This Week In My Classes

This Week In My Classes: Everything Else!

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

BigMagicFinalWhen it’s this quiet around here, that can only mean one thing: I am very busy elsewhere! The main reason I haven’t written up any new reading is that I’ve been working on a review for the next issue of Open Letters. Despite my best efforts, I’m still quite a slow and painstaking writer when I know it’s for a “formal” purpose (most of the time, I write with much greater freedom here, but there haven’t been quite the spin-off benefits in the rest of my writing life that I’m always hoping for). Sort of ironically, given that, the book I’ve been writing about is Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, which I picked up to read (not, initially, to review) precisely because I was feeling stymied about my writing and thought maybe she’d have some helpful tips. All I’ll say about the book for now is that it did indeed motivate me to do some writing!

I sent my draft of that review off to my co-editors for their input a couple of days ago and will come back to revisions once they are done with it. I’ve been writing for Open Letters for six years now (my very first piece went up in the October 2009 issue) and everyone there is now a friend as well as a colleague, but I still get butterflies when I post my work for their edits. If you’ve contributed to OLM you may sometimes have wondered what the process is like for the insiders: believe me, we are just as attentive and rigorous with each other’s work! And in a way it’s a more intense process for us, because we condense and redact editorial comments a lot of the time before sending them back to authors, whereas we see the edits on our own work quite unfiltered. To show what I mean, here’s a screen clipping of a typical* segment of one of my drafts (the first version of this review) festooned with suggestions (I won’t decode which font is which editor):

editingsample

(If you want to see the details, click on the image and it gets bigger). Even a piece that doesn’t provoke a lot of objections or corrections can generate a lot of debate about its argument or examples: it’s thrilling, really, to have so many smart people ready and willing to pay close attention to my writing. And while it can be intimidating, it’s done in such a supportive spirit that it’s somehow never discouraging. I’ve certainly never experienced anything like it in academic publishing.

Anyway, because I was using so much of my extra-curricular time writing the review, I haven’t done much other interesting reading, so I don’t have anything to write up for the blog. I have been slowly working through Adam Johnson’s Fortune Smiles, but as I’m going to be reviewing it for OLM for the next next issue, I won’t be blogging about it in any detail. (I can say, though, that it seems to me as extraordinary in its own way as The Orphan Master’s Son, which is one of the most memorable novels I’ve read in a long time.)

The other reason it has been quiet here is that I have been pretty busy on campus too — not so much with teaching, since my load this term is not heavy, but with administrative and advising work. I’ve already sent out a lot of reference letters and there are more requests coming in pretty steadily. Writing the letters themselves is often kind of uplifting, as you are cheering students on as they move into new, exciting phases of their lives. The paperwork is a real pain in the a–, though, even though these days much of it is virtual. No two places have the same forms or the same specific requirements, and often when there are forms they pose interesting technical challenges (yesterday, for instance, I ended up retyping several paragraphs into a fillable PDF because for whatever reason I could not get it to allow me to paste in the text of my letter, even though that is something I have done without difficulty on similar forms). As far as I know I have never screwed up anyone’s application by missing a deadline or sending the wrong materials to the wrong place or whatever, but it’s stressful worrying that I might lose track of something important.

Committee work, too, has been a bit hectic. One reason is that our department is steadily losing resources: we have five wonderful senior people now phasing into retirement (and more to come soon, it seems likely), which has lots of implications for administrative assignments as well as teaching capacity, and this fall at one point we also had four people on sick leave plus another on a personal leave — and that’s not even counting sabbaticals. We also have no truly “junior” people left in our tenure-track ranks as it has been so long since we made a permanent hire. It seems like many of our recent meetings have focused on reshuffling the people we still have in order to keep everything running, and it’s just barely working. Welcome to the downsized humanities. I’ll never forget the dean telling our Faculty a couple of years ago that we were all going to do “less with less and do it better.” The “less with less” part has certainly come true, but better? Well, we’re certainly doing our best, and every day I’m reminded how committed everyone is — to our students, first of all, but also to the university, in both its real and its ideal incarnation.

All is not gloom and doom, however! I thoroughly enjoyed the class my TA ran on “Araby” on Monday (as always, when I get to move back to the other side of the podium, I was reminded just how much I loved being an English student), and yesterday we had what I thought was quite a good session on Katherine Mansfield’s “The Garden Party.” In my graduate seminar, we struggled with the second half of The Mill on the Floss — not with actually reading it, of course, but with figuring it out. As I eventually said to them, one thing about the ending is it as good as tells us directly “you need to interpret this!” It’s not a novel that’s overtly metafictional in a cool postmodern way (not as much as Middlemarch is, anyway), but it constantly teases us about how fiction works and what its conventions are, as if to make sure we think about how The Mill on the Floss confronts them. We start Middlemarch on Monday; we’re taking it slowly, with just the first two books assigned, so I hope that allows them to linger over the reading and think about form as well as plot.

