This Week In My Classes

Workday Miscellany: Ph.D. Problems, Institutional Inertia, Graduate Teaching, and the Yoke of Marriage

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I’m feeling a bit scattered this week. Here are some of the things buzzing around in my head.

1. It’s hard not to want to say something about Louis Menand’s much-linked-to post on “the PhD problem,” but what? Readers of this blog will not be surprised that I nodded emphatically at this statement:

The non-academic world would be enriched if more people in it had exposure to academic modes of thought, and had thereby acquired a little understanding of the issues that scare terms like “deconstruction” and “postmodernism” are attempts to deal with. And the academic world would be livelier if it conceived of its purpose as something larger and more various than professional reproduction—and also if it had to deal with students who were not so neurotically invested in the academic intellectual status quo.

But I don’t really know how to assess some of his larger claims, especially the more sociological or statistical ones; I can’t even compare them to my own experience, really, because the information is exclusively about American institutions and I don’t know how closely the patterns he describes are repeated here in Canada–despite having spent two years as coordinator of our graduate program. One of the reasons is that the concerns of that position were, of practical necessity, extremely local: it’s a two-year stint by departmental policy, with an incessant stream of relatively small bureaucratic and advising tasks and intervals of intense labour around major fellowship deadlines and, of course, admissions. In the first year of the position the learning curve was steep and my dependence on our (exemplary!) office staff nearly total; the second year was slightly better but the end was already in sight. New initiatives? Policy development? Research into large-scale professional questions and how they might impact or play out in our tiny program? Not a chance: there was just no time, and frankly no incentive, to explore broader issues.

2. In a related vein, I was struck by Menand’s passing suggestion that “If every graduate student were required to publish a single peer-reviewed article instead of writing a thesis, the net result would probably be a plus for scholarship,” but this seems to me another of those ideas about changing “the system” (not unlike the MLA’s call to “decenter the monograph” as the gold standard for evaluating tenure and promotion files) that can never be addressed on a local level and so may never be addressed at all. Which department wants to be the first to say that they will award a Ph.D. without requiring a thesis? For that matter, which department could make such a change in policy without losing their accreditation or funding? Which department could independently assert its ability to evaluate the work of its members without the sacred stamp of “peer reviewed publications,” or at least giving equal weight to less conventional modes of knowledge dissemination? (How far, as the MLA report suggested, has “peer review” become an excuse for farming out the job of scholarly evaluation to editors?) Anecdotally, conversationally, there’s plenty of dissatisfaction with the professional status quo and interest in making various features of it more flexible and more responsive to changing conditions in, say, publishing or employment. But this week, in a couple of different contexts, I was reminded again of how rigidly current practices are enforced by administrative structures that assume certain models for estimating academic productivity and value (for instance, fellowship competitions in which quantity of publications is taken as the only ‘objective’ measure of excellence, or research models that promote applications for large grants as if more expensive projects are both necessary and desirable). People grumbled about the implicit principles but the atittude appears to be “that’s the way things are now, and we’d better stay in the game.”

3. I was also struck by Menand’s remark that “Inquiry in the humanities has become quite eclectic without becoming contentious. This makes it a challenge for entering scholars to know where to make their mark.” This certainly echoes my strong feeling for the last several years that English, for one, has become a field so inchoate that it is unable to declare and defend itself in any compelling way that all of its members can agree on–at least, not without resorting to unbelievably bland formulations (all the world’s a text!). How can we sustain a sense of ourselves as a functioning discipline under these circumstances? Though I don’t want to fall into conservative lamentation about the good old days when everybody knew what books were valuable and why (when were those days, exactly, and how long did they last?), anyone who has worked on curriculum reform (and probably everyone working in an English department anywhere has done so at least once) knows that the lack of an identifiable core is a practical as well as an intellectual problem. It’s a problem for us, as we try to define priorities in hiring as well as teaching, and it’s a problem for students, whose programs include so much variety it is possible to meet a 4th-year honours student and be more struck, somehow, by what they don’t know or haven’t read than by what they do and have, and certainly impossible to predict what experience or knowledge they bring to your class (in my 4th-year seminar on Victorian sensation fiction, I have students who have never studied 19th-century novels before–they have a lot of catching up to do, to participate effectively in some aspects of our discussions). But what, if anything, to do about that? Too often, I think, we resort to a rhetoric of skills (critical thinking!) that (as Menant points out with his remark about the dubious efficiency of studying Joyce to achieve more general ends) rather strips away the point of working through literature to achieve such general, marketable ends.

