Don’t let the lack of new posts between last week’s teaching update and this one mislead you: there has been plenty of novel reading around here lately! Specifically, I have finished A Suitable Boy–yes, just a few short weeks after deciding it would be the perfect complement to a term already well-stocked with loose baggy monsters. It became a thoroughly enjoyable and often surprisingly poignant reading experience (and there was some melodrama and some humour in there too), and I hope to write a proper post about it soon. For now, though, here’s what I’ve been doing for my day job:

In Mystery and Detective Fiction, after Monday’s midterm (too short, apparently, as over half of them were done well before time was up), we’ve moved on to hard-boiled detective fiction. For today we read Chandler’s great essay “The Simple Art of Murder” and Hammett’s “The Gutting of Couffignal.” This stuff will really wake you up when you’ve been reading Agatha Christie for a while. Though it’s not at all to my personal taste, I get pretty energized teaching it, partly from the intensity of the language and the fast-paced plotting, and partly, I think, from exactly that contrast between the world Hammett puts us in and the much more artificial world of the puzzle mystery. I am also (nearly) convinced that puzzle mysteries, though far less graphically violent, are far more morally problematic. Even Poirot’s sombre analyses of the corrupting effects of small moral lapses on ordinary men–blunting their moral fibre, as he says of Dr. Sheppard–are not sufficiently weighty to compensate for the essential frivolity of the murder story itself, the insouciance, for instance, with which Poirot seats himself in the very chair where Ackroyd’s body was found as he works out possible theories of the crime. I think Chandler is right when he argues that such works have little to do with live as it is lived–or, more important, with violent death as it is died. But the degree to which we accept violence by our hard-boiled protagonist because we accept the ends he serves does, itself, become problematic, as I know we will discuss more next week with The Maltese Falcon (yes, I faltered in my resolution to replace in with The Big Sleep).

In my George Eliot seminar, we’ve moved on to Romola, which I am thoroughly appreciating now that I’ve made it through the painfully ponderous early portion. And, having described it that way, I should add that we talked quite a lot in class yesterday about the challenge of reading it, yes, but also about the effect of struggling through so much information and about the thematic and generic purposes it serves. As I recall, George Eliot said (in a letter, I think) that she hoped to create as rich a sense of the Florentine context as she had of the environment of St. Ogg’s in The Mill on the Floss. How do you achieve such a goal, so that your characters can be seen to move in a milieu that is richly historically specific and also intensely local and personal–so that their language, values, and behaviour belong, as it were, to their place and moment–when that milieu is not already familiar to your readers? Though (as we also discussed) there seems to be even more pressure in Romola than in her earlier novels towards the universal or mythic, all of the characters embody their characteristics in ways that are entirely within realistic parameters (OK, until we get to the very end, but that’s next week). It’s fascinating how she takes her favourite abstractions (egotism and altruism) and makes them more concrete by associating them with major intellectual strains of Renaissance humanism, on the one hand, but also fanatic Christianity on the other: the impulses may transcend history, but their expression is determined by history, or constrained by it, and so in a way we are being prepped for Dorothea’s inability to express her heroic spirituality in the ways that Romola can. Last week we talked a lot about Maggie’s moral appeal to Stephen Guest: “‘If the past is not to bind us, where should duty lie?'” And here we have Tito, who personifies just the moral unmooring that results when you cut ties to the past–or try to. Of course, you can’t escape your past, and in Romola we are reminded of that with the thrillingly literal clutch of Baldassare’s hand on Tito’s arm. Romola herself is, surprisingly, not that prominent in the first half of the novel. Our installment for this week ended just as her alienation from Tito begins to undermine her dreams for fulfilling herself through marriage; next week we will be able to consider the various ways in which she (or George Eliot) attempts to imagine a different future, even a different identity, for her that will satisfy her ardent soul (yes, she’s another one of those).

In British Literature Since 1800 we are finishing up Great Expectations this week. The students are also hard at work (or so I hope) on their first major assignment for me. I’m rather proud of its design, though I have not given it before and so I won’t know whether it takes them where I hope they’ll go until I see the results late next week. In brief, it’s an annotated bibliography, but it’s tailored to a general topic which they are then supposed to shape as they build the list of sources. In the end, they will submit a list of their “best” (most relevant) sources, but also a narrative of how, through the process of the research, they identified their narrower topic and then pursued it. It’s the backstory of an essay, as I told them. I’m not actually having them write the essay, though their commentary will include a preliminary working thesis. Too often when I’ve assigned essays on Great Expectations students in past classes have skipped the preparatory stages and turned in plagiarized papers. But the thinking and reading and researching part is every bit as important as the final “writing it up into an essay” stage, so that short-cut is not only dishonest, since it isn’t their essay, but irrelevant. I’m hoping that by emphasizing this part of the exercise they will really feel that difference. Also, one of the course objectives is research skills (citation and stuff), so I wanted an assignment that would really highlight research as a process, as well as giving lots of practice in the fun stuff like MLA style.

All that and A Suitable Boy too. No wonder I’m feeling a bit run down!

