This Week In My Classes

This Week in My Classes: Almost the End!

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The last couple of weeks of term always feel like the mental (and organizational) equivalent of coasting hands-free down a steep hill on a bicycle while wearing an unzipped backpack spewing pieces of paper. Though to some extent the pressure of new content subsides (I have really only two more class hours in which I am responsible for lecturing or leading discussion), there are a lot of moving parts. This week these include practice exams and peer editing worksheets, for instance. Also, realizing the end is nigh, students suddenly start actually coming by my office hours for help with their papers, or (less endearingly) brandishing medical notes or sob stories of various kinds to explain their many absences or failure to meet course requirements along the way. Complaints about scheduled exam times are not uncommon, either. For the record, I too would be much happier not to have an exam at 8:30 a.m. on December 18!

Tomorrow, then, is my last real lecture in the British Literature After 1800 survey class. Last year, due to an oversight when I drew up the original syllabus (I forgot about Good Friday!) I had to cut my planned final lecture on Atonement and use that hour for our peer editing. This term I have that hour back, and I hope to use it not just to highlight and discuss some of the most interesting things we learn about Atonement from its concluding revelations but also to elicit some reflections on the course overall. After all, Atonement raises a number of questions about what we want or expect or need from art–particularly the novelist’s art, but also, along the way (with its invocations of Auden and Yeats, for instance) from poetry, and through The Trials of Arabella, perhaps from drama as well. Friday is peer editing, and Monday is exam review, and that’s a wrap. Well, except for the grading,  of course, which (between final essays and the late exam) will take me right through to Christmas, I expect. Sigh.

And tomorrow is also our last seminar discussion in Women and Detective Fiction, as Friday’s class is a student presentation and Monday I have set aside our class time for conferences on their final papers, as these are their major assignment of the term. They’ve done proposals already. We are working our way through Prime Suspect, and have been having some good discussions–with wide-ranging allusions back across our other texts, which I’m happy to see at the end of a course–especially about what many critics discuss as the dual crimes of so many women’s crime novels: there’s the specific crime under investigation, and there’s the broader ‘criminal’ context of what I suppose is easiest to label misogyny, though depending on the example, it may be something that seems to deserve a subtler name, like discrimination, or marginalization, or depreciation. Even going back to Miss Marple we find that one aspect of the case is the detective’s gender: for Miss Marple, there’s the way she is constantly underestimated by those around her because of her little old lady persona (as we discussed, this can be a strategic advantage for her, of course) and who also often solves a puzzle thanks to experience or expertise that is also gendered–domestic knowledge, for instance. So not all of the works we looked at take gender as a problem, but it’s always an issue, because it always does make a difference to who someone is and how they live in the world. I think the first novel we read this term that clearly stakes out territory as a feminist analysis of this context is Death in a Tenured Position, though An Unsuitable Job for a Woman is a tricky case (James disavowed any feminist intention, but the reasons for feminism are all over the place in the novel). With Prime Suspect, one of the questions we haven’t finished with is how far Tennison’s efforts are ‘feminist’ and how far they are self-interested, with sexism simply an obstacle she needs to overcome to succeed. (Is there a difference?)  Like Miss Marple, Tennison uses knowledge she has because of her sex (recognizing the labels on victims’ clothing, for instance), but she also makes an issue of looking closely at women’s faces: the initial misidentification of the victim is a result of the men on the case not differentiating between women, which is a theme continued through the series, including the incident we discussed yesterday in which Tennison is approached by a ‘john’ while interviewing two prostitutes. At key moments like this her proximity to the victims is played up and her power as a DCI shown to be unstable, or at least something that needs to be repeatedly asserted. One important sequence near the beginning has her standing next to a photo display of two murdered women, both blonde: in that shot, she can easily be seen as the next in line, a possibility recharged near the end when one of the forensic team holds up a hair he’s pulled from a crime scene and asks, “Your girl blonde?” Tomorrow we’ll look closely at the final interview with Moyra and then at Tennison’s triumphant celebration with “the lads” after the case is cracked. Many of the early scenes emphasize (through camera angles, for instance) her isolation from the team. At the end she has certainly won them over:  is that success? On what terms?

This Week in My Classes: Grafton, Paretsky, Auden, Heaney, Rushdie!

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I think the only unifying theme to this week’s readings is (a slight variant on) Cliff Clavin’s immortal Jeopardy question.

And, speaking of Jeopardy, Monday’s class was our final session on Grafton’s ‘A’ is for Alibi, which means it was time for a student presentation. What is the connection? Thanks for asking! Years ago I decided I couldn’t allow students to drone on from notes for these events so I instituted some rules: no more than 10 minutes just talking at the class, and the rest of the time must be used for some balance of audio-visual materials, group discussion, and activities. Lots of different activities are allowed, from splinter groups to take up particular passages or problems, to hands-on activities, role-playing, or games. Probably because it’s the most fun, many groups choose to devise a game. My rule is that the game (or other activity) must be thematically relevant and somehow move us closer to understanding some substantial issue from the course or reading. Students usually prove ingenious at accomplishing these goals! With An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, for instance, we played Hangman (!): each challenge was a key quotation from the text, and if we killed off our victim we had to tackle a discussion question. Monday, then, we played Sue Grafton Jeopardy. Categories included ‘Biography,’ ‘Plot,’ ‘Characters,’ and ‘Weapons,’ which certainly tested our familiarity with the details of the novel,and the “daily doubles” were (again) discussion questions. They let me play! Often I am assigned an impartial role (I was the presiding judge, for instance, in “Law and Order: Gaudy Night edition”). But I’m sure my team would have won without my participation. (Hee.) It’s amusing to see how competitive everyone gets–and the discussion questions give us a chance to put that more trivial knowledge into wider contexts, so don’t worry: it’s not all about the cookies. Tomorrow we start work on Sara Paretsky’s Indemnity Only. I lectured on this novel in my detective fiction survey course last winter term (see here, for instance) but I think it will be especially productive to come to it right after Grafton, because the two novelists are often discussed together and they do, structurally, some similar things–revising hard-boiled detective conventions, for instance. But both the personalities and the styles of feminism are quite different in the books. The two series are still going strong and they have developed in quite different ways, too, though I think in ways that you can see from the beginning, Grafton more of a quirky individualist, Paretsky with a more ambitious social and political reach. My students responded quite positively to Kinsey Millhone, though not for the kinds of reasons I necessarily hope for (they found her very “relatable”).

