Collegiate partnership fosters appreciation for Jane Austen

There?s more to an author than can be found between the pages of her books, as students taking Jane Austen seminars at Union and Skidmore colleges learned firsthand, thanks to exhibits on both campuses that have given them a deeper appreciation for the beloved 19th-century British novelist.

As a result, Phyllis Roth, professor of English at Skidmore, and Annette LeClair, associate librarian and head of technical services at Union?s Schaffer Library, will give an invited talk on Jane Austen?s legacy at the annual meeting of the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA) next October. They will present their findings at a session titled ?Exhibiting the Learning: Jane Austen on Display.?

?We found that working on a library exhibit enhances more conventional classroom experiences,? said LeClair. She added, ?It responds to different learning styles and fosters new relationships among audiences.?

Roth and LeClair met when Roth went to Union a year ago as part of the Mellon faculty exchange program that supports faculty career development.

Undergraduates in Austen seminars offered on both campuses in recent years have produced a series of library exhibits featuring Austen texts, contexts, ephemera, images, and scholarly and popular interpretations of Austen?s life and work. Roth taught the seminars, supervised and evaluated student work, and supplied much of the exhibit material. LeClair provided to the students essential resources and her own expertise and creativity as an Austen scholar.

Students in each seminar create distinctive exhibits with different emphases, reinforcing the fact that literary interpretation is creative and ever changing. While solid interpretations and hard work constitute the foundations for the exhibits, there?s no denying that there?s a great deal of fun involved, as well.

Roth calls Austen?s stories ?irresistible, and richer than they have in some eras been thought to be. There is the romance, of course?the ?marriage plot??but it cuts both ways, embedded as it is in a carefully critiqued social structure, a richly portrayed world inhabited by often hilarious caricatures or sweetly innocent-seeming but vicious antagonists.?

The exhibit process begins when students are given a collection of Jane Austen items, much of it owned by Roth, an enthusiastic shopper in the Jane Austen market. Fueled by the spate of big screen film adaptations of the novels during the 90?s as well those more recent and brand-new BBC adaptations, that market is currently thriving. According to Roth, ?What we could call the Jane Austen industry is quite stunning. In addition to the films, the literally hundreds of books and articles entailing expertise from diverse disciplines on a wide range of Austen topics, there are the tchotchkes ? the Jane Austen bobble-head dolls and the action figure, the finger puppets, the thimbles, bookplates, costumes, riddle and quiz books, comic books, landscape books, and stationery?.?

How does she find this stuff? ?I had a terrific semester on location on eBay one year,? she confessed. Jane Austen has, of course, entered the digital age, apparent in the number and variety of web sites, starting with those originating in Jane Austen societies around the globe. One of the best is in Australia, she added.

In creating the exhibits students are given some items that are sheer fun, some initially inscrutable, and some quite serious, including last year?s ?awe-inspiring? first edition of Pride and Prejudice owned by Union College. The students seek to answer these questions:

-What does all of this material make you ask about Jane Austen, and why does she give rise to this productivity?

-What are the prevailing and changing views of her life and her art?

-What tones do we wish to strike in the exhibit and in what order?

-How do we share what we?ve learned about Austen with a public we assume knows not much if any more than we did at the beginning of the course?

-How do we attract and retain their attention through the flow of the exhibit?

LeClair and Roth noted in their proposal to JASNA, ?After structuring and articulating these insights for exhibit visitors, students report that they are amazed at how much their appreciation for Austen has grown.?

Designing and mounting an exhibition has a noticeable effect on learning, according to Roth. ?It?s a challenging and exciting experience typically ? something like writing a paper, but with very different media and responsibilities to viewers. It is fascinating to see the differences among exhibits, and to hear the students talk about what, and how, they learn. Typically, they love the project and feel their learning to be significantly enhanced, collaborating with each other and owning an interpretation of the phenomenon of Jane Austen.?

Exhibition openings are special occasions. At last fall?s Union College opening of the exhibit students had named ?Jane Austen: Then and Now,? the students dressed mannequins as men and women from the Austen era, juxtaposed with a contemporary Austen heroine, the character of ?Cher? from the 1995 movie Clueless, loosely based on Austen?s novel, Emma. That opening also featured the Schenectady Country Dancers engaging the attendees and the students in Austen-era dances.

The upcoming JASNA talk will illustrate the ways that requiring exhibits generate fresh interpretations of the author and enable students to ?inhabit her world? in telling ways. To convey the scope of the students? imagination and achievement, the presentation by LeClair and Roth will include excerpts of video recordings of student interviews and images of exhibit materials. They indicated in their JASNA proposal, ?We found that when students deal directly, collaboratively, and creatively with the ever-growing mountain of ?stuff? that now provides evidence of Austen?s enduring influence, they move from being overwhelmed and puzzled to being intrigued and energized.?

Founded in 1979, JASNA has some 3,000 members. Most are professional scholars or well-read amateurs from across the United States and Canada, and 13 other countries, from Japan to the Netherlands.

Roth reports that hundreds of people attend such conferences. ?There?s a wonderful mixture of scholars and what are known as ?Janeites?,? she explained. ?The meetings are both wonderfully instructive and useful to the scholar as well as just a hoot. At some sessions, the experience can be startling when one enters a room with others, some of whom are dressed in period costumes. In some, when the presenter begins to quote a relevant passage from one of the novels, the 45 members of the audience will join right in and quote the entire selection verbatim from devoted memory, demonstrating how profoundly Austen?s language affects her readers and devotees.?

?Since the exhibit at Union, Professor Roth and I have continued to collaborate,? said LeClair, a JASNA member. ?I went to Skidmore to hear her students talk about their own Austen exhibit, for example, and to describe Union?s exhibit and its surrounding events. Our efforts also demonstrate the fruitfulness of faculty-librarian partnerships across institutions as well as in our own.? Roth concurred, citing Wendy Anthony, special collections associate at Scribner Library, whose enthusiastic support has been essential to the success of the several exhibits created by Roth?s students over the years.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has funded Skidmore?s Mellon faculty exchange with Union College and two other upstate New York institutions, Hamilton College and Colgate University. ~Reprinted with permission of Union College, with additional reporting by Skidmore College.

(Photos: Top left: Annette LeClair, courtesy of Union College. Bottom right: Wendy Anthony displays a Jane Austen cake at a Skidmore opening reception.)