…so here’s what you’ve all been waiting for: “the template that a nation of anxious undergrads [and MA students!] has been looking for”:

This project was deeply influenced by your thinking and I am very grateful for that will you please advise my Ph.D. dissertation.

Oh!!!! And Your Institution also has that Awesome Institute/Center/Program-Thing! Which I know absolutely nothing about but am totally totally prepared to praise to the skies because I just know it will be crucial to my research!!! (read the whole thing here).

It’s easily adaptable to SSHRC applications, too, so no need for anyone to bring by any more for me to vet! Thanks to Footnoted for the link.

From The Onion:

Third-Person Limited Omniscient Narrator Blown Away by Surprise Ending

(HT: The Elegant Variation)

Renewed discussion is breaking out about academic blogging among those who have been doing it for a while; here are some additions, then, to my earlier list of links.

1. “A Skeptic’s Take on Academic Blogs” (Adam Kotsko, Inside Higher Ed, November 1, 2007)
2. “An Enthusiast’s View on Academic Blogs” (Scott Eric Kaufman, Inside Higher Ed, November 1, 2007)
3. “Academic Blogging Revisited” (Joseph Kugelmass, The Valve, November 1, 2007)

There are many points of interest in all of these pieces. In light of my own meandering reflections on generating “dialogue and exchange” through blogs, I was struck by Adam Kotsko’s remark that “having a productive conversation in an online format is very hard work, which is why it happens so rarely.” I think, too, from my own experience and from conversations with non-blogging (but often blog-reading) friends and colleagues, that a lot of academics are so accustomed to working in relative isolation and communicating about their research or scholarly practices exclusively with other specialists, if at all, that there is a kind of culture of secrecy (some might call it privacy) in the academy–aggravated by our defensiveness about how we are perceived by non-academics–that makes many academics anxious about expressing themselves publicly. There’s also a fear of exposure: you’ll say something careless and expose your ignorance, or you’ll expose your views to those who disagree with you and have to answer for them, or you’ll expose yourself to ill-conceived and ill-tempered attacks from those who don’t understand the nature of academic scholarship, or to cranks (academic or not) who read without charity, take you out of context, etc. These factors discourage academics (many of whom are reclusive bookworms at heart, after all) from engaging in online conversations when the benefits (professional or other) are uncertain or elusive. I know I take a deep breath before clicking “post,” either on my own blog or as a commenter on someone else’s (the latter is more stressful for me by far). But I think Joseph Kugelmass points towards where things might go when he mentions the widening acceptance of social sites such as Facebook as an example of people coming on board with something that initially seemed fringe or irrelevant. There was a time that some of us can remember when e-mail was a strange new medium and listservs seemed like cutting-edge ways to reach across distances and form academic communities. But I wonder if any active academic today is not linked electronically in some way to others. Some form of blogging may well be equally ‘normal’ and common in the near future. As far as benefits go, one possibility is that such a development would work against the excessive specialization and resulting fragmentation typical of today’s humanities departments; one of the commenters at Inside Higher Ed makes the point that “often, we’re not even interested in what our colleagues are doing,” something with which surely many of us would ruefully agree. And if it brought differences of view and style out into the open, would that be such a bad thing? Affinities and serendipitous connections might emerge as well. The string of closed office doors in my hallway up here does not make this place look much like an intellectual community. Blogs at least open windows. More “interfacing” between academics and a wider public seems to me like a good thing as well, if only to counteract the bizarrely excessive hostility some people show towards us. (Maybe we fear that if they knew us better, they would not like us any better? Are we so bad at explaining ourselves that we feel safest not even trying?)

ReadySteadyBook points us to this interesting series at Critical Mass: “Each week, the NBCC will post a list of five books a critic believes reviewers should have in their libraries.” Writers surveyed so far include John Updike, Morris Dickstein, Cynthia Ozick, Colm Toibin and Katha Politt; Eric Auerbach’s Mimesis is an unexpected crowd favourite, while some point to works of fiction or poetry rather than criticism or theory. If the question really is which books would be most useful to a practising critic, I think I’d incline towards reference books as much as exemplary scholarship or criticism. How about these five?