4. All of this mental muddle is particularly distracting because one of the things I’m trying to get done is course planning for next term, and particularly the plans for my upcoming graduate seminar on George Eliot. When I first taught such a class (in 1997-98), I thought it was pretty obvious what I should do: graduate courses are training for professional work in the field of literary criticism, right? That shouldn’t have seemed so obvious to me then (I didn’t take into account, for instance, that Dalhousie’s program includes a ‘terminal’ M.A. and thus serves a student population that is not necessarily headed down an academic path), and it certainly does not seem so obvious to me now. But what difference does, or should, it make that there seem to me to be a number of uncertainties about the purpose of their degrees more generally, our seminar in particular, and even literary criticism itself? Is a (real or mock) conference paper a reasonable goal, or a paper suitable to be revised and submitted to a peer-reviewed journal? Should I diversify the requirements to suit a wider range of possible applications of scholarly expertise–say, a resource-rich website, an experimental hyper-text edition of a chapter, a paper aimed at a general audience, a portfolio of book reviews, a class wiki? Is it possible to accommodate such a range and still to ensure equal workloads and fair evaluation? I’ve been reading and rereading a swathe of critical articles in preparation for the usual “secondary readings” requirements but if I can’t even be sure myself what we need to accomplish in the class, how can I choose what they should read? Probably I’ll just do what I usually do, which is pick some articles that seem particularly useful or interesting, or that stand for some reason as key or classic pieces; require a couple of short response papers, a seminar presentation, and a term paper (of the usual academic variety). It’s tempting to reinvent the course–but it’s part of a whole system of requirements and expectations, and so there I am again, reluctant to deviate from local norms, to point out that most of them will never need to do academic criticism (or get a permanent job in which it is required of them for tenure) and so we should really find something else to do about what we read.

In the meantime, my classes seem to be going fine. I was particularly pleased with the lively discussion in the Sensation Fiction seminar the last couple of meetings; I think we have some real momentum now, having bulldozed through four major novels in preparation for the next phase of the course, which involves a series of workshops and then a series of student presentations. In the other class, assignments just went back and besides the inevitable angst and resentment that generates, I think most of them are behind on their Middlemarch readings. But I’m doing my best to keep the energy up and to give them ideas about how to make the most of the reading as they work their way along. We talked about Lydgate and Rosamond, and the “ideal not the real yoke of marriage” (a phrase actually used about Dorothea and Casaubon, but widely applicable in this novel). For a happily “married” woman, George Eliot could sure put her finger on just how and why marital relations can turn from bliss to pain. To my knowledge there are only two married people in the class; they seem to be the ones doing most of the nodding as I explain the process of disillusionment and then adaptation to reality the novel describes.

This Week in My Classes (November 3, 2009)

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In Nineteenth-Century Fiction this week, we get to look at two of my favorite chapters in Middlemarch. Our general theme is the importance of looking at things from different perspectives–a simply idea but one that gets refracted in a number of different ways in the novel. On Monday I brought up the problem of achieving solidity in narrative. As Carlyle pointed out, “narrative is linear, but action is solid”: in life, many things happen at once, and what happens means different things to everyone involved because each ‘event’ is in fact part of many different stories, all overlapping but which you can only coherently narrate one at a time. What’s a novelist to do? One of Eliot’s techniques is to revisit moments in time, presenting them and then circling around to come at them again and make us consider them as part of a different story than we were following the first time. A good example occurs, for the first time, at the very end of Chapter 27–appropriately enough, as this is the chapter that opens with the famous pier glass parable, making explicit that the ‘scratches’ (events) take on their meaning depending on where we place our ‘candle’ to cast its light. The story we are with in this chapter is the developing relationship between Lydgate and Rosamond (the latter, of course, believes it is a developing romance). Lydgate’s practice is picking up, and one day, “when he had happened to overtake Rosamond on the Lowick road,” he is

stopped by a servant on horseback with a message calling him in to a house of some importance where Peacock [his predecessor in the practice] had never attended; and it was the second instance of this kind. The servant was Sir James Chettam’s, and the house was Lowick Manor [Mr Casaubon’s home, and aptly named].

