This Week In My Classes

This Week In My Classes: Reading Against the Grain

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

adambedeI have really enjoyed rereading Adam Bede for my graduate seminar over the past two weeks. Though I know the novel reasonably well, I have never spent the kind of dedicated time on it that I have on Middlemarch or The Mill on the Floss  — or, for that matter, on Romola. I’ve never even assigned it in an undergraduate class, I realize! Still, I do have a half-finished (well, maybe one-third-finished) essay on it for Open Letters that was (is?) going to focus on the line between explaining and justifying, between understanding and forgiving. This is a problem raised in most of Eliot’s novels, but Hetty’s infanticide is an extreme test case: there’s nothing abstract about the consequences of her crime, nothing diffuse or dispersed about the damage done, as there is with, for example, Bulstrode’s lies or Tito’s betrayal. “Children may be strangled, but deeds never,” says the narrator rather chillingly in Romola, but it’s really only in Adam Bede that there’s a literal child to mourn rather than an intangible (if irrevocable) fault.

Though the novel is called Adam Bede (a faintly puzzling choice that we talked about several times in class), Hetty is by far its most interesting element: both the drama of her story (especially the still-gripping-after-all-these-years journeys in hope and despair) and the meticulous care with which Eliot presents her vain, shallow, artless, and ultimately tragic character. Critics sometimes accuse Eliot of being hard on her beautiful women in general and on Hetty in particular. It’s true we’re shown Hetty in a very unflattering light, despite the emphasis on her kitten-like charms. That seems to me the only plausible option, though, if we are going to go through the moral exercise the novel sets for us of sympathizing with “more or less ugly, stupid, inconsistent people.” The point is not to help us see Hetty in a kindly light, to show us that she’s somehow better than she seems — but to show us that however irredeemably selfish she is, however incapable of self-reflection, nonetheless the onus is on us to “tolerate, pity, and love” her. Dinah, of course, is our model for that moral transcendence, and though she herself is rather a dull character, I think the meeting between the two women in prison is thrilling. (I wrote a little bit about it near the end of this essay on faith and fellowship in Middlemarch.)

So, there’s all that, and luxurious landscapes, and dramatic rescues, and Mrs. Poyser to boot — what’s not to love?

But I had much less fun rereading some of the critical articles I’d assigned, even though they are smart and well-argued and thought-provoking and all the things that they should be. I was trying to figure out why, and what I came up with was that in many ways they position themselves against George Eliot, against Adam Bede as she offers it to us. I’ve been reading and writing for so long now outside of academic parameters that I’ve become less accustomed to the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” or to readings that are less interested in the discussion the author is overtly having with us than in undermining or second-guessing or critiquing the terms of discussion the author has chosen. I would never argue that such critiques are illegitimate; often, too, they establish a valuable chiaroscuro in a robust appreciation (who today can love Dickens, for instance, without also conceding that his women often disappoint?). It would be naive, or worse, to pretend that there’s nothing objectionable to be found — even in George Eliot! (Yes, her politics are cautious to the point of conservative; yes, she’s essentialist about gender; yes, she can be less than rhapsodic about coarse peasants; etc.) I think that right now, though, for me it’s less rewarding to do or read criticism that digs in on these issues when there is so much that is progressive and aspirational, and also beautiful, in her writing. What are we to do with Adam Bede, after all, if we conclude that it perpetuates or advocates a vision (a version) of society that we reject? Close it and put it away for good?

Almost certainly not, of course, and I don’t think that’s what any of the critics we read are saying either. Usually (as I take it) the implicit subtext is something more like “read it in a more complicated way,” or “approach with skepticism.” Don’t, in other words, take Eliot’s words for granted, which is exactly the mantra I’ve been insisting on in my Introduction to Literature class — except that there, the purpose is not to catch out or undermine the author but to appreciate their artful use of language to serve their ends. That approach is consistent with ultimately finding those ends problematic, but it’s still overall a more positive exercise. (That seems both right and necessary as a first step: you can’t effectively critique what you don’t thoroughly understand, after all.)

Writing this, I am plagued by a sense that I’m being inconsistent, maybe even hypocritical. I definitely resist some books and read them, if not suspiciously, at least with something quite other than appreciation. I’ve also committed a lot of time and thought to the importance of ethical criticism, which is fundamentally about questioning the implications of an author’s literary strategies, as much as or more than it is about identifying their overt or covert political commitments. Maybe I still haven’t rightly identified the source of my annoyance, then — or maybe what it comes down to is just that I prefer my Adam Bede to the Adam Bede I saw in some of the critical essays. The miraculous thing about great books is that all these versions can coexist, that all these things can be going on at once. Love, too, can coexist with criticism — even my love for Middlemarch, which is complicated but not diminished by my anxiety that there is something potentially dangerous about its most beautiful moments.

This Week In My Classes: Reading, Writing, and Just a Little Ranting

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

broadviewWe are into our second full week of classes now. I think things are mostly going smoothly, but that’s as much thanks to habit and experience as anything I’ve done particularly effectively in the past week or so. It’s not that anything is going badly — at least, not as far as I can tell. I just feel creaky, and I suppose that’s to be expected after almost nine months out of the classroom.