TLS_Cover_October__1186210hOne other piece of good news, which I kept quiet about until now because I was worried that (for who knows what reason) it might not actually come to fruition: in the summer I got the opportunity to review a book for the TLS (the TLS!), and after much waiting, my review has finally appeared in the current issue. I try not to be an “old media” snob, but there’s something about the TLS and its history that makes it pretty thrilling to see my name in its table of contents.

*OK, maybe not 100% typical – it looks like the new piece is coming through relatively unscathed, for instance! (Maybe I’m getting better at this?) But typical of sections that show fear. Never show fear in the shark tank – it’s like a faint trail of blood and they’ll always pick up on it!

This Week In My Classes: Strangeness and Subtlety

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

millonflossBecause of the Thanksgiving holiday on Monday, my graduate seminar didn’t meet this week. If only Eliot had written her novels in a different order, we could have used that extra time for reading through Middlemarch — always the book for which I like to allow the most weeks because it demands and rewards such luxurious patience. But we are only on The Mill on the Floss, so instead we just delayed our discussion of the second half. Not that The Mill on the Floss doesn’t also demand and reward patient reading! In fact, rereading it has been one of the best parts of the past couple of weeks for me. It still absorbs me, especially as we rush towards the final catastrophe in Books VI and VII. I hope the students feel the same way.

My Introduction to Prose and Fiction class, however, has two meetings this week. We have wrapped up our work on essays and are in the middle, now, of our short fiction unit. We read “The Yellow Wallpaper” for Wednesday’s class, and I was reminded all over again what a strange, creepy, brilliant story it is. Though obviously one key thing I wanted us to discuss (which we did) was Gilman’s critique — through her narrator’s sad, horrifying, weirdly comic disintegration (“I got so angry I bit off a little piece [of the bed] at one corner – but it hurt my teeth,” she says, with such disquieting reasonableness!) — of a whole destructive patriarchal system, I also tried to keep some emphasis on literary details, including symbolism (an easy one, in this case), personification, and imagery:

It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide — plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard-of contradictions.

The colour is repellent, almost revolting: a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight. It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others.

All of these vivid details contribute, of course, to our sense of her character and situation: it’s not hard to pick up on the wallpaper, and then the woman she “sees” behind the pattern, as a projection of her entrapment and despair. That’s one reason that the story’s a classic, and that it’s so fun as well as useful to teach: there are subtle details, but as a whole it’s almost as flamboyantly expressive as the wallpaper.

bviewshortfictionToday in our smaller tutorial my group will be reading a story that is equally artful but far more subtle: Kazuo Ishiguro’s “A Family Supper.” Here, I think, we will have to work much harder to move past our initial impressions of what the story is about, of what details in it are significant and how they add up. Ishiguro is a master of understatement but also of moods and shadows. Despite its innocuous-seeming title, “A Family Supper” has an atmosphere of menace from the opening account of the poisonous fugu fish, and the title itself starts to seem less and less innocent as we learn first of the death of the narrator’s mother (at another seemingly-innocuous supper) and then of a father who killed himself and his whole family to escape the dishonour of his failed business. There isn’t much overt action in the story, and the ending especially feels like an anti-climax. With Ishiguro, though, the conflicts tend to shimmer around the characters, to be represented as much by what they don’t say or do as by what they actually say or do.

I’ve been following Dorian’s wonderful series of posts about his short fiction class, and it has got me thinking about the role of leading questions in our teaching — often he comments on what he’s hoping or expecting students to come up with in response to his prompts, for instance. This is not the same as trying to steer them towards one “correct” answer, of course, and the process he describes is intensely familiar to me. There’s no point asking completely open-ended questions that, as far as you know, will get you nowhere in particular in terms of understanding the story in front of you, so we ask leading questions to help our students discover for themselves what we already know is there. The process also models for them the right (meaning most productive) kinds of questions to ask. But at the same time, you want to allow for different readings, for original observations, for the idiosyncrasy of genuine individual engagement. One reason I like to mix in stories I don’t already know well, like “A Family Supper,” is that it is easier for me to back off, to be open-mindedly curious and see where our discussion takes us. I have some ideas about the story’s central themes and how its specific details (the fugu fish, for instance) fit into them — but it’s still somewhat strange to me, and its subtlety means working harder to make something of it. I hope it isn’t too elusive for the students to take an interest in it. (Updated post-tutorial: I think we had quite a good discussion, particularly about the family dynamic in the story and the way both cultural and generational expectations and differences affect it. Some students said they found it frustrating that there’s so little action, or that the conflict feels so unresolved, but I suspect that’s one reason we ended up with so much to say about it — unlike a more plot-driven story, “A Family Supper” forces us to look for meaning in other places.)

Next week it’s “Araby” and then Mansfield’s “The Garden Party,” so back again to established classics. One of my TAs has volunteered to teach the session on “Araby,” which means I get to return to one of my favorite roles in the classroom — being a student again!

This Week In My Classes: Looking Ahead Already!