In the Oxford edition, this is on page 256. The next chapter begins immediately, but earlier in time and with another story, that of Dorothea and Casaubon’s return to Lowick from their honeymoon. We follow them until we learn why Casaubon needed medical attention,on page 267, when “Mr Lydgate was sent for and he came wonderfully soon, for the messenger, who was Sir James Chettam’s man and knew Mr Lydgate, met him leading his horse along the Lowick road and giving his arm to Miss Vincy.” It’s a nice exercise to work out what the fetching of Lydgate by Sir James’s servant means for a range of different characters involved, especially Rosamond and Lydgate (both of whom take it as evidence that Lydgate will prosper professionally), Dorothea (who is coming to realize that Casaubon’s demands on her, or his need for her, will not be of the kind she imagined before their wedding), and of course Casaubon himself, whose confrontation with his own mortality sets him up for Chapter 42, which may be the greatest in the book–next to Chapters 19-21, maybe, which we also looked at (here, we tried comparing the order of events as plotted in the novel to the order of events in the story, or chronologically)–or maybe Chapters 80-81…

Tomorrow I want to look first at another pattern of revisiting, this time not circling around in time but coming back to a familiar setting with new information. For this, I’ll focus on Dorothea’s blue-green boudoir, which changes dramatically (but, of course, not really at all) from when she first sees it and thinks it needs no alteration to her return from Rome, when “the very furniture in the room seemed to have shrunk since she saw it before.” Later still, “the bare room had gathered within it those memories of an inward life which fill the air as with a cloud of good or bad angels” and the portrait of Casaubon’s Aunt Julia has become yet more interesting because of its association with Will Ladislaw. If we have time, we’ll start looking at examples of people who look different as your experience changes, which will bring us to Dorothea’s mighty struggle with her lesser self at the end of Chapter 42. This is the culmination, or nearly so, of the struggle that begins in Rome and reaches a new stage in Chapter 28, when she “was no longer struggling against the perception of facts, but adjusting herself to their clearest perception.” This movement, of course, is the essential one towards realism, but the next great step must be towards sympathy. Can she take it? What will be the consequences? As the narrator says in Chapter 42, when Dorothea’s picture of Casaubon becomes nearly (but not yet quite) as clear as ours, “In such a crisis as this, some women begin to hate.”

In Victorian Sensations, we’re still working our way through East Lynne. The sheer improbability of the plot is such a delight in this half of the book that despite the mounting pathos of the plot, it’s hard not to find it comic. On Monday I had the students work in groups on some key passages looking at Lady Isabel’s condition after the train wreck that literalizes her symbolic death to the world (the price of her moral fall)–but then doesn’t, since she doesn’t actually die but returns like the ghost of her former self, unrecognizable because, well, here’s how she looks now:

Look at the governess, reader, and see whether you know her. You will say “No.” But you do, for it is Lady Isabel Vane. But how strangely she is altered! Yes, the railway accident did that for her, and what the accident left undone, grief and remorse accomplished. She limps as she walks, and slightly stoops, taken from her former height. A scar extends from her chin above her mouth, completely changing the character of the lower part of her face; some of her teeth are missing, so that she speaks with a lisp, and the sober bands of her gray hair–it is nearly silver–are confined under a large and close cap. She herself tries to make the change greater, so that all chance of being recognized may be at an end, and for that reason she wears disfiguring spectacles, and a broad band of gray velvet, coming down low upon her forehead. Her dress, too, is equally disfiguring. Never is she seen in one that fits her person, but in those frightful “loose jackets,” which must surely have been invented by somebody envious of a pretty shape. As to her bonnet, it would put to shame those masquerade things tilted on to the back of the head, for it actually shaded her face; and she was never seen out without a thick veil. She was pretty easy upon the score of being recognized now; for Mrs. Ducie and her daughters had been sojourning at Stalkenberg, and they did not know her in the least. Who could know her? What resemblance was there between that gray, broken-down woman, with her disfiguring marks, and the once loved Lady Isabel, with her bright color, her beauty, her dark flowing curls, and her agile figure? Mr. Carlyle himself could not have told her. But she was good-looking still, in spite of it all, gentle and interesting; and people wondered to see that gray hair in one yet young. (Ch. 39)

