It is possible for students to obtain advanced degrees in
English while knowing little or nothing about traditional
scholarly methods. The consequences of this neglect of
traditional scholarship are particularly unfortunate for the
（5） study of women writers. If the canon-the list of authors
whose works are most widely taught-is ever to include
more women， scholars must be well trained in historical
scholarship and textual editing. Scholars who do not know
how to read early manuscripts， locate rare books， establish
（10）a sequence of editions， and so on are bereft of crucial tools
for revising the canon.
To address such concerns， an experimental version of
the traditional scholarly methods course was designed to
raise students' consciousness about the usefulness of
（15）traditional learning for any modern critic or theorist. To
minimize the artificial aspects of the conventional course，
the usual procedure of assigning a large number of small
problems drawn from the entire range of historical periods
was abandoned， though this procedure has the obvious
（20）advantage of at least superficially familiarizing students
with a wide range of reference sources. Instead students
were engaged in a collective effort to do original work on
a neglected eighteenth-century writer， Elizabeth Griffith， to
give them an authentic experience of literary scholarship
（25）and to inspire them to take responsibility for the quality of
their own work.
Griffith's work presented a number of advantages for
this particular pedagogical purpose. First， the body of
extant scholarship on Griffith was so tiny that it could all
（30）be read in a day； thus students spent little time and effort
mastering the literature and had a clear field for their own
discoveries. Griffith's play The Platonic Wife exists in three
versions， enough to provide illustrations of editorial issues
but not too many for beginning students to manage. In addi-
（35）tion， because Griffith was successful in the eighteenth cen-
tury， as her continued productivity and favorable reviews
demonstrate， her exclusion from the canon and virtual dis-
appearance from literary history also helped raise issues
concerning the current canon.
（40） The range of Griffith's work meant that each student
could become the world's leading authority on a particular
Griffith text. For example， a student studying Griffith's
Wife in the Right obtained a first edition of the play and
studied it for some weeks. This student was suitably
（45）shocked and outraged to find its title transformed into A
Wife in the Night in Watt's Bibliotheca Britannica. Such
experiences， inevitable and common in working on a writer
to whom so little attention has been paid， serve to vaccinate
the student ——I hope for a lifetime-against credulous use
of reference sources.
17.The author of the passage is primarily concerned with
（A） revealing a commonly ignored deficiency
（B） proposing a return to traditional terminology
（C） describing an attempt to correct a shortcoming
（D） assessing the success of a new pedagogical
approach
（E） predicting a change in a traditional teaching
strategy
