Thanks to Dalhousie benefactor George Munro, we have Friday off, which means that I’ve already wrapped up my teaching week. Hooray! Because although we are in the midst of some great books in both classes, I am feeling both tired and distracted, and an extra day or two to get my brain caught up with my schedule is very welcome.

In Mystery and Detective Fiction, we wrapped up The Hound of the Baskervilles on Monday and started on The Murder of Roger Ackroyd today. I’m not a Sherlockian at all — for me, a little bit of Holmes goes a pretty long way — but I like Hound a lot. There are always students in the class who are very keen on Sherlock Holmes (and, often, on his many reincarnations), so I count on them to fill in extra details about his history and character that aren’t directly presented in our readings. I, on the other hand, can point out the dangling modifiers in Doyle’s otherwise gripping prose: I figure that’s a fair trade. 🙂 More seriously, our discussion tends to focus on the tension between natural and supernatural explanations, which follows nicely on our earlier discussions of the emergence of detective fiction from the gothic tradition and leads nicely into our work on Golden Age mysteries, in which supernatural elements are strictly ruled out by documents like The Detective Decalogue.

I always particularly enjoy the first class on Agatha Christie: I have some fun setting her up as a victim of the modernist preoccupation with difficulty and the related elitism about work that is really popular. It’s not that I actually claim The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is a better novel than Ulysses, or even its equal — not in so many words, anyway! But I do try to stir up questions about the idea of “literary merit,” and to historicize some of the presuppositions that often work against genre fiction. I also bring up related points about the literary curriculum (I’m reasonably certain, for instance, that Agatha Christie is never taught in classes on “20th-Century British Literature”) as another way of getting everyone thinking about what books we pay attention to or take seriously, and in what contexts.

In 19th-Century Fiction, we focused today on Chapter 53, “A Rescue and a Catastrophe.” This is such an exciting moment in the novel, not just because it is full of dramatic action, but because it brings so many aspects of the novel into focus, from the real costs and risks of Becky’s climb up the social ladder to the narrator’s role as guide and moralist. “Was she guilty or not?” he asks at the end — and refuses to tell us, an evasion which I think is central to his insistence that the novel is not ultimately about Becky but about us. Chapter 53 also includes this memorable tableau of Becky after her great catastrophe:

She remained for hours after he was gone, the sunshine pouring into the room, and Rebecca sitting alone on the bed’s edge. The drawers were all opened and their contents scattered about — dresses and feathers, scarfs and trinkets, a heap of tumbled vanities lying in a wreck. Her hair was falling over her shoulders; her gown was torn where Rawdon had wrenched the brilliants out of it. She heard him go downstairs a few minutes after he left her, and the door slamming and closing on him. She knew he would never come back. He was gone forever. Would he kill himself? — she thought — not until after he had met Lord Steyne. She thought of her long past life, and all the dismal incidents of it. Ah, how dreary it seemed, how miserable, lonely and profitless! Should she take laudanum, and end it, to have done with all hopes, schemes, debts, and triumphs?

What a moment to incite us to pity! But this too seems to me strategically essential: like all of us, she’s really just another player, after all — just another fool “striving for what is not worth the having.”

I got to do an extra class this morning, making a guest appearance in a colleague’s first-year seminar. I say “got to” because although it was extra work, it was of a particularly pleasing kind, as she asked me in to speak on the role of “Dover Beach” in Ian McEwan’s Saturday. I taught the novel myself an astonishing (to me) nearly 10 years ago, so I had some notes to draw on but, oddly, none specifically on the scene with “Dover Beach,” so that left me some work to do! I am a big admirer of McEwan in general, or at least of his later novels (I have not has as much success with his pre-Atonement works). Atonement remains my favorite, but reviewing Saturday I was impressed by it all over again. In this morning’s class I gave some context for “Dover Beach” then we talked a bit about the poem itself before turning to why it has the effect it does on the various characters, and whether McEwan is using its presence in the novel to assert the value of art against his protagonist’s resolute scientism. Perhaps he’s suggesting that we still need the consolations of poetry, despite our progress in other realms, especially if we (like Arnold’s speaker) don’t have the comforting “girdle” of faith. Rereading the poem in preparation for class, I admit that I felt consoled by it — it made me feel that I need to get more poetry into my own life.

