Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 “Je suis Voltaire,” or, Appropriating the Philosophe in the Social Media Age
- 2 “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story?”: The Uses of Hamilton in Special Collections Pedagogy and Public Engagement
- 3 Performing Frankenstein in the South: Sex, Race, and Science across the Disciplines
- 4 French Fairy Tales and Adaptations in the Twenty-First-Century Classroom
- 5 Select Trials at the Sessions-House in the Old-Bailey (1742) and Mark Ravenhill’s Mother Clap’s Molly House (2001)
- 6 Teaching with The Pilgrim’s Progress Video Game
- 7 Eliza Haywood’s “Bad Habits”: Teaching Adaptations of Fantomina: or, Love in a Maze and The Distress’d Orphan; or, Love in a Madhouse
- 8 Teaching Eighteenth-Century Literature through Eighteenth- Century Adaptations: Adaptive Structures
- 9 “A Private Had Been Flogged”: Adaptation and the “Invisible World” of Jane Austen
- 10 Fifty Shades of Pamela in the Undergraduate Classroom
- 11 Teaching the Austen-Monster-Mashup: Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters
- 12 Learning to Adapt: Teaching Pride and Prejudice and Its Adaptations in General Education Courses
- 13 Race and Romance: Adapting Free Women of Color in the Long Eighteenth Century
- 14 The Crusoeiana: Material Crusoe
- 15 Adaptation in Strange Places: Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder and the Narrative Effect and Form of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela
- 16 Adapting the Tombeaux des Princes: A Study in Media Variations
- 17 Experiential Pedagogy to Join the Thread of Conversation with Paul et Virginie
- 18 “Lookin’ for a Mind at Work”: Hamilton, Adaptation, and Enlightenment Ideals for the Core Curriculum
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
18 - “Lookin’ for a Mind at Work”: Hamilton, Adaptation, and Enlightenment Ideals for the Core Curriculum
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 April 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 “Je suis Voltaire,” or, Appropriating the Philosophe in the Social Media Age
- 2 “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story?”: The Uses of Hamilton in Special Collections Pedagogy and Public Engagement
- 3 Performing Frankenstein in the South: Sex, Race, and Science across the Disciplines
- 4 French Fairy Tales and Adaptations in the Twenty-First-Century Classroom
- 5 Select Trials at the Sessions-House in the Old-Bailey (1742) and Mark Ravenhill’s Mother Clap’s Molly House (2001)
- 6 Teaching with The Pilgrim’s Progress Video Game
- 7 Eliza Haywood’s “Bad Habits”: Teaching Adaptations of Fantomina: or, Love in a Maze and The Distress’d Orphan; or, Love in a Madhouse
- 8 Teaching Eighteenth-Century Literature through Eighteenth- Century Adaptations: Adaptive Structures
- 9 “A Private Had Been Flogged”: Adaptation and the “Invisible World” of Jane Austen
- 10 Fifty Shades of Pamela in the Undergraduate Classroom
- 11 Teaching the Austen-Monster-Mashup: Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters
- 12 Learning to Adapt: Teaching Pride and Prejudice and Its Adaptations in General Education Courses
- 13 Race and Romance: Adapting Free Women of Color in the Long Eighteenth Century
- 14 The Crusoeiana: Material Crusoe
- 15 Adaptation in Strange Places: Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder and the Narrative Effect and Form of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela
- 16 Adapting the Tombeaux des Princes: A Study in Media Variations
- 17 Experiential Pedagogy to Join the Thread of Conversation with Paul et Virginie
- 18 “Lookin’ for a Mind at Work”: Hamilton, Adaptation, and Enlightenment Ideals for the Core Curriculum
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
Summary
Two challenges. Number one: a literary scholar of the long British eighteenth century—with particular expertise in gender theory and intersectionality, women's writing, the novel, and film adaptations—wants to keep teaching those subjects in an era of dwindling English majors. Number two: said liter- ary scholar has opted into teaching a new core-curriculum seminar designed specifically for first-year students that has a multitude of student learning objectives. The course “commandments”: choose any focus you like, but you must address the common learning goals that include helping students to read challenging texts, acquire research skills, critically assess the issue of “the greater good” from multiple (interdisciplinary) perspectives, develop strong mentoring relationships, begin to identify their vocations, and succeed at college. The solution: take a shot at harnessing adaptation theory and the fan culture surrounding the richly complex and wildly popular Broadway musical Hamilton. Close study of the musical presents opportunities to teach students research methods and best practices for college success, as well as to explore challenging eighteenth-century source texts, modern issues of creative adaptation and appropriation, and the human rights paradoxes enacted during the founding of our country that remain ongoing, urgent issues in American society.
Because I am a specialist in eighteenth-century Britain, Hamilton's context is a bit out of my comfort zone. Despite being a product of a good public school system and having vivid memories of mindlessly marching around in the mid-winter Michigan sludge for my role as a Continental Army soldier in a fourth-grade enactment of the encampment at Valley Forge, colonial America is not my area of expertise. I have twice taught the first-year semi- nar course with a focus on “Adapting Jane Austen,” which students deemed too challenging, citing the reading load in particular. But how could I teach only one Jane Austen novel? Which of the works in the revered Austen canon would go to the guillotine? In a Hamilton course, I feel no compulsion toward “coverage.” Indeed, despite the title, the course devotes very little time to Alexander Hamilton himself. Nevertheless, the topic provides myriad ways to introduce students to transatlantic eighteenth-century content, the “chal- lenging texts” I am trained to read and teach.
- Type
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- Information
- Adapting the Eighteenth CenturyA Handbook of Pedagogies and Practices, pp. 282 - 296Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2020