My section of Introduction to Prose and Fiction is still warming up overall. At this stage I’m mostly introducing vocabulary and trying to demystify the process of close reading: encouraging close attention to words and literary devices, modelling ways to back up overall impressions (he’s making a joke, it’s ironic, he’s upset about the way imperialism has driven him to act against his conscience) with reference to the particulars of the text that gave you that idea. (In order, “Advice to Youth,” “A Modest Proposal,” and “Shooting an Elephant,” in case you wondered.) The challenge is always to balance providing terminology and relevant contextual information with opportunities for open discussion and actually practising the skills the course aims to teach. I always allow some time for this in class, but this term we also have scheduled tutorials, as the class is fairly large (around 70, at this point). It’s nice to know we can use the tutorials for more personalized attention and hands-on activities — though it also means that I have to be extra organized, so that I can set my teaching assistants up with a plan for each session and the materials to follow through on it. Here too I will step back as the term goes on, so that the TAs can approach their sessions in the way they want, but at first I think it helps us (staff and students) to have a high degree of consistency across the course.

I sometimes wonder if I should dream up a more dramatic way to launch this course. I do try to work up some excitement about our readings as texts that were never intended to be sanitized and homogenized in anthologies, even ones as choice and elegant as our Broadview readers. I do a little riff in the first class on the intimidating invitation of the blank page (or screen), on the urgency and difficulty of resolving to write something on it in the first place, and then on the cascade of choices that immediately follow: genre, voice, point of view, and so on, down to individual words — from which we, as readers, work backwards again to our richest sense of what the writer meant. I certainly find writing challenging enough to be full of wonder and curiosity about how it works, when it does, and of course our examples are hand-selected to be well worth examining. I hope I communicate some of my own enthusiasm for this process, along with my conviction that knowing more ultimately enhances the rewards of reading. Still, I expect that by and large the class comes across as a bit dry at first. But I do believe that it serves our purposes to be patient and somewhat technical at the outset. We’re going to get into some rather more subtle and confusing readings as the term goes on, and everything will go better if they have learned habits of rigor and precision.

Yet despite my overall satisfaction with the plan and execution of this class, it’s also where, right now, I’m feeling the creakiest, because I feel out of practice at the demanding skill of thinking on my feet. When you ask open-ended questions, you have to field the replies, and they are rarely exactly what you expect, and sometimes they are difficult to understand or even to hear clearly. I want the students to feel comfortable speaking up, so as far as possible I try to reply in a positive way, reshaping or redirecting if there seems to be a confusion, encouraging and prompting further details if it’s an insightful remark, and so on. Usually I’m pretty adept at this, but right now my mental reaction time just seems a bit slow.

adambedeMy other class this term is my graduate seminar on George Eliot. Here I have a cozy group, just five students, and it really is an entirely different ball game than Intro. Last week I gave an overview lecture on George Eliot to provide some common background, since as usual the students have quite a range of prior experience (this year, from none at all to a bit) reading her work. Then we took a look at some of her most famous essays, including “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists.” We spent some time on the vexed question of whether the essay’s brilliant snark is misogynistic. Since the last time I taught this seminar (in 2010), my own reading has broadened to include romance fiction, which has in turn made me much more aware of how discussions of romance readers and novelists are carried on today — so I couldn’t resist sending the class a link to William Giraldi’s piece on Fifty Shades of Grey. I thought (rightly, as it turned out) that comparing his screed to “Silly Novels” would provoke more discussion about when and how criticism of specific women writers shades into general contempt for women. I must say that (though there are still reasonable grounds for objecting to her tone and argument), Eliot ends up looking positively benign by comparison.

This week we discussed the first half of Adam Bede. What a treat it is to be rereading Adam Bede! I’m quite prepared to admit it is not nearly as artful or wise as Middlemarch, that the good people in it are mostly too good, that the narrator isn’t, yet, quite all that she will become and so on. It has qualities Middlemarch lacks, though, including the expansiveness of its descriptions of the landscape, and its focus on fewer characters means that (especially in the second half) there is greater emotional intensity — we are more invested, I think, in their plight, and especially in Hetty’s. As a set piece, Adam Bede‘s Chapter XV (“The Two Bedrooms”) is almost as great as Middlemarch‘s Ch. XV (the tremendous “let me introduce you to Lydgate” chapter) — the juxtaposition of Dinah and Hetty is thematically perfect but also dramatically believable. We ended up talking quite a bit about characters today, particularly about how they exemplify the novel’s stated principles of confronting us with mixed, imperfect people who nonetheless deserve our sympathetic attention, not to mention the novelist’s loving treatment. “I would not, even if I had the choice,” Eliot says in the famous Chapter XVII (“In Which the Story Pauses a Little),

be the clever novelist who could create a world so much better than this, in which we get up in the morning to do our daily work, that you would be likely to turn a harder, colder eye on the dusty streets and the common green fields — on the real breathing men and women, who can be chilled by your indifference or injured by your prejudice; who can be cheered and helped onward by your fellow- feeling, your forbearance, your outspoken, brave justice.

