In other words, while it’s important for students to engage in historical context to identify historical markers and allusions, it’s also important that they don’t see this book as a holistic representative of real world history.
Many books are unreliable guides to the real world outside the texts, and it’s dangerous to talk about, say, Renaissance attitudes toward race based only on your reading of Othello. As Jack Lynch says in his very helpful blog I use when teaching literary analysis papers: “Never forget that books are books and, if you’re in an English class, you’re being asked to talk about them. While this interpretation has some seeds of truth - Doctorow does look at historical and fictional figures across the racial and socioeconomic spectrum - these claims fall into the trap of linking specific narrative choices to generalized statements about the real world. The first time I taught this novel my students came up with a general type of response to the text when developing literary interpretations that went something like this: Through the use of historical narrative, Doctorow shows how “X group” (African Americans, working class laborers, industrial powers, women) were treated/seen/acted in the Progressive Era. Morgan, Harry Houdini, Emma Goldman, and many others, with fictional figures and events primarily in NYC to investigate key moments during the United States’ Progressive Era. Ragtime is a 1975 novel that mixes historical figures such as J.P.
Doctorow’s historical revisionist novel, Ragtime. It can be hard to strike a balance between the two, and I discovered this a particular challenge when teaching E.L. As a teacher, I want them to look closely at text and use that to interpret, but I am also of the belief that a text never exists in a vacuum. Context helps my students wrap their heads around material that may seem distant or foreign to their own experiences, but it also can interrupt or subordinate their attention to close reading. One of the major tensions I find myself wrestling with when teaching lower level literature classes is the balance between contextual understanding and close reading.