It’s Agatha Christie week in Mystery and Detective Fiction, which means fun times with “words, ingeniously used.” When we start The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, one of the things I point out is that it is published in 1926, so within hailing distance of a couple of other very famous novels including Ulysses (1922) and To the Lighthouse (1927). Unlike those novels, however, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is rarely assigned in university classes and never (to my knowledge) discussed as a modernist classic–because, of course, it is no such thing. In fact, modernism is probably one reason it’s tricky taking genre fiction seriously as literature, for reasons we spend a little time on. That said, in its own field, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is a classic, and one of the reasons it deserves that status is that it does quite brilliantly some of the things that kind of book is supposed to do, such as giving the reader enough information to solve the mystery without ever, in fact, giving the reader enough information to solve the mystery. You have to be ingenious indeed to tell without telling. It’s fun, once the murderer has been revealed, to go back through the novel and see, not just the clues, but the delicately duplicitous way the story is controlled throughout.

Still, Christie exemplifies ingenuity only in its cunning aspects. For the full experience of language “marked by inventive skill and imagination,” Dickens is your man. I find it hard to talk about Great Expectations without wanting to sound like Dickens, just a little bit, just for the fun of it–so today I found myself helplessly muttering “J-O-Joe!” at odd moments during our class discussion. That’s the comic Dickens, of course, but there’s also the creepy Dickens (“I saw speckled-legged spiders with blotchy bodies running home to it, and running out from it, as if some circumstance of the greatest public importance had just transpired in the spider community”) and the poignant Dickens (“Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlaying our hard hearts”). Sometimes, the most remarkable thing is his ability to change registers, or even to sound both funny and tragic notes at once. There’s Joe’s hat, toppling hilariously off the mantlepiece like an animated indicator of Joe’s unfitness to be in Pip’s elegant lodgings, and then moments later there’s Joe himself, showing up the superficiality of that very judgment and shaming Pip back into humility with his own “simple dignity”:

‘You and me is not two figures to be together in London; nor yet anywheres else but what is private, and beknown, and understood among friends. It ain’t that I am proud, but that I want to be right, as you shall never see me no more in these clothes. I’m wrong in these clothes. I’m wrong out of the forge, the kitchen, or off th’ meshes. You won’t find half so much fault in me if you think of me in my forge dress, with my hammer in my hand, or even my pipe. You won’t find half so much fault in me if, supposing you should ever with to see me, you come and put your head in at the forger winder and see Joe the blacksmith, there, at the old anvil, in the old burnt apron, sticking to the old work. I’m awful dull, but I hope I’ve beat out something nigh the rights of this at last.’

And so, of course, he has.

In my George Eliot seminar, it was week 2 on The Mill on the Floss. I wrote a bit about it at The Valve and don’t have much to add except that reading so much George Eliot at once this term is really bringing home to me how important I think intelligence is to fiction with any real literary aspirations. I’ve quoted David Masson before on the relationship between a novelist’s writing and a novelist’s thinking; here’s the most relevant bit from British Novelists and Their Styles :

the measure of the value of any work of fiction, ultimately and on the whole, is the worth of the speculation, the philosophy, on which it rests, and which has entered into the conception of it. . . . No artist, I believe, will, in the end, be found to be greater as an artist than he was as a thinker.

I’m thinking maybe I will found a school of criticism based on this principle. The Massonites? This may be the definitive answer to the whole ‘should aspiring writers go through MFA programs’: no, or at least not too early on, because they should not expect to be taught how to write before they have learned how to think–and think hard. The satisfactions of George Eliot’s novels are certainly not all intellectual or philosophical, but far from agreeing with those who object that the novels are somehow too discursive to be pleasurable, I agree with Henry James’s remark that the “constant presence of thought, . . . of brain, in a word, behind her observation, gives the latter its great value and her whole manner its high superiority. It denotes,” as he says, “a mind in which imagination is illumined by faculties rarely found in fellowship with it.”

Last week went by too quickly for comment, apparently. The usual term-time feeling of things hurtling by is exacerbated by my Brit Lit survey course: Monday was Tennyson, Wednesday was Browning, Friday was Arnold. Forget the Romantics–they’re so, like, the week before last! But I also tripped into my own small version of the perpetual ‘crisis of the humanities,’ and there went all my blogging time.

So, this week.

In Mystery and Detective Fiction it’s Sherlock Holmes week. In previous incarnations of this course I have given short shrift to the greatest detective of all, or so at least my evaluations have routinely pointed out. So this year we’re doing not just a short story (“Silver Blaze,” the one with the dog that does nothing in the night time) but also The Hound of the Baskervilles, which we start tomorrow. I find Holmes’s displays of superhuman brilliance and pseudo-scientific deduction fairly tedious, actually, and I don’t find there’s much to say about them once you’ve run through the basic “Holmes represents the comforting promise that science and reason can control the world’s complex uncertainties” theory, to but Hound has a rich mix of gothic, mythic, historical, and symbolic elements, so I hope it will prove more interesting to work through.

In the Brit Lit survey, we’re rushing onward through Victorian poetry. We read the Norton’s excerpts from Aurora Leigh for Monday. I enjoyed working them up: Aurora Leigh is one of those texts I get quite excited about, mostly because of its enormous exuberance, but also because it has such brilliant unity of form and content. As I tried to explain to the class, it’s a poem that overcomes all kinds of conventional oppositions, not just poetry / prose (it’s a ‘novel-poem,’ after all) but also epic / lyric, art / life, fallen / pure, spiritual / material, social / personal… Take Aurora’s defiant words to her practical cousin (and would-be lover), Romney:

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-sould 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.

