Where the dickens did February go? It only just started, and now it’s past. Sigh. I knew it was going to be a compromised month because in its infinite wisdom the Halifax Regional School Board decided to move the kids’ usual March break to February and extend it to two weeks, ostensibly to allow families to attend the Canada Winter Games, which Halifax hosted. I have yet to talk to one family that went to any of the sporting events: most seem to have left town, or just hunkered down–which is what we did. Between my sabbatical and my husband’s February break overlapping with the kids’ for one week, we managed to juggle things OK without packing them off to some kind of camp: this option is one great gift of the flexibility of academic schedules, but also as the kids get older (they are 9 and 13 now–which makes me … young! very young!) they are more self-sufficient about entertaining themselves. Still, I am cursed with a need for silence and extended contemplative periods without interruptions if I want to do serious reading or writing, so I knew that the second half of the month would not be my most productive time. What I hadn’t figured on was the four snow days in the first two weeks of the month, which meant that altogether they were in school (and thus I was “at work” in the usual way) only SIX DAYS in February.

Still, there was time to read and write, and even some time to think. When I fretted about how the break weeks were going to go, my daughter sagely recommended that I should “make plans for things that you can do, and then do them!” And that’s pretty much what I did: I adjusted my expectations and ambitions to focus on the projects that weren’t quite as intensive. Hence all the reading and blogging about crime fiction, which has actually brought me a lot closer to some decisions about how to mix up the second half of the reading list for my mystery fiction course. Right now, I’m thinking I’ll take out Rankin’s Knots and Crosses and probably a few short stories, and put in Ed McBain’s Cop Hater (to make the transition to contemporary police procedurals and a bridge to the Scandinavian writers explicitly influenced by him) and then either one of the Sjowall and Wahloo series or one of Henning Mankell’s. I still have more to read, but this direction makes sense to me, and I feel increasingly comfortable about being able to work with the material. I’m almost finished Mankell’s The Fifth Woman, and it really is quite a different kind of book than Faceless Killers. I don’t like the case much, and I still am finding the style dull, but it is just much richer and more interesting. That said, it’s also quite long, which may make it less than optimum for late in the term. I have a handful of other related titles to read but this seems like progress.

Let’s see: what else? I’ve done some other reading and blogging, and I’m working on a small piece for another site about one of my favorite books (the struggle I’m having being satisfied within the 400-word limit is a salutary one for me, as I often give my students very short limits on their papers and blithely tell them how much harder it is to make a few words densely meaningful than to ramble on for several pages). I have done more letters of reference (and another request for one came in this week). Yesterday I returned a 50-page thesis chapter on Frances Burney. I prepared some materials in support of my nomination for a teaching award. I explored funding options for a conference I hope to attend in early September–in the next week or so, I need to write up a proper proposal for my part in a panel as well as one for a workshop for graduate students, which will probably be something to do with academic blogging. I practised using my iPad. The keyboard still nearly defeats me. Maybe I could use little sticky things to give me some tactile indication of where the darned space bar is: about 75% of the time, if I try to actually ‘touch’-type, I put “n” in instead. It’s a long way from the IBM Selectric I learned on back in 1983 to a perfectly flat glass screen. I worked on soliciting and editing pieces for the March issue of Open Letters Monthly. That’s about it. Oh: I also finished my little ‘Blue Ocean’ quilt!

My last class of the term was Monday afternoon–a review session for the final exam in my Brit Lit survey. I had hoped to go out on some kind of high note. Usually I plan a bit of a closing peroration about the value of literature and the intellectual rewards of our work over the term, and sometimes (ever the optimist) I bring a list of suggested further reading. Two things militated against rhetorical flourishes on Monday. First, I got sick–“just” a cold, but you try (I’m sure some of you have tried) being eloquent when you have a cold. (It turns out that even speaking as much as I did was a bad idea, since almost immediately after class the virus marched its happy way to my  larynx and took away my voice, which made my other major commitment for this week, participating in a PhD comprehensive exam, just that much more challenging!) The second factor was the format of the class: I like to do review in a Q&A format working off a handout of possible exam questions. I figure they should have their last chance to make me explain or clarify the things they feel uncertain about. But that means it wasn’t a very orderly session, and I didn’t have the physical or mental strength to reclaim the room at the end to make any kind of goodbye statement. Well, I’m sure they didn’t mind. I feel frustrated about this particular class because I really haven’t been able to judge their level of engagement as well as I usually can. One-on-one exchanges with students usually gave me a good feeling, but then the students who bother to talk to you one-on-one are a self-selecting group. I think I offered them quite a lot of good stuff this term (with the help, too, of some great guest lecturers) but I’m not sorry that someone else is taking this class next year: I’d like to rethink a few things about it before I do it again. I’m sorry to say that one of the things I’m reconsidering is the wiki project I designed. I was very enthusiastic about this assignment when I introduced it last year, and the results were pretty good despite some initial resistance and some lackluster participation from a few. I thought I could overcome the resistance better this time by talking about the value it had proved to have for last year’s group, and I made it worth more to motivate the slackers to do their share. Though some students really stepped up, overall the investment in the wikis seemed worse this year. Given how much effort it takes to set them up and administer them, I think I might not try again, or I might try such a thing only in a much smaller class where I can really play an active role in stimulating ideas and generating the kind of enthusiasm for results that is necessary to carry it along.

So now it’s all over but the marking: 23 essays for Mystery & Detective Fiction (they went through proposals with me already, so I’m expecting the final results to be quite good–plus in this group the level of engagement was conspicuously high), 60 or so for the survey (which thankfully I split with my TA), and then 60 or so exams, which don’t even get written until December 18. I can’t say I am looking forward to the next two weeks, but at the end of them lies my sabbatical, for which I have high hopes.

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?

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.

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.