This Week In My Classes

Another Term Over!

Rohan Maitzen9 Comments

I have certainly not kept up diligently with posting about my teaching this year. I’ve posted just twice about it since January, and once was a re-run! I blame . . . well, pretty much everything, including how much of my energy was spent this term on administrative stuff that was at once important and kind of mind-numbing. But really it’s probably as simple as: a habit, once broken, is hard to repair, however much you miss it, or however guilty you feel about it (however irrationally). I was talking with a good friend recently who commented how helpful she’d found the comment “it’s OK to change your interests.” Has my interest in blogging about my teaching just declined? The proof, I guess, is in the posting.

And yet: I have missed it! I continue to believe, as well, that it is a habit that did me good. I became a better teacher because I took regular opportunities to reflect on what I was doing and how it was going. As I approach the end of my teaching career–I don’t know when that will be, yet, but I know it’s coming eventually!–I know I will be glad to have this record of so much of it, as well.

This felt like a difficult term, though mostly for reasons not directly to do with my own teaching. The string of snow days and cancellations didn’t help: I got pretty tired of gaming out revisions to our reading schedules and deadlines. Disruptions aside, I think my two classes actually went pretty well. I was anxious heading into the Brit Lit survey class, because it did not go well the last time I taught it–and that’s even without taking into account that mid way through it, the pandemic broke out and we were all sent home. The reading list this time was pretty much the same, but it all felt very different, in a good way. How much of that was me, doing things differently (better) and how much of that was the unpredictable chemistry of the group, the room, the moment? I loved working through Great Expectations with them, of course, but the biggest treat for me was The Remains of the Day, which was on the reading list for the course in 2020 but had to be cut when everything blew up. It remains a top 10 novel for me, and its insights and impact feel as urgent to me now as they did a decade ago–more, perhaps. And of course the final scene on the pier still makes me weep.

My other course this term was a combined Honours and graduate seminar on George Eliot. I have taught a grad-only version before but this was my first time being able to offer it to Honours students as well. Because many of the undergraduates in the class had read at least one George Eliot novel with me before (along with an array of other Victorian novels), and some of the graduate students had never read her–or much Victorian fiction at all–there really was no meaningful difference in level or preparation, and the discussion was smart and energetic and invested the entire term. Well, OK, it flagged a bit while we were making our way through Felix Holt, which was not a general favourite–but that was also during the worst of our winter weather, so I choose to think it’s not really, or not entirely, Felix’s fault. Silas Marner was a clear favourite, but to my delight and relief, so was Daniel Deronda, which I don’t think anyone in the class was really looking forward to. They were all very happily surprised at how (relatively) fast-paced and provocative and interesting it is. I would have loved to include Middlemarch, but you can only do so much in 12 weeks. (I have put it on the reading list for the Dickens to Hardy class in the fall, as compensation.)

The last time I taught the grad seminar version of the George Eliot class was 2015, and it was interesting to notice some shifts in the interests and questions students brought to our discussions. To some extent this was a function of the critical essays I assigned for the graduate students, which I refreshed to highlight recent developments in the scholarship. But it was still up to them what they specifically brought up in class, and the undergraduates were not doing those readings (or at least were not required to)–and across the board it was clear that disability studies, eco-criticism, and gender were key interests. It’s not that gender wasn’t a central topic of discussion in the past, but the terms of the discussion have evolved: we had as lively discussions about Gwendolen as a possibly “ace” character, for example, as about Maggie’s non-conformity with 19th-century norms of femininity. There didn’t seem to be much energy for talking about empire, even with Daniel Deronda, and my expectation that the novel’s conclusion would provoke controversy about Palestine and Zionism did not really play out.

The spectre haunting everyone’s pedagogy this year was AI. I really tried not to let concerns about it preoccupy me. By and large, I trust my students to want an authentic experience, to be bringing their real selves to the classroom and to the work they do for me. I never had the feeling with any of the work from the students in the George Eliot seminar that it wasn’t truly their own. Could I be wrong about this? Sure. But I got to know them all pretty well, and unless I have learned nothing in 31 years of teaching, there’s not much overlap between “students who want to take an entire seminar about George Eliot” and “students who want to take short-cuts.” I wasn’t always so sure with the online tests in the survey class: some of the answers did have that combination of vagueness and fluency, a kind of unnatural glibness with very little actual substance, that gives off the whiff of AI. Most of the time that meant they also didn’t meet the requirements for full credit, which typically included things like “give a specific example from the reading to support your answer, explaining clearly how it does so.” In those cases I could just give partial credit, noting how the answer fell short without getting tangled up in having to prove AI use. Other times I had to shrug and give credit for a “good enough” answer, even if I doubted its authenticity. Usually I noted that doubt in my feedback, explaining why the answer had made me wonder, in case knowing that was in any way useful to the student.

I’m not at all sanguine about the corrosive effects of AI on teaching and learning, and I don’t kid myself that there is any way to “AI-proof” my assignments. I remind myself, though, that one of my worst teaching experiences ever was the term–not that long ago!–when 1 in 5 of my first-year students was found guilty of an academic integrity offence for literally cutting and pasting material from sites on the internet. AI is worse: more insidious, and at least potentially more widely damaging to the trust I consider essential to my work. I have tried hard over the years to think about plagiarism as a symptom rather than a moral failing and to do what I can to create the conditions in which students neither need nor want to resort to it. The same is surely true of AI, but it’s impossible to ignore how much harder it keeps getting, not just to ward it off (I mean, Copilot is literally integrated in the software they are provided by the university!) but to manage those conditions. Classes are larger, everyone is busier and under more pressure, students’ preparation and expectations and needs vary widely. All I can really do is speak up for and model the value of the process and the work itself. I do feel pretty sure that, whatever complaints they no doubt have about me and my pedagogy, my students can tell I am there for it and for them, that I am genuinely committed and enthusiastic. I hope they appreciate that I continue to prioritize both trust and authenticity on both sides. When I can’t bring that positive energy to the room any more, it will definitely be time for me to retire.

From the Archives: “Janet’s Repentance”

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

For the first time ever, I have assigned Scenes of Clerical Life in one of my classes—more accurately, a scene of clerical life, “Janet’s Repentance.” My re-reading of it some years ago had lodged the possibility of assigning the story (novella?) in my mind, but I hadn’t found what felt like the right opportunity until this term’s all-George Eliot, all the time seminar. We are discussing “Janet’s Repentance” in the seminar this week, so I thought that was a good enough reason to lift this post out of the archives.

I’m not sure when I last read George Eliot’s first published fiction, Scenes of Clerical Life. It might have been as much as 15 or 20 years ago that I read any of the stories right through, though I have certainly dipped into “Amos Barton” once or twice when thinking or writing about her realism and her intrusive narrator. I picked the book off my shelf again this week because I have been thinking (and will be writing) about scenes of visiting in Eliot’s novels. So many of her climactic moments are set up that way, with a sympathetic visitor bringing comfort or guidance to someone in crisis: Dinah visiting Hetty in prison in Adam Bede, for instance; Lucy visiting Maggie near the end of The Mill on the Floss; perhaps most notably, Dorothea visiting Rosamond in Chapter 81 of Middlemarch. The key thing, of course, is that these are human, rather than divine, “visitations” and thus neatly encapsulate her ongoing translation of religious beliefs into secular practices. As I was collecting examples, I had a vague memory of Edgar Tryan visiting Janet in “Janet’s Repentance,” so I thought I’d go back to the story and see what it adds to the pattern I’m exploring.