The brilliant part is that she goes back to her former home to serve as governess to the children she abandoned when she ran away with her lover (sorry for the spoilers, but really, none of you were ever going to read this novel, right?)–and nobody recognizes her as long as she has on those spectacles. I am fascinated by the comment that she is “good-looking still.” We discussed this for a while in class, and the students who very able worked up this passage made the point that it suggests beauty is a matter of character as well as appearance. It also seems to be a gesture towards keeping our sympathy for her alive: she’s not so hideous we look away. Tomorrow we’re going to try to figure out how the election that figures, quite suddenly, in the late part of the novel makes any sense–how is it connected, or how does it enhance, the other themes or conflicts we’ve been considering? My opening gambit is that it directs our attention away from the duelling female protagonists, Isabel and Barbara, and does something with our thinking about the male antagonists, Carlyle and Francis Levison. But what exactly? I think the students will enjoy the ducking scene.

This Week in My Classes (October 26, 2009)

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In Nineteenth-Century Fiction it’s (finally) time for Middlemarch. I’ve posted pretty often about teaching Middlemarch (see, for instance, here, here, and here), and you can hear me talk (fast) about it here, too, in an interview with fellow blogger and bibliophile Nigel Beale. For something just a bit different this time, I thought I’d post the PowerPoint slides I used for my introductory lecture today. The file conversion seems to have affected the layout and font color for the worse, but the slides illustrate my initial approach, which is to woo students into being interested in the novel by way of, as I say, “The Interesting Life of Mary Ann Evans.” In the spirit of one of her contemporaries, who regretted the way her husband John Cross’s biography took the “salt and spice” out of her “entirely unconventional life,” I show them just what a remarkable (and spicy) person she was–so that they will read the novel with more appreciation for the ways in which it, too, is “entirely unconventional.”

GE Slides http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=21651620&access_key=key-gwli9tgqyramszy7oh5&page=1&version=1&viewMode=slideshow

In Victorian Sensations, we’re starting up with Ellen Wood’s East Lynne, the last in the sequence of four primary texts for our course before we turn our attention to critical work (both 19th-century and current) and then to Fingersmith. When I’ve taught East Lynne before, I’ve found myself preoccupied with questions of literary evaluation (see here, for instance). For whatever reason–perhaps because I’ve just been over similar ground in working my way through Aurora Floyd–I’m less interested in that question at this point than I am in just thinking about the book on its own terms. What is it interested in? What is it up to? (I realize that it can sound odd to attribute agency to a novel, so another way of asking these questions would be by way of the novel’s implied author.’ I think the result is the same, though: you are trying to figure out how literary strategies and devices, from plot and character through setting, imagery, metaphor, theme, and so on, are being used to achieve effects or communicate ideas–aesthetic, political, or other.)

On this reading so far, East Lynne strikes me forcibly for its interest in money. It is almost as specific as a Jane Austen novel about the financial situation of its characters, especially the spendthrift earl who has somehow managed to burn through enough capital to have underwritten an income of L60,000 / year–at a time when, as the footnotes to our edition tell us, a middle-class family needed something like L300 / year for a comfortable life. Even accounting for inflation, that makes Mr Darcy look shabby, and yet Lord Mount Severn has not only spent it all, but left absolutely nothing for his angelically beautiful, sweet-eyed, if brunette, daughter Isabel. So pinched for cash is Isabel that after his sudden death she doesn’t even have enough to move to her new home, where she will be living on the charity of the new earl and his wife. The smitten lawyer Archibald Carlyle tries to help by dropping a crumpled L100 note on her lap as she drives away. The ambiguity of this gesture (is it romantic? chivalric? forward, even vaguely compromising?) nicely represents the complex interrelationships in the novel between emotions and economics. When he eventually proposes, it’s as much to save her from physical as well as financial vulnerability as anything, and in fact what he offers her, explicitly, is the chance to return to her former home as its mistress–that is, he offers her security, as well as his love (which we are led to believe is really a kind of infatuation–“Beware your senses, Mr. Carlyle,” the narrator warns). She admits she does not love him (she too is infatuated, with the handsome ne’er-do-well Francis Levison, who fortunately, or not, is not the marrying kind, as he is quick to warn her–we know he would feel differently, of course, if she still had her fortune). So she trades her self for his money, a transaction that in some contexts, in some novels, is shown up as little better than prostitution. We might even think of Austen’s Charlotte Lucas in this way (how much money would you consider reasonable in return for sleeping with Mr Collins?)–but both Austen and Wood are clearly pragmatists, refusing the most stringent moral judgment because they, and their novels, are so aware that their women simply can’t afford (literally) to be squeamish.

