Although canons are by definition the products of selection and exclusion, even the narrowest literary canons need to be excerpted when brought into the classroom. Even in courses that use a traditional literary-historical curriculum, the teaching canon is ever only a shadow of the scholarly canon. This is especially problematic for "crowded" literary periods such as the Renaissance and English romanticism. For instance, in the introduction to England in 1819, James Chandler shows that it is possible to teach a course on 1819 which treats only major canonical British literary productions of that year, and needs nevertheless to exclude a great majority of them. Overcrowding is not just a function of the shifting boundaries of literary studies; it is a problem for any developed literary history working in the confines of an eclectic curriculum.
The "expansive" student project allows students to perceive the teaching canon as an instance of the scholarly canon. In assembling texts that are diversely related to the common texts of the course -- whether by genre, author, ideological premise, or historical situation -- students will both become aware of the received literary-historical narrative, and come to question the decisions the teacher has made in constructing the course. This project will be most effective if it is implemented as a kind of reappropriation of the common texts of the course, where students revisit these texts (in class presentations, for instance) in light of the expanded contexts generated by their projects.
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