“Janet’s Repentance” is interesting for lots of reasons, including its grim account of Janet’s abusive marriage, which has driven her, in her misery and shame, to drink:

‘I’ll teach you to keep me waiting in the dark, you pale, staring fool!’ he said, advancing with his slow, drunken step. ‘What, you’ve been drinking again, have you? I’ll beat you into your senses.’

He laid his hand with a firm grip on her shoulder, turned, her round, and pushed her slowly before him along the passage and through the dining-room door, which stood open on their left hand.

There was a portrait of Janet’s mother, a grey-haired, dark-eyed old woman, in a neatly fluted cap, hanging over the mantelpiece. Surely the aged eyes take on a look of anguish as they see Janet — not trembling, no! it would be better if she trembled — standing stupidly unmoved in her great beauty while the heavy arm is lifted to strike her. The blow falls — another — and another. Surely the mother hears that cry — ‘O Robert! pity! pity!’

“Do you wonder,” asks our narrator, as the sordid tale unfolds, “how it was that things had come to this pass — what offence Janet had committed in the early years of marriage to rouse the brutal hatred of this man? . . . But do not believe,” she goes on,

that it was anything either present or wanting in poor Janet that formed the motive of her husband’s cruelty. Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside itself — it only requires opportunity. . . . And an unloving, tyrannous, brutal man needs no motive to prompt his cruelty; he needs only the perpetual presence of a woman he can call his own.

“A woman he can call his own”: that remark is strongly reminiscent of Frances Power Cobbe’s powerful 1878 essay “Wife-Torture in England,” in which Cobbe emphasizes the corrupting effect of presumed “ownership”:

The general depreciation of women as a sex is bad enough, but in the matter we are considering [spousal abuse], the special depreciation of wives is more directly responsible for the outrages they endure. The notion that a man’s wife is his PROPERTY, in the sense in which a horse is his property . . . is the fatal root of incalculable evil and misery. Every brutal-minded man, and many a man who in other relations of his life is not brutal, entertains more or less vaguely the notion that his wife is his thing, and is ready to ask with indignation (as we read again and again in the police reports), of any one who interferes with his treatment of her, “May I not do what I will with my own?”

 (If you’re interested in reading more on this aspect of Victorian marriage and its treatment in Victorian fiction — try Lisa Surridge’s Bleak Houses and Kate Lawson’s The Marked Body, both of which discuss “Janet’s Repentance.”)

millIt’s also interesting how recognizable George Eliot is here. Many of the things she does better (or at least more fully, or with greater finesse) in her later novels are here already, such as the patient unfolding of social context — the “thick description” within which her plots acquire so much more meaning than their simple actions might indicate — and the pulsation between individual moments and philosophical ideas, facilitated by the narrator’s commentary on the action. Just as, despite her protective camouflage, Eliot’s friends “IRL” knew her when they read her earliest fiction, any readers of The Mill on the Floss know they are in familiar company when they see this anticipation of the famous “men of maxims” passage:

Yet surely, surely the only true knowledge of our fellow-man is that which enables us to feel with him – which gives us a fine ear for the heart-pulses that are beating under the mere clothes of circumstance and opinion. Our subtlest analysis of schools and sects must miss the essential truth, unless it be lit up by the love that sees in all forms of human thought and work, the life and death struggles of separate human beings.

And Janet’s appeal to Mr. Tryan — “It is very difficult to know what to do: what ought I to do?” — is one that has echoes across Eliot’s oeuvre, including in a passage in Middlemarch that has long been central to my thinking about the broader question of religion in Eliot’s fiction: “Help me, pray,” says an overwrought Dorothea to Dr. Lydgate; “Tell me what I can do.”

The big difference, though, is that in Middlemarch the appeal may have the same impulse as a prayer (“an impulse which if she had been alone would have turned into a prayer”) but it is directed at a doctor, and it’s not even really his medical advice she wants but something more fundamentally human, some guidance about how to be in the circumstances. The transformation from sacred to secular is even more distinct in the climactic encounter between Dorothea and Rosamond much later in the novel. But in “Janet’s Repentance” not only is Janet asking a clergyman (and an Evangelical one, at that) for help, but his advice is religious advice — and it is not undercut, or translated into humanistic terms, by the narrator. David Lodge notes in his introduction to my Penguin edition that “Janet’s Repentance” is “a completely non-ironical account of a conversion from sinfulness to righteousness through the selfless endeavours of an Evangelical clergyman.” He goes on to suggest that Eliot’s “religion of Humanity” is just below the surface, but it’s certainly not visible the way it is in her later works. It’s true that Tryan’s kindly fellowship is essential to his success as a religious ambassador: “Blessed influence of one true loving human soul on another!” says the narrator. But it’s trust in God that Tryan recommends, and that brings Janet peace.

Durade GEThe ending of the story is a bit of a disappointment: like Anne Brontë’s Helen Huntingdon, Janet feels obliged to stand by her man as he pays the final price for his cruel and self-destructive behavior. I think that in both cases this affirmation of ‘proper’ wifely devotion is important to direct our attention to the sins of the husbands. Brontë has a more political point to make, though, about the structural as well as ideological failures of marriage, while Eliot’s story focuses us more on the internal moral life and on the redemptive value of compassion and faith. Janet also does not get the hard-earned Happily Ever After that Helen enjoys, at least, not in this life: as Lodge points out, Eliot “even compromised with her belief in immortality to the extent of allowing her hero and heroine a ‘sacred kiss of promise’ at the end.” Disappointing, as I said, and surprising, from an author who wrote so stringently about the immorality of acting on the basis of future expectations rather than immediate consequences:

The notion that duty looks stern, but all the while has her hand full of sugar-plums, with which she will reward us by and by, is the favourite cant of optimists, who try to make out that this tangled wilderness of life has a plan as easy to trace as that of a Dutch garden; but it really undermines all true moral development by perpetually substituting something extrinsic as a motive to action, instead of the immediate impulse of love or justice, which alone makes an action truly moral.

Was she catering to her as-yet unconverted audience, do you suppose, in setting Janet up as a memorial to “one whose heart beat with true compassion, and whose lips were moved by fervent faith”? Or practicing what she herself preached by inhabiting, as fully as possible, a point of view different from her own?

Originally published January 7, 2015. The writing I was doing on visitations in George Eliot became (more or less) the essay “Middlemarch and the ‘Cry From Soul to Soul,'” published in Berfrois in August 2015. Sadly, Berfrois is no more, but the essay can also be found in my collection Widening the Skirts of Light, available as an e-book from Amazon & Kobo for the lowest price I was allowed to set.

This Term In My Classes: Breadth, Depth, & Reflections

Rohan Maitzen6 Comments

Another January, another new term! I’ve got two classes this term of two quite different kinds. The first is our second-year survey course British Literature After 1800, so its aim is to cover a broad sweep of territory; the other is a combined Honours and graduate seminar on George Eliot, a rare opportunity to zoom in on a single writer—a privilege rarely accorded, in our program anyway, to anyone besides Shakespeare!

