This Week In My Classes

This Week in My Classes: Not with a bang but a whimper

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

Classes wrapped up for the term on Monday. Usually I feel deflated, if also a bit relieved, after my last class meetings. For all that the ongoing pressure to be ready and keep on top of everything can be wearing, the energy I get from actually being in the classroom more than makes up for it. Last term, 19th-C Fiction certainly had its challenges, and students were not as forthcoming in discussion as I would have liked, but overall I thought the course went well, and at least judging by their course evaluations, so did the students. But it was Mystery and Detective Fiction that felt like the most fun: it had great energy and a higher participation level than I have usually had in it, and I usually left the room feeling a dizzying blend of exhaustion and exhilaration. (I wonder if any of that was really due to how fiercely overheated our classroom was.) This term, however, the adrenaline buzz was rarely there after either class, and so now it feels more like stopping than concluding, if that makes sense — more like “we made it” than “we did it!”

This is not to say there wasn’t a lot of good, smart discussion in both classes, and in Intro especially there was a small core of students who seemed to be really present and engaged in all the ways I always hope for. But, as I’ve complained about before, attendance this term — in both classes — was erratic to poor, and in the 4th-year seminar, a context in which I’m used to the students really carrying the ball, it often felt like I was working awfully hard to coax any contributions out of them … which was especially odd because I know (from other classes and from one-on-one meetings) that you couldn’t wish for a nicer or brighter bunch of students. And in our seminar it’s not that they were (as far as I’m aware!) unhappy or bored or being sullenly uncooperative. They were just — on average — kind of quiet. In retrospect, I wonder if it would have helped to have assigned specific critical articles along with our primary readings. I don’t typically do this in undergraduate classes, because I’m usually assigning such a lot of reading to begin with (though for 4th-year seminars I always put a range of articles and books on reserve or on Blackboard) . In this case, though, the novels on their own were not that demanding, and I felt at times as if that had led the students to underestimate the critical work they could (should) be doing. When (if) I offer this particular seminar again, I may build that component in.

In contrast, I think that the next time I teach Intro I will dial back the amount of assigned reading and allow more time for in-class workshops, writing exercises, and group activities — more hands-on practice for everything from punctuation and citations to close reading. Last year I taught a full-year section, and for this half-year course I more or less just adapted the second term of last year’s syllabus. But even without the full week’s worth of classes we ended up losing to storm days, we were a bit rushed because I always forget how much time the logistics take up when you’re starting a course from scratch. Also, over a full year it’s possible to do more repetition and rehearsal of key concepts so that there’s more chance they will sink in, whereas with just one term I think different strategies may be called for. I don’t think we covered an unreasonable amount this term (and I think in many ways the variety keeps things interesting for us all); it’s more a question of shifting the emphasis a bit more next time from reading to writing.

We aren’t entirely done with this term’s classes, of course. I’ve received one set of final essays, which I’ve begun working my way through, and the other batch arrives Friday. Then the final exam for Intro is April 23: the one perk of having it so late in the exam period is that I’ll certainly have time to grade and return all the essays before then. After the exams are marked and final grades calculated and filed, it will be time for my favorite end-of-term activity: cleaning my office! And after that, it will be mental housekeeping time: sorting and setting priorities for summer research and writing projects.

This Week In My Classes: Endings and Beginnings

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

We aren’t quite done with classes here, at least not those of us on a MWF schedule – my last meetings are Monday. It’s hard to believe we are so close to finishing, though, mostly because today is the first day there’s any hint of spring at all, and usually I strongly associate the last couple of weeks of classes with the lifting of the winter gloom. Two big storms in the last 10 days certainly knocked out that possibility. But whatever the weather, the last few classes of the term do have their own seasonal rhythm: paper proposals sprout; new material gives way to review; editing worksheets and exam review handouts compete for their time in the sun.

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In Intro today it’s our second editing workshop: last time the students did a peer editing exercise, but I’ve opted for a self-editing exercise today in which they will go through their own papers and produce reverse outlines. It can be harder to look critically at your own work than at someone else’s, so I think it’s useful to have some concrete strategies for checking whether you have accomplished what you want and need to. They are writing on Carol Shields’s Unless but the topics they are choosing from are generated by lines in A Room of One’s Own — I wanted to highlight the idea (integral to both books, too) that writers are in conversation with each other and that we, in turn, enter into that conversation when we try to understand and interpret their works. My impression is that Room was (again) quite difficult for a lot of them to make sense of, so I’m glad for their sakes that I didn’t set this up as a straight comparative essay. That said, Unless poses its own challenges, not least because of its somewhat fragmented and episodic form. One good thing about assigning a book structured like that is that it’s harder to fall into plot summary: when you have to collect evidence and examples across a broad and scattered territory, I think you’re more aware of the details as adding up to something, rather than just moving along in linear fashion. We have one more session to come, for exam review and closing perorations, and then a couple of weeks until the final, so I’ll have plenty of time to comment on and return the essays. I think I may have been a bit cranky in my comments on the last set. That did have the beneficent side-effect of getting more people than usual in to see me. This is a not-unfamiliar phenomenon for me as a parent as well – say something temperately and you are likely to end up repeating it, but jump up and down about it and somehow it sticks. But even if yelling sometimes seems to work better, that doesn’t make it ideal!