Then there’s her radical poetics, as announced in this passage as remarkable for its imagery as for its self-assertion:

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.’

I find the Norton’s choice of excerpts somewhat tendentious, selecting out those that illustrate, not so much Aurora’s development as a poet or the crucial reconciliation between her artistic ideals and Romney’s commitment to social reform, or Marian’s radical revision of the ‘fallen woman’ narrative, but the condition of women, particularly through her chafing against her limited education and then against Romney’s belittling suggestions that she abandon her art to become his “helpmate.” These choices make Aurora Leigh seem more comfortably feminist than I think it actually is, and the complications that arise (but are not excerpted) make it a less doctrinaire and more interesting work than it seems from these pieces. What about Aurora’s declaration, for instance, that “art is much, but love is more,” or that “the end of life is not a book”? It’s tempting to make her an iconic figure for the woman artist’s struggle for autonomy, but it matters, I think, that for her there really is a struggle between love and independence. Arguably, this opposition is also resolved in the poem’s jubilantly erotic conclusion, also not excerpted, which is a shame. Here’s a bit of it:

It’s always fun when there’s an unexpected synchronicity between two (or more) courses. Even the sheer coincidence of juxtapositions can be fruitful: I remember the thrill I felt as an undergraduate when I happened to be assigned the first volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality in my historiography seminar for the same week I was reading John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman for my English honours seminar. I still have the paper I wrote as a result, “Changing the Angle: A Re-Interpretation of Sex, Power, and Sexuality in The French Lieutenant’s Woman“–and oh my goodness, glancing through it, was my undergraduate writing self a painful blend of sincerity and sententiousness (plus ca change etc., I know).

Anyway, I had a modest version of that intertextual thrill this week rereading Adam Bede for my graduate seminar. In waltzes our “hero,” the dashing young squire Arthur Donnithorne, and almost the first thing out of his mouth is this pithy assessment of Lyrical Ballads, hot off the press when the novel is set:

“It’s a volume of poems . . . : most of them seem to be twaddling stuff; but the first is in a different style–‘The Ancient Mariner’ is the title. I can hardly make head or tail of it as a story, but it’s a strange, striking thing.”

As it happens, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” was Monday’s reading for my Brit Lit survey class, and so I spent much of my weekend renewing my acquaintance with its “strange, striking” verse and browsing in the vast array of attempts to “make head or tail of it.” As I’m sure I would have known more definitely if I were a Romanticist, “Mariner” is one of those poems that have become as significant for their critical history as for themselves (if there’s a distinction, an issue which of course underlies many of the articles I was reviewing). Having introduced Romanticism last week with some Wordsworth, particularly “Tintern Abbey,” it is certainly vexing to turn to “Mariner” and see how it messes with one’s generalizations (the language of common men? I don’t think so!)–and yet that’s the point, or one of them, that there aren’t going to be any truly stable generalizations in our course even though we will need them to move forward, or to start from. And I’m in some sympathy with Arthur about Wordsworth’s contributions; as was remarked over at Wuthering Expectations some time ago, Wordsworth is probably “the most boring great poet in history.” Great, yes, but the risk of trying to write unpoetically is writing, well, unpoetically at times.

But I know I shouldn’t sympathize with Arthur’s reading taste too far, and in fact one of the interesting issues we discussed about Adam Bede in our seminar was characters’ reading (or not) and how it affects both their thinking about their own lives and our judgments of them. Hetty doesn’t read novels, we’re told, and so spins her fantasies about becoming a lady oblivious to the potential complications; Arthur should have finished Zeluco, which might have strengthened his moral resolve by emphasizing the consequences of seducing innocent young girls. A lot of our attention ended up being on our own reading of Hetty, and in particular on whether the narrator’s close attention to her interiority and the inadequacies of her self-perception and moral development in any way compensates for those defects, or whether that attention is (perhaps inevitably) condescending, or worse. We remarked that everyone around Hetty attributes qualities to her that she doesn’t really have, largely because of her deceptive beauty (leading Adam, for instance, to assume a tenderness of character equal to the softness of her arms and other curves). Dinah too mistakes Hetty for something more than she is, but Dinah’s case is particularly interesting because she gives Hetty credit for greater moral elevation, seeing in Hetty’s sobs, for instance, “the stirring of a divine impulse” when in fact Hetty is just moody, in an “excitable state of mind.” “[W]hile the lower nature can never understand the higher,” the narrator remarks,

the higher nature commands a complete view of the lower. But I think the higher nature has to learn this comprehension, as we learn the art of vision, by a good deal of hard experience.

The hierarchical language is potentially troubling here, especially in combination with the frequent associations of Hetty with animals and other “lower” creatures. Some judgment on Hetty for her vanity and selfishness (eventually destructive not just to herself, but, most painfully, to her child) is surely essential. But if she is of a “lower” kind, how far ought we to hold her responsible? It’s striking that the “hard experience” called for here is Dinah’s, or the “higher” nature’s: Dinah is capable of moral growth and the expansion of her sympathy even to Hetty as she really is, seems to be the message, but isn’t it Hetty’s “hard experience” to which much of the novel is primarily dedicated? But it’s Hetty who is not able to read her own experience and learn from it: that’s for Dinah, and us, to do.