For a short week, it has still been a busy one, then, and next week will be even more so, with paper proposals and midterms coming in on top of the usual class preparation. I also need to finish up the paper I’m writing for the Louisville Conference: I hope to make real progress on that on my day “off” this week. I’m kind of excited about the trip to Louisville, though I dread the travel days, especially with the risk that somewhere along the way everything will get screwed up by winter. Because our panel is on the first day, I’ve allowed a whole extra day so if things go awry with my flight schedules I still have a fighting chance of arriving in time. And if things go smoothly, I can play tourist for a day! Maybe it will even be above freezing there. Any suggestions for things to do in Louisville? I’m thinking about a visit to the Frazier History Museum.

It always takes a couple of weeks for a term to rev up and really get going: we have to get through a certain amount of reading, for example, before much writing can be done and thus for much marking to be needed. We are passing that point now, though, and this week I have already returned some paper proposals, there’s a batch of tests waiting for my red pen, the pace of submissions has picked up on reading journals, and that won’t be the end of it — not just this week but really for the whole term, since I have built in so many ‘small’ assignments (as part of my attempt to emphasize the process over the product) that from now on there will almost always be something coming in and something going back.

That’s OK, though, because that also means we’re past the start-of-term annoyances (more or less) — things like having to constantly update the class list as students add and drop classes (for two whole weeks! I’m sure I’ve mentioned that this drawn-out period of indecision is one of my pet peeves. I have tried but so far failed to convince administrators that while it may be a convenience for ‘customers,’ it is a pedagogical nightmare for both students and teachers.). And it also means we are getting used to each other so class discussion keeps getting better, and that we all more or less know what’s going on in terms of course requirements and policies and all the rest of the logistical stuff.

I should say that I think our final sessions on Pride & Prejudice went well in the 19th-Century Fiction class last week: whatever my misgivings about the novel’s intransigent popularity, that does mean a generally positive attitude in the classroom and a high percentage of people who are well (really well) caught up on the readings. We’ll see how their spirits hold up as we move into Vanity Fair, which we start on Friday. I am pretty excited about that, actually: I haven’t assigned Vanity Fair since 2010, so it will feel relatively fresh to me, and a quick poll showed that it’s completely new to all of the students. The actual OUP volume looks so vast and dour that I think they can’t help but be pleasantly surprised when they start reading. But before we get there I’m taking one class to do a workshop on how to write a good essay for the course — this has become a regular feature of my upper-level classes and reflects my ongoing efforts to make my expectations as clear and transparent as possible and to demystify, as far as possible, the concept of a “good essay.”

In Mystery & Detective Fiction, we are finishing up The Moonstone. I enjoy it so much that I’m almost sorry I’m taking a break from this class next year. It occurs to me that I could assign it in the 19th-Century Fiction class next year instead, since I’m doing the Dickens-to-Hardy version — but that’s my best chance to do The Woman in White, so I probably won’t.

As that comment shows, one of the things I’m busy with, if so far still haphazardly, is planning next year’s classes. We’ve got our course assignments and it won’t be long before we need to turn in preliminary course descriptions and reading lists, as registration begins in March and the whole course selection apparatus needs to be ready. The one I’m thinking about the most is Pulp Fiction, which I’ll be teaching for the first time next winter. I’ll save my many but currently quite inchoate ideas about that class for another post! But I will say that it’s a good example of why it’s hard to draw firm lines between work and not-work for people in my profession, or at least for me: many things I’ve read “for fun” in the past are now possible candidates for its reading list, and many things I’ll read in the next few months in case they’re perfect for it won’t be strictly work-related at first, and maybe never will be!