primesuspectIn Women & Detective Fiction, we’ve just wrapped up class discussions of Prime Suspect I. The series seems to have gone over unusually well this year: people who hardly talked at all up till now have been pitching in, and the overall energy has seemed good. We lost (another!) Wednesday to last week’s blizzard, so I’ve had to give up a planned final round-table to discuss people’s term paper projects: I usually make time for this in the schedule and when it has actually happened, it has always been very interesting and, I think, productive as a way to wrap up a seminar. But instead we’ll be having our last group presentation (on Prime Suspect) — which should also be a way to go out on a high note, given how creative and informative the presentations have all been this term. Though there is no requirement that the presentations incorporate a game (just that they include some form of class activity), I think every group has made one up! And that means there are usually prizes in the form of sugary treats.

This was also the week that book orders were due for the fall term! I always try to meet these deadlines — partly because I’m dutiful, partly because I know the bookstore sets them early so that they can work out their buy-back arrangements for students, and partly because I like to have this done and not have to worry about it any more. It’s possible to spend a really long time waffling over book choices but there really are no right answers, so sometimes just making the call and clicking ‘submit’ on the form is better than dithering any longer. I wasn’t waffling much over the next iteration of Mystery and Detective Fiction, which will be pretty much the same book list as this year. The only change I’m making is swapping out An Unsuitable Job for a Woman and putting back a short story anthology. That lets me ease up the pace intermittently, and it also simplifies the logistics of assigning the stories I always use (some Poe, some Sherlock Holmes, etc.).

I did run through a lot of variations on the book list for 19th-Century Fiction from Dickens to Hardy, though. I used to just pick five (or, once upon a time, six) ‘representative’ novels without much concern for an overarching theme. Lately, though, I’ve been experimenting with more deliberate groupings and liking it: last time I did this course, I chose all books dealing one way or another with troublesome or rule-breaking women (Bleak House, Cranford, The Mill on the Floss, Lady Audley’s Secret, Tess). Then this fall in the Austen to Dickens course I did variations on the Bildungsroman (Persuasion, Waverley, David Copperfield, Jane Eyre, North and South). For next fall I decided on the theme of vocation, or (as these are two persistent concepts of vocation in the 19thC novel) on love and work. I had three sure things (Middlemarch, Great Expectations, Jude the Obscure) so my dithering was all about which other books to include. Most years I would fill the list in with something by Trollope, something by Gaskell, and/or an example of sensation fiction. This year I decided I’d like to include The Odd Women, which I’ve rarely assigned in lecture courses, and it occurred to me that though I usually keep the Brontës in the earlier course, Villette would be a really interesting contrast in its treatment of women and work and love and solitude … so I cut short the dithering and put it on the list. I’ve never lectured on it, and I haven’t even assigned it since maybe 1998, so that gives me something new to work on for the course, which is always a good thing.  I think the students will like it (and be surprised by it), and the more I think about it, the more provocative I think it will be in juxtaposition to our other readings. Also, much as I love Trollope, I don’t usually get much enthusiasm for him from students (Barchester Towers is boring?!), and I’m feeling a bit tired of sensation novels at the moment, so all in all, I feel good about this impulsive choice. And even if I didn’t, too late now! villette

Once again it’s just two courses for me in the fall. One’s big-ish (90) and one’s kind of medium-sized (40), and both are likely to be full, or very nearly so — but I plan the assignments carefully knowing I’ll be doing all the marking myself, and as both are classes I’m quite comfortable in I think it will be an energetic and not overwhelming term. But it’s still far off on the horizon: now that the books are ordered, I’ll be turning my attention back to the here and now, which means wrapping up this term and lining up my writing priorities for the summer. As always, the academic work cycle epitomizes Eliot’s wise remark that “every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.”

This Week In My Classes: Canons and Complications

Rohan Maitzen10 Comments

unlessMy classes aren’t meeting at all today, thanks to the “weather bomb” we are currently enjoying. It is uncanny how many storms have come through on Wednesdays this winter! And it’s an unpleasant surprise to get a big one this late in the term. The bright side seems to be that it’s supposed to warm up significantly by the weekend, so we can hope that all this snow will just be a bad memory before too long.

