Author: Rohan Maitzen

This Week in My Classes: Focus on Writing

Rohan Maitzen7 Comments

I don’t seem to be posting my teaching updates with the regularity I used to: “this week” too often means “last week” or “these days.” I was wondering why I put off posting, and I think it’s because after doing this series for so long, I worry about repeating myself if I simply report on the week’s activities. It’s not that things don’t change in my teaching, but I think at this point I have blogged about every course in my repertoire at least once and sometimes two or three times. I mix up the readings every time (for instance, this term I’m teaching 19th-Century Fiction from Dickens to Hardy with a completely different book list than I used in this course last year) — but even so I’ve often assigned the books in other courses. And I change up the assignments regularly, for better or for worse (“I think Dr. Maitzen is trying too hard to make her assignments different,” says one of the evaluations for last term’s Somerville Novelists seminar). But after a while, how interesting is it to hear about this kind of thing?

Still, I stand by my reasons for launching the series, and I see no signs that misunderstandings or misrepresentations of academic work have abated (cough cough Forbes article cough cough). So, I’ll keep it up at least to the end of this term and then maybe reconsider. In the meantime, I’ll try to get back to more of a brief update than a long screed or meditation, just to reduce the psychological roadblocks I’ve been putting up!

nightIn English 1000 this week, we’re finishing our discussion of Wiesel’s Night. In our conferences at the beginning of term a lot of students said they still have difficulty coming up with a good thesis, soI’m going to use a fair amount of our class time on how to move from observations about Night to an interpretive argument of the right kind. One of my strategies for tomorrow is to show them the ‘suggested essay topics’ for Night that are posted at SparkNotes. None of them would lead to an essay that is really appropriate to the kind of work we’ve been doing in the course in general or on Night in particular: we’ve been talking mostly about the difficulties of representing the Holocaust, and thus on what strategies Wiesel uses both to show and to overcome the inadequacies of language.  I’m hoping that the SparkNotes topics will clarify by comparison the kind of thing we are trying to do. Then we’re going to walk through the thesis-building process again, starting from something they find worth noticing to collecting observations about it to asking questions about its significance and finally to stating a thesis about it.

In English 3032 the students are writing the first of their “mini-midterms” tomorrow — these are replacing the multiple-choice pop quizzes I used for many years to motivate reading and note-taking. Then on Wednesday, this class too will focus on essay writing. Though it’s a 3000-level course, it’s not limited to senior students and I find there’s always a range of levels. Even the more advanced students, too, in my experience, often benefit from some guidance on the difference between an essay that describes something in the novel to an essay that interprets something in the novel. So we’ll walk through a similar exercise to the one I’m doing in Intro. I’ll be interested to see what attendance is like for that session. I know I never would have missed an opportunity to hear more about expectations and standards for an assignment! But not one of my professors ever spent time on this kind of “how to” or “process” class. It’s up to the students which of our first four novels they write about for their first essay. I’m happy to say that two students did in fact resolve to write on Bleak House! I wonder what the breakdown will be over the other options (Cranford, The Mill on the Floss, and Lady Audley’s Secret).

With just two classes this term rather than last term’s three, I do feel more relaxed, especially about finding time to do marking. There’s lots else to do, though, from administrative meetings to reference letters to MA thesis proposals etc. etc. Plus it’s winter, and both kids have been sick off and on, so all the daily logistics are a bit harder than would be ideal. Thankfully, my husband is on sabbatical this term and working at home, so he’s coping with most of the fall-out from sick days and snow days. This month I also had five contributors working on pieces for Open Letters, which has been great, of course (thank you all!) but has rather hampered my work on my own piece. Well, if not this month, then next month for sure, especially as I’ll have the February reading week guaranteeing me some stretches of uninterrupted time.

Hjalmar Soderberg, Doctor Glas

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

doctorglasThe obvious comparison for Doctor Glas is probably Crime and Punishment, but as I haven’t read that (I know, I know) I was reminded of Poe’s tales of horror, specifically “The Tell-Tale Heart,” which is also a tale told by a murderer, full of logic and hatred and signifying … well, actually, that’s where the resemblances end, as Poe’s murderer is a sociopathic madman, while Doctor Glas is something else. That’s he’s not so clearly a lunatic makes his story both more creepy and more depressing. It’s easy to distance ourselves from Poe’s delightfully raving, palpably unreliable narrator. Doctor Glas (and Doctor Glas) elicits a more complicated, even ambivalent response.

Doctor Glas is told as a series of journal entries by the eponymous narrator, a lonely doctor prone to brooding and philosophizing. By any standard, but especially for a doctor, he’s disturbingly uncommitted to the value of human life. “Respect for human life–what is it in my mouth but low hypocrisy? What else can it ever be on the lips of anyone who has ever whiled away an idle hour in thought?” He’s an outspoken advocate of euthanasia:

The day will come,  must come, when the right to die is recognised as far more important and inalienable a human right than the right to drop a voting ticket into a ballot box. And when that time is ripe, every incurably sick person–and every ‘criminal’ also–shall have the right to the doctor’s help, if he wishes to be set free.

 He keeps cyanide pills handy — for his own exit plan, initially, but that bit of forethought turns out to be convenient when he resolves to end someone else’s life.

That someone else is the odious Rev. Gregorius, whose pretty wife Helga comes to the doctor seeking help because she finds her husband’s sexual demands repulsive…or does she? I wondered at a couple of points just how much of Dr. Glas’s version we should accept, given that his own interest in Mrs. Gregorius is fairly intense and he has his own sexual issues, as someone who “at past thirty years of age, [has] never been near a woman.” He wonders why that drive that “forces honest men to subject themselves to every sort of tribulation and sacrifice,” and women “to surmount those feelings of modesty which the education of generation upon generation of young girls has been designed to awaken and develop,” has so far “not driven [him] to anything.” Is it that urge or some more philanthropic motive that eventually drives him to murder?

