Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

Literature remained a favored means for instruction in academic institutions, yet
the recent developments at the forefront of the literary scene prompted a shift in
pedagogy, particularly in the way texts were to be presented to students. Ross explains
that literature in schools began to be considered as something to be didactically taught
and not merely presented, claiming that Addison’s notes on Paradise Lost probably
inspired Greenwood’s The Virgin Muse (1717), which provides the first example of an
anthology intended to teach poetry (221). In 1751, Benjamin Franklin suggested that
schools teach the great authors, while in 1743 James Barclay emphasized the importance
of students’ reading and understanding texts (Ross 222). Ross argues that “such
statements are of notable historical significance, for they suggest how pedagogical
practice was being redefined in radical ways during the period,” and he describes how
eventually, schools (particularly universities) became the canon-makers (223-24). In
addition, teaching literature “was turned into an object to study, to be valued less as a
mode of symbolic exchange than as a type of moral technology that could enrich students
by virtue of the labor required to understand and appreciate it” (Ross 226-27)—an
attitude that echoes Plato’s statements in The Republic. By the 1770s, both Adam Smith
and Hugh Blair revived the Platonic idea that literature serves an educational purpose and
saw it is as a means of improving students’ “style and conduct” (Ross 227). The latter
claimed literature could “embellish his [the student’s] mind and supply him with
entertainment” and help the student “arrive at a much more desirable state of self-
knowledge,” which could become his moral foundation (Ross 228). As literature became
something to be studied, the commercially profitable contemporary adaptations of
Shakespeare were popular, but lost “cultural legitimacy,” as Shakespeare came to be seen
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