As a proud new member of NAVSA (better late than never!), I have just received a copy of the latest issue of Victorian Studies. Of the many interesting features in this issue (Volume 50 No. 1), I particularly enjoyed George Levine’s review of Barbara Hardy’s George Eliot: A Critic’s Biography, a book I own but haven’t yet read. One of my clearest recollections of my early days as a graduate student is being asked by one of my new faculty mentors to name a critic whose work on George Eliot I admired. “Barbara Hardy,” I promptly replied. The response was a tolerant smile and nod, and a bit of sage advice: “Of course, you can’t be Barbara Hardy any more.” True enough–unless, naturally, you actually are Barbara Hardy. Her steadiness in being herself is at the heart of Levine’s admiration of this new book:

Negative hermeneutics has never been Hardy’s mode, and her determination to take seriously what Eliot said said, without suspicion and cynicism as a premise of the reading, is one thing that might make this anti-biography suspect to modern critics. But that determination becomes a form of negative capability that is one of the most moving and satisfying aspects of the book. For Hardy, Eliot wrote as if she meant what she said and she said what she meant. In critical circles, this is an astonishingly fresh argument these days. (100)

I’ve put it at the top of my “t0 read” pile.

Subcategory A: Well, that’s OK, then!

“[P]ostcolonial critics inevitably homogenize as ‘imperialist’ critics did before them. The difference is that they typically profess an awareness of the problematics to a degree the others did not.”

Subcategory B: Inadvertant Irony and Foregone Conclusions

“[Postcolonial cultural studies] involves a dialogue leading to the significant insight that the Western paradigm (Manichean and binary) is highly problematical.”

Over at the Chronicle of Higher Education’s newish blog Brainstorm, Gina Barreca chides whiny academics for complaining about the pressure to publish:

OK, so you not only have to show up and teach, you also have to publish. But in our line of work, that’s how you tell a professional from an amateur. The professional is somebody who does it all the time, does it publicly, does it well enough to be recognized by peers as a formidable presence, and who does it in such a way that other people can make use of and follow her example. (read the rest here)

While I take Barreca’s point that getting stuff into print is an “initiation rite” that proves we belong in the “gang” of professional critics, I’m disturbed by her suggestion that it’s pure self-indulgence to want to wait until you have something worthwhile to say.

Imagine, if you will, a nasal voice contorted into a faux-Brit accent passionately reciting the following lament: “I do research for my own particular and personal purposes. Why should I, I who have been the top student in my class since my mother took Lamaze, be pressured into publishing before my ultimate opus is up to it?”

Why?

Because a commitment to work is what is expected whenyou are a professional. Look, I brush my teeth twice a day but that doesn’t make me a dentist. I cook dinner five nights a week but that doesn’t make me a chef. Just because you read novels, you wouldn’t call yourself a novelist, would you? Because you read the paper everyday, you wouldn’t call yourself a journalist, right?

So why is it that after you’ve read a stack of critical volumes, you feel free to call yourself a critic?

Journals and bookshelves are overflowing with the results of the current insistence on publishing more and more sooner and sooner. To argue that scholars should just shut up and put out because that’s the game they’ve agreed to play is realistic, no doubt, but shouldn’t we at least pretend to believe that we publish when we think we are ready to make a genuine contribution to scholarship? Shouldn’t we also worry about whether scholars publishing for the sake of doing so produce anything like the best work they are capable of? Further, it’s a long way from writing to publishing; those academics I know who protest the pressure to publish are not objecting to the requirement that they develop their research into articles or books but to the way professional survival now hinges on a hugely competitive, often arbitrary, and supremely slow-moving process in which you have no recourse against even the most patently inept editorial decisions (as the MLA itself has remarked in recent years, tenure decisions have effectively been handed over to publishers). Certainly no one without tenure could afford the luxury of refusing to publish; it’s disingenuous at best to describe resentment at these pressures as no better than prima donna posturing. And given what it takes to achieve tenure these days, isn’t it perhaps a good thing if scholars take the opportunity afforded them by their hard-won security to think hard about their research and writing priorities and to take more time, if they want to and need to, to change directions, learn new things, and produce work they are proud of?

