teaching

This Week in My Classes

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We have a short week because of the Thanksgiving holiday yesterday, but that doesn’t mean we won’t be busy (that little bit of extra time to catch up on reading is probably what most of my students were thankful for–well, maybe).

1. 19th-Century Novel. The students are completing their letters on Great Expectations. I got the idea for this assignment from Art Young’s Teaching Writing Across the Curriculum, in which (on pages 30-34) he discusses using letters for an assignment on Heart of Darkness What intrigued me the most was his description of the improvement in clarity and liveliness in the students’ work in this form, compared to their attempts at more overtly ‘academic’ essay-writing. He accounts for this partly as follows:

I think the social nature of the assignment was important. The students had interpreted my “critical essay” assignment as the familiar school assignment, what Susan called “busy work”–show the teacher that you read The Importance of Being Earnest and can think of some things to say about it. You are not really helping the teacher understand the play any better because the teacher has read and taught the play several times, read many professional books and essays about it, and you
have spent a week reading this play while taking four or five other classes at the same time. The advantage of the letters is that they are written for a specific individual, a peer, who is asking real questions, asking for help, and for whom you can play the role of colleague or teacher as mentor. The letters demonstrate students communicating to a real audience rather than practicing at communicating to the pretend audience of professional scholars who read and write essays about literature. In addition, the letters are contextualized within the classroom community.

In my version of this assignment, I try to emphasize these features: I urge them to set questions they would genuinely like to get answers to; I bring the partners face to face with each other and encourage them to discuss what interests, attracts, repels, or confuses them in the novel; I remind them that they are writing to someone they know has also read the novel (so, among other things, they should know not to include excessive plot summary); I urge them to draw on and to cite lectures and class discussions, to listen for and create connections between their writing assignment and our other work. When I first tried this system out, it was because I had tired of the Perfunctory Paper, written to meet requirements rather than out of any genuine intellectual curiosity and often taking students’ attention away from our shared class work as they focused on their individual topics. This way everyone writes something on every novel, with (in general) a much higher level of engagement. Students who really want to write a longer paper get the opportunity to do so late in the course. I certainly like this system better than what I used to do, and the feedback from students has been quite positive.

They turn their papers in tomorrow, at which point I get the ball rolling for our next book, Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret. This is a fun teaching text, with lots of suspense and thus helpful momentum for the students and lots of interesting features for analysis and interpretation. In the end, I don’t think LAS is a very good novel, mostly because I don’t think Braddon has really worked out what her idea is about the problems she highlights, or even the characters she develops. The plot is fairly well constructed, but the language is pretty uninspired, especially right after Great Expectations. But I’m sure we’ll have some good discussions (Lady Audley: Victim or Villain? Robert Audley: Hero?). We’ll get to talk about sensationalism in relation to realism, which will set us up to move to our next book, which is Middlemarch–not, as critics have noted, free of sensational elements, including a suspicious death, some near-adultery, and a convenient thunder storm.

2. Victorian Women Writers. Jane Eyre, week two. I’ve assigned a cluster of readings on JE and colonialism (Spivak, Meyer, O’Connor), but I leave it mostly up to the students to take up issues from the criticism (or n0t), so I don’t know how much the issues raised in those articles will dominate our discussion. We also read some interesting essays focusing mainly on narration last week, and some of the problems they focus on (such as Jane’s reliability) will need reconsidering now that we’ve all read to the end of the novel.

This Week in My Classes

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1. 19th-Century Novel. We’re still on Great Expectations this week, moving through the phase that I lecture on as “Great Revelations.” While I tend to emphasize the moral pressures of the novel in class, while re-reading it this weekend I found myself pleasurably reminded of what an emotionally powerful and intensely literary book it is. Here’s Pip confronting Estella and, indirectly, Miss Havisham, after he has learned the truth about his benefactor and been forced to reconsider the kind of ‘gentleman’ he has become:

‘You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read, since I first came here, the rough common boy whose poor heart you wounded even then. You have been in every prospect I have ever seen since–on the river, on the sails of the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the light, in the darkness, in the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the streets. You have been the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become acquainted with. The stones of which the strongest London buildings are made, are not more real, or more impossible to be displaced by your hands, than your presence and influence have been to me, there and everywhere, and will be. Estella, to the last hour of my life, you cannot choose but remain part of my character, part of the little good in me, part of the evil. But, in this separation I associate you only with the good, and I will faithfully hold you to that always, for you must have done me far more good than harm, let me feel now what sharp distress I may. O God bless you, God forgive you!’
In what ecstasy of unhappiness I got those broken words out of myself, I don’t know. The rhapsody welled up within me, like blood from a wound, and gushed out. I held her hand to my lips some lingering moments, and so I left her. But ever afterwards, I remembered–and soon afterwards with stronger reason–that while Estella looked at me merely with incredulous wonder, the spectral figure of Miss Havisham, her hand still covering her heart, seemed all resolved into a ghastly stare of pity and remorse. (Vol. 3 Chapter V)

Of the many things that could be said about this passage, I’ll just point to the way Pip’s impassioned speech associates Estella with the evocative landscape he describes to us much earlier in the novel, the horizontal lines broken only by the beacon and the gibbet–symbols that seemed to oppose hope and death, beauty and despair, love and crime, Estella and Magwitch–oppositions that by Volume 3 have proved not just illusory but dangerously so, as Pip now sees. Contemporary novelists are often described as “Dickensian,” usually for writing long, diffuse novels with lots of plots and characters and a bit more emotional exhibitionism than is the norm in ‘serious’ fiction. I rarely think they deserve the label, because to me it’s moments such as this one, combining dense symbolic allusiveness, rhythmic and evocative language, high sentiment, and urgent moral appeal–all bordering on the excessive, even ridiculous, but, at their best, not collapsing into it–that distinguish Dickens from other novelists. I’m not sure any modern novelist takes such risks.

2. Victorian Women Writers. Here it’s week 1 of Jane Eyre. Perhaps the greatest challenge here is trying to approach the novel in any fresh way, given not just how familiar it is to me after many readings, but also how dense is the accretion of criticism around it. Just selecting a handful of critical articles to assign was an incredibly fraught process: at this point, what are the most important things to be known or said about it? So much of the discussion, too, is ultimately all about us, the critics, and how what we have seen in this novel, how we have read it, reflects our own assumptions or desires about literature, feminism, romance, realism, narration. And how to find something new to say? Find something that others have neglected or misunderstood, point out what this tells us about those other readings, and posit your own, corrective analysis. You thought it was a happy ending? Think again! Rochester’s still a patriarch, Ferndean is unhealthy, Adele is exiled, it’s really a revenge story, Jane’s narrative strategies undermine what she appears to be saying about living ‘happily ever after.’ The key to the novel’s themes or politics is not Jane but Bertha, or Grace Poole, or Bessie. Miss Temple is barely an improvement on Brocklehurst. Bertha is Jane’s repressed double, or is she the oppressed Other? You thought the novel was a woman’s (or a woman writer’s) declaration of independence–look how you failed to see that version of feminism as complicit with racist exclusion, or reliant on imperialism. Or, look how you have subjugated the novel to your own theory about race or empire. And on and on it goes. It’s not that I don’t find some of these readings interest or compelling, but after a while, it starts to seem odd that one book should attract such a weight of other people’s ideas, should stand for so many things. While recognizing that there can be no such thing as “just” reading the novel (any more than what I’ve said above is “just” about Great Expectations “itself” in some transparent way), I do find myself thinking that, especially in some of the more ‘suspicious’ readings, those that go most determinedly against the grain, we have left the novel behind, refusing, as Denis Donoghue says about another text, to let it have its theme.

This Week in My Classes

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The warm-up period is over: now we’re really getting down to work.

1. English 3032, 19thC Novel. This week, we start Great Expectations. In addition to placing the novel in the context of Dickens’s career and a range of social and intellectual issues (from the alienation induced by modern urban professional society, to anxieties about the moral implications of Darwinism), I like to focus on Pip’s retrospective narration and the ways his personal development prepares him, ultimately, to become the kind of man (especially the kind of “gentleman”) who is capable of telling us this story. Great Expectations is also good for shaking up casually-held stereotypes about Victorian ‘realism,’ as from Pip’s palindromic name to Miss Havisham’s wedding feast to Wemmick’s castle to Magwitch’s splendidly eerie reappearance, nearly every element in the novel pressures us to read it literarily rather than mimetically. Plus, there’s Joe’s hat falling off the mantel in Volume II Chapter 8…

