Arthuriana

Introduction MAUD BURNETT MCINERNEY Some years ago, I got on a bus to the airport in Charleston, South Carolina, with Maureen Fries. I had recently finished teaching a course on Arthurian literature to undergraduates for the first time, and I was unhappy with the experience. I had underestimated my students' interest in the material and their competence to read medieval texts, even in translation, and I had overestimated my own ability to engage them with the material. In effect, I given no thought to pedagogy but had somehow assumed the material would teach itself. Maureen, ofcourse, had advice for me. 'What I do,' she told me, 'is make each of them produce a bibliography on a single character, right at the beginning of the term. That way, however much they know or don't know coming into the classroom, they start to identify with Guenevere or Galahad or Gareth, and soon they are experts on the transformations ofat least that one figure.' This advice seems simple but it has the effect ofempowering the student from the very beginning ofthe course, ofreconfiguring the usually hierarchical nature of the classroom and creating a learner-centered environment in which everyone can be an authority at least some ofthe time. It also focuses the attention of both student and instructor on questions of identity and identification. The course on Arthurian Legends that eventually developed from this conversation aims to create, complicate, reinforce and challenge a variety of identities and identifications, in order to throw into relief the way that they are shaped through opposition and reaction. It attempts to get at the way that identity itself (self-assumed or imposed, national or ethnic, personal or social) is inevitably the product ofideology. I tell this anecdote to indicate how an apparently slight shift in teaching method can develop into an entire pedagogical strategy. Maureen's influence on the present collection, however, is not limited to having initiated my own interest in Arthurian pedagogies. She was the co-editor (with Jeanie Watson) ofthe MLAApproaches to TeachingtheArthurian Tradition, which appeared in 1992.' That volume remains an essential resource for teachers ofmedieval arthuriana 15.4 (2005) 4 ARTHURIANA literature, but it is our hope that the present issue ofArthuriana may provide a useful supplement to it. In the years sinceApproachesappeared, pedagogical theoryhas evolved in provocative directions; increasingly, pedagogyhas come to be understood as notsimplypragmatic but both political and theoretical. In the post-modern classroom, questions concerning whar we teach, what we do worteach, how we engage notions ofthe canon and canonicity, have become more and more pressing—most pressing ofall, perhaps, for medievalists who often find themselves driven to defend the relevance of their area ofstudy, largely populated as it is by dead white males. In an essay titled 'The Subject of Literary and the Subject of Cultural Studies,' Antony Easthope suggests that: 'at a point well short of tadical institutional change, it is possible to reshape the force and forms of particular academic discourses and rhe subjectivities they seek to effect. One such intervention involves introducing cultural studies on the terrain traditionally occupied by the teaching ofthe canonical wotks of a national litetatute.' Several ofthe essays in this collection model such interventions. Other essays confront the fact that the demographics of courses on medieval literature have changed in interesting ways; increasingly we find ourselves teaching non-majors, students whose reasons for being in the classroom are very different from those that placed us there in the (sometimes remote!) days of our own undergraduate careers. At the graduate level, as the last two essays in this volume suggest, it has become increasingly important for the instructor to think not only about the material he or she teaches, but about the skill sets he or she can provide for students as they begin careers either inside or outside ofthe academy. The bibliography that accompanies these essays is eclectic; it includes a wide variety of teaching resources (from musical recordings to websites to manuscript facsimiles to collections ofessays on pedagogical theory). It lists few scholarly editions oftexts, preferring instead translations and collections that are, in one way or another, particularly teachable. Other teaching tools, including syllabi of the courses described...