I got sort of inspired, as I prepped for Monday’s session on Auden for my Brit Lit survey class, and thought that if I couldn’t necessarily bring my students to the cathedral, I could perhaps bring the cathedral to them. So I planned to take a few minutes of class to dim the lights and play them this clip (which sadly I’m not able to embed), even though “Funeral Blues” is not in our anthology. I think John Hannah does such a beautiful job, and of course the poem itself is beautiful, mournful, but unsentimental. That it’s a clip from a mainstream film seemed right for my purposes, which include making sure we think about literature as something not meant to be confined in homogenizing anthologies. Luckily, I’m teaching in a classroom that, though it’s terrible for discussion, is all set up with computers and projectors. Well, of course, when I got to class the computer in the podium was not on, and no combination of buttons on the console brought it to life–and the machine itself is completely secured inside various locked panels. So much for that. I may bring my laptop on Wednesday and try again (although it occurs to me that when I showed them a video clip, I also could not locate a volume control, so who knows how well they’d be able to hear it). Dear People Who Preach The Importance of Teaching With Technology: You have to support us well or we just can’t do it. A/V support is in a different building (ironic, since I’m teaching in the computer science building).

Ah well. Back to basics on Wednesday, then, with Seamus Heaney–though I’d like to be able to show some graphics of the bog people. I moved Heaney from the tutorial session into the lecture session because things went so splendidly last year when we talked about “Digging.” Probably it will fall completely flat as a result. And I moved Rushdie into the tutorial spot, thinking “The Prophet’s Hair” was just the kind of story to stimulate lively discussion around the seminar table.  (That, and the excellent colleague who lectured on Rushdie last year is on sabbatical this year and could not be corralled into making her guest appearance again.) We’ll see.

In lieu of the Auden clip, here’s Seamus Heaney reading “Digging” himself. I’m interested in the emphasis he places on the two instances of “my” in the last bit. I hadn’t heard it that way, in my mind.

Last Week and Next in My Classes: A Mess of Modern(ist)s

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It’s that time of term now when every day is a struggle to triage the demands on my time and attention–and last week I got distracted by a personal (or at least not-quite-work-related)  issue and failed utterly to settle in to grading assignments as I really should have, meaning this coming week will need to be even more tightly packed. Unlike this time last term, though, I have lecture notes and class materials on hand already for the Brit Lit survey, which is a huge help, and I also have the luxury of not one but two guest lecturers. Last week my very able TA took over for the class on Joyce’s “The Dead,” and next week another very able Ph.D. student is dealing with T. S. Eliot. Not only is it a relief to let someone else take charge for a while, but I thoroughly enjoy being on the other side of the podium on these occasions. After all, it was the rewards of being a student that lured me down this path in the first place! And I’m never reminded of that more clearly then when I get the treat of learning from someone smart and passionate all over again. It’s interesting, too, to observe how other people manage both the material and the room.

My own lecture last week was on Virginia Woolf’s essay “Modern Fiction.” I surprised myself by how worked up I got about it! Not only are the governing ideas of the essay really helpful and important to thinking about how formal and aesthetic priorities shift between the Victorian and the modern period, but they also lay the groundwork for the analysis we’ll be doing of Atonement in just a few weeks. All that aside, though, it’s just such a strikingly intelligent, thought-provoking, and beautifully written essay. Observing to my class that it appeared in the TLS in 1919, the same year as Woolf’s great essay on George Eliot, I wondered aloud (as if any of them care about this–but then, you never know, maybe they lie awake at night wondering, too!) who writes for the TLS today in anything like such a memorable way, with that stunning combination of erudition and idiosyncrasy. Have the conditions of contemporary publishing and reviewing made such magisterial yet speculative writing inconceivable? “Modern Fiction” is, of course, the one with the marvellous image of the ‘luminous halo,’ part of Woolf’s protest against the dreary literal materialism of Wells, Bennett, and Galsworthy. “Life escapes,” she says of their writing; “Whether we call it life or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing, has moved off, or on..”:

The writer seems constrained, not by his free will, but by some powerful tyrant who has him in thrall, to provide a plot, to provide comedy, tragedy, love interest, and an air of probability embalming the whole so impeccable that if all his figures were to come to life they would find themselves dressed down to the fashion of the hour. The tyrant is obeyed; the novel is done to a turn. But sometimes, more and more often as time goes by, we suspect a momentary doubt, a spasm of rebellion, as the pages fill themselves in the customary way. Is life like this? Must novels be like this?

“Must novels be like this?” That seems to me a great question to ask–of any fiction. What are its imperatives? What (perhaps as a result of those imperatives) are its limitations?

