This Week In My Classes

Not Blogging But Drowning

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OK, I’m not really drowning, as this is my ‘light’ term and I’m also lucky enough to have a TA to share the essays with in my larger class. But working through papers and exams is really sapping my psychic energy right now. I hope–no, plan!–to have the last of the essays done tomorrow. Then I’ll be back! There’s nothing like being immersed in student writing to make you question your teaching and assignment strategies, and so Mark Bauerlein’s provocative post on his own decision to assign “all summary, no critical thinking” in his freshman comp class next time is timely and may provoke me all the way to a post of my own. I’m certainly wondering if the ‘critical essay’ will continue to be a standard part of my assignment sequences, even for upper-level classes. Marc Bousquet’s equally provocative post “Robots are Grading Your Papers!” is also timely: though I’m not (happily) teaching in anything like the kind of mechanical context he describes, and I’m not sure that working with students to produce writing that is more academic is what I want to do, I will be thinking about how to change my assignments to increase the amount of genuine engagement, not just between the students and the material, but between me and the students. I have the very strong feeling this term that I was asking students to do too many things at once that were new, difficult, and poorly understood, and that my own expectations about how they should prepare for and accomplish these things were not congruent with their own habits and expectations. This may be just the usual slump that comes from working through a large pile of assignments in a short period of time, but at this point my own level of dissatisfaction is high enough that I’m pretty motivated to think about how else to proceed next time.

First, though, I have ten more essays to mark. And one revised thesis chapter to attend to.

This Week In My Classes: (How to Avoid) Reinventing the Wheel

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

It’s too late now to do anything organized about this problem this term, but as I work my way through the next-to-last assignments my students are doing I’m puzzling over why so many of them seem not to have learned much from the assignments they have already turned in and had returned. It seems a no-brainer to me that you would scrutinize a returned assignment to learn how to do better next time: that’s the point, that’s why this is called ‘education,’ that’s why I write comments and corrections on it in the first place–that’s why I hold office hours, too, so that if my written comments don’t give you enough to go on, you can follow up in person. But I’m not the only resource, and for some problems (apostrophe errors, for instance) I’m not the best one to turn to, not because I can’t explain apostrophe errors, but because you can look those up easily on your own and save our inevitably limited one-on-one time for higher order things. Obvious as it seems to me that you don’t just note the grade and file the assignment away (or recycle it), though, I’m convinced that many of them simply put finished work behind them and move on to the next task as if it is unrelated.

It’s possible that a lot of students are actually diligently following up on my comments and just making very slow progress. It’s possible, too, that a lot of the problems I see are the result of haste rather than ignorance, and that they persist because the students get no better at time management as the term goes on, and even get busier, making proofreading an even more unlikely process. And it’s also possible that many students are happy enough with the grades they are getting that they can’t be bothered to strive for better–professors, themselves relentless and incurable “A students,” have a hard time understanding complacency in the face of a C, or even a B+, but that’s our problem. Whatever the reason, though, it is frustrating to get the sense on assignment after assignment that some students are endlessly and needlessly reinventing the wheel, opening a new document and just starting in (probably late at night before the due date!) as if there’s no connection between this new task and what they’ve already done.  I always urge them, as a new deadline approaches, to review their past work, but I’ve been thinking that I should actually build that into the structure of some classes as a requirement.

On Twitter the other night, when I was complaining about this issue, @rwpickard noted that he asks “for a commentary on the last paper’s grade & comments before I accept the next paper,” which sounds like a great idea. I remember that in my own first-year English class, we had to turn each essay back in after it was returned to us, making corrections or revisions on the opposite side of the page in response to the professor’s comments.  (I actually have a vague memory of having required something like this in my earliest sections of English 1000 myself, back in the dark ages.) My only concern is that with relatively large classes, such measures add a potentially onerous, or at least tedious, further step for me–but on the other hand, telling someone on three papers in a row that they haven’t stated a thesis but only announced their topic is also tedious, as is endlessly circling incorrect apostrophes. I have a small first-year class next year, the smallest I’ve ever had (30 students): I think this is a good chance to try something like this, as it clearly does not go without saying (and does not happen, by and large, without the element of coercion). Still, I am a bit anxious about the additional 180 items that will need to be submitted and returned across the year (we have a departmental requirement of six essays in our first year classes).

I’d be very interested in ideas from other people about how to encourage students to follow up on the feedback they get, and particularly about strategies that are fairly easy and efficient to handle with larger groups. Even with my nice small class of 30, I will have two other classes going on at the same time, adding up to about another 100 students, and no TA support: there’s only so much paperwork I can do and keep track of. Also, in classes where writing is meant to be a supporting issue, while literary content is the chief class objective, it’s tricky to know how to balance demands that they write clearly and correctly against the other aims of an assignment.

