Well, my idea to keep up some blogging momentum by going back to the model of a commonplace book for a while worked … for a while! But even that kind of posting requires a different kind of reading than I’ve been doing, it turns out, at least if there’s going to be any variety in the experience. And as you can see from this photo, my recent reading has been vast but also, in many respects narrow — certainly narrower than I expected when I proposed a project that required rereading all of the Dalgliesh novels. (The realization that James’s oeuvre is, paradoxically, both remarkably capacious and extremely limited is one of the things the essay will be about, most likely.)

Good as she is, James turns out to be a poor choice for binge-reading, and yet a plan is a plan and a deadline is a deadline, so I have been persisting. The endeavor is not without its rewards: again, she’s good– very good, even! It’s just that she’s  always good in exactly the same way, sometimes even in the exact same words. I was trying to think of other authors who have stood up better to this kind of determined march through their works. I remember really enjoying myself when I read all of Trollope’s Palliser novels straight through many years ago, and I have always loved rereading the Lymond Chronicles start to finish–but stories accumulate in a different way in those than in most detective series. While we are interested in and generally grow attached to the investigators in a long-running series, if the novels become more about them than about detecting, we’ve probably shifted genres–though having said that, counter-examples immediately occur to me, including Elizabeth George and Tana French, and of course there’s Gaudy Night, which perfectly balances case and character. In James’s novels, in any case, the personal arcs of her recurring cast are always peripheral to the main action, and while that strikes me as a principled decision, formally, it also has constricting effects. By the end of The Lighthouse I was far more interested in Dalgliesh’s relationship with Emma Lavenham than in whodunit–and that too is something my essay will most likely take up.

I have been trying to read other things when I’ve had the energy, which hasn’t been often. I gave up on A Time of Gifts, though, which shames me somewhat to admit but there it is. There was a lot of fine writing but I couldn’t catch any momentum from it, and it turns out not to be as diverting as I’d hoped to read about someone else’s travels while unable to go anywhere myself. I’ve read a handful of romance novels–Christina Lauren’s The Unhoneymooners, Talia Hibbert’s Take a Hint, Dani Brown, and (most of) Jasmine Guillory’s Party of Two–just meh, all of them. I’m a hundred pages or so into Isabella Hammad’s The Parisian and it seems promising; once I finish The Private Patient, I want to settle in and really give it a chance. I’ve also just read Sarah Moss’s forthcoming Summerwater — but I have to save up what I think about that for the review I’ll be writing for the Dublin Review of Books.

Otherwise, I’ve continued puttering away at ideas for my fall classes. I was feeling overwhelmed by attempting to shape my traditional MWF schedule for 19th-Century Fiction into modules (though it was a boost to remind myself, by doing that work, that the end result will eventually be talking about 19th-century novels again, which I miss!). So for the last few days I’ve gone back to working through ideas for a new grading scheme for my first-year class. I’ve moved away from ‘contract grading’ towards ‘specifications grading,’ and I’ve been trying to map out bundles of activities that would work well with the options we’ll have in the online environment. (If you are wondering what specifications grading is, here’s a general overview and here’s someone talking about how he has used it in his class.) As I do this I have also been trying to imagine modules for the first-year class, which is not driven by specific texts the way the 19th-century fiction class is. I usually organize it by genre and then use specific examples within each genre to highlight specific topics like point of view, figurative language, irony, etc. For the online version I think I’m going to start from those topics and pick the readings from different genres–but I really don’t know yet.

One thing that has started weighing on my  mind is that all this planning isn’t the same as actually creating content for the fall. I don’t have much more time, really, before I have to commit to a basic outline of elements for both classes and begin to script presentations, videos, writing prompts, and so forth. The whole specifications grading thing is going to require very careful explanations and instructions. But I remind myself: I’m not starting from scratch, even though the apparatus and presentation will be different. I have oodles of notes and materials, including slides, that can be adapted–and I don’t have to have everything ready to go at once. In some ways I can see that would be desirable, but on the other hand, it seems key, especially when this is all so new to me, that I be ready and able to change things up based on how things go with the first few modules. I hope students will recognize that for me too, this term will involve some trial and error!

And that’s where I am now, almost four months into this strange new locked down world–at least in the parts of my life that I write about here. I continue to take comfort and courage from the virtual communities that mean more to me now than ever, as we support and distract and teach and challenge and console each other as best we can.