I led off the survey class today with what I called “explanations and excuses”: I talked in general terms about the traditional model of the historical survey in literature programs; I gave a potted overview of what the standard story of “British Literature After 1800” would have been, moving from the Romantics through the Victorians to the Modernists and beyond; then I raised some questions about oversimplification, inclusion, periodization, and ‘the canon’; and then I made some arguments in favour of nonetheless looking at things in chronological order, at least some of the time. (Showing my age, I used the example provided by David Lodge in Small World of the student who claims he is doing his thesis on the influence of T. S. Eliot on Shakespeare, much to the delight of the hip deconstructionists around him.) Because, if only for my own sake, I like to have some sense of unifying themes beyond chronology, I explained that one thing we would be talking about across the course was what our various authors thought literature was for or should or could do, and I quoted some statements they had made about this, from Shelley’s “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” to Ishiguro saying “I like to highlight some aspect of being human. I’m not really trying to say, so don’t do this, or do that. I’m saying, this is how it feels to me.” And that, besides a bit of logistical stuff about requirements and schedules and getting the books, was that! Friday we get going more specifically with Wordsworth.

Something that was very much on my mind as I prepared for this particular class meeting was the last time I taught this course, which was the winter term of 2020. In early March of that term, we were all sent home; my notes leading up to what turned out to be our last day in person have a number of references to contingency plans, but none of them (none of us) anticipated the scale of disruption. It came on so quickly, too, as my notes remind me. We were part way through our work on Woolf’s Three Guineas on our final day; quite literally the last thing I wrote on the whiteboard was “burn it all down.” I got quite emotional many times while revising the course materials for this year’s version: that term stands out so vividly in my mind as “the before time,” before COVID, which is also, for me, before Owen died. We were still essentially in lockdown, after all, when he died in 2021; we had only just been able to start coming together as a family again. I don’t usually have a lot of emotional investment in my course materials, but it was unexpectedly difficult revisiting these and thinking of how much has changed. Tearing up over PowerPoint slides: it seemed absurd even as it happened, but it did. That said, because of COVID I ended up cutting The Remains of the Day from the syllabus in 2020, and given that it is in my personal top 10, that I rarely have the opportunity to assign relatively contemporary fiction, and that I am running out of years to assign anything at all, I am stoked about being able to read through it with my class this term. If only it didn’t feel so timely!

I am also super stoked about getting to spend the whole term reading and talking about George Eliot with a cluster of our best students—not just our brightest but honestly, I know most of these students from other classes and they are some of the nicest and keenest and most engaged and curious people you could hope to work with. I felt so much good will from them today as we did our ice-breaker (nothing too “cringe,” just everyone’s names and anything they wanted to share about their previous experience, or lack of experience, with George Eliot). I hope their positive attitude survives Felix Holt, not to mention Daniel Deronda! Knowing that a number of them had read Adam Bede and/or Middlemarch with me in other recent courses, I left both of these off the reading list for this one. Middlemarch especially feels like a gap, but on the other hand, I don’t think I could have realistically asked them to read both Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda in the same term (unless I didn’t assign anything else), and Daniel Deronda is pretty great. I had quite a debate with myself about Felix Holt vs Romola: just for myself, I would have preferred to reread Romola, but I’ve taught Felix Holt in undergraduate courses before and it is actually pretty accessible. Sure, Felix is so wooden he makes Adam Bede look lively and nuanced, but, speaking of timely, a book about the pitfalls of democracy when the population is not (ahem) maybe sufficiently wise to make good choices seems on point. Along with those two, we will be reading “Janet’s Repentance,” The Mill on the Floss, and Silas Marner. I’m already a bit worried that it’s going to be too much reading . . .

The last time I taught this class was 2015, and then it was a graduate seminar only. I had stepped back a bit from teaching in our graduate program: we get at most one seminar a year, and my favourite classes to teach have always been our 4th-year or honours seminars, so I made them my priority. OK, that’s not entirely truthful: I had also felt increasingly uncomfortable with graduate teaching, both because of my own loss of faith in aspects of academic research and publication (amply documented here over the years) and because it seemed so clear that an academic path was not a viable option for our graduate students and I wasn’t sure what else we were really doing. These reservations made me much happier focusing on undergraduate teaching, though I missed graduate students themselves: we get such lovely ones! Now we mingle undergraduate and graduate students in some of our seminars, which was the model for last year’s Victorian Women Writers seminar—which I thought went really well. (There was at least one student who disagreed, judging from the evaluations, but you can’t please everyone!) I have high hopes for this seminar as a result, which includes a number of the same students, at both levels.

It is a crazy time in the world and has been a pretty difficult time at work as well, with budget cuts and government interference and all kinds of discouraging internal administrative moves. I have never felt so strongly that I might actually be getting tired of the whole thing, that retirement, scary as it is to me for other reasons, might be welcome just so I don’t have to deal with all this nonsense—the persistent devaluing of the work we do, and the degradation of the conditions in which we nonetheless strive to do it well. I have to say, though, that one day back in the classroom with students has made a difference: I don’t exactly like “the job” at the moment, but I really like the work, the part I think of as the real work. The question will be whether the changes and complications and cuts make it impossible for me to do that work, or to do it well, or just start to outweigh the value I find in it.

Believe it or not, I’ve been posting here about my teaching since 2007. At that point I had already been at Dalhousie for 12 years. These posts are a record, then, of almost two decades in a 30-year teaching career (more if you count the teaching I did as a graduate student). In their own idiosyncratic way, they tell quite a history themselves, including the rise and decline of academic blogging, the (thankfully burst) MOOC bubble, the Great Online Pivot of the COVID years, the encroachment of generative AI (may that bubble burst soon). Through it all, my colleagues and I have just kept on showing up to class. It is common, even among academic administrators, to champion “innovation” as a good in itself and to chastise people or systems that continue to work in more or less the same way. The substance of what we do as English professors changes constantly: we are not asking the same questions or bringing the same methods to bear on the texts we study and teach as professors were 20 or 30 or 40 years ago. But it is not a bad thing that our pedagogy stays true to some essential practices and values. I wish more people with decision-making powers would acknowledge that sometimes things stay the same because they work. Today I sat with students around a table and talked. I have tried all kinds of things over the years (again, as amply documented here!) from class wikis to Pecha kucha presentations; I have used PowerPoint and recorded videos and done letter exchanges instead of essays and on and on. After all this time I am convinced that there is no better pedagogy for the kind of learning I believe in for my students than sitting around a table and talking. Second best (still pretty good!) is leading a robust discussion from the front of the room. That kind of teaching can’t be monetized, surveilled, or sold to tech moguls, though, so nobody gets excited about it—except those of us in the room. We are fighting to be able to keep on doing it. If you care about it yourself, vote for politicians who don’t dismiss it because it doesn’t clearly serve “government priorities.”

This Week, Back In My Classes

Rohan Maitzen9 Comments

It was just about a month ago that I last posted in this series. At the time, Dal faculty were locked out but we were hoping that a resolution to the labour dispute was close, which, thankfully, it did turn out to be. Still, because the back-to-work protocol rightly included some preparation time, we were ultimately three weeks late starting classes. Another part of the deal was adding a week to the December end of the term, so technically we have lost “just” two weeks of class time, but it has still meant a lot of reorganizing and everything has felt rushed. Some administrative deadlines have been pushed back, but not everything, so all in all, it has been a hectic time.

