I’ve put off writing this post, hoping that I’d get some bright idea about what to say in it. Is it possible that I’ve been reporting on my weekly class business for too long? Everything I have to say seems like something I’ve said before. Actually, that in itself might be worth considering, because I have also been feeling as if a couple of the topics and activities I’ve covered in my classes since the start of term have lost their interest or their urgency for me, and that as a result it has been harder for me to present them with as much conviction as usual. I don’t think (or at any rate, I hope) that my students are likely to have noticed, since they don’t have previous iterations of these courses to compare their own experience to. But if things are feeling a bit repetitive here, that is almost certainly a sign that I may be repeating myself a bit too much in the classroom, and that it’s time to shake things up, if only for my own sake.

In Close Reading, for instance, I am feeling impatient with the basically very good textbook I’m using. Its explanations of key terms and its models of close reading are as sound as before, but this is the third time I’ve used it, and it has quite a limited selection of poems and stories, many of which the author uses extensively in her own discussions, leaving me with even fewer to choose from for the students’ assignments. In our poetry unit, I do bring in “outside” texts sometimes for in-class exercises (tomorrow, for instance, we’ll be discussing Robert Graves’s “The Cool Web,” which as I’ve mentioned before here is not just one of my favorite poems but the one that transformed me into an English major). There are logistical, copyright, and other reasons, though, why this gets harder as we move into short fiction. I’m hoping not to teach this class again next year, partly because there are other courses I haven’t had a chance to teach in a while and partly because I’d like to look around again for different possible readers. The first couple of times I taught it, back in 2003 and 2004, I used a somewhat eccentric book from Broadview Press called Visions and Revisions: The Poet’s Process. Comparing different versions of the same poem is a great way to focus attention on the effects of particular words, forms, or rhythmic variations. I don’t know if I’d go back to it: the range of really usable options was not that great in it either, as I recall.

This is not to say that I’ve tired of enthusing over Donne’s “Death, be not proud,” even in the context of trying to teach scansion, and I am absolutely looking forward to teaching both Middlemarch and The Remains of the Day again. As the great Samuel Johnson said, “When a woman is tired of Middlemarch, she is tired of life!” OK, he didn’t exactly say that–but surely it is true. Similarly, I am enjoying working through Persuasion in 19th-Century Fiction from Austen to Dickens — which I haven’t actually done that recently, since last time around I made the mistake of assigning Pride and Prejudice. I mentioned last week that Persuasion might be losing its place as my favorite Austen novel; if that were true, Pride and Prejudice would certainly replace it. But Persuasion has the great advantage, in the classroom, of being not nearly so familiar, beloved, or frequently adapted. (It is familiar, beloved, and adapted plenty, as all things Austen are … but I will back slowly away from the rant this topic too easily provokes.) I do feel it’s time to rework my start-up material for this course, and for its alternate (19th-Century Fiction from Dickens to Hardy). I always give an overview of “the rise of the novel” and talk a bit about social contexts, publication methods (like serialization), and other background information that I can’t assume the students have learned about before: I think this is important, and I try to keep it up to date, and to tweak it, also, to reflect the particular novels we’ll be reading and any specific issues they raise. But I would like to find a catchy way to start off that doesn’t make the students so passive, because as I move out of lecture mode and into Socratic mode, it takes a while for participation to pick up. I’m pretty sure to be teaching the Dickens to Hardy class next fall, so this is something I will put on my to-do list for the summer.

We’ve just wrapped up work on Persuasion in that class and on Monday we start Vanity Fair. I’m excited, even if the one student in the class who read it ahead of time already told me she didn’t like it. I will convert her! Or maybe not, but I do believe, not least because I’ve so often found it to be the case with my own reading, that it is possible to learn to appreciate something, if not necessarily to like it. (Update: Another student who has just started it tells me she’s finding it “hilarious” so that’s encouraging!)

On a side note, the painting that is my first graphic here is Duncan Grant’s “Interior with the Artist’s Daughter”: it has no particular relevance to this post but I like paintings of readers and I can’t find any of teachers.