This Week In My Classes: The Final Countdown

Rohan Maitzen7 Comments

In both of my classes, we are now on the final book of the term. The bad news is, this means that in both of my classes, we aren’t working on Middlemarch any more. It was fun while it lasted, that daily double dose! I tried to do different things in them, especially once I’d done the basic introductory work. I also tried to work up some new material, particularly in the interests of covering some topics or plot lines that I haven’t always had time for. And for the 19th-century fiction class, I took pains to crack open some of the more neatly crafted lectures I had prepared over previous years, both to get the students more involved and to give myself more room to wander around people and ideas. For our final session I talked about forgiveness and secular grace in the novel, bringing in some of the ideas about how Eliot humanizes the religious impulse that I talked about in this long-ago post on ‘George Eliot and Prayer.’

Now we’ve moved on to Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day in Close Reading and Jude the Obscure in 19th-century Fiction. I love The Remains of the Day, both to read and to teach. It invariably moves me to tears, but Ishiguro approaches Stevens’s tragic fallibility with impeccable delicacy as well as moral rigor. I wrote a bit at The Valve once about why I admire it so much.

On the other hand, I don’t much like Jude the Obscure. Well, that’s not exactly true. It’s also very moving, and it’s extremely provocative. It’s also depressing and not particularly well written–at the level of sentences, anyway, though on a larger scale it is pretty carefully built. I really should take up a different Hardy novel (can’t avoid him altogether as the course is called “Dickens to Hardy”), except every year when book orders come due (this year, April 1!) I feel too rushed with ongoing immediate business to scope out the alternatives. Tess of the d’Urbervilles seems an obvious choice. Maybe I’ll just order that for next year’s version–except (another disincentive to mixing things up) I’m very aware of how helpful it is to work with familiar texts, especially at the end of term when everything else is very busy, and especially in a term when I will be teaching three courses including one with all-new prep, which will be the case in the fall. A final point in favor of Jude is that it is generally very popular with the students. Tune in next week for the thrilling conclusion of ‘What’s On Order?’ In the meantime, I must get my thoughts together for Jude this afternoon. “Nobody did come, because nobody does” is pretty much my whole idea so far. Happily, the gloom will be offset by the stunningly beautiful weather. It’s supposed to go up into the mid twenties today!

Update: I just remembered that we’ve switched the terms for my classes so I need to have the Mystery books for next year decided pretty soon but I have longer to consider my options for the 19th-C Fiction class. So–any suggestions for how best to get out of my Jude the Obscure rut? I haven’t read The Mayor of Casterbridge in ages–is that a popular one with students? Does Tess teach well? I could do some Hardy re-reading in the summer.

This Week in My Classes: Middlemarch Everwhere!

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After all that concentrated activity in February, I found myself quite out of energy at the end of last week. I deliberately took it fairly easy over the weekend, to help myself recharge, and it was nice to putter. I did some reading–my book club is discussing Tender is the Night on Saturday, so I worked on getting into that (I’m not loving it–the self-absorbed and over-emotional characters are having something of the same effect on me as the crew in The Good Soldier–I think I’ll try to steer us in some new direction for our next read), and I had a nice trip to the public library with Maddie where I picked up Helen DeWitt’s Lightning Rods from the ‘new fiction’ display (I’m already nearly finished reading it, as it moves along quite fast, and I have really no idea at this point what to say about it except that if it weren’t by the author of The Last Samurai I never would have tried it). I finished the King Tut jigsaw puzzle we got for Christmas, I played MarioKart and Life with the kids…and I read Books III and IV of Middlemarch and organized lecture notes for today’s classes.

Yes, that’s right: reading Middlemarch was preparation for both classes! This week and next it’s Middlemarch everywhere! This is partly great, because the more time on Middlemarch the better, and it’s convenient to have my class reading do double duty. It is also partly difficult, because the classes have different purposes, so I can’t just use the exact same materials for both of them even if I wanted to–which I don’t anyway. There has to be some overlap, because after all, it’s the same book, and one little challenge is remembering what I’ve said to which group. But I’ve been thinking that this time around especially, because there are quite a few students who are in both classes, I should really try to address some different issues in the 19th-century fiction class than I do in Close Reading.

In Close Reading I’m spending a lot of time on the structure of the novel. In Friday’s tutorial and again today we worked on chronology, looking at episodes in which there is significant backtracking or circling around to return us to the same moment in time from a different point of view. I asked the students to look especially closely at Chapters XIX-XXII and then at Chapters XXVII-XXIX. Not only do these chapters include some of the novel’s greatest passages (the squirrel’s heartbeat passage, for one, and the equivalent centers of self, and the pier glass passage, and then ‘But why always Dorothea?’) but they are beautiful examples of that chronological manipulation. The main point I try to get across is that Eliot is dealing artistically with the problem Carlyle identifies in his essay on history: “narrative is linear but action is solid.” How do you deal with simultaneity, especially if you are committed (for moral as well as artistic reasons) to showing things (objects, people, events, histories) from different points of view? Chapter XXII, which deals mostly with the developing romance between Lydgate and Rosamond, ends with Sir James Chettam’s servant meeting Lydgate and Rosamond on the road (they are out for a walk) and summoning Lydgate to Lowick. The next two chapters take us back in time and bring us up to this same moment as it occurs in Dorothea and Casaubon’s story. To Lydgate and Rosamond, the servant’s arrival is a positive sign of Lydgate’s advancing career (which, for Rosamond, is also welcome confirmation that Lydgate is just the man she imagines him to be and will play just the role she wants in her fantasy). To Dorothea, Casaubon’s attack is key to her developing pity for him, and to redefining her married life in terms that have little to do with fulfilling her own aspirations. To Casaubon, his illness is a painful reminder of his mortality–and thus we end up, later on, with Chapter 42, my favorite in the whole novel.