That conviction that the novel can help us be our best selves is part of what I love so much about Eliot. That, in turn, perhaps explains why I’m having such a hard time writing the 1000 words I’ve promised about Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train, which relies (with distressing success) on exactly the opposite supposition — not that we are already perfected and so in no need of moral reinforcement, but that the “clever novelist” will do best by appealing to our worst, most prurient selves. I hate what The Girl on the Train assumes about us as readers, and I hate, too, that its 35 weeks on the NYT Bestseller list proves it right.

This Week In My Classes: Back to School Edition

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

September-Calendar-ClipartI haven’t been in the classroom since December 2, 2014, so I guess it’s no wonder I’m experiencing more than my usual start-of-term jitters as well as a general sense of disorientation! It’s not as if I haven’t been thinking about teaching a lot since then, especially in the last several weeks, but I can tell it’s going to be a challenge readjusting to the rhythm and relentless pace of the teaching term after the relative freedom (in both my mental life and my schedule) of my sabbatical and then the summer months.

I’m fortunate to be teaching only two classes this term. The oscillation between them will be interesting, as they are at the two extremes of our curriculum: one is a section of English 1010 (Introduction to Prose and Fiction), while the other is a graduate seminar, English 545o (George Eliot). I have taught English 1010 quite a few times, most recently in Winter 2014. This time, however, I have a significantly larger group: then, I had one of our special “baby” sections, capped at 30, while this year my section is capped at 90 (enrollment is currently hovering around 70). This means I will do a bit more semi-formal lecturing, though most of the time I will incorporate some back-and-forth discussion; it also means that I will have teaching assistants who will each work with a smaller tutorial group once a week (as will I). Tutorials obviously help make the class a more personal experience for the students, and they enable us to do the kind of hands-on work on writing skills that is essential to a class like this one (worksheets, drafts, peer editing, and so forth).

Durade GEI feel pretty sure that I know what I’m doing in English 1010. But I haven’t taught a graduate seminar since 2010, and I feel somewhat more uncertain — not about the day-to-day activities of this year’s version, but about its overall purpose. One reason I stepped back from graduate teaching was my own disaffection with some aspects of academic research, writing, and publishing, as well as with the whole teetering structure of graduate studies in the humanities. What was I doing — what were we doing — or what should we be doing, when carrying on blithely with what was (is) more or less an apprenticeship model seemed wrongheaded? I have never really been able to swallow the argument that our graduate programs still make perfect sense even if most of our students aren’t going to continue into academia (see my post on The Ph.D. Conundrum, including the comments thread, for further discussion about this) — or that if we tweak them by adding some discussion of “alt-ac” or non-academic careers, we’re fine.

At the same time, I certainly see the intrinsic value of advanced study in our discipline, and I know that graduate degrees are not dead ends. Many of my reservations fall away when we’re talking about M.A. students, also. Finally, finding new ways to use the specialized training I received myself has helped me think more positively about the whole process. So I put my name back on the roster and now I’m almost ready to go. One change I’ve made since the last time I taught a graduate seminar on George Eliot is building in some attention to her place in current literary culture: I hope that will broaden the conversation we have about her work in ways that complement the reading we’ll do in academic criticism.

I meet with English 1010 for the first time tomorrow, and with English 5450 for the first time on Monday. I think I have all the paperwork ready — attendance sheets, spreadsheets for keeping records, syllabi, handouts. I have built the Blackboard sites and, for English 5450, a (private) WordPress site. I have printed tomorrow’s lecture notes and done Monday’s readings. Now I just have to show up!

I’m not the only one starting school this week: my son begins at Dalhousie this term, as a student in the Faculty of Computer Science. I wrote an open letter to him for the excellent blog Hook and Eye that includes my general advice for all students just starting down this path. Good luck to all of them, including Owen, and may we all have a stimulating, thought-provoking time!

This Week in Class Prep: Syllabus Season

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

escher12It’s that time of year again for academics around here: the fall term is closing in, and that means it’s time to finalize the syllabi for our classes.

For me, this is a process that generates equal parts enthusiasm and irritation. I enjoy the optimism of course planning: it’s fun to anticipate the intellectual sparks that can fly if you juxtapose readings in a clever way; it’s exciting to review the readings themselves and be reminded of how interesting and provocative and artful they are; it’s challenging to think hard about what you hope students will learn and practice and achieve in a class, and then to tweak and add and structure assignment sequences and course requirements that you believe will support those goals.

At the same time, it is frustrating trying to formulate class policies that often have little to do with those educational goals and a lot to do with managing student behavior and expectations — not to mention anticipating complaints and appeals. Rebecca Schuman is right that once upon a time, a course syllabus was a much more minimalist document. I still have the one-page (mimeographed!) outlines distributed at the outset of my own undergraduate classes. Things they usually didn’t include: attendance policies; policies on late assignments; statements on plagiarism and academic integrity; deadlines for (or detailed information about) course assignments; explanations of course objectives or ‘learning outcomes’ … the list could go on.