We’re one week into the fall term and I’m starting to feel that I’ve got my sea legs back. Every new term seems a bit herky-jerky at first, but before long it smooths out, or at least becomes routine again.

In Close Reading, where my initial goal is to foster a habit of paying close attention (our mantra is “don’t take the words on the page for granted”), we have started working on scansion. It’s not an advanced poetry course so we don’t get too fancy about it: the point is just to learn how to pay attention to rhythm and versification. So in this class we are literally counting this week — not words, of course, but syllables, then feet, and then lines. I happen to think this kind of thing is both fun and interesting; I hope I conveyed some of that enthusiasm on Wednesday while I walked them through the basic elements, and that they show some of their own when we practice it together tomorrow. I always enjoy choosing examples to show the reason rhythm matters, the difference it makes. Consider these two excerpts, for instance:

Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

‘Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns!’ he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

and

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the fields and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.
Me only cruel immortality
Consumes…

Both Tennyson, of course, but what a contrast, and so much of that has to do with how he has arranged the stressed and unstressed syllables.

Here and in all the topics we cover in Close Reading, what I’m trying to do is turn a habit (reading) into a methodology, with the short term payoff being more detailed analysis of specifics and the longer term payoff being (I hope) more confidence in the interpretations they generate of whatever they read. Part of my pitch for the course is that these skills are supremely portable as well as enormously important–aesthetically, but also ethically and politically. It’s true that in this context scanning lines of verse remains somewhat niche skill, but appreciating poetry is also virtuous in its own right!

In 19th-Century Fiction, we’re reading Persuasion. For a long time I have identified Persuasion as my favorite Austen novel, but this time through, my allegiance is wavering: more than usual when reading it I am frustrated by Anne Elliot’s not speaking, when all it would take to bring about the consummation so devoutly to be wished is a few clear words at the right moment. I know, I know: her reticence and self-control are admirable, and just going for what you want makes you Louisa Musgrove, a literally fallen woman who clearly signals the dangers of undisciplined desire. When Anne finally does say something (“she speaks!” say my marginal notes at one point) it is also always significant: a breakthrough of feeling, an assertion of principle, a lesson in values. Still, one key to the novel’s happy ending is that she finds her voice, or figures out how to use it to win for herself the kind of happiness someone of her high character can accept: not simple pleasure or self-gratification, but a marriage of true minds.

Image: The Charge of the Light Brigade, by Richard Caton Woodville, Jr. (Wikimedia Commons)

Or maybe not. I hope not. I don’t mean that my students in the classes that started up today made a bad impression on me–far from it, in fact, as they seemed pretty attentive and ready to go, which is impressive considering the circumstances of my first class meeting this morning, at least. But their first impressions of me probably could have been better, and given the research that shows students make up their minds about professors pretty quickly (for better and for worse), it’s a bit discouraging to start the term off this way.

Actually, maybe it wasn’t so bad. My afternoon class seemed basically fine, though in an ironic contrast to the sweltering room my morning class was in, its room was so cold it gave me the sniffles! I was more comfortable in other ways, though: my afternoon class is 19th-Century Fiction (Austen to Dickens), and especially once I got to talking about our actual novels, I felt my own enthusiasm for the new term rising. I didn’t choose the reading list to follow any deliberate theme (not like last year’s Dickens to Hardy version, for instance, which focused on ‘troublesome’ women). It’s just a greatest hits list, starting with Persuasion then moving through Vanity Fair, Jane Eyre, North and South, and Great Expectations. There are definitely some common threads, as I began pointing out today: one will be the Napoleonic Wars, another the ‘condition of England,’ another paths (and impediments) for women, and another versions of the Bildungsroman. Because students arrive in this class from so many different paths now, I typically begin (as I will on Friday) with a capsule history of the 19th-century novel. Then it’s on to Austen on Monday and away we go!