1. The Oxford English Dictionary.
2. M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms.
3. Joseph Williams, Style: 10 Lessons in Clarity and Grace.
4. Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction.
5. Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form.

On the other hand, if the real question is not which five books would be most useful for the broadest range of critical work but which five books exemplify your critical ideals, or which five books most provoked you to think about critical issues, or which five critical books you felt taught you the most about how to read (whether or not, in the end, you agree with them all the way), the list would look quite different, maybe something like this:

1. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (or Natural Supernaturalism).
2. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic.
3. Wayne Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction.
4. Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature.
5. David Lodge, The Art of Fiction.

But of course five is really not enough: I’d want to get in at least some of James’s critical prefaces, and some of Woolf’s Common Reader, and George Eliot’s essays, and probably The Great Tradition, because what it does, it does well, and maybe Lukacs’s The Historical Novel…So what would your top five be (and how would you choose to understand the question)?

There’s an extremely interesting interview with Steven Pinker and Rebecca Goldstein at Salon.Com:

Would you say your common interests are partly what brought you together?

GOLDSTEIN: Oh yes, completely. Actually, we met through each other’s work. I was a great fan of Steve’s work. And then I discovered that he had cited me in one of his books. It was my unusual use of an irregular verb. So it was completely through our work and my tremendous interest in Steve’s work that we first came to know each other. I don’t know if I should say this, but when I first met Steve in the flesh, I said that the way he thinks had so completely changed the way I think — particularly what I had learned from him about cognitive psychology and evolutionary psychology — that I said, “I don’t think I’ve had my mind so shaken up by any thinker since [18th-century philosopher] David Hume.” And he very modestly said, “That can’t be the case.” But it was the case. So I can certainly say that Steve has profoundly influenced the way I think.

PINKER: I’ve certainly been influenced by Rebecca as well. Our connection isn’t just that we met through an irregular verb, which sounds like the ultimate literary romance of two nerds finding each other. [Goldstein laughs.] Rebecca as a philosopher is a strong defender of realism — the idea that there is a real world that we can come to know –which emboldened me to press that theme in my own writings, even though people often say that we just construct reality through language. And the topic of consciousness — how the mind emerges from the body, and what makes the three-pound organ that we call the brain actually experience things subjectively — is a theme that runs through both my nonfiction and Rebecca’s fiction and her philosophical writings.

Read the rest here. I am keen to read Goldstein’s book on Spinoza, not least because of his influence on George Eliot.

On Friday night I attended the first in the series of 5 Massey Lectures being given this year by Alberto Manguel. It was an erudite and occasionally eloquent performance, but by the end I was feeling distinctly underwhelmed. For one thing, for all the wide-ranging literary allusions and anecdotes, his points were wholly predictable, even banal, and certainly preaching to the choir on occasions such as this: books nourish our humanity, fictions of all kind offer us stories about how we do or could or should live our lives, language shapes as well as reflects our experience, and so forth. Perhaps he considered it necessary for the occasion and for his intended audience to speak in extreme generalizations, especially as this was the first in his series, but strip away the allusions to Plato and Doblin and I think there’s a pretty fine line between much of his talk and platitudes. Further, though, and more problematic (there’s nothing wrong, after all, with asserting general claims for the beauty and value of literature from time to time in prominent venues), I became troubled by two aspects of his characterization of literature.

First, he repeatedly invoked the difference between political language and literary language, without, I thought, sufficiently acknowledging the highly political dimension of much literature (or literary language). I don’t think he meant to imply that literature operates in an apolitical realm (indeed, his talk about the role of literature in imagining society and shaping identity, including national identity, at least implicitly pointed towards its political dimensions, which can of course be reflected in its form and language as well as in its content). But he did persistently point to political discourse as the opposite of literary.