That said, it has felt really good to get back to class. I have noticed other professors commenting on social media that students seem very engaged this term, and I have the same feeling, that in spite of —or perhaps because of —the forces arrayed against us as we all try to carry on being curious, rigorous, and enthusiastic about literature, they are bringing their best selves to the room. Students IRL are always such a different thing than the abstractions or generalizations that often circulate about them. I mean, of course there are exceptions, but especially in upper-level classes that not one of them has to take, they are there for good reasons and working in good faith. While I am sure some of them can feel the temptation of AI’s false promises, I am even more sure that what they really want is authenticity; if anyone wavers or wobbles, it will be (as has always been the case for ‘shortcuts’) because of time, pressure, or anxiety. What I need to do is not police or surveil them more intensively but work explicitly on process, as I have always tried to do, and then do my best to model for them the kind of reading, discussion, and analysis that I believe is intrinsically valuable, not to mention enjoyable!

Noble aspirations, and already ones I have had a few stumbles living up to, but I have resolved not to spend the twilight years of my career in the classroom assuming the worst and chasing demons. After all, the highest incident of (discovered) plagiarism I have ever had was the dismal year that 1 in 5 of my intro students ended up in a hearing (with a near 100% finding that they had committed an offence)—and this was all cut-and-paste plagiarism of the most discouraging kind (much of it on pass-fail exercises, including supposedly personal writing like reading journals! I still can’t get over that!). Yes, AI is a game-changer, but I refuse to play, and I especially refuse to dedicate a single minute of precious class time to “training” students how to use it “responsibly” (as if there is such a way) instead of using our time on what they and I are actually there for.

Ok, enough of that, but clearly it is on my mind, as it is on everybody’s.

So what have we been talking about? I am on a reduced teaching load this term because I am our ‘Undergraduate Coordinator,’ meaning I chair the committee that oversees our undergraduate programs and also serve as Honours advisor. This means my only class this term is 19th-Century Fiction from Austen to Dickens. We started with Persuasion and are now getting well into The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which I have not lectured on since the winter term of 2020, the term in which we were all sent home. I actually have found going through my lecture notes for courses from that term quite emotional—next term I am teaching the Brit Lit survey course that I was also teaching that term, and my ‘announcements’ notes for mid-March bring up a lot of difficult memories about the “before” times, before the pandemic began and also before Owen’s death, two long-running catastrophes that tend to bleed together when I cast my mind back.

I have taught the Austen to Dickens class since then, but I assigned Jane Eyre. Much as I love Jane Eyre, I think I enjoy teaching Tenant more: its structure is so smart and complex, and the problems it tackles are, sadly, still so timely. I also appreciate that Anne Brontë’s attention is more clearly on social and systemic problems and solutions, while Jane Eyre is relentlessly personal—which is not to say, of course, that Jane’s story isn’t embedded in wider contexts, but her first-person narration focuses our attention constantly on what it is all like to her, on her individual feelings and values and decisions.

Because it has been so long since I taught Tenant in a “lecture” class (I have assigned it in seminars more recently), my old notes still reflect the more controlled (or controlling) approach I have lately been working self-consciously to change, weaning myself off more scripted lectures and trying instead to steer class discussion at once loosely and effectively enough to still hit all the things I think are important. I did always aim to have discussion, of course! It’s about shifting the balance. This term I am also incorporating some very low-key, low-stakes in-class exercises to make tangible the ways I have always wanted students to be engaging with our topics. For example, yesterday I gave them a handout with two columns, one for 1827 and one for 1821, and I asked them to generate some notes about Helen in both timelines so that we could talk about what we are learning, as we go back in time to her diary, about how she became the isolated, prickly, but still passionate woman we (and our ‘hero’ Gilbert) meet in his framing narrative. They then have the option to do a follow-up response that focuses on a specific topic or example. My impression so far is that this is proving a good way to warm up for discussion as well as a useful way to plant the seeds for future work. And of course it has the non-incidental effect of encouraging attendance. 🙂

One of the biggest tasks I have underway at the moment as Undergraduate Coordinator is drafting a first attempt at what next year’s slate of classes will look like. As I pencil in my own courses (or whatever the Excel equivalent is of that!), I find myself reflecting that I won’t be on the timetable for that many more years. When I’m tired and grumpy, I feel some relief about this, but when I have just been in class and riding that adrenaline rush, I feel wistful, even bereft. What will make up for the loss of that energy, of that sense of purpose, of being on the front lines of something that matters, of being pretty good at something? I know there are other things that matter and I am trying to figure out what else I might be good at. Still, this is something that actually causes me more work-related stress than AI. I will try not to make these posts a dreary refrain about either of these topics! And on that note, we have two more weeks to spend on Tenant and then we are on to David Copperfield, and then, thanks to the added week in December, there will still be time for Cranford: hooray!

This Week (Not) In My Classes

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

It has been very quiet here lately, for reasons that may seem counterintuitive: I have had very little going on, because (long story short) the faculty at Dalhousie has been locked out by the administration since August 20, and while I am not in the union (I’m a member of the joint King’s – Dalhousie faculty) I have been instructed to do no Dal-specific work while the labour dispute continues. You’d think that this would mean I have all kinds of time to read books and write about them here, and yet what has happened instead is that the weird limbo of this situation has prolonged my usual summer doldrums and overwhelmed me with inertia. At this point I can hardly imagine summoning up the energy to stand up in front of keen young people and sustain a lively discussion—and yet at the same time there is nothing I want more to do, especially because if we were in classes this week we would be wrapping up our work on Austen’s Persuasion, my favourite of her novels. The two sides are at the bargaining table again this evening: who knows, maybe by the time I press ‘post’ there will be news of a deal.

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I have done some reading since O, the Brave Music, but nothing that really stuck except William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow, which is as good as everyone said it was, bleak but somehow not depressing. I have just started Frans G. Bengtsson’s The Long Ships, which I am enjoying even though it is not at all what I expected: for no good reason, I suppose, I thought it would be more like Dorothy Dunnett’s novels, or Hild, but it is not nearly so dense or expository but is rather more like a chronicle, with a faintly antique cadence as if it is being told rather than written / read. Maxell’s novel deserves its own post but is not going to get one—score one for inertia!—but when I finish The Long Ships, I resolve to write it up properly! In between I have been rereading Robert B. Parker and Dick Francis, most recently The Edge, which is one of my favourite of Francis’s novels and also helps to sustain my dream of one day taking a cross-country train trip.

I have also been continuing my read-through of Woolf’s diaries. I am into 1923 now. 1922 seemed like a slow year and then she published Jacob’s Room and read Ulysses, both of which events generated a lot of interesting material. I am fascinated by her self-doubt: we meet great writers of the past when that greatness is assured, and also when their writer’s identity is established, but Woolf is not so sure on either count, and is hypersensitive—as George Eliot was—to criticism, especially when she felt her work was misunderstood, not just unappreciated. Jacob’s Room is significant because it is the first novel that, to her, really feels like her own voice: “There’s no doubt in my mind,” she says, “that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice; & that interests me so that I feel I can go ahead without praise.” I am always fascinated and inspired by accounts of artists of any kind who find their métier and know it; I still think often of Mary Delany, and when I reread that post I also reflect on the expanding confidence I felt at the time and wonder where it went and how to recover it. Well, as Molly Peacock tells us in her wonderful book, Mary Delany was 72 when she discovered and fulfilled her own artistic purpose, so I will try to think of myself as “only” 58 and take heart, again, from her story.