That’s actually sort of the angle from which we approached Friday’s reading, Katherine Mansfield’s “The Garden Party”–not a novel, of course, but an inquiry (or so I read it) into what fiction can or should do. There’s the party, with its beautiful flowers and other aesthetic preoccupations, and there’s the gritty reality of the accident and the “poky little holes” where the workers live. Laura’s moral confusion–can they, should they, continue with their party?–is diverted by the sight of her reflection in “her black hat trimmed with gold daisies,” which renders the painful idea of the dead man and his bereaved family “blurred, unreal, like a picture in the newspaper.” Later, having carried the basket of party leftovers to the widow, Laura stands over the body of the dead man, and says,”Forgive my hat.” But just when you might think she (and perhaps through her, the story overall) is turning against, apologizing for, choosing frivolous beauty over serious realism, we are confronted with her ecstasy at what she has seen: “It was simply marvellous,” she tells her brother about the sight of him. “Isn’t life . . . isn’t life—” Isn’t life what? She doesn’t say, and that sense of revelation inflected with uncertainty epitomizes something about at least one aspect of modernism. Whatever life is, it isn’t simple–or, to return to Woolf, it isn’t “a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged.”

Next week, before T. S. Eliot we have Yeats. And not to neglect my Women and Detective Fiction seminar, we have finished up our work on Death in a Tenured Position, and moved on to Sue Grafton’s ‘A’ is for Alibi. So those two, plus the remaining assignments, plus two promotion cases, plus revised MA and PhD thesis chapters hungry for comments, plus curriculum proposals to review, plus about eight remaining reference letters with deadlines coming up . . . But I’ve been through enough weeks like this before, now, to know that it all, somehow, always gets done.

This Week In My Classes: The Importance of Being Earnest

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The thing is, though Wilde means it ironically and makes it seem very funny, I think it is important to be earnest–not all the time, maybe, but in essence, and certainly about important things. And the move from Gaskell’s Mary Barton to Wilde’s play in my survey class this week really made me feel that preference on my reading pulses. We spent Monday on the conclusion of Mary Barton. It’s heavy-handed, sentimental, didactic, and politically compromised, but for all its faults, it’s a rousing rejoinder to Wilde’s quip that “there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book: books are well written or badly written, that is all.” That is not all.  Mary Barton really means what it says, and that sincerity makes it worth my time and argument–that, and its commitment to making people’s lives better by helping them understand each other better. It also finds beauty in acts of common human love and decency, and conveys the richness and variety of human lives even in the face of the most unrelenting circumstances. Wilde may have enjoyed the idea that you need a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing, but I am wholly susceptible to scenes such as this one:

Barton grew worse; he had fallen across the bed, and his breathing seemed almost stopped; in vain did Mary strive to raise him, her sorrow and exhaustion had rendered her too weak.

So, on hearing some one enter the house-place below, she cried out for Jem to come to her assistance.

A step, which was not Jem’s, came up the stairs.

Mr Carson stood in the door-way. In one instant he comprehended the case.

He raised up the powerless frame; and the departing soul looked out of the eyes with gratitude. He held the dying man propped in his arms. John Barton folded his hands, as if in prayer.

“Pray for us,” said Mary, sinking on her knees, and forgetting in that solemn hour all that had divided her father and Mr Carson.

No other words would suggest themselves than some of those he had read only a few hours before:

“God be merciful to us sinners. – Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us.”

And when the words were said, John Barton lay a corpse in Mr Carson’s arms.

So ended the tragedy of a poor man’s life. (from the Gaskell Web etext)

Gaskell really wants her writing to be a force for good in the world. That’s not every artist’s goal, and it is a risky one. But despite everything, I am moved by this tableau of the murderer dying in the arms of his victim’s father, both desperate to salvage their humanity from the wrecks of their lives. And in fact, maybe I am moved, not despite everything, but because of everything Gaskell has done to prepare us for this moment. As some parts of Mary Barton show, and as is still better demonstrated by her later novels, Gaskell is capable of much greater restraint, which is what we often take as a key element of ‘artistry,’ but at this moment she  throws that kind of aesthetic caution to the winds: it’s all about the pathos, the regret, the forgiveness. You’re in or you’re out, at this point in the novel. Me, I’m in.

With The Importance of Being Earnest, in contrast, I tend to side with Shaw, who reviewed it in the Saturday Review in 1895:

I cannot say that I greatly cared for The Importance of Being Earnest. It amused me, of course; but unless comedy touches me as well as amuses me, it leaves me with a sense of having wasted my evening. I go to the theatre to be moved to laughter, not to be tickled or bustled into it; and that is why, though I laugh as much as anybody at a farcical comedy, I am out of spirits before the end of the second act, and out of temper before the end of the third . . .

Still, despite resenting my amusement just a little, I did enjoy (and I think the class enjoyed), the clips from the brilliant film starring Edith Evans as Lady Bracknell, who delivers this famous line better than anybody:

This Week in My Classes: Worlds in Crisis–Mary Barton and P. D. James

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After last week’s big effort towards launching the students in my survey class on their research assignments, we spent our first two classes this week with Mary Barton: no PowerPoint, no overheads, just me, them, and the novel. My impression (though it is necessarily impressionistic, since I can’t even really focus on most of their faces in our particular room) is that they are finding the reading a bit of a slog right now. This is not really surprising, since for many of them this is their first experience reading Victorian fiction (probably, any long fiction, though since many of them are English majors, I shouldn’t assume the worst, I suppose). And even those who have ventured into the nineteenth century before are more likely to have read Austen or the Brontes than any Gaskell, much less Gaskell at her most sentimental and didactic. Wait–that’s probably Ruth, so they should consider themselves lucky to be reading a novel in which there is a lot of action, including a fire (with a daring rescue), a murder, a boat chase, a trial scene, and a touching deathbed reconciliation. In Ruth, as I actually told them yesterday, the basic story is that Ruth is seduced and then spends 400 pages being very, very sorry. On Monday I focused on Gaskell’s strategies for softening her readers up to the working-class families who make up the large majority of the novel’s population, only, once she’s made us all cozy with them, to start bumping them off in large numbers. The string of deaths in the first 90 pages of the novel really is quite shocking, which of course is the point: we need to ask, as the characters themselves as, why their lives are so precarious. We looked also at John Barton and the process by which he becomes a radical, a Chartist, and eventually a [spoiler alert!] murderer. Gaskell is careful to show the social and economic causes of his alienation, hostility, and violence: his Chartism is not the result of any moral failing on his part, but of his desperate circumstances, and, most important to her analysis, of his perception (largely justified) that those around him with power and money do not listen or care. Communication between the classes: this is, essentially, Gaskell’s prescription for solving the ‘condition of England’ problem, and of course her novel is explicitly offered as an aid to that conciliatory process. Mary Barton is another example, that is, of a novel in which the characters have difficulties that would be solved if only they had the opportunity to read the novel they inhabit. (Vanity Fair is another one, or so I have argued.) Is there a name for this kind of self-referential intertextuality?