What is it interrupting? Well, in Intro to Prose and Fiction we’ve moved on to Carol Shields’s Unless, a novel I appreciate more and more the more time I spend with it. It’s not an in-your-face kind of novel, but (appropriately, given its themes) its sharp edges can take you by surprise: a modest-seeming story about a woman writer rethinking her life and work because of a family crisis, it’s also a commentary on women’s writing and the literary canon, and on women writers and literary culture. Reta is seeking an explanation for her daughter Norah’s decision to drop out of ordinary life and sit speechless on the curb holding a sign that says only ‘GOODNESS.’ In a series of increasingly acerbic letters to intellectuals, writers, and critics (never actually sent) Reta connects Norah’s rejection of the world with the world’s indifference (or worse) to women. To the magazine that has run an advertisement for a series called “Great Minds of the Western Intellectual World,” for instance, Reta writes,

I have a nineteen-year old daughter who is going through a sort of soak of depression . . . which a friend of mine suspects is brought about by such offerings as your Great Minds of the WIW, not just your particular October ad, of course, but a long accumulation of shaded brown print and noble brows, reproduced year after year, all of it pressing down insidiously and expressing a callous lack of curiosity about great women’s minds, a complete unawareness, in fact. . . .

I realize I cannot influence your advertising policy. My only hope is that my daughter, her name is Norah, will not pick up a copy of this magazine, read this page, and understand, as I have for the first time, how casually and completely she is shut out of the universe. I have two other daughters too — Christine, Natalie — and I worry about them both. All the time.

To the author of an article on “The History of Dictionaries,” she observes “there is not a single woman mentioned in the whole body of your very long article (16 pages, double columns), not in any context, not once.” In wry anticipation of the VIDA counts (and their critics), she notes,

Bean counting is tiring, and tiresome, but your voice, Mr. Valkner, and your platform … carry great authority. You certainly understand that the women who fall even casually under your influence (mea culpa) are made to serve an apprenticeship in self-denigration.

 And later, addressing the author of a book review who calls women writers “the miniaturists of fiction,” she says,

It happens that I am the mother of a nineteen-year-old daughter who has been driven from the world by the suggestion that she is doomed to miniaturism. Her strategy  is self-sacrifice.

The letters punctuate the story of Reta’s reconsideration of her own writing: in particular, she is working on the sequel to her earlier work of light fiction, My Thyme is Up; in our class reading, we’ve just arrived at her conclusion that her new novel, “if it is to survive, must be redrafted,” so when we meet again on Friday I hope we’ll be able to have a good discussion about how and why Reta wants to write a different kind of book, with different kinds of options for her heroine, Alicia. Then next week we’ll consider her editor’s advice that she rework it to make it “one of those signal books of our time” — by making Alicia’s fiance, Roman, the central character:

‘I am talking about Roman being the moral centre of this book, and Alicia, for all her charms, is not capable of that role, surely you can see that. She writes fashion articles. She talks to her cat. She does yoga. She makes rice casseroles.’

‘It’s because she’s a woman.’

‘That’s not an issue at all. Surely you — ‘

‘But it is the issue.’

‘She is unable to make a claim to — She is undisciplined in her — She can’t focus the way Roman — She changes her mind about — She lacks — A reader, the serious reader that I have mind, would never accept her as the decisive fulcrum of a serious work of art that acts as a critique of our society while, at the same time, unrolling itself like a carpet of inevitability, narrativistically speaking.’

‘Because she’s a woman.’

‘Not at all, not at all.’

‘Because she’s a woman.’

Clipping these bits out on their own makes the novel sound more didactic than the experience of reading it actually is, partly because Shields plays around with the form of the novel, partly because the other anecdotes and memories Reta shares with us implicitly raise the questions these more pointed sections address explicitly, so that the book reads like an ongoing dialogue — internally, for Reta herself, and then with us — about what we look for in fiction, how we judge what we find, and how those questions are affected by gender. We’re reading it right after A Room of One’s Own, and many of the questions are the same: what (where) is the women’s literary tradition, what is the place or effect of anger in literature, how are our notions of literary greatness tied to ideas about scale? (Shields said “Jane Austen is important to me because she demonstrates how large narratives can occupy small spaces.”)

forrestIn Women & Detective Fiction, this week’s reading also raises questions about literary canons and standards, and how we decide what is worth reading and discussing, but in this case it does so more accidentally. I’m not someone who believes that we should assign only the books we believe to be The Greatest (even if we individually felt we could be confident about our standards). Universities are in the business of education, not adulation, and plenty of works that we might feel falter on some grounds are plenty interesting and significant (historically, theoretically, formally) on others. Courses vary in their purposes, too, and the best and most relevant conversations don’t always emerge from the most elegantly crafted narratives. Still, I do sometimes find my principles conflicting with my actual reading experience, and that’s how I’ve felt with Katherine V. Forrest’s Murder at the Nightwood Bar, which has been our class’s reading for the past week.

