This Week In My Classes

A New Year, A New Term!

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

Winter term classes start for us today. Happily, it’s a dry day, with no ice or snow complicating the back-to-school logistics. On the other hand, with the wind chill it “feels like” -21C, so there’s no forgetting that it is winter. (The distinction between the actual temperature and what it feels like always seems such a silly one: who cares what temperature it doesn’t feel like?)

Things ease up for me a bit this term, as I shift down from three courses to two. I prefer it this way, as I find winter both physically and psychologically exhausting. Also, there’s less time to get ready for it than there is to prepare for the fall term! I was marking exams until December 23, and with such an early start date for this term, I had to start puttering away on syllabi and handouts and Blackboard sites and reading for my new courses pretty much as soon as my fall grades were filed. However, I do feel pretty well prepared this week. We’ll see how long that lasts!

I’m teaching one class this term that I haven’t taught since I started blogging–since even before then, actually, as I last offered it in 2005. This is a class on ‘Close Reading,’ which, as I explained at some length in lecture today, is one of our department’s core ‘theory and methods’ classes (the others are ‘History of Literary Criticism’ and ‘Contemporary Critical Theory’). When I first taught Close Reading, back in 2003, it had fairly recently been invented and added to the curriculum as a mandatory class for all English Honours and Majors students. I found it exhilarating teaching a class that so clearly had (or, appeared to have!) the backing of the whole department: it made it easy to make statements about the use and value of the skills we were practicing. Now that students are required to choose one from this cluster, I make my pitch in a somewhat different way, focusing not just on what I still see as the generic importance of close reading skills to answering all critical and interpretive questions, but also on the extra-curricular importance of really paying attention to, and asking questions about, the things we read. There are lots of good reasons for English students to learn about the history of criticism and about the array of theoretical approaches that are practiced in our discipline. There are also discipline-specific reasons for working hard on close reading. But the specialized approach and vocabulary of literary theory becomes less and less useful and relevant the further you get from campus–which is not to say literary theory has no value, or no intrinsic interest (though at times I have thought both of these things myself!). But the importance of being an attentive, well-informed, questioning reader matters more and more as you get away from school and take over primary responsibility for your own book lists! Much of what we require of students in our curriculum aims at making them mini-critics, mini-professionals, but that’s exactly what most of them won’t be. I particularly emphasized in my talk today ways in which close reading takes us through aesthetic questions into ethical ones: here I am influenced, of course, by Wayne Booth, and in fact I quoted some of what he says about the choices that lie behind the finished literary product, and about the choice we make about whether we want to be “friends” with particular books. I hope that these general remarks helped frame the course in an interesting and even provocative way for the students. Much of what we will be doing on a day to day basis will be much more concrete, down in the nitty-gritty details. But if they can think about where this kind of analysis can take them, or about what kinds of broader conversations it supports and enhances, I think they’ll find it a more resonant experience.

My other class is the second installment of the 19th-century novel, the Dickens-to-Hardy half. I taught this last in 2009, when the book list was North and South, Great Expectations, Lady Audley’s Secret, Middlemarch, and Jude the Obscure. I shuffle the books around a bit every time, and this time I’m leading off with Barchester Towers–in past versions of the course, I have often started with The Warden, which I am very fond of, but I’ve been wanting to bring in Barchester Towers for a long time so finally I just made up my mind to it. Since I’ve never lectured on it before, I’m feeling slightly regretful right now, since if I were doing The Warden again I’d have all my materials to hand plus I’d be intimately familiar with the novel. But I’ve been rereading Barchester Towers and enjoying it enormously. How could I not? It is funny, poignant, sharp, and sentimental–sometimes all at once! I’ve kept Great Expectations (though I kind of wish I’d had the guts to sub in Bleak House, just because, well, because it’s Bleak House, and because I’ve taught and thus read Great Expectations pretty often lately). Then it’s The Woman in White, which I alternate with Lady Audley, and then Middlemarch and Jude to close. The tweaks in the book list keep me alert. I decided to stick with the letter exchange assignments that I used last term. I haven’t actually had time to look at my fall course evaluations, so I don’t know if the students were happy with the assignment sequence, but there are a lot of things I like about it, including keeping everyone focused on every book as we go, and giving them lots of writing practice.

I have put one small innovation in place in the 19th-century fiction class. I have been regretting the difficulties of having more direct contact with students as class sizes in general go up, and in these 19th-century novels classes I have also been feeling that there is less reciprocal engagement during class sessions–I have my lecture notes more carefully planned out, usually, and though there is always a core of talkers in the class when I work on generating discussion, there are also a lot who don’t speak up and thus at least seem fairly passive. I have a theory that this passivity sometimes (not always) shows up in their written work: it’s not very lively, it’s not very excited, it’s very safe (if they are attentive) or off the mark (if they aren’t). Students who come to confer with me one-on-one very often not only do better assignments and show more improvement across the term, but seem more energetic in class. Of course, this correlation is probably because those who come to see me are precisely those who have that extra bit of keenness! Anyway, I wanted to change the classroom dynamic a bit, so I’ve designated most Friday classes as seminar meetings: I’m dividing the class into two subsections, and each time one group will meet with me seminar-style, around a table. With a class of 40, we can’t do better than 20 for these, but 20 is actually the usual size for our 4th-year seminars, and it’s much smaller than a typical tutorial in the classes where this kind of break-out group is the norm (these are usually around 30). We’ll do general discussion but also some worksheets and practice for assignments–tutorial kind of stuff. I hope this will help them get to know both me and the course material better, in a different way. It will also force me to change up what I do with the other hours and to loosen up a bit in my own control of our time. There’s nothing intrinsically radical about including tutorials, of course, but they are not at all the norm here for classes of this size and at this level. We’ll see how the plan goes over!

This Week in My Classes: Exams!

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Last night I invigilated a three-hour exam for my 19th-Century Fiction class; Saturday is the three-hour exam for my Mystery and Detective Fiction class. Papers for all three classes (from everyone in the seminar, and from those who did the essay option in the other two) came in on Monday. So mostly what I’m doing this week is pacing and marking! I’m making decent but not great progress on the essays–I have about 10 left. I haven’t started the exams yet, but tomorrow I’ll be working on the first set in alternation with the papers, and next week of course I need to get everything wrapped up so that I can submit this term’s grades … and move on to prepping for next term.