I actually think there are good reasons to include most of these things — I think it’s progress, not a problem, that (for instance) it is now standard to include information about accessibility and accommodation and many of the other support systems in place to help students succeed, while expanding our syllabi to explain academic matters in more detail implicitly acknowledges that students arrive in a classroom from a range of backgrounds. A lot of what used to be taken for granted shouldn’t have been assumed then either. Just saying, as Schuman suggests (facetiously, of course, as is her style, but also with some serious intent) that “what you need is to learn and learn well” is to mystify both the process and the goals of our work in an unproductive way. I also find it very helpful, just in practical terms, to have a common document we can all turn to when there’s a question about how the class operates. Everyone, I always point out (especially when being asked for special treatment), is bound by the terms of the syllabus, including me.

At the same time, I worry that the more we try to spell everything out, the more we unintentionally send the message that anything not made explicit in the syllabus does not apply. And I get frustrated at some of the things it now seems to be necessary to spell out. Why should I need to tell students that they are expected to attend class, do the readings, and turn in their assignments? What else would they think is required of them? Indeed, why else did they register in the course in the first place? Why, too, does my individual syllabus have to reiterate the terms of university-wide policies, as if (and indeed, this can turn out to be the finding, on appeal) a student isn’t bound by Dalhousie’s policies on plagiarism if I didn’t say so in so many words? Where is the role of common sense, in some of this, and of basic respect — not just for everyone else in the classroom, but for the underlying purpose of the whole enterprise? So much of my syllabus is actually aimed, not at the students working in good faith to make as much of the opportunity as they can (and occasionally needing some consideration, because life happens), but at students who would rather not — not do the reading, not show up, not do preparatory work that will make their longer assignments better, not, not, not … unless I coerce them. I try to make the syllabus a positive document, but 20 years of teaching has taught me that it is most needed in the negative situations.

One of the things I had to do for my promotion file (now, thank goodness, all assembled) was collect copies of the syllabi for every class I’ve taught at Dalhousie since I started here in 1995. It was more interesting than I expected, looking them over. I haven’t changed my approach dramatically: I’ve always tried to be clear, specific, and detailed. The tone has varied somewhat, though, as I have experimented with being more formal or more friendly, more rule-oriented or more goal-oriented. At this point I don’t think there is one right way of writing a syllabus. (I’m also very aware that context makes a big difference: for instance, this instructor has a lot more control than I do over who joins her class and when — our add-drop period is over 2 weeks long, and students do not need my permission to enroll, so I have to think about students’ relationship to the syllabus differently. Also, and this is just personal, I guess, I hate the idea of spending that much time reading a boring document aloud. I prefer to hit on the key points then come back to larger issues of purpose and motivation over the term, as we approach different tasks.) The only rule I’d stand behind absolutely is clarity — both in how you actually write the document and in how you understand and communicate its purpose to your class. I now think of the syllabus as one important part of the scaffolding of a successful course. Ideally, it’s both stable and open enough that you and your students can rely on it and yet go beyond it to the real course content.

If you’re curious what my current fall syllabi look like, I’ve posted drafts of them here (and last fall’s are here).

Not a Very Good Week

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

I’m in a slump — a writing slump, mostly, but (and relatedly) also an emotional slump. I will come out of it, I’m sure, but so far I haven’t figured out exactly how. Some of it is my usual summertime blues, which have been exacerbated this year by how grey and rainy it has been here. Some of it is discouragement about the writing I did over my sabbatical, which right now seems to have led only to dead ends. Some of it is frustration because the teaching tasks I turned to, to cheer myself up by at least getting something concrete done, haven’t gone that well. For instance, twice while I was entering my long list of reserve readings for my fall graduate seminar the library’s form timed out on me after I’d put in all the information — which is a painstaking process, believe me! (Third time’s the charm, thank goodness.)

That’s small potatoes, though, compared to discovering that the work I’d put in on my Blackboard site for my fall intro class has been completely wiped out (my section was mistakenly reset instead of someone else’s). I can do it all again — I’ll have to, obviously. But what is torturing me at the moment is that back in June, when I last worked on the site, I had hit on what I thought was a really good way not just of reorganizing the course materials but of explaining and introducing them: after several tries, I’d found a tone and wording that I thought hit just the note I wanted. And now, of course, I can’t remember exactly what I’d said and done. No doubt it was not perfect in some ideal way, but in my mind now there will always be an imagined but inaccessible Better Version. Working on Blackboard is so fun, too: who wouldn’t want to spend more time on it! That will teach me to start early.

Then there’s the Amazing Disappearing Notebook. For every seminar class I teach, I use a spiral-bound notebook for preparing my own class notes and for taking notes during discussion. I have a shelf full of these notebooks! It is very helpful to leaf through previous versions of them when prepping for a new iteration of a course, so naturally I went looking for my notebook from the last time I taught my grad seminar on George Eliot — and it is nowhere to be found. I have emptied filing cabinets and shelves and done all the insane things you do when you are sure something is in the room but you can’t see it anywhere. It’s not as if I absolutely need it: I wasn’t going to actually use it for teaching the class this time. But I really would have liked to have it as a prompt and a reminder! So, one more small source of frustration that adds to my cumulative feeling of failure.