2. English 5465, Victorian Women Writers. Here, we are taking one more look at the ‘real’ life of a Victorian woman novelist before turning our attention to the novels themselves. But with Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Bronte, we have the added interest of one Victorian woman writer writing about another, and in the process exploring the ideas of femininity, authorship, vocation, and duty that preoccupied them both, though in different ways, throughout their writing careers. Last week we considered Margaret Oliphant’s writing her own story in response to a literary representation of George Eliot’s life (she points to Cross’s biography as having prompted her to begin the Autobiography). But Oliphant has been reading Gaskell’s Life of CB as well, so as we read on, we are accumulating a range of interrelated ideas about these women and their work–from them and from their respondents, interpreters, and critics–to carry forward with us into our analysis of the fiction they produced. In class we struggled somewhat with the idea of Oliphant’s Autobiography as a literary text because at times both its form and its content seem so unselfconscious, spontaneous, and diary-like that we weren’t confident attributing intent or design (though we also considered, of course, that it has literary qualities and other effects regardless of how deliberately they were developed). Gaskell’s biography of Bronte is much more conspicuously constructed with its own aims and purposes. Critics have disputed how far Gaskell’s stated goals–such as defending Bronte against her critics and presenting a sympathetic portrait of someone we are often reminded was Gaskell’s “dear friend”–are sincere or unproblematic and how much she is using Bronte as a prop to establish her own literary credentials or to resolve larger debates about the “vexed question of sex” in authorship, as she calls it (she is emphatic that whatever their domestic responsibilities, women also have a duty to use their God-given talents, even if that means stepping outside the ‘normal’ bounds of female propriety). I expect we will have some good discussion along these lines. Reading The Life of Charlotte Bronte right after Oliphant’s Autobiography should also prompt some conversation about their very different views and experiences of being women writers.

Blogs and Plagiarism

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I check my sitemeter intermittently to see what searches land people over here. The results usually surprise me: not long ago I noticed that a lot of people seemed to end up here because they were looking for information on Margaret Oliphant, for instance, and lately a lot of people are looking for information on James Wood, on Brick Lane, and on Black and Blue. There is, of course, no way to know why people are searching these topics (though I think it’s safe to assume it’s not because they are anxious to know what I in particular have to say about them). Now, though, I’m seeing signs of the new academic term being underway–or at least, that’s what it looks like–as more searches appear to come from students looking to get a little direct ‘help’ with their homework. Someone recently Googled “conclusion for emotional/moral paper,” for instance, and ended up at my post on George Eliot and non-belief, while another Googled “revision questions Middlemarch” and ended up at my post on A.S. Byatt. Of course, I can’t be sure that the former was hoping to find a conclusion for a paper s/he was supposed to write, or that the latter was hoping to answer whatever questions had been provided. Like many Google search strings, these ones are elliptical and ambiguous. And I don’t expect that these (or other searchers with impure intentions) find much help on this site–these ones didn’t stay long, anyway, which I incline to think is a good sign. But this has prompted me to think more about something that worried me when I began doing this, namely whether by blogging I am contributing to the problem of plagiarism that plagues me in my more formal role as a teacher and professional. I see that Acephalous and his commenters have been over this territory as well, and in particular over the problem that apparently TurnItIn.Com does not do well at catching blog posts. One suggestion made was that bloggers should stick to a ‘bloggy’ style, so that bits cut and pasted into supposedly formal assignments would stand out; the reasonable response was, basically, that academic bloggers hope to generate high quality material, and insisting on a highly colloquial style or otherwise restricting the character or form of blog posts would defeat that aim. Given all the other information readily available online, I guess I don’t see that blogging literary texts (or potential essay topics) really gives would-be plagiarists that much more to work with / steal from. But teachers should presumably be aware that TurnItIn is not a one-size-fits-all solution and that you should also run key phrases through search engines yourself. I also recently heard an interesting story about plagiarism running the other way, from someone’s published work to someone’s blog–though what someone would achieve by turning things around that way rather eludes me. In any case, students should be aware that if they can find a source on the Internet, so can their instructors, and also that if their instructors post course-related material on a blog, they will almost certainly recognize their own ideas or phrases if their students incorporate them into their assignments.