Why would I even entertain the notion that there might be something principled about murder? That’s where Doctor Glas is most conspicuously different from Poe. The doctor is not simply a obsessive creep. In fact, I’m not even sure he’s creepy at all, though he certainly makes me uncomfortable. We know Poe’s narrator is a bad guy because his reasoning is so absurd:

He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! He had the eye of a vulture –a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees –very gradually –I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever.

But Dr. Glas’s logic is pretty compelling, his murder arguably an extension of his duty to heal. First he tries to solve Mrs. Gregorius’s problem by telling her husband she has a medical condition and should be left alone. When she returns to him with the news that “he raped me. As good as raped me,” that “he was strong. Wouldn’t let her go,” he has to try a different strategy. This time he warns Rev. Gregorius that his own health is at risk and prescribes separate bedrooms. When that doesn’t work, his dreams of killing Gregorius become plans–though not until after he has an extended debate with himself:

I hear conflicting voices. I must interrogate them; I must know why the one says: I want to, and the other: I don’t want to.

You first, who say ‘I want to’: Why do you want to? Reply!

–I want to act. Life is action. When I see something that makes me indignant, I want to intervene. . . .

–But the unwritten law? Morality . . . ?

–My good friend, the law, you know as well as I do, is in a state of flux. . . . Morality, the proverbial line chalked around a hen, binds those who believe in it. Morality, that’s others’ views of what is right. But what was here in question was my view. . . . I’m a traveller in this world; I look at mankind’s customs and adopt those I find most useful. And morality is derived from ‘morales,’ custom; it reposes entirely on custom; habit; it knows no other ground. And I don’t need to be told that, by killing that parson, I’m committing an action which is not customary. Morality — you’re joking!

 Though excerpted like that it sounds kind of annoying, the doctor’s tendency to think and question adds a lot of depth and interest to the novel, and more importantly, to the character. For a murderer, he’s a pretty poignant figure, actually, as he reflects on his sad childhood, his abusive father, his lost dreams of love — and yet these too have their disturbing aspects, as, for instance, after the drowning death of a girl he once kissed he dreams of her “white body lying among weeds and slime, rising and falling on the water.” Love and lust seem hopelessly intermingled, in his thoughts and feelings and memories, with hatred and disgust.

soderbergWhat will linger with me most after finishing the novel is its atmosphere. It is eerily evocative, with a strong sense of place, and of spiritual isolation in that place:

 The moon is shining. All my windows are open. In my study the lamp burns. I have put it on my escritoire, in the lee of the night breeze which with its gentle hush fills the curtain like a sail. I walk to and fro in the room, stopping now and then at my writing desk and jotting down a line. For a long while I’ve been standing at one of the windows of the sitting-room, looking out and listening for all the strange sounds that belong to the night. But tonight silence reigns, down there beneath the dark trees. Only a solitary woman sits on a bench; she has been sitting there a long while. And the moon is shining.

 Though, following the dictates of the self that argued “life is action,” Dr. Glas does ultimately act, the much-anticipated action is anticlimactic, bringing little satisfaction and no resolution. “Life has passed me by,” he concludes, and we’re left with another image of emotional bereavement:

Autumn pillages my trees. Already the chestnut outside my window is naked and black. Clouds fly in thick droves over the rooftops, and I never see the sun.

Doctor Glas is this month’s selection for the Slaves of Golconda book group. Discussion is scheduled to begin on the weekend; I have to get my copy back to the library by tomorrow, which is why I’m jumping the gun a bit on this post.

Rebus is Back: Ian Rankin, Standing in Another Man’s Grave

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

rankingraveYes, Rebus is back, and it’s good to see him again, the sodden old crank. The Malcolm Fox novels have been fine, but I don’t find Fox as interesting a character as Rebus–though that could be because I’ve known Rebus for so long. Also, I had hoped that Rankin would take up Siobhan Clarke as his protagonist when Rebus retired. She has quite a prominent role in Standing in Another Man’s Grave, so my hope of that is renewed!

Rebus is back — and that seemed to me the major feature of this new novel. It’s a solid, well-constructed procedural on its own merits — Rankin is an experienced pro at this, after all — but it’s as a novel of character that Standing in Another Man’s Grave is most interesting. It doesn’t have the ambitious scale or political reach of the late books in the initial Rebus series, particularly Fleshmarket Close (which is described on the cover as a “state of the nation novel”–surely a variation on what I talk about in the 19thC context as a “condition of England novel”) or The Naming of the Dead. Both of these work their particular crimes up as symptoms of much wider social evils. By contrast, the case in Standing in Another Man’s Grave is mostly an occasion for Rebus to revisit and rethink his identity as a detective as he contemplates a move from the cold case unit he moved to on retirement back into active service (something made possible as a plot twist by changes in regulations). The case itself seemed a little perfunctory, except that in linking together old cases with new, it continues the preoccupation of all of the Rebus novels with the complex relationship between past and present.

Here, it’s Rebus himself who often seems like a relic of the past, something Rankin can make the most of because this novel is itself a kind of throwback. While Rebus was out of our sight, our world and his was changing, and his ways of doing things — always borderline inappropriate — are now conspicuously “old-school,” as Malcolm Fox’s colleague Tony Kaye points out. Rankin set Fox up to be in many ways Rebus’s antithesis, and here we see Fox determined to put an end to Rebus’s tainted career. “I know a cop gone bad when I see one,” he tells Siobhan, warning her to cut ties if she values her own career advancement:

Rebus has spent so many years crossing the line, he’s managed to rub it out altogether. As far as he’s concerned, his way’s the right way, no matter how wrong the rest of us might know it to be.