My morning class was Close Reading. I don’t think it was a disaster–I did more or less get through my introductory lecture, in which I lay out the underlying concepts of the course as I’ve developed it–but it did not go well. One problem both was and wasn’t my fault. It was my idea to find us a new room when I saw that we’d been assigned to one of the dreary (and very dusty) rooms in our Life Sciences Centre (which is where pedagogical dreams go to die, in my experience). Don’t let the picture fool you: there may be perfectly nice, bright, airy rooms somewhere up high, but the ones we’re typically stuck in are at ground level or below, and they are terrible. I taught Mystery and Detective Fiction once in a windowless concrete block that might as well have been in a prison–which I guess was thematically appropriate, but it was no fun, and neither was teaching Bleak House in a similar room another time. Anyway, with the help of my indefatigable colleague in our department office I was able to move out of LSC into what sounded like a much better room, upstairs in the library, with windows all around (to the library, not to the outside, but still!) and recently refitted technology. Unfortunately, though my class is sized for the room’s theoretical cap, there was barely room for everyone, and the poor students were crammed in cheek by jowl as the temperature rose steadily to a truly unhealthy level. Not good! Then, as I was sweating my way through my lecture, my laptop froze, which has been one of the regular perks of my recent “upgrade” to a Windows 10 machine. I managed to reboot it without too much trouble and more or less managed to carry on with my lecture–I think! But I was so overheated and flustered by that point that I can only hope I remained coherent.

Well, I’m sure they’ve seen worse–right? I did at least cover what I’d meant to, and I think I made helpful noises when students asked questions, and now we are working on relocating the class again so none of us have to endure quite that level of discomfort again. Ironically, the only room that is currently available is the same one in Life Sciences that I worked so hard to get out of. If it’s big enough and not too hot, I guess I can put up with having a chalk board instead of a white board and needing to sign out cables any time I need to hook up my iPad for slides. (I won’t be using my laptop again, that’s for sure: I don’t need that extra layer of worry!)

And so here we are: another year begun. To be honest, I hadn’t been feeling that excited for the start of term: I’ve been feeling tired and mopey for much of the summer, and the shadow of my promotion debacle still hangs over my relationship with some of my colleagues and with Dalhousie as a whole. Once upon a time I was ready and willing to put my work for the university ahead of almost everything; looking back, I actually regret the extent to which I made it a priority, and now when I’m asked to do things that aren’t necessarily in my job description I find myself reflecting on the sacrifices I made to be in this profession (which are never acknowledged as such by universities)–like settling far from my family–and thinking maybe that’s actually enough “extra” commitment for one lifetime! It really helped my attitude to see students again, though. My goal for the year is to do as well by them as I can. I feel pretty confident that if I put my energy where they are, it will have a good effect on other aspects of my life and work as well.

I haven’t disappeared or given up blogging! It’s just that as soon as my final grades went in, I had to buckle down and finish two reviews that have been haunting me — not because I didn’t want to write them, but because though I have had the books for some time and had even started reading them, it just hadn’t been possible for me to get the hard work of writing thoughtfully about them done. The result was that even though neither of them was technically late, I felt guilty for weeks! But one went in last week and the other today, and while I now have to wait and find out what the editors think, including what revisions they want, I’m out from under that shadow and ready to contemplate the rest of my summer.

It doesn’t look much like summer yet, of course. May weather in Nova Scotia is … well, let’s be charitable and call it changeable. We have had a couple of days–or at least afternoons–of beautiful sun, and the daffodils are in full bloom, but there has been a lot of rain and fog, and I’m not putting away the flannel sheets any time soon either. Sometimes you have to very consciously remind yourself how great it is not to be buried in winter anymore, because the relentless gloom and grey can be almost as depressing, even if you don’t have to shovel it.