In some ways I’m not a big fan of exams. I know that they are not always reliable indicators of what students know or what kind of thinking and writing they are capable of, and I don’t think students retain all that well material they cram into their heads during intense last-minute study sessions. On the other hand, there are always some students who flourish in exam situations–who find themselves released from whatever writer’s block made them fumble on essays, or who (whether out of brilliance or desperation, who knows) become remarkably insightful on the fly. Exams also are one more way to take stock of who has done all the reading and who is good at doing the kind of analysis I’ve been trying to teach them, and this is what they are, after all, earning a course credit for. The real reason I keep holding exams for my courses, though, is really quite cynical: I feel that I need the threat of the exam as a motivator over the term. Students, understandably, set priorities, and my experience has been that, perhaps because exams are (or seem) so concrete and measurable, students often ‘prioritize’ exam preparation over other work. (This tendency often manifests itself in the form of late papers submitted with the shameless “excuse” that the students didn’t meet my deadline because they had to study for their chem or psych or Spanish midterms.)

So holding exams is one way to make sure I’m in the game, competing with their other courses for priority. Also, knowing that there will be an exam that covers all of the course material is a helpful incentive for them to actually  do the reading, come to class, and take notes, and these things make our class time much more productive for all of us. Some students need this incentive more than others, of course, but sadly I find nothing focuses attention in the room more visibly than prefacing an exercise or example with “this is the kind of thing I’m likely to ask about on the exam” or “this is a favorite exam passage of mine.” I try to use this phenomenon to our collective advantage: my goal is to get them interested in the readings, to help them learn how to analyze them, etc. To reach these goals, they need to be paying attention. If they are paying attention in part because they are worried that, if they don’t, they won’t do well on the exam, that’s fine with me. In the past couple of weeks I have had more than one conversation with a student who said that they planned to use some of the time before the exam “to finish reading X book”–and since another of my goals is to have them just do all the reading that the course credit they are getting suggests they have done, that’s good too. I try to make my exams thorough, transparent, and fair: I work on practice questions and passages, which we do together in class, and I relate the skills we are practicing in doing this to the other work we’re doing in the course. I make no effort to catch them out, though I do cover the full range of course material. I give out the essay questions in advance so that they can plan their answers.

I don’t hold exams in all my classes. There are no exams in my honours seminars, for instance, where I assume a higher level of commitment and make different kinds of demands (including more emphasis on class participation) across the whole term. I also won’t have an exam in my Close Reading class next term: not only will be we doing a lot of very challenging writing and editing, but it’s not a class that emphasizes coverage, whether of material or of terminology, or skills that can be quickly demonstrated and assessed. But overall I think exams do more good than harm in my classes. There’s even some real satisfaction in marking the good ones and seeing how much students know. Sometimes, bless their hearts, they even write little ‘thanks for the course’ notes at the end. After three stressful hours of exam-writing, that’s pretty generous of them.

Last night’s exam went by more quickly because I brought along Testament of Experience to read. I was at a terribly exciting section: not only was Vera in London enduring the Blitz, but G. was crossing the Atlantic by boat and was torpedoed! Though in some ways this volume is not as surprising or intellectually satisfying to read as the first two, it’s still a remarkable story told by a woman whose life is itself a testament to ideas and commitment, and her account of the devastation of the war is gripping and occasionally heart-rending. More about that later…maybe I’ll be able to finish it during Saturday’s invigilation.

This Week: More Classes, a New Open Letters, a Book Club Fail, and a Happy Ending

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The past two weeks have been crazy busy: I received and returned 65 midterms, 40 papers, and about 30 paper proposals–and, of course, I kept prepping for and going to class. It was such a blur I can’t even think of anything reflective to say about all that!

While all this was going on, we were working on the December issue of Open Letters Monthly, which went live on Thursday and not only looks great as usual but is (also as usual!) full of diverse and interesting content. I don’t have a full-sized piece in this month’s issue, but many of the editorial team pitched in on our Year in Reading feature, which includes John Cotter on Jonathan Swift (and others), Steve Donoghue on some outstanding reissues of classics including the annotated Persuasion, Sam Sacks on various collections of literary criticism and essays, and much more. Another highlight for me in this issue is Rosemary Mitchell’s essay on Hilda Prescott’s A Man on a Donkey, a book I have owned for many years but never read–clearly it’s time! And there’s a lovely piece on Horace’s Odes that brings home to me, as so many things have done this year, how woefully backward my education in the classics has been. Do go over and check these out, along with the rest of the issue, and if you enjoy it, help us spread the word.

While I was working on all these things, I was also supposed to be finishing Molly Gloss’s Wild Life for the Slaves of Golconda book club. Fail! I had time to do it–I know that, because I did read a bit of other ‘just for fun’ stuff. But I came to dread picking it up because I really wasn’t enjoying it. I don’t really see that as a good excuse: the point of being in a book club is to get out of your comfort zone sometimes, and besides, a commitment is a commitment! The comments from other readers in the group have been helpful in bringing out strengths and weaknesses of the novel as they experienced them, and I do plan to push on to the end this week. One thing about the novel that was working for me was its evocation of the “Pacific Northwest,” which of course is more or less the landscape of my youth–not just B.C., but we used to take camping trips into Washington State and Oregon as well. Reading Wild Life I recalled how much I used to love Daphne Marlatt’s Ana Historic, another historical (indeed, meta-historical) novel full of towering trees. Maybe my reward for finishing Wild Life can be a reread of Ana Historic.

And while all the rest of this was going on, I was also reading through the final draft of a Ph.D. thesis by a student I have been co-supervising in our Interdisciplinary Ph.D. program for seven years. It’s a study of four 19th-century women’s travel narratives, two by British women, two by German women, all (primarily) about Italy. It’s a perceptive, wide-ranging study of little-known material that is as interesting for what it says about travel writing as a form of self-discovery and identity formation (personal as well as national) as it says about Italy. I’ve learned a lot from being part of this project, and we worked hard to bring it to fruition. I am proud and happy to report that she defended her thesis successfully, and with authority and also considerable panache–congratulations!