This week’s New York Times Sunday Book Review includes a very interesting essay by literary scholar Leah Price in response to the recent National Endowment for the Arts report “To Read or Not To Read.” Price’s main point is that historically, widespread reading has not been the norm–particularly if by ‘reading’ is meant ‘reading for literary experience.’ Further, as she points out, excessive reading (particularly of fiction) has as often prompted anxiety as applause:

We’re not the first generation to invest reading with miraculous powers. But until radio and television dethroned the book, social reformers worried about too much reading, not too little. Advice about when and where not to read was once a medical specialty. In an 1806 diagnosis, a British doctor hypothesized that the “excess of stimulus” produced by reading novels “affects the organs of the body and relaxes the tone of the nerves.” Reading at the table interfered with your digestion, reading before lunch with your morals. Another expert, in 1867, warned that “to read when in bed … is to injure your eyes, your brain, your nervous system, your intellect.” Cue to the other in-bed activity that makes you go blind. Like masturbation, reading was too pleasurable for its own good; like masturbation, it threatened to upstage real human contact (messy, tedious, disappointing) with virtual pleasures. (read the rest here)

My own work on 19th-century criticism of the novel has had me reading and re-reading many examples relevant to Price’s argument. Here’s Anthony Trollope’s (characteristically temperate) overview, from his 1879 essay “Novel-Reading”:

Fond as most of us are of novels, it has to be confessed that they have had a bad name among us. Sheridan, in the scene from which we have quoted, has put into Lydia’s mouth a true picture of the time as it then existed. Young ladies, if they read novels, read them on the sly, and married ladies were not more free in acknowledging their acquaintance with those in English than they are now as to those in French. That freedom was growing then as is the other now. There were those who could read unblushingly; those who read and blushed; and those who sternly would not read at all. At a much later date than Sheridan’s it was the ordinary practice in well-conducted families to limit the reading of novels. In many houses such books were not permitted at all. In others Scott was allowed, with those probably of Miss Edgeworth and Miss Austen. And the amusement, though permitted, was not encouraged. It was considered to be idleness and a wasting of time. At the period of which we are speaking,–say forty years ago,–it was hardly recognised by any that much beyond amusement not only might be, but must be, the consequence of such reading. Novels were ephemeral, trivial,–of no great importance except in so far as they might per¬haps be injurious. As a girl who is, as a rule, duly industrious, may be allowed now and then to sit idle over the fire, thinking as nearly as possible of nothing,–thus refreshing herself for her daily toils; as a man may, without reproach, devote a small portion of his day to loafing and lounging about his club; so in those perhaps healthier days did a small modicum of novel-reading begin to be permitted. Where now is the reading individual for whom a small modicum suffices?

And very evil things have been said of the writers of novels by their brethren in literature; as though these workers, whose work has gradually become so efficacious for good or evil, had done nothing but harm in the world. It would be useless, or even ungenerous now, to quote essayists, divines, and historians who have written of novelists as though the mere providing of a little fleeting amusement,–generally of pernicious amusement,–had been the only object in their view. But our readers will be aware that if such criticism does not now exist, it has not ceased so long but that they remember its tone. The ordinary old homily against the novel, inveighing against the frivolities, the falsehood, and perhaps the licentiousness, of a fictitious narrative, is still familiar to our ears. Though we may reckon among our dearest literary possessions the pathos of this story, the humour of another, the unerring truth to nature of a third; though we may be aware of the absolute national importance to us of a Robinson Crusoe or Tom Jones, of an Ivanhoe or an Esmond; though each of us in his own heart may know all that a good novel has done for him,–still there remains something of the bad character–which for years has been attached to the art.

Trollope, of course, goes on to defend the novel; many of his contemporaries, including George Eliot, were also eloquent proponents of the moral, social, and aesthetic value of fiction. The point is, though, that they had to argue for this–and one reason the merits of the novel, in particular, were controversial was precisely that the reading public was expanding and some saw the attractions of “literary experience” as undesirable or risky. Here’s W. R. Greg, for instance, from an 1853 essay on the “False Morality of Lady-Novelists”:

There are many reasons why we should look upon novels in [a] serious point of view. They are the sole or the chief reading of numbers; and these numbers are mainly to be found among the rich and idle, whose wealth, leisure, and social position combine to give to their tastes and example an influence wholly out of proportion either to their mental activity or to their mental powers. They are the reading of most men in their idler and more impressionable hours, when the fatigued mind requires rest and recreation; when the brain, therefore, is comparatively passive; and when, the critical and combative faculties being laid to sleep, the pabulum offered is imbibed without being judged or sifted. They form, too, an unfortunately large proportion of the habitual reading of the young at the exact crisis of life when the spirit is at once most susceptible and most tenacious–“Wax to receive, and marble to retain;” when the memory is fresh, and has a greedy and by no means discriminating appetite; when the moral standard is for the most part fluctuating or unformed;–when experience affords no criterion whereby to separate the true from the false in the delineations of life, and the degree of culture is as yet insufficient to distinguish the pure from the meretricious, the sound from the unsound, in taste; and when whatever keenly interests and deeply moves is accepted and laid to heart, without much questioning whether the emotion is genuine and virtuous, or whether the interest is not aroused by unsafe and unwarrantable means. Finally, novels constitute a principal part of the reading of women, who are always impressionable, in whom at all times the emotional element is more awake and more powerful than the critical, whose feelings are more easily aroused and whose estimates are more easily influenced than ours, while at the same time the correctness of their feelings and the justice of their estimates are matters of the most special and preeminent concern.