However! Rain is perfectly good weather for taking stock and making plans, and that’s the stage I’m at now. I actually feel as if I need some dedicated time for that, because I’m not really sure right now what my top priorities are. I spent a lot of the last two summers doing work related to my promotion application: in 2015, I spent a buoyant summer preparing the application, a process that (ironically, in retrospect) made me feel very proud of what I have accomplished in the last decade or so; in 2016, I spent many dreary hours writing out appeal documents of one kind or another, trying to convince other people of the value of the work I’d been doing. Since the appeal was denied in November I have tried, with intermittent success, to focus again on my own goals and standards, but just keeping up with the day to day demands on my time and energy kept me from doing this in more than an ad hoc way. Ideally, the summer months allow for sustained reflection and work of a more expansive kind–but what work, of what kind? I know that I’d like to get back to writing more essays instead of just reviews, but about what? I have a couple of ideas and one fairly definite plan; it will feel good to clear my desk (and my desktop), set some priorities, and get to work on projects I am excited about.

I’ll settle in to do this after I get back from my vacation: I leave on Thursday, as soon as we’ve put our annual ‘May Marks Meeting’ behind us. It will probably continue to be quiet here at Novel Readings while I’m away (though I will have my laptop along, so you never know). However, I will be reading plenty (I’ve got Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived In the Castle for the plane, for instance), and I will come back refreshed and ready to write.

I filed final grades for my winter term courses this week: apart from a couple of make-up tests that still need sorting out, my work for them is over. I have sorted and recycled or filed all my notes and paperwork, and put the books back where they belong — which for some of them means on the shelf where I will gather materials for next year’s courses, but for all of them means out of the way of the space I will use to stash everything for my summer projects. (These will get their own post, once I’ve sorted out better just what they are!)

Looking back over my 2016-17 teaching, a few things stand out.

First of all, while classroom teaching is always, for me, the best part of this job–the part that makes up for a lot of the nonsense and the stress and the long hours it entails–this year it mattered to more than ever, because I was doing it under the shadow of my promotion appeal, a process that significantly undermined my confidence, my self-esteem, and my collegiality. During the fall term especially, I often found it hard to concentrate, never mind to be my best self, but almost without fail, my time in the classroom was both intellectually stimulating and emotionally therapeutic.

Some of that was due to my specific teaching assignments this year. My fall term courses were both ones I have taught before and really enjoy. Since I first designed my version of Close Reading, I have tried to infuse its more technical aspects with both critical and moral purpose, and the result is that it generates some of the most interesting discussions and assignments I get. It was also balm to my soul to spend five weeks on Middlemarch for this class: that is not enough time, of course–what would be?–but still feels comparatively luxurious (when I teach Middlemarch in my standard 19th-century fiction class, we get three weeks). Finishing with The Remains of the Day is always marvelous, but Ishiguro’s novel felt particularly and painfully relevant right after the U.S. election.

My other fall term class was The Victorian ‘Woman Question.’ For this class we read works from a range of genres, including Mill’s The Subjection of Women, Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and EBB’s Aurora Leigh–another text that resonated powerfully with current events. I had a particularly keen and engaged group in this seminar: class discussions were exceptionally smart and lively, and the group presentations were among the best I’ve ever seen.

In the winter term, I taught 19th-Century Fiction from Dickens to Hardy, which is familiar territory in most respects as I teach either it or its Austen to Dickens version pretty much every year. (I’m fearful that might change when we revise our curriculum to cope with our shrinking faculty complement–that would be sad!) I do try to mix things up at least a little bit every time, and this year’s innovation was putting Adam Bede on the reading list. I thought it taught beautifully: it is more schematic than Middlemarch and more accessible than The Mill on the Floss (both of which I have taught in this class). I think some students found it a bit slow–but imagine, then, how they would have found either of the other two! It also stood as a wonderful contrast to Tess of the d’Urbervilles; a lot of students wrote on these novels for their essay question on the final exam, and the results were usually excellent.

The big teaching adventure for me this term was Pulp Fiction. I’m not really sure yet how it went: I’m still thinking about it! I found it much more difficult than I’d expected to get discussion going in class–both in the lectures and in the smaller tutorial sessions–and this made me worry that nobody was finding the readings or the class engaging, but based on some feedback I’ve had since, I think at least some of the students were enjoying themselves just fine, they just weren’t talking. This is not ideal, obviously, so as I prepare to teach the class again next winter I’ll be thinking about ways to liven things up.