Second, he repeatedly described literature as posing, rather than answering, questions, as allowing for ambiguity, confusion, and profundity rather than insisting on clarity, definition, or systems. I have found that people working on the relationship between literature and moral philosophy (such as Martha Nussbaum, Cora Diamond, or Jane Adamson) also typically characterize literature in this way, thus opposing it to what they consider the reductive tendencies of analytic philosophy. But as Adamson’s essay “Against Tidiness” clearly shows (but does not seem self-conscious about itself), this is not a universal or historically constant view of literature, and applying its standards strictly could mean ruling out some pretty important writers (such as Alexander Pope, say, or George Eliot) as not truly literary precisely because they do offer some strong prescriptions. As I have written about elsewhere, I think this is why Nussbaum starts off her theory of literature as moral philosophy with Henry James, explicitly setting George Eliot aside. (Actually, as I discuss in that article, she really works in the other direction, starting from her favourite novel, James’s The Golden Bowl, and looking for a way to find or explain its philosophical significance.) Although typically these people (including Manguel) mean to be boosting literature by emphasizing its difference from dogma, by insisting on its irrational or unphilosophical or subjective or mystifying aspects, they risk limiting its relevance (or its perceived value) in today’s world in just the ways their supposed opponents (Plato, utilitarians, scientists, politicians, analytic philosophers, etc.) do. Though I’m sure most readers share George Eliot’s view that it is not desirably for fiction to lapse “from picture to diagram,” it does seem important that we not restrict our thinking about the role of literature in society (or philosophy) according to an essentially Romantic notion of it.

Well, I suppose it had to happen sometime. OK, it didn’t, but it does sound sort of amusing:

Arabella is renowned as a great beauty, the prize of London. Meanwhile, her childhood friend, Robert Petre, is plotting against Queen Anne, although the revelation of his Jacobite affiliations could ruin his family and end his life. Reunited as adults, the two begin a torrid affair that could destroy her reputation and thus her chances of marriage. Despite being a Catholic, the charismatic Lord Petre can have his pick of London’s women and so the affair is particularly ill-advised for Arabella; even for a catch like Miss Fermor, a proposal from Lord Petre would be a foolish thing to hope for, as his family would never permit the match.

Meanwhile, Arabella’s cousins, the Blount sisters, come to London for the season, along with their great friend and admirer Alexander Pope. On the periphery of this glamorous and decadent set, successful but not yet celebrated, he watches the affair from its inception to its dramatic finale, events that ultimately inspired the poem that made his fortune. From the ashes of Miss Fermor’s reputation rose the making of Alexander Pope’s. (read the rest at The Guardian)

We’re told that the author has “a PhD from Harvard in ‘pollution, filth and satire in 18th-century London'”…

