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