“You don’t know him,” Siobhan replies, and that’s what long-time Rebus readers would say as well: Fox’s summary is pretty accurate, except for his conclusion that Rebus’s disregard for rules, protocols, and lines proves him to have “gone bad.” Rebus’s methods may be unorthodox, but the law and the right do not always completely coincide, and Fox’s determination to put Rebus on one side or the other of that line shows his own moral limitations, or at least his own moral rigidity.

Standing in Another Man’s Grave is in some ways an affirmation of Rebus’s approach. As Kaye tells Fox,

Rebus got results the old way, without seeming to earn them. He did that because he got close to some nasty people in a way that you couldn’t. . . . Rebus specialises in something a bit different — doesn’t necessarily make him the enemy.

Rebus gets results here too, through “old-school” contacts, hunches, and the weary, dogged persistence that has seen him through so many cases before.

Standing in Another Man’s Grave is not quite a triumphant return to form for Rebus, though. Rebus proves himself still up to the job, but just barely — not so much because he’s bemused by new methods and new media, such as Twitter (a bit of an inside joke from Rankin, who is a frequent and adept user of social media — you can follow him at @beathhigh if you’re interested) but because he’s just barely hanging in there physically, and no wonder, considering he smokes and drinks incessantly. Even if his application to be reinstated is accepted, how long before he’s in his own grave? His ancient Saab, also on its last legs (wheels?), becomes a metaphor for his debilitated condition. “And the Saab didn’t break down?” asks Siobhan after one of Rebus’s long trips to check out leads. “Not ready for the knacker’s yard just yet,” replies Rebus, and the same seems to be true of him. Maybe there’s one more Rebus novel left in him before Siobhan gets her chance at the lead role.

This Week In My Classes: The Value of F2F

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The Student (Dixon)Last week I cancelled two regular class meetings for my Introduction to Literature Class and instead set up individual conferences, 15 minutes per students. (If you want to do the math, of the 26 registered students 24 ended up meeting with me, so that was six actual contact hours in place of two, and since it wasn’t possible to run the meetings entirely consecutively, overall I had about eight hours of my schedule taken up with this exercise.)

In a previous post I wrote quite a bit about my motivations and goals for these conferences. It will be a while before I can tell if they made much difference in terms of how students respond in the classroom. Many of them set as one of their goals that they would like to participate more in discussion — yet on Monday things were not especially lively, even though I thought the readings (Randall’s “Ballad of Birmingham” and Hughes’s “A Dream Deferred”) were reasonably provocative. Whatever happens, I think the process had value for them, because it prompted them to reflect on their work for last term and to consider what role they might have in making this term successful. All of them seemed to take the exercise seriously, and some of them realized important things about their work habits or about relationships between different course requirements (such as reading journals) and outcomes (such as understanding of material or grades on papers). So that’s good!

And the process had value for me too, not least because meeting with them face to face renewed my conviction that teaching is a very personal activity. “Content delivery” is not nothing, but it’s far from everything; skills development is also something, but it too is not sufficient. Education is an internal process as much as anything: something has to change within, and while no avid reader is going to say face to face interaction is the only route to inner transformation, I really believe that there’s something special about speaking directly to another human being who takes a sincere interest in you. I was at a faculty meeting today where we were invited by our university’s president to imagine the program we would create if we could do anything we wanted, without constraints. It was an ironic suggestion, really, as the meeting was about dealing with a looming budget crisis–it was all about constraints! The problem is that what I imagine is a program in which that kind of personal interaction is routine–if not throughout a student’s entire degree, at least at key moments, and I’d consider their first year just such a moment. My “blue sky thinking” always brings me back to something like a “freshman seminar” model, with maybe 15 students around a table with a dedicated, experienced instructor with plenty of time and attention for them. But I can’t figure out how such a dream is compatible with our need to (as our Dean put it) “do less with less,” especially when the only recipe for financial flourishing appears to be more students and fewer faculty.

Anyway, I’m glad I worked these meetings into my plans for this term. If nothing else, they know there’s one person on campus who’s really paying attention to them! And it’s a rarity for me to have any class, much less an intro class, small enough to make this logistically feasible.

Now we’re back to our regularly scheduled programming, with another week of poetry before beginning Elie Wiesel’s Night next week. This week’s poem are something of a build-up to Night, in that they all deal with difficult realities, from Randall and Hughes yesterday to the horrors of trench warfare on Friday, with Owen’s “Dulce et decorum est.” One thing we’ll talk a lot about with Night is how (and even whether) to transform suffering into art, and how choices of literary form and representation are also choices about the meaning of real events. After that we’ll move on to The Road — so basically we’ll all be depressed for about the next month.

In 19thC Fiction I won’t be having conferences, but I am having the students write regular reading journals, and that gives me at least a little sense of them individually to add to what I can glean from class discussion. I’ve had just a few submitted so far but I like reading them: they seem to be just formal enough that the students have put some thought into them, but not so high stakes that they (or I) need to stress out over them. That said, I’m going to be reading a lot of them this term: if every student submits the three required entries for every novel, that’s 630 journal postings at approximately 150 words each, for a grand total of … eek, about 94,500 words. Will I end up regretting not just assigning more standard essays? But these have other purposes, and they come in small and so far quite tasty doses. And if any students in this class want to meet with me one on one (which I will emphatically encourage them to do when they are working on their longer papers), they’ll be welcome — and, in case they need any extra incentive, I’ll let them know that I have a stash of extraneous books in my office from which visiting students are always welcome to help themselves…

Magical Thinking: Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

tiffanyBreakfast at Tiffany’ s is the January read for my Halifax book group: we’re meeting next Saturday at Pipa to talk it over and celebrate the new year.

I more or less enjoyed reading Breakfast at Tiffany’s: more because the prose is so elegant, less because I found Holly Golightly tedious. She seems to me one of a type, though a particularly fey and charming example of it: it’s a type I think of as the intellectual man’s idea of a temptress, and other examples include Sue in Jude the Obscure and Julia in Brideshead Revisited. I believe I accused these two of representing “pseudo-philosophical eroticized flightiness.” Holly lacks their intellectual pretentiousness and shows no sign of haphazard piety, but she raises the same question for me as the other two: what’s so attractive about her? Is it that she’s so unstable her sexuality is not threatening? Is it that her intelligence is randomly dispersed rather than ambitious? Is it that for all her allure she seems fundamentally vulnerable?