One thing I realized as the term went by is that the big questions that, in my mind, really motivated the course–questions about the difference between “pulp” or “genre” fiction and “literary” fiction, for instance–were not of great interest (at least, as far as I could tell) to most of the students: they did not seem to be invested in either the distinction or arguments against it. My guess is that most of them had never thought much about genre categories or literary prestige before; certainly I got no sign that they believed themselves to be victims of or participants in any kind of “culture war” by virtue of having been assigned Elmore Leonard and Loretta Chase instead of Shakespeare and Jane Austen. It’s possible that some of them are now more interested in how and why we might draw these kinds of lines, but it was at once disorienting and refreshing to realize that they were not nearly as exercised about them as people often are in the media or in the world of literary criticism and book reviewing. In the end it was just another thing I was trying to teach them about.

I also found that the issue of how to deal with “inappropriate” or potentially offensive content in our readings–such as racist language or explicit sex scenes–which is something I fretted about a lot as I drew up the course materials and my early lecture notes–did not seem to be much of a problem either. It is possible that I successfully preempted some kinds of knee-jerk reactions: for the first time ever, for example, I included a kind of “content warning” statement in my syllabus, acknowledging the presence of elements that we would need to exercise care, precision, and maturity in addressing. One of the first technical things I talked about was the use/mention distinction, and I took care also to work on the difference between a character’s point of view and what we could discern to be the position the novel as a whole took on issues like race or gender. It’s also possible that I will learn more about students’ reactions to these issues when I read the course evaluations: it may be that students who did find some of the material uncomfortable also did not feel free to tell me so. In a way, that is fine, provided they were not unhappy with how we (or just I) dealt with the material in class discussion.

I know how fortunate I am that these four courses comprised my entire teaching load this year, especially as two of them were upper-level courses in my own field of specialization. When we adopted 2/2 as our standard teaching load a few years ago, we did have to raise class sizes, sometimes significantly,  which meant that though contact and preparation hours went down, the marking load stayed more or less the same. Larger classes also increase administrative time–everything from data entry to alphabetizing assignments to handling student appointments and emails takes longer the more people you are keeping track of. (This term, for instance I had about 130 students between my two classes: I’ve had more some terms, though I’ve also sometimes had fewer.) As we head into 2017-18 we are facing a significant reduction in the number of full-time faculty members in our department: inevitably, we are reconsidering how to allocate the resources that will remain. My teaching next year is going to be almost identical to this year’s, but after that, who knows?

You can read more about my classes going all the way back to 2007; posts about it are indexed on the Teaching page (so far I haven’t added links to this year’s entries), or you can click on the tag for ‘This Week In My Classes’ and work your way backwards.

OK, I exaggerate slightly: I’ve also had some papers to grade. But the final exams for both of my winter term classes were this Tuesday. At 3 hours each, with set up and pack up time that meant over 7 hours straight in the dreary Dalplex fieldhouse, and I walked away with 120 exams which I will be working my way through until next Tuesday at least. Overall, it’s not exhilarating work: there are certainly bright spots (many of which so far have been in the essay answers from students in the 19th-century fiction class), but a lot of this marking is more or less drudgery. I do try to make the questions not just relevant but, where possible, interesting, for me as well as for the students, but as I’ve written about here before, the main value of exams for me is simply, and kind of sadly, coercive. So I approach this part of every term with resignation, and try to pace myself so that repetition and fatigue don’t make me mean.