Murder at the Nightwood Bar is one in a series with inarguable significance (“First, first, first,” emphasizes Victoria Brownworth in her recent profile of Forrest), and it deals explicitly with questions of sexual identity and systemic discrimination both through its closeted detective (alienated, thus, both from her follow officers and from the lesbian community she engages with during the investigation) and through the crime itself. It sets up lots of good points of comparison with our other books, from the detective’s struggle over getting too personally involved with the case (or people involved in it) to the connections it makes between individual crimes and systemic injustices. As far as all that goes, I have no regrets about having added it to the syllabus this year. I just wish it were better written — yes, that awkward evaluative measure! Better at what, to what ends, as I’m always asking? In this case, I just mean “better at the words”: especially during the patient rereadings required for class prep, it has seemed stilted and inartistic, sometimes tediously so. I’ve felt no temptation to discuss anything that’s not literal about it: not its form or its style, not its voice, its attention to setting, none of those “literary” aspects. Mind you, it’s not the first of our readings to make that kind of reading seem beside the point: Agatha  Christie is also not particularly literary. But Christie’s prose has a clarity and economy that gives it its own (superficial?) elegance. That said, while Forrest may not be as good a stylist, her materials are more challenging — her agenda is more ambitious, and she gave us much more to talk about than Christie did, even though Christie is, of the two of them, the one who is obviously part of the ‘canon’ of detective fiction. Not every course can or should be a tour of “the best that has been thought and said” (as if we could be sure what those examples are — as Woolf says, “where books are concerned, it is notoriously difficult to fix labels of merit in such a way that they do not come off”). My goal is always to find the readings that are the best for my purposes, which in this case include considering a wide range of different examples of detective fiction by women as well as examples that are in fruitful conversation with each other when collected on the syllabus. My hope is that they will also reward close reading and rereading. At this point, then, I’m ambivalent about Murder at the Nightwood Bar, then, which certainly serves the first purpose but doesn’t quite fulfill my hopes for the second.

This Week In My Classes: Writing and Talking

Rohan Maitzen7 Comments

escher12“‘It’s the season when the s–t hits the fan,” I observed to the students in my Intro class on Monday. And that’s the truth for all of us: from this point on in the semester, if we want to stay in control it’s all about setting priorities, managing time, and getting things done. For this class in particular, this week they turn in the first fairly heavily weighted essay (they’ve already done two short warm-up assignments, for practice and to clarify expectations). Today they brought in drafts and did a peer-editing exercise. I was pleased that everyone seemed to be taking it seriously. As I told them several times, even professional writers have editors, and editing is a crucial part of the writing process. I think it’s also interesting for them to see how their classmates have approached the same assignment. Sometimes it seems that students believe there’s One Right Way and if only they could guess what it is they could get one of those magical A things, but of course there isn’t, and that’s exactly what makes this kind of work both challenging and interesting. In any case, even those who might think they got little out of the workshop itself will benefit from having almost three more days to review and revise their own essay. I hope they take advantage of it!

The essay they’re working on is a comparative one on Night and The Road. This wraps up our mini-unit on horror and despair. Friday we start on A Room of One’s Own, which we’ll follow up with Unless: I was very pleased with this pairing last year, despite some fretting about the particular challenges of teaching feminism, and I hope it works as well again this time around.

In Women & Detective Fiction, we’re part way through our discussions of Sara Paretsky’s Indemnity Only. Discussion was so sluggish on Monday that I left class feeling quite fed up with everything! I even came up with a cunning plan for today in case I had the same pulling teeth sensation and decided drastic measures were called for … but they weren’t, which is definitely the happier outcome of the two. Still, there is a much larger cohort of non-talkers in this group than I’m used to in a seminar, which is an ongoing frustration. I have long had an explicit policy of not doing cold-calling in seminars: there are incentives built in for participation, and usually that’s enough even for quite shy students. Also (despite what some people may think) I go out of my way to be receptive and respectful: I hope students feel that when they do contribute to discussion, they are listened to and encouraged. I suppose that being really listened to may itself be a bit intimidating!

In this class too, deadlines are looming: they will be submitting paper proposals next week, so if I’m smart I’ll mark the first-year papers very promptly so I don’t have two sets of assignments on my conscience. The past couple of weeks have been very busy with administrative work, but after this Friday the schedule of meetings will lighten up, which will help me keep my mind on these tasks. I’ve also more or less completed two short-ish writing projects I agreed to do for a website being created by the British Library (I’m pretty excited about being involved with something for them!). They were harder than I expected, but also interesting. I was actually working on one of them last night, and as I struggled to fit in all the parts I wanted while not going too wildly over the proposed word limit, I felt a real kinship with my students, out there somewhere laboring over the drafts of their essays! I don’t know if it means anything to them, but I often mention in class now that I too have writing deadlines and challenges and editors. I even pass on little tricks I’ve developed that help me work through the frustrations of producing that “shitty first draft” — putting stuff I’m not happy with in different colored fonts, or surrounding it with XXX’s, or including editorial questions to myself in brackets, for instance, all of which frees me (at least a little) from thinking that because it’s not perfect yet I shouldn’t move on to write the next part. I know that for me it has been helpful to realize that I’m surrounded by writing that did not in fact magically appear in all its current erudition and elegance but had to be done by someone, worked on by someone, edited by someone … In our own ways, we’re all in this together, just trying to put words in the right order and contribute to the big, disorderly, kaleidoscopic conversation about literature!