We’re spending a lot of time on technical things in Close Reading–we’ve talked about point of view, narration, theme, plot, characterization, allusion, and figurative language as important parts of the craft of the novel. Of course I want to address some of these same things in 19th-Century Fiction (you can hardly read, much less teach, Middlemarch without addressing point of view, for instance!) but I’ve been thinking that my usual approaches tend to shortchange stories outside the Dorothea-Casaubon-Will and Rosamond-Lydgate axes. Fred and Mary don’t get nearly the attention they deserve, and neither does Bulstrode, or Farebrother. I’d also like to spend time on the novel’s political contexts and Mr Brooke’s run for Parliament, which I probably won’t have time for in Close Reading. There’s never enough time to talk about everything! It would probably be good for me, too, to back off a bit and see what the class wants to talk about. I’ll try. It’s hard, when my own enthusiasm is high and also when the challenge for them of just doing the reading seems pretty great. I scheduled four weeks for the novel in Close Reading, so we aren’t exactly rushing; we have almost but not quite that much time for it in 19th-Century Fiction. All of this planning may be up-ended, mind you, as the Dalhousie Faculty Association is currently in a strike position as of Saturday, and conciliation does not seem to be going well. But as I told my students, whatever happens you’ll be doing some kind of assignment on Middlemarch, and you can’t go wrong during any disruption of regularly-scheduled classes if you just keep reading…and reading.

This Week in My Classes: No Classes!

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That’s right, it’s February Break, or Reading Week, here at Dalhousie, and just in time too, because I have so much to do! By way of motivating me and helping me keep track, here’s my task list for the week. I’ll update it as things get done!

  1. Finish essay on Virginia Woolf’s Common Reader volumes for Open Letters Monthly (done!)
  2. Finish essay on blogging and academic practice for Journal of Victorian Culture (done!)
  3. Mark 30 short fiction annotation assignments for Close Reading (done)
  4. Read and give feedback on 63-page Ph.D. thesis chapter (done)
  5. Write two reference letters, both due March 1 (done)
  6. Prepare thoughtful reply to inquiry about blogging for someone else’s article about it (done)
  7. Finish reading The Woman in White and prepare concluding lecture for next Monday’s 19th-Century Fiction class (done)
  8. Keep reading Middlemarch and prepare lectures and activities for next week’s Close Reading classes, plus intro lecture for 19th-Century Fiction (done)
  9. Finish blog post on Ahdaf Soueif’s Cairo: My City, Our Revolution
  10. Start series of blog posts on Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (my Balkan photos scanned)
  11. Submit book list to library for upcoming course on the ‘Somerville novelists’ (preliminary list underway)
  12. Brace myself for Fall 2012 book orders, which will come due April 1. (begun exploring options; publishers contacted for review copies)
  13. Mark 1 late poetry assignment for Close Reading (done)
  14. Edit incoming pieces for the 5th Anniversary Issue of Open Letters Monthly (I almost forgot that my own duties to this issue don’t begin and end with my own contribution!) (done!)

That list is sort of in order of priority, though I’m likely to intersperse lighter tasks like the Soueif blog post with harder ones like the thesis chapter and marking assignments. And the class prep for next week is here because I don’t want to wake up on Sunday and realize that in focusing on my special projects for this week, I let the routine business slip and end up in a panic. It’s a lot to do, but because this is also supposed to be a bit of a break, my aim is to work hard during the day and not work (or not work so much) at night the way I usually do. I have one more season of MI-5 to go on Netflix. An episode a night would be a nice treat–well, not so nice, since they keep killing off characters I’m fond of. But still, it’s a distraction.

February 28 Update: I didn’t get quite everything done during the actual break, but now it’s looking pretty good. The Rebecca West posts weren’t really a high priority anyway, but I am eager to get started on them and to keep reading the book. Not on this list is ‘Read Winifred Holtby’s Anderby Wold, which I have in fact been doing…so a post on that should follow before long. I think having this list posted publicly did prove motivating!

This Week in My Classes: Close Reading Middlemarch

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You can’t really do it, of course, or not and finish the novel in a few short weeks. I’ve been rereading it for years and I know I still haven’t read it closely enough. Still, if you can slow down and really pay attention, I don’t know a book that’s more fun to try reading closely than Middlemarch–which is why I’ve been crazy enough to assign it in my Close Reading class.

We’re just starting up the novel this week, so on Monday I gave an introductory lecture on ‘The Interesting Life of Mary Ann Evans,’ part of my belief that humanizing the author will help give the students courage as they stare down what is one of the longest books they’ll probably be assigned during their degree. In that lecture I also lay out some general principles that are important to George Eliot’s philosophy of fiction in general and to Middlemarch in particular–ideas about realism and sympathy and morality. Though I worry a bit that starting with big abstractions will put students off the novel or make them approach it with something less than their usual enthusiasm for plot and character, I think it’s not a good idea to assume we can work inductively with such a big text. In this class especially, our work is on understanding and appreciating the literary techniques at work and how they support or convey such large-scale ideas. We will be able to talk better about what’s going on at the level of literary devices if I give them some shortcuts to themes and patterns.