On all these fronts and more, the fix is simple, in theory at least: I need to take a deep breath and just get back to work. I need to commit to a new writing project and stop second-guessing its interest or value; I need to get the darned Blackboard site back into shape, even if it isn’t the perfect shape; I need to finish drafting my syllabi and handouts and organizing reserve materials and rereading key materials so I’m ready for the first day. I need — and this one is harder — to return to my sabbatical writing and figure out (again) how to shape and direct it. I will do all of these things. In my entire life, I have actually never not done the things required of me — so there’s that to remember, when I exacerbate my slump by criticizing my own lack of resilience and lapses in productivity.

I did get my application for promotion completed, so that’s one (pretty big) thing crossed off my list. I suppose that means this is not a good time to mope in public! Someone in a position to (and with a mandate to) judge might be watching. As I’ve said before, though, I think it’s misleading to pretend everything’s going swimmingly all of the time. Who knows: my discouragement might actually end up being perversely encouraging for someone else who is also feeling stymied. It happens! You’re not alone. We’ll get past it.

Update: I went for a walk, then got some small but necessary things done (finished a draft syllabus, did final edits on a submission for Open Letters, played around with my book order for a winter-term course). I feel a bit better. Maybe tomorrow I might even be ready to tackle some of the big things!

This Week in ‘Not My Sabbatical Any More’

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

eggMy sabbatical actually ended officially on June 30. I marked the transition with my week’s vacation in Vancouver, and returned to Halifax ready to get back to “regular” work. It’s summer, of course, which means I’m still not teaching, but there’s definitely been a shift in my attitude, attention, and priorities.

For one thing, the fall term is no longer a distant possibility: now it’s a looming reality! So I’ve started drafting syllabi and organizing Blackboard sites. The former is always fun (because it’s both creative and optimistic), while the latter usually has me cursing within the first 15 minutes. I’m incorporating a blog into my graduate seminar, too, and so I’m setting up a WordPress site for that class as well. (Yes, Blackboard now has “blog” options, but one of the points of blogs is that they are not inside boxes. Even though I’m keeping the site private — at least to start with — working in WordPress at least feels more like actual blogging, and one of my goals is to help my students get more comfortable with the possibility of writing where other people can see them. Usually even writing where other students can see them causes a bit of anxiety at first.)

As preparation for the new teaching term, I’ve also been doing some housekeeping: sorting through my file cabinets, recycling redundant or outdated course materials in old teaching folders and properly sorting and filing what remains; archiving hard copies of grade sheets and course evaluations; and generally trying to put things in order. I keep things reasonably organized anyway (at least judging from the stacks of papers and folders visible on some of my colleagues’ floors and bookshelves — though presumably their “system” works for them) but it was a bit surprising to realize how much miscellaneous paper I still had around to deal with.

Another motivation for getting my paperwork sorted is that after much wavering and soul-searching I decided that after 20 years at Dalhousie it was time to put in my application for promotion to Professor. I earned tenure and promotion to Associate Professor back in 2000. It’s actually up to me entirely whether I ever seek another promotion, but it’s tacitly expected that we are all working with that ambition in mind. I’ve been puzzling about how much, if at all, to talk about this here. I think it’s best that I stay away from specifics, both of the case I’m making and of how the application seems to be going, at least until it’s all over. It’s a long, rigorous, and carefully orchestrated process involving every administrative level of the two universities where I am a faculty member (Dalhousie and the University of King’s College — please don’t ask me to explain the relationship, or the complexities of my joint appointment!) as well as external reviewers from at least four other universities. I won’t know the final outcome of my application, one way or the other, until next May, though I suppose I’ll have had some strong hints in the meantime. It will feel strange to keep fairly quiet about something that is going to preoccupy me mentally for months, but I think that talking about the specifics in public might come across as unprofessional, especially to those scrutinizing my file who aren’t accustomed to the relative openness of social media.

cassatI will say, though, just generally, that I am citing Novel Readings as part of my case, and that I am including it in my research dossier alongside my more conventional scholarship. (My teaching and service contributions are the other two major components of the application.) Where or how to “count” blogging in tenure and promotion cases has been much discussed online of course, and I reread a lot of articles and blog posts — including some of my own — on this topic before making up my mind about how I wanted to present Novel Readings. I was ultimately guided, of course, by departmental and faculty regulations. One of the most important tasks for me this month has been writing up a cover letter and research statement to explain and justify not just the blogging component of my file but also the other online writing I’ve been doing. This has been pretty challenging, mostly because there is so much I want to say but I have limited space to say it in. The other rhetorical challenge is to be assertive without sounding defensive, even though I would be a fool not to expect some skeptical responses. I think (hope) I have found the right tone as well as the right key points to make. I guess I’ll find out!

The other parts of the application are demanding in much more mundane ways. I had to compile a folder of every one of my course outlines, for example, which is one sure way to discover that your filing has not been 100% scrupulous over the years. I need to include a list of every class I’ve ever taught and its actual enrollment, and a table of all my numerical scores on course evaluations next to the departmental mean — I am very fortunate that our office administrator, who is helping me with all this, is fabulously competent, efficient, and also very kindhearted, which means almost more than anything else when you’re doing something that inevitably makes you feel exposed and vulnerable. (“It’s like taking your clothes off in public,” I said to her plaintively the other day, “and at my age, too!”)