If Mary Barton were called John Barton, as Gaskell once planned, then it would be a more radical book than it is, but in Mary Barton John’s story is–not sidelined, exactly, but nearly overwhelmed by Mary’s story, which is in some ways a predictable love triangle. Yesterday we (well, I–Monday, I hope to really bring them into the discussion, since by then they should have read the whole book!) focused on how that story, and women more generally, fit into the novel’s larger interests. I looked especially at Mary’s Aunt Esther, who is lured by her experience of financial independence (she worked in a factory) to desire more social mobility than the novel sees fit: she eventually falls for a rich man and then becomes a fallen woman, and she wanders the margins of the town, and the novel, as a cautionary tale for Mary. Tomorrow we will spend our tutorials on the ever-exciting topic of proper MLA-style citations, then Monday we wrap up our class work on the novel with, I hope, some vigorous debate about the novel’s proposed solution to its problems.

In Women and Detective Fiction we’re reading P. D. James’s An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. I very much admire this novel, which exemplifies James’s desire to use the structure of the mystery novel as a frame on which to hang (an unfortunate verb, in this particular case!) issues of character and theme. I was rereading its conclusion today soon after reading this eloquent and depressing post at Tales from the Reading Room about the recent catastrophic budget cuts being proposed for higher education in the UK, which include potentially reductions of as much as 100% for humanities education. This juxtaposition gave unusual resonance to the confrontation between Cordelia and Sir Ronald Callender, who has murdered his own son in order to protect the funding for his laboratory. In response to Cordelia’s appeal to love, Callender makes an overtly utilitarian argument for his crime:

[D]on’t say that what I’m doing here isn’t worth one single human life. . . The greatest good of the greatest number. Beside that fundamental declaration of common sense all other philosophies are metaphysical abstractions.

Callender is a ‘conservationist,’ that is, an environmentalist. So in some sense he is pursuing the ‘greatest good of the greatest number.’ But Cordelia confronts his narrow definition of ‘good’ with an appeal to humanity (‘what is the use of making the world more beautiful if the people who live in it can’t love one another?’), and it’s surely no accident that the individual victim here is a humanist and that one of the battlegrounds is Cambridge, which Cordelia idealizes as “ordered beauty for the service of learning” before she realizes that its scholarly pursuits have at least two faces: in Bunyan’s words, which she quotes, “then I saw that there was a way to hell even from the gates of heaven.” That James takes Cordelia’s side is suggested by Sir Ronald’s role as the villain of the piece. He has created his own Frankenstein’s monster in the person of his lab assistant, Lunn, whose subservience to his scientific master nearly leads to Cordelia’s death. In a genre that typically rewards objectivity and detachment, Cordelia (though just barely) survives and succeeds because of her attachments and loyalties, her refusal to allow love to be devalued, even after death. Though in the end she causes at least one, arguably two, deaths, and lies even to the point of becoming an accomplice to a murder, Dalgliesh concludes that “she’s absolutely without guilt.” Using the skeletal apparatus of a crime novel, then, James has in fact written a novel about values, and in particular about the conflict between two visions of learning, one coldly scientific and the other youthful, naive, idealistic, but ultimately worth fighting for–a novel, as it turns out, well suited for the current moment.

This Week In My Classes: Gaskell, Sayers, and Literary Research

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It was a short week, thanks to the Thanksgiving holiday–so why do I feel so flattened? It has something to do with the 6-8 hours I put in just trying to decide what to include in and how to present an introduction to literary research for my survey class. There are just so many things I want to say to them, to help them with, and to warn them against! They are doing a very particular kind of assignment that mimics the process of doing the research for a critical essay but with several specific steps that are really about learning to use (and discriminate among) the overwhelming array of potential sources of information now available. Having now heard not one but two presentations in my fourth-year seminar that relied heavily and unapologetically on Wikipedia, I’m more determined than ever, not to stop students from using Wikipedia (I use it myself, after all), but to make sure they start there, not stop there, and that they know why.

Anyway, I feel as if I hadn’t quite got to the point I wanted with the presentation, but here it is–without, of course, my running commentary including qualifications, elaborations, and acknowledgments of points of controversy. What I was most interested in accomplishing was getting them away from the idea that research means looking up ‘the right answer,’ and impressing upon them that research is not a linear journey from one question to one result but a kind of spiralling process. I tried to find the graphics that best represented the way I hoped they conceptualize their task. If anything strikes you as a major howler, do let me know, as it seems fairly likely I’ll get another chance at this course next year.

My other task for the survey class this week was setting up our study of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (which is what their research assignment focuses on–I used Hard Times for my examples as it seemed close enough to be useful and suggestive). I’m disappointed now in the way I did that, actually. The class size and room, along with the particular goals of the course, which make me feel pressured to ‘cover’ things, made it seem right to provide a lot of general context on the 19th-century novel and social problem fiction. But I used to do a lot more interactive teaching even in the early sessions on novels, and I think I’d like to go back to that even if it’s hard to pull off in a tiered lecture hall. While it’s true they don’t usually know much, if any, of that general context, it will probably mean more to them if I let the explanations arise more organically from developments in the novel itself and make sure they are getting involved sooner rather than later.