So it has been quite a couple of weeks, and I can hardly express how relieved I feel to have made it through with only the one minor blip. If I had to fail at something, I guess in the circumstances I’m glad it was Wild Life. Next week will not be nearly as crazy, as I’ll have “just” the routine business of class prep, and that only up until Wednesday, which is our last day of the term. Then there’s a small lull until exams and papers pile up–I have to actually make up the exams, but that’s not the kind of thing that usually means working nights and weekends. I should be able to get in a little Christmas shopping, clean up and reorganize my offices (at work and at home), enjoy some guilt-free time with Testament of Experience, get The Paris Wife finished for my other book club, and turn my mind to next term’s classes….

This Week in My Classes: Work In, Work Out

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This is an assignment-intensive week in my classes. On Monday, paper proposals were due in from the students in my Victorian ‘Woman Question’ seminar at 9:30. Then at 11:30 the students in Mystery and Detective Fiction wrote their second mid-term test. Today the students in 19th-Century Fiction turn in the fourth round of their letter exchanges, this batch on Hard Times.

To some extent, the convergence of all of these things represents a failure of planning on my part. I always intend to, but never quite do, collate my schedules for all my classes as I draw up the syllabi. I know it would be better for me (and thus, indirectly, for my students) if I didn’t get overwhelmed with multiple assignments to evaluate all at once. The problem is, things aren’t altogether that flexible, especially at the end of term, but also along the way: you have to cover a certain amount of material, or finish some number books, before you can reasonably ask students to do any substantial work reflecting on what they’ve learned. I do lots of small things along the way, to practice skills, motivate attendance and participation, and so on, but papers and tests require a foundation of reading and thinking before they can mean much. And so, weeks like this one, in which you simply have to power through your share of the work. Because some of the students in Mystery and Detective Fiction are considering an essay alternative to the final exam that depends on their marks on their two midterms, I made marking their tests a top priority: those who want to do the essay have to submit a proposal by next week, so I wanted them to know as soon as possible if this would be an option for them. I’m proud (and a bit astonished) to say that thanks to a combination of discipline and concentration on my side and a relative absence of other interruptions yesterday (a non-teaching day, so prime time for both work and, often, meetings), I was able to post the test scores (all 65 of them!) a mere 25 hours after bringing the midterms back to my office with me. I’m also about half way through commenting on the ‘woman question’ proposals, which I would like to return by tomorrow. And the papers I get in this afternoon should be back no later than Monday–so that I have a clear desk for the further proposals that will be coming in, not to mention the new priorities that will be urging themselves upon me, like making up practice exams, fitting in the last few in-class responses, and (last but definitely not least) rereading a Ph.D. thesis in preparation for the defense next Friday.

In the meantime, regular class preparation goes on. We start The Odd Women in the ‘woman question’ seminar this morning; I expect lively discussion, as it is both a fast-moving and a provocative novel. It’s Indemnity Only in Mystery and Detective Fiction, so today we’ll talk about the challenges and pleasures of subverting hard-boiled conventions with a female protagonist. And it’s our first day on North and South in 19th-Century Fiction. There’s a major snow storm just starting up as I write this, and that’s my last class of the day–I fear attendance will be sparse, but those who do come will probably be treated to a small clip from the BBC version starring the very intense Richard Armitage as Mr. Thornton. I like to show the scene of his first meeting with Margaret, which in the BBC version turns on his beating up one of the ‘hands’ at his mill–which, of course, never happens, at least not literally, in the novel. Sharp differences between book and adaptation like this often help us focus on what’s at stake in the original (the overt physical and sexual violence in the adaptation of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, for instance, gives Helen motives for leaving her husband that are more recognizable to contemporary audiences than those she actually declares in Brontë’s text, a shift that I think actually changes the political and thematic emphasis a lot). In the North and South example, it’s more like shorthand, I think: without the time or the technical means to give us the kind of exposition we get from Gaskell, the beating-up scene very quickly lays out differences in values between Margaret and Thornton, still leaving room for us to see (or reconsider) the conflict from their different perspectives.

This Week in My Classes: The Morals and the Stories

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Though everyone is looking a bit peaked around the department these days–students and faculty alike–and I’m certainly feeling the usual pressures as we move into the term’s final phase, I am also finding myself intellectually invigorated by the novels we’re working through in all of my classes. It is just such a pleasure to be spending time reading and thinking about them, even under less than optimal conditions.

In The Victorian ‘Woman Question,’ we are finishing up The Mill on the Floss. Although I love the early volumes of this novel, with their evocative (if also rather vexed) representation of childhood, and their wonderful blend of sly humor and philosophical reflection (not to mention, of course, the brilliant characterizations of Tom and Maggie and their whole mish-mash of a family life), Books VI and VII really get me excited. I know they are disproportionately short, and who wouldn’t love it if Eliot had written out the great conflict between duty and desire more fully–but then, there’s something apt, too, about the headlong rush to the ending. Though we had read only to the kiss on the arm for today, it was clear from our discussion that the students both grasp the complexity of Maggie’s situation and are interested in it: there aren’t easy answers, the way there are in Tenant of Wildfell Hall, for instance. Brontë’s narrative is complex in other ways, but that there is a right way out of Helen’s difficulties is far less difficult to grasp, just as it is easier to see where she went wrong in the first place. Her attraction to Arthur Huntingdon, while understandable, is a sign of her moral immaturity. Maggie’s attraction to Stephen Guest, on the other hand, while equally misguided in its own way, is a symptom of something much deeper and much further from her control. I was struck on this reading with how much Eliot emphasizes that Maggie and Stephen are initially motivated by unconscious forces, feeling as if “in a dream,” unable to recognize or articulate the “laws of attraction” that compel them. Their drifting down the river is hardly a deliberate act, or at least its impelling motives are hardly clear to them–which of course is much of the use Eliot is making of the metaphorical pattern of rivers and water and currents and drifting right to the end of the book. Once Maggie wakes up, though, into full consciousness, then sexual attraction ceases to be an accidental cause and becomes a force to be reckoned with, and that reckoning is the process of morality–the engagement of human reason in “the labor of choice.” Though it’s possible (I reluctantly suppose!) to find something mechanical in Maggie and Stephen’s impassioned debate, I find it very moving precisely because it represents that struggle to think through feeling to right action:

Maggie trembled. She felt that the parting could not be effected suddenly. She must rely on a slower appeal to Stephen’s better self – she must be prepared for a harder task than that of rushing away while resolution was fresh. She sat down. Stephen, watching her with that look of desperation which had come over him like a lurid light, approached slowly from the door, seated himself close beside her and grasped her hand. Her heart beat like the heart of a frightened bird; but this direct opposition helped her – she felt her determination growing stronger.

‘Remember what you felt weeks ago,’ she began, with beseeching earnestness – ‘remember what we both felt – that we owed ourselves to others, and must conquer every inclination which could make us false to that debt. We have failed to keep our resolutions – but the wrong remains the same.’

‘No, it does not remain the same,’ said Stephen. ‘We have proved that it was impossible to keep our resolutions. We have proved that the feeling which draws us towards each other is too strong to be overcome. That natural law surmounts every other, – we can’t help what it clashes with.’

‘It is not so, Stephen – I’m quite sure that is wrong. I have tried to think it again and again – but I see, if we judged in that way, there would be a warrant for all treachery and cruelty – we should justify breaking the most sacred ties that can ever be formed on earth. If the past is not to bind us, where can duty lie? We should have no law but the inclination of the moment.’

‘But there are ties that can’t be kept by mere resolution,’ said Stephen, starting up and walking about again. ‘What is outward faithfulness? Would they have thanked us for anything so hollow as constancy without love?’

Maggie did not answer immediately. She was undergoing an inward as well as an outward contest. At last she said, with a passionate assertion of her conviction as much against herself as against him,

‘That seems right – at first – but when I look further, I’m sure it is not right. Faithfulness and constancy mean something else besides doing what is easiest and pleasantest to ourselves. They mean renouncing whatever is opposed to the reliance others have in us – whatever would cause misery to those whom the course of our lives has made dependent on us. If we – if I had been better, nobler – those claims would have been so strongly present with me, I should have felt them pressing on my heart so continually, just as they do now in the moments when my conscience is awake – that the opposite feeling would never have grown in me, as it has done – it would have been quenched at once – I should have prayed for help so earnestly – I should have rushed away, as we rush from hideous danger. I feel no excuse for myself – none – I should never have failed towards Lucy and Philip as I have done, if I had not been weak and selfish and hard – able to think of their pain without a pain to myself that would have destroyed all temptation. O, what is Lucy feeling now? – She believed in me – she loved me – she was so good to me – think of her….’

One of my students remarked that when she studied The Mill on the Floss in another class, they discussed Maggie and Stephen’s relationship as a great romantic love story–thwarted, I suppose, by “society,” though she didn’t go into detail about their interpretation. I admit, I find that a puzzling take on these two, who seem so ill-suited to each other in character and taste, and also, as we see here, in values. That their passion cuts across these factors is precisely what makes it so surprising and dangerous. If only there were a great romantic option for Maggie in the novel! Instead, she’s torn between three loves (Tom, Philip, and Stephen), each with his own demand on her feelings and loyalties. Where is she to go–what is she to do? Short of leaving them all behind and starting over, there is no way forward for her, and she can’t cut them off because as she tells Philip (become, poor fellow, her “external conscience” rather than her beloved), she “desires no future that will break the ties of the past.” Given that, her final choice is as inevitable as its result.

In 19th-Century Fiction we are nearly finished with Hard Times. I was wondering about my decision to rotate it into the reading list again after a few years of Great Expectations and a special turn for Bleak House, but I’m actually finding it really compelling. The structure is taut (if every so often the sentiment is a bit flabby) and it’s such a very dark novel. We were discussing Louisa today and her descent down Mrs Sparsit’s staircase. I don’t know another novelist who could (or would!) stretch out a conceit like that across not just paragraphs but whole chapters. And throughout the novel there is such a tight integration between Dickens’s prose and his thinking, every thought infused with fancy so that as we read we live the novel’s principles. It’s not his most subtle novel, but subtlety will get you only so far, as Trollope conceded when he wrote about “Mr Popular Sentiment” in The Warden: the artist who paints for the millions must use glaring colours, and might make more difference than all his own fine shades of gray. And what subtle novelist could make me cry the way Dickens does every time I read the chapter called “The Starlight”? Before the week is out I want to bring in some excerpts from Martha Nussbaum’s Poetic Justice: it occurred to me during today’s discussion that we could think in more contemporary terms about the social effects of his literary strategies.

In Mystery and Detective Fiction it’s a Victorian kind of week too, because we’ve moved on to P. D. James’s An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. James has always been explicit about her interest in 19th-century fiction, especially Austen, Eliot, and Trollope, and I think in many ways Unsuitable Job is very much in their tradition. It is a kind of Bildungsroman, or so I will propose in Wednesday’s class, and the central conflict is between a calculating kind of utilitarianism (on the villain’s part, of course!) and Cordelia’s passionate humanitarianism: “what use is it to make the world more beautiful if the people in it can’t love one another?” she exclaims, and in that moment she is close kin to Louisa as she falls on the floor before her father, Mr. Gradgrind, proclaiming “your philosophy and your teaching will not save me.” Both make the case for the wisdom of the heart over the wisdom of the head.

This Week in My Classes: Pacing Problems

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One of the most challenging aspects of course planning for me is pacing, particularly in my 19th-century fiction classes, where I teach a lot of pretty long books. My strategy has always been to assign specific parts to be read for each class meeting. That way I can keep expectations clear and the reading load manageable for all of us, and make sure we are on common ground for class discussions. Though this method does create some pedagogical and critical challenges (for instance, not talking about what happens later in the novel until we get there), I have found it also has surprising benefits: for instance, because we can’t rush ahead to what happens later, we really have to pay attention to what has happened so far!