On Wednesday, we worked on ways the novel teaches us how to read it. We talked about the title and subtitle, for instance, and how they let us know that we’re in kind of a middling community, marching along rather than wandering according to impulse (certainly not dancing!). We’re reading a “study of provincial life,” not, say, an exposé of the seamy underside of London: that sets up some expectations too, and it begins our education about the narrator, a learned observer, perhaps a scientist or philosopher, someone outside or above the action. That’s a good place to talk about what omniscient and intrusive narrators are good for: with other texts (such as Updike’s “A & P”) we had talked quite a bit about the advantages of first-person narration, but also about what a first-person narrator can’t usually do, such as provide historical background or critical perspective on himself. Exposition (or “telling”) sometimes gets a bad rap in contemporary talk about fiction, so it’s good to spend a little time on its  uses. One of the overall goals I have for the course is precisely this kind of attention to what different choices enable. In Middlemarch, one result of Eliot’s narrative strategies–not just her particular kind of narrator but also her attention to multiple points of view–is a lot of dramatic irony. We know a lot that the characters don’t know, or see things in ways they don’t. In the first chapters, we especially see more than, or differently from, Dorothea: we know that her marriage to Casaubon is a dreadful idea, and knowing that, we watch with shock and horror as she rushes ardently into it. But because we also get a lot of information from, and about, her point of view, we understand why she does it.

Today we had our first tutorial sessions on the novel. One of my goals was to get people started talking more about the novel, just to loosen everyone up. There’s a certain intimidation factor with such a big book, and we need to get past that and just start reading it and discussing it as soon as possible. But this is not a class on 19th-century fiction as such (in that class, we start Middlemarch next week, though, so yay, more!) but a class on close reading, so today I also wanted to help them see how and why to really pay attention. One of the most important stylistic features of the novel is precisely its constant shifting among different points of view, which happens at the level of individual sentences as well as paragraphs, chapters, and entire volumes. Eliot uses a lot of free indirect discourse, so some of the shifts are subtle. It can be fun but is also sometimes crucial to tease them out. If you aren’t paying attention to point of view, you might wrongly attribute observations or conclusions to the narrator, for instance (and thus take them to be the ‘position’ of the novel overall) that properly belong to specific individual characters or groups or communities.

Here’s one of the passages we read through today:

And how should Dorothea not marry? — a girl so handsome and with such prospects? Nothing could hinder it but her love of extremes, and her insistence on regulating life according to notions which might cause a wary man to hesitate before he made her an offer, or even might lead her at last to refuse all offers. A young lady of some birth and fortune, who knelt suddenly down on a brick floor by the side of a sick laborer and prayed fervidly as if she thought herself living in the time of the Apostles — who had strange whims of fasting like a Papist, and of sitting up at night to read old theological books! Such a wife might awaken you some fine morning with a new scheme for the application of her income which would interfere with political economy and the keeping of saddle-horses: a man would naturally think twice before he risked himself in such fellowship. Women were expected to have weak opinions; but the great safeguard of society and of domestic life was, that opinions were not acted on. Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.

Much of that paragraph reflects the perspective of that “wary man”; it’s certainly not the narrator who thinks it’s “natural” to think twice about marrying unconventional women, or who sees it as the “great safeguard of society” that women not act on their weak opinions–or, if these are the narrator’s views, they are ironically inflected ones, as the rest of the novel might reveal. Unconventional people and ideas are, after all, disruptive.

Here’s another paragraph just a little bit further on:

She was open, ardent, and not in the least self- admiring; indeed, it was pretty to see how her imagination adorned her sister Celia with attractions altogether superior to her own, and if any gentleman appeared to come to the Grange from some other motive than that of seeing Mr. Brooke, she concluded that he must be in love with Celia: Sir James Chettam, for example, whom she constantly considered from Celia’s point of view, inwardly debating whether it would be good for Celia to accept him. That he should be regarded as a suitor to herself would have seemed to her a ridiculous irrelevance. Dorothea, with all her eagerness to know the truths of life, retained very childlike ideas about marriage. She felt sure that she would have accepted the judicious Hooker, if she had been born in time to save him from that wretched mistake he made in matrimony; or John Milton when his blindness had come on; or any of the other great men whose odd habits it would have been glorious piety to endure; but an amiable handsome baronet, who said “Exactly” to her remarks even when she expressed uncertainty, — how could he affect her as a lover? The really delightful marriage must be that where your husband was a sort of father, and could teach you even Hebrew, if you wished it.

Again, we start with the narrator, but if you miss the slide into free indirect discourse at the end, imagine what an odd idea of the narrator’s values you’d have! The more familiar we get with the characters as well as with the narrator, the more assured our attributions become (different characters speak very differently, as we’ll get to have some fun with in class when we do my “Look Who’s Talking in Middlemarch” handout (if you follow the link and do the quiz, let me know!).