This Week In My Classes: Marching Along

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

February break is only a memory now: even this short distance into March, it feels as if we’re hurtling towards the end of term. I usually find this an invigorating time in my classes, as all the ‘getting to know you’ stuff is over, we’ve developed some routines and, ideally, some rapport in the classroom, and we’re far enough along in the material that usually students’ confidence for engagement is greater.

I’m not feeling quite this surge this term. One reason is that the attendance in my Introduction to Prose and Fiction section has not been … robust. I’m trying not to take it personally; it helps that I’m hearing plenty of anecdata suggesting that absenteeism is a conspicuous issue for my colleagues and maybe more broadly around campus these days (“I’m glad it’s not just me,” said yet another colleague as we chatted about this on the stairs on Friday). I have been speculating that a discussion-based class might seem particularly expendable to students because of the excessively results-oriented culture they are currently steeped in: if they aren’t intrinsically drawn to the material (which is likely, in a course often taken to fulfill a requirement) and the results of attending (or not) aren’t overtly quantifiable, other things might well take priority. Naturally, I think that’s a shame: one day they may look back and realize that they missed a fairly rare (and potentially transformative) opportunity to get involved in a conversation with at least one person guaranteed to be “listening very intently to everything” they say. But who knows: maybe I (inevitably, egotistically) overestimate the value of spending that time in the room with me following my lesson plan! I have tried hard in recent years to make quite explicit the ways I see our classroom work feeding into the assignments on which they will be evaluated (and the skills and objectives both of these aspects of the course serve). But if they don’t see the pay-off  (or they aren’t even present to hear the peroration) and don’t care about the discussion for its own sake, there’s not much more I can do. Once again the gym analogy seems apt.

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For those Intro students who are coming to class, we’re working our way through The Road. I put a lot of work in preparing materials when I taught it for the first time last winter, so it’s nice to have a file of ideas and notes and handouts to draw on this time around, and to feel more certain what are useful lines of inquiry. For tomorrow’s class, where we’ll be focusing on McCarthy’s style, one of the most useful resources I have is my own blog post from last year, in which I asked (not disingenuously) whether McCarthy is a terrible writer – working through the post and then keeping up with the discussion that ensued was very stimulating, and as I’ve been rereading the book this year I’ve kept trying to figure out if there’s any way to answer the question more confidently than I could then. I’m still not sure, but I will say that on this rereading I’m taking what I can only describe as a tactile pleasure in his writing: I pause to read individual words or phrases out loud and enjoy their crunkly feeling, their resistance to easy reading — “rachitic,” “gryke,” “kerfs,” “claggy” — or, more rarely, their rhythmic poetry: “Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.” I also found, a bit to my surprise, that having spent more time intellectualizing the novel has not distanced me from it: rereading the final section this afternoon I found myself weeping uncontrollably. As I remarked on Twitter, I realize that crying over the book does nothing to settle the question of whether McCarthy’s a “good” writer. I wonder what value, if any, does attach to this kind of visceral response. There’s a way in which being moved to tears by a book is inarguable proof of at least something — but is it something about the reader or something about the book? It’s about the connection between reader and book, I suppose, that mysterious alchemical combination by which language becomes meaning and feeling of a particular, and sometimes particularly personal, kind. I value that kind of emotional connection: surely you would hardly choose to specialize in Victorian literature if you didn’t! But at least when I’m wearing my ‘professor’ hat I try to retain some skepticism about it too. Just because you can make me cry doesn’t make you right!

In my Women and Detective Fiction seminar, I’ve also been fretting a bit, not so much about attendance (though this group has not been as reliably present as I am used to in upper-level seminars) as about participation. Last week’s classes were pretty sluggish. But yesterday there was an up-tick in energy, so for now I have deferred my cunning plan to use some of the strategies I’m more accustomed to deploying in lower level classes: “think-pair-share” exercises, break-out groups, and so on. We are currently reading Sue Grafton’s ‘A’ is for Alibi: I had the sense on Friday that they mostly hadn’t even tried to do more than just read it, and I wonder if at first they were lulled into passivity by the fast-paced prose and suspenseful plot and forget to apply the critical frameworks we’ve been developing. By tomorrow we’ll have read to the end, so I expect we’ll talk a lot about [spoiler alert!] what it means that Kinsey turns out to have been sleeping with not just a suspect but one of the murderers: the novel raises all kinds of interesting questions about the temptations and risks of submission and the ways sexual desire can undermine a principled commitment to independence. The novel focuses especially on sexual politics as played out in marriage, but Kinsey’s role as a detective also prompts us to consider how these “private” issues intersect with wider questions of justice and accountability. I haven’t taught Grafton in a while and I’ve appreciated getting reacquainted with her tongue-in-cheek approach to the genre. I kept up with the series for a long time, but my interest in it has flagged over the years, partly because the humor that keeps this first one so fresh gives way to a much more sententious style. I should probably hunt up the latest ones just to see where things have gone. We start Indemnity Only next week and at this point I’m one Sara Paretsky behind as well.