Over the years I’ve stuck with this system. The only alternative I can really think of is expecting students to have read the whole book by the first class session on it–and that means they’d be reading the next book (presumably) while we’re still talking about the one before it, so how focused and ‘in the moment’ could they be? Plus realistically, they probably would not, in fact, have read the whole book by that first class, so it seems tidier to admit that and try to be literally all on the same page. Especially with novels that were published serially or in instalments, it’s not that hard to find good places to break and take stock. It can still be tricky, though, to assign enough that there’s something new to learn and discuss from each instalment, but not so much that we feel rushed, especially when there’s not that long a reading interval between one class and the next. My classes meet Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. How much is too much–or too little–to expect them to read between 3:30 Monday, when we wrap up one session, and 2:30  Wednesday when we’re at it again? They do have four other classes (at least), after all.  I usually assign longer chunks between Friday and Monday–but is that fair, as it rather assumes weekends are for studying? Bigger instalments give us more to work with–if we haven’t read a lot since the last class, sometimes it feels to me as if our discussion is necessarily a bit thin or even repetitive–but if a lot of people are behind, it’s not necessarily the case that class discussions will be better if I assign more.

I used to notice this problem of balance less in these classes. My expectations overall were higher earlier in my teaching career (I’ve gone from a standard of six assigned novels in a one-term course to a norm of five–with six, there was never a feeling of having too much time to spend on any one of them!). Also, we used to meet twice a week instead of three times in upper-level ‘lecture’ classes, so with fewer classroom hours, again, there was never any feeling of lingering too long on one point or example. An order came down from above, though, that we had to have three “contact hours” a week in all our classes. In reading-intensive classes, it might actually make most sense to meet once a week for 2-3 hours. As far as I know, this is only an option for night classes, though, and that’s not an option that appeals to me at this stage of my family life. My impression is that five novels seems like plenty to my current students, especially when one of them is Vanity Fair  or Bleak House or Middlemarch, so bulking up the reading list and generally intensifying the workload doesn’t seem like a good idea. I do use some class hours for writing workshops, group discussions, and other learning activities, and that’s not only pedagogically time well spent but helps vary the pace. Sometimes I also use a lecture hours for student conferences, as it’s a time when I know that group is actually available (regular office hours are often sparsely attended, and conflicting schedules is a major reason). Even so, I sometimes look at the schedule and think “that many more classes on the same book? whatever will we talk about?”–or, “we haven’t read any further than that yet?” Those of you who also teach long novels–how do you manage them, logistically? Do you worry about finding that line between being burdensome and being boring?

I did pack the reading list for the mystery class with a couple more titles than usual this term and I like the greater variety–and I don’t think we’re rushing. The books are shorter there, and generally easier to read (except The Moonstone–but that’s just so fun!). We have three novels left to do in that class this term (after we finish The Terrorists for Wednesday, there’s An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, Indemnity Only, and Devil in a Blue Dress), whereas in the Victorian fiction class we have only 1.5 (the rest of Hard Times, and then North and South).

 

This Week: More Classes, and a New Issue of OLM

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Did I mention how busy things have been at work? It’s rare for me to go nearly a week without posting something here, but I just haven’t had the time or energy: what extra I had of either went into this month’s Open Letters, which includes my own review of Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot and a lot of other pieces across an impressive array of books and writers, from Rumi to Robert Musil, from Emma Goldman to Dick Cheney, from Ha Jin to Dickens to Umberto Eco. On the first of every month, all of us involved in editing, writing for, and producing Open Letters sit back and wonder for a little while that we did it again! And then we get right to work on the next issue. I found the Eugenides review quite challenging to write, partly because The Marriage Plot is one of the “it” books, the books of the moment, and comments and reviews are appearing from pretty much every source. I decided to keep my head down until I’d written mine–I didn’t even go over to the Wall Street Journal to see what our own Sam Sacks had said about it until yesterday. As I was putting the final touches on, it occurred to me that I have been pretty critical of every new book I’ve reviewed for Open Letters except Sara Paretsky’s Body Work. I guess I was pretty much OK with Claire Harman’s Jane’s Fame, too.  I do get enthusiastic about things I read! Maybe it’s just that the odds of any particular book being one I’ll be enthusiastic about are dramatically reduced when the field is limited to The Very Latest. What have I been most excited about here recently, for instance? Testament of Youth, for sure, and also The Last Samurai. One every 100 years isn’t bad! (But as those of you who follow me here know, I exaggerate my choosiness. It won’t be long now before my traditional look back at highs and lows of my reading year, and there will be many highs.)

At my day (and sometimes night and weekend) job, things continue to be busy, though I returned a set of papers last Friday and don’t get another in until this Friday, so I don’t feel quite as harried as I did–even though I am doing yet another “new” book in Mystery and Detective Fiction, The Terrorists. This is not new to me, of course, but new to my teaching, so I have no materials filed away for it. Rereading the opening chapters today, though, and drafting up some class notes, I felt really glad I had chosen it. We had good discussions of Ed McBain’s Cop Hater, and a lot of the students seemed to be enjoying it quite a bit, but there’s no getting around a couple of problems with it qua book. First, the writing really is cheesy (with some exceptional passages interspersed). I invited comment on the “literary merit” of the book, and one student said that every time she came to one of his emphatic one-sentence paragraphs she heard the Law & Order “da-DUH” scene-changer in her head–which I completely sympathize with. Those little tag lines seem so cheap and manipulative, as if we won’t feel the suspense with writing that’s any more complex. Then there’s the novel’s severe discomfort with women, who are consistently sexualized and severely limited in their roles, in ways that make Hammett’s portrayal of Brigid O’Shaughnessy seem subtle. Interesting and influential as McBain is in the history of the genre, I’ll be glad to move on to Sjöwahll and Wahlöö, who seem so much more sophisticated in just a few pages. We aren’t totally out of the woods yet with the representation of women, though: while the range of women is much greater and there are strong, independent women characters, there’s still a slightly voyeuristic quality to the way they are presented, including Beck’s love Rhea Nielsen, whose nipples are remarked frequently and whose naked body is described in much more detail than Beck’s ever is. Point of view accounts for some of this, but when Beck stares at his own body in the mirror, he doesn’t tell us anything about his pubic hair; we know the size of her breasts but not of his … anything. Not that I want to know, but it’s conspicuous which way the gaze is directed. (I wonder if I’m more aware of this now that I’ve been reading romance novels, which do direct our attention very specifically to men’s bodies.)