Another paradox around my lack of posting is that for whatever reason, this is the writing I like doing the most. All summer I have been struggling to get something, anything done on a couple of other projects, and while I did meet a couple of small reviewing deadlines and submit something to a CFP for a special issue of a journal (I won’t know for a while if anything comes of that), my larger plans keep fizzling out because I can’t shake the feeling that they are futile: even if I completed exactly what I imagine they could be, the odds that they would find a publisher or an audience seem so slim. When nobody is asking for something and there’s no extrinsic need or reward for it, you really have to believe in it to actually do it. Perhaps my lack of conviction is a sign that these are not in fact the right projects for me . . . but then what is? These have not been good years for trusting myself, partly because of the legacy of my failed promotion bid. Oh wait, that’s where that surge of optimism and confidence went! and in fact that’s exactly right: I’ve been struggling to rebuild ever since, and I was making some progress when COVID hit and then all the hard personal stuff of the last few years. At some point, of course, explanations shade into excuses—and I have in fact been getting lots of other things done, and would be getting more done if I were back in my classes now, as I should be and hope to be soon. Teaching is almost always restorative for me, and this term—when it finally starts—should be especially so as due to an administrate release I have just one class, 19th-Century Fiction from Austen to Dickens.

Cross your fingers that a fair deal is struck soon, not just so that I can get out of this dreary purposeless limbo but so that I don’t have to cut Cranford from our reading list because we don’t have enough time for it. And whatever happens with the negotiations, I will try to stop malingering.

This Week In My Classes: The Kids Are Alright

Rohan Maitzen7 Comments

Look, I don’t want to pretend everything is fine, in general or in my classes. Last week I was grading take-home midterms for Mystery & Detective Fiction and feeling to my core the truth of what is now a commonplace: AI is pervasive, and not “for better or for worse”—just, unequivocally, for worse. The one consolation I had (and it is, truly, not particularly consoling) is that the results, for the students, are not usually good. This means it doesn’t matter whether I can prove AI use or not: I can just mark the answers on their merits and move on. But it really sucks going through this process and wondering what the point of it even is. I felt demoralized, sad, and frustrated, which is unfortunately how I have often felt about this course this term because attendance has been so poor: on a good day, maybe 60% of the students are present, and there are some who have almost never been to class at all since January. What am I even doing, I have wondered, and how much longer can I keep doing it if it just no longer means to them anything like what it means to me?

BUT.

Here’s the other side of how things have been going in Mystery & Detective Fiction. There is a solid core of students who come every single time (or close enough—it’s perfectly reasonable, of course, to miss a class here and there because you are sick or your bus was late or whatever). I don’t know if they are all reading every page of every book, but enough of them are keeping up that we have pretty good discussions: the ones who speak up seem keen and interested, and they seem to be listening to each other, and they laugh when I try to be funny (which is one way to see if they are paying attention!). We have worked our way through a lot of good, complex, thought-provoking fiction, most recently Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s The Terrorists. (It is a book that seems uncannily relevant to our current moment, with its questions about what happens to citizens when their government is actively indifferent to their needs and politics is the playground of people too corrupt and too wealthy to be held accountable.) Sure, a lot of the midterms I marked had the whiff of ChatGPT (or Copilot, I guess, which is now oh-so-helpfully available via the Microsoft suite the university installs on its computers)—but a lot of them did not, and some of these were really excellent. To answer my own plaintive question, then, what I am doing is showing up, as cheerily as I can, to offer these students the class they deserve. As always, I will also keep puzzling about how to reach the ones who aren’t: AI may be new, but students turn to it for reasons that are not new, reasons I have been trying to find solutions for as long as I have been teaching.

Even to myself this positive spin, if that’s what it is, does not sound completely convincing. Yes, something is different now. I’m just not sure it’s as bad as this gloomy article says it is. Maybe I’m kidding myself. A few years back, one of my best students let slip that a lot of students in my 19thC fiction class were basing their contributions on what they’d read in SparkNotes, not the assigned novels themselves. I wished she hadn’t said that! Was it true? Is it still true? It doesn’t feel true in these classes! I want to believe! But also, even if it is true about some students, it is definitely not true of all students. I just get too much evidence to the contrary, often from conversations with students outside of class, like the one who came to my office hours recently to talk about her term paper ideas but also to ask for recommendations for more Victorian novels to read after she graduates. Guess which novel she’d studied with me had most won her heart: David Copperfield! (It is truly heartwarming how many students who were in the Austen to Dickens class last year have told me they loved David Copperfield. A lot of them signed up for Dickens to Hardy this year and I have never had a group dig in to Bleak House with so much enthusiasm!) Twice this term, students who had already graduated from Dalhousie asked to sit in on my Victorian Women Writers seminar just to hear some of our discussions of Middlemarch. The current students who are actually taking that seminar seem genuinely caught up in the novel—some of them so much so that they will be writing on it. Those who aren’t will be writing on Villette, or on North and South.

These are long, complex, demanding books! So when the author of that essay declares that “our average graduate literally could not read a serious adult novel cover-to-cover and understand what they read,” that students “are impatient to get through whatever burden of reading they have to, and move their eyes over the words just to get it done,” I have to wonder: are my students really so exceptional? I mean, I do think they are lovely and wonderful; I genuinely look forward to every class. It’s true they are English students, and mostly Honours English students at that, with some graduate students as well, so definitely, when it comes to reading, both an elite and a self-selecting group. Still, when we tell stories about higher ed today, shouldn’t we talk about them too?

It’s not just about choosing between glass half empty and glass half full perspectives: I think it really matters that we not turn our grimmest anecdata into the dominant narrative. If things are really as bad as all that, after all, what are we all doing, and how much longer should we keep doing it? It is important that alongside our laments about the “stunning level of student disconnection” we acknowledge the students who do care, who choose engagement, who want to read and think and write and don’t want their education to be stripped of its humanity (and the humanities). Here in Nova Scotia our provincial government has proposed a bill that would give them the power to interfere with universities that aren’t doing what they consider a good enough job serving “provincial priorities.” Giving these students the education they want and deserve should be one of those priorities—though I am morally certain that is not the kind of thing our leaders have in mind, even though, as we have explained over and over, studying literature actually is excellent preparation for a whole range of careers, if that’s what you think is the point of an education. (Do you think if I dropped off copies of Hard Times at Province House they would see themselves in Gradgrind and M’Choakumchild and be ashamed?)

Anyway. I am as guilty as the next tired professor of occasionally giving in to cynicism and anger and venting some of it on social media. Many of us believe, or at least hope, that AI will go the way of MOOCs (remember when they were going to revolutionize education?). In the meantime it is definitely making things harder for us, and (despite the edtech industry’s promises) no better for the students, unless “ubiquitous” and “seems easier than doing the work myself” is all that counts. The antidote to despair is not AI detectors or in-class tests, though: it’s the students themselves. Just as I thought we should stand up to the Srigleys of the world when they declared our classrooms “contentless” and said we were leaving our students’ “real intellectual and and moral needs unmet,” so too I think we should counter the “it’s all over” doomsayers with some positivity. I am a Victorianist, after all! Optimism comes with the territory.