Actually, even as I write I’m thinking of more ways Holly is different from my other examples. She is more endearing (at least to me), because for all her elaborate artifice, she seems warmhearted. Though she uses the men in her life to serve her selfish ends, she also enjoys giving pleasure, and she’s loyal . And she says some wise things, including “Anyone who ever gives you confidence, you owe them a lot.” And — and here’s where I think much of her charm probably does lie, for every reader — she’s a wistful dreamer, someone who, like all of us, is just wishing for a way to live her life that feels safe and happy, and maybe even a little bit dignified:

What I’ve found does the most good is just to get into a taxi and go to Tiffany’s. It calms me down right away, the quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there, not with those kind men in their nice suits, and that lovely smell of silver and alligator wallets. If I could find a real-life place that made me feel like Tiffany’s, then I’d buy some furniture and give the cat a name.

Do we all have a place that works its magic on us the way Tiffany’s calms and cheers Holly? I bet in this crowd a lot of us feel that way in a bookstore. I’ve been feeling kind of fretful lately, but this afternoon I treated myself to a browse and a coffee at Chapters, and though it’s not even my favourite bookstore to visit, I sure felt better after an hour or so roaming the shelves. While I was in there, I was wondering about one of the sources of my fretfulness–the surge of writerly confidence I felt after I got back from Boston last year, or rather the way that surge seems to have ebbed away. I spent a lot of my time in Boston in bookstores, and with other people who thrive on reading and writing and talking about books. I’m not looking for excuses to buy more books, really! But it occurred to me today that just spending my time in that way might have affected me at some subterranean level by affirming priorities, and even an identity, somewhat different from my day-to-day reality. My relationship with the wider book world is much more furtive in my ordinary life: I often (if irrationally) feel kind of guilty when I buy books, or when I steal away from work and family to browse them at my leisure; my bookish contacts and conversations are nearly all virtual; I have to fit in my non-academic reading and writing in between my “real” work tasks; my home office where I do my blogging and non-academic writing is even in the basement! I think there’s a way in which being in an actual bookstore summons up a fantasy life for me the way Tiffany’s does for Holly, though the precise things we want to feel and do are hardly the same.

From the Archives: The Last Time I Taught Bleak House…

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bleakhouseoupFor some reason this phrase has been running through my head to the tune of “The Last Time I Saw Paris.” I don’t know why I would be feeling nostalgic about teaching Bleak House, though it was rather a while ago–it was Fall 2008, to be precise. Because we’ve started work on it in my 19th-century fiction class this week, I’ve been reviewing old notes and also old blog posts, which prove (among other things) to be a valuable archive. Because (so far at least) my ideas about the novel haven’t really changed in the meantime, and because a lot of people who might stop by and read this post almost certainly never read my earlier ones, I thought I’d repost a couple of them, starting with this one about the beginning of the novel and the beginning of my class discussions of it.

From the Novel Readings Archives: Fog. Mud. Smoke. Soot. Gas. Fog.

Bleak House Shadows (Phiz)

No, that’s not today’s prediction from Environment Canada (though there is something implacable about today’s weather, even if it’s not yet November). This week in one of my classes, it’s time for Bleak House–by comparison with which, nothing else I’m doing at work really matters. The introduction to our Oxford World’s Classics edition remarks that the opening ‘set piece’ is ‘too famous to need quotation.’ Well, I don’t know about that, especially because I consider it an aesthetic accomplishment self-sufficient enough to render critical commentary not just redundant, but irritating. Here are the first four paragraphs, then (three of them composed entirely, it’s worth noting, of sentence fragments).

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes–gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls deified among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ‘prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.

Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time–as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

Sure, there’s plenty to be remarked about this passage, beginning with its literary virtuosity and metaphoric ingenuity. Dinosaurs and compound interest? Snowflakes in mourning? ‘Fog’ used 13 times in one paragraph? Gas that’s ‘haggard and unwilling’? I’m reduced to the exclamatory mode some critics objected to in James Wood’s How Fiction Works: “What a piece of writing that is!” It puts to shame other writers called ‘Dickensian’ for no apparent reason except that they write multiplot novels with quirky characters and lots of emotion. There’s also its extraordinary efficiency at launching both governing ideas and dominant images of the vast novel it introduces; fog, mud, and infection order the thinking of Bleak House as much as webs do the same for Middlemarch. But really, the point of this passage is just to read it, to experience it, and then to carry the impression of it with you as you read on. (Is this response ‘aesthetic’? I’m not sure, or at least I’m not sure I could separate my admiration for the literary features of this passage from my sense of its ethics–or, better, its ethos.)

Today I’ll give a brief introduction to Dickens and some context for the first publication of Bleak House. Then my chief concern is to help my students find some reading (and note-taking) strategies to make their experience of the novel rewarding, which means helping them organize the mass of material (and the array of characters) they will be rapidly confronted with. We’ll do some ‘getting to know you’ work first of all: who do we meet in each of the first few chapters, and how are they connected? I’ll encourage them to keep a list of characters in each plot or location and to draw lines between them as relationships are discovered. They will have a chaotic criss-cross of lines before too long, which of course is the point–everything and everyone is connected, as Dickens challenges us to realize with his disingenous questions in Chapter 16:

What connexion can there be, between the place in Lincolnshire, the house in town, the Mercury in powder, and the whereabout of Jo the outlaw with the broom, who had that distant ray of sunshine on him when he swept the churchyard-step? What connexion can there have been between many people in the innumerable histories of this world, who, from opposite sides of great gulfs, have, nevertheless, been very curiously brought together!

