Month: November 2008

‘Literary’ vs. ‘Genre’ Fiction

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At ‘Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind,’ Kyle Minor offers some thoughts on the relationship between ‘literary’ and ‘genre’ fiction:

I did not set out to be a mystery writer or a crime writer, nor am I sure I am one now. That’s not to say that I don’t admire the genres, because I do. If forced to trade, I’ll take one Dennis Lehane, one Richard Price, one George Pelecanos, one James M. Cain, one Big Jim Thompson or Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett—any one of them, any day—over any ten “literary” writers. I mean it. Because all of these writers do all of the things to which literature ought to aspire—vivid evocation of character, an intelligent reckoning with thematic material that matters, an acquaintance with the music language can make—while, at the same time, giving us a sock-in-the-gut story in a time and place of consequence.

(I also ought to mention, while we’re speaking of it, that contemporary crime and mystery writers are lately doing another thing that literature used to do more often, which is to work out intractable social problems on a big canvas and consider the workings of groups and systems as worthy as the individual of their attentions. I might argue, in fact, that the closest thing we have to Dostoevsky, Dickens, and Dos Passos these days is HBO’s The Wire, a television show helmed by nonfiction crime writer David Simon, with episodes penned by Lehane, Price, and Pelecanos. But that’s an argument for another day, another essay.) (read the rest here)

This is well-travelled territory for anyone who teaches mystery fiction, as readers of this blog will know. The remark about ‘The Wire’ sounds a bit familiar too… But the distinctions between varieties of fiction do matter, if only insofar as our assumptions about them affect our reading practices–something highlighted to great comic effect in Thurber’s “The Macbeth Murder Mystery.” The exercise of drawing up “a list of mystery stories that belong in the literary canon, and a list of canonical works of literature that are, at their core, mysteries” is fun, as drawing up lists always is. On the other hand, highlighting mystery novels that count as literary rather perpetuates the idea that most of them don’t–an assumption I don’t actually disagree with, but then, I wouldn’t consider all “canonical” works equally literary either. Of Minor’s list, I’d think the Hammett and Chandler hardly need defending on these grounds anymore. I haven’t read Lush Life, but unless it is much better than Clockers, it wouldn’t be on my list: I thought Clockers was well conceived and constructed, but not very well written. (Probably it would have seemed more original if I hadn’t just watched all of The Wire.) Minor’s list is also weighted towards American hard-boiled and police procedurals, but I would consider P. D. James one example of someone working within the British tradition who uses the strong structural frame of a detective story to do some very thoughtful and literary things (A Taste for Death comes to mind, as does An Unsuitable Job for a Woman). Ian Rankin, also, is an obvious example of a writer whose crime fiction shows both social and thematic reach and literary sophistication. But it’s the conversation generated, rather than the lists themselves, that seems to me most valuable on these occasions: we should all keep thinking and talking about what qualities make some books better or more important than others, no matter where they are usually shelved in the bookstore.

(via.)

‘Tis Aw a Muddle…or Is It?

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I’ve been trying for a while to find a conceptual framework that will unify the various reading and writing activities I’ve been doing. The immediate, pragmatic motivation for bringing things into some kind of order is that it’s about time I applied for some research grant money to support those activities (and by “support,” I mean pretty basic stuff, like buying ink cartridges for my office printer or paying for research-related xeroxing, not to mention buying books, renewing memberships in professional associations, or upgrading my take-home computer equipment–all expenses that are not covered by my department or faculty). There is money to be had, internally and externally, but of course to get any of it you need to have a research project defined clearly enough to justify your demands. I have a couple of objections to this system. One of them is just to the principle of the thing: doing research is part of my job, so I’ve never understood why I have to scrounge up the money necessary to get it done. Another is to the inflationary effect of the grant application process. Except for the occasional conference trip, I don’t actually need much money–what I really need is time to think and read. In terms of funding, what I’d like is enough to cover the basics (cartridges, xeroxing, books) on an ongoing basis. I’d like to feel I can keep reading and thinking and looking things up and writing things until I reach a point at which I can’t express my ideas and findings adequately in short form but need the time and resources to produce a book that will do them justice. Instead, I have to start the process assuming I’m writing a book, because that’s the kind of project that gets grants. So I have to inflate the significance and scope of what I’m currently doing, and what I plan to do next, so that I can ask for enough money to get taken seriously. (SSHRC standard grants, for instance, now require a minimum budget of $7000, but we’re generally advised to ask for a lot more). Our main internal source of research funding clearly spells out in its terms that it is seed money for SSHRC-fundable projects, so it is also not hospitable to exploratory work, and it also rules out what it calls “basic research overhead,” which it declares is the responsibility of our departments and faculties. It doesn’t say exactly what counts as “basic research overhead,” but I’m thinking that category probably includes things like printing and xeroxing, and maybe books (which I know SSHRC used to refuse to pay for)–and it specifically excludes computer equipment. So some fancy footwork is required to explain one’s research needs in a way that will at once meet the approved criteria and actually provide the things one needs for one’s research. And, to get back to my main point, the whole thing has to be framed as an attempt to accomplish some clearly defined research endeavor…ideally, one that builds in some coherent way on past research accomplishments.