This Week in My Classes: Great Fiction

Rohan Maitzen7 Comments

broadview short fiction

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)?

This Week In My Classes: Settling In, Stocking Up, Asking Questions

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

broadviewlnfIs 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.”

marpleFor 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.

This Winter Term: Some Small Good Things

Rohan Maitzen7 Comments

1005017_10152126924015803_2115018870_nI may have been in Nova Scotia almost 20 years, but it’s no secret that I have not adapted well to east coast winters. I complain about them a lot! It’s not even the cold and damp I hate so much as the stress of driving in snow and ice. If I could hibernate, or just opt out of work, school, appointments, and grocery shopping whenever the roads are bad, I might shut up about winter!

However, this particular winter (though the weather so far has been dreadful) I’m feeling grateful for a number of small things that are making my term easier. If I write them up here that will make it harder for me to forget them the next time there’s freezing drizzle on top of a foot of snow and everything starts looking bleak.

1. This is my first full term with a reserved parking spot. What a relief! Not only can I drop my kids at school without either forcing them to be uncomfortably early or fretting that I’ll arrive on campus too late and be stranded, but I can even leave and come back during the day if I want. Or make a morning appointment off campus and still come in to my office after. This flexibility would have been even nicer when the kids were smaller, but even now it sure feels liberating not to be worrying about this logistical issue every day.

2. This is my first term in many years without a 9:30 class. Happily, I have long managed to avoid 8:30 classes (by nature I’m a night owl, not a morning person), but even a 9:30 class means having very little prep time in the morning, which means knowing you have to arrive on campus basically ready to go, which means often doing prep in the evenings. I’m sure I’ll still do some reading or marking or making up handouts after dinner, but not as often, and at the very least I’ll know I have plenty of time to do things like finalize notes or print and copy materials on campus before I have to head into my first class.

3. And speaking of classrooms, for the first time that I can remember my classes are all meeting in the same building that my office is in. This is a huge break during the winter term! Not only will I save all kinds of time putting on winter gear and trekking across campus and back (and, of course, also miss the unpleasantness of going outside repeatedly in cold, wet, blustery weather), but I don’t have to teach in my winter boots in my usually overheated classrooms. Plus if I forget something, it’s literally right upstairs, so I don’t have to check and re-check the contents of my folders and bags quite so obsessively. Win! This is possible because …

4. I have a very modest number of students this term: only 2 classes, with 30 in one and 22 in the other. Classrooms in this building officially hold 36 students; my classes capped at 40 used to get scheduled in here regularly anyway but apparently the fire marshal has gotten serious and as a result (because they are pretty much always full) I’ve been exiled for them – and classes capped at 60 or 90 (like Mystery and Detective Fiction) of course always have to be elsewhere. So: more intimate groups, less marking, more discussion instead of lecturing, and all in one building. Hooray!

5. Finally, and not specifically teaching or work related, I just discovered Sun Butter. It really does taste just like peanut butter! I used to love peanut butter, but since my daughter was diagnosed with a severe peanut (and tree nut) allergy over a decade ago, we haven’t had any nut products in the house. Sun Butter is completely nut free! (It’s made of sesame seeds.) I always doubted the nut-free alternatives but a friend assured me she even preferred this to the real thing so I finally risked it … and it’s good! I’ve never resented going without nuts at home (it’s actually easier, too, than worrying about cross-contamination — we can all just relax and eat), but it’s nice to have an old favorite so nearly restored to me. And if I get more protein in the morning and that gives me extra energy, that may indeed be a plus for my teaching term.

You see? I said these were small good things*, but they add up! I’ve been surprised, actually, what a difference the first three especially are making to my frame of mind during what is usually such a stressful time. Do you have any small (or big!) changes this term that make your days a little better? Or any that you wish you could make?

*A small bad thing is that the fiction anthology I’m using doesn’t include “A Small, Good Thing,” which is one of my favorite short stories. But you can’t have everything!

Next Week In My Classes: Who, Me? Intimidating?

Rohan Maitzen10 Comments

Teaching evaluations (or “Student Ratings of Instruction” as we apparently call them these days) are a notoriously … imperfect … guide for future conduct. Probably because we all spent many, many years being graded, professors nonetheless read them obsessively compulsively carefully and fret about freak out pay special attention to the most negative ones, because at the end of the day, or the term, we want everyone to like us want to get an A hope to improve our pedagogy.

