Book Love and Reading Commonplaces

By Mai-Lin Cheng, University of Oregon

Preface to the Syllabus  

In the history of reading, the commonplace book is a crucial artifact. It shows us both what readers noticed and how they organized ideas they took from books. It is a particularly important artifact for scholars of Romanticism as it remained an important tool and product of reading throughout the Romantic period. Reading commonplace books helps modern students understand books and reading the way Romantic readers once did. It helps them understand what Romantic readers loved in the books they read, and how they lavished care upon them. Making their own commonplace books helps today’s students understand what is distinctive in their own reading practices. It shows them how to at once release and shape their affective reading and suggests how some creative borrowing from old practices can enhance their reading skills. In the syllabus below, I describe a seminar I teach at the University of Oregon entitled “Book Love” that incorporates these themes. 

I initially developed “Book Love” because I was seeking a strategy to get students interested in book history. In my own research, I had found commonplace books to be a compelling way to engage canonical literature. I found them engagingly intimate, and I found they posed problems and puzzles about literature that differed from the sorts of questions that modern literature scholars typically pose. I also found them accessible in a way I thought would appeal to undergraduates. We could dip into them here and there. We could think of them as a kind of highlight reel. Most of all, we could make our own.[1]

I expected students would enter the class with no knowledge or understanding of what a commonplace book was but could relate to the idea of loving books so much that they wanted to keep pieces of the texts with them. This DIY aspect of excerpting passages from their reading struck me as resonant with the ways in which students regularly collect digital scraps with their phones and other devices. And in teaching the class, I found that they quickly connected their own screen-based practices to the analog manuscript and print-based technologies we use in this course. At the same time, the course shed light on the analog practices that they continue, even if they haven’t previously placed particular value upon them. While the course led some students to start keeping digital commonplace books, many converted to analog. As one student group wrote in their summation for the class, “For many of us, commonplacing was a foreign practice until this class, and now it's something many of us want to continue to practice.” One student, motivated by this unfamiliarity, wrote a children’s book explaining the practice for her final project.[2]

Fig.1: A page from an undergraduate student’s creative final project for Book Love, a children’s book entitled Kitty, the Commonplace Book, and the Question of Authorship: An Adventure where Kitty meets Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, and Jane Austen, Fall 2019. Personal collection.

I had a few main goals in the course: I wanted students to slow down; to recognize the process of selecting an excerpt as a creative and critical practice; and I wanted our readings to connect to the questions of active reading involved in the production of their individual commonplace books, bringing together theory and praxis. When I ask my students to keep a commonplace book, I am also prompting them to think about gendered and classed concepts of originality; reading as authorship; and how we craft ourselves through reading. I bring together critical theory with material practices to make clear that the course’s analog practice is not an expression of nostalgia or resistance to digital media, but a way for students to reflect on their own (often digital) reading practices by defamiliarizing them through the study of related analog practices. I have learned over a few versions of the course that a few students wonder why they are only to “set down” the words of others while others learn to experience commonplacing as something more than an homage to abstract, satirized, or lionized notions of literary genius.[3] Copying a passage is never just copying. It involves choosing and arranging and is thus already a critical and creative practice. 

While this is not principally a course on Romantic literature, it offers a view of literary history with Romantic authors as its anchors. The course emphasizes hands-on experiential practices of reading distinct from those of a typical upper-division English seminar. Field trips to the campus art museum, the book conservation lab, and Special Collections and University archives explore the book from the cuneiform tablet to the bound book as art, as fragile patient, and as shapeshifter. Workshops on book making and historic methods of writing turn the literature classroom into a makerspace. Experiences with artifacts such as quill pens introduce new skills and help students reconnect to the materiality of physical writing and its attendant immaterial value.

Fig. 2: Students learning to write with steel nib and quill pens in handwriting workshop. Photo by Sarah Northrup. 

Fig. 3: A pamphlet produced in book-making workshop. Photo by Sarah Northrup.  

Students have responded positively not only to the intellectual content of the course but also its practical, material dimension. As one student put it, “Usually I leave a class with nothing really to show for it, save for a couple papers, a PowerPoint, maybe some books I’ll never touch again. This time, I left with the commonplace book. Which is to say I left with a way to remember.”

Fig. 4: A page from a student commonplace book, Spring 2024. Photo by Mai-Lin Cheng.

Fig. 5: A page from a student commonplace book, Spring 2024. Photo by Mai-Lin Cheng.

Notes

 [1] Mai-Lin Cheng, “Domestic Extracts." Studies in Romanticism, Studies in Romanticism, 60.4 (Winter 2021): 467-486

[2] Lauren Jin, Kitty, the Commonplace Book, and the Question of Authorship: An Adventure where Kitty meets Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, and Jane Austen, undergraduate term project for Book Love course, Fall 2019.

[3] In Don Juan, Byron describes “That prodigy, Miss Araminta Smith  / (Who at sixteen translated "Hercules Furens" /Into as furious English), with her best look, / Set down his sayings in her common-place book” (Canto 11, Stanza 52, lines 413-416).

Book Love and Reading Commonplaces © 2024 by Mai-Lin Cheng is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

About the Author

Mai-Lin Cheng is Associate Professor of English at the University of Oregon. She is author of the book, British Romanticism and the Literature of Human Interest (Bucknell University Press, 2017). For her current book project, “Place and Commonplace in Romanticism and After,” Cheng received an appointment as an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow at The Huntington Library and a UCLA Clark Memorial Library fellowship.