That’s the long and the short of it! Or, I should say, between my two classes we’re reading both long and short examples of it. What a treat.

Last week the university closed (because BLIZZARD!) just before my Introduction to Prose and Fiction class was supposed to meet to talk about Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour.” I ended up compressing some brief mention of it into our next session, which was officially on Poe’s “The Black Cat.” Though these are great stories, the main purpose of those lessons was setting out some key vocabulary for analyzing short fiction (again with the critical tool-kits!), from basic stuff like “exposition” and “characterization” and “setting” to different varieties of narrators to the ever-vexing notion of “theme.” Now that these terms have been introduced, we can review them as necessary while actually using them to talk about our readings, which for another few classes will be more short stories.

I consider short stories very hard work: as I often remark to my students, their length (or rather, their brevity) is misleading! The nice thing about Victorian triple-deckers is that if you don’t get the significance of a detail the first time you see it, it will almost certainly recur another 47 more times until you do get it.  I usually finish a short story feeling as if I have walked off a narrative cliff where I expected there to be much more solid ground: where are the other 790 pages? So I have to go back and work through it again, and again, and again (and usually, again and again!) until I think I know what has just happened. I really enjoy the process, and yet it does not come naturally to me as a reader, which is probably why I almost never choose short story collections for my own leisure reading. The stories we’re doing are so splendid, though, that they make me think I should reconsider. Today, for instance, we discussed Joyce’s “Araby”: everything about it is just so satisfying. I thought the class discussion was very good, too, with lots of participation and what seemed like genuine engagement. Friday’s assignment is Katherine Mansfield’s “The Garden Party,” which is not as economically beautiful but is still dense with interesting things. And then next week it’s Alice Munro’s “Friend of My Youth” and Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Interpreter of Maladies.” And then (thankfully, given what a tough wintry time we’ve been having) we get a scheduled day off, because MUNRO DAY.

One thing I did in today’s class that I have done only rarely before is a bit of “cold calling” on students. I have been pleased with the level of participation so far in this class, but it has also become very clear that there are five or six students who will readily carry it if I let them, and I decided that I wanted to break that pattern up before it sets. I tried to be unthreatening and non-confrontational about it, but I think I made the point in practice that I also make in my syllabus, which is that literary criticism is something you learn by doing, and what we do as critics is try out our readings on other attentive readers. Everyone I called on was able to contribute something, so I think I’ll keep this up! It took a mental push for me to do it, but it felt just fine once I got started.

In Women and Detective Fiction, we’ve moved on from short fiction to our first long — and great — reading, Gaudy Night. I’ve said plenty here about this novel before, and so far I don’t have anything to add. (That post and the ensuing discussion, by the way, stand out for me as one of my favorite and also one of my most valuable blogging experiences.) I can’t really tell yet how this group of students is responding to the novel, as we only just got going on it. As usual, there were signs of some unease over the class issues, but I thought there was a bit less resistance to Harriet’s judgmental habits than on other occasions, and at least one student took her side against Mrs. Bendick — or, rather, agreed that Mrs. Bendick’s farm career was a waste of her very different education. For me it’s quite interesting reading Sayers right after Christie and Nancy Drew, neither of which really offers much of literary or thematic substance…or character development, for that matter. Plenty of interesting things arise from reading the other two, but Sayers is just so much more interesting. Assuming I teach this seminar again in the future (yes, I’m reconsidering book lists again already!) I may rethink my choices. At a minimum, I think I should do a full-length Christie novel rather than short stories. The problem is that I really don’t want to read all the Miss Marple novels in order to pick which one. Would anyone like to suggest a couple of options that highlight women’s roles in some way (besides Miss Marple herself as a woman detective)?

Is it possible that we’ve already finished two full weeks of classes? Well, that time just flew by!

I think one reason it seems as if the term is still only just beginning is that today is also the last day of the add-drop period, which is the bane of my teaching life ever single term. Why in my day you picked your classes before the semester began, you showed up for your classes when the semester began — and then you just kept on showing up until they were over! And it was up hill both ways! Harumph. But seriously, having two weeks out of a single term in which new students may show up at any point and supposedly current students may or may not . . . well, it’s a pain, because along with this “shopping period” often comes an attitude that nothing you might have missed during it should really count, which of course is impossible. I can’t let 1/6 of the term go by and do nothing that matters! And if I did, it would be an insult to the students who have shown up since Day 1. So, I start when the term starts, and if students want to shop around they have to be aware that there are consequences. This is a perennial complaint, and I am in fact starting to explore if there’s anything at all we can do to influence administrators so that the pedagogical insanity of the current system can be ameliorated. At the very least I dream of being able to remove registered students from the class if they fail to show up on the first day (or heck, in the first week) so that I can settle things one way or another for students on the waiting list. Attendance would go way up for the first week of classes, I bet, which would be good for everyone, and students would realize that their behaviour around registration isn’t just an annoyance for professors but can be a genuine headache for other students.

