The CEA Forum - Summer/Fall 2009 - TEACHING ELIOT TO THE NET GENERATION

Oct 15, 2026

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“Teaching Eliot to the Net Generation” examines how digital pedagogy affects undergraduate literature teaching, arguing that students’ online research habits can be guided toward greater intellectual rigor. The author describes revising an assignment on Eliot and allusion after initial reports proved dull while internet use produced insightful essays. The essay evaluates hypertext versions of The Waste Land, considers scholarly concerns about reading stability and electronic text, and presents hypertext’s links and network structure as a potentially enhanced learning tool.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages6

Reading Time15 min

AccessFree to download

GOOGLING ALLUSIONS: TEACHING ELIOT TO THE NET GENERATION

Digital research techniques and assignment redesign

Hypertext editions in the classroom

Debates on stability vs. participatory hypertext

The CEA Forum Summer/Fall 2009: 38.2 Next: Filling in the Blanks: They Say, I Say, and the Persistence of Formalism GOOGLING ALLUSIONS: TEACHING ELIOT TO THE NET GENERATION Ann K. Hoff For years, I resisted digital pedagogy. My students' propensity to find and use other classrooms' online discussions, endless numbers of un-authored encyclopedia entries, blogs about poets by their untutored fans, and other students'papers fueled my ambivalence. However, students of the Net Generation are not merely computer proficient; they are computer fluent. Students in 2010 address most of their college administrative obligations online; text message and email systems inform them of school closings or class cancellations. Electronic communication is their main mode of interaction with peers and often with their professors. And while it may not occur to my students to turn to the informational notes at the back of a text (or for that matter to read those provided at the bottom of a page), they are quick to “Google” a phrase they suspect to be an allusion. Their instinct, when seeking information, is to seek it online. Do we accept and harness this impulse or resist it? Adopting an informed technological approach to teaching literature has the potential to increase intellectualism and academic rigor rather than reducing either. In this essay, I offer some of the theory behind my pedagogical change of heart, the sources and resources that enabled such a shift, and the results my students were able to achieve because of it. In particular, I trace the experience of teaching the course “Eliot and Allusion” in a computer-classroom environment. I will also address the merits and drawbacks to teaching with a hypertext version of The Waste Land; the efficacy of permitting students to read web-based editions of the texts to which Eliot alludes; and the results achieved by establishing and supporting“healthy” digital research techniques. My change of heart occurred in the process of teaching an assignment on Eliot and allusion to undergraduates in a Modern Poetry survey course for majors. My assignment specified that students begin with a footnote from an annotated edition of The Waste Land and thoroughly investigate the root of one of Eliot's allusions. My directions warned against internet searching, fearing that students would find prefabricated analyses rather than performing their own. The reports I received from students who followed my directions were accurate, obedient, predictable, and dull. The students who defied my instructions and went to the Internet turned in some startlingly insightful and original essays, having found primary sources not noted in our annotated edition or not available in our perpetually underfunded library. Since then, I have altered not only my instructions for this undergraduate assignment, but have altered the syllabus for my graduate-level course “Eliot and Allusion,” which I now teach in a computer-classroom, using predominantly digital texts. Let me first address the use of a hypertext edition for classroom use. The use of hypertext is not without controversy. Some theorists contend, as does David Miall, that the practice of “reading imaginative texts such as novels or poetry, is rendered incomprehensible by the model of reading put forth by hypertext theory”(par. 4) . Miall argues that the hypertext experience instills in the reader a “false sense of…freedom” and that “the disembodied nature of electronic text precludes much that is most significant in the process of literary reading, which depends on the reader's affective engagement with a stable text”(par. 4) . Certainly, scholars want the stability of Eliot's own notes, and permanent, durable links to reputable scholarship. A sloppy hypertext will not serve any more than a sloppily edited print edition, and Eliot scholars are notoriously hard on sloppy editions of the poet's work. Jim McCue's article “Editing Eliot” asserts that “we are ent

FAQs

Why did the author initially resist digital pedagogy?

The author expected students would default to derivative online content, such as forum discussions, un-authored encyclopedia entries, and casual blogs, leading to dull work.

What changed after students ignored the “no internet searching” instruction?

Students who used the internet produced more original and insightful essays by finding primary sources beyond the annotated edition and beyond limited library holdings.

What is discussed regarding using hypertext editions of The Waste Land?

The essay weighs concerns about hypertext making imaginative reading incomprehensible and undermining stable engagement, against arguments that hypertext’s links and shifting structure can better reflect Eliot’s destabilized, networked allusions.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by SANS