All Things ASE
Teaching the Gothic: exploring and expanding traditions.
ASE tutor Evan Hayles Gledhill shares their experience of redesigning and teaching ASE seminar course Queering the Gothic.
Perhaps the most rewarding, difficult, and enjoyable task for a university lecturer is the construction of a cohesive programme of study.
You start with a blank timetable provided by your organisation, and try to address both a gap in the subject matter currently on offer to students, and a gap in their knowledge and skills base. You try to balance your desire to communicate all your expertise in a topic, against what is possible and reasonable to cover in a limited time period. You want to provide an overview of existing scholarship, including a range of views and approaches, but not to create confusion. You want students to practise useful skills, but this means designing assessments that don’t just encourage a regurgitation of what they think their tutor wants to hear! And, perhaps most difficult of all, you want to generate a genuine interest in the subject for your students.
In 2022, I came to teach at ASE as a replacement for a friend and colleague, taking over an existing course on Queer Gothic literature. I was handed a six-week module and asked to expand that into a full semester’s worth of study, aligning with the original description of the aims, methods, and research outputs. I had huge fun expanding the readings to cover the full history of the Gothic, reaching back to the late eighteenth century from the twenty-first, introducing film and television adaptations of classic texts to trace themes and characters through time. Where the original module set text list included Interview with the Vampire (1976) by Anne Rice, I also added Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories (1992) - both are vampire novels that span two hundred years of American colonial history, the first through the eyes of the white European settler, and the latter from the perspective of the formerly enslaved and indigenous populations. With a longer module on a very specific topic you can look beyond the ‘big names’ and the mainstream texts, to explore the overlooked publication or the ‘lost classic’ of an earlier era.
It was really exciting, as a researcher, to be able to introduce students to connections I have made in my own work and see how they respond to new framings for their traditional assigned reading. Part of my own research into the Gothic is looking at its development through fandom. Genre fiction often relies upon a smaller and dedicated audience, as it is traditionally excluded from mainstream ideas of literature. Enjoying Clara Reeve’s historical fiction The Old English Baron, written in the 1770s and set during the early fifteenth century, can be difficult as the language and gender politics of the text are deliberately regressive. However, framing Reeve’s engagement with the emerging Gothic genre through the concept of transformative works and fan fiction enabled me to make new connections. In this context, I encouraged students to think about why an educated woman like Reeve might choose to write from the perspective of a man, when so many of her contemporaries were dedicated to exploring women’s interiority, and we explored interviews with contemporary fanfic authors who rewrite existing male characters. This introduced thinking about audiences and publishing contexts into our literary analysis.
The freedom that ASE has offered to me, in developing modular programmes of study in Gothic literature, has really stretched and developed my skills as a tutor just as I have sought to develop the skills of my students. ASE has highly organised and well-established administrative protocols, meaning that new tutors are provided with clear templates and structures, encouraging the setting of clear aims and outputs for students and staff alike. But within these module plans and timetables, the academic content itself is left entirely in the hands of the subject expert, creating what seems to be an ideal balance between freedom of topic and approach, with quality control and student expectations in mind. I have now been teaching at ASE for two years, and have been told that my module will be offered again in the next academic year. And this continuity enables me to refine my teaching methods, and align ever more accurately my module parameters to the needs of the students who choose ASE.
I knew that all the students who are offered a place with this programme of study are achieving high grades in their home institutions, but I have been consistently impressed by not only the skills and abilities of the student body, but also their willingness to approach new styles of learning. I admit I was a little over ambitious in my first year, trying to encourage students to work more collaboratively than they were perhaps used to, which created some anxiety around how grading would be handled. However, this expansion of the possibilities of what teaching and the university experience can be is, I think, one of the reasons students sign up for this programme in the first place. The opportunity to live and study outside your home institution and country is not just about spending your weekends in Amsterdam or Edinburgh, when your base is closer to some desirable holiday destinations. The students I have taught at ASE have all enjoyed discussing, outside and inside the classroom, the experience of living and learning in an environment governed by different traditions and expectations, both social and institutional.
In discussing this module I have built with the students, and listening to their feedback, I am already exploring the changes I will be making in its delivery in 2024. I adjusted some of the tasks I set for students in this second year of running the class, now that I have a better understanding of the differences between teaching in the UK and the USA, making sure that I am smoothing the edges of the joins between their experience at home and abroad. Next year, I am planning on making some changes to the set texts, to draw out the specificity of nationality in the Gothic of North America and the UK as interlinked but distinct literary traditions. It disappointed me how few students knew of the rich history of the Gothic in the American literary canon, from Charles Brockden Brown to Joyce Carol Oates. It might be ironic that they’ll get a good grounding in this by travelling to Europe, but it is often said that a physical distance can help one to obtain a critical distance. For me ASE has provided the same – an institution one removed from the British University where I am usually based, which enables me to reflect on my practices as a tutor and a researcher, and to consider, reflect upon, and incorporate aspects of other educational traditions and practices.