I have been interested in these recent discussions about what books ought to be assigned to young readers. Like the seemingly endless array of articles about Harry Potter’s success and what, if anything, it means for the literary tastes and aptitudes of current and future readers, these exchanges have made me think back on my own youthful experiences with books. For instance, I’m not in a position to assess whether in fact the boom in literature aimed at “young adults” has created readers ready and eager to move on to other books (books for “old adults”?). But I do have reservations about sending the message to younger readers that there are books that are for them and books that are not, either because of their content or because of their more demanding or sophisticated style and vocabulary. Judging difficult, depressing, or confrontational books inappropriate for young readers in fact seems to me the most likely way to contribute to a “decline in literary reading.” I read Judy Blume and Jean Little pretty enthusiastically as a “tween” and teenager, for instance, and Barbara Willard and K. M. Peyton, among authors who wrote with readers more or less my age in mind. But I also read Charlotte Bronte, Dorothy Sayers, Dorothy Dunnett, Jane Austen, John Steinbeck, James Michener, Louisa May Alcott, Tolstoy, Dick Francis, Jean Plaidy, Margaret Mitchell…anything that looked interesting to me, that fed my love of language and of story, or that I hoped would help me live up to my aspirations to be a bookish person, involved in what I saw as a highly-valued adult activity. I read books that I did not understand, books that disturbed me, books that were trashy, books that were philosophical, books that were innovative, books that were formulaic, books that I’ve completely forgotten and might as well not have read, books that I still love today. My reach often exceeded my grasp–but what strikes me, in retrospect, is that I was grasping, and that I was encouraged to do so, rather than encouraged, as my daughter now is, to seek out books that are “just right” (which, we’ve been told, means books in which no less than 90% of the vocabulary is familiar, and are also, as far as I can tell from the assigned books she brings home, entirely wholesome and entirely flavorless, like pablum). Admittedly, she’s in Grade 1, and it’s a reasonable goal to want her to get confident about reading. And it was my parents, rather than my teachers (with rare and memorable exceptions), who made reading seem to me such an exciting pursuit–largely by reading incessantly themselves. But in Grade 1 I was reading The Young Mary Queen of Scots, to my teacher’s surprise, and loving it. Comfort with reading quickly becomes a pretty limiting standard, and one that no doubt lies behind some of the complaints academics hear so often about the kinds of books we assign–too long, too hard, too boring. I’m not really worried about my daughter: she will do her homework with the “just right” books, but she’ll have lots of books around to challenge and excite her, lots of support with moving beyond her comfort level. That way I hope she’ll feel bold, critical, and confident not just reading but also responding to whatever books she’s assigned, as well as any she picks off the shelf for herself. But I worry about how pervasive the theory seems to be that what is taught should meet or reflect, rather than raise or challenge, the reader’s current interests and abilities. It seems all to easy, to me, for “just right” to settle into “just enough”–and no more.

…of books, that is!

As the teaching term gets underway, one’s good intentions regarding research are mostly (at least in my experience) manifested through stacks of books you fully intend (honest!) to read during the next interval you have set aside (ever the optimist!) for concentrated research time…but the stacks rarely diminish much, because (a) that time gets stolen away by meetings, because strictly speaking you don’t really have something scheduled for that time and it’s the only time the six other people on the committee can meet (I know, administration is important too), and (b) the other way you prove that, nonetheless, you are going to make progress on your research projects is that you drop by the library on your way back from class to pick up a few more books from your working bibliography (and you were going there anyway to get some caffeine, to keep you awake during your next meeting). Here are my most recent additions:

1. Robert Scholes, The Rise and Fall of English (This one will be sort of a ‘reread,’ but I felt I needed a refresher look.)
2. Richard Ohmann, English in America (ha–“Why, in America, they haven’t used it for years!”–My Fair Lady)
3. Richard Ohmann, Politics of Knowledge (or, apparently, English in America 25 years later)
4. Jonathan Arac, Critical Genealogies
5. Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb, eds., Just Being Difficult?: Academic Writing in the Public Arena (this looks like an interesting review but I don’t have a subscription)

On the bright side, these will all make a nice break–or a change, at least–from the emotional devastation of Oliphant’s Autobiography or (next week’s adventure in literature, depression, and death) Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Bronte.

Germaine Greer, in The Guardian:

In 1978, a guest at my little house in the Tuscan hills left behind a paperback copy of Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds. Having nothing else with which to read myself to sleep, I took it to bed with me. When the clatter of the nightingales (the original thorn birds) gave way to the pre-dawn chorus, I was still reading, utterly engrossed in the best bad book I had ever read.

I was engrossed in The Thorn Birds once too, though I don’t think I had the excuse of having nothing else available to read. I haven’t looked at it in many, many years. I wonder if I re-read it now if I would find it “the best bad book” I’ve read. Until I re-read it and find out (if I ever do), I wonder which book is the current winner in that category. What exactly does it mean to be “the best bad book”? The book you like best, even knowing that by some standard it’s pretty bad? Bad in what way? Bad writing? Bad politics? (Greer says “It would probably be over the top to denounce The Thorn Birds as a sneakily racist and sectarian book, but it is definitely contrived and insidious.”) Bad (improbable?) plot? Bad dialogue? Just a bad idea? Maybe I’ll nominate Lady Audley’s Secret (it’s fresh in my mind because I just finished teaching it). Any further nominations?