We have had more storms since the last time I posted but happily no more storm days, so we are still on schedule … for now! (In fact, things are looking pretty nice–by January standards–for the rest of the week, especially considering that we’ve been having some days with wind chills in the -20 range.)

In 19th-Century Fiction, it did seem a bit rushed at the beginning of our classes on Austen because of the hour we’d lost, but by our last discussion of Pride and Prejudice, it seemed to me that we had done a good job with the novel. You never address every detail in class, of course: the goal has to be to develop a kind of interpretive map, with central cruxes and questions suggesting possible directions through the text. That way students can consider examples we didn’t explicitly talk about as parts of the patterns we’ve been considering and think for themselves about how they fit–or don’t!

I really did enjoy rereading the novel this time, especially the reliably hilarious as well as deliciously subversive final encounter between Elizabeth and Lady Catherine. One thing we spent a fair amount of time on in class is the way Austen manipulates us into liking or disliking characters, only, much of the time, to undercut or at least complicate our “first impressions” so that we realize we are vulnerable to the same interpretive mistakes as the characters. In this respect I think even Mr Collins gets a bit of a reprieve from our initial distaste. Not only is his offer to Lizzie actually quite honorable, despite also being laughable, considering he has no obligation to make up to the Bennet sisters for the future loss of their home, but at Hunsford we see that while he is still absurd, he treats Charlotte well and has made it possible for her to live a dignified life. I don’t think there’s any backtracking on Lady Catherine, though: she remains an antagonist to that bitterly delightful end:

“I take no leave of you, Miss Bennet. I send no compliments to your mother. You deserve no such attention. I am most seriously displeased.”

In her absolute consistency I think she shows both Austen’s brilliance and her limitations. Austen manages to keep Lady Catherine entertaining and provocative without ever making her three dimensional, but if you compare her characterization to, say, Mr. Bulstrode’s in Middlemarch, you realize how much more interesting it actually is to have your worst character be someone so fully developed that your judgment has to sit in awkward company with your understanding. The moral tests are much easier to pass in Pride and Prejudice.

In British Literature After 1800 we are still reading poetry and I am still struggling with “how to balance attention to context and content with attention to form,” as I put it in my last post. After a somewhat sputtering discussion on Friday–which was largely my fault, as I did way too much lecturing, partly as a wrongheaded reaction to my anxiety about how class discussions had been going!–I spent a lot of time on the weekend reading blog posts and articles about improving student discussions (such as this one) and decide that my best strategy given all the variables at play (class size and composition, the nature of the readings, the already established set of course requirements, etc.) was to provide more prompts to guide them during their reading outside of class. The result of this was that I spent several hours preparing study questions for each of this week’s little clusters of poems, starting with our “Victorian medievalism” cluster (Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott,” “The Epic,” and “Morte d’Arthur”) on Monday. My hope was that the questions would bring them to the room better prepared to try out answers to my leading questions in class, rather than my simply hoping they would be able to generate ideas on the spot.

This is hardly a radical strategy, including for me. I do often (and did this term) provide study questions for the novels in my 19th-Century Fiction classes, for example, to help students organize their observations as they read the long books–to know what, of all the many details flooding past them, to really pay attention to. But I also find it pretty easy to ask questions in 19th-Century Fiction that will get at least some answers, and usually lots of them, because we always have plot and character as starting points, from which we can level up to questions about form and theme. Maybe because I don’t teach poetry often, I underestimated the difference it makes to be working on, not just poetry, but poetry much of which is in a somewhat archaic diction. My impression (though I may be mistaken) is that many of the students are struggling with the literal meaning of the poems–their basic paraphraseable content. Perhaps, too, the variety in our reading list that keeps things interesting for me (and is to some extent necessitated by the survey format) is making things harder for them because each poet is so different and thus makes different demands on our attention as readers. With that in mind, in the study questions I came up with I tried to make the assigned poems more legible for them, combining questions about theme with prompts to consider form, and making some connections across the poems.

So far, however, even with these questions provided to them in advance, I feel like I am struggling to find the right questions to raise in class that will launch a good conversation–the poetry equivalent of leading off a fiction class with “OK, so which characters do you like or dislike so far and why?” (which is a sure-fire way to get people talking, and almost equally sure to lead after a while to much more subtle and important questions). There are some people talking, which is great, and actually today, in our class on “Victorian Poetry of Faith and Doubt,” there was good participation about the general issue of what religion means to or provides for people in their everyday lives, and thus what people might feel they have lost or want to fight for when their faith is challenged. When it came time to see what our poets were saying or doing about that, though, it got much quieter again. I am not used to “Dover Beach” sparking so little (evident) interest! Well, all I can really do is keep trying different things–and hope that they are just quiet, not bored, confused, or (worst of all!) not actually doing the reading. If nobody can make the case for the Duchess’s innocence in Friday’s class on Browning, that will be a bad sign.

One of the poems we read for today is Hopkins’s “God’s Grandeur,” which (atheist though I am) I always find extraordinarily beautiful and moving. I really liked the slide I made for it, so for no better reasons than that, here it is!

