TEXT D It is possible for
students to obtain advanced degrees in English while knowing little or nothing
about traditional scholarly methods. The consequences of this neglect of
traditional scholarship are particularly unfortunate for the study of women
writers. If the canon--the list of authors whose works are most widely
taught--is ever to include more women, scholars must be well trained in
historical scholarship and textual editing. Scholars who do not know how to read
early manuscripts, locate rare books, establish a sequence of editions, and so
on are bereft of crucial tools for revising the canon. To
address such concerns, an experimental version of the traditional scholarly
methods course was designed to raise students’ consciousness about the
usefulness of traditional learning for any modern critic or theorist. To
minimize the artificial aspects of the conventional course, the usual procedure
of assigning a large number of small problems drawn from the entire range of
historical periods was abandoned, though this procedure has the obvious
advantage of at least superficially familiarizing students with a wide range of
reference sources. Instead students were engaged in a collective effort to do
original work on a neglected eighteenth-century writer, Elizabeth Griffith, to
give them an authentic experience of literary scholarship and to inspire them to
take responsibility for the quality of their own work.
Griffith’s work presented a number of advantages for this particular
pedagogical purpose. First, the body of extant scholarship on Griffith was
so tiny that it could all be read in a day; thus students spent little time and
effort mastering the literature and had a clear field for their own discoveries.
Griffith’s play The Platonic Wife exists in three versions, enough to provide
illustrations of editorial issues but not too many for beginning students to
manage. In addition, because Griffith was successful in the eighteenth century,
as her continued productivity and favorable reviews demonstrate, her exclusion
from the canon and virtual disappearance from literary history also helped raise
issues concerning the current canon. The range of Griffith’s
work meant that each student could become the world’s leading authority on a
particular Griffith text. For example, a student studying Griffith’s Wife in the
Right obtained a first edition of the play and studied it for some weeks. This
student was suitably shocked and outraged to find its title transformed into A
Wife in the Night in Watt’s Bibliotheca Britannica. Such experiences, inevitable
and common in working on a writer to whom so little attention has been paid,
serve to vaccinate the student--I hope for a lifetime against credulous use of
reference sources. (433) Which of the following best states the "particular pedagogical purpose" underlined in paragraph 3
A．To assist scholars in revising the canon of authors. B．To provide students with information about Griffith’s work. C．To encourage scholarly rigor in students’ own research. D．To reestablish Griffith’s reputation as an author.