This Week in My Classes (October 20, 2009): Secrets and Lies

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It’s another week of sensation fiction, with the last two class meetings on Lady Audley’s Secret in 19th-C Ficton and on Aurora Floyd in Victorian Sensations. I’m still puzzling my way through this round of Aurora Floyd. I wrote a bit about it at The Valve: my conclusion is, rather inconclusively, that the novel is both bad and good, depending on how or why you read it.

Outside of the classroom, I’m busy marking a set of papers, with another (but thankfully smaller) set coming in on Friday–and then another next Wednesday, all of which will get terribly in the way of my reading of Wolf Hall. For pedagogical reasons, I’m a fan of frequent shorter assignments; I think it benefits class discussion and attendance, too, when everyone is writing something on every book we read. The result, though, is that I have papers in pretty constantly throughout the term. Luckily I seem to have done pretty well staggering the dates in my two classes for once. I’m experimenting this term with doing all of my marking electronically, mostly to save paper. I like it better than I thought I would: I’m so accustomed to working on a computer ow that it actually feels easier, and also somehow less demoralizing, to have the papers in a virtual folder on my virtual desktop rather than a paper one on my actual desktop. I can comment in more detail because typing is fast and space (and legibility) is not an issue; I get less physically tired, too. The only clunky part is downloading the files from Blackboard and then uploading them again, one at a time, once I’ve put my comments on. It seems as if you should be able to open the document in a window inside Blackboard, mark it up, and then just close it again. But if the students just paste the text in to the box in the Assignments section, there appears to be no way for them to format it properly (which does matter, if you are trying to teach conventions for quoting and citing) or for me to mess with the submission. Maybe I’m just not seeing how to do this: I should ask the fine folks at ProfHacker for tips!

This Week in My Classes (October 16, 2009): Aurora Floyd

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It’s all Mary Elizabeth Braddon all the time, this week. Having just finished discussions of Lady Audley’s Secret in my upper-year seminar on Sensation Fiction, we’ve begun our work on it in my ‘regular’ 19th-century fiction course. In the meantime, in the Sensation Fiction seminar, we’ve moved on to Braddon’s second blockbuster success, Aurora Floyd. Judging from the students questions coming in for their letter assignment in the novels class, LAS is as popular as always: there’s a reason, or two or three, that it was a bestseller in its own day, after all, and perhaps readers haven’t changed that much in the intervening century and a half.

I’ve written before in this series about Lady Audley’s Secret, including as recently as last week, so I’ll focus on Aurora Floyd for this instalment. It’s a novel I don’t know nearly as well myself as LAS, having read it only a couple of times all through and taught it only once before. It’s an odd book, uneven, even somehow ungainly. It seems to want to be something more than it is: where LAS rushes ahead with a sort of gleeful pleasure in its own tawdry excesses, Aurora Floyd manifestly aspires to something more than straight sensation, and even its sensational elements are conceptually more complex and thus more interesting than those in its famous predecessor.

What I mean by that is that while LAS makes the most of the shocking inconsistency between Lucy Audley’s angelic appearance and her fearful capacity for deceit and violence, the most surprising thing about Aurora Floyd is that she is depicted as strong-willed, passionate, even sexual, and yet not villainous. Her youthful error of running off with her father’s handsome groom (“wonderfully and perfectly handsome–the very perfection of physical beauty, faultless in proportion, as if each line in his face and form had been measured by the sculptor’s rule, and carved by the sculptor’s chisel. . . yet it is rather a sensual type of beauty”) does not disqualify her from marriage to an excellent husband (of course, it should have, seeing as how the result is bigamy and all, but my point is that other than that small technical problem–which, to be perfectly fair, is accidental, as Aurora believes her first husband to be dead–Aurora is a good wife for John Mellish). Sure, she loves riding horses, and even betting on them, more than is strictly proper, but again, this aberration from conventional feminine propriety does not signal her incompatibility for the role of “heroine” of the novel. To some extent, she is tamed and chastened by the disasters that follow from her early indiscretion, but she is only “a shade less defiantly bright” at the end. So while in LAS Braddon panders to, or at least takes advantage of, fears of powerful women who pursue their own desires rather than subduing them, in AF she tries, I think, to complicate questions of feminine nature and identity by creating a protagonist who is neither angel nor demon, but something more complexly human.