In 19th-Century Fiction, we have our last session on The Tenant of Wildfell Hall tomorrow and then on Friday we begin Hard Times. I have a love-hate relationship with this novel. I love that it’s shorter and thus in some ways an easier sell than most other Dickens novels; I love the clear fabular structure and the surreal tone and the elaborate artifice of the language. It’s more symbolically dense and thematically coherent than some of the bigger novels. But I hate that it is stripped so bare of the Dickensian details that make the big fat ones so delightful; I hate that it is so heavy-handedly moralistic and didactic (ironically so, given its emphasis on fancy); I hate that its fable-like style reduces the characters to quite slight and, again, artificial figures. But (yet again!) for all its oddities and its ironically mechanical feeling, it makes me cry every time I read it, and I think Louisa Gradgrind is one of Dickens’s really great creations. I absolutely thrill to the moment when she tells Tom that she would cut out the piece of her cheek where Bounderby kissed it. Cut it out with a knife! She understands the kind of man Bounderby is. Our final novel for the course is Gaskell’s North and South, and the two novels, published in close proximity, pair wonderfully for comparative discussions of industrialism, class relations, and unions–both contain chapters called “Masters and Men,” for instance, but they take really different approaches to resolving the “condition of England” problem.

In The Victorian ‘Woman Question’ we discussed “Goblin Market” last week and yesterday turned our attention to Gaskell’s short story “Lizzie Leigh.” That more or less concludes our ‘unit’ on fallen women, unless you consider Maggie Tulliver fallen, which of course will be part of our discussion of The Mill on the Floss, which we start talking about tomorrow. I’m really looking forward to that, for some of the same reasons I’m glad to get to Martin Beck in the mystery class: really good, interesting, satisfying novels are the most rewarding to pay sustained attention to, and they also usually generate the best discussions because their complexities need sorting out.

All of this week’s efforts will be fuelled by leftover Hallowe’en candy. Where have all the trick-or-treaters gone? We have maybe a dozen last night, even though the weather was as good as can be hoped for in Halifax at this time of year. (Better than it was on Sunday, when we greeted Ian Rankin with a massive wind and rain storm–he finished up his Canadian tour with a stop here, and yes, I lined up to get his autograph.)

This Week in My Classes: Mid-Term Madness!

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

The sheen is definitely off the new term now: we are in the thick of it, and the challenge of juggling its many demands has not been helped by (and probably contributed to) the cold-y flu-y virus I’ve been struggling with for about ten days. It was at its worst this past Friday,when in a rare moment of weakness I even let one of my morning classes go early! They looked so tired themselves, and they weren’t really rising to the bait of my discussion questions–but the bait itself was kind of limp with no fight left in it, not the fresh wiggly kind you need to … well, whatever. Probably best for us all that I stay away from fishing metaphors. Anyway, I was tired and slightly foggy at that point and suddenly just couldn’t keep the song and dance routine going. Some quiet working time in my office and some hot tea perked me up enough to get through the last class of that day, and by Monday I was more or less healthy, but it sure has felt like a slog. It’s good to feel better, but the work is still piled up, more than it would be if I hadn’t been sick last week, and that’s despite how much I did over the weekend and routinely do at night as well. This is the time of term when it’s particularly galling that all the mainstream media coverage of higher ed so often seems focused on what a bad job we are doing teaching undergraduates because we are either lazy tenured slackers or self-important research kingpins who can’t be bothered to spend time in the classroom.

So. Where are we now? Well, in Mystery and Detective Fiction we have just wrapped up our discussion of The Maltese Falcon, which I continue to find a particularly depressing novel, and tomorrow we turn to Ed McBain’s first 87th Precinct novel, Cop Hater. This is one of the books I read during my sabbatical quest to refresh the reading list for this course. When I wrote up my first impressions, I noted,

What seems really different about Cop Hater compared to earlier detective novels is its attention to the specific procedures of the police investigation, even including reproductions of gun licenses and rap sheets, but also detailed explanations of forensic measures (such as fingerprinting) and lab work. These features, along with the spread of the novel’s attention across several detectives (though Carella is clearly the main character) help us see the police as a system, as part of a bureaucratic organization operating within a network of other supporting (or, sometimes, hindering) systems. The case is not solved by the ingenuity of Poirot or the ratiocination of Dupin or Holmes but by the persistence of men who just keep looking and asking until they find something out.

This is one of the things I want to talk about tomorrow, though I think we’ll start with some attention to the setting, especially since we’ve talked quite a bit about the whole “mean streets” idea in Chandler and Hammett. Rereading the McBain, I was struck again by some of the stylistic tics I found annoying the first time, but I’m more interested in the dynamic of the squad room. I’m curious to see how the class reacts to this one. It is quite a good group: there’s a core of keen participants, and as far as I can tell most of the rest of them are reasonably engaged, with the exception of a couple of them who sit at the back and pretty obviously scrawl notes to each other and smirk. The room has tiered seating and isn’t that deep, so they are quite visible to me. Pretty soon I may actually say something to them, as it does occasionally throw me off my mental track wondering what they’re writing…

In 19th-Century Fiction (where, actually, there are also a few scribblers / whisperers and smirkers, and it’s a much smaller room, so again, it gets distracting!) we are working our way through The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Happily for me, given how much else I’m trying to stay on top of, I just did this novel in The Victorian ‘Woman Question,’ so it’s pretty fresh in my mind, though I’m still rereading pretty much all of each instalment. It is interestingly different doing a book in a seminar and a lecture class. I don’t just lecture, of course, but even when we’re working through points together I’m steering things more than in the seminar. The participation level is definitely better with Tenant than with Vanity Fair. It helps that some of the students, too, just read the novel for my other class! But it helps even more, I think, that the novel is simply more straightforward, in some ways more familiar, and definitely shorter. I’m a big admirer of Tenant, which is a really artfully constructed novel as well as a compellingly told one. For some time I have been meaning to do another Victorian ‘Second Glance’ piece for Open Letters (which I haven’t done since I wrote on Vanity Fair in the summer of 2010) and Tenant is at the top of my list. Another one that would be fun is Ellen Wood’s East Lynne … but no time to think about that now!