There are peculiarities, again, in works of fiction which must always secure them a vast influence on all classes of societies and all sorts of minds. They are read without effort, and remembered without trouble. We have to chain down our attention to read other books with profit; these enchain our attention of themselves. Other books often leave no impression on the mind at all; these, for good or evil, for a while or for long, always produce some impression. Other books are effective only when digested and assimilated; novels either need no digestion, or rather present their matter to us in an already digested form. Histories, philosophies, political treatises, to a certain extent even first-class poetry, are solid and often tough food, which requires laborious and slow mastication. Novels are like soup or jelly; they may be drunk off at a draught or swallowed whole, certain of being easily and rapidly absorbed into the system.

Like Price, I’m an advocate of “reading for literary experience” and would like to see it sought and practised widely and avidly. But it’s salutary to be reminded that a “crisis in reading”–even “reading” itself–can be defined and measured in many different ways and to different ends. The N.E. A., Price says, “shuns…any use of literacy for something other than disinterested pleasure”–reading done for work or school, for example. Price’s assessment of our current situation is certainly provocative: “It takes some gerrymandering to make a generation logging ever more years in school, and ever more hours on the BlackBerry, look like nonreaders.”

I’ve been enjoying the “Review-A-Day” service from Powell’s, not least because you never know what will show up next. Today’s choice, for instance, was quite surprising: an Atlantic Monthly review of Adam Bede from 1859:

Adam Bede is remarkable, not less for the unaffected Saxon style which upholds the graceful fabric of the narrative, and for the naturalness of its scenes and characters, so that the reader at once feels happy and at home among them, than for the general perception of those universal springs of action which control all society, the patient unfolding of those traits of humanity with which commonplace writers get out of temper and rudely dispense. (read the rest here)

Anyone still seeking holiday gifts for bookish friends should also note that Powell’s is the source for the ever-popular Jane Austen action figure, complete with removable quill pen. If you think she’ll be lonely, you can also get Dickens (removable hat!), Oscar Wilde (imagine the dialogues they’ll have), Shakespeare (of course), or Sherlock Holmes, not to mention Mozart, Freud, and Einstein…

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.”)

Update: From Amazon Customer Service: “At this time, we are unable to offer the Amazon Kindle and associated digital content from the Kindle Store to our international customers due to import/export laws and other restrictions.” Well, never mind. Regular books work just fine for me, even if they do make my bags heavy when I travel. (Not that I was actually about to drop $400 on a gadget anyway!)

Original Post: I love books as artefacts–the look, the smell, the feel of the pages, the jacket designs, the inscriptions on the fly leaves from loved ones, the history of their material existence that old ones carry with them like an aura. Books are also, as many have pointed out, near-perfect technology for their purposes. It has been hard to imagine an electronic device giving as much pleasure, or allowing the same range of uses, even it could deliver the same content. But this week Amazon is launching its new Kindle, and I admit, I’d like to be able to try one out. Mark Thwaite at ReadySteadyBook points us to the write-up at the OUPblog:

With the keyboard driving the ability to look up and notate content, the cellular wireless feature feeds the user with instant ecommerce gratification and enables connectivity to the broader world of content. Imagine finishing an ebook while stranded in the airport and not being able to get more content unless you find a bookstore. With cellular wireless connectivity (Amazon is calling their wireless service Whispernet) you can get instant access to the Amazon ebookstore and buy a new book to while away the hours… And if getting more ebooks instantly isn’t compelling enough, getting access to subscription products such as newspapers will be optimal with Kindle. Wake up every morning and the New York Times will be as up to date as the online version, but as easy and convenient to read as the paper version. (read the rest here)

The Amazon product description amplifies what is meant by ‘notate content’: “By using the keyboard, you can add annotations to text, just like you might write in the margins of a book. And because it is digital, you can edit, delete, and export your notes, highlight and clip key passages, and bookmark pages for future use. You’ll never need to bookmark your last place in the book, because Kindle remembers for you and always opens to the last page you read.” Awesome! But now the question all serious booklovers need answered: can you read the Kindle safely in the bathtub?

