Month: December 2007

Wanted: The Death of the Critic

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The “Books of the Week” listing at ReadySteadyBook reminds me that I want to get my hands on Ronan McDonald’s The Death of the Critic. (The Bedside, Bathtub, and Armchair Companion to Virginia Woolf looks good too!). (Just by the by, my first experience ordering from the Book Depository went so well that I am likely to become a regular customer: great selection, including books that are hard to get in Canada, good prices, and no minimum order for free shipping. Excellent!) Anyway, here’s the blurb provided on McDonald’s book:

In an age of book clubs, celebrity endorsements and internet bloggers, what role is there now for the professional critic as an arbiter of artistic value? Are literature and the arts only a question of personal taste? Is one opinion ‘as good as another’? Rónán McDonald’s The Death of the Critic seeks to defend the role of the public critic. McDonald argues against recent claims that all artistic value is simply relative and subjective. This forceful, accessible and eloquent book considers why high-profile, public critics, such as William Empson, F.R.Leavis or Lionel Trilling, become much rarer in the later twentieth century. A key reason for the ‘death of the critic’, he believes, is the turn away from value judgements and the very notion of artistic quality amongst academics and scholars.

Peering around for further information or reviews of the book, I found this preview from McDonald in the Guardian and this post by Todd Swift at Eyewear, to which McDonald graciously replies. This exchange focuses on the debate about the status of blogs as criticism, which also surfaced again in this review of Gail Pool’s Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America (further discussion can be found at This Space). It is endlessly mysterious to me why the perfectly obvious and predictable truth that there are both good (thoughtful, well-informed, articulate) and bad (careless, knee-jerk, incoherent, ignorant) blogs about books (or anything else) needs such incessant re-stating. This Space puts the case well:

[B]ook blogging is a new form of criticism under restraint. It has good, bad and indifferent practitioners. As a reader, I make the same decisions online as I make in the bookshop and the library. I don’t dismiss fiction because of Tom Clancy anymore than I dismiss online criticism because of Amazon customer reviews.

(Blogging skeptics out there could do worse than check out the recommendations in Scott McLemee’s recent Inside Higher Ed piece “Around the Web.”)

Next Term in My Classes: An Anticipation

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I haven’t finished with this term’s classes yet (my 19thC Novel students wrote their exam this afternoon, and I have papers coming in tomorrow and Friday)–but I’ve raised my head just high enough above water to notice that next term’s classes aren’t quite ready to be launched yet. If I don’t want to be competing for the photocopier with everyone else on January 7, I’d better get the details sorted soon. Because book orders were due months ago, though, I do at least know what we’ll be reading, and, since I’m a stickler for chronological order, what order we’ll read them in. Here’s what’s in store:

English 2040, Mystery and Detective Fiction:

English 4604, The Victorian ‘Woman Question’:

I’ve enjoyed Mystery and Detective Fiction a lot when I’ve done it before. Part of the fun is getting outside my usual territory a bit, not just in the reading list but in some of the questions we kick around, such as why Agatha Christie, apparently the best-selling English language author of all time, is not a staple in literature classes, or how to acknowledge the impositions of genre conventions or requirements without dismissing the results (for instance, characterization is a victim of the puzzle mystery form, since you need a lot of plausible suspects). I’m looking forward to it.

But this year I’m particularly excited and apprehensive about the ‘Woman Question’ class. I’ve taught it several times before with a mixed genre reading list that I have always thought was very successful: lots of formal and thematic variety, lots of stimulating juxtapositions. I always particularly enjoy the ‘fallen woman’ cluster: “Jenny,” “A Castaway,” “Lizzie Leigh,” “Gone Under,” Aurora Leigh, The Mill on the Floss…. But I thought it would be good for me to shake things up a bit, so I reconceptualized it as a fiction-only course with a special focus on novels that take us past the ‘matrimonial barrier’ (or, in the case of Gissing, see that barrier as insurmountable). You see where this got me, though: with more pages than I have ever assigned in any one course before. Book ordering somehow makes me all giddy with the sense of possibilities–and now I’m facing the consequences. I’m not regretting my choices; I’m just well aware that careful planning and handling is called for. While I was invigilating my exam today, I doodled around with ideas for assignments that would keep some kind of steady buzz going about the readings without overwhelming the students with busywork when they need to keep reading (and reading and reading). I’m a firm believer in the pedagogical value of frequent short written pieces, so that they can practice focusing and expressing their insights and get regular feedback as they move towards their big essays. I also like to make sure everyone has to write at least something on everything we read! But I want a lighter touch than usual this time, I think, so that they stay energetic but also engaged. Given what I’ve been doing myself lately, naturally I’ve been wondering about some kind of class blog arrangement. BLS (once WebCT) has a blog option built in which would overcome some of the privacy issues that arise if you required students to post their ideas in an open-access forum. Ideas welcome, blog-ish or otherwise! I have a couple of weeks to make my final decisions.