The other typical feature of this time of year is an uptick in meetings. These too require some deliberate self-care for me these days, as I continue to struggle a bit with the emotional residue of my failed promotion application. Certain topics, and certain faces, can still trigger bursts of bitterness; one thing I’ve been thinking about, inspired in part by this excellent post from Timothy Burke, is how to orient myself towards the university for the remaining third of my career there. (I’ll probably write something more about this once this term is fully behind me.) At the department level, our meetings are particularly difficult right now as we are facing a decline of a third in our faculty complement (the number of full time faculty in the department) due to the non-replacement of retirees. As you can imagine, shrinkage on this scale has significant repercussions for everything from our ability to form supervisory committees for graduate students to the kind and range of undergraduate courses we can offer — and thus for how we structure our majors and honors programs. Let’s just say the term “death spiral” has come up more than once: it’s hard to sustain a program, much less expand or innovate it, under these conditions.

I have been managing to get some reading done: some serious reading, with an eye to reviewing deadlines coming up, and some light reading. I just finished Julie James’s newest, The Thing About Love — and did not love it. It was entertaining enough, and she’s good at both plot and banter, but the awkwardness I always notice in her prose seemed particularly conspicuous this time. I can’t believe better editing couldn’t smooth a lot of it out: she has tics like explaining new names by adding “referring to etc. etc.” after them. I was diverted by the book, but also disappointed in it, especially as I like her previous novel, Suddenly Last Summer, a lot. I am really looking forward to doing some immersive reading that’s not for work (or for formal reviews, for that matter). I have some birthday gift cards I’m going to use to treat myself to some new books as soon as I file final grades! It will probably be pretty quiet around here until then.

This post really should be called “This week, last week, and next week in my classes” — partly because I didn’t manage to post last week at all, and partly because if I had, or if I manage to post again next week, the theme is likely to be the same: it’s Dory time!

My teaching posts around this time of year, like those in late November and into December, have a probably tedious sameness to them that reflects the cyclical nature of academic work. As the end of term approaches, it’s like a blizzard of different tasks, big and small, from getting the last few readings and lectures prepped to making up review handouts, and including marking the work that’s still coming in while bracing for the onslaught of final exams and term papers. As I’ve mentioned before, because I have one all-new class this term (Pulp Fiction), I’ve had to create basically every scrap–meaning everything from paper topics to editing worksheets to lecture notes to you name it –from scratch, so that has meant a lot of scrambling. I had been feeling kind of discouraged about this class, but in the last week or so I got a bit of positive feedback about it, which helped a lot, and also heard from a few students about how much they’d enjoyed Lord of Scoundrels. Score one for my team! I’m teaching it again next winter: it will be much easier, logistically anyway.

This has not been such a problem in 19th-Century Fiction, except that this is my first time including Adam Bede, so that meant both new materials and tweaks to existing ones to integrate it. Also, the additional students I blithely admitted (in a fit of altruism, I raised the cap on the class from our standard of 36 for upper-level classes to 50, so everyone on the waiting list could take it) meant at least 30 additional hours of work over the term — which was fine, really, as I was happy to have more interested students participate, but it has added up. As I said when I made the call, though, the more people who read Adam Bede the better! It’s my small way of contributing to the growing good of the world. I’m not so convinced reading Tess is a means to that end, but I have to give Hardy credit: for all his terrible sentences, he provokes more impassioned responses than almost any other author I teach.

Anyway, the unusual silence here mostly reflects just how busy I’ve been, along with how tired I’ve been feeling when the work is done — too tired to do much good reading, too tired to do much extra writing. The reading I’ve done outside of work has mostly been light: I just finished both of Lucy Parker’s contemporary romances set in the London theater scene, for instance, both of which I really enjoyed. As much as the stories, I liked the inside look at play production: I guess this continues my habit of enjoying both romance and mystery especially when there’s “neepery” involved.

Another reason for the lapse in my blogging is that we’ve been struggling with some technical problems at Open Letters (if you have visited the site recently, you may have noticed it either loading very slowly, or not loading at all). We are working away at fixing this — I say “we,” but I admit I’m not able to help much. In fact, all of the editors are a bit out of our depth when the problems are too far below the surface of our WordPress template, but we are making progress and, best of all, have a lead on someone trustworthy with more technical expertise than any of us, in whom we have now invested all our hopes and dreams! It is a particularly good issue of Open Letters this month, I think, so it is really frustrating knowing that has been less accessible. Happily, for me at least, Novel Readings does not seem to have been affected, or at least not in the same way.