I haven’t seen my evaluations from last term yet, though I’m sure they’ll arrive in my inbox any day now (we’ve recently switched to online evaluations, which has added a new layer of complications and made the results even less robust than before). I have seen last year’s, however, and they were the usual blend of enthusiasm and disdain, gratitude and offense. Also as usual the balance tipped in the right direction, assuming that it is preferable to have more happy than discontented students. And, again as usual, what I’ve tried to focus on in them is not the outliers (good or bad) but any pattern of feedback (I so hate to think of these as “ratings,” as if I’m one option in a giant Cineplex) that teaches me something about how I teach — or at least about how I taught last year.

I did find one, and it was something I hadn’t seen before: a number of comments from students in my section of our first-year “Introduction to Literature” class who felt I was “intimidating.” It wasn’t by any means a unanimous perspective, but enough students used that very word to give me food for thought.

Now, I should say that I don’t consider it an altogether bad thing that some of my students found me or my course intimidating. To a certain extent, that was the effect I was going for, at least at the start of term. This is because I have run into enough Intro students who are taking English only to meet a requirement and fully expect it to be their “bird” course, or at any rate who are strongly inclined to make it a lower priority than their “hard” courses or the ones they see as more important (often, their science courses). There are also a lot of students in first year, including some  who consider themselves prospective English majors, who are more used to “expressing themselves” in English classes than learning specialized vocabulary and using it for well-reasoned critical analysis — who are surprised, that is, to find themselves faced with intellectually strenuous tasks and high standards. There are also, of course, students whose previous preparation — or just whose attitude and expectations — make them quite prepared to work and think hard, but they are typically outnumbered.

As a result, I usually start out emphasizing the stringency of the course. The tone I aim for is cheerful but uncompromising, about the logistics of the course (requirements, deadlines, policies, etc.) but also, and more importantly, about the skills and content it aims to teach. The message I seek to convey is quite simple: It is possible to do a better or a worse job of literary analysis. The goal of this class is to help you do a better job, which means both reading better (a matter of both knowledge and skills) and writing better (again, a matter of both knowledge and skills). It’s hard work, but it’s also fun and creative and important work (because the classroom is far from the only place we read, or write). I take it seriously, and so should you. I am passionate and enthusiastic about it, and I hope you will be too, but at the end of the day it’s not about what you like, it’s about what you learn.

In other words, I want them to take the class seriously and understand that they will have to work to get good results. It’s meant to be aspirational: I hope they will be motivated to rise to the challenge. But it’s also meant to be cautionary: don’t think you can phone it in, don’t blow me off. I mix in some inspiration too (some discussion about the value and beauty of literature), but to open the term, it’s the perspiration I usually emphasize, so that they’ll be ready to put in the work that enables us to have good, serious discussions about literature and criticism as we move through the term.

My first question, then, is: since I have always run the class more or less the same way, why was last year the first time I’m aware of that the intimidation factor persisted and became inhibiting? I was aware that the group was not (collectively) very relaxed: I fretted quite a lot last year about the low level of participation, for instance. It wasn’t a disaster — it ebbed and flowed — but compared to other sections of intro that I’ve taught, this was far from the most lively. And my second question is, how much, if anything, should I change?

I have a theory about the first question, which is that last year was the smallest section of intro I’ve ever taught at Dalhousie. Until recently, all of our first-year sections were capped at 55 and taught with one instructor and one TA. Now we have a range of class sizes, including one giant section (360, with multiple TAs), some in the middle, and some “baby” sections at 30 with just the instructor (our Writing Requirement rules mandate a maximum ratio of 30:1). I had a baby section last year that settled down at around 27 students. You’d think that would mean rainbows and lollipops and all good things, and it certainly felt luxurious in some respects, but my standard strategies evolved for bigger rooms and bigger numbers. In a group of nearly 60, the critical mass of both unmotivated and talkative students is bigger, so more students need the chastening “listen up!” approach while more students are present who are willing to join in a class discussion. My professorial presence is also more diffuse (if that makes sense) in a bigger room: in our smaller room, I may have seemed to be more “in your face.” And while in some ways it can be harder to put your hand up with more people around, in other ways you don’t stand out as much, so it can feel like the stakes are lower. I may be way off in these speculations, of course, but my guess is that I need to approach the smaller section (which is what I have again this term) aware that it’s a more intimate group and setting and thus requires a somewhat softer touch. What I don’t want to change is the overall message: that this is not a course to be taken lightly; that it requires attention and studying and commitment, not just showing up; that grades in English are not just a matter of opinion but of expertise and judgment.

So! With all this turning around in my head, as you can imagine I am both excited and anxious about our first meeting on Monday. I have been revising my notes, and I’m making plans for an ice-breaker exercise, nothing too fancy but something to get them talking to each other a bit on the first day, rather than mostly just listening or talking to me. Something I tell all of my classes is that literary criticism is something you get better at by doing — which includes class discussion (at some point I usually explain the concept of “coduction“) as well as both informal and formal writing. I hope that if they all hear their own voices in the classroom on the first day, in a nonthreatening context, it will ease them into the more important conversations to come. And I hope that if I set myself up initially as both professor and facilitator, they will find me less (but not un-) intimidating.