I’ve also got a guest lecture on Ian McEwan’s Saturday coming up for a colleague’s class that seemed remote when I agreed to it but is now (eek) just over two weeks away. Wouldn’t you know it: I have a whole folder of materials on Saturday from when I taught it myself in 2006, but somehow I have no lecture notes specifically on the significance of “Dover Beach” in the novel, which is what I proposed talking to her class about (what with my being a Victorianist and all). Since I haven’t actually read Saturday since 2006, I should probably add rereading it to my to-do list…

Also looming uncomfortably close on the horizon is the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900, which I am attending (weather permitting!) as a participant on a panel about criticism in the internet age, along with Dan Green and David Winters. I have an abstract of my paper and a mess of notes: now it’s time to get serious about shaping something presentable out of them! Aside from the work that will require and the stress of having travel plans for mid-February, I’m looking forward to the conference: the program is full of interesting things, and it will be great to meet Dan and David in person. I’ve known Dan virtually since I started blogging in 2007! (Maybe one day I’ll also meet the elusive Amateur Reader face to face. I would promise never to reveal his super-top-secret-real-life-identity!)

I’ve been busy with some writing, also, and with the usual editorial things for Open Letters Monthly. And as if all this isn’t enough, it’s also winter and we have had three storms in the past week, which means we’ve also been busy shoveling. So far it has not been that bad — the roads and sidewalks are getting decently cleared in pretty good time — but I was recently reminded that at this time last winter, Halifax hadn’t turned into Hoth yet either, and we’ve got nearly three months to go before we’re really out of danger.

I am managing a bit of non-required reading in the interstices of my days. I finished Vivian Gornick’s The Odd Woman and the City but haven’t decided whether or how to blog about it. Now I’m about half way through my reread of Emma and it’s not going very well. I will persist, however — and then choose something a little less stuffy with a little more action in it. True Grit, maybe, which is on my list of Pulp Fiction possibilities and which by all appearances is pretty much the anti-Emma.

And that brings us pretty much up to date! I look forward to doing some more bookish blogging soon.

The new term is underway, as you might guess from the sudden dearth of new blog posts. After all this time I am much better at the start-up logistics; what gets harder is adjusting to the sudden dramatic increase in demands on my energy. I was exhausted after every class meeting this week! But as we get deeper into our course material, more energy flows back towards me, and then the process feels less draining — on a good day, it’s even exhilarating!

One thing I found myself thinking a lot about as my classes got underway is the importance but also the difficulty of bringing us all together intellectually as well as physically. I always feel that before we can delve into the details of our particular readings, we need to establish some common ground. Because both the canon and our curriculum have diversified so much in the last few decades, there’s very little that I can expect everyone to know or to have read. Even with our most “advanced” seminar classes, I can’t expect students to have studied any of the material before, or even any material from the same genre or period. (This is increasingly true of students in graduate seminars as well.) While the range of knowledge and perspectives everyone brings can have some great results for our discussions, it can also mean things get a bit random and scattered, or that it’s hard to make connections meaningful enough to draw everybody in. So one thing I try to do at the beginning is sketch out some of the general territory in which our particular class is situated. This usually means providing historical and/or literary historical contexts, but it can also mean setting up some conceptual frameworks.

For Mystery & Detective Fiction, for instance, I start with some comments about the (vexed, contested, elusive, perhaps nonexistent) difference between “literary fiction” and “genre fiction,” and some thoughts about how our ideas and expectations about these kinds of fiction affect our reading strategies. I also give an overview of the development of mystery fiction as a genre, from Newgate and gothic fiction through sensation fiction and Sherlock Holmes and on to the present day, with attention to the emergence of a wide range of subgenres; and I talk a bit about the history of policing, from thief-takers to Scotland Yard. For courses on Victorian fiction, I often lead off with some discussion about the contemporary connotations of “Victorian,” then talk about the historical and literary-historical reasons for those stereotypes; then I go over some generalizations about the “rise of the novel,” with some attention to social contexts and some to formal or thematic trends.

I’m always very aware when I put these introductory lessons together that they are, inevitably, in some ways artificial and inadequate. I usually say so eventually, too, noting that every generalization I offer, every master-narrative I string together, could itself be the starting point for a complex and nuanced exploration of details. But I still believe that we need some sense of a (not the) big picture, just to get oriented. I also think good reading does rely to some extent on having the relevant knowledge: to give another example from my own recent teaching, I don’t think it’s possible to read A Room of One’s Own really well if you don’t know anything about the history of women’s education and where to place A Room of One’s Own in that story. It’s not that you wouldn’t get anything out of your reading without knowing these things, but aspects of your understanding would necessarily be superficial. So that’s a context I make sure we address in class.

