nineteenth-month terms, the standard length for a Dickens long novel like *Dombey and Son* (which originally appeared from October 1846-April 1848). However, one can still copy the installment format in the current academic calendar by assigning, say, two parts every week to complete a long novel in ten weeks, discussing the featured long work on only one class a week (or even part of a class), while other days are devoted to different works both short and long. The extended relationship with a single work fostered by this approach is common in literary history, both in recognized eras of serialization (the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) and in earlier centuries when families, communities, and even nations engaged in the reading and discussion of classics (in both senses) for months and years rather than a single day or week. An inspiration for Joyce’s *Ulysses*--now perhaps unteachable, according to Shapiro--was Homer’s *Odyssey*, a work recited over many days and on different occasions, certainly not bound up in a single volume. Much later, though still early in the era of print culture, Edmund Spenser published the first three books of *The Faerie Queene* in 1590, the second three books in 1596; and the *Mutability Cantos* did not appear until 1609, several years after Spenser's death.
In our classes in the last decade we have taught successfully many of the works Shapiro insists are disappearing from the canon: Dickens's *Bleak House*, Conrad's *Lord Jim*, Tennyson’s *Idylls of the King*. Given the demands on students’ time identified by Shapiro, these works might not have been read within the conventional format, with students responsible for finishing the whole thing in a week. But when students are assigned shorter units over many weeks, they read carefully, critically, and, generally, with considerable pleasure. Moving through installments (made like original audiences to "wait" for what makes them "laugh" and what makes them "cry"), they discover that they actually enjoy long works of literature. And with long works they encounter complex statements about the human condition on the grand scale Shapiro sees slipping away from us.
While not all long works were originally serialized, such as James’s *The Wings of the Dove*, these works, too, can be broken up Into units of reasonable reading length--three to five chapters, say--and assigned serially over the course of a semester. Our students keep the different story lines of multiple titles straight in their minds as effectively as they watch different television soap operas, remain members of disparate social groups, and take simultaneously courses in different literary periods or genres. It’s not the length of a work that prevents its being taught, then, but the way in which professors assign them to be read and discussed. Whatever novels and poems teachers “across the ideological spectrum” want to teach, they can do so by reviving reading in parts.