This Week In My Classes: New & Old

Rohan Maitzen15 Comments

New to me, is what I mean, and then a couple of old friends: this week in my classes I have just finished teaching Dorothy B. Hughes’s The Expendable Man for the first time in Mystery & Detective Fiction, and on Wednesday we start P. D. James’s An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, while as of tomorrow it’s all Middlemarch all the time until the end of term in the Victorian Women Writers Seminar.

I enjoyed working up The Expendable Man for class and then talking it through with my students. I used it to raise many of the same questions that usually come up when we’re working through Devil in a Blue Dress: about the whiteness of “classic” crime fiction, for one thing, and the genealogy of African-American crime novels, and about the ways race complicates common themes in the genre, from ideas about the role of the police to the relationship between the specific crime and its solution (or not) and larger contexts of racial and social justice. Mosley’s novel is very different in style and tone, though, as well as in its specific historical contexts, so this time instead of talking about World War II or the history of policing in Los Angeles I sketched out a basic timeline of the civil rights movement (the novel presumably takes place around the time of its publication, so the early 1960s) as well as the fight for reproductive rights, with some attention to what it was like at this time in Phoenix specifically, where the novel mostly takes place.

It is quickly evident with Hughes’s novel that the murder that needs solving is in some ways less important than the systemic problems glaringly exposed through Hugh Densmore’s vulnerability, not even so much as a suspect but just as a black man in a relentlessly racist society. Ultimately, though, as we discussed, to say that the novel is “about” the crime of racism does not really tell us much about it in particular: you still need to dig in and think about what it is exactly that Hughes has to show or to say. What is the effect, for example, of giving us a protagonist who is so irreproachable? (I read one scholarly article about the novel that—oversimplifying the argument, of course—felt she had flattened out his humanity to serve her political purposes, making him too ideal or too safe.) What do we think about Ellen, the woman who is initially an incidental romantic interest but becomes an important ally? And what about Iris / Bonnie Lee, who enters Hugh’s life like an inadvertent femme fatale (or does she know what she is doing?) only to become a murder victim herself? When I posted about the novel after my first reading of it last year, I noted that I was bothered by what seemed to me its vilification of abortion providers. I felt basically the same during my rereads of it as I prepared for class discussion, but I was curious what the students thought and I’m not sure we reached any firm conclusions about whether we were supposed to consider Iris in any way a victim of a systemic problem similar to (if, in this scenario, less important than) the one that puts Hugh’s life at risk.

Overall, I think the book worked well for the course. I did note to my students, as I was putting it alongside novels like A Rage in Harlem, Blanche on the Lam, and Devil in a Blue Dress, that it was perhaps odd—and had given me pause—to assign a book about race and crime that is written by a white woman. As I said when reflecting on that in my earlier post, the Afterword in the NYRB edition is by Walter Mosley: he seems fine with what he calls Hughes’s “gamble,” and his admiration for the book certainly suggests that he thinks the gamble paid off. I don’t know if I needed to cite Mosley in defense of my choice, but I also didn’t think I should just ignore the issue, so I did highlight his comments. My feeling is that the book itself justified its own inclusion on the syllabus, both by its quality as a novel and by the quality of the discussions it prompted.

I haven’t taught An Unsuitable Job for a Woman in the mystery survey class for a while—possibly, since 2018, which is the most recent set of lecture notes I have saved for it. I have assigned it a couple of times since then in the seminar I also teach on Women and Detective Fiction, most recently in Fall 2022. It is an odd book in many ways but I really like it: I consider it as much a novel of ideas as a crime novel, and I think of it as pushing back against the tendency in most of the other novels we’ve read this term, especially The Maltese Falcon, to treat love as an inadequate motive for action. I like the way mixing up the reading list a bit every time I offer the course makes different conversations happen. (I admit I am relieved, however, that I get a break from this course next year, as I have been teaching it so often that sometimes it’s a struggle to keep it fresh even so. Except The Moonstone. I don’t think I could ever get tired of teaching The Moonstone! It’s sad to think that I am eventually—in the foreseeable future, now—going to retire and then I will never get to teach The Moonstone again.)

I have gone on a pretty long time already and haven’t said anything about the other novels I have been or will be teaching this week. I’ll have to post again once we’ve actually started Middlemarch. I have such a good group of students in the Victorian Women Writers Seminar: a bit quieter than some groups I’ve had, maybe, but always really astute and interesting in their comments and willing to engage with whatever questions I or their classmates bring up. So I’m optimistic that this is going to be a really satisfying month reading through this great novel with them. It’s not the slowest pace I’ve ever set for reading Middlemarch, but I think it’s pretty reasonable: we’re doing just the first 10 chapters for Wednesday, for example. I reread them on the weekend—what a treat. And speaking of new conversations, I’m not sure I’ve ever put it next to North and South before, or in the same course as Villette, and I can already tell that these juxtapositions are making slightly different things stand out.

WordPress is being weird about inserting images tonight so I’m going to post this without any, just so it doesn’t malinger unpublished. If I can I will perk it up with some pictures tomorrow!

This Week In My Classes: Uncertainty

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

It’s not that the topic of my classes this week is uncertainty, exactly, or that there is anything particularly uncertain about this week—although I suppose that depends on where you’re looking, as nationally and globally there is plenty of unease to go around, while on campus, as the university shapes and shares its plans for coping with a massive budget shortfall (created in large part by heavy-handed federal decisions about international students, on whom universities have unfortunately come to depend because of decades of inadequate provincial funding) we are all wondering just how bad it will get. These are the external contexts for my classes, but by and large I try not to focus on them when I’m actually in the classroom, where persisting with what we find interesting and worthwhile to talk about seems like one way to make sure we uphold our values in the face of all of this.

So why bring up uncertainty? Because in Victorian Women Writers this week we are finishing up our work on Villette, and more than once in class I have acknowledged my own uncertainty about what exactly is going on in this strange, brooding, gripping novel. As I said yesterday, I have pretty clear interpretive ideas about most of the novels I assign, which is not to say (I hope) that my teaching is all about coercing students into seeing things my way. What it means is that I have a sense of how things add up, of how form contributes to or reflects content, of how details are parts of wholes. This still leaves plenty to be discussed, but overall we usually arrive at a sense of what the open questions are, or of what some alternative (but still basically unifying) readings are.

With Villette, though, I find that kind of clarity or unity really elusive. Lucy herself is such a slippery narrator, for one thing, but typically with an unreliable narrator we end up with a reasonably clear sense of the two stories they are telling, the one they mean to tell and the other one they reveal as they show us who they are. With Lucy, it is never really clear why she is so coy with us about some things while being almost excessively forthcoming about others. If it’s a novel primarily about the effects of repression, then why does she freely recount all the times when she really lets loose? If it’s a novel about a struggle for female agency, why does she make such a point about being by nature inert, and why does she seem to respond so well to being pushed around, including by her eventual love interest? If it’s a novel about asserting Protestantism or Englishness, then why does Lucy love (if she does) a Catholic and settle abroad? If these oppositions are reconciled over the course of the novel, why does it not have a happy ending? Etc. There are many complex and sophisticated critical analyses of Villette, some of which we are reading for the graduate seminar version of the course, and they say lots of things I find smart and convincing but they rarely leave me thinking “OK, that makes sense of it all.” (The ones we’ve read this term focus on national identity, religion, theatricality, and queerness—one highlighting Lucy’s resistance to ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ and arguing that she is trying to find an alternative relationship between men and women, such as being a “female brother,” another arguing, counterintuitively, for the ending of the novel as a rare instance of “queer joy.”)