The other topic for today’s tutorials was diction–a small word with big implications for Middlemarch. Our textbook introduced the concept of “semantic fields” in the section on poetic vocabulary, and I’ve been encouraging students to work with the same idea here, starting with the vocabulary associated with Dorothea and Mr. Casaubon. I gave them one direct hint (watch for uses of “ardent”) and we’ve already started running into “petty”: those two words define one of the novel’s central thematic conflicts, so if they start paying attention to them–to who uses them or where they apply–they will start to find that the initial impression the novel gives of information overload is offset by an awareness of patterns the information falls into. I hope.

You see, this is why I think Middlemarch is a good choice for a class on close reading: it just gets better the more closely you read it. It’s not a book for rushing through (though I do remember reading along breathlessly to the end on my first time with it!).

This Week In My Classes: Men and Women and The Woman in White

Rohan Maitzen13 Comments

The Woman in White isn’t the only thing going on in my classes this week, but it’s by far the most fun–and happily, it seems as if the students like it too. They had to submit their questions today for the next round of letter exchanges, and I saw more than a few comments about how much more suspenseful and enjoyable it is than our first two novels. I’m a bit surprised that they didn’t find Great Expectations suspenseful: Collins doesn’t have any moments better than the one in which Pip returns to London from a visit to Miss Havisham, only to be met at the gate by the note in Wemmick’s writing, “Don’t go home!” But I can see why they are feeling the suspense more in The Woman in White: Collins sets a faster pace than Dickens, and he builds the suspense less by images and intimations and more through heavy-handed foreshadowing and cliff-hangers. It really is great fun–and part of the fun comes, I think, from the impression the whole novel gives off of a writer having a blast with his own material.

Today we talked about gender roles in the novel. We started with our hero Walter Hartright, whose heart certainly is in the right place, but who doesn’t exactly live up to the promise of that noble-sounding name in his actions. The advantages that accrue to him (socially, legally, economically) because he’s male are undercut by the disadvantages of his class position. It’s even made explicit that he is effectively neutered by his role as a drawing master:

It had been my profession, for years past, to be in this close contact with young girls of all ages, and of all orders of beauty. I had accepted the position as part of my calling in life; I had trained myself to leave all the sympathies natural to my age in my employer’s outer hall, as coolly as I left my umbrella there before I went up-stairs.

It’s possible to read the rest of the novel as the story of how Walter learns the value and use of his, um, umbrella. His polite propriety has costs, after all: when he learns that the woman he loves, Laura Fairlie, is engaged to the creepy Sir Percival Glyde, he mopes, weeps, and runs off to South America, leaving her to the ineffectual protection of her girly uncle Frederick  (“he had a frail, languidly-fretful, over-refined look–something singularly and unpleasantly delicate in its association with a man”) and the ardent but also ineffectual care-taking of her manly half-sister Marian (“altogether wanting in those feminine attractions of gentleness and pliability”). Laura herself is almost too ideally feminine: “Think of her,” Walter muses, “as you thought of the first woman who quickened the pulses within you that the rest of her sex had no art to stir. . . . [she has] all the charms of beauty, gentleness, and simple truth, that can purify and subdue the heart of man”).

Laura epitomizes the ideal Victorian woman: she is pure, virtuous, innocent, and unworldly. Of course our hero falls in love with her! But actually Laura is so perfect she’s boring, and so Walter’s love for her seems oddly uninspiring and unheroic. It also seems significant that her double in the novel is a woman who has escaped from an asylum and is twice mistaken for a ghost. Readers since the novel’s first publication have found Marian much more attractive–in spite of (or is it because of?) the “dark down on her upper lip [which is] almost a moustache.” What do we really want in a woman, Collins seems to be asking? Or, for that matter, what do we expect in a man? If Walter, our good guy, disappoints by becoming so predictably infatuated with Laura, what does it mean that Count Fosco, Sir Percival’s flamboyant co-conspirator, is the only man in the novel with the good sense and good taste to appreciate Marian? “Under happier circumstances,” he effuses, “how worthy I should have been of Miss Halcombe–how worthy Miss Halcombe would have been of ME.”

This Week in My Classes: Fun with Fiction

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In Close Reading we have finished our poetry unit (yay, say the students–no more scansion!) and been working on short stories. The basic idea is the same: our focus is on paying attention to the various ‘technical’ elements in them, to see how they work to support the effects and ideas of the stories overall. The process of picking out individual elements often feels somewhat artificial, but there’s also a useful discipline in it. Often, we work backwards from a general impression, of a character or scene, for instance, to figuring out how we got that impression. So far we’ve talked about point of view, narration, characterization, and setting. Because one of the guiding principles of the course is that it provides portable knowledge and skills, I’m having some fun bringing in illustrative examples from all kinds of books in addition to our officially ‘assigned’ reading. Here are some of the excerpts we considered as examples of different approaches to characterization:

Dorothea knew many passages of Pascal’s Pensées and of Jeremy Taylor by heart; and to her the destinies of mankind, seen by the light of Christianity, made the solicitudes of feminine fashion appear an occupation for Bedlam. She could not reconcile the anxieties of a spiritual life involving eternal consequences, with a keen interest in gimp and artificial protrusions of drapery. Her mind was theoretic, and yearned by its nature after some lofty conception of the world which might frankly include the parish of Tipton and her own rule of conduct there; she was enamoured of intensity and greatness, and rash in embracing whatever seemed to her to have those aspects; likely to seek martyrdom, to make retractions, and then to incur martyrdom after all in a quarter where she had not sought it.