My other main strategy is to get them thinking in terms of themes and variations. Today, for instance, we’ll look at how many ways the idea of housekeeping is refracted across the different story lines. Finally (though this is certainly not my last priority) I will try to convey, and make contagious, my enthusiasm for Dickens’s language in the novel, and to get them thinking about how his literary strategies (including the kinds of wild metaphors we get in the first few paragraphs) are important to his conception of the ‘condition of England question,’ and to his answer to it.

[originally posted October 27, 2008]

Next Week in My Classes: Winter 2013 Term Begins!

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

ScreamThe past week has been all about getting organized: packing and cleaning up from Christmas, sorting the kids out to get back to school, and sorting myself out to be ready for the start of winter term classes tomorrow. I wasn’t starting from scratch, happily, but I made some adjustments to my plans for my Introduction to Literature class, which continues from last term, and finalized the plans for The 19th-Century British Novel from Dickens to Hardy, which is just beginning.

Reflecting on the first term’s work in Intro, what I decided was that this term I want to get the students more involved. They’ve been a good group: diligent, attentive, and basically cooperative for class discussion, group work, and peer editing. My sense is, though, that most of them did not sign up for the class because they were passionately interested in literature or in becoming literary critics. For most of them, English just seemed like the default option for their mandatory writing requirement. Dal’s writing courses are based on a ‘writing across the curriculum’ model, though, which means that our courses are not composition classes but are intended to introduce students to the methods of our discipline. Most of our upper-level courses have one or the other of these introductory classes as their prerequisites, with the program as a whole building up to increasingly specialized critical work. I’ve always taken this discipline-specific mission pretty seriously, not by working in literary theory or anything but by focusing on ways to talk precisely about things like poetic form or narration or characterization, and by working hard on how to develop and support an interpretive argument. Though this does vary by background and training, first-year students very often arrive having done little analytical work in English classes: their experience tends towards book reports or personal (or even creative) responses. So there’s lots to be learned, and that’s what we focused on in the fall.

Now I’d like things to — not loosen, so much as liven up. There is still a fair amount of uncertainty about literary terminology and about how to think your way through to a strong and interesting thesis, but the focus will be on practising, on doing, even more than before. So I want more class discussion, more partner and group work, more students talking in class, and maybe to the rest of the class. I want them to feel in their bones that class time when I’m not talking can be some of the most valuable, rather than least valuable, time: that trading ideas with each other and challenging each other is our version of doing labs, and, above all, that just staring at the words on the page is not enough to prepare for class. Finally, having spent a lot of the first term telling them what they need to learn and do, I want them to take over the task of motivating themselves: I want them to identify their strengths and weaknesses and consider these in relation to their goals for the course. One way to put it is that I have brought them to the water and now they need to decide if they will drink ! Another way to put it is that having, I hope, established a clear framework for their learning, I can gradually get out of their way.

I don’t think I’m talking about a drastic shift (it’s not as if I micromanaged every aspect of their work or our discussions last term) but it is something I want to be deliberate about. So what I decided to do this week is to work on personalizing the course for them by replacing a couple of our first class meetings with one-on-one conferences in which we’ll discuss their work in the course so far and their goals and expectations for the rest of it. I’m asking them to do a self-assessment for their first journal assignment, to bring along to the meeting with me: that way I know they will have given some thought to the purpose of our little chat. I think it will be useful for them to take stock, and asking them to so in writing that they submit will show them that I am interested in their ideas. My experience has also been that individual meetings help students get more comfortable with me, and help me understand better who exactly they are and how I might be useful to them. It’s relatively rare for me to have a small enough class that I can afford the time to require such conferences, but in this case not only is it the smallest intro section I’ve ever taught but it’s also a full-year course–a real luxury these days–so the logistics aren’t overwhelming. Here’s hoping the effects are beneficial.

Bleak House Shadows (Phiz)I taught the Dickens to Hardy class just last winter, but with a book list that was 100% different, so I won’t be just coasting along this time. This year’s reading list is thematically unified (sort of) around troublesome women, and it includes two novels I’ve never lectured on (Cranford and Tess), so I’ll be busy finding out what I have to say, and what I want us to discuss, about them. I’ve also tweaked the assignments again, introducing online reading journals and what I’m calling “mini-midterms” as ways of stimulating and measuring attention on a regular basis, and then assigning one short paper for everyone followed by the option of a longer research paper or a final exam. I found I just didn’t have the stomach for the letter exchange assignment I used for many years. While pedagogically I think having them write really frequently is very beneficial, I was exhausted by organizing all the bits and pieces and dealing with students who (sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for no reason at all) messed up the system. For the short papers this time, I’m allowing them to choose which of our first novels they write on and thus which deadline they meet. I almost decided against this because I was worried they’d all gravitate towards the latest deadline and thus (oh no!) nobody would write on Bleak House (which we’re reading first). But then it occurred to me that I don’t much want to read essays on Bleak House by students who don’t actually want to write on Bleak House, and the mini-midterms give them an incentive to read it on schedule, at least … and the same goes for the other books. Surely I can trust them to manage their time and follow their hearts. In the worst case scenario, I get 40 essays on Lady Audley’s Secret and they have to wait a while to get them back.

Novel Readings 2012

Rohan Maitzen13 Comments

2012 seems to have been a particularly rich and rewarding reading year – also, a particularly maddening and occasionally stultifying one. I suppose what I’m saying is that it was a reading year like any other one! As always, some books stand out, though sometimes as much for the challenge and gratification I found in writing about them, or for the conversations that my posts generated, as for the reading experience in itself. As is traditional, here’s a look back at the highlights.

peacockBook of the Year:

Molly Peacock, The Paper Garden. This book drew me to it by its physical beauty and turned out to be the right book for me at the right moment. This is the kind of serendipitous discovery that seems unlikely to happen except in a real (and well-curated) bookstore: for reasons I explain in my original post, it’s unlikely I would have deliberately sought out a book like this. I’m so glad I succumbed to its charms. My review is one of my favorite pieces of my own writing from 2012.

