Directions: Read the
following text carefully and then translate the underlined segments into
Chinese.
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. 46． 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. 47．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. 48．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 theobvious 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.
49．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. 50．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.