He belonged to that class of men – vaguely unprepossessing, often bald, short, fat, clever – who were unaccountably attractive to women. Or he believed he was, and thinking seemed to make it so. And it helped that some women believed he was a genius in need of rescue. But the Michael Beard of this time was a man of narrowed mental condition, anhedonic, monothematic, stricken.

Macon wore a formal summer suit, his traveling suit—much more logical for traveling than jeans, he always said. Jeans had those hard, stiff seams and those rivets. Sarah wore a strapless terry beach dress. They might have been returning from two entirely different trips. Sarah had a tan but Macon didn’t. He was a tall, pale, gray-eyed man, with straight fair hair cut close to his head, and his skin was that thin kind that easily burns. He’d kept away from the sun during the middle part of every day.

 He had a great relish for feminine beauty; he was addicted to observing and analyzing it; and as regards this young lady’s face he made several observations. It was not at all insipid, but it was not exactly expressive; and though it was eminently delicate, Winterbourne mentally accused it – very forgivingly – of a want of finish. He thought it very possible that Master Randolph’s sister was a coquette; he was sure she had a spirit of her own; but in her bright, sweet, superficial little visage there was no mockery, no irony.

Dear Joan,

 I do hope I know you well enough to say this.

 I think you ought to forget about your leg. I believe that it is something psychological, psychosomatic, and it is very hard on Charles. It is bringing both him and you into ridicule and spoiling your lives.

 Do make a big try. Won’t you! Forget about your bodily aches and pains. Life is a wonderful thing, Joan. I have discovered this great fact in my work with the Dying.

 Your sincere friend,

   Eliza (Peabody)

We were talking about the role of description or exposition, speech (including thought) and action, external points of view, and what I called ‘accessories’–all the things on or around a character that help communicate who they are, from literal accessories to homes or occupations or hobbies or what books they are reading in a scene. I quoted David Lodge’s remark, from The Art of Fiction, that “all description in fiction is highly selective; its basic rhetorical technique is synecdoche, the part standing in for the whole”: that seems to me a helpful principle to keep in mind. It was interesting how much information we could glean from these small pieces, especially as nobody in the class had actually read any of the novels I took them from. I think (I hope!) they could see the point of the exercise, which was to help us realize how we know what we (think we) know when we’re reading along. Working on fiction in this way you always have to resist their tendency to get caught up in the plot, so using examples out of context, which might seem perverse in other contexts, is actually helpful in this particular course.

In Victorian Fiction we are nearly done with Great Expectations–already! One of the things I like to think about with this novel is the development of young Pip into the Pip who is morally capable of narrating the novel. One of the most moving chapters in the novel for me is Chapter 44, in which Pip first confronts Miss Havisham and Estella with his new knowledge of the real identity of his benefactor. He hasn’t yet moved all the way from confusion to compassion, but already he is working to make something right out of the wrongs he–and they–have done in pursuing their false ideas, and to restore some sense of love and forgiveness to their devastated lives. “You will get me out of your thoughts in a week,” says Estella as Pip, overcome with grief and horror, begs her not to throw herself away on the malignant Bentley Drummle. Pip’s response moves not only us, but also, against all expectation, Miss Havisham:

`Out of my thoughts! You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read, since I first came here, the rough common boy whose poor heart you wounded even then. You have been in every prospect I have ever seen since — on the river, on the sails of the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the light, in the darkness, in the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the streets. You have been the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become acquainted with. The stones of which the strongest London buildings are made, are not more real, or more impossible to be displaced by your hands, than your presence and influence have been to me, there and everywhere, and will be. Estella, to the last hour of my life, you cannot choose but remain part of my character, part of the little good in me, part of the evil. But, in this separation I associate you only with the good, and I will faithfully hold you to that always, for you must have done me far more good than harm, let me feel now what sharp distress I may. O God bless you, God forgive you!’

In what of unhappiness I got these broken words out of myself, I don’t know. The rhapsody welled up within me, like blood from an inward wound, and gushed out. I held her hand to my lips some lingering moments, and so I left her. But ever afterwards, I remembered — and soon afterwards with stronger reason — that while Estella looked at me merely with incredulous wonder, the spectral figure of Miss Havisham, her hand still covering her heart, seemed all resolved into a ghastly stare of pity and remorse.

That ability to touch someone’s heart is fundamental to Dickens’s fiction, isn’t it? This moment makes an interesting comparison to the climactic encounter between Dorothea and Rosamond in Middlemarch, which also turns on an encounter with someone else’s ‘center of self’ and on the morally inspirational effect of generosity…and yet the scenes are arrived at so differently and belong in other ways to such different worlds.