The main thing I’m thinking about, however, is not so much “what is the meaning of Villette?” (though if you have a favorite essay or theory about it, I’d love to know!) as “what is the role of uncertainty in pedagogy?” I don’t think of myself as a particularly authoritarian teacher, but in general I think it makes sense to acknowledge that I am a teacher because of my expertise; shouldn’t I act and talk as if I know what I am talking about? On the other hand, I don’t think any interpretation is definitive; if it were, our whole discipline would operate completely differently! I’m always so amused by Thurber’s story “The Macbeth Murder Mystery,” which concludes, tongue in cheek, with its wry narrator promising to “solve” Hamlet. Literature can’t be “solved”! Books worth paying attention to are layered or multifaceted; they look different or mean differently depending on how we approach them. I often explain literary interpretation to my first-year students with an analogy to the transparencies used to teach anatomy: each question or approach draws our attention to specific features. Just as all the parts and systems of the body cohere, interpretations have to be compatible to the extent that they can’t ignore or contradict facts about the text, but they do not replace each other or rule each other out. This means, of course, that it is fine that the articles I’ve mentioned illuminate issues in Villette without satisfying every question I have about the novel.

I like the uncertainty I feel about Villette. Some novels feel uncertain to me in a different, less interesting way. Lady Audley’s Secret, for example, I think is genuinely undecided about whether Lady Audley is a villain or a victim. I have come to consider this a genuine weakness in the novel, evidence of inadequate care or thought on Braddon’s part, although another way to put it is she is just not that kind of a novelist, or Lady Audley’s Secret is just not that kind of a novel—it entertains, it provokes, it surprises, but it is not underwritten by a consistent concept or idea. It is incoherent about its themes . . . but maybe that only matters to someone trained and committed, as I am, to interpret fiction with that as a priority.

Villette, on the other hand, feels uncertain by design. It is destabilizing. Our confusion feels like part of the point. Maybe that is the underlying unity of the novel! Maybe there is no ‘right’ way for Lucy to be, to act, to love, to live, and so the novel, by immersing ourselves in her struggles, is just replicating them formally. “Who are you, Miss Snowe?” demands Ginevra Fanshawe at one point, with exasperation: aren’t we asking the same question, right to the very end? Why should unity be the end point, even for a novel that seems to be some kind of a Bildungsroman? I do wonder, though, why I am willing to give Brontë so much more credit than Braddon for the artfulness of her uncertainty. One factor is probably that there is so much evidence of design in Villette, if if I’m not sure what the patterns mean: all the buried (or not!) nuns, for example, and their tendency to show up when Lucy is most emotional; the recurrent imagery of storms and shipwrecks; the emphasis on surveillance, discipline, and self-control; the proliferation, almost to excess, of foil characters for Lucy, from little Polly to Vashti. At every moment of the novel I feel sure there is something meaningful going on.

Anyway, I hope admitting my own uncertainty made my students feel that there was room for their own ideas, not that I was not up to my job! We start North and South next, a novel that includes many thought-provoking elements but which is also patterned in a pretty clear way—and after a couple of weeks on that, we will spend the rest of the course on Middlemarch, about which, for better or for worse, I am much more confident and opinionated, although it is such a complex and capacious novel that there too there is plenty of room for discussion. It is such a good group of students: what a treat for me, and I hope for them too, that we can tune out the madness for a few hours a week and explore what these novels have to offer us.

This Week In My Classes: Gaskell & Holmes

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

It has been a long time since I worked through Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë with a class. In fact, the last time I did so was the first year I began this blog series, in the fall term of 2007! In the intervening years, when I have put in to teach a graduate seminar (which is what Victorian Women Writers used to exclusively be) it has been one focused just on George Eliot—which is the course I will be revising next year for this new undergraduate / graduate format.

It is interesting reading through that old post: in its broad outlines, it describes pretty much exactly the same topics we’ve been covering. It is quite broad, and that class is so long ago that I really don’t recall how closely our specific discussions matched what we have been talking about this year. It seems as if we have ranged more widely—but we probably touched on a lot of things then too that aren’t captured in that summary. My sense is that this time around we are paying more attention to the variety of genres and layers in Gaskell’s text, to things like her reliance on extensive quotations from Brontë’s letters, for example, which, as we talked about today, don’t always self-evidently support the characterization of Brontë that Gaskell sets up. For one thing, the Brontë of the letters is bolder, friendlier, and funnier than the timid, shy, sickly little person Gaskell usually shows us in her own narrative. Today we talked about (among other things) what nature means, to Brontë and in Gaskell’s story of her and her family, as in moments like this, in one of Brontë’s letters to a friend:

For my part, I am free to walk on the moors; but when I go out there alone, everything reminds me of the times when others were with me, and then the moors seem a wilderness, featureless, solitary, saddening. My sister Emily had a particular love for them, and there is not a knoll of heather, not a branch of fern, not a young bilberry-leave, not a fluttering lark or linnet, but reminds me of her. The distant prospects were Anne’s delight, and when I look round, she is in the blue tints, the pale mists, the waves and shadows of the horizon.

Copying out that passage, I am struck by its power just as a bit of prose: how delicately infused it is with both the beauty of the moors and the pathos of Charlotte’s grief.

Read right after Oliphant’s Autobiography, with its heartbroken lamentations for her lost children, Brontë’s life story feels like an extension of those lessons in loss, though Oliphant’s narrative itself is fragmented, broken into pieces by each new blow, while Gaskell carries us through the relentless sequence of deaths at Haworth with her own storyteller’s skill. And after they are all gone, each with an ending portrayed as intensely, almost unbelievably, characteristic—Emily fiercely resisting death to the very last, Anne leaving “calmly and without a sigh”—Charlotte (like Oliphant) is left alone with her writing:

She went on with her work steadily. But it was dreary to write without anyone to listen to the progress of her tale,—to find fault or to sympathize,—while pacing the length of the parlour in the evenings, as in the days that were no more. Three sisters had done this,—then two, the other sister dropping off from the walk,—and now one was left desolate, to listen for echoing steps that never came,—and to hear the wind sobbing at the windows, with an almost articulate sound.

“No one on earth,” Gaskell observes, “can even imagine what those hours were to her.” Maybe, but also, maybe not, as there is much that will be sadly familiar about that desolation to anyone who also grieves “the days that are no more.” Honestly, I think it will be a relief, not just to me but to the class, to move on to Villette next week. Not that Villette is a joyful romp! But at least it puts us back in the more familiar analytical territory of fiction, and if we like we can choose to believe that it has a happy ending: as Brontë says, “let sunny imaginations hope”!