In spite of everything, our academic term here is wrapping up on schedule: we are now in the middle of our exam period, final grades are due May 1, and a week or two after that my department will hold a remote version of our annual “May Marks Meeting.” For me specifically, this means that I have now submitted final grades for one of my classes and that starting tomorrow I will be marking the take-home final exams for the other (for those who opted to write it) and then calculating and submitting those grades. And after that, I will be done with this teaching term, which feels like a genuine accomplishment, under the circumstances, but also like an enormous anticlimax. I never had a chance to say goodbye to my students–none of us really understood what was happening on what turned out to be our last day of face-to-face meetings, not just in the classroom but of any kind–and I also didn’t have a chance to deliver my traditional concluding perorations about the value and rewards of the work we had been doing.

I did work some of these thoughts into the slide presentations I put together to cover the remaining course content and exam review, however. I wonder how many students actually went through those, after all the work I did on them! I guess one thing I’ll have to decide, as I work on my plans for approaching my fall teaching online, is whether I want to use more of the tracking features available in Brightspace–not so much because I think the students need surveillance but because it is (presumably) important to have some sense of what is or isn’t actually engaging the class. If the students aren’t looking at or completing the posted materials, that can’t be good.

At this point we don’t actually know for sure that the fall term will be all online, but we have been asked, quite rightly, to begin drawing up plans based on that strong possibility. In case any current or prospective students read this, I want you to know: your professors are going to dedicate themselves to making your fall term a good one, I promise. Most of us would absolutely rather see you in our classrooms as usual, but if we can’t, it won’t mean that we are any less committed to your education. We’re all inevitably going to fumble and struggle and screw up, at least those of us who are new to online teaching. But in my 25 years as a professor I have seen, so often and in so many ways, demonstrations of how deeply and personally–not just professionally–we all care about our students. There is bound to be a bit of grumbling from a lot of folks (including from me) about the mechanics of teaching online, and some lamentations (again including from me!) about how much we miss teaching you in person. But if this is how we have to carry on, well, okay then: we’ll do our best to rise to the occasion. It won’t be the same, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be any good.

I guess that’s a sort of peroration, isn’t it? Apparently I’m working them in wherever I see an opportunity. Anyway, it’s odd and a bit sad to be wrapping up a term and feel so deflated about it. I think one reason it hits hard is that I spent so much time planning for this one, especially for the Brit Lit survey class–and I was so excited about Three Guineas and about moving from it to The Remains of the Day. Ordinarily at this point I would be throwing myself into choosing the readings for my first-year class in the fall, as instead of doing Pulp Fiction again I am taking on a section of “Literature: How It Works”; I’m finding that hard to focus on, though, both because there’s a lot I still don’t know about what kind or size of class it will be and because I have lost some enthusiasm for advance planning given how much I had to toss out this term. I did put in an order for the books for 19th-Century Fiction from Dickens to Hardy, but for whatever reason, for the first time I can remember it is not filling well (and it’s not, or not obviously, a coronavirus thing, as many of our other courses at that level seem to be filling up just fine) so that’s a bit deflating as well. But there’s time for all of this to get sorted.

In the meantime, I am getting a bit of my own reading done: I’m about 300 pages into The Mirror and the Light and loving it. There’s a gripping lucidity to Mantel’s prose that draws me right in. If I’m slow finishing the novel, that will be my fault, or the fault of my still floundering concentration, which has not been helped at all by the absolutely devastating events of this past weekend. When the last of my grades are filed, I think I’ll try to settle in and immerse myself in it, as a kind of mental vacation (if not a particularly sunny one!) before trying to come to grips with all the “what’s next” questions that would usually feel so energizing as we head into the spring and summer.

Last week was our winter term study break, which is always a welcome interlude–more welcome even, I think, than the equivalent week off from classes in the fall because the winter term is grueling in ways the fall term is not, simply because it’s winter! Everything just takes more time and energy. We’ve been having a spell of unusually mild weather over the past few days and it has been so nice not to have any shoveling or scraping to do. There have even been days when it made perfect sense not to wear boots! Imagine that, in February. 🙂

But we’re back in class now, and from here to the end of term it will feel to all of as if we’re hurtling down hill. Why does the second half of term always seem to go by so much faster than the first? It’s not like we don’t still have a lot to get through! So: let’s take stock.