It’s always fun when there’s an unexpected synchronicity between two (or more) courses. Even the sheer coincidence of juxtapositions can be fruitful: I remember the thrill I felt as an undergraduate when I happened to be assigned the first volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality in my historiography seminar for the same week I was reading John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman for my English honours seminar. I still have the paper I wrote as a result, “Changing the Angle: A Re-Interpretation of Sex, Power, and Sexuality in The French Lieutenant’s Woman“–and oh my goodness, glancing through it, was my undergraduate writing self a painful blend of sincerity and sententiousness (plus ca change etc., I know).

Anyway, I had a modest version of that intertextual thrill this week rereading Adam Bede for my graduate seminar. In waltzes our “hero,” the dashing young squire Arthur Donnithorne, and almost the first thing out of his mouth is this pithy assessment of Lyrical Ballads, hot off the press when the novel is set:

“It’s a volume of poems . . . : most of them seem to be twaddling stuff; but the first is in a different style–‘The Ancient Mariner’ is the title. I can hardly make head or tail of it as a story, but it’s a strange, striking thing.”

As it happens, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” was Monday’s reading for my Brit Lit survey class, and so I spent much of my weekend renewing my acquaintance with its “strange, striking” verse and browsing in the vast array of attempts to “make head or tail of it.” As I’m sure I would have known more definitely if I were a Romanticist, “Mariner” is one of those poems that have become as significant for their critical history as for themselves (if there’s a distinction, an issue which of course underlies many of the articles I was reviewing). Having introduced Romanticism last week with some Wordsworth, particularly “Tintern Abbey,” it is certainly vexing to turn to “Mariner” and see how it messes with one’s generalizations (the language of common men? I don’t think so!)–and yet that’s the point, or one of them, that there aren’t going to be any truly stable generalizations in our course even though we will need them to move forward, or to start from. And I’m in some sympathy with Arthur about Wordsworth’s contributions; as was remarked over at Wuthering Expectations some time ago, Wordsworth is probably “the most boring great poet in history.” Great, yes, but the risk of trying to write unpoetically is writing, well, unpoetically at times.

But I know I shouldn’t sympathize with Arthur’s reading taste too far, and in fact one of the interesting issues we discussed about Adam Bede in our seminar was characters’ reading (or not) and how it affects both their thinking about their own lives and our judgments of them. Hetty doesn’t read novels, we’re told, and so spins her fantasies about becoming a lady oblivious to the potential complications; Arthur should have finished Zeluco, which might have strengthened his moral resolve by emphasizing the consequences of seducing innocent young girls. A lot of our attention ended up being on our own reading of Hetty, and in particular on whether the narrator’s close attention to her interiority and the inadequacies of her self-perception and moral development in any way compensates for those defects, or whether that attention is (perhaps inevitably) condescending, or worse. We remarked that everyone around Hetty attributes qualities to her that she doesn’t really have, largely because of her deceptive beauty (leading Adam, for instance, to assume a tenderness of character equal to the softness of her arms and other curves). Dinah too mistakes Hetty for something more than she is, but Dinah’s case is particularly interesting because she gives Hetty credit for greater moral elevation, seeing in Hetty’s sobs, for instance, “the stirring of a divine impulse” when in fact Hetty is just moody, in an “excitable state of mind.” “[W]hile the lower nature can never understand the higher,” the narrator remarks,

the higher nature commands a complete view of the lower. But I think the higher nature has to learn this comprehension, as we learn the art of vision, by a good deal of hard experience.

The hierarchical language is potentially troubling here, especially in combination with the frequent associations of Hetty with animals and other “lower” creatures. Some judgment on Hetty for her vanity and selfishness (eventually destructive not just to herself, but, most painfully, to her child) is surely essential. But if she is of a “lower” kind, how far ought we to hold her responsible? It’s striking that the “hard experience” called for here is Dinah’s, or the “higher” nature’s: Dinah is capable of moral growth and the expansion of her sympathy even to Hetty as she really is, seems to be the message, but isn’t it Hetty’s “hard experience” to which much of the novel is primarily dedicated? But it’s Hetty who is not able to read her own experience and learn from it: that’s for Dinah, and us, to do.

It feels as if this year there was an unpleasantly (even, unconscionably) short time between the end of exams–or, more significantly, the end of marking exams–and the beginning of our new term. The feeling of hurtling headling into another round of, well, everything was exacerbated by the entire administrative structure of the university being closed from the day I submitted my final grades until the day I showed up to teach again. Well, it’s nice that some people weren’t working between December 24 and January 3, but for some reason I didn’t think I could just show up on January 4, walk into the classroom and start talking. Good thing I didn’t need the library, a/v support, answers about anything from room booking or the Registrar’s Office, or a printer.

Sigh.

