Before the mid-twentieth century, pedagogy in many countries involved a considerable amount of memorization, perhaps especially in engagements with literature. But after World War II, the practice of memorization and public recitation virtually disappeared in American schools, generally replaced by a practice of analysis in which the poem is experienced principally as an object of interpretation. Here, Jonathan Culler describes the undergraduate course ‘Major Poets’, taught by him for many years at Cornell University. For each of the poets studied (including Shakespeare, Pope, Keats, and Dickinson), the students were asked to complete a variety of exercises, one of which was to memorize and recite a poem of at least 12 lines. In doing so, the highly patterned language of the poem was presented not as something to be interpreted, but as a discourse to be repeated, performed, and appreciated in other ways.

中文翻译：

---

背诗

在 20 世纪中叶之前，许多国家的教学法都涉及大量的记忆，尤其是在与文学的接触中。但二战后，背诵和公开朗诵的做法在美国学校几乎消失了，通常取而代之的是一种分析的做法，在这种做法中，这首诗主要是作为一个解释的对象来体验的。在这里，Jonathan Culler 描述了他在康奈尔大学教授多年的本科课程“主要诗人”。对于所研究的每一位诗人（包括莎士比亚、波普、济慈和狄金森），学生们都被要求完成各种练习，其中之一是背诵一首至少 12 行的诗。在这样做的过程中，这首诗的高度模式化语言被呈现出来，而不是被解释为某种东西，