ABSTRACT
This collection of essays offers us an opportunity to reflect upon broader and more far-reaching matters than we generally talk about in our conference papers, write in our articles, and teach in our classrooms. In each of those formats, we have trained ourselves, following various academic conventions, to focus sharply on our particular subject and to explore it within certain set parameters or limits. These may involve time—the twenty-minute conference paper, for instance,—or they may involve space, like the 5,000- to 8,000- word essay. In the classroom, these parameters involve time in several ways. Most of us teach within a semester- or a quarter-based curriculum, which shapes and constrains how we define, organize, and focus our material: teaching “Romantic poetry” in ten weeks, for example, is a very different task than teaching it in fifteen weeks, both in terms of content and in terms of pacing. This is of course equally so for the students, who are exposed in these two different curricular “packages” to what are often strikingly different representations of the subject matter.