This Week in My Classes

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Here’s what my students and I will be reading and talking about this week:

1. English 3032, 19th-Century Novel: We are finishing up Trollope’s The Warden, with a special focus on Trollope’s redefinition of heroism on a small scale and on his interest in the way public questions are always “a conglomeration of private interests.” We’ll also be looking at the role of his intrusive narrator, and at his parodies of Carlyle (as Dr. Pessimist Anticant) and Dickens (as Mr Popular Sentiment) as he works towards his own theory of fiction. “What story was ever written without a demon?” he asks in Chapter XV; “What novel, what history, what work of any sort, what world, would be perfect without existing principles both of good and evil?” As every reader of The Warden comes to see, this novel does not allow us to perceive the world as consisting of such extremes, despite John Bold’s frustrated exclamation, “If there be a devil, a real devil here on earth, it is Dr. Grantly.”

2. English 5465, Victorian Women Writers: This week it’s Margaret Oliphant’s Autobiography, which shifts us sharply away from last week’s more abstract discussion of Victorian arguments over femininity and women’s ‘mission’ into a life full of contradictions and compromises, struggle and suffering (economic and mental). While Oliphant’s consideration of her own fiction, and her comparisons (often rueful or resentful) between her own hard-earned modest success and her more triumphant literary ‘sisters’ (especially George Eliot and Charlotte Bronte) will be of much interest to us, I am sure we will also talk about the form, mode, and tone of the Autobiography itself, with its long passages of heartbreaking lamentation for lost children interwoven with (often, seeming to slice apart) its record of ordinary domestic life and travels. Here’s an excerpt from just after the death of Maggie, aged 10, after a sudden and very brief illness:

I ask myself why, why, and I cannot find any answer. I had but one woman-child and she was just beginning to sympathize with me, to comfort me, and at this dear moment, her little heart expanding, her little mind growing, her sweet life blossoming day by day, God has taken her away out of my arms and refuses to hear my cry and prayer. My heart feels dead. . . . Now I have to go limping and anxious through the world all the days of my life. . . . Oh God forgive me and help me. O God convey to me a sense of my darling’s happiness, a feeling that she will not forget me and that I shall find her again, and have pity upon a poor heartbroken creature who does not know what she is saying. . . .Those curls I was so proud of were never more beautiful than when they were all rippling back with the gold string through them from her dear head as she lay ill, and when they lay all peaceful and still with her white wreath of hyacinths and snowdrops, she as as lovely as the angel she is. Oh my child, my child.

She would lose all of her children before her own death, “writing steadily,” as she says, “all the time” to support the ne’er-do-well sons who survived into adulthood and the array of relatives who came to depend on her industry and charity. The poignant conclusion:

And now here I am all alone.
I cannot write anymore.

 

This Week in My Classes

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I think one of the commenters on Footnoted is right that the most hostile reactions come from people who have an inaccurate idea of what goes on in ‘lit departments.’ I also think that essays like Wasserman‘s don’t consider academics when they think about the state of literary culture because (a) for a mix of good and bad reasons, most academic writing and scholarship is not directly or visibly connected to or known in that culture and (b) our classroom work is typically forgotten, disregarded, or misunderstood outside the academy. I don’t suppose that my own classroom is either wholly typical or exemplary, but I think it might contribute somewhat to the demystification of our profession, now that the teaching term is underway, to make it a regular feature of my blog to outline what lies in store for me and my students each week. As I have just two classes this term, thanks to the teaching relief I get for coordinating the graduate program, the list won’t be long (unlike most of the readings we’re doing!). And so, without further ado…