And then before too much longer (since they are doing the timetable so early this year, with an eye to recruiting, I think) we’ll be facing requests for course descriptions for 2008-9 [update: they’re wanted by January 25, as it turns out–yikes]. I doodled around with ideas for those too today, resolving (among other things) that I really am going to take a break from Jude in the Dickens to Hardy course. I’m thinking Tess: maybe a change is as good as a rest? Hey–I could do a whole ‘bad girls’ theme, with Maggie, and Lady Audley, maybe Bleak House, and Ruth… (you see how it goes!).

Philosophy and Literature Again

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Further to an earlier post on David Masson’s British Novelists, here’s another bit I came across today in my proofreading that I can add to my file of Victorian observations on the relationship between philosophy and literature. This one is from an 1848 review of Jane Eyre that appeared in the Christian Remembrancer (hence its ultimately tendentious conclusion):

With [novelists] it rests to determine, each for himself and according to the measure of his gifts, whether so powerful an instrument of moving men, as fiction is, shall be used to move them for good or evil. Are the poetic and artistic faculties given to man purely for his amusement? Are they alone of all his powers not subject in their exercise to the legislative or judicial conscience? Curiously enough, we believe no moral philosopher has yet given a complete scientific answer to this question. A philosophical account of that part of man’s essence which is neither moral nor intellectual, but lies midway between the two, both in itself and in its relation to the moral and intellectual parts, would we believe still be an addition to the Moral Science. . . . [T]he position that the poetic and artistic faculties are subject to conscience, is a truism in theory which seems to be metamorphosed into a paradox in practice. We suppose, for instance, that Mrs Marcet considered herself to be uttering an acknowledged truth in saying that Goldsmith’s ‘Deserted Village,’ being poetry, is none the worse for being bad political economy. Yet if this is so, neither is Don Juan, being also poetry, the worse for being bad religion. Goldsmith intended, or at least he foresaw that the effect of his poem would be, to raise certain sentiments and impressions relative to certain social questions; and if those sentiments were morbid and those impressions wrong, his poem is as plainly vicious as the most rigorous scientific treatise, embodying the same fallacies, would have been. This may seem an exaggerated instance. It is an experimentum crucis, certainly–but where is the line of demarcation to be drawn? . . . We do not mean to say that the writer of fiction is called upon to play the part of the preacher or the theologian. Far from it. What he is called upon to do is to hold up a clear and faithful mirror to human nature–a mirror in which it shall see its good as good, its evil as evil. His pages must give back the true reflection of a world of which morality is the law, and into which Christianity has entered.

Some good questions, along with a number of assumptions few critics today would entertain about literary merit or morality–though I enjoy the idea that morbidity is somehow an objectively measurable (and obviously undesirable) quality.

This Week in My Classes (December 3, 2007)