This Week in My Classes: Contact Hours

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

One of my goals for this term was to increase the amount of direct contact between me and my students. One step towards that goal was my (re)introduction of seminar groups into my 3rd-year “lecture” class on the Victorian novel. It’s not a straight lecture class: hostile media reports to the contrary, I know no professors who literally only lecture, and in English, some degree of back-and-forth with the class is, I’m confident, 100% the norm in every class. English is not a fact-finding discipline at heart, after all: though we need to teach vocabulary, provide contexts, and model interpretation, the overall goal is students who can think and write their own way through the course material. My Victorian novels classes are probably pretty typical, in that sometimes I do hold forth for most of the 50 minute session, especially when introducing new material, but most often I gather ideas from the class and return them reorganized, or challenge them, or complicate them, or offer illustrative examples for them. The classes are capped at 40 and are usually full (this term, Barchester Towers seems to have scared a few away during the last bit of the add-drop period, and we are down to 34, which is an atypically small group). In a class that size you can get quite a bit of student involvement, but it’s still not possible to hear from everyone or to give everyone’s ideas a lot of sustained attention. And the more I talk specifically to a student, the more I find that student engages and learns. So I’ve broken them up into two groups, one meeting basically every Friday while the other had a dedicated reading hour (Friday afternoons–yes, I’m positive they will all use that hour to go to the library, definitely!).

We had our first small group session last Friday, and I was extremely encouraged about the plan: it went great! Although it was clear that many of them were not falling in love with Barchester Towers (the word ‘dry’ was used!!), the discussion was very lively and did not require a lot of intervention from me to keep it going. It was great to hear what they were thinking about and responding to, and to have a chance to steer them from observation to analysis in a more immediate way. Some students were particularly keen on the Stanhopes–one said that they had “saved” the novel for her by livening it up just as she was worrying that it would be all dull clergymen all the time (I’m paraphrasing loosely, but that seemed to be the gist of it). I am so fond of Mr Harding and the Archdeacon that I admit I hadn’t been focusing that intently on the Stanhopes (except the Signora, of course) but it’s quite right that they bring a degree of informality into the book, as well as a careless cosmopolitanism that does break up the intense provincialism of the other characters. That very looseness of theirs enables some key developments in the plot (for instance, it’s the Signora’s interference, improper as it is from some perspectives, that finally gets Eleanor and Arabin together), so that was a great place to take the discussion. The general topic I had settled on as the focus of the session was the women of Barchester Towers, as in the first lecture meetings our focus was primarily on the men and their ‘parties.’ Eleanor was not a great favorite! I guess she is rather dull at first. I hope by the time she boxes Mr Slope’s ears, they were giving her more credit.

So that’s one way I am changing things up. I’m doing something quite different in my Close Reading class that turns out to be another way of increasing direct contact, although that isn’t exactly how I’d thought of it–and that’s regular homework. We have tutorial groups already in Close Reading, as it is a skills-oriented course and supposed to include plenty of hands-on, collaborative, and consultative time. Because of that hands-on emphasis and my previous experience when reading assignments are light that students rather blow off class preparation (sure, you can breeze through a sonnet while waiting for the classroom to open and be ready to go, right? wrong! especially, though not exclusively, when it’s a Donne sonnet!)–because of those features of the class, and because for the first time I’m using an actual textbook that includes question sets and practice exercises, I thought it made sense to assign specific things to get done before each class, usually fairly simple questions that apply the current topic (say, meter and scansion, or figurative language, or poetic structure) to select texts. I actually called it ‘homework’ in the syllabus and have been feeling kind of self-conscious about that; I even acknowledged to the class that I know that terminology sounds a bit high schoolish. But I also stressed that all the homework does is make tangible what would be my expectation anyway, namely that they would actually work on the material before class, and practice applying what they have learned.

The thing is, I have graded four sets now, and to my surprise (I expected to find it tedious) I quite like the experience of it, precisely because it does put me in contact with the students so often and in such a non-threatening way (well, non-threatening to me, at least). The homework sets are not “worth” a lot each (2%), and as long as they are responsibly completed, I’m giving them full marks: it’s not about deducting points for scanning it wrong or calling something “anaphora” when it’s not. The point is I can see their work, see how they are doing, what they get and what they don’t, and give them prompt feedback. I can also see who’s doing the work and who’s not, and as the evidence about this accumulates, I’ll use it to nudge the slackers, because I bet there will be a strong correlation between doing the weekly work for the class and doing well in the class! It’s not like I haven’t given regular small assignments of one kind or another in a lot of classes. Often they are in the form of discussion questions and reading responses, or in-class writing starts, or reading journals (which is what these homework assignments will become when we have finished our time with the textbook). It’s just that these exercises feel very straightforward, both in their relationship to the course objectives and in terms of my interaction with them: they are about practising, for them, and about coaching, for me. I hope that getting that kind of personal feedback, even on such a small scale, will help them feel connected to me and to the work we are doing: as they see that I do go over their homework and use it to prompt them towards better work, I hope they won’t see it as “busywork” but as a meaningful, if minute, interaction between us.