That said, there are many irritating features of the novel, though I have had a hard time deciding why I don’t tolerate , from this author or in this book, literary strategies I don’t object to in others. For instance, I find Braddon’s narrative intrusions too intrusive in Aurora Floyd; they strike what seem like false notes, creating awkward shifts in register. Is there something inept about them, or is my response conditioned by my expectations for ‘sensation’ novels–e.g. that they should not even try to be realist or philosophical novels? Braddon is not an exceptionally gifted stylist in any case: there’s nothing distinctive about her prose, though as I remarked last week about LAS, it can be very effective in creating certain kinds of moods or pictures. She can’t resist heavy-handed foreshadowing (“That home so soon to be desolate! — with such ruin brooding above it as in his darkest doubts, his wildest fears, he had never shadowed forth!”). Still, it’s a perpetually interesting book, not just at the level of plot (it develops into a murder mystery) but in terms of its manipulations of literary and social conventions and tropes.

This Week in My Classes (October 5, 2009): It’s Sensational!

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In 19th-Century British Fiction, we’re wrapping up our discussions of Great Expectations this week. I’ve written before about teaching this novel. Here’s a bit from that post, in which I focus on Pip’s moving speech to Estella after he learns Magwitch is his true benefactor and Estella, though she “cannot choose but remain part of [his] character, part of the little good in [him], part of the evil,” is not destined for him after all:

Contemporary novelists are often described as “Dickensian,” usually for writing long, diffuse novels with lots of plots and characters and a bit more emotional exhibitionism than is the norm in ‘serious’ fiction. I rarely think they deserve the label, because to me it’s moments such as this one, combining dense symbolic allusiveness, rhythmic and evocative language, high sentiment, and urgent moral appeal–all bordering on the excessive, even ridiculous, but, at their best, not collapsing into it–that distinguish Dickens from other novelists. I’m not sure any modern novelist takes such risks.

I’ve been thinking even more this time about the “risks” Dickens takes, his excesses of both language and imagination. They press us so far beyond the realistic, in almost any sense of that elusive term. Take Miss Havisham, for instance. There’s really no excuse for Miss Havisham: to be confronted with her is to be challenged to forget plausibility–to abandon, not just suspend, disbelief. Less a woman than a grotesque embodied symbol of life without love, a kind of moral and emotional zombie, she is also a key agent of the plot, with completely commonplace control over money and property. What kind of undead figure has its own lawyer? So she exists in a strange liminal zone between human and inhuman, until woken to her own tragedy, and the tragedy she has spawned in Estella (“I am what you have made me!”) by witnessing Pip’s suffering:

‘What have I done! What have I done!’ She wrong her hands, and crushed her white hair, and returned to this cry over and over again. ‘What have I done!’

I knew not how to answer, or how to comfort her. That she had done a grievous thing in taking an impressionable child to mould into the form that her wild resentment, spurned affection, and wounded pride, found vengeance in, I knew full well. But that, in shutting out the light of day, she had shut out infinitely more; that, in seclusion, she had secluded herself from a thousand natural and healing influences; that her mind, brooding solitary, had grown diseased, as all minds do and must and will reverse that reverse the appointed order of their Maker; I knew equallywell. And could I look upon her without compassion, seeing her punishment in the ruin she was, in her profound unfitness for this earth on which she was placed, in the vanity of sorrow which had become a master mania, like the vanity of penitence, the vanity of remorse, the vanity of unworthiness, and other monstrous vanities that have been curses in this world?

Miss Havisham cannot survive this ordeal by moral revelation, which, in truly Dickensian fashion, leads to a literal conflagration of the “rottenness” and “ugly things” that made up her perverted identity. Pip’s ability to feel compassion for this creature who has captured and ruined his own best hopes and feelings is one of the signs that he is on his way to being, not the Pip who turned his back on Joe, but the Pip who has the ethical sensibility to narrate Great Expectations.