But I was, mostly, ready. And the truth about teaching (one truth, anyway) is that there’s only so much you can do in advance. I find I can’t even draft detailed lecture notes much ahead of time if I want to really mean the things I say. For one thing, transitions and examples that seem absolutely reasonable at one moment can look wholly obscure at another (“Why have I put ‘quote Arnold’ here, again? Which Arnold?”). And for another, each class meeting has to be to some extent responsive to the one that came before it (and the ones that came before that). So I usually focus a lot of energy and attention on the scaffolding for my classes–planning reading and assignment sequences, tweaking course policies, setting up Blackboard sites and so forth. This time I obsessed about the wiki projects I am doing with my Brit Lit survey class (very similar to the one JBJ describes here), especially the instructions (detailed! with screen shots!) and the evaluation rubric. I also puzzled for some time over what assignments to use in my graduate seminar, as I am tired of going through the ritual round of in-class seminar presentations (in the end, I decided to move a fair amount of writing and discussion onto, you guessed it, a class blog). I’m hopeful that these mildly innovative formats for our work will be energizing for the students as well as for me, but right now I feel exhausted from the effort it took to create the sites and then explain (and justify, pedagogically or methodologically) their use.

And even having laboured over syllabi and websites and reserve lists and discussion questions until my eyes were all starey and red, the problem still remained: what to say in class? Luckily, for one class (Mystery & Detective Fiction) I have a lot of material to draw on from previous years, so this time all I added was some pizazz in the form of PowerPoint slides. There really is no lecture that can’t be improved by a large picture of Humphrey Bogart. For my graduate seminar, I knew I wanted to begin with an overview of George Eliot’s life and philosophy, also something I’ve done before. I also had asked them to read three of her major essays (“Woman in France,” “The Natural History of German Life,” and “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists”), so we could begin our seminar work with some discussion of, among other things, gender and voice.

The big blank for me was how to start up the Brit Lit survey. In the end I decided to go with a sort of ‘motivational speaker does literary history’ thing, emphasizing ways in which a text can hum with unexpected significance if we bring to it a keen enough sense of the contexts and forms on which it draws, or to which it responds. To feel that energy ourselves, we have to stock up on ideas and information, including historical and literary-historical, so that, for instance, we can look at something that otherwise might seem entirely innocuous, even trivial (my example was “I wandered lonely as a cloud”) and see it as, in its own way, revolutionary. Why would someone say this thing, in this way, at this time? Under the circumstances, what did it mean? And then, of course, given all that and everything else we know, what does it mean for us? I had the idea that they should not take the class, or literary history for that matter, for granted–not just sit there and be writing down things about what the texts meant, or who wrote them and when. Nobody has ever (I think!) written literature in the hope of being anthologized, after all. People write (or so I assume) so that other people will join with them, if only temporarily or provisionally. Anyway, I tried to communicate some sense of why I think it matters (and helps) to know something about literary and historical contexts; I tried to make the discussion at once abstract and personal (for them, not for me). Today, on the other hand, I made large generalizations about “Romanticism” and pointed to some sections of “Tintern Abbey.” I think that was more what they were expecting from the course.

As of late yesterday afternoon, I had finally filed all of my grades for my fall term course: a late exam (December 18th) proved both a blessing (because I had time to finish up other things in the meantime) and a curse (because I couldn’t wrap things up sooner even if I wanted to). I know that writing exams is very stressful, so I’m always touched when a student takes a precious minute or two to include a little “thank you” or “happy holidays” message to me at the end. There were several of those this year (and thank you, too, if any of you are reading this, and enjoy your well-earned break!), including the one quoted in the title to this post. As you can imagine, it gave me pause. “Odd yet interesting”? Of course, I’m glad it was interesting, but I wish I knew what was odd about it. Like the frequent comment on my course evaluations that I am “so organized,” this one makes me wonder just what my colleagues are doing, which in turn makes me think about how hermetically sealed our classrooms are, at least to each other. I haven’t had a colleague sit in on one of my own classes since I was compiling my tenure dossier nearly a decade ago; I’ve observed teaching demonstrations by job candidates and sat in once or twice at the request of a graduate student or junior colleague also working on his or her teaching dossier, but that’s it. Although teaching is done in front of an audience, when I think about it it is a strangely isolating experience also: you prepare alone, by and large, you carry out your plans as best you can and measure your success, or not, against your own standards and intentions, then you shuffle back to your office and get ready to do it all over again. Inevitably, after you’ve been doing it for a while, you find strategies (and handouts, and assignments, and textbooks, and so on) that you like and because there aren’t that many opportunities to compare what you are doing to what other people are doing, you start thinking of yourself as the norm–until you discover that, at least to someone, you seem “odd”! Actually, now that I think about it, last year I got a very nice card from a wonderful Honours student who also made a remark that made me wonder about myself: to paraphrase, she said that I had shown her that there were “other ways” of studying literature. Other than what?

Hazarding a guess, it has something to do with my attempts to talk about literature as something of personal and moral significance. I end my Victorian novel classes, for instance, after reviewing the historical and literary contexts we have studied and the major thematic and critical arcs of the specific texts, with a little speech about the conviction most Victorian novelists display that we, the readers, are where the real action has to go on: not only do they engage us in the novels, with strategies such as intrusive narration and direct address to us, the ‘dear readers,’ but they frequently point to public apathy, indifference, ignorance, or prejudice as the source of their characters’ difficulties. Lydgate’s failure? Dorothea’s unhistoric life? We made it possible, with our pettiness and self-absorption. Jo’s death? Well, aren’t they “dying thus around us every day”? The whole of Vanity Fair? Isn’t that where we live? I wrote a bit about these ‘closing perorations’ last year:

A further, and related, feature of these novels, and one that seems to me of increasing importance, is the imperative they communicate that we, as readers, have a lot of responsibilities: to read well, to judge carefully, and to think about our own role in the social worlds and institutions the novelists examine so imaginatively and often so critically—many of which have continuations or counterparts, after all, in modern society. At heart, this is the demand these novels make on us—to get involved, as readers—to acknowledge that the world they talk about is always, if not always literally, our own. When still an aspiring novelist herself, George Eliot remarked that “art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.” Right now, there is a lot of interest in fiction in this way, as a literary form that perhaps is specially suited to bringing about change in the world as well as in individuals. For example, Martha Nussbaum has published a book called Poetic Justice in which she holds up Dickens’s Hard Times as exemplary of the potential role of the literary imagination in public life—holding up a vision of human flourishing that contrasts with the theories most at play in socio-economic theory today, and that she argues is best cultivated precisely through the form of the novel. This is part of a broader attempt on her part to get the novel as a genre recognized as a form of moral philosophy. I myself have published a paper arguing for the value of George Eliot’s Middlemarch as an ethical text.

My general point is that the very qualities that make 19th-century novels problematic if your approach is formalist, aesthetic, or modernist can be those that make them matter if your approach is philosophical, activist, humanist, or communicative—why not, we might ask, use the powers of language and story-telling to get people thinking and talking about the way they live with other people, or about their ability to face themselves in the mirror in the morning? Yes, these novels are demanding in their length and complexity. But the greatest demand they place on us as readers is to be active, rather than passive, whether through the great moral “labour of choice” we experience vicariously in The Mill on the Floss or through the exercise of our sympathetic imagination and social conscience on behalf of those who need our help, as Bleak House might inspire us.

When I describe myself as a ‘Victorianist’ these days, I don’t really mean ‘someone who is immersed in scholarship about Victorian literature and culture’ (in fact, I confess my interest in ‘Victorian Studies’ as a field has been steadily declining, to the point that for the first time in almost twenty years I have changed my settings for the VICTORIA listserv to “digest”–though I still consider this list exemplary for its wisdom, generosity, and collegiality, I’m just not engaged with the topics it covers). I mean something more like ‘someone who embraces some key Victorian ideas about the novel in particular, and about literature more generally.’ Maybe, again, just guessing, this is what seems ‘odd’ or different. But without knowing what other people do or say in the classroom, I can’t be sure.

Otherwise, things have wrapped up without incident this term. The Victorian Sensations seminar picked up a lot of momentum towards the end, or so I thought. I had to put in some strenuous work for a while, especially when we turned our attention to contemporary criticism, but it seemed to pay off, and the discussions in our last couple of weeks showed that, despite what I thought was a stuttering start, everyone had accumulated a range of good critical strategies and contextual frameworks for discussing our primary texts, including the two I consider the most interpretively elusive, Aurora Floyd and East Lynne. And the Victorian novel class (odd though it may have been) seemed typical enough to me. I do think, though, that it might be time for me to re-imagine it, as I have been teaching the two ‘halves’ of it more or less the same since 2003. I enjoy both the Austen to Dickens and the Dickens to Hardy versions a lot; I vary the texts at least a little every time; and I have used a range of assignment structures. It’s great to have notes and handouts ready to be tweaked and reused. But I think it’s starting to make me a little intellectually lazy, knowing so well what I want to do or say with each novel, or at any rate each author. I have no idea how else to run the courses, but next year, for the first time since 2003, I’m not teaching either of them–in fact, we’re hiring a sessional to cover them, as I’m on half-sabbatical starting in January and will be doing other teaching in the fall. So between now and September 2011, maybe I’ll get some new ideas. Maybe I should sit in on some colleagues’ classes, too, and see what they do. I bet in their own ways, they are odd too, but it would be nice–and probably instructive–to see what the difference is.

There’s less than one week of classes left in the term–amazing, because it seems like just a moment ago that I was printing off my introductory handouts, getting familiar with the A/V setups in new classrooms, and luring my students through our first readings. I think it’s the relentless need to keep looking towards the next thing (you walk out of your last lecture on North and South, say, and your mind is already buzzing with preparations for your first class on Great Expectations) that makes teaching terms go by so fast. It has felt like a fairly busy term, which is a bit nerve-wracking when I consider that I’m only teaching two classes, both of which are repeats and so I have quite a lot of notes and handouts I can reuse–but next term I have three classes, including one brand new one covering all kinds of material I have never taught before and one graduate seminar for which the expectations and demands are different and harder than u/g lecture courses. Pause for deep breaths . . . but before I get there, there’s still work to be done for this term.

In 19th-Century Fiction we’re working our dreary way through Jude the Obscure. For some reason I’m feeling more kindly towards Hardy’s prose this time. Usually I find him a fairly clunky stylists, blunt in his statements and awkward in his development of both plot and character. But this time I am appreciating the pithiness of his declarations, which gives the novel a polemical cast quite different from our other readings (even though, at heart, most of them have also been polemical, or at least didactic). Here he is describing Jude’s marriage to Arabella, for instance:

And so, standing before the aforesaid officiator, the two swore that at every other time of their lives till deathtook them, they would assuredly believe, feel, and desire precisely as they had believed, felt, and desired during the few preceding weeks. What was as remarkable as the undertaking itself was the fact that nobody seemed at all surprised at what they swore.