Other books I’m particularly glad I read or wrote about:

Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies. Well, of course. But then, it’s no small feat to follow up the brilliant Wolf Hall with something equally brilliant. I did think, as I read it, that it would have been just a teensy bit more exciting if Mantel–who is a prose virtuoso–had decided to approach each novel in her Cromwell trilogy in a different way, a different voice. But the close third-person narration is just as compelling and even more morally complex here than in the first volume, and my expectations are now sky-high for the concluding one.

T. H. White, The Once and Future King. Another surprise: I don’t “do” fantasy any more than I “do” the 18th century, and yet from the first page I loved this novel. I can’t think of another novel I’ve read recently–not just in 2012 but in several years–that had this much emotional range. For once, the adjective “Dickensian” doesn’t seem out of place, as this really is fiction written to change how you think as well as to make you laugh and cry.

Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary. Along with St. Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels, Madame Bovary was the most thought-provoking read of 2012 for me as a critic, because it was the least congenial for me as a reader. Even while I couldn’t deny its mastery, I couldn’t help but decry its grim and limited worldview. Yes, we can all sometimes be Emma Bovary, but most of us will surely never be exclusively so self-absorbed or self-deceived. If we are, shame on us, and we need books that help us out of that moral rut even more.

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina. I’ve only just finished Anna Karenina so I’m still thinking about it. I wasn’t swept up in it, but then, limited as my experience with Tolstoy is, I guess that shouldn’t have surprised me: there’s a quality of ruthlessness in his fiction that I’d noticed before.

Edward St. Aubyn, The Patrick Melrose Novels. I abhorred and admired these novels in about equal measure. Actually, I think by the end of At Last admiration had won out, but it was a close thing.

Helen DeWitt, Lightning Rods. Another surprise. I don’t think any author except DeWitt could have pulled this off in a way I would, if not exactly enjoy, at least applaud.

Susan Messer, Grand River and Joy. I was completely absorbed by this novel set in Detroit around the time of the 1967 riot and focusing on tensions “between blacks and Jews but [also] between individual identities and group allegiances, between narrowly-defined protective self-interest and the desire to reach out and make connections.”

J. G. Farrell, The Siege of Krishnapur. I liked this as much as I liked the first in the trilogy, Troubles. If you want to read something truly substantial about Farrell, skip my post and read Dorian Stuber’s essay on him in Open Letters.

Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front. The ultimate novel of the ‘lost generation’: “We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial–I believe we are lost.”

Books I didn’t much like:

Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea. Meh.

Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier. Hey, it’s my blog, isn’t it?

Low point of my reading year:

George Sand, Indiana. Don’t worry, George: it’s not you, it’s me! Or maybe not.

Books I’m especially looking forward to reading in 2013:

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All the ones in my Christmas loot pile, of course. But also:

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. It has been fabulous so far, and my only (lame) excuses for not having persisted are not having committed deliberately enough (I proved to myself with Anna Karenina this month that being busy with other things is no reason not to get through a doorstopper) and its weight: there’s no way you can tuck this volume in your purse for reading at odd moments.

The Singapore Grip. One more in Farrell’s Empire Trilogy, and I’m sure it will be as strange and brilliant and darkly comic as the others.

The rest of the Raj Quartet. I found The Jewel in the Crown engrossing and complex and am keen to make my way through the next volumes.

War and Peace. This has featured in this “to read” list for several years now; maybe 2013 is the year I’ll finally get it done.

Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts. This is another book I picked up on my spring trip to Boston and one of the few from that expedition that I haven’t read yet. Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose is another, and that’s high on my TBR pile too.

Up next, though, will be Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which is the January book for my local book club, and then Doctor Glas, which is the next read for the Slaves of Golconda.

Notable Posts of 2012:

Finally, it seems worth noting a couple of posts that weren’t exactly reviews but that generated more excitement than is usual in this quiet corner of the internet:

Your book club wants to read Middlemarch? Great idea! I have not forgotten or abandoned the idea of creating the “Middlemarch for Book Club” site I proclaimed so boldly here. In fact, it already exists in skeletal form. I wanted to do it well, though, and thus took my time over it at first, and then I put it on the back burner and then it was the new term. One of my resolutions for 2013 is to build more of it and then start making it available in a ‘beta’ version. It’s not going to be anything too fancy: I’m just using WordPress to set it up. But if people seem to like it and find it valuable, it’s the kind of thing I might eventually seek out some funding for and try to make really good.

How to Read a Victorian Novel. I put this together as part of Molly Templeton’s call for responses to the NYTBR “How-To” issue that seemed to think women didn’t know how to do much of interest beyond cook and raise children. How does that even happen, in 2012? Where are the editors? What are they thinking, when they see a cover graphic like that? Anyway, the resulting tumblr turned into something quite amazing, and it was really energizing to be a part of it. Thanks to a couple of high-profile links to it, this is my most-read post of all time.

Thanks to everyone who read and commented on Novel Readings in 2012. Happy New Year!

“And such is the meaning of all existence!” Levin and Anna Karenina

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

annakIf Anna represents the futility of material striving–of seeking lasting happiness through pursuing her own immediate needs–perhaps Levin represents spiritual striving. At any rate, that’s the best I’ve come up with so far as I ponder the relationship between the two major plots of Anna Karenina. In Levin’s epiphanic musings towards the end of the novel, he repeats the words of the peasant Theodore:

To live not for one’s needs but for God! For what God? What could be more senseless than what he said? He said we must not live for our needs–that is, we must not live for what we understand and what attracts us, what we wish for, but must live for something incomprehensible, for God whom nobody can understand or define. Well? And did I not understand those senseless words of Theodore’s? And having understood them, did I doubt their justice? Did I find them stupid, vague, or inexact?