I was warned that putting this file together was a big job, and it definitely is: it’s most of what I have been doing, really, since the beginning of July. It has been surprisingly interesting in some ways: even gathering my old course outlines has prompted some reflections on what has changed and what has stayed the same in my pedagogy since 1995. Still, I’m glad that my part of it is almost over: I should be able to turn everything in next week, and then, for me, it’s all about the waiting. And it’s also back to the teaching prep, and on with the writing — I’ve got three book reviews on my to-do list in the short term, plus a guest post for another blog, and I have some essay ideas that I’d like to solidify, before term begins and before the momentum I’d built up during my sabbatical fades away entirely.

This Week In My Sabbatical: Winding Down and Waiting

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

  My sabbatical ends officially on June 30. I leave on June 29 for a week’s vacation in Vancouver, so that will mark the transition nicely. I already feel a shift, though, not just in how I’m using my time but in my attitude: the big push I was making to get new writing done has yielded to a period in which I have to wait and see what comes of it, and while I haven’t stopped writing (or planning more new writing), I’ve started doing some prep work for my fall classes, like setting up Blackboard sites. I could put that stuff off until later in the summer, but I don’t enjoy doing it, so picking away at it a bit at a time works best for me. I also like the sites to be up and running before term begins, so that students can check them out.

I suppose another approach would be to rush headlong at these last two weeks and see how much else I can get done. Also, the summer months are meant for research and writing as well, so it’s not as if June 30 is my last day! I will certainly try to do what Jo calls “laying down some breadcrumbs,” so that after my vacation I can keep going, both with the George Eliot material and with some other ideas I have about possibly “pitchable” pieces. I love writing for Open Letters (honestly, I don’t think you’ll get better edits anywhere you submit — I never have), and I don’t intend to stop, but I also want to branch out a bit if I can, for the experience and exposure, for my own self-confidence, and, just a little bit, for the health of my c.v., so that I can point to work I’ve had accepted at places where I’m not on the masthead…in case, just for instance, I decide it’s time I applied for a promotion or something like that.

But speaking of Open Letters, that’s where much of my attention has been this week, as I’ve been working on a review of Kate Atkinson’s A God in Ruins for the July issue, wrangling contributors for our annual Summer Reading feature, and doing my share of editing on the other new pieces we’ve got.

I wish I had something more exciting to report!  But it has been a pretty uneventful week, really, at least where sabbatical stuff is concerned. It is also my son’s last week of high school, so that’s eventful in its own way: it has made me more sentimental than I expected, and very conscious of the passage of time. I’m kind of in between books, so I’m rereading Venetia just for fun; my book club meets in a week or so to discuss Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net, so that’s probably my next serious read.

This Week In My Sabbatical: Bits and Pieces

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

escher12The most important bits and pieces at issue this week, sabbatical-wise, are those I’ve been breaking off from the large chunk of writing I worked on through January, February, and March. At 18,000+ words it was unwieldy for any purpose, including a potential book chapter, and it was always going to need pruning, but the more I stared at it the more it seemed to me that in putting everything I could think of into it, I had smothered rather than revealing its purpose. There were always some smaller parts that in my mind were the really key ones, so over the past week or so I experimentally cut them out and patched them together into something much smaller and more focused. Now I’m cautiously adding material to this new micro-version, trying to find the sweet spot at which the main idea is sufficiently amplified without being either tediously repetitive or blurry from extraneous details.

I have no idea if, strategically, it is right to be working on refining smaller pieces right now rather than churning out more messy rough material. It has certainly helped my day-to-day motivation and focus, but of course that might be relief at turning away from something more difficult (because more inchoate) rather than a sign that I’ve found my way. On the other hand, it is easier to build something larger out of good small pieces that (cross your fingers) have already been published than to go the other way. Also, as I’ve talked about here before, I’ve had ongoing doubts about whether my approach really lends itself to a book-length project, and this feeling had only been growing as I tried to work out my ideas in book-sized forms. I’m not abandoning a book as a possible outcome down the road, but right now it feels important that I just keep writing, and it turns out I feel much more comfortable doing that on a smaller scale. So I’ll keep doing that for a while and then take stock of the results.

todolistI’ve also been adding bits and pieces to my fall syllabi. I had vowed not to turn my attention to class prep until my sabbatical was over at the end of June (with the exception of book orders, which were due April 1). The temptation is very strong, though, because the tasks are so definite, and it’s a relief to do something so familiar. I also really enjoy preparing syllabi! It’s such an optimistic thing to do. My other justification for poking away a little at teaching stuff now is that neither of my fall classes exactly reiterates a previous offering. It’s true that I have taught them both before (I’m doing a section of one of our intro classes and a graduate seminar on George Eliot) — but the intro section is going to be the largest version I’ve ever done (it’s capped at 90), while I want to integrate some different ideas and materials into the graduate seminar. So both are going to take some careful planning, and, for the grad seminar, some advance reading. That’s a good excuse for drawing up some tentative schedules, at least, just to see what the options and challenges are going to be.

