If we can agree that one of the central goals of a historically-grounded literature course should be getting students to "try on" the ethical, political, aesthetic, and social sensibilities of a prior age, can we agree on how to go about doing this? Is this mission any less difficult when the texts themselves foreground issues of sympathy, fellow-feeling, solidarity, and community, as they do during the Age of Sensibility? Why don't contemporary readers seem receptive to the workings of such texts whose aims, at least in part, were to school their readers in the competencies of heart and mind that they privileged above all others? Is it only to be expected, then, that these same readers have an easier time identifying with Dostoyevsky's "Underground Man" or Kafka's "Hunger Artist"? And what might this identification suggest about the affinity of our contemporary cultural sensibilities to those of a hundred or so years ago? Can we even speak of "our" (collective) or "sensibility" (singular)?
I want to suggest that the best metaphor for the kind of "trying on" vital to literature classes is the one used in a certain kind of foreign-language instruction: namely, "immersion." Why treat the language of the eighteenth century as identical with our own just because it shares the name "English"?
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