So that’s what’s up! Not much, and I do wish I had more of interest to say, and especially more good reading to write about. That time is coming, though. I can see it, through the mists! Spring is coming too, I think, though it’s still a bit early to be too confident about that.

The March madness continues – indeed, I’ve been wondering how I managed not just to read but also to blog about actual books more than once last week. I felt quite on top of things for a bit, but two sets of papers have just come in, more paper proposals are incoming even as I write, and by Friday I’ll have another set of tests to mark … whew! The trick is just to take it one item at a time, and to take regular breaks for tea and treats. 🙂

When I’m not marking, I’m still prepping and teaching, of course, which this week has meant finally beginning the unit on romance in Pulp Fiction. The assigned readings for Monday–Liz Fielding’s “Secret Wedding” and an excerpt from Everything I Know About Love I Learned From Romance Novels giving Loretta Chase’s “rules” for the genre–were chosen to highlight expectations and conventions associated with romance novels; I also assigned Jennifer Crusie’s “Defeating the Critics” as a useful precis of some of the oft-heard criticisms of romance and how they might be responded to. We haven’t had a chance to discuss this material yet, as I typically start a new unit with an overview lecture to provide some historical background, critical contexts, and relevant vocabulary.

In this case that meant, among other things, talking about what historical or conceptual parameters we might use to define “romance fiction,” from its connections to the 19th-century marriage plot novel (with some discussion of whether Jane Austen is a romance novelist) to the genre requirements identified by the RWA. With an eye to complicating generalizations about the genre as a whole, I also outlined some of the various subgenres, from Regency to paranormal. While I emphasized the similarities between romance and the other genres we’ve studied–all popular forms not widely considered “literary,” all strongly governed by recognizable tropes and a relationship of reciprocal knowingness between authors and readers, etc.–I went on to talk about ways romance is different, in its extraordinary popularity and in both the degree and the kind of contempt it provokes. (I actually quoted a bit from William Giraldi’s screed, about how romance is “uniformly awful and awfully uniform,” to show them I wasn’t exaggerating.) Along with suggestions about the way the reception and perception of romance is gendered, I noted the powerful literary and cultural tradition of punishing women for their sexuality, against which recent romances in particular, with their emphasis on agency, consent, and mutual satisfaction, can be seen as empowering and subversive. That was a lot to cover even in a cursory way, and my hope is not that I gave anything like definitive accounts of or positions on these topics but that I laid out an array of ideas for us to draw on as we move into our specific readings, including Lord of Scoundrels.

In 19th-Century Fiction we’ve been finishing up Lady Audley’s Secret, which can of course be read as utterly hostile to sexually powerful women — or as a subversive challenge to a world that condemns them for using the only power patriarchy allows them. I can never decide which of the two I think it is, which I have come to consider a sign of Braddon’s (relative) weakness as a novelist: she is a great story-teller, but I’m never convinced, by the end of Lady Audley’s Secret, that she herself has completed sorted out the victim / villain alternatives for her heroine. Is Lucy’s fate well and truly justified (because she is both ruthless and shockingly free of remorse), or is she herself justified in the drastic steps she took, because she was fighting for her survival against an implacable man and a pitiless system? It’s possible that the very ambiguity of the ending is the point: it opens up disquieting possibilities in both directions, leaving us to puzzle out where our own politics or moral principles take us. It is certainly a very entertaining novel, and in that respect at least I think it is also well-timed for this class at this overloaded time of term: discussions have actually been livelier than usual! That said, we start on Tess of the d’Urbervilles next week, which is bound to bring us all down. It’s not my fault: the course is called “19th-Century Fiction from Dickens to Hardy.” If you know an uplifting Hardy novel I could sub in for Tess or Jude, do let me know.