In Victorian Sensations, we’ve finished with The Woman in White and are nearly done with Lady Audley’s Secret. When I wrote about this novel before (in the context of a different course), I remarked, “It is always a bit discouraging to me how popular this novel is with my students, full as it is of cheap tricks and thoughtless language.” My feelings are a bit more complicated this time. Lady Audley’s Secret is certainly in the category of ‘novels I teach largely for reasons other than their overt literary merit’: even acknowledging the difficulty of defining that quality with any specificity, I do chafe at the excesses of Braddon’s writing–they aren’t the imaginative or linguistic excesses of Dickens but the novelistic equivalent of using a lot of exclamation points or TYPING IN ALL CAPS in an email. “We get it!” I want to say (no doubt, of course, many readers feel the same about Dickens). Here’s a sample, for instance, from a conversation between Our Hero, Robert Audley, and his BFF George Talboys. Robert has recently convinced George to come and visit Audley Court to meet his uncle, Sir Michael Audley, and his pretty, young, golden-haired new wife. George has been feeling melancholy since learning that his pretty golden-haired wife died (hmmmm) just before his return from three years in Australia.

‘I’m not a romantic man, Bob,’ he would say sometimes, ‘and I never read a line of poetry in my life that was any more to me than so many words and so much jingle; but a feeling has come over me since my wife’s death, that I am like a man standing upon a long low shore, with hideous cliffs frowning down upon him from behind, and the rising tide crawling slowly but surely about his feet. It seems to grow nearer and nearer every day, that black, pitiless tide; not rushing upon with with a great noise and a might impetus, but crawling, creeping, stealing, gliding towards me, ready to close in above my head when I am least prepared for the end.’

As Miley Cyrus might say, d’ya think something bad might lie in his future? And is it just me, or is it hard to maintain literary decorum with a hero named ‘Bob,’ as in this immortal line, “‘I trust in your noble heart, Bob'”?!

And yet there are sections of this novel that are as good as most others I’ve read. In particular, this time through, I was struck by how effectively Braddon evokes the psychological restlessness, even instability, of Lady Audley as she waits for what she hopes (or possible, just a little, fears) is the news of Robert’s death. Spoiler alert: she has double-locked his door at the inn and then set the place on fire, and we get this striking image as she leaves the scene of the crime:

Sir Michael’s wife walked towards the house in which her husband slept, with the red blaze lighting up the skies behind her, and with nothing but the blackness of the night before.

It’s a nice touch to identify her by the status she has risked so much to achieve, but also to hint, with the “blackness” ahead of her, that despite the devastation she has now wrought, her future contains nothing “but the blackness of the night.” Then follows a long chapter of waiting, a damp listless day with no outlet for Lady Audley’s energies by “to wander up and down [the] monotonous pathway” in the courtyard of her luxurious home. The day ekes itself out:

Sir Michael’s wife [again, nice] still lingered in the quadrangle; still waited for those tidings which were so long coming.

It was nearly dark. The blue mists of evening had slowly risen from the ground. The flat meadows were filled with a grey vapour, and a stranger might have fancied Audley Court a castle on the margin of a sea. [This image ominously echoes Robert Audley’s earlier dream of Audley Court ‘rooted up . . . standing bare and unprotected . . . threatened by the rapid rising of a boisterous sea, whose waves seemed gathering upward to descend and crush the house he loved.’] Under the archway the shadows of fast-coming night lurked darkly; like traitors waiting for an opportunity to glide stealthily into the quadrangle. [Again, this image harkens back to an earlier one, in which the history of Audley Court is associated with secrets and conspiracies. Traitors to what, we might ask at this point?] Through the archway a patch of cold blue sky glimmered faintly, streaked by one line of lurid crimson, and lighted by the dim glitter of one wintry-looking star. [In Robert’s dream, the only stars are those in the eyes of ‘my lady, transformed into a mermaid, beckoning his uncle to destruction. See how completely this very suspenseful moment builds on images and ideas from earlier in the novel?] Not a creature was stirring in the qudrangle but the restless woman, who paced up and down the straight pathways [ones she has, metaphorically, strayed from quite a bit by this point!], listening for a footstep, whose coming was to strike terror to her soul. She heard it at last!–a footstep in the avenue upon the other side of the archway. But was it the footstep?

To find out whose footstep it was, you’ll have to read the book yourself! My point here is that this seems to