No, I understand him just as he understands them: understood completely and more clearly than I understand anything in life. . . .

Levin’s agnosticism has been a constant up to about this point in the novel. Does he “find” God here, then? It sounds like it:

But now I say that I know the meaning of my life: it is to live for God, for the soul. And that meaning, in spite of its clearness, is mystic and wonderful. And such is the meaning of all existence.

At the end of the chapter, he rejects not just doubt but reason:

Reason has discovered the struggle for existence and the law that I must throttle all those who hinder the satisfaction of my desires. That is the deduction reason makes. But the law of loving others could not be discovered by reason, because it is unreasonable.

Anna, perhaps, lives more according to reason, opposing those who hinder the satisfaction of her desires. Levin, in contrast, embraces here an ethos of love, but a different kind of love than the gratification of vanity and ego that defines Anna and Vronsky’s love. Levin’s is an ethical love, a love of the soul, a love of others. By the light of his love, we judge the moral failure of Anna’s; through his embrace of life, we condemn Anna’s choice of death.

And yet I’m not satisfied with this way of reading the contrast between them. For one thing, I can’t figure out how we are positioned relative to Levin’s revelatory statements here. Though he has often meditated on the meaning of life and the significance of death, he has never proffered a religious interpretation before. More, the sentiments he expresses here are so vague and ecstatic I find it hard to take them seriously as a response to the complicated world we’ve been living in with him. He declares that the “knowledge” he has acquired is “given to me as to everybody,” but we have hardly seen other people motivated by “the law of loving others.” Is the idea that Society–the same Society that crushed Anna’s more earthly desires–also crushes spiritual idealism, so that Levin’s story doubles up on the social criticism of Anna’s, while also holding out (as her story does not) a standard by which a better world could be established? Or is it possible (because Levin seems kind of an erratic, ineffectual figure for a heroic protagonist) that he’s modelling another kind of folly, rather than an ideal? What kind of noble life is truly possible without reason, after all? His final assertions of revelation depend on a resolute setting aside of hard intellectual problems (such as “the relation to the Deity of all the different beliefs of mankind”). Is this supposed to be right–never mind the details, just feel the truth in your heart? Or is it supposed to seem, as it does to me, a feel-good cop-out?

I’m sure that some of my confusion about Levin is rooted in my historical ignorance: much more than Anna, he is involved with social, political, economic, and, especially, agricultural questions specific to his time and place, and I don’t know the context well enough to understand what his particular efforts in these areas mean about his values. I’m not a trained historian of Victorian Britain, but when Caleb Garth confronts the farmers who oppose the building of the railway, or when Mr Brooke attempts to run for the Reform parliament as an Independent, I have some ideas about what it all means as part of the politics of Middlemarch. Here, though, I have no general background to prepare me, and my one complaint about the Oxford edition I was reading is that it is not really an annotated edition and so the many political and other references go unexplained. There are a small number of notes at the bottoms of pages (mostly translations of French phrases) but I would have appreciated a thicker layer of supporting information to help make the various councils and voting schemes and farming experiments a bit more … well, interesting.

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John Bayley also says little about Levin in his introduction to my edition, but he does suggest one way in which Levin’s story is thematically related to Anna and Vronksy’s: “His apparently causeless depression … relates to something which is also present in the Anna-Vronsky ménage,some primal dissatisfaction with the fact that one has gone one’s own way and should be happy, and yet one is not.” In Levin’s case, he should be happy with Kitty, the tedious embodiment of ideal, nurturing, maternal femininity who is everything that Anna is not (“is Anna the pit and Kitty the pedestal?” reads one of my marginal jottings) — except that Kitty (for all her nesting) is not so perfect, and Levin, as Bayley says, does not subside into bliss on marrying her. As with Anna and Vronsky, we see with Kitty and Levin the close proximity of love and possessiveness, the neediness, the jealousy. When they are happy, they’re kind of boring, aren’t they? So it doesn’t seem as if they are the “ought’ to the other pair’s “is.” Maybe the most that can be said is that they are basically nicer people than Anna and Vronsky, more sincerely concerned with the well-being of others. Maybe Levin looks for transcendent meaning but we should not.

“I want to love and to live”: More Anna Karenina

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

anna2I finished Anna Karenina yesterday–or, I should say, I finished Anna Karenina for the first time: it’s so large and complicated, and also so alien, so unfamiliar, to me that I hardly feel I’ve really read it yet. It was an odd, engrossing, and somewhat frustrating experience working my way through it. Despite its sprawl and its episodic character, it felt well built to me, with the two major plots running sometimes in parallel, sometimes intersecting, and always provoking questions about the significance of their juxtaposition. But I felt morally and thematically adrift much of the time, partly (presumably) because I’m new to the novel and there’s a lot of it to take in, and partly (perhaps) because the novel doesn’t work quite the way the big novels I know best work, which is to say, it sets out its characters and its problems without also providing a readerly guide in the form of, say, an intrusive narrator. There’s no friendly companion, no wry moralist, no philosophical or historical commentator–in other words, this is not a novel by Trollope, or Thackeray, or George Eliot. The unifying perspective–the set of ideas that make all the different parts of the novel into a whole–emerges only implicitly, and to me, so far, remains somewhat elusive.

I know there’s lots of accessible expert commentary out there to help me. After my earlier post on the novel, for instance, maryb linked to this piece at the New Yorker, which I’ve since skimmed and will return to read more slowly soon. A lot of other bloggers have written about Anna Karenina, too. But before I get too caught up in what other people have said, I’ll try to sort out some of my own impressions and ideas. I thought that for today, I’d start with Anna herself. It is, after all, nominally her novel.