Of course, I have applied for research funding before, and I have used the resources I obtained responsibly and gotten things done–published, even. I haven’t made a successful SSHRC application yet; my one attempt (which, in retrospect, I admit was enthusiastic but naive in its presentation) was slapped down hard enough that I wasn’t very motivated to try again, though it’s interesting to me that I have, after all, gone on to do some key parts of the ‘program of research’ described in it, so it can’t have been altogether wrongheaded. The most recent internal money I got was to help me get the Broadview anthology taken care of. But now that’s all gone, and so is my last print cartridge and any remaining credits on my copy cards. So it’s time to go back and ask for some more. But for what?

My problem is (and I realize that I have brought it on myself by the choices I’ve been making about how to use my time) my attention has been increasingly diffused over the past couple of years. Instead of picking one critical problem and pursuing it consistently, I’ve been looking around at a lot of different things. Why have I been doing this? Well, for one thing, I can’t seem to bring into focus any one critical problem that feels urgent to me: I can’t find something to work on that seems truly necessary and exciting, and I’ve chosen to indulge–or respect–my weariness with the flood of academic microcontributions that has resulted from the incessant pressure to publish as soon as possible and as often as possible. I felt that academic scholarship tended too far away from the liveliness and urgency of literature and I wanted to look outside to see how non-academics talked about books, or how academics talked about books outside of ‘work’ that maybe had more mobility and potency. And the first thing to really hit me once I started looking around in this way was just how ignorant my own specialized research had made me. Behold, I knew not anything! Or at least not anything that anybody else was likely to take an interest in–or so it seemed.

This was the point at which I began a relatively systematic exploration of books about books, as well as books about the relationship between academic criticism and what we might call ‘public’ criticism. This was also the point at which I began taking more time writing blog posts and tentatively looking for a place for myself (small, no frills, just a corner of my own) in the wider world of book talk. It took me almost no time to realize that I am very poorly equipped to be a public intellectual: graduate training does not produce generalists, and life pre-tenure, not to mention life post-babies, does not make it any easier to broaden your reach. Still, my professional work has given me some equipment for analyzing books that aren’t Victorian novels, and it was both educational and fun to see how that might work. I have also written about academic issues and about my teaching, both exercises in mobilizing what I know in new ways. Along the way, I think I’ve done some decent thinking and writing. (I’ve written before about the intrinsic benefits of blogging; making connections with other readers and writers, academic and not, has been the very best part of this experiment so far.) I’ve also completed the Broadview anthology and puttered along with my inquiry into Ahdaf Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun as an engagement with Middlemarch, so it isn’t as if I’ve been doing nothing but playing online. However, I do feel that I have fallen behind in my supposed area of specialization, because while I was looking the other way, the flood of new publications continued. Now I feel inadequate in two directions!

Overall, though, I’ve been doing so much reading and writing that it seems as if it must add up to something. So far, however, I just can’t see what. I can see a strong convergence between my metacritical inquiry into the nature of academic criticism and its alienation from the wider reading public, on the one hand, and my attempt (primarily through blogging) to find a different kind of criticism, though so far that attempt is not systematic or particularly ambitious. I can see links, too, between those issues and my work on 19th-century criticism (very much an activity of the public sphere). But I don’t really want to do a project about criticism so much as I want to do criticism differently…but it’s hard to see how to do writing about the literature I’m best prepared to write about (Victorian literature) in a non-academic way, because non-academic book talk seems (reasonably enough) preoccupied with contemporary writers about whom, and about whose contexts, I discover I am in many respects an amateur. So perhaps the Soueif project stands as a way of bringing 19th-century literature into a modern discussion because that is what Soueif herself does by taking Middlemarch as in some way her starting point?

Well, I’m not going to arrive at any answers tonight, and there may in fact be no answer that draws these different threads together. Maybe what I need to do for the grant application is articulate fully the interests and goals of the Soueif essay and never mind the rest. But I’d like to think there’s a point to the rest of it too. I’m also aware that exploring without a shaping purpose eventually becomes dilettantism, and I’m convinced of the importance of being earnest even without a research grant to strive for, so any time I can clear some mental space, I’ll think about it some more.

A Day in the Life…

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My “Things To Do” list for today:

  • Prepare notes on Alice Munro, “The Found Boat” for tomorrow morning
  • Prepare notes on Bleak House (up to Chapter 36) for tomorrow afternoon (still some work to do here, but class isn’t until 1:30…)
  • Review Reading Responses and Reading Journals from two classes
  • Write as many as possible of seven six five reference letters (needed a.s.a.p.)
  • Grade as many as possible of a batch of papers on Jane Eyre
  • Comment on a Ph.D. thesis prospectus (needed a.s.a.p.)
  • Comment on an undergraduate paper proposal (needed a.s.a.p.)
  • Comment on two draft SSHRC proposals (needed a.s.a.p.)
  • Review a paper resubmitted by a dissatisfied customer student
  • Prepare notes on departmental hiring priorities for a committee meeting tomorrow (I’m thinking mental notes are good enough here)
  • Prepare notes on how best to use money that may be donated for graduate scholarships
  • Pick up important groceries and prescriptions
  • Attend parent-teacher interview
  • Collect children from after-school program trip to Natural History Museum
  • Dinner: cook, feed to children, eat (sitting down if possible)
  • Oversee homework, eke out some ‘quality time,’ do bedtime reading and cuddles
  • Read some of book for review (now past deadline)
  • Fold laundry, empty dishwasher
  • Feel guilty about items left undone from this list while watching U.S. election coverage on TV
  • Call it quits for the day (but not before staying up until 1:20 a.m. to watch Obama’s victory speech!)