We started with Sherlock Holmes in Mystery & Detective Fiction this week. I’m not the world’s biggest Holmes enthusiast, but as I have documented here often enough over the years, I greatly appreciate The Hound of the Baskervilles, which we will get to on Wednesday. Today was “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle,” with its famous “interpret everything about a man from his hat” set piece, and “A Scandal in Bohemia,” with Irene Adler (“To Sherlock Holmes, she was always the woman”). These are good ones: I enjoy them. I think the class is going fine so far: it ought to be, considering how often I’ve taught it now! One thing I’m noticing is spotty attendance. It isn’t making me rethink my long-ago decision not to give grades for attendance, but it gives me food for thought in other ways, as this seems to be a trend in this class in recent years. Perhaps it’s because the course is an elective for pretty much everyone taking it, so they give it lower priority than their other obligations? Is it that students who don’t take a lot of English classes assume the pertinent course content is exclusively in the “textbooks” (what we call the “readings”!) and don’t expect our class time to offer much “value added”? I know that in some subjects lectures often do simply reiterate content in that way, but of course I’m not standing there rehearsing the plot of The Moonstone. Anyway, I try not to take it personally but it rather baffles me: what is the point in signing up to “take” a class but then not really “taking” it? Sure, you can read on your own (or, sigh, just search online summaries and call that “keeping up”), but unless all you are after is the course credit, aren’t you skipping the good part, not to mention the part you are actually paying for?

Speaking of taking classes, there’s one more class in my weekly schedule now: it’s the online one I am taking myself, Introductory Watercolour Painting. We met (via Zoom) for the first time last week and I have been diligently practicing colour gradients and one- and two-stroke leaves for my homework. Also (keener that I am!) I looked ahead a bit in our Brightspace site (yes, I have to use Brightspace now as a student as well as an instructor) and saw some examples of “loose floral wreaths,” which are on our lesson plan for this week, and I couldn’t resist giving it a try. This will be my “before” example, for comparison with the one(s) I make after I learn more about how to make the flowers and leaves fuller and looser, and also more layered and translucent, like the models.

This Week in My Classes: Mourning& The Moonstone

Rohan Maitzen7 Comments

I want to get back in the habit of low-fuss but (potentially, for me) high yield posting about my teaching this term. So without further ado, here’s what’s up this week.

In my Victorian Women Writers seminar, we are discussing Margaret Oliphant’s Autobiography. When I was drawing up the syllabus for this version of the course, I included this book without much reflection, as it has always been a staple of the reading list. Preparing for class over the past few days has been a bit rough, though, as the last time I had actually read it was soon after Owen’s death, and Oliphant’s outpourings of grief about the loss of her “dear bright child” Maggie and then her sons Tiddy and Cecco remain unhappily resonant. Students have already commented in class that these are the most compelling sections of the autobiography, sometimes picking out exactly the passages that I quoted in my post about it. I am pretty good at compartmentalizing, and of course it would not be appropriate for me to say in class “yes, that’s exactly how I felt and thought after losing my own beloved child,” so I have managed to keep my own personal feelings in check in that context, but it is definitely a harder job doing that than it was when my relationship to her grief was purely theoretical or vicarious.

It’s such an odd and interesting memoir in so many ways. I’ve always been particularly struck by the conspicuous tension in it between two kinds of stories, one a fairly conventional account of Oliphant’s life and her experiences as a highly prolific writer, the other an intensely personal outpouring of her most private feelings. Her comments about her writing life themselves often signal a further tension between her identity as an “ordinary” woman (a point she makes repeatedly, and perhaps strategically) and her identity as a woman writer and thus a kind of anomaly. They are also interesting for her frequent comparisons of herself with other, more famous or highly praised, writers, especially George Eliot: she often tries to shrug off her sense of inferiority, or to excuse or justify her “lesser” standing on the grounds that she only ever wrote because she liked to and because she needed the money, disavowing ambition or serious literary aspirations—”I am afraid I can’t take the books au grand sérieux,” she says at one point, calling them “my perfectly artless art”—but it’s also clear that she feels both defensive and envious of the writers with higher reputations, making her self-deprecation seem disingenuous.

Critics have often analyzed the fragments and contradictions of the Autobiography as meaningful aspects of its literary form, reflecting the paradoxes and contradictions of Oliphant’s life and, more broadly, of the situation of every Victorian woman writer. That seems reasonable in a way, but Oliphant left her text unfinished, so the fragments are not themselves deliberate formal choices—we are actually reading the raw material of what for all we know might have been a very different, more integrated or unified memoir. This is not to say that this unity would not have come at a cost, particularly of authenticity. I found myself thinking as I was rereading our current installment this morning about the genre of the “grief memoir,” which seems from what I know of it to lean pretty hard into “a journey of discovery / recovery” as its narrative arc, ending with some version of acceptance. Of course that may be true to the authors’ experiences, but it’s hard not to suspect it is also more marketable than the devastating non-ending Oliphant’s memoir offers: “And now here I am all alone. I cannot write any more.” Denise Riley’s Time Lived, Without Its Flow, also stops rather than concluding: “And by now I’ve stopped making these notes.”

In Mystery & Detective Fiction, we have begun our work on The Moonstone. I usually really enjoy teaching this novel as I know it well enough now and am confident enough in my own ideas about it that, while I do always reread it and update my notes, I can lead a fairly fluid discussion without worrying that we won’t get where I want us to go. Tomorrow is mostly “talk about Betteredge” day: I’ll start by just gathering up observations about what kind of fellow he is, considering both the things he explicitly says and how he says them—which is at least as important, given the novel’s emphasis on first-person testimony and the way eye-witnesses see according to their assumptions and prejudices. We can build out from there into a sense of the novel’s setting: what kind of world does Betteredge serve, what are the threats to or problems with that world, who in the novel begins to counter his point of view, and so on, which should lead us into Sergeant Cuff and what he brings to the investigation—and then the sources of his failures to solve the crime.

As my teaching posts over the year repeatedly remark, the first part of term is always a bit chaotic as we adjust and class lists are in flux and so on. By the end of this, our second week of classes, we should all have settled into more of a routine, although this is also the point at which the workload picks up as assignments and deadlines begin to arrive. The biggest change I’m noticing this term so far is the physical toll class meetings take on me, something that was already becoming apparent to me last term. I’m just more tired than I used to be when the session is done. It takes a lot of energy to keep the attention of a room full of people and, especially, to give them my full attention so that our back-and-forth is always clear and meaningful. You never know what someone who puts their hand up is going to say, and you are constantly figuring out how best to reply to it, which is precisely what I enjoy about teaching, because it means it is never truly repetitive, but it is also what makes it hard work. (Yes, mental effort is real work too!) And in lecture classes I pace around a fair amount once we get into discussion. When I get back to my office after class I’m not good for much else for a while—this in spite of my increased diligence about going to the gym. It’s a different kind of exertion, I guess.

The broader context of my teaching term is not very encouraging: budget cuts, a hiring freeze, ongoing pressure to do more with less, and over it all the worry that if we can’t somehow get in its way, generative AI is going to be allowed, even encouraged, to overwhelm us (meaning both professors and students). I find I don’t think or care much about any of this when I’m actually in the classroom. Plenty of students still seem pretty engaged, eager to read and ready to talk. As long as they keep on showing up in that spirit, I’m going to keep doing my best for them.