I doubt there was ever a time when every student arrived in any given class with all the “right” equipment: setting things up, or filling them in, has always been one of a teacher’s jobs, along with drawing semi-arbitrary lines around what’s relevant and what’s not. It’s a good thing that we’ve gotten more self-conscious about how and why we do this and why it is also a way of making things up, but I expect most of us still do some version of it, laying the groundwork we want everyone to have for our purposes. In my department, we used to do more of this structurally, through course requirements and prerequisites. This has become less and less possible, however, both because of the way our mandate has grown (despite what some conservative bobble-heads might think, the expansion of literary studies has been additive — it’s not that we teach comic books instead of Shakespeare or vampire movies instead of Beowulf but that, resources permitting, we do it all!) and because students seem to like requirements less and less. (I think the two developments are related, actually: the more it’s clear they could reasonably study, the less reasonable it seems for us to require them to study anything in particular.)

If our curriculum currently has an organizing principle or direction, it’s more skills-oriented rather than content-oriented: first-year classes emphasize reading strategies and writing skills, then for majors and Honors students we have kinds of required classes (literature surveys and theory / methods) that they choose among. There are some breadth requirements, for historical range, but because they can take classes in pretty much any order they want, none of this provides any predictability or consistency. And so I try to build it in myself.

I’m curious what other people’s experiences have been with this sort of problem — or whether it even seems to you like a problem! Maybe other teachers just show up and jump right in, or maybe students would rather learn as they go, or make do with what they already know, and never mind the Grand Unifying Theory of Everything, even as a provisional framework. If you’re a professor, how does your department deal with the question of “coverage,” or of sequencing, or have you done more or less what we’ve done, that is, let the diversity of material become a smorgasbord of options for students? Viewed that way, I think our offerings are pretty tempting — they are both nutritious and delicious! And mostly I am glad about that, about their variety and inclusiveness and even idiosyncrasy, because that’s the reality of our field. We contain multitudes! For the first week or so of every term, though, I struggle with the pedagogical implications of what we have become.

I’m always relieved at the end of the term, because the last phase is always quite stressful. But I’m also always aware that it’s really only the end of a term — another one immediately looms, and another, and another! Every limit is, indeed, a beginning as well as an ending, and so this in-between time inevitably prompts reflections. What went well — and what could I do better next time? What fell flat — and what might, nonetheless, be worth trying again? From class policies to book lists, from the layout of the syllabus to the assessment of final exams, teaching is always a work in progress, isn’t it?

I don’t think there’s really any way to judge if a course as a whole has been a success: what would that mean, especially for my first-year class, which was populated largely by people taking it, not out of interest, but as a requirement? Their success (in learning to write better, for example, or learning more about literature) is only partly in my hands, too: this term I was particularly struck by the difference it makes when a student really shows up for class — meaning, not just attending (though that is very important), but being truly present and engaged, following up on feedback, and so on. Another article complaining about a consumerist mindset among students recently made the rounds on Twitter, and again the gym membership analogy seemed apt to me: you literally cannot buy an education, but if you energetically use what you are paying for (expertise, guidance, support), you can get what you came for. Another measure of success, this one perhaps more dependent on my efforts, would be seeing students who arrived with low expectations  discover how interested they get in our readings and discussions. That was me, once upon a time — an avid reader but one who didn’t really understand why or how to “study” books, who lit up at what I found in my own first-year class. So I try to keep in mind, as I work with my first-year students, that both they and I can’t predict what this required class will end up meaning to them.

I was more or less happy with the reading list this year for intro, which wasn’t much changed from the course’s last iteration. Because, with a larger class size, we had regularly scheduled tutorial meetings, I did cut back the reading: our only two long texts were A Room of One’s Own and Unless. (Last time, we also did Night and The Road.) I didn’t make this choice because of the recent Dentistry scandal, but that context gave these readings new urgency, and (perhaps because of it?) this group seemed more receptive than usual to the discussions these books invite.