Maybe going public like this will help me stay on task! (11/5: Also, this list is an interesting historiographical example, in that it records the completely mundane nature of this day from an individual perspective, even as it acknowledges its glancing intersection with ‘world-historical’ events.)

This Week in My Classes (November 3, 2008)

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In my first-year class, we’re still working on short fiction. Today’s selection was “A Small Good Thing,” by Raymond Carver. One thing I enjoy about intro classes is the chance to dabble in material outside my usual range, and that certainly describes Carver. I find this particular story (the only one of his I really know besides “Cathedral”) very moving, and yet, as I was discussing with my class today, his conspicuously non-literary style makes the move from reading to interpretation initially difficult for me. By non-literary, what I mean is that he writes, with an almost flat affect, strings of fairly simple declarative sentences describing quite ordinary people and objects. It’s not immediately easy to get a purchase on what is important (beyond plot–which in “A Small Good Thing” is a strong factor, as the story turns on a couple of dramatic moments, including a car accident). Of course, what we realize is that the literary effect lies precisely in getting us to notice those ordinary people and objects, and seeing how they become infused with meaning or cease to be ordinary: a birthday cake, a bicycle, a car in a parking lot. I enjoyed reading through the material posted on the New York Times’s ‘featured author’ site for Carver, particularly Jay McInerney’s account of the rigor Carver brought to his teaching:

Though Ray was always encouraging, he could be rigorous if he knew criticism was welcome. Fortunate students had their stories subjected to the same process he employed on his own numerous drafts. Manuscripts came back thoroughly ventilated with Carver deletions, substitutions, question marks and chicken-scratch queries. I took one story back to him seven times; he must have spent 15 or 20 hours on it. He was a meticulous, obsessive line editor. One on one, in his office, he almost became a tough guy, his voice gradually swelling with conviction.

Once we spent some 10 or 15 minutes debating my use of the word ”earth.” Carver felt it had to be ”ground,” and he felt it was worth the trouble of talking it through. That one exchange was invaluable; I think of it constantly when I’m working. Carver himself used the same example later in an essay he wrote that year, in discussing the influence of his mentor, John Gardner. ”Ground is ground, he’d say, it means ground, dirt, that kind of stuff. But if you say ‘earth,’ that’s something else, that word has other ramifications.”

Wednesday it’s Alice Munro’s “The Found Boat” and Friday (for fun, before a long weekend), it’s Thurber’s “The Catbird Seat.” I always find teaching a unit on short fiction a disconcertingly miscellaneous experience, but one hope is that the variety suits the mix of constituencies inevitably present in a first-year class.

It’s still Bleak House in my 19th-century fiction class. In the last two meetings I’ve been working on ways to organize the overflow of information we get in the novel as new plots and characters tumble out relentlessly at every turn of the page. Last time, for instance, we worked on houses and families, with a particular interest in ways the idea of ‘housekeeping’ becomes a metaphor for national concerns as much as domestic ones and small acts like Jo’s sweeping the entry to the paupers’ graveyard become emblems of grace in a corrupt environment. Today we’ll turn from this ‘theme and variations’ approach to the novel’s detection plot, its pursuit of the mystery of Lady Dedlock’s connection to the mysterious law-writer ‘Nemo,’ which provides a strong forward momentum for the novel. We’ll talk about what’s at stake in the contest between Lady Dedlock and Mr. Tulkinghorn, about the relationship between knowledge and power, or evidence and control, and about sexuality and morality. If I can work it in, we’ll consider the role played by affect or emotion in directing our judgment in the novel. The strongest example will come with Jo’s death later on, but in the installment for today we have what we might consider the emotional case made for Lady Dedlock–for our compassion and forgiveness for her sexual fall:

As Sir Leicester basks in his library and dozes over his newspaper, is there no influence in the house to startle him, not to say to make the very trees at Chesney Wold fling up their knotted arms, the very portraits frown, the very armour stir?

No. Words, sobs, and cries are but air, and air is so shut in and shut out throughout the house in town that sounds need be uttered trumpet–tongued indeed by my Lady in her chamber to carry any faint vibration to Sir Leicester’s ears; and yet this cry is in the house, going upward from a wild figure on its knees.

“O my child, my child! Not dead in the first hours of her life, as my cruel sister told me, but sternly nurtured by her, after she had renounced me and my name! O my child, O my child!”