Our liberal arts undergraduates do a 6,000 word research project in their final year. This year, instead of assigning a research paper, I allowed one student to do a 6,000 word commentary on part of the last canto of Dante’s Paradiso. The result was quite spectacular

It made me think I should be using this kind of assessment task more often and not relying so heavily on student essays

You can still have the usual markers of research - e.g. primary sources; literature review (this was embedded in the commentary); development of a thesis (the passage from canto 33 was chosen to allow for a specific line of interpretation through the commentary)

At a conference last year Gordon Teskey said he likes to get his students to prepare an edition of a selected passage from Milton, just as you would for a published critical edition. I haven’t tried this but it also sounds like a great way to facilitate close scholarly reading

You would think annotations to a classic text (with its own huge commentary tradition) would be too derivative compared to the originality of an essay. But this Dante student mastered so much technical scholarship and made so many informed but independent interpretive decisions

Plus the student had no choice but to weigh up every line and every from the selected passage. Essays are great but they also make it easy to hide. You get to choose what to talk about and what to ignore.

Even professional scholars have to struggle to ensure that their writing is a genuine investigation of the unknown and not merely a seductive cover-up. Some exposure to commentary practices might help students to be more aware of these dangers and limitations of the essay

At any rate, my student’s Dante commentary demonstrated more scholarly mastery and more independence of thought (I won’t quite say “originality”, but what kind of criterion is that when you’re writing on Dante?) than I would normally expect to find even at postgraduate level

While student research can be almost arbitrarily selective, the Dante project turned my student into a researcher. She tracked down sources in multiple libraries, got help with languages & obscure texts etc. There was something about the task that sparked an investigative spirit

Another advantage. One of the challenges of doing a research project under tight time constraints is that it’s hard to know where to start, and this often leads to wasted time. With a commentary project it’s easy to start right away; the work is clearly structured from the outset

I wonder if even some PhD students would benefit from spending their first year doing a commentary on their key primary texts, not as a substitute for a dissertation but as a preliminary way of structuring their reading, identifying key debates and interpretive problems etc

PhD students in Australia typically spend a year working on a research proposal (basically a lit review plus a premature outline of the project). Much of it becomes redundant as the project develops. Whereas a commentary could be an archive of problems & ideas for the work ahead

An example: Coleridge prepared for his lectures on Shakespeare by getting a special copy of the book prepared with a blank page facing each page of text. He crammed those pages with enough comments, questions, and analysis to last a lifetime of study and reflection