This Week in My Classes: Poems and Prelates

Rohan Maitzen1 Comment

And we’re underway! It’s still a bit chaotic (cue rant about Pet Peeve #47, the long class add-drop period, which sends students the message that they can join a 12-week course 2 weeks in and expect not to be behind) but most of the students seem to have made it back from the break (PP #53, why don’t they just come back for the first day of term?) and even if they haven’t, it seems reasonable to start acting as if they have, including holding them accountable for catching up to us. Though this makes me sound cranky, I’m actually feeling pretty perky today, mostly because I enjoy being back in the classroom and I’m pretty keen about the material we’re working on in both of my classes.

In Close Reading, we’re working through some basic elements of poetic analysis: last week, we talked about diction; today, I reviewed major types of figurative language; and Wednesday and Friday we’ll focus on scansion. In theory, this is review for most students, but in practice, especially since we have muddied diluted diversified our core curriculum and program requirements so much, there’s no guarantee they will have spent time on it. And if they have, there’s no guarantee, of course, that they will have retained, much less mastered, it. So I really do focus on the basics. The immediate goal is to grasp what the elements are–to be able to recognize and name them. But this in itself is not much of an objective, and especially because this is an upper-level course, I try hard to emphasize that the real goal is to be able to talk better about poetry, to be able to recognize what’s going on in a poem when we read it, to be as precise as we can about its effects. In the handout I prepared for them, I quoted this excerpt from a good book called Poetic Designs:

No one reads the rules for the game of … hockey for pleasure; yet no one can possibly understand the game without knowing the meaning of ‘icing the puck’ or ‘offside.’  Without this understanding, the game is a meaningless blur.  Only with it does the game begin to ‘make sense.’  But prosody, like the rules of hockey, is not simply a body of information that one learns and then ‘applies.’  The truly informed fan sees the offside happen before the whistle blows, experiences it in the stir of action.  In poetry as in sport, the observer’s eyes—and ears—must be educated to this same point of instinctive understanding.

Yes, I had some hope that the hockey analogy would appeal to a room full of Canadian 20-somethings! But the same principle applies to, say, quilting: if you know what the norms and standards and challenges are, you can appreciate “the achieve of, the mastery of the thing” when you see it, not just at an analytic level, but “in the stir of action.” If you don’t know much about it, you might like it just fine, and you might have a strong personal response to it, but you couldn’t appreciate it in the same way you could if you had that “instinctive understanding” that combines knowledge and excitement, insight and affect. One of our first readings was Frost’s “Design,” for instance. It’s a deceptively simple poem; it adds to my appreciation of its deceptive simplicity that I see how regular the first line is–that sing-song rhythm leads us along as if into a harmless nursery rhyme–and then find my poetic innocence betrayed by the irregularities that follow. I’m not a hard-core poetry expert, and I sometimes think that helps in this particular class: we’re not going after the most obscure or complex levels of analysis, just practicing how to develop and support our reading. We’re trying to understand how we know what we think we know about our readings, as well as why they have the effects and meanings they do.

In 19th-Century Fiction, today was our first day on Barchester Towers. I took pretty much the whole time myself, with some introductory framing comments about Trollope and his aesthetic, and then an explanation of the basic hierarchy and social significance of the Church of England in the mid-Victorian period. About Trollope, I noted the ways his rather literal novels resist ideas about what is literary, being neither difficult nor particularly poetic. He was never really the go-to novelist for the fancier kinds of literary theory, not yielding as well to symbolic, psychoanalytic, or deconstructive approaches. But he has proved amenable particularly to ethical criticism (as with Ruth ap Roberts’s nicely titled The Moral Trollope). I talked about his interest in institutions, not just the church in the Barsetshire novels but the law and government in the Palliser series, and about his exploration of the interaction between institutions–which have their own abstract logic and their larger missions and priorities–and the individuals who actually constitute those institutions. That’s the point at which some explanation of the Church of England becomes essential, from the general, such as the extent to which it is always already a political institution (not to mention a social and educational one), to the particular–such as what it means for the position of Warden to be ‘in the Bishop’s gift’ or why the impending change of government matters so much to the novel’s very opening question, who will be the new Bishop of Barchester? I always feel a bit bad when I talk so much, but then, it’s pretty hard to navigate intelligently in Barchester Towers without knowing something about these matters. Once you get the idea, you can be “in the stir of action” as you read it. Next time we will get into the novel itself, and into class discussion, starting (as you always must and should, in Trollope) with people: we’ll talk about Archdeacon Grantly, Mr Slope, and Mr Harding to start with, I think, sorting out what they stand for and what the larger implications are of the antagonisms among them.

I really hope that the students are finding Barchester Towers amusing. How could they not? There’s the brilliant comedy of Mrs Proudie’s reception, for instance, at which Signora Neroni’s sofa strips the Bishop’s haughtily arrogant wife of her finery, and there’s the constant entertainment of Trollope’s narrator, who really comes into his own here, after warming up so charmingly with The Warden: “And now, had I the pen of a mighty poet, would I sing in epic verse the noble wrath of the archdeacon.” Good heavens!