In Mystery and Detective Fiction, we wrapped up Gaudy Night. Here too I felt a bit disappointed. Maybe I’m losing my teaching mojo! It’s true that I haven’t been nominated for a teaching award since 2007 and my evaluations are not as consistently high as they once were… But actually in this particular example my disappointment was that the class just didn’t seem very excited about the novel, and since it is one of my very (very, very!) favourite books, I felt I had somehow failed it. Or them. Maybe that was the problem, though I tried not to make it too obvious that it is one of my very (very, very!) favourites but to entertain arguments on both sides about how effectively it achieves Sayers’s aims of integrating the ‘novel of manners’ with the detective story, or how intelligently Sayers unifies her characters and situations with the novel’s themes, including women and academic life and the difficulty of balancing the demands of the head with the desires of the heart. It’s funny how it is sometimes much easier to teach things you aren’t very invested in personally!

And now, home for the weekend. In my bag: Mary Barton and An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, for work; Elif Batuman’s The Possessed, for fun (and a little for ideas, as I keep turning around and around in my head different ideas for writing projects of my own); Brenda Maddox’s George Eliot in Love, for a review I must finish this weekend (!); and an advance copy of Jill Paton Walsh’s latest Peter Wimsey concoction–maybe, also, for a review, but also just because.

This Week in My Classes: Head and Heart

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Both of my class readings for today focus on conflicts–real, assumed, or perceived–between the demands of the head and the demands of the heart.

Balliol College, Oxford

In Women and Detective Fiction, it was our first session on Dorothy Sayers’s Gaudy Night. The novel opens as Harriet Vane revisits Oxford for her college’s Gaudy celebrations. She is pleased to be leaving behind her, as she thinks, the emotional disruptions of her life in London, including her troubled past as a murder suspect and her current relationship with Lord Peter Wimsey. Oxford, to her, represents at this point an oasis of order and clarity:

To be true to one’s calling, whatever follies on might commit in one’s emotional life, that was the way to spiritual peace. How could one feel fettered, being the freeman of so great a city, or humiliated, where all enjoyed equal citizenship? . . . In the glamour of one Gaudy night, one could realize that one was a citizen of no mean city. It might be an old and an old-fashioned city, with inconvenient buildings and narrow streets where the passers-by squabbled foolishly about the right of way; but her foundations were set upon the holy hills and her spires touched heaven.

This “exalted mood” does not altogether survive the ensuing encounters with old classmates or former teachers, but even as clues emerge that beneath its beautiful surface Oxford conceals its share of ugly truths and dark secrets, Harriet continues to be compelled by the ideal of a place in which the highest value is placed on “integrity of the mind.” Writing about Gaudy Night, Sayers recalls having been asked by her own Oxford college to give a toast at the Gaudy dinner:

I had to ask myself exactly what it was for which one had to thank a university education, and came to the conclusion that it was, before everything, that habit of intellectual integrity which is at once the foundation and the result of scholarship.

Much of the novel explores the implications of this commitment, and whether the intellectual life can, or should, be isolated from the life of the heart. For Sayers, the technical challenge was to integrate her interest in this problem, and in the characters she had invented who were living out its implications, with her chosen fictional form:

The new and exciting thing was to bring the love-problem into line with the detective-problem, so that the same key should unlock both at once. I had Harriet, feeling herself for the first time one equal ground with Peter, seeing the attraction of the intellectual life a means of freeing herself from the emotional obsession he had produced in her, and yet seeing (as she supposed) that the celibate intellectual life rendered one liable to insanity in its ugliest form. I had Peter, seeing the truth from the start and perfectly conscious that he had only to leave her under her misapprehension [about the causes of that insanity] to establish his emotional ascendancy over her. . . . Peter’s honesty of mind had to tell him that if Harriet accepted him under any sort of misapprehension, or through any insincerity on his part, they would be plunged into a situation even more false and intolerable than that from which they started. She must come to him as a free agent, if she came at all . . .

Sayers explains in the same essay that her creation of Harriet as a strong, deep, and independent woman necessitated her reinvention of Peter: she had to rewrite him from a caricature to a human being so that a relationship between the two was conceivable. More than that, though, and I think this is at the heart of why so many women writers and critics cherish this novel, she would not compromise Harriet’s autonomy in the interests of romance, so she devotes this entire novel to the struggle of both Peter and Harriet to find the necessary balance or equipoise in their relationship that they can achieve both love and respect, can satisfy both head and heart.

In British Literature Since 1800 we are spending this afternoon’s class on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh. I am fortunate to have as a colleague one of the leading experts on EBB, Marjorie Stone, who recently co-edited the definitive annotated edition of EBB’s poetry for Pickering and Chatto. Marjorie has kindly agreed to do a guest lecture. I’m always very excited when someone else lectures in my class. I thoroughly enjoy lecturing myself, but I love feeling like a student again–that experience, after all, was what sent me down this path in the first place! It’s wonderful to hear someone speak with passion and wisdom about a subject really dear to their heart. We are reading just the excerpts in the Norton Anthology: the bits from Book I on Aurora’s education, from Book II in which she faces off against her conventional cousin Romney, and then from Book V in which she (meaning both Aurora and EBB) redefines the epic form for the modern age, and for the woman poet:

Never flinch,
But still, unscrupulously epic, catch
Upon the burning lava of a song,
The full-veined, heaving, double-breasted Age:
That, when the next shall come, the men of that
May touch the impress with reverent hand, and say
‘Behold,–behold the paps we all have sucked!
This bosom seems to beat still, or at least
It sets ours beating: this is living art,
Which thus presents, and thus records true life.

It’s an exciting moment, but one that Aurora has earned (or so she thinks) by choosing her head over her heart, rejecting Romney’s proposal that she give up her poetic ambitions to become his helpmate in social reform: “If your sex is weak for art,” he says,

(And I, who said so, did but honour you
By using truth in courtship), it is strong
For life and duty.