  1. English 3032, The Nineteenth-Century British Novel from Dickens to Hardy. Having begun Monday with an overview of literary and historical contexts for the novel in our period, we are launching today into our study of Trollope‘s odd little charmer The Warden. A small man in a big institution has a small problem that is a big one for his conscience; while sorting through this dilemma in his plot and for his characters, Trollope is also working out his own style of realism, in contrast to “Mr Popular Sentiment” (Dickens). Today I’ll be offering some generalizations about Trollope, then zeroing in on his interest in individuals working in complex institutions (the Church of England, in our particular case), then looking at the characterization of the main players in The Warden, especially Mr Harding (love that imaginary cello!) and the chief combatants, John Bold (he’s bold–get it?!) and Archdeacon Grantly (“Good heavens!”).
  2. English 5465, Victorian Women Writers–the Novelists. Here too we have begun with an overview of literary and historical contexts, this time with an emphasis on women’s situation in the 19th century and how this affected (or, as Gilbert and Gubar notoriously argued, “infected”) their literary options, attitudes, and styles. To kickstart the term’s discussion, we read some 19thC essays on ‘lady novelists,’ one of them (of course) being George Eliot’s (in)famous “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists.” “Be not a baker if your head be made of butter” is a good line for anyone who ventures into print–perhaps especially for bloggers…

And now, off to class.

Academic Etiquette

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Wise words from the Little Professor on “dealing with professors“. My favourites:

3. If you want to know the assignment for the next day’s reading, please look at the syllabus. That’s why it’s there.

and

8. Do not ask your professor “Did I miss anything?” or “Will I miss anything?” or “Is there something important we’re going to talk about?” Just don’t.

Actually, I often have a version of #8 right there in my course syllabus…along with the list of books for the class, deadlines for assignments, my office hours, my policies on late assignments and missed classes, my mother’s maiden name, my home phone number…OK, not the last two, but I do work hard to put everything you need to know about the course in the syllabus, so really my basic advice would just be:

Before you ask me anything at all, read your syllabus carefully.

And since it’s posted on WebCT, it doesn’t matter if you left your copy on the bus, or your dog ate it, or you don’t think I gave you a copy last class: you can find it 24/7.

(This posting is dedicated to the anonymous student who complained in my course evaluations last year that whenever s/he asked me a question, I always said “go look in your syllabus.” In case you ever read this, there’s a relevant saying that is something about giving someone a fish vs. teaching them to fish…)

Blogging Trollope II

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The further I read (and I’m now about 2/3 through, which is no small feat, let me tell you), the more I am enjoying thinking about how He Knew He Was Right would play off against the other novels I have in mind for my class. It’s a seminar on the Victorian ‘woman question,’ and I have taught it several times before, always with a reading list that includes a fair mix of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction prose. I have always thought (and the students have always seemd to agree) that it has been successful, and discussion has always been vigorous, but I decided it was time for a change, and so this time I’m focusing on novels, and in particular on novels that follow couples past the ‘matrimonial barrier.’ That means I’ll keep The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and The Odd Women, two of my favourites, but I’m going to replace The Mill on the Floss with Middlemarch and (I’m now thinking) bring in HKHWR…and maybe East Lynne also, for a more ‘sensational’ take. I’m finding HKHWR has a lot of links to The Odd Women in particular, starting with the obvious similarity of an excess of female characters. The notes to my edition of HKHWR suggest links between Priscilla Stanbury and Dorothea in Middlemarch; at the moment I don’t really see it, but I’m interested in the possibility. East Lynne has an actual infidelity that would provide an interesting comparison with the suspected offense in Trollope’s much more literal (and yet, in many ways, ‘sensational’) novel. If the students don’t get completely overwhelmed with the reading load, this could be a lot of fun. (That does seem like a big ‘if’ at this point. Well, I haven’t actually ordered the books yet, so there’s time to pull back.)

Dragging through the Classics

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In one of many essays occasioned by the release of the final Harry Potter instalment, Ron Charles at the Washington Post remarks,

As I look back on my dozen years of teaching English, I wish I’d spent less time dragging my students through the classics and more time showing them how to strike out on their own and track down new books they might enjoy. Without some sense of where to look and how to look, is it any wonder that most people who want to read fiction glom onto a few bestsellers that everybody’s talking about?

As I look back on my own dozen years of teaching English, I’d like to think that while dragging my students through the classics may not have taught them where and how to look for new books, it has taught them a lot about what to look for when they actually sit down to read–and maybe also raised the bar for the kind of books they enjoy. That said, I agree that English teachers should encourage their students to see the work they do in class as preparation for a future in which, for most of them, there will be no more “required” reading. For those who need help when they do strike out on their own, John Sutherland’s How to Read a Novel provides some useful, if idiosyncratic, advice.