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

dalhousieWe’ve barely settled into a routine in this term’s classes but the call already went out for us to propose offerings for next year. This request seems to get earlier all the time, and often it’s an unwelcome distraction in the hubbub of the fall term. It’s also frustrating to have to make these decisions before you’re quite sure how things are going this time: the success (or not) of a particular course might be a reason either to try it again soon or to give it a rest for a while. This year I was glad to get the request, though, because it came just as I was thinking that — good as I think the readings are for my section of Intro to Literature, and confident as I am that the basic principles and sequences I follow make pedagogical sense — I am feeling a bit tired of the course and would like to try something different.

I do rotate through a fairly consistent set of classes most years, but I try to keep them fresh, which I do mostly by mixing up the reading lists. I’m passionate enough about the classes in Victorian literature that it’s hard to imagine ever tiring of them in any deep way, and the mystery class usually keeps me pretty engaged and entertained precisely because so much of what we cover is outside my usual territory. Intro classes can feel like more of a chore, though, partly because the ones I teach have such a generic mandate (literally generic, meaning, they are meant to introduce the major literary genres). That leaves a lot of latitude, of course, for building in thematic approaches or finding other ways to provide unity and momentum across the term. I think I haven’t done too badly with that over the years: we always read a lot of splendid short works and some of the combinations of longer texts I’ve assigned have been quite exciting to teach together. That includes this year’s pairing of Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and Carol Shields’s Unless: the first time I assigned them in juxtaposition it was actually kind of a random decision, but they turned out to play off each other quite brilliantly and I’m looking forward to working through them again.

Still: every intro class I’ve taught has been some variation on the same basic model, and when the call for proposals appeared in my inbox I was in the mood to seek out something genuinely new. As a result, I put myself down for a section of another of our intro-level courses, one I’ve never taught before: English 1050, Pulp Fiction. Here’s the basic course description from the university’s Calendar:

This course provides an entry point to the discussion of literature through ‘pulp’ genres such as romance, mystery/crime, the Western, sci-fi/fantasy, horror, sports literature, and comic books.

The first thing that might occur to you, looking at this, is that “pulp” is being used in a fairly imprecise way: the course sounds more like a general introduction to “genre fiction,” or to “popular” (rather than canonical) fiction. (I suspect that the course title was chosen partly as a marketing ploy.) Then, the list of possible genres covered is itself a bit oddly various. But we usually keep Calendar copy deliberately open-ended: specific enough to mark out some distinctive parameters for a class but vague or flexible enough that different people could take the job on and do it in a way that suits their interests and judgment.

ladyaudleyI don’t know yet how I’ll approach the “pulp fiction” class, much less which books I will assign. I do know, though, that I’m already interested in thinking about these questions, so that’s exciting. Looking at book lists from a couple of my colleagues who have taught the class before, they don’t actually strike me as very “pulpy,” at least not in the longer texts, which have included works by Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and Shakespeare. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that! Indeed, I can see how any of these writers might be used to provoke really exciting discussions about canonicity, literary prestige, historical shifts in taste and popularity, and so on.) I do have some relevant experience from teaching the mystery fiction class (a hard-boiled novel might make a good choice for this one), and over the last few years (thanks to Twitter and blogging friends) I have accumulated some helpful ideas about romance fiction, both in and out of the classroom (at the moment I’m tempted to assign Lord of Scoundrels). The Victorian period is also full of possibilities, including some I know well (Lady Audley’s Secret, for example) and some I know a bit about but haven’t actually read yet (such as H. Rider Haggard’s She or King Solomon’s Mines). I know basically nothing, so far, about Westerns (unless Cormac McCarthy counts, and though he is many things, I’m not sure “pulpy” is one of them), and have only a spotty sense of what might be a useful sci-fi or fantasy title for these purposes. Happily, I have until next fall to work out the reading list and until January 2017 to fix all the details — so you can expect to hear more about it here. If you have ideas for either primary or secondary sources to help me figure it all out, do let me know! I’d be especially interested to know how you would define “pulp fiction” as a category: it won’t be possible to make good choices for specific readings until I settle on a satisfactory working definition of the term, or at any rate choose the definition that my course will be organized around.*

It looks like I will also be teaching our survey of British Literature Since 1800, which I’ve done a couple of times before and very much enjoyed (but haven’t taught since 2010), plus two Victorian classes – The 19th-Century Novel from Dickens to Hardy and an upper-level seminar on the ‘Woman Question’ (which I haven’t taught since 2011). So, my 2016-17 courses will be a good mix of levels and material, and will involve plenty of class prep that won’t seem at all routine.

But for now, it’s back to the realities of my 2015-16 classes … though not quite yet, since it’s a long weekend. Happy Canadian Thanksgiving!

*Quick update: After posting this I read James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, which was one of the first titles I thought of as I brainstormed possible readings. It certainly is lurid and suspenseful — and it’s short and reads briskly, too. That combination keeps it on the list of possibilities, as for a first-year course (and one that’s also supposed to spend class time on writing skills) I can’t get too ambitious with the reading list.

This Week In My Classes: Reading Against the Grain

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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.