Anyway, enough grumbling. I have done my best to stay calm and just get on with teaching, and in my section of Intro that means we’ve actually almost finished our first unit, on essays. I’m using a new book this year, the literary non-fiction volume of Broadview’s new Introduction to Literature set, and I’m very happy with the selections in it. We started with Twain’s “Advice to Youth,” which I thought would be fun and thus help my campaign to be less intimidating. We’ve also read Swift, Orwell, Woolf, and, for today, Miriam Toew’s “A Father’s Faith,” which I like so much that I’ve added A Complicated Kindness to my TBR list.

I can’t know if the cause is my somewhat revised approach or the different group or both, but class participation in Intro is already more lively than it was most of the time last year, so I’m optimistic that as the term goes on and we get into longer and more challenging material, the atmosphere will stay engaged and collaborative. I use a lot of time early in the term for what I (unoriginally) call “stocking their critical toolboxes,” that is, building up a vocabulary of precise terms for discussing literature. This inevitably cuts into the time we have for talking in detail about the readings, but as we move along I can scale back on technical stuff, so today was mostly about Toews and Monday we should also be able to focus almost entirely on our grimly gripping excerpt from Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families.

In Women and Detective Fiction we’ve also started with shorter works, and in a sense here too we began by stocking up on analytical tools, though of a different kind. What questions are illuminating and productive to ask of our readings? What contexts do we need – literary, historical, critical – to talk well about them? Because not everyone in the class has done any previous classes on detective fiction (though a majority have in fact taken the lower-level survey class) I lead off with a lecture on the history of the genre and reviewed some key critical concepts and conventions, and we read a handful of ‘classic’ texts (Poe, Conan Doyle, and Hammett). Then we looked at a couple of early women’s crime stories – Mary Wilkins Freeman’s “The Long Arm” and Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury of Her Peers.”

For the last two classes we’ve been reading a selection of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple stories. This is a group of smart, keen upper-level students, and so it is interesting to me both intellectually and pedagogically that it was difficult to generate much discussion of Christie. It’s possible that two classes on these readings is one too many because honestly, the stories aren’t that interesting. Can I say that? There are certainly many interesting aspects of them, considered in our context – Miss Marple herself is an intriguing character; the stories frequently make little points about how women’s expertise can be overlooked, or how women themselves, if they aren’t young and sexy, are overlooked; there are some class issues; there’s the problem of treating violent death as a puzzle rather than a human tragedy. But there’s not much to be said about language, style, and form, or about other themes. The students remarked how hard it quickly became to tell the stories apart or remember what detail came from which one. The characters are quite 2-dimensional, and the mysteries unfold with a predictable rhythm, right down to Miss Marple’s charmingly self-deprecating and digressive version of the “reveal” scene.  My sense that we were already running out of steam in the first class led me to prepare an exercise for today that focused on precisely this problem (how well do these stories reward close reading?). I asked them to consider what other short fiction they’d studied and with what emphases, and then to consider Edmund Wilson’s infamous essay “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” I explicitly and sincerely told them that I was not setting Wilson up as a straw man. I think he has a good point – several good points, in fact! But I also think a case can be made against his case for capital-L Literature. I thought this might generate some intense debate about literary merit as a concept, but it didn’t, quite. One reason was that it turned out many students had studied very little short fiction! I was surprised. I fully expected that they would all have read at least some of Dubliners, and/or some array of the usual suspects from Katherine Mansfield to Carver or Hemingway to Alice Munro. But no! So asking them what they “typically” focused on when discussing short stories went pretty much nowhere.

The other inhibition I thought I sensed, though I realize I may be misreading or over-reading (both hazards of my training!), was about the whole concept of literary merit: nobody who spoke up, at any rate, championed Wilson’s point of view or took the position that, clever as they are, Christie’s stories are, really and truly, just not as rich, interesting, or worth our time as “The Dead” (or, since most of them hadn’t read “The Dead,” some other work of Literature). I wonder if we have educated them into extreme caution about such value judgments (I do my part in that with my lecture on Christie vs. the Difficult Modernists in the mystery survey class – and, indeed, through the whole way in which I frame the class as a test of the oft-assumed hierarchy between literary and genre fiction). Or maybe they really do see no qualitative difference (which I admit would shock me), or if they are worried about criticizing the assigned course readings, or if they just in some way aren’t ready for that conversation, or if they really enjoyed Christie’s stories and don’t want to feel bad about it, or what. Well, as I remarked at the end of class, Nancy Drew (who we turn to next) is not going to make this question go away but in many respects will exacerbate it.