In my last post I said that “I don’t understand her infidelity and thus can’t sympathize with it.” That remained true for me to the end. If anything, I became less sympathetic, in fact, as far as the supposed love affair between Anna and Vronsky was concerned. There’s something so self-absorbed about it, so petulantly self-indulgent. “For you and me,” Anna exclaims, “only one thing is important: whether we love each other. No other considerations exist.” Far from being a grand passion for which they heroically pit themselves against society, though, it’s a commonplace enough affair, as Anna herself seems to realize near the end:

‘What did he look for in me? Not so much love as the satisfaction of his vanity. . . . Yes, there was in him the triumph of successful vanity. Of course there was love too; but the greater part was pride in his success. He boasted of me. Now that is past.’

She describes her own love as growing “more and more passionate and egotistic,” but it seems very much that way from the first. Even when wracked with grief about being separated from her son, it’s her own painful choice she is fixated on, not Serezha’s loss: “I love those two beings only,” she tells Dolly, “and the one excludes the other! I cannot unite them, yet that is the one thing I desire.” At no point does she attain a broader vision of her actions, seeking to understand their meaning for other people the way that (yes, the inevitable comparison) Dorothea does after her ‘white night’ near the end of Middlemarch. “Was she alone in that scene? Was it her event only?” thinks Dorothea. For Anna, the answer to this question is surely “yes”: she has little concept of other people having an “equivalent center of self,” and her suffering, the product of a thwarted quest for selfish gratification (“Count Vronsky and I have also been unable to find that pleasure from which we expected so much”) leads her only deeper into her own neediness.

The more I read, though, and the more I gave up on my initial expectation that Anna Karenina was a transcendent love story, the less it mattered that Anna and Vronsky hardly seemed to deserve happiness–or sympathy. The commonplace, almost tediously conventional, nature of their relationship, for one thing, started to make its extraordinary consequences seem particularly absurd. Anna herself has no intention of being either a heroine or a martyr. “I don’t want you think that I wish to prove anything,” she tells Dolly; “I don’t want to prove anything: simply I wish to live, not hurting anyone but myself. I have a right to do that, have I not?” That’s a narrow idea of rights, to be sure, but at the same time, from the first page of the novel we know that adultery is commonplace in her world, and that many people (including, obviously, Dolly) learn to live with it. Of course, Stiva is a man, and the contrast between his cheerfully trivial infidelity and Anna’s catastrophic affair painfully exposes the sexual double-standard that is surely part of the novel’s larger moral calibration. Anna pays, and pays, and pays for her adultery, but it is not any more morally grievous than her brother’s, is it? And once we start asking that question–if anyone in Anna’s world really asked that question–the arbitrary and artificial rules of Society can hardly bear their own weight.

It’s not just the double-standard that works against Anna, though, and leads her to be, in effect, a prisoner in her own home as well as her own ego. For all her claim not to want to prove anything, she does want to live openly with Vronsky, to treat their relationship as a socially legitimate one precisely because it is not a furtive dalliance. I think this is part of the quality of sincerity which many characters admire in her. “In addition to her intelligence, grace, and beauty, she also possessed sincerity,” reflects Levin; “She did not wish to hide from him the hardships of her position.” What seems unnatural to Anna is hiding her feelings, hiding the truth of her situation. If everyone knows anyway, after all, what’s the point? “She has done what everybody, except myself, does secretly,” says Princess Myagkaya, “and she would not deceive, and has acted splendidly.” But it’s this “splendid” honesty (is it naïve? defiant?) that brings the judgment of Society down on her, as during the painful scene at the opera. Vronsky is “vexed” with her determination to expose herself in this way:

“To appear dressed as you are at the theatre, accompanied by the Princess, whom everybody knows, means not only to acknowledge your position as a fallen woman, but to throw down a challenge to Society–which means, to renounce it forever.”

But he does not say these words out loud to her, partly because he too does not know why she is so determined: “But how can she fail to understand it? And what is happening to her?” he wonders. It’s this episode that shows Anna, I think, the folly of her own grandiose, romantic insistence that “no other considerations exist” besides their love: as she sits in her box pretending to be tranquil and composed, “she felt as though pilloried.” Vronsky hopes his sister-in-law, Varya, will help rehabilitate her, but Varya insists that she “cannot do it! I have daughters growing up, and I must move in Society, for my husband’s sake. . . . I am not able to raise her.” “I don’t consider that she has fallen lower than hundreds of people whom you do receive,” returns Vronsky, but by removing the veil of pretense, Anna has made it impossible for herself to move among those for whom the appearance of virtue is, if not everything, at least enough.* Anna loses both social and moral mobility, as a result, and her relationship with Vronsky becomes the totality of her options. Her jealousy, fretfulness, and eventual desperation arise from this, particularly as she is painfully aware that Vronsky’s situation is different: “He has the right to go when and where he pleases. Not only to go away, but to leave me. He has every right and I have none at all.”

Anna’s agony, under these pressures, might have had a different outcome if she herself had a different character–if she were heroic, noble, or aspirational. Dorothea is only able to turn her grief into sympathetic action, after all, because she is already a profoundly compassionate person. Suffering has no particularly benevolent effect on Rosamond, and our judgment of her damaging egotism is infinitely complicated by our awareness (cultivated across 800 pages) that she lacks the capacity to do or be otherwise. I ended up thinking that it’s the same qualities in Anna that made me find her an unsympathetic character that turn her, finally, into a tragic character. What else can she do, at the end, except put an end to her own problems? Solving other people’s problems is never what her life has been about.

*I was reminded, during these exchanges, less of George Eliot’s novels and more of George Eliot’s life, as she knew that her most radical choice was not getting sexually involved with a married man but doing so openly, as if she had a right to. “Light and easily broken ties are what I neither desire theoretically nor could live for practically,” she wrote to a close friend after her elopement with Lewes. “Women who are satisfied with such ties do not act as I have done–they obtain what they desire and are still invited to dinner.” She staked her future on Lewes’s steadfastness, and she (and not he) endured social ostracization on their return.