Untitled-2Finally, I’ve been reading in bits and pieces too. After I finished Station Eleven, I relaxed with some Julie James, whose romances usually amuse me — they are like reading romantic comedies. My favorite is Practice Makes Perfect (which should really be a movie already), but this time I picked up Just the Sexiest Man Alive, an early one that I hadn’t read before. It was just OK — I guess she got better with practice. Two things do bother me about her books, though, that were definitely problems in this case. One is that I think they are badly edited: there are recurrent errors, particularly confusing “lay” and “lie,” and there are also lots of examples of awkward exposition, as if nobody could think of a graceful way to give us relevant facts except to add “he said, referring to X” after a bit of dialogue. The other is that her people are just too good-looking: the men are always “tall, dark, and smoldering” (or, in a variation, “tall, dark, and glowering”) with great physiques, while her women are all stereotypically gorgeous, with long wavy hair, perfect skin, and dream bodies. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! Or, actually, yes there is, because people who aren’t beautiful do in fact fall in love, and there’s something boring about perfection.

Then I decided it was time I try some of Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse books, which (shockingly, I know) I haven’t read any of. This didn’t go well: I started at the beginning, as I usually do, with Last Bus to Woodstock, and I disliked Morse so intensely I had to stop. Is he always such a sexist pig, or does Dexter outgrow that?

HildNow I’m reading Nicola Griffith’s Hild and really enjoying it. It is giving me much the same trouble that King Hereafter did, as it is full of names I can’t pronounce* or remember, so I’m frequently confused about who is doing what to whom and why, but Hild herself is a brilliantly realized character, and the larger arc of the story is quite gripping. The prose, too, is really wonderful. The overall effect is kind of Dunnett-like, with the lavish details that sensually evoke a strange time and place, but the language is more poetic, with lighter exposition and more reliance on striking moments or images. At this point (about half way through) I’m particularly interested in the emphasis on reading as something that makes new kinds of communication possible, across distances but also between women, who are often separated from friends and family because of their roles as “peaceweavers,” used to create and sustain strategic alliances. The reading is going quite slowly, but now that I’m well into the book and have a sense of how it works, I think it will move faster for me. I’m looking forward to writing about it in more detail when I’m done.

*Updated: I have belatedly discovered a note on pronunciation at the end of the book — and a glossary! Very helpful. That will teach me not to read through the whole table of contents before starting the novel itself.

The Past Couple of Weeks In My Sabbatical: Various!

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How’s that for a vague title for a blog post? But it is accurate, really: for the past couple of weeks my attention and energy have been focused on a range of different things. I  haven’t felt inspired to write a sabbatical update for a while precisely because my activities seemed so miscellaneous, and not that variable, either, from week to week. But it seems like time to round things up.

First, some good news! One of the questions Jo asks us at each ‘Meeting With Your Writing‘ session is how we’d like to feel while we’re working. At the top of each new entry in my MWYW notebook is my answer, which has become a kind of mantra for me this term: “engaged, optimistic, productive.” It’s optimism that has given me the most trouble, what with winter and all, but sometimes it has also been hard to tell if I’m being productive because I haven’t been quite clear on my goals. The past week has been a particularly good one in all these respects, though, because I decided on a concrete task I wanted to accomplish that turned out to be really fun to work on. Imagine that: I have been enjoying writing! In fact, it came so (relatively) easily and has caused, so far, so little hair-tearing and second-guessing that I’m starting to think I must have gone horribly astray. It’s a subset of the larger plans I have been following for the George Eliot book project, something I thought would work well at essay-length. It’s now in a reasonably clean draft awaiting a final round of editing and revision. We’ll see what becomes of it, but right now I’m just happy and energized by the experience of pulling it together.

In other good news, the May issue of Open Letters Monthly went up on schedule; if you haven’t already checked it out, I hope you will! As always, the pieces range very widely — more widely, we think, than in most other literary journals. Books reviewed include Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, Ian Bostridge’s Schubert’s Winter Journey, Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, and Helen Vendler’s The Ocean, The Bird, and the Scholar; John Cotter contributed a thought-provoking essay on the possibility that the gigantic glass atrium at Boston’s MFA is a symptom of our changing relationship with art; Steve Donoghue tests (as only he can) the claims of a new translation of the Iliad to be “declaimable”; and I offer a “Second Glance” at Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret. I thought about Open Letters today when I read this piece on the effects of Britain’s REF: “Taking on a journal editorship? That means you’ll be helping other scholars publish their REF research, but what about yours? Can you spare that kind of time?” I realize that Open Letters is not necessarily the kind of journal editorship she has in mind (though I have had British scholars tell me that writing for it is something that they think works in their favor), but I have often felt particularly pleased that one thing I’ve been able to do there is show off how smart and interesting my academic colleagues and connections are. I don’t know if that kind of editorial role will count in my favor if I ever go up for promotion, but I think (I hope) that we are still clinging to more generous and collegial models of scholarship on our side of the pond — for now, and maybe just barely, as that piece emphasizes.

unbrokenThe other writing I’ve done has already shown up here, in my posts on my recent reading. I’m currently completing my “war in the Pacific” unit with Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken, which I gave my husband for Christmas. I rarely risk buying him books, but he likes good nonfiction, and this one seemed ready-made for him, as he’s a long-time track and field enthusiast and his father piloted a B-24 during WWII. He really enjoyed it, and I’m enjoying it too — though “enjoy” probably isn’t quite the right word for either of us, since it’s rather a grim story! A lot of it is, naturally, very reminiscent of elements of both The Narrow Road to the Deep North (particularly the treatment of the Allied POWs in the Japanese camps) and Shame and the Captives (especially the context and commentary Hillenbrand provides on the aspects of Japanese culture that contributed to the extreme brutality of the camps). I find Hillenbrand’s narrative a bit clunky or heavy-handed at times: it has that “one damn thing after another” rhythm that is perhaps inevitable when you’re putting together a lot of material into a fairly straightforward chronological account. I suspect that images from the novels will stick with me longer than anything from her book except the outline of Zamperini’s undeniably astonishing story.