Every year my rate of posting (never particularly frequent or steady anyway) falls off at this time of year thanks to the rising pressure of other reading and writing — much of it kind of mind-numbing (midterms, for instance) and thus sloth-inducing when it’s done. That’s about where I am this week, with two sets of midterms in (one now marked – hooray!) and various proposals and papers imminent. Still, when I reflect how much I had going on this time last year, especially with the all-new and very labor-intensive Somerville seminar, I can’t really complain: overall, this is a much less hectic term. That’s what makes it possible for me to be at least contemplating getting another review done for Open Letters this month — though my attempts to write it have been going badly so far.

In Mystery and Detective Fiction we wrapped up Knots and Crosses before the latest midterm and we’ve just started on Indemnity Only. In my usual mental game of musical chairs for this course, I’ve starting thinking it’s time to rotate Paretsky out in favor of ‘A’ is for Alibi next time around, just for some variety, but I always enjoy teaching Indemnity Only. As with Rankin, Paretsky has later novels that are richer qua novels, but in both cases these series starters do a lot of useful setting-up work and are more self-consciously messing about with genre conventions, which works well in a survey course. I rattled off way too many ‘opening questions’ in a hurry in yesterday’s class and felt bad about it afterwards: tomorrow I will be sure to slow down, filter the key ones for our particular attention, and allow for a lot more discussion. I think defensiveness about working on an overtly feminist text had something to do with my feeling that the framing issues needed to be addressed so fully, but it’s a mistake to let hypothetical carpers set my agenda. At the same time, though, I think it makes sense to anticipate some potential misunderstandings or knee-jerk responses, and to do some basic things like point out that “feminism” is a word that does not have a single fixed meaning. When we were discussing Knots and Crosses this year I tried to emphasize more than usual that Rankin explores ways in which crime is gendered; we also always discuss the novel’s interest in masculine identity and the cost of living up to certain ideals of “manly” strength, as exemplified by Rebus’s SAS training. I hoped that would make Paretsky’s (and V. I.’s) commitment to challenging gender norms ‘belong.’ But I’m sure there will be some of the usual irritated comments, and that’s fine: we come to discuss the book, not to share its values.

In 19th-Century Fiction we have wrapped up our time on David Copperfield and begun reading North and South. It has been a couple of years since I’ve assigned North and South, and I’m coming back to it with pleasure: it’s always one of my favorites, and happily it is often popular with the students too, as they find Margaret a strong and interesting character (she should be especially welcome after the insufferable Dora and the almost as tedious Agnes!) and appreciate the explicitly political drama. Besides thinking about Gaskell, I’ve been thinking a lot about the assignment sequence I’ve used this term and in last term’s Dickens-to-Hardy class. Some aspects of it do just what I had hoped they would, but the reading journals in particular continue to be a mixed success — successful, that is, only for the students who don’t need special prodding to do them regularly and thoughtfully. I’ve been thinking that I may have to set questions for them that would require them to be up to date with the reading to answer, and that would quite deliberately target issues and scenes I plan to discuss in class — which might increase the participation rate. But while that sounds efficient in those ways, it also stifles creativity and independent thinking about the books, which I do value and want to encourage and even see more of. How to find the right balance between coercion and liberty? Well, that’s an appropriate enough question to be pondering while reading this particular novel, I suppose.

And on that note, back to rereading it for tomorrow’s session.

We had our last class on Jane Eyre in 19th-Century Fiction on Monday. Reflecting on my own diminishing enthusiasm for the novel, I’ve been thinking that one of my problems is not only over-familiarity but also difficulty seeing the novel anymore — it just doesn’t rise fresh from the page anymore but comes trailing clouds of interpretation. Why is this any different from any other novels I assign? I’m not sure! But somehow Jane Eyre just feels blurry to me now rather than sharp and exhilarating. I’m not saying I couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for it, especially during class discussion or while talking through essay ideas with students. And I’m certainly not saying I don’t think it’s a great and important novel. I just think it’s time to put it on hiatus from my syllabus for a bit. Maybe next time around I should take the plunge and assign Wuthering Heights instead. I’ve subbed in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall a few times, and it is one of my very favourites to read and to teach, but I’ve never actually taught Wuthering Heights, mostly because I have never liked it. And really, what kind of excuse is that?