During our discussions of Woolf and Shields, I also felt very aware of ways that my years of reading and writing with an eye to the book world outside the academy enhanced our discussions. I brought in things like the VIDA counts and the recent kerfuffle over David Gilmour‘s narrow-minded braggadocio; I also provided a link to one of many stories about the way YA writers get segregated by gender. My point was to show that the literary history both Woolf and Shields talk about and intervene in is an ongoing one; that these are not just academic issues; that the problems that frustrated them as women writers aren’t solved, though they may have some new forms; and that the feminist critique Woolf made so eloquently is still necessary. One of my most important goals as a teacher is to help my students think about how and what they’ll read when they aren’t under orders: I hope that some of this discussion will stick with them and they will look out for these things, not just in their own reading but in their parenting, in their work as librarians or teachers or editors or journalists or programmers, or in any other context where books and reading and gender matter. Now that would be a success!

I enjoyed a lot about my graduate seminar on George Eliot, but it was a source of some pedagogical frustration for me. I felt all term that I was talking too much, for instance. But also I felt somewhat confused about the aims of the seminar now that we’ve all openly admitted that graduate school isn’t now (if it ever was) wholly populated by people aiming at academic careers. I couldn’t decide how much that could or should change the conversations we had in class, the research I asked the students to do, or the kind of writing I asked for. I don’t think it’s possible to turn a specialized seminar in a particular discipline into an all-purpose smorgasbord of skills and knowledge, so in the end I didn’t change much of what I’ve routinely done in graduate seminars.  But I did (for the second time) include a blogging component aimed both at encouraging preparation for our once-a-week face-to-face sessions and at increasing the students’ comfort with the idea of writing more publicly. I also included as options seminar topics on George Eliot ‘outside’ the academic context, which led to three presentations on recent ‘popular’ versions of George Eliot: Diana Souhami’s Gwendolen, Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch, and the BBC adaptation of Daniel Deronda. These examples all gave them real-life proof that people talk about, write about, and care about Victorian literature in non-academic contexts, and the presentations all raised good questions about how and why they do, especially in comparison to the kinds of reading and writing that are more typically academic.

For me, it didn’t feel like a great term, but I think overall it went smoothly — as surely it should, after all these years. I think one reason it felt rough at times is that I was mentally (and sometimes emotionally) preoccupied with my promotion case, which has been moving slowly along through its various stages. For obvious reasons, this is not something I can address in detail here, at least before it’s all over. I will say, though, that in general it has already been a learning experience, in some ways a very good one (thought-provoking, constructive, illuminating) and in other ways an unwelcome one —  it’s one thing to anticipate what executive types call “pushback,” after all, and  another to see what form it actually takes. Eventually (once I know the ending!) I may have a longer tale to tell.

Next term I hope to have a bit more straight-up fun in the classroom — even though it is winter. I’m teaching the mystery class again, which I still find really stimulating even after teaching it almost every year for a dozen years. One reason I think the atmosphere is generally so positive and the students so engaged in this class is that it’s an elective for everyone: this can have its down sides (sometimes it’s not a top priority for students, for example), but mostly it means hardly anyone is there who doesn’t want to be. Plus, of course, I do try to make it as lively, interesting, and thought-provoking as I can!

My other course is yet another incarnation of “The 19th-Century Novel from Austen to Dickens,” for which as usual I have mixed up the reading list: instead of Persuasion, I’ve switched in Pride and Prejudice (which I haven’t done in 5 years); instead of Waverley, I’m bringing back Vanity Fair; instead of Jane Eyre, we’ll read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall*; and then I’m pairing Mary Barton and Hard Times at the end. Mary Barton is not as accomplished a novel as North and South, but its raw power always surprises me, and its importance as a social novel is perhaps greater. Hard Times is not everyone’s favorite Dickens novel, but I think it too is very powerful in its strange, excessive, fabular way. It’s a line-up I chose more for variety than continuity: the last time around, the novels were all variations on the Bildungsroman. I am most curious about how Vanity Fair will go over; I think the last time I assigned it was 2008. Will I need to stage an intervention, as I did last time with Waverley? Or will the inimitable Becky carry them all along with her, in her unscrupulous clamber up the social ladder?