In British Literature After 1800 we have just finished a couple of weeks on Great Expectations. More than half the class chose to write their first paper on it, which may be a sign of engagement, though it might also be a sign that they don’t want to write on poetry, or that they realized they would like to get the paper out of the way before the later option. In terms of our class discussions, I think it was nice to park ourselves in one place for a while, as the course overall, just by its nature, moves quite briskly along through a range of quite different material. As I look ahead to the other long texts I chose for the course (Three Guineas and The Remains of the Day) I’m pleased at the thematic connections I can see opening up. From a pedagogical point of view, that means they pair up in interesting ways for the later assignments, which include a comparative essay. But they are also different enough in form and voice that our conversations won’t get repetitive.

I’ve taught The Remains of the Day quite a few times, but before we get to it there’s quite a lot of material on the syllabus that I haven’t assigned often or at all before, starting on Friday with Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King” (which is the first Kipling I’ve ever taught) and including Three Guineas. I have assigned A Room of One’s Own enough times to know some of the challenges of working through Woolf’s long winding arguments. With Room I have found it helpful to start by modeling very carefully how to follow her from one step to another, literally drawing a map of the associative connections from one idea to the next. Skimming is much more hazardous here than it is with Dickens, where you may well miss details or delights if you aren’t paying close attention but you are likely to catch on again eventually. With Room there are set pieces that are particularly good for close reading and discussion (the contrasting dinners in the opening, for instance, or the story of Shakespeare’s sister): I think there are similar exemplary moments in Three Guineas but I haven’t had a chance to test them out and see which ones catch on. Our sessions on it will thus be necessarily experimental, but I hope the students will find the book as brilliant and provocative as I do.

In 19th-Century British Fiction from Austen to Dickens we have wrapped up our work on Waverley — and I have to say, it seemed to go pretty well! I allowed more class time for it than I have before, and I really dug in on the historical context early on, both of which I think helped, but credit definitely also goes to the students: they just didn’t seem to find it as difficult, or at least as off-putting, as the previous batch did, or if they did, they were more good-natured about it! There was not nearly the precipitous falling off in class discussion after Pride and Prejudice that I’d feared. Something else I’ve already noticed is Waverley (and Waverley) coming up in discussions of other readings (including of Great Expectations, as I have a number of students who are in both classes), which confirms my sense that whatever its challenges, it is a novel that sets the terms for a lot of what happens after it.

Next up in this class is The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which we started on Monday. I have assigned this often in my seminar on the ‘woman question’ but I realized it has been nearly a decade since I worked through it in a lecture class instead. As always, I am enjoying rereading it. I think it is such a smart novel, especially in its complicated narrative and chronological structure. (Here’s my Open Letters Monthly essay laying out my ‘reading ‘ of it.) But it’s also very direct and emotionally engaging, making it a rather different experience than Waverley in ways that are both refreshing for us as a group and interesting for us as students of the 19th-century novel. One of the things I thought about a lot during my sabbatical last winter was whether it was time for me to slot Wuthering Heights into this course. I admit, I’m glad I didn’t. For one thing, I’ve got enough new stuff on my plate right at this moment in the term. But the key thing is that I can’t get past how unpleasant I find Wuthering Heights. If I had time to do two Brontë novels, I could do Tenant right after it, as a tonic and a corrective (which is, some critics think, something Anne herself intended it to be), but in a class with only 5 novels altogether, that’s not an option. Still, maybe next time. Or maybe not.

After Tenant we will be doing Mary Barton and then wrapping up with Hard Times. We’ve already been asked to submit course descriptions and tentative reading lists for 2020-21, and one of the courses I’ll be doing is the Dickens to Hardy course. Dickens is the only novelist explicitly named in both course titles, and every so often I wish I didn’t feel obliged to include him on every reading list–or to include Hardy at all–so I asked this group if they’d feel cheated if they signed up for “The 19th-Century British Novel from Dickens to Hardy” and discovered they would not be reading either Dickens or Hardy. A bit to my surprise, most of them said an emphatic “Yes!” I guess those names have more traction than I realized. The problem for me is that I really (really) want to assign Middlemarch for the class, and I’m wary of including two monstrously long novels, which means once again I’d have to choose among the short(er) Dickens options, which are getting a bit stale for me. Or would I? Would it be so tough to read both Bleak House and Middlemarch in one term? What if I included two really short novels in between, to balance them out (The Warden? Cranford?) and then ended (as apparently I must) on Hardy? I have a couple of months to think about this before the actual book orders are due: I’ll run some scheduling scenarios and see what looks reasonable.