We are well into Pride and Prejudice in 19th-Century Fiction this week and I have to say that while my reservations about teaching a novel that is so intractably popular remain (and I have seen some of the same symptoms of dealing with a ‘fan favorite’ in class discussions as in the past), overall I think it’s going well. I am certainly enjoying the novel, and the energy in the classroom seems very good: participation is robust for so early in the course, which may of course be a side-effect of that same level of pre-existing comfort that sometimes makes the novel hard for students to approach critically.

I am continuing the effort I’ve been focused on in recent years to wean myself from my lecture notes, and that too is helped by my own familiarity with the novel and the questions I want us to gnaw on collectively. Looking at the fairly detailed notes I have used before, I see that the price (if that’s the right word) of loosening my grip is giving up the more careful “laying out of interpretations” that I used to do, which I always thought of as usefully modeling the construction of literary arguments and the use of literary evidence. Our more free-wheeling discussions–though never, I hope, simply unfocused or scattered–do not necessarily “add up” in the same elegant way that is possible if I’m really controlling the pace and flow of information. The benefit, however, is having the students generate more of the material and then see (as I do my best to organize and shape it on the fly) that they know how to proceed towards those kinds of conclusions themselves. The other thing I’m trying to remember to do is explain the process of our class time in a way that connects it to the process for their assignments–this is something that I realized some years ago that I was taking for granted but needed to make explicit. A key point about process I make over and over is that students often try (as I see it) to skip steps when they begin work on an essay assignment: often when they come to see me I realize that having chosen their topic, they think their next step is to come up with a thesis statement and then work back through the novel to figure out how to support it. As I point out, that’s backwards: a good thesis is much more likely to emerge from their rereading, thinking about, and doing some open-ended writing about the novel with their topic in mind. Their method accounts for why we so often see the best version of an argument in the conclusion, rather than the introduction, of student papers–because that’s the point at which they have actually worked through their ideas and examples closely enough to realize what they want to say.

A minor point of concern about how the popularity of Pride and Prejudice might affect the rest of the course is that in a show of hands yesterday it looked like nearly half of the students have decided to write their first essay on it (they get to choose among our first four novels for this assignment). That might be as much about wanting to get the essay done early, before they are busier with their other courses. Whatever the reason, though, it’s a much larger proportion of the class than usually does any one novel, never mind the first one of the term. I really hope it doesn’t mean they will be less engaged with our next books, especially Waverley. They will have to write short tests on all of them, which is one of the coercive elements I build into the course requirements in the interests of sustaining everyone’s attention. Of course, I always hope that our books and conversations will keep everyone’s attention because the novels are great and the discussions are interesting! But I’m not naive enough to think those intrinsic qualities will be enough to coax everyone along.

In British Literature After 1800 we are skipping briskly through our small sample of Romantic poets. The rapid pace is at once the blessing and the curse of a survey course with a mandate to span more than 200 years of writing in multiple genres: we don’t spend long enough in any one place to go into a great deal of depth, which means we also don’t spend long enough on any one topic to get tired of it. I enjoy the variety myself, including the chance to talk about genres and examples that don’t come up in the courses I teach more often–such as Romantic poetry! In fact, because the introductory courses I’ve taught for the last several years have been either Introduction to Prose and Fiction or Pulp Fiction, I’ve spend hardly any time on poetry at all except for Close Reading, and the last time I taught that was Fall 2017. So I’m having fun, but also feeling a bit wobbly about how to balance attention to context and content with attention to form.

This problem wasn’t helped by last week’s snow storm, which cost us a class meeting. Because I didn’t want to cut back time on specific poets any more than the survey format already requires, I decided to sacrifice the class I’d set aside to talk about poetic form, including scansion. I’ve been trying to make up for this by integrating discussion of poetic form into our other classes, which of course I was going to do anyway but not starting from scratch. The students have a varying degree of experience with things like scansion: some of them are clearly at home with it, and with talking about poetic devices and forms, while others have looked bemused, frustrated, or completely blank when asked to think or talk about these aspects of our readings. Well, all we can do is keep moving along: I hope that with repetition and coaching from me and practice from them, we will all get more comfortable. For yesterday’s class I decided to do more of the talking myself than I had on Monday because on Monday it seemed to me a lot of them were still very uncertain about what it meant to discuss the relationship between form and meaning in poetry: it’s a bit harder (in my experience, anyway) to teach this through open-ended discussion with poetry than with fiction, where you always have the option of starting with “easy” things like plot and character as a way of opening up thematic and structural issues. I also point out that those of them who feel completely at sea need to put in some time: our readings so far have been quite short, which may be deceptive in terms of the amount of work it requires to read them well.

We’ve read some Wordsworth, some Shelley, and some Keats so far. Tomorrow we’re doing a small cluster of poems by Felicia Hemans and EBB on women and poetry, and then next week we’re on to the Victorians–some Tennyson, some Browning, and a cluster on faith and doubt including some Arnold and Hopkins and some excerpts from In Memoriam. Fun! I hope they think so too.