*Update: So much for working from memory: I chose Jane Eyre again for this round, as I was reminded today when I went to check the stock in the bookstore! I was a bit disappointed to realize that at first, but actually it’s good, as 2016 is the 200th anniversary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth, so we really ought to be reading her most famous book. And I do love Jane Eyre.

We are rapidly nearing the end of term, which means a lot of time and thought on all sides is going into final assignments. In my Intro to Lit class, I’m particularly conscious of this phase of the course as a time in which I pull back and see if the scaffolding I have tried to build for the students, starting on the first day of classes, supports them now that they have to do their biggest independent project. Last week I gave them a self-assessment exercise that, among other things, asked them to let me know what they thought the teaching staff could do to help them succeed — what else, I should say, since it’s not as if my TAs and I have been passive so far. It was useful to see what they identified as their own strengths and weaknesses. Their anxiety pretty clearly centers on building a viable and interesting argument out of the details they notice while reading. A number of students said that they wished we would “explain” the readings to them more clearly: as I discussed with the class, if this means “tell them the answer to the readings,” tell them what to argue about them, then they aren’t going to get their wish, since learning to develop and support their own interpretations is really the primary course objective. I’ve been stressing the process that leads to a good interpretation, which is what we model and practice in every class, but I’m not going to offer them a “nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of [their] notebooks and keep on the mantel-piece forever,” even if (as Woolf ironically observes) this is “the first duty of a lecturer.”

Still, I can see that it’s stressful working towards a goal that maybe you can’t quite picture, not having seen a strong thesis before, or not having seen details from a close reading integrated into an essay’s overall argument. So I devised a couple of exercises that I hope have helped bring that desired result into better focus, including a handout with a sample paragraph drawing on an example we’d worked on together in class, and in today’s tutorial we’re working with a sample thesis statement for a text they aren’t writing on for their final essays (as I told them, I don’t want 61 essays all arguing for my interpretation of Unless!) and, again, a process-oriented worksheet focusing on choosing good evidence and organizing it into an interpretive argument. I hope this boosts their confidence about what to do — what steps to take — and makes them feel better about the fact that they need to do it in service of their best reading and thinking about the novel. I have said since day 1 that there aren’t “right answers” to the kind of work a critic does. There can be wrong ones (if you just flat out misunderstand the words on the page, for instance), but after that there are just better, more convincing ones or weaker, less persuasive ones. Next week they have drafts due and tutorials will be spent on peer editing, so that gives them one more chance to run their plans past another reader before they commit fully.

My graduate students too are facing end-of-term hurdles. Here my scaffolding has been somewhat less meticulous or overt, but I hope our directed conversations all term have given them lots of ideas to work with as well as a good sense of how to talk about them. They also wrote proposals for their final essays last week, which I have returned to them with comments and suggestions. For the next two weeks, our class time will be dedicated to their presentations. In previous years I’ve integrated presentations into the term’s work, but this year I wanted to use them to extend our class discussions beyond the assigned readings, so I have two students presenting on works by George Eliot that weren’t otherwise on our syllabus, and three presenting on contemporary interpretations of Eliot’s work — Diana Souhami’s Gwendolen, Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch, and the BBC adaptation of Daniel Deronda. (These were the students’ choices from a menu of options I gave them.) I’m looking forward to these! I have kept my own reviews of Souhami and Mead a bit under wraps (though I suppose the students might turn them up during their research) as I didn’t want to preempt what might be very different responses.

In terms of my own teaching chores, I’m in a bit of a lull at this point. There are still classes to prep on Unless, but I’ve got notes to work with, and I’ve drafted both the quiz I still need to give in Intro and the peer editing worksheet they’ll use. It will all come crashing upon me at once as soon as classes actually end, though, with both sets of papers coming in and the final exam for Intro scheduled the very first day of the exam period. I’m taking advantage of this week’s lighter demands by getting a start on the syllabi for next term. I’m also digging in to Portrait of a Lady, which I had been making only slow progress on. It really isn’t that irritating, it turns out — or maybe I’m just acclimatizing.

Update: As Stacey requested in the comments, here are the handouts I drew up for my Intro class to model and them help them practice moving from close reading details to using those details to support an interpretation: English 1010 Worksheets Close Reading in Context.