This week is nearly over already! Whew. It hasn’t been a particularly intense week in my classes (relatively “light” reading, for instance, in both of my undergraduate classes, plus the final books of Middlemarch for my graduate seminar, which I know well enough by now not to have to reread every word–though, as a matter of fact, I did reread almost all of it anyway, because who wouldn’t, given the excuse?). But it’s March Break, which means some schedule juggling, and then my poor daughter came down with a violent stomach flu, which derailed her camp plans. We are fortunate to have a lot of flexibility in our working hours, but I find that as I get older I find it harder to make up in the evenings for reading or marking that I couldn’t get done during the day. Happily, anyway, she’s on the mend, if sipping a little ginger ale means anything, and by Monday we’ll all be back to our usual routine.

So, what have I been doing, when I could? In Mystery and Detective Fiction, we’re on to our unit on ‘the contemporary police procedural, with short stories by Ed McBain, Peter Robinson, and Ian Rankin. I haven’t actually read any of McBain’s 87th Precinct series, only a few short stories in the various anthologies I’ve used over the years, which have felt to me a bit too much like reading episodes of Law & Order. It’s just not my favourite style, though maybe I just haven’t read the best examples. I generally enjoy Robinson’s Inspector Banks series, but our story was actually a one-off, a historical mystery that is not really (as my students quickly discerned) a police procedural proper, as its detective is only a “special constable” and has the usual run-ins with the official officers of the law that we expect of the amateur detective or private eye. Set in September 1939, the story (“Missing in Action”) evokes a feeling of civilization spiraling out of control; vigilante justice, justified in hard-boiled detection as the only way for Our Hero, however morally questionable, to fight for The Right in a corrupt world, is shown in a darker light here, reminding us of why we need to rely on formal systems of law and evidence, even if the outcomes are not always satisfactory. Tomorrow, it’s Rankin’s “The Dean Curse,” which sets us up well for Knots and Crosses next week, not only by introducing Rebus, but by making similar connections between military training and police work, and asking difficult questions about the moral responsibility of a military organization that (of necessity) trains men away from their humanity only to loose them on the world at the end of their service. Rankin is the best stylist of this group, for sure.

Having said that, I confess to feeling some impatience in the last week or so with the preponderance of mediocre-to-fine writers on that reading list. Though I wouldn’t accept any argument that genre fiction is inherently or inevitably less “literary,” it’s striking that the prose is so rarely excellent, even among the most popular or innovative mystery writers. “Workmanlike” is how I would describe, for instance, the writing in Paretsky’s Indemnity Only: important as her work is, for its contributions to breaking open the feminist potential of crime fiction, there’s no temptation to linger over the language at any point. In fact, only Chandler and Hammett much tempt me that way, this term, which may be one reason I’m missing P. D. James’s An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, removed from the syllabus because of its unpopularity with students over the years–James cares about language as well as story and character. When I go looking for new writers to include in this course, I usually tire of the exercise quite soon because however interesting the angle or scenario may be, so many are badly, even dreadfully, written (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, anyone?).

It’s only fair to say that bad or mediocre writing occurs in all forms, including self-consciously aspiring “literary” novels (The Mistress of Nothing, anyone?). But much of the time there’s no reason to teach a mediocre work. For a course on the contemporary novel, I don’t think Tracy Chevalier, for instance, would even be a contender for the syllabus. But when your criteria is not literary excellence but something else, then you do teach material that is “interesting” for other reasons, and I think what happens is that once you’ve gone through it a few times, it isn’t really that interesting to you anymore and you’re just reiterating stuff about its relationship to conventions and social / political issues and so on, reading it symptomatically, for what it is, rather than (dare I say) lovingly, for what it specifically says, or, as important, how it says it. I know, I know: “literary excellence”–what does it mean? But surely one defensible measure of excellence is “bearing up well under repeated, attentive readings.” It might be intellectual qualities or aesthetic qualities that achieve this quality of endurance, and there are certainly many, many ways of being excellent, but a book that eventually lies flat before me like a deflated balloon because there’s really nothing else to discover in it is not excellent, I feel pretty sure about that. I routinely teach some pretty bad books (Aurora Floyd, anyone?)–but so far, some of them do continue to bear up, maybe because they are so odd and unfamiliar that they resist deflation despite everything. But I think I’m going to start purging my teaching life of the ones that have become perfunctory. That may mean giving up the mystery and detective course, at least for a while. I know I still make the books interesting for students coming to them for the first time, but I’d really rather those same students were getting excited and interested in better books, books that will survive to become real literary friends of theirs and/or that will encourage them to set their sights higher. In spending a lot of time explaining what’s interesting about not-very-good books, it sometimes seems I am implicitly allowing that it’s OK to settle for them.

I wonder if I’m fretting over this problem this term because of the contrast with the readings for the Brit Lit survey: because there I have had to be so selective, I often feel overwhelmed with the fabulousness of our readings. This week, for instance, we’ve done Auden, Dylan Thomas, and Seamus Heaney, all writers who seem to me to offer the whole package.

And having said all that, I started rereading Daniel Deronda last night and I’m very excited about going through it again, with all of its challenges and rewards.

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.