Next up for us in this class is David Copperfield. This is all going to be quite fresh, as I come into it with no stash of pre-existing teaching materials or lecture notes. I’ve been mapping out a tentative set of topics for each of our eight (eight!) class meetings but I also want to defer some planning until I see how discussion goes. Also, given the luxury of so many sessions (it takes time, after all, to read 855 pages) I want to use more class time for group discussion and perhaps some collaborative exercises, in addition to the usual mix of call-and-response ‘lecture’ time. Today I did lecture for most of the time, setting up some context for Dickens himself and also some frameworks I hope will be helpful as they read on. One thing I wanted to address up front, for example, was the question of “excess.” I quoted that bit by Nick Hornby about the current preoccupation with “spare” writing and made some suggestions about what ethos is served by an aesthetic of abundance, from a principle of social inclusivity to an anti-utilitarian joy in the sheer possibilities of language and story-telling.* I also usually start a big novel like this with some suggestions about information management: the idea that Dickens’s novels are often structured as a ‘theme and variations,’ for instance. Motifs that get started right away in David Copperfield include bad husbands and child wives, education, parenting, and childhood: on Monday we’ll have a less structured discussion just collecting lots of examples under some of these headings to get a preliminary sense of what pattern emerges, and we’ll spend time, too, just getting to know the people. I’ll probably leave careful discussion of David’s narration until a bit later, but we’ve worked on retrospective narration as an important feature of Jane Eyre, so we should be ready to think about its effects here too. Oh, how I hope they get some pleasure out of the novel! I urged them today to let themselves have fun with it, which means, among other things, making sure to manage their time well enough that they aren’t reading it in such a rush that its length is just frustrating.

In Mystery and Detective Fiction we are also working on a story about growing up, P. D. James’s An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. One of the things I usually emphasize when teaching this novel is the extent to which James is self-consciously working less in the tradition of the sensation or crime novel than of the domestic realists of the 19th-century. She cites Austen in particular as an influence, along with Trollope and George Eliot. Her interest in moral questions is really clear in this novel, which is one of the darkest in this course — not because the crime is necessarily the most violent (though I wonder how exactly we would measure that!) but because, as Cordelia reflects, it comes from something “stronger than wickedness, cruelty or expedience. Evil.” “Evil” is a strong word, and a powerfully moral one. It also has theological connotations, but it’s a strictly, and shockingly, human form of evil that plans and executes Mark Callender’s horrible death. Monday, when everyone should have read to the end, we’ll focus on the confrontation between Cordelia and the murderer, which continues a very Victorian theme of love countering calculation — the language of the killer is explicitly utilitarian, though in the narrowest sense of that philosophy. We’ve been talking about Cordelia’s youth and what will be required for her to grow up into a successful private investigator: will she have to outgrow things like compassion, give up getting personally involved, in order to become professional? Does a P.I. have to be tough? I find James’s exploration of this problem (an ongoing one for female private investigators especially) subtle and interesting. Unsuitable Job is one of my favourite books on the class list — but it is typically the least popular one (well, next to The Moonstone) on class evaluations. I might swap it out next year for something new, not because I don’t think it works well in the course but because of all the books assigned it’s probably the least integral to the overall history of the genre we trace out over the term. If I took it out, maybe I could also take out Knots and Crosses and then replace the two together with a longer, more complex Rebus novel. On the other hand, there is a strong preference among students in this class for shorter books, so that might be risky. (Why am I already thinking about next year? Because we’ve already had to work out our offerings, which means the call for class descriptions and at least tentative reading lists can’t be far away.)

*As an aside, I asked if they had heard of Nick Hornby and they didn’t recognize him at all until I linked his name to a couple of film adaptations of his books. I seem to draw blanks all the time now when I try to make connections from our readings to other books — in class but also one on one with students. This has me wondering, since a lot of my references are not (I don’t think) to particularly obscure writers: what are they reading? Perhaps (as they often say) they don’t have time to read outside of class, but I don’t get the impression that they are much engaged with books in kind of a general way, or with the ‘book world’ reflected through reviews or prizes — much less blogs. This is only a very cursory impression, of course, but it has me thinking about how we could do more as a department to connect what we do with what goes on with books elsewhere, which is of course the ongoing motivation of this blog!