It will be easier next time. And better, too, probably.

Or at least, this is my comforting mantra every time I come out of my Brit Lit survey class these days. Today it was a madcap dash through Yeats, with some gestures towards “What is modern(ist) poetry?” Wednesday and Friday are T. S. Eliot, next Monday it’s Auden, then Dylan Thomas, then Seamus Heaney. It is nerve-wracking trying to decide what to say when you’re moving so fast. I’m sure learning a lot, though, and that’s always exhilarating. Did you know, for instance, that Yeats had a testicle transplant? Or, more to the point (if there is one) that he considered himself a Romantic, or at least that’s what he said sometimes? We spent most of our time today on “Easter 1916.” I wasn’t altogether intending that until I started reading about Yeats’s “distaste” for the War Poets, who he omitted from his edition of the Oxford Book of Modern Verse. I was surprised that they aren’t represented in our Major Authors edition of the Norton anthology, and reading about Yeats’s objections to their depiction of “passive suffering” along with other information about his own turn to political poetry after the Easter rebellion got me thinking about the possible extremes in representing political violence–I suggested in class that his view of the War Poets would be one problem, a kind of lament, I guess, with something like “The Charge of the Light Brigade” perhaps at the other end, didactic and bombastic. “Easter 1916” perhaps successfully occupies more ambivalent territory, epitomized in its refrain about a “terrible beauty.” How far might the stakes be understood to include the aestheticization of violence that “Easter 1916” itself inevitably participates in? Is its beauty part of what is, terribly, born of the firing squads? I wish we could have read “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” or “Dulce et decorum est” along with it, if only to test Yeats’s “distaste” against our own reactions. And yet I suppose that is not really the main point to be considered about Yeats–and I did save a little time for the widening gyres of “The Second Coming.”

We had our second session on Indemnity Only this morning in Mystery & Detective Fiction. I wanted to explore Paretsky’s (or at least V. I. Warshawski’s) feminism more inductively this time, considering how exactly V.I. behaves, what her values and priorities are, rather than assuming she represents any particular dogmatic idea of feminism. (Coincidentally, as I was typing this, Sara Paretsky sent out this ‘tweet’:” Today is Int’l Women’s Day–a national holiday in Ukraine. Good wishes to women everywhere, with hopes for equality in our lifetimes.”) We talked, for starters, about V.I.’s good looks, self-consciousness about eating too much, and interest in clothes, all stereotypically ‘feminine’ concerns. The suggestion I eventually made is that Paretsky sets Vic up to illustrate the compatibility of feminism with femininity–or, that femininity need not be equated with weakness. Similarly, Vic is fiercely independent, with a chip on her shoulder especially about men encroaching on her ‘turf,’ but she shows a softer side in her interactions with young Jill Thayer, calling her ‘sweetie’ and ‘honey’ and offering her help and comfort: strength is compatible with tenderness. One context for this discussion is our recent work on The Maltese Falcon, in which Sam survives by choosing against his softer sentiments: that kind of toughness is idealized in some versions of hard-boiled detection, as is the inhuman detachment of Dupin and Holmes. It’s easy to see that these models repeat and solidify old ideas about men and women (such as the ‘separate spheres’ model of the 19th century). The Maltese Falcon hints at how damaging it can be (morally, emotionally) to live up to such a standard of masculinity. It wouldn’t necessarily represent progress, from a feminist perspective, to show a woman living up to the same standard. The greater challenge is to create models, for both men and women, of living freely and fully in both professional and private life. Like Grafton (whose Kinsey Millhone can never really accept the compromises of romantic partnership, at least on conventional terms), Paretsky seems to suggest that there’s still a way to go before such a resolution is possible–though in the later novels in the series, Vic does settle, more or less, into a long-term relationship, in this case poor Ralph is just not up to it, not because he’s a bad man, but because he’s an ordinary man raised with “ordinary” (traditional) assumptions.

Tomorrow, it’s the George Eliot graduate seminar and round two of Middlemarch–which reminds me, there’s no student officially responsible for discussion questions this week, so I’d best go start up an open thread on our class blog. This week’s installment includes Chapter 42, currently my very favourite.

Last week there were no classes–it was that heady interval known as ‘Reading Week,’ or, to some, ‘February Break.’ I could tell it was a ‘break’ because I didn’t work nights. Otherwise, I was pretty busy, especially with working my way through the major research assignment that had just come in from my Brit Lit survey class, reading through some graduate thesis chapters, and catching up on paperwork (note to me: keeping track of your students’ contributions to wikis and blogs requires both foresight and ongoing attention). Round about last Thursday, though, it hit me that this week was coming, with a nearly full slate of classes on material I hadn’t lectured on before. So much for the ‘break.’

However, here I am, nearly half way through the week and so far, I’m more or less on top of it, I think–even though it’s hard to escape the vaguely surreal feeling that I’m role-playing rather than teaching (today, RM appears in the unfamiliar role of a modernist and Joyce expert…). I have two research assignments to finish evaluating, but I made it through my session on Woolf’s “Modern Fiction” for the survey class on Monday and have spent a few quite enjoyable hours since then brushing up on Joyce for today’s class on “The Dead.” Friday it’s Katherine Mansfield’s “The Garden Party” and then we’re done with modernist fiction and on to T. S. Eliot and Yeats next week. In Mystery and Detective Fiction we wrapped up The Maltese Falcon on Monday and now we’re moving into feminist revisions of hard-boiled detection, starting with short stories by Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky. I have usually taught Grafton’s ‘A’ is for Alibi as the longer text for this topic, but this year I’ve switched in Paretsky’s Indemnity Only. It’s at least as interesting in terms of confronting specific conventions of the genre, but I admit it is not quite as much fun: Paretsky (like her detective) takes herself pretty seriously, whereas with Grafton, at least in her early novels, there’s a playful quality to it. But Paretsky’s focus on systemic corruption actually seems more relevant to the kind of story Hammett tells in Falcon than Grafton’s emphasis on dysfunctional family structures. We’ll see how they react. I have found in past years that when I start taking overtly about feminism, there’s a perceptible disengagement. On Monday, for instance, I invited discussion about how far we could interpret Brigid O’Shaughnessy as a woman choosing survival strategies in a profoundly sexist environment: not (just) a femme fatale but in her own way a victim, including, perhaps, to Sam’s hyper-professional, masculine code of ethics by which “if a man’s partner is killed, he’s supposed to do something about it.” No takers at all, at least not anyone prepared to speak up.

In my graduate seminar, happily for me we have moved on to Middlemarch, a novel I know well enough not to sweat the details of class prep in quite the same way I had to for Romola. Although I just read through it last term for my 19th-century fiction class, I am rereading it carefully, with a clean new copy to mark up (and put sticky notes in), to make sure my recollection is precise and to see what different aspects stand out in this particular context, reading through so much of her work at once. A colleague remarked not long ago that she has the hardest time preparing to teach material she knows exceptionally well; the problem is that it’s hard to be satisfied with what you can get through in a limited time. I do feel that a bit now with Middlemarch–not that I know anything like everything about it, but that it’s a bit laborious starting it up all over again with a new group, and wanting to get past some of the obvious bits or sticking points. Also, my own comments seem inadequate, whereas I’ll be happy enough to have found anything reasonably intelligent to say about “The Dead” (as long as no real Joyce expert is listening in).

Overall, we’re hurtling towards the end of term, which means I have to get final paper topics ready, mid-term tests prepared, and all the other bits and pieces that are part of your plan but seem so far away when you first show up in January. And before that, I have to get those last two annotated bibliographies squared away, so off I go to do that.