Do you have thoughts or experiences about being either intimidating or intimidated in class? I certainly remember professors I found intimidating, but I didn’t see that as their failing but rather as mine. Often, they were the ones I most admired and hoped to impress. I find it hard to imagine myself as intimidating (I often think of that wonderful line in Middlemarch about our “poor little eyes” behind the “big mask and the speaking-trumpet”) … but I realize we don’t always know how we strike other people, and I have occasionally had other indications that I seem harder, or harsher, than I knew. (I remember one of my own professors saying to me – quite out of the blue, it seemed! – “I always wonder what you’re thinking when you look at me that way.” Perhaps the natural cast of my face is just judgmental?)

This Week in My Classes: Term Limits and New Ideas

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

Arcimbolo LibrarianThis was the last week of fall term classes for us, which means concluding remarks and exam review and conferences about term papers — and then, beginning Monday, an influx of papers and exams to be marked, final grades to be calculated, and everything to be filed away and tidied up. I have an exam from 7-10 p.m. on the very last day of the exam period, which means I won’t be all done for quite a while yet.

It’s always bittersweet when the term ends. I put a lot of time and thought into preparing for each class hour, and a lot of energy goes into each actual meeting, which means I spend most of the term in a strange blend of panic and euphoria. When we’re done, I genuinely miss the buzz of meeting my students face to face and seeing what we can do with our material: even when a session doesn’t go particularly well, the challenge of it is definitely stimulating, and this year my mystery class especially was just a whole lot of fun. When a lot of smart students are really engaged and keeping me on my toes, it’s amazing how fast 50 minutes can go by! But I don’t miss the relentless pace of it all. What a relief it is to be home on a Friday night and be relaxing without the haunting awareness that by Sunday at the latest I have to be turning towards work again: the work I have to do for the next couple of weeks really can be managed in something more like regular office-job hours — unless I want to do a little puttering here and there evenings and weekends. I’m hoping that means I’ll be able to get some momentum on some reading and writing projects I’ve been deferring over the term. Ideally, I’ll get enough done that I can keep going on them when the winter term begins. This may mean not writing for the January issue Open Letters: much as I like to contribute, my recent pieces have not been entirely in line with my other writing priorities (especially the book on George Eliot I’m trying to conceptualize).

But as a wise woman once said, every limit is a beginning as well as an ending, and even as this term is winding down, things are heating up for the winter term, which starts exactly one month from today. Inquiries have been coming in about the waiting list for my intro section and about the readings for my 4th-year seminar; I’ve started roughing out my syllabi and I’ve got blank course spaces set up on Blackboard, with the goal of having materials ready for students well before the end of the month (in the spirit of ‘hit the ground running’).

And as if that isn’t enough, we’ve already had to organize our slate of classes for next year, and it won’t be long before we are asked to send in preliminary course descriptions and book lists, for promotional purposes. It usually makes me kind of cranky to be asked about next academic year when this one is still very much a work in progress, but on the other hand, the future is such a hopeful place to be! Drafting and redrafting possible book lists for the next incarnation of the Dickens-t0-Hardy course is pretty fun, and frustrations with this year’s assignments sequences are easier to handle when I think about them as learning experiences for next year’s New and Improved versions. (You can look forward to more posts about how I’m going to do everything different and better, especially the reading journals for the 19thC novels class.)

Looking even further ahead, I’ve been thinking more about the question of whether or what our students read outside of class and the perfectly reasonable point that we assign so dang much reading (ahem) that at least during the term it’s pretty challenging for them to be engaged in the book world more widely, even if that’s something they want. Of course, one reason I started this blog was because I was trying to figure out how to build some kind of relationship between my own academic reading and writing and that wider culture — and it has occurred to me that an obvious way to translate this impulse into pedagogy is to dream up a course that does something of the same thing, perhaps by combining assigned readings with readings students choose ‘from the field’ (books and reviews), and then requiring both standard essay assignments and different kinds of reports and reviews. It could be called “Books in the World” or something. Would this be a good first-year class? Or are the actual demands of any good book writing such that it would be better as a more advanced class, so that students will already have practised their writing skills and acquired some useful literary terminology and history?  In a recent interview, Daniel Mendelsohn proposes that students would be better off “reading Pauline Kael reviews in the New Yorker than Derrida” because when they begin “they literally have no idea, at first, what the point of being critical is.” I would be motivated by a somewhat similar impulse, I think: that they should have a sense of what (and where) the critical conversations are, because (as I do already say frequently in class) literature is not in fact written for the classroom but for the world.

This is still a very new idea for me, but maybe it’s actually a common approach and I’ve just been stuck (as we all so often are) in my own ‘how things are usually done’ rut. I’d be happy to know about any classes that are run along these lines, and also to know what anyone’s first impression is about this possibility.