Of course, this intrusive commentary ensures that we have the opportunity to be surprised, to look at what is more typically treated as a culminating romantic moment (“I do!”) as a misguided attempt to fix in rigid form something that, as the novel will repeatedly emphasize, is naturally wayward–and to make compulsory feelings, and expressions of feeling, that ought to be (as Sue will later argue) wholly voluntary. That marriage itself is (at least potentially) immoral, rather than a solution to, or a guard against, immorality is one of the radical proposals of this novel. Thus, for instance, Jude’s reunion with Arabella near the end of Part Third has the feeling of an adulterous liaison, even though she is his legal wife; thus, too, Sue’s declaration to Phillotson, her legal spouse, that for her to live with him on “intimate terms” given her feelings for Jude “is adultery, in any circumstances, however legal.” It’s an argumentative book, pressuring us intellectually into emotional reactions that run contrary to a number of both literary and social conventions. Hardy’s language, if not especially elegant and only rarely poetic (in descriptions of landscape, for instance), is effective for that purpose. “Yet he perceived with despondency that, taken all round, he was a man of too many passions to make a good clergyman; the utmost he could hope for was that in a life of constant internal warfare between flesh and spirit the former might not always be victorious”–even if we read this as Jude’s language, it’s stilted, almost pedantic, and yet it makes perfectly clear that a central problem, for Jude and for the novel, is that ‘warfare between flesh and spirit,’ and there’s something to be said for clarity.

Yesterday we spent some time on stones and buildings. I came at this topic by way of Ruskin’s Stones of Venice and the idea that architecture can be “read” as expressing the spirit or values of an age (I tried an analogy also to Carlyle’s “Clothes Philosophy,” though I ended up feeling that trying to explain what he means by that makes things more, rather than less, confusing). This is not a subtle aspect of Jude (as I’ve already suggested, this is not a particularly subtle book in any respect): arriving in Christminster, which Jude has long dreamed of as an “ecclesiastical romance in stone,” he reads the “numberless architectural pages around him.” His work as a stone mason repairing the “rottenness of the stones” is at once practical and symbolic; we considered some of the ways it represents his attempts to realize his dreams even as he learns that the walls around him are keeping him out. We also considered the ways walls and stones and buildings come to represent the burdensome weight of the past, and I proposed some comparisons to the concept of history in Middlemarch, where success seems to lie more in acknowledging, understanding, and developing from the past, rather than rejecting it. Indeed, Eliot’s strongly organic view of history and society make the idea of escaping from the past not just illogical but dangerous (those who ignore their roots are bound to trip over them), whereas in Hardy, the wish seems to be to emerge somehow free from the coercive pressures of the overhanging ages. Mind you, Hardy too does not suggest that such an escape is possible–but for him, I think that’s a tragic impossibility.

In Victorian Sensations we’ve wrapped up our discussions of Fingersmith (such a smart book, as well as a thoroughly gripping read, even after multiple times through it). It really does provide an excellent conclusion to a course in which we have considered not just a series of primary texts in sensation fiction (the ‘inspiration’ or generic genealogy for Fingersmith) but a series of literary historical and critical questions about the genre, its subversive potential or ideological limits, its revisions (or not) of gender identities and class boundaries, its fears, threats, and promises, and its implications for questions of canonicity and literary merit. Waters seems clearly to have considered most of these things too, and to have written many of them into her own book. I don’t think it’s just a pastiche or a period piece, though: one of the reasons sensation fiction has become such a hot area of critical inquiry in recent years is surely that its issues remain ours, and Waters is also engaging in a very contemporary way with problems about writing, gender, and authority, about sexual identities, about eroticism and pornography and exploitation, and about distinctions between genre and ‘literary’ fiction. Every one of her novels has given me that satisfying sense of reading something that has ideas at its heart. I can’t wait to read The Little Stranger–it’s at the top of my Christmas wish list!

In Victorian Sensations Wednesday’s and Friday’s classes this week are devoted to student presentations. I’m using an assignment sequence I’ve used once before with (I thought) great success. I have some reservations about how it is going this year, and I can’t really put my finger on why it has seemed so much more difficult. I thought, in fact, that I had prepared for it better and provided clearer instructions this time around, and yet . . . But Wednesday’s presentations certainly included a lot of good material, and evidence of good thinking and research; I hope Friday’s will too.

This is the point in the term when I look up from my daily class prep and the endless line-up of papers to mark and realize that (holy cow!) the end is in sight. Though there is always a bit of relief in the mix, the chief emotion this elicits is panic: so much left to do, so little time! And if I feel this way, imagine how the poor students feel, as they contemplate the term papers and exams they have to begin planning for even as we continue to expect them to show up keen and well-prepared for class. No wonder they look a bit worn. But we all have to press on: we are in books stepped in so far that to return (if we even could) would be, not just tedious, but regrettable…

In 19th-Century Fiction, we’ve pretty much run out of time for Middlemarch: I have one more lecture, in which I have all kinds of work to do concluding the particular web of connections I’ve been following–leaving all kinds of other tempting relevancies untouched. Having worked up a lecture on politics in the novel, now I’m regretting not having addressed religion directly, especially because a bright, curious student was in my office talking to me about plans for her assignment and returned to this a couple of times as something she’d like to spend more time on. It is certainly something I consider important in the novel, and I’ve written a bit about how I think the novel works to move us towards Eliot’s commitment to a secular morality (e.g. here and here). Next time perhaps I’ll spend less time on narrative strategies (but they are so interesting!) and conflicts between egotism and altruism (but they are so important!) and use a class to consider, not just the general idea that religion can be understood as a wholly human phenomenon, but also the specific examples of different religious attitudes we get, by way of Tyke, Farebrother, and Bulstrode, for instance. I also, as usual, feel that in focusing primarily on Dorothea and Casaubon, and Lydgate and Rosamond, I neglected Fred and Mary–especially Mary. By way of compensation, here’s a bit of the narrator’s description of her from Chapter 12:

Only a few children in Middlemarch looked blond by the side of Rosamond, and the slim figure displayed by her riding-habit had delicate undulations. In fact, most men in Middlemarch, eexcept her brothers, held that Miss Vincy was the best girl in the world, and some called her an angel. Mary Garth, on the contrary, had the aspect of an ordinary sinner: she was brown; her curly dark hair was rough and stubborn; her stature was low; and it would not be true to declare, in satisfactory antithesis, that she had all the virtues. Plainness has its peculiar temptations and vices quite as much as beauty; it is apt either to feign amiability, or, not feigning it, to show all the repulsiveness of discontent: at any rate, to be called an ugly thing in contrast with that lovely creature your companion, is apt to produce some effect beyond a sense of fine veracity and fitness in the phrase. At the age of two-and-twenty Mary had certainly not attained that perfect good sense and good principle which are usually recommended to the less fortunate girl, as if they were to be obtained in quantities ready mixed, with a flavor of resignation as required. Her shrewdness had a streak of satiric bitterness continually renewed and never carried utterly out of sight, except by a-strong current of gratitude towards those who, instead of telling her that she ought to be contented, did something to make-her so. Advancing womanhood had tempered her plainness, which was of a good human sort, such as the mothers of our race have very commonly worn in all latitudes under a more or less becoming headgear. Rembrandt would have painted her with pleasure, and would have made her broad features look out of the canvas with intelligent honesty. For honesty, truth-telling fairness, was Mary’s reigning virtue: she neither tried to create illusions, nor indulged in them for her own behoof, and when she was in a good mood she had humor enough in her to laugh at herself.

It’s a characteristically rich passage, bringing out not just Mary’s gift for looking realistically at herself and the world (a great moral advantage), but the portentous contrast between her and Rosamond, whose ability to indulge in illusions sets up one of the novel’s saddest failures. In the “intelligent honesty” with which Mary looks out of her canvas, we might see a truer reflection of George Eliot than in the well-known identification the novelist made of herself with the tiresomely pedantic Mr Casaubon.

In Victorian Sensations, we have begun our series of workshops intended to build on our experience of reading four key examples of sensation fiction by putting them into some specific contexts. On Friday we considered questions of genre and canonicity by grappling with comparisons between our novels and some specific novels more firmly situated in the list of ‘great books’ but which were in their day, and might still be now, seen as more alike than distinct from sensation fiction. In particular, I asked the students to think about Jane Eyre and Great Expectations and about the technique of intrusive narration (which, we have speculated a couple of times this term, is used by our sensation novelists with the aim of elevating their work by adding philosophical perspective). I was interested in how far we were prepared to say that there is, indeed, something different about the novels that carry the ‘sensation’ label. As might be expected, we didn’t settle the question, but I think it is valuable to consider why people care(d) about drawing distinctions of this kind. We did (partly at my prompting) spend time on the idea of literary merit as well. Yesterday we moved on to a selection of 19th-century critical responses; tomorrow and Friday we will be discussing a range of contemporary critical articles and books. The discussion yesterday seemed pretty stilted to me, and perhaps it was my fault for not structuring it more carefully or for allowing (even encouraging) it to range over a fairly wide range of issues. My feeling was that the students were not really accustomed to metacritical questions, such as what assumptions underly a particular approach to fiction or particular judgments. I think some things will come into better focus, though, as we compare what critics do today with what the Victorian reviewers did. A key distinction that always strikes me is how closely the 19th-century critics assume we are affected, personally, by what we read–no academic critic today is worried (at least, not overtly) about whether readers will be corrupted or learn bad moral lessons from sympathizing too closely with Fosco or Isabel Vane. As we began to discuss yesterday, there are some moralizing assumptions in some contemporary criticism when the focus is on class relations, for example, or gender politics, but I don’t think anyone is debating whether Lady Audley is a subversive or a misogynistic characterization because they think it will make a difference to how we actually live. Historical distance is part of this, but so too is an assumption about our relationship to the book–although, as we also touched on, perhaps audience matters a lot here. Academics aren’t worried on behalf of other academics, as there is a tacit assumption of our independence in the face of a novel’s blandishments or appeals to our senses or prejudices. There’s a bit of a different attitude, I think, when it comes to the ‘mass reading audience’–today, as in the 19th-century, there is an implicit (occasionally, perhaps, even today, an explicit one) that there are good readers and bad readers, and the bad readers are the ones vulnerable to false consciousness, bad ideology, etc. (I have noticed this attitude in relation to women’s reading especially, as if women will simply fall for the worst possible invitations to materialism or fairy-tale fantasies of romance etc. I’ve been thinking about this and related issues because of the recent Guardian post in defense of “chick-lit” and the subsequent thread at Bookninja…but more about that later, I hope, in a separate post.)