Once I’m done with Unbroken I think I’ll be happy to read something that doesn’t involve beatings, excrement, or hungry sharks. I picked out Nicola Griffith’s Hild and Sybille Bedford’s A Legacy with my birthday gift card to Bookmark, so one of them will likely be next, though I also got Aislinn Hunter’s The World Before Us from the library today because a friend highly recommended it. I’m starting to be more aware of the luxury it is to be choosing my reading material this freely: it won’t be long before my sabbatical is officially over (June 30 suddenly doesn’t seem so far away!), and I’ve already started thinking a bit about fall classes, as book orders were already due. I’m second reader on an MA thesis that should get to me in early June, and I’m also participating in a PhD comprehensive exam coming up in just a couple of weeks, for which I’ve been having semi-regular meetings with the student. A sabbatical is not, in fact, ever a period of complete isolation or exemption from one’s regular duties! But come September I’ll be doing required reading again.

This Week in My Sabbatical: Out of Sync

Rohan Maitzen6 Comments

thedanceToday is the last day of classes in Dal’s winter term. Usually, that would mean I am feeling elated, relieved, deflated — and a bit panicked at the looming prospect of grading final papers and exams. But because I’m on sabbatical, it’s just another day, which brings on its own feelings, including some disorientation. The thing about academic life is that it has such strong rhythms, such intense recurring cycles of highs and lows, from the optimistic frazzle of the first day of classes through the mid-term slump and slog to the year-end celebration. Everyone goes through these phases, teachers and students alike, and the result is a strong, if occasionally fraught, camaraderie as we go up and down together.

I’m not sorry, of course, to be out of that rhythm for a while, though as my sabbatical goes along one of its beneficent effects is that I’m thinking positively about teaching again (which was not so much the case late last December) and I’m almost (almost) ready to enter wholeheartedly back into conversations about graduate student funding, curriculum reform, class scheduling, and all the other topics that draw us together even as they drive us apart (academics are nothing if not fractious!). It’s nice not to be on that erratic hamster wheel and to pace myself according to my own priorities, and also to follow my own energy as it rises and falls instead of forcing myself to meet a steady stream of external demands. When you’ve been “in school” one way or another as long as I have, though, it is odd to have time passing in this steadier, more self-reflective way, especially when you are working on campus and everyone around you is caught up in the familiar pattern.

WP_20150409_002My own sabbatical rhythm — which has never quite settled into a regular beat thanks to the nightmarish winter we’ve had — has been more disrupted than usual this week, first by the Easter weekend and then yet another snowstorm Tuesday morning, and then by the beginning of a long-anticipated kitchen make-over. We are finally saying goodbye to our aging laminate cupboards and vintage 80’s appliances, which were failing bit by bit and thus ultimately forced our hand: there comes a point where it seems like throwing good money after bad to keep them running. We aren’t doing anything structural — just taking the old stuff out and replacing it with new stuff — but even so there’s a lot of domestic disruption (something they rather downplay in those TV shows where a top-to-bottom renovation appears to happen in 60 minutes less commercials). To my surprise, the thing I find most frustrating is not having a proper sink. Even filling a kettle becomes a logistical challenge in a shallow bathroom sink, and you know how important my morning tea is to me!

I did manage a Meeting With Your Writing session on Thursday, and I’m puttering away at my George Eliot stuff. I think I have reached some tentative conclusions about the book vs. essay question, but I’m still turning things around in my head. While it’s true I don’t have to decide now, I think I will work better if I have a better understanding of my goals (short term and long term), so it’s useful brooding provided I can keep the neuroses under control. I haven’t gotten much concentrated reading done since I finished The Good Terrorist (which we discussed energetically at my book club meeting last night): inspired by Oleander, Jacaranda, I have begun rereading Moon Tiger, and I’m dipping into Ellis Peters‘s One Corpse Too Many in the interstices of the day. I also read, or really skimmed, Nora Roberts’s The Next Always. I kind of liked the ones I read from her Bride Quartet, because I liked the insider look at the different expertise each heroine had. But they were like literary jello: smooth, sweet, but nothing at all to sink your teeth into! The Next Always is about the same except it has a ghost and a stalker plot that seemed like a cheap way to provide the crisis and resolution required to come to the HEA.

And that’s where I am as this week in my sabbatical wraps up! Work on the kitchen continues next week and then there’s a lull before the final stages can be done; now that the planning and packing and reorganizing is done and the project is actually underway, it should be easier (in between specific events) to get back into a writing rhythm. I hope so! One thing about witnessing the end-of-term rush is that it reminds me that this time to work on my own terms is both precious and fleeting.