And in The Victorian ‘Woman Question’ we wrapped up Aurora Leigh last week. I thought our discussions of it went well–better than I expected, frankly! They did not find its blank verse bulk nearly as off-putting as I had anticipated, and we had some good lively sessions on it. This week we’re doing more poetry: yesterday was D. G. Rossetti’s “Jenny” and Augusta Webster’s “A Castaway,” both complex and fascinating dramatic monologues focusing on ‘fallen women,’ and tomorrow and Friday it’s Goblin Market.

Behind the scenes, I marked the first set of Mystery midterms last week and this week I’m trying hard to get through the Vanity Fair papers for the novels class. On the weekend I wrote up my final evaluation of an honours thesis I’d agreed to examine for the University of Western Sydney and sent it off. The letters for the three tenure and promotion cases I was involved in have been submitted, and I don’t think there’s any major committee business looming again for a while–so that’s a relief, because there’s a Ph.D. thesis chapter languishing in my inbox that I’d like to get to before another week goes by, and it’s starting to seem possible that I will manage it!

This Week in My Classes: WMT, AC, and EBB

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

It’s a short week, because of the Thanksgiving holiday on Monday. I think I saw the effects of the long weekend–not good ones–in my 19th-century novels class, where the limp response to questions about Vanity Fair (except from a couple of stalwart contributors) suggested people hadn’t exactly spent it keeping up with the reading. It has been three years since I taught Vanity Fair  (shocking!) and I’m not having as much fun with it as I’ve had before, and I also don’t get the impression that very many students are having fun with it. I feel as if I must be doing something wrong, though I’ve been too busy the past couple of weeks to get creative about possible fixes. The novel is massive as well as somewhat miscellaneous: I’ve been suggesting ways to manage the information overload by looking for parallels and patterns, themes and variations (on vanity, for instance) but maybe they are just feeling overwhelmed. Or maybe they are loving it and just not letting on. Will Vanity Fair join Waverley as a novel I just don’t want to teach because of the burden of resentment and disconnection it puts on the class? But what about the two or three students who do love it? And what about the fact that it is just one of the great Victorian novels? Why should I care if they don’t love it? I’m sure things will pick up when we get to Tenant of Wildfell Hall next week.

In Mystery and Detective Fiction, we have wrapped up our discussion of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and are heading into our first mid-term on Friday. Funny how the looming presence of an exam improves attendance and concentrates attention. I think the discussion of Ackroyd went well. I always try to provoke as much discussion as possible about the morality of a novel in which violent death is treated so casually. It’s almost comical, in fact, the way the characters mill around Ackroyd’s dead body checking whether windows are closed and so on, and then when Poirot blithely sits down in the very chair in which Ackroyd was killed. We spent some time on the issue of why the chair wasn’t too bloody for that to be a good idea sartorially, never mind morally, and that let us move into the issue of the detective’s necessary (or is it?) detachment, a scientific or clinical attitude we also saw in, for instance, our sample Dr Thorndyke story–and which is of course exemplified in Sherlock Holmes, who is described by Watson as a “thinking and reasoning machine.” We have also read “The Problem of Cell 13,” featuring The Thinking Machine himself. The value of detachment gets challenged by some of our later readings, including especially P. D. James’s An Unsuitable Job for a Woman.

In the Victorian ‘Woman Question’ course, we are making our way through Aurora Leigh. It has been even longer than three years since I got to teach this strange, wonderful poem in its entirety. In our first session on it, I asked what background the students had in Victorian poetry, and the basic answer was none at all. That’s distressing! And it also means that some sections of the poem, like the central part in Book V about redefining the epic for modern times, lose a lot of their argumentative force. It would be nice to be able to refer to, say, Idylls of the King and know they have some idea what I’m talking about. Increasingly I regret that for various logistical reasons we simply can’t have specific prerequisites for what are supposed to be our most ‘advanced’ classes. It’s an issue that particularly irks me when I teach the seminar on sensation fiction: much of the interest of the genre and the course arises from the relationship of sensation novels to the Victorian ‘canon,’ but when Lady Audley’s Secret and East Lynne are the first Victorian novels someone is reading, it’s hard to have substantial discussion about why such novels were scandalous in their day and marginal in the field until very recently. On a still more basic level, my group was evasive about their background in scansion too, and we’re reading quite a bit of poetry this term–I can’t be expected to provide remedial instruction in poetic forms and versification for an honours seminar, surely! and yet how can we really talk about poetry without being able to talk about it as poetry? Aurora Leigh is particularly challenging in this regard because it is already a hybrid form, a verse-novel, so the temptation is strong to abstract the plot from the language and discuss characters, relationships, and social issues as if they don’t come to us in blank verse…but they do, and it matters that they do, not just because form always matters but because genre and poetic form are central issues of the poem itself and we can’t think well about how it reflects or advances its own aesthetic theories unless we care about it as poetry. Still, the discussion is going reasonably well, as far as it can go under the circumstances.

This Week in My Classes: Amidst the Mess, Three Mysterious Morsels

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The past week or so has just felt crazy with tasks and details to keep on top of. When we’re planning courses, we (or maybe it’s just me?) tend to focus on big picture issues, like which books to assign and which assignment sequences to use. Once that’s all decided, there’s filling in the syllabus, usually a happy task full of dreams of lively discussion prompted by clever juxtapositions (like this week’s cluster of ‘poems by women poets about women poets’ right before we start Aurora Leigh!) and supported or solidified by informal and formal writing. What we (or maybe just I) tend not to prepare so well in advance are things like spreadsheets for record-keeping or evaluation forms for seminars, or attendance sheets–which it is nearly pointless to get to organized about anyway, at least until the add-drop period ends and the list has some stability! I’ve reached the point in all of my classes where I needed all these things firmly in place, as assignments have been coming in, quizzes have been written, students have given seminar presentations, and so on.  Luckily I do have templates for all these kinds of things, or at least a set of best (or usual) practices, so I’m not dreaming them up from nothing, but I am drawing them up or finessing them to suit this year’s particularities. And of course this administrative stuff (plus the marking of quizzes and evaluation of assignments and so on) has to happen in addition to the other aspects of class prep, so just when you are starting to think “see, the teaching term isn’t that busy after all–I’m getting all my readings and class notes ready in plenty of time!” you are reminded why the teaching term actually is quite intense.

Then as if this year’s classes aren’t enough to be worrying about, the deadlines for course proposals and timetabling for next year have been moved way up, and in fact we were asked to submit our teaching preferences for 2012-13 by last Friday. I’m reasonably certain that this deadline has nothing to do with program planning or pedagogy (heaven forbid we should think about next year once we have some kind of idea how this year is going) and everything to do with recruiting: Dal’s big fall Open House is October 14, and it probably helps to be able to point prospective students to at least tentative course listings. This process was further complicated for us this year by bad budget news in the faculty that had repercussions for our TA allocation and thus, potentially, for our graduate student funding–which meant rejigging much of our curriculum on the fly to ward off various worst-case scenarios. Once again, program planning and pedagogy were given short shrift because of external imperatives! This is not to trivialize the budget difficulties, but it’s a real shame the timetable for figuring out how to deal with them was not different. Book orders for the winter term also came due, though luckily I had made most of my decisions about that already. Still, I’ve been stymied by discovering, to my great surprise, that a book I had counted on assigning (Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day) appears not to have a Canadian edition available at the moment. Seriously? The bookstore and I are working on this, but if we can’t find a workaround, I’m going to have to decide on something else in something of a hurry.

Add in the three tenure and promotion cases I’m involved in, the three Ph.D. students I’m supervising who persist (darn them!) in being industrious and thus giving me work to do, the two Honours students I’m now mentoring in preparation for our year-end Honours “conference,” the reference letters I’m already assembling documents for (and then writing, collating, addressing, and mailing), and the two other committees I’m on that persist in holding meetings or circulating materials for us to read (darn them too!)–and whew! My head has been buzzing, and my stress levels nasty, by the end of most days. The student union president who blithely commented in a recent Maclean’s story that “Professors have a pretty good gig . . . You put in some office hours, you teach for a few hours and then you end up with a decent paycheque” should maybe job-shadow a professor or two before concluding that it’s only reasonable for us to return all student emails within 12 hours. (Yes, that’s right: we were born knowing even the most recent developments in our field–amazing, eh?–and basically just sit around until it’s time to go pontificate. Assignments appear from nowhere, and magically reappear with comments and grades! Hmm: I just might contribute a little to that Facebook group mentioned in the article…)

Happily, at the center of all this you still do have those “few” hours in the classroom, and even more happily, it is often a treat getting ready for them because you are working on something you find genuinely interesting and exercising not just your expertise but your creativity in figuring out how to get your students equally involved in it. I’ve been teaching a lot of quite familiar material so far this term, but as always I’ve tweaked my syllabi here and there for variety and to keep me alert. One regular source for new material is whatever reader I’ve chosen for Mystery and Detective Fiction: it’s easier to change up smaller readings, and I’m often dissatisfied with an anthology for one reason or another so I have used quite a few over the years. This year, after much (much!) exploring, I settled on the inexpensive and perfectly suitable Dover collection Classic Crime Stories, and this week, much welcome relief from the other dull or worrisome things I’m taking care of comes from the three short stories we’re reading about “Great Detectives”: Jacques Futrelle’s “The Problem of Cell 13,” G. K. Chesterton’s “The Blue Cross,” and R. Austin Freeman’s “The Case of Oscar Brodski.” All of them are models of ingenuity in both the construction and the telling of the plot. All of them feature detectives who reason their way to solutions beyond the reach of us ordinary people, but each detective has a unique character and very particular gifts–and one of them, Father Brown, of course also has enormous endearing charm. Futrelle’s Thinking Machine is the least appealing of them, I think: his sheer arrogance is interestingly offset by the way his promise to think his way out of his solitary cell turns out to be, let’s say, misleading (of the three, he’s the one whose solution to his problem is ultimately most un-astonishing–though certainly surprising until explained–and relies the most on quite ordinary kinds of help from other people). The fellow-convict who believes his guilty conscience is driving him to confess provides another example of the Holmes-like trope of the seemingly unnatural element that has a perfectly natural explanation. Father Brown brings a new dimension to the uncomfortable proximity between the criminal and the crime-solver that we have been discussing from the beginning of the course: unlike many famous detectives, he manages to retain his innocence despite his deep understanding of guilt.  “The Case of Oscar Brodski” is the most formally interesting, with its first part (“The Mechanism of Crime”) telling us the crime going forwards, and its second part (“The Mechanism of Detection”) taking us backwards as each bit of evidence is traced to its source and the events are reconstructed. It is also the one with the most violent crime, and thus the one that most emphasizes another uncomfortable aspect of this kind of detective fiction, namely, the lack of human feeling so often displayed as the intellectual problem is given priority. Nobody is particularly upset by the decapitated corpse of poor Brodski! We’ll be spending a lot more time on this problem (if it is one) when we discuss The Murder of Roger Ackroyd starting Friday. Today, I have planned an in-class exercise designed to prompt the students to generate their own commentary on the stories: I asked them to read with an eye to “teachable” moments, explaining (as per my previous post) that they are supposed to be reading actively enough to get what’s interesting and relevant on their own. I’m going to put them in pairs and then larger groups and circulate transparencies for them to write up ‘lecture notes’ on, and then put them up on the overhead projector and see what they’ve come up with.