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Today was the last meeting of my 19th-Century Novels class–a depressing inquiry into the meaning of the tragedies of the final volume of Jude the Obscure. One effect of the children’s deaths is to drive us to interpretation. After all, if they ‘mean’ nothing, then their horror is unredeemable. Here our activity as readers becomes entangled with the efforts of the characters to make sense of their experience. In particular, Sue is driven to religious explanations, in part for the (meager) comfort they offer, and in part because if she interprets her suffering as punishment for her ‘sins’ against God, then she can seek atonement by turning back to His laws. So religion is shown as answering human needs, rather than as offering truths. Jude’s explanations are more consistent with what we’ve seen in the novel (“it is only … man, and senseless circumstance”)–but what response can we muster to that? Jude’s response, of course, is to lie down and await death. Then there’s Arabella’s survival, scariest of all, perhaps, if we ordinary folks create the environment in which it is only Arabella who can flourish–just as in Middlemarch, “we insignificant people with our daily words and acts are preparing the lives of many Dorotheas, some of which may present a far sadder sacrifice than that of the Dorothea whose story we know” (Finale). I usually point my final lecture for this class towards the responsibilities of readers, pointed to so often by both the content and the forms of our readings. As Janice Carlisle argues persuasively in her smart book The Sense of an Audience, the goal of many Victorian novelists was “an ‘ennobling interchange of action’ [Wordsworth’s phrase] that would elicit the best qualities of both the reader and the narrative persona of the novelist” (11).

And in a truly Victorian spirit of optimism, I also always end this course by recommending other 19th-century novels my students might enjoy now that they’ve got a taste for them. So here’s this year’s list of Recommended Further Reading:

  1. If you particularly enjoyed The Warden: Scenes of Clerical Life, Barchester Towers, or any other Trollope novel
  2. If you loved Great Expectations: David Copperfield, Bleak House, Mary Barton, North and South
  3. If your favourite was Lady Audley’s Secret: The Woman in White, Aurora Floyd, Fingersmith
  4. If Middlemarch inspired you: The Mill on the Floss, Wives and Daughters
  5. If Jude the Obscure was your favourite: go on vacation, preferably somewhere sunny

And that’s a wrap.

Weekend Miscellany

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Weekends in our house are not really times for concentrated work or reading, between household chores, kid stuff, and the odd idea that even academics should be off-duty occasionally. On the other hand, it’s nice to have a little intellectual pay-off for puttering too. So in between activities and distractions, one thing I end up doing a fair amount of on the weekend is poking around in blogs and literary websites, just seeing what’s around that’s of interest to me or to friends or family (whose mailboxes I now regularly clutter up with links to things I think might be of interest to them too). Here are a couple of things I’ve been looking at this weekend, some of them ‘old’ in web years but newly come to my attention:

  1. Crooked Timber had a book event on Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, a copy of which I finally picked up for myself a little while ago. Not only is there a nice array of interesting contributions by ‘Crooked Timberites,’ but Clarke herself participated. I’ve bookmarked it for now, since I’d like to read the novel ‘fresh’ before reading so much about it, but just browsing through its contents has made me move the novel to the top of my ‘to read’ pile.
  2. A. S. Byatt has an interesting piece in the TLS about novels and neuroscience. Its conclusion: “We have had a lot of the body as desire, and listened to many professors of desire. There is something else – the human capacity to think, and to make feelings into thoughts. It is a way out of narcissism.”
  3. Conversational Reading had a Friday Column back in February on ‘Classical Music in Literature’; many of the books sound extremely interesting. I could add to the books named there also Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music, Angela Huth’s Easy Silences, and one of my long-time favourites, Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s Disturbances in the Field; none of these are as formally ingenious as some of CR’s examples sound, but all bring to life the demanding blend of intellectual and aesthetic response (and sheer physical and mental labour) that is classical music. Of the ones CR discusses, Europe Central sounds most compelling to me.
  4. And speaking of classical music, The Guardian has a couple of reviews of recent books about it, all of which sound tremendously interesting: Alfred Brendel’s Collected Essays, and Oliver Sacks’s Musicophilia and Daniel Levitin’s This is Your Brain on Music.
  5. ReadySteadyBook refers back to earlier posts condemning “Establishment Literary Fiction” (or “ELF,” cute) for ignoring the challenges of modernism: “ELF endlessly repeats the tropes and styles of the Victorian Novel, with its fingers in its ears, shouting its (sometimes very good) narrative, flaunting its (sometimes very finely drawn) characters, refusing to be interrogated and refusing to recognise its own structural ressentiment.” I think it’s not supposed to be the Victorian Novel that has its fingers in its ears, but even so, the set-up suggests a monolothic naive realism on the one side with self-conscious meta-fictional modernism on the other, in a way that is hardly fair or accurate. I haven’t followed back all the old links yet.