Follow-Up: I’m also wondering whether the device will be available for customers outside the U.S. Amazon.Ca does not seem to be listing it. So far I haven’t found this question directly addressed at Amazon.Com; I’ve written to their Customer Service to see what I can find out.

Jenny Uglow on Gaskell’s Cranford, now being dramatized by the BBC:

This is not entirely escapist territory, despite its air of nostalgia. The Amazons of Cranford, like the ladies of Mr Harrison’s Duncombe and Lady Ludlow’s Hanbury, are not sheltered beings.
They have been through much a youthful love affair stifled, a life threatened by bankruptcy, an estate lost through gambling. And while they squabble over the sedan chair and settle down to cards, they also hear in the distance the rumble of the new, speedy world with its railways and new-fangled medical treatments, its factories and mines. The stories are wonderfully funny, but the ridiculous is bathed in a poignant, dreamlike mood found nowhere else in fiction, and profound ideas and strong values sleep beneath everyday details of bonnets and cakes. (read the rest here)

And a new ‘neo-Victorian’ novel, The Journal of Dora Damage, by Belinda Starling (a good Dickensian name):

Starling skilfully conjures up a dank, deviant London, although at times the plot seems as bewildering and overcrowded as the city itself – opium dens, blackmail, the American Civil War, the slave trade. Yet the novel’s twin themes of subjugation and emancipation are interesting and well balanced; the idea of intense satisfaction gained through sexual pleasure and meaningful work is gratifying, as are the memorable characterisation and plush imagery. (read the Guardian review here; see also the LA Times review here)

I’ve fallen behind in writing up my recent reading, but I have in fact read a few things besides the books for my classes this term. Here are at least some brief comments on them–so that I can tidy them back onto my bookshelves.

1. K. M. Peyton, the Pennington series. These are old, old favourites of mine; the copies I have are battered old Vancouver Public Library discards, and as the series does not appear to be in print any longer, I’ll continue to cherish these. I picked them off my shelf again when I was thinking about the issues touched on in my post about ‘just right’ books for children. Although these books are written for young readers, they seem to me to assume fairly adult interests; Pennington’s Heir, for instance, turns to a large extent on the drama and demands of Penn’s learning to play Liszt’s B-minor sonata. The vocabulary also aims high: one short paragraph, for instance, includes both ‘assuage’ and ‘punctilious,’ words I’m sure I didn’t know when I first read the books. Now, as then, it’s the characters–driven, complicated, impulsive, trying to find their way–that draw me into the story.

2. Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I hadn’t read this in years but, perhaps for the same reasons that I was drawn back to the Pennington books, I couldn’t resist it when I came across it in a second-hand bookstore recently. The style seemed remarkably blunt to me when I began reading; with the exception of the central motif of the tree, it’s almost wholly non-‘literary,’ just moving along from one person and even to the next. Yet the cumulative effect is powerfully evocative of a time and place. I didn’t find Francie altogether believable or compelling, especially towards the end. Perhaps it’s a sign of how my own position in life has changed that it was her parents whose story moved me the most!

3. Anne Tyler, Digging to America. Anne Tyler has written some of my favourite novels, including Ladder of Years, Back When We Were Grown-Ups, The Patchwork Planet, and The Accidental Tourist. I have always agreed with Wayne Booth’s remark (about Back When We Were Grown-Ups) that with her, you always feel she is giving you the best she has got. (I believe the comparison he is drawing is to Peter Benchley’s Jaws, which Booth does not consider very flattering to its implied audience.) Tyler’s prose is spare but deft; her lightness of touch often conceals, or eases us into, more difficult feelings of regret, poignancy, and loss. But typically her protagonists, who often begin their novels as wistful or wry misfits in the lives they are living, come through their process of exploration only to find themselves happy, after all, with what they have made or found. Somewhere recently I came across a comment about her realism being of a “conservative” type. I’m not sure if it is because of the form and style she uses (there’s nothing metafictional or postmodern about it) or because of this tendency to teach her characters to appreciate what they already have. (I’ve written a bit about this before when comparing the fate or attitude of Tyler’s heroines to those of Joanna Trollope’s and George Eliot’s.) Tyler’s novels also typically operate on quite a small scale: marriages, families, with only implicit engagement with the larger social systems that shape them. The Amateur Marriage moved that domesticity into a larger historical frame; to me, the novel seemed (perhaps as a result?) to be moving too fast for itself, so the kinds of intensely evocative tiny moments, and the nuances, of the novels I like best were diffused. Digging to America also takes on more, and in this case I found that the lightness of handling I usually appreciate seemed inappropriate to the topics it touches on, including the tensions of post-9/11 America. But at the same time, I appreciate what I take to be Tyler’s ideas, that big political conflicts are experienced very personally, and that national, ethnic, or religious stereotypes lose their potency when we focus on the individual–on what, in her other books, we also see as the “quirkiness” of people seen up close. This may be a novel that grows on me.

4. Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach. This is a book that has been written on plenty recently by all kinds of terribly serious book types; I find I don’t have much to say about it myself. I admired Saturday enormously. This novel seemed to think too much of itself and its subject. I was struck, page after page, by the technical control McEwan shows: every word seemed solid, judicious, effective. But I just didn’t care for the purpose he was using them for. On Friday I showed my class the excellent documentary included with the DVD of Middlemarch. It includes interviews with David Lodge, Terry Eagleton, A. S. Byatt, Kate Flint, and Claire Tomalin, all, of course, supremely articulate. At one point Tomalin remarks (I forget a propos of just what question) that “George Eliot writes about sex perfectly: she never mentions it, and of course that’s the best way to write about it. Who needs the penis and the pubic hair? That’s not sex. Sex is the feeling” (that might not be the exact quotation–but close enough to get the point). Perhaps the distinction might be that you don’t need the explicit elements of sex to achieve eroticism; is there a more erotically charged scene in ‘proper’ Victorian literature than the moment in which Stephen Guest kisses the inside of Maggie Tulliver’s arm in The Mill on the Floss? McEwan writes like a clinician; even the feelings his couple have are dissected, presented for our analysis and judgment. It seemed a tired cliche to me (despite his careful historicization of their attitudes) that he is keen and she is uninterested, even frigid. It also struck me as unfair that at the end, it becomes his novel. For most of the book, their perspectives are balanced, one against the other. Somewhere there’s a paper to be written (no doubt, being written) on McEwan’s late fiction and “Dover Beach”…

5. Jane Smiley, Moo. I picked this up soon after reading Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Novel, which I wrote about, mostly admiringly, before. This one, I’m sorry to say, I haven’t finished yet, though I began it months ago. It turns out it is arch. I don’t enjoy arch, at least not in long stretches.

6. Elizabeth von Armin, The Enchanted April. This was delightful. In many ways, it was exactly what I expected, light but touching, warm but poignant. Without extended explicit social commentary, it shows its women realizing, emotionally more than intellectually, how the constraints of their usual world confine them, but also how they contribute to their own diminishment. More than the movie version, the novel maintains some skepticism about the rapprochement of the women and their husbands (for instance, we always know, though Lotty doesn’t, that Mellersh is well-behaved mostly because he hopes to gain clients, and we also know the comedy of errors that nearly erupted because Frederick comes to see the wrong woman). But what I wasn’t expecting was the marvellously tactile quality of von Armin’s prose:

The cherry-trees and peach-trees were in blossom–lovely showers of white and deep rose-colour among the trembling delicacy of the olives; the fig-leaves were just big enough to smell of figs, the vine-buds were only beginning to show. And beneath these trees were groups of blue and purple irises, and bushes of lavendar, and grey, sharp cactuses, and the grass was thick with dandelions and daisies, and right down at the bottom was the sea. Colour seemed flung down anyhow, anywhere; every sort of colour, piled up in heaps, pouring along in rivers…

The obvious comparison is with A Room with a View (and I learned from the afterword in my edition that Forster tutored von Arnim’s children for a time). But this novel is about adults coming to terms with their lives and loves, and so it has more wistfulness, and more lurking pathos, than Forster’s. I loved Mrs Fisher’s gradual emergence from what Lotty calls her “cocoon” (even if it is, like Lucy’s awakening in A Room with a View, basically at the expense of the Victorians): “Her great dead friends [Ruskin, Arnold, Tennyson…] did not seem worth reading that night. . . . No doubt they were greater than any one was now, but they had this immense disadvantage, that they were dead. Nothing further was to be expected of them; while of the living, what might one not still expect?” The afterword remarks, rather unexpectedly, “The novel is the lightest of omelettes, in the making of which the least possible number of eggs gets broken. Only an incorrigible pedant would try to judge it at a deeper level.” Well, call me incorrigible, and a pedant (I’ve been called worse, goodness knows), but I enjoyed the novel so much it lit a little spark of scholar’s curiosity in me and made me curious to look up a former M.A. student of mine I haven’t heard from in a while whom I recall had proposed a Ph.D. project on von Arnim. It also (especially in combination with our first snow of the season) made me dream of going back to Italy!

Next up? I picked up A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell on my last expedition to Doull’s (Haligonians know all about Doull’s and its temptations). But I’ve also got Suite Francaise and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in my ‘to read next’ pile–and first priority is Margaret Oliphant’s Hester to begin again for my graduate seminar.