Romney’s assumptions about women reflect Victorian commonplaces about the division of the world into separate spheres of natural aptitude and interest. His assumptions about poetry are also representative, in this case of the Utilitarian prejudice against such frivolous pastimes (“men, and still less women, happily, / Scarce need be poets”). Aurora’s rebuttal is one of many great passages in the verse-novel that reject such polarizing binaries, not just between men and women or poetry and useful work, but between the real and the actual, the spiritual and the material, the individual and the social:

I hold you will not compass your poor ends
Of barley-feeding and material ease,
Without a poet’s individualism
To work your universal. It takes a soul
To move a body: it takes a high-souled man,
To move the masses, even to a cleaner stye:
It takes the ideal, to blow a hair’s-breadth off
The dust of the actual.

Just as Romney must learn to value the heart (or poetry, or the soul, or the spiritual), Aurora must let go of her own absolutism and make manifest the value of poetry as a force for social good, as well as reconciling her head and her heart by accepting the value of love. By the end of Aurora Leigh, they have achieved a rare equality of both passion and commitment, which they celebrate in some wonderfully erotic, ecstatic poetry that (sadly) is not included in the Norton excerpts:

But oh, the night! oh, bitter-sweet! oh sweet!
O dark, O moon and stars, O ecstasy
Of darkness! O great mystery of love,
In which absorbed, loss, anguish, treason’s self
Enlarges rapture, – as a pebble dropt
In some full wine-cup over-brims the wine!
While we too sate together, leaned that night
So close my very garments crept and thrilled
With strange electric life, and both my cheeks
Grew red, then pale, with touches from my hair
In which his breath was. . . .

Sure, it’s perhaps a bit excessive, but isn’t rapture precisely excessive? And even Jane Eyre doesn’t bring her physical response to Rochester to such sensory life.

This Week in My Classes: Nancy Drew and Tennyson

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That’s perhaps the oddest couple I’ve ever put together in the title of a post! Yet both in their own wildly disparate ways provided plenty of material for my Monday classes.

I was nervous heading into our first session on Nancy Drew in Women and Detective Fiction that The Secret of the Old Clock would not bear up well under close examination. Luckily, we didn’t head into it cold but have spent a couple of weeks already setting up some of the major themes and tropes we’ll be following as we move along through the course, from the relationship of women to the law and authority to ways women detectives and their creators manipulate conventional expectations about gender to set up their cases and provide ingenious solutions–Miss Marple, for instance, sometimes finds it advantageous to be underestimated, while her expertise in domestic ‘trivia’ repeatedly turns out to be as useful as her insights into human nature.

We started off our discussion today by reading the first two pages of Chapter 1 aloud and then going over all the information we get about Nancy from them. This exercise, which I settled on as my opening gambit partly to be sure we did focus on details and not skip too merrily along, proved more fruitful than I’d hoped, actually. We talked about her appearance, her mobility (specifically her car), her relationship to her “Dad” (who relies on her “intuition”), her quick response to a crisis, her apparent expertise as a paramedic (is there any situation she can’t handle?), her rapid adoption into the homes of strangers who immediately become her intimate friends and confidantes. We moved on to discuss the case: I usually suggest looking at the central case in a detective novel as symptomatic of what needs to be fixed in the imagined world we’re in, and then the investigation helps us see what qualities or elements are needed to resolve it. In this case, right away we are focused on problems of inheritance and the damage done by depriving good people (in this novel, particularly nice women) of the resources they need to sustain their homes and families. We talked about Nancy’s strengths–her father’s good connections, her own unexplained freedom from other duties or obligations (in the first version of the novel, she was only sixteen, so at least at her revised age of eighteen there’s no expectation that she’d be in school), her resolute niceness.

In preparation for this part of the course I read around in some of the critical literature on the Nancy Drew series; among the most interesting explanations I read of her strong and lasting appeal is that she exists in a paradoxical place, in between childhood and adulthood, enjoying the perks of both but not the drawbacks, just as she both is and is not a rebel against conventional expectations. To me she seems like a child’s idea of what it is like to be grown up, something I see in my daughter’s pretend play in which she mimics things like going to work or having children. In the imagined version, it’s all about being the one who is in control, who copes, who solves problems–with no suggestion that the control may be hard won, or temporary, that the coping sometimes takes more effort than collapsing would, that some problems are not, after all, within our power to fix. Having begun thinking through the ways in which Nancy is exemplary and inspiring, we also considered the limits on her “universal” appeal. She’s not necessarily someone every girl can “relate” to, representing as she does quite a particular ideal of the All-American girl. I think it was a good discussion overall. One additional benefit of bringing Nancy Drew into the syllabus seems to have been that she has tempted a few students to speak up who have been pretty quiet so far! I hope they keep up this momentum.

In British Literature Since 1800 it was time for an introduction to the Victorian age (yes, we’re done with the Romantics already–shocking! but in about 10 weeks we have to have made it to Ian McEwan, so onward we go, relentlessly). Just as Wordsworth does nicely for setting up Romanticism, so Tennyson–who takes up his mantle as Poet Laureate, after all–does fine as our lead-in to Victorianism. I proferred some generalizations about things like an Age of Transition, faith and doubt, science and nature, the importance of the novel, and the role of sage writing. That was fine, I think, but what really got me worked up today was trying to sell them on the importance of prosody. There’s the sort of technical issue that they are being trained to write analytically about literature and that’s a hard thing to do about poetry without the vocabulary and a sense of what form is and how meter works. But more important, because it motivates that kind of analysis, is just grasping how fundamental rhythm is to our experience of poetry–to the sound and feeling of it. We spent last Friday’s tutorial on this and it turned out (again!) that almost none of them had any idea how to scan a line, or even that there was such an exercise as scanning a line. Then, in my group at least (and yes, NYT, there are ‘actual’ professors who lead tutorials–and mark papers, too!) they tried to get the hang of it and mostly got confused–so much so that I overhead one group arguing strenuously about how to pronounce ‘hamburger’ (I start them out with ordinary words and just ask them to mark in the stressed and unstressed syllables). I’m pretty sure not one of them would go into Wendy’s and ask for a hamBURger, or a hamburGER. Anyway, I knew they were (are) going to need more than that one session, but I also can’t take a great deal of lecture time on it, and besides, it’s the sort of thing you have to learn by actually doing. So today was all about dramatizing the sound and rhythm and demonstrating how great poets work with and against their basic meter to make things exciting. I had collected a bunch of good examples but it occured to me as I reviewed ‘The Passing of Arthur’ that I might be able to make them hear what I meant if I read this passage with all the feeling I could muster, and so that’s what I did:

Nor ever yet had Arthur fought a fight
Like this last, dim, weird battle of the west.
A deathwhite mist slept over sand and sea:
Whereof the chill, to him who breathed it, drew
Down with his blood, till all his heart was cold
With formless fear; and even on Arthur fell
Confusion, since he saw not whom he fought.
For friend and foe were shadows in the mist,
And friend slew friend not knowing whom he slew;
And some had visions out of golden youth,
And some beheld the faces of old ghosts
Look in upon the battle; and in the mist
Was many a noble deed, many a base,
And chance and craft and strength in single fights,
And ever and anon with host to host
Shocks, and the splintering spear, the hard mail hewn,
Shield-breakings, and the clash of brands, the crash
Of battleaxes on shattered helms, and shrieks
After the Christ, of those who falling down
Looked up for heaven, and only saw the mist;
And shouts of heathen and the traitor knights,
Oaths, insult, filth, and monstrous blasphemies,
Sweat, writhings, anguish, labouring of the lungs
In that close mist, and cryings for the light,
Moans of the dying, and voices of the dead.

Try reading it for yourself, as if you really, really mean it. Tennyson may be a better poet than he is a thinker, but OMG, when he’s a good poet, he’s very, very good, and I think these lines are just marvellous. There’s hardly a line in there, either, that scans as ‘straight’ iambic pentameter. Then after going over a few more simple examples, I went through a few lines of Donne’s Holy Sonnet ‘Death, be not proud’:

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;

and
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.
I’m not a wildly outgoing person by nature, so my willingness to make a fool of myself in class amazes and amuses me sometimes. There I was striding around declaiming “For THOU ART NOT SO! Death! Thou! Shalt! Die!” and asking them “So? Who’s the boss of Death here? Who’s the boss of the meter? Who’s the boss of the sonnet form?” I’m sure they were mostly wondering “Who’s the crazy lady at the front of the room?” but if just a couple of them were thinking “OK, wow, poetry really is amazing,” then it was worth it. And really, if you can’t get excited about “Death, be not proud,” you shouldn’t be an English major in the first place.
As for the rest of the week, it’s Nancy Drew again on Wednesday in Women and Detective Fiction, with a student presentation on Friday, and in the survey class it’s Browning and then Arnold.

This Week in My Classes: Agatha Christie and a Trio of Lyrical Treats

Rohan Maitzen1 Comment

Actually, the trio of lyrical treats identified in Dorothy Parker’s delightful “Pig’s-Eye View of Literature” are Byron and Shelley and Keats, while this week in British Literature Since 1800 we’re doing Coleridge and Shelley and Keats. But Coleridge can be lyrical too, and ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ is something of a treat, though of just what kind I’m never sure. We’re still very much in the warming-up phase in this class. Building any momentum is significantly hampered, I find, by the long course add-drop period (two weeks in which at any time new faces may appear while ones you were just starting to attach names to vanish without a trace). The system is clearly designed to make things easier for the students, who can take their sweet time sorting out their courses; the pedagogical inconvenience and paperwork generated for us as we try to keep our class lists up to date and initiate the dribble of new people into the class expectations and materials don’t seem to matter to the people in charge. Yes, this is making me cranky: I’ve just updated my class lists for about the 12th time, then had to manually add and remove students from Blackboard and PBWorks in the hopes that the newbies will show enough initiative to check out all the information provided on these sites rather than just showing up this afternoon and asking “did I miss anything?” In an entire week of classes? YES! Of course you missed something. (Yes, I know the Tom Wayman poem about this.) Anyway, it’s routine business at the start of every term, but it’s absurdly inefficient.

What they missed, if it’s English 2002 they are just joining, is our introduction to the course, first of all, in which I outline not just the schedule and requirements and so forth, but also the principles and motivations behind them and the objectives I hope they’ll meet. Next was our introduction to Romanticism, via Wordsworth, and a training session on using PBWorks. I raised the stakes a bit this year to motivate better participation in the wiki projects. Last year’s results were OK, but the weak spot was the concept of “gardening,” signing in a couple of times a week just to tweak the site and make it a little better. With the project overall worth a bit more of their final grade, I hope they’ll take this responsibility more seriously. It’s not a big time commitment, but as everyone who works online knows, a few minutes every so often can make a big difference. Last year I waited for weeks to see if someone would correct a main headline that read “Woodsworth” (someone eventually did, but not until I dropped a big hint in class about embarrassing typos). This week we continue our discussion of Romanticism but complicating and even undermining some of the generalizations I offered about it as a chronological period and, more importantly, as a literary movement. Coleridge’s preoccupations are not the same as Wordsworth’s, and Keats and Shelley are different again, from the ‘first generation’ as well as from each other. I always feel that Romantic poetry is a like Impressionist art, in that it is easy to like it in a casual sort of way: the surface features are pretty and undemanding, and the first layer of ideas is easily assimilated. But both get more interesting in context, as you get a sense of what the artists were working against and for. With Wordsworth in particular, that’s what I tried to bring out in the short time I had for him: I made a pitch for how it is possible to read “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” which is about as simple and child-like a poem as you could dream up, as revolutionary precisely in its simplicity and child-like attitude, as well as its invocation of memory and nature as balms for the troubled modern soul. OK, it’s maybe a bit of a stretch, but if they can come to see daffodils as aesthetically subversive, they are on their way to appreciating some of the ways a text achieves its significance–and to realizing that its significance will not always be obvious but will often require some thought and some research to understand.

In Women and Detective Fiction, we warmed up last week with samples from some ‘classic’ authors, to get a sense of the history and conventions of the genre to which our women writers will provide a counter-tradition (or, as I suggested today, a counter-point tradition, as the intersections are many). So we read Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” “A Scandal in Bohemia,” and Hammett’s “The House on Turk Street.” Then on Friday we looked at a couple of early examples of women writing about crime and detection, with Susan Glaspell’s great story “A Jury of Her Peers” and Mary Wilkins Freeman’s “The Long Arm.” Both press us to consider the adequacy of conventional ideas about both crime and justice; in both cases, people’s gendered expectations interfere with solving the crime. This week it’s Agatha Christie, with a selection of Miss Marple stories, and then next week we’re on to Nancy Drew. In this class the material is quite fun and the group is highly self-selecting, so in some respects things are bound to go along smoothly. The challenge becomes making sure we take the material seriously ourselves. I’m a little worried that two classes on Miss Marple is too much: it’s tricky scheduling things so that the pace of topics is reasonable, especially when the readings aren’t especially deep or complex. (There’s a reason, as others have noted as well, that close reading tactics become dominant just when there’s a significant body of literature that is quite difficult to understand at first glance, and also why certain writers are especially ‘teachable’ using these methods–Donne, say, rather than a more literal poet like Dryden, or Hammett rather than Christie, to use a more immediately relevant example.)

This Week in My Classes: Let the Wild Rumpus Start!

Rohan Maitzen8 Comments

Well, it won’t be wild today, I don’t expect, but my teaching term does begin, with the first meeting of my seminar on Women and Detective Fiction. I’ve always really enjoyed teaching this seminar in the past: it usually attracts a good group of students, the readings are varied and, I think, productively juxtaposed, and the discussion as a result tends to be lively and interesting. Plus who wouldn’t like a reason to read Gaudy Night and call it working? Today is just administrative stuff, mostly, though I’ll make a few remarks about my choice of readings and some of the themes that I expect we’ll concentrate as we go forward. Then we’ll discuss the course requirements and expectations, and then sign everyone up for question sets and seminar presentations. Looking at my incredibly detailed syllabus, I am amused to remember the one page mimeographed sheets that served this purpose when I was an undergraduate. Now, if it’s not in the syllabus, good luck insisting on it! Today, students expect a very literal and precise explanation of what they are supposed to do and how they will be evaluated for their efforts. There are some good reasons for this, including transparency (it seems only fair that they should know what they are supposed to do and how they will be evaluated for it!) but at the same time the trend towards hand-holding does rather sap the student experience of what I guess I’d consider adult expectations. I worry, too, that my detailed handouts (and Blackboard sites) sometimes backfire, in that students don’t even try to infer anything or figure anything out for themselves (looking up regulations, for instance)–and then there are the students who blithely ignore all the support materials and email or corner you with tediously repetitious questions about when things are due, what the policy is on late papers, and so forth. I no longer answer these questions, except with a smiling “You’ll find all that information and more in your syllabus.” It’s that whole teach a man to fish philosophy (imagine, then, how it peeved me to see on one of my course evaluations a year or so ago, “She’s not very helpful: whenever I asked her anything, she just said “look in the syllabus”…).

Anyway, these petty annoyances aside, I’m glad to be heading into the classroom, and I expect to post regularly about it as I have been doing since Fall 2007! I still find the expectation (mine, not anybody else’s) that I’ll keep up the series a helpful kind of discipline, and I’m still frequently surprised at what I discover I have to say about the class meetings, even if it’s only some idea about what not to do next time when I cover the same material. This term is all repeat teaching, actually, except that I always tinker a little with the reading lists from year to year. In the British Literature Since 1800 survey course, for instance, I’ve put in Gaskell’s Mary Barton instead of Great Expectations, which mixes things up a bit. Much as I love Great Expectations, brilliant as it is, and sorry as I am not to be doing any Dickens, as a result, in the course–I just couldn’t go through it one more time quite so soon! And Mary Barton, while not nearly as brilliant, is in lots of ways just as interesting and representative of important things about Victorian literature. Plus it has a boat chase. I love the boat chase. In Women and Detective Fiction I didn’t succeed in really revamping the list, but then I’ve always been mostly very happy with it. But I did eventually add in Nancy Drew. And did I mention that I get to reread Gaudy Night? To my annoyance, Death in a Tenured Position (which nicely rounds out the academic focus of Gaudy Night and An Unsuitable Job for a Woman with a more contemporary perspective on feminism and universities) went out of print right after I placed my book order, but happily our bookstore has been able to round up nearly enough copies for everyone, and if the students can show a little extra initiative, they will be able to find more themselves. I didn’t want to let this book go, not just because of the academic angle (and the importance of poetry in it, which makes another interesting link to Gaudy Night) but because I definitely wanted to talk about Carolyn Heilbrun (who has also written some of the best essays around on women and detective fiction). I could have picked a different one of her novels, of course, and next time I might have to, but I’m fond of this one–and sometimes, with so many to choose from, that’s as good a reason as any!

So, off I go to class, and then this afternoon we all ‘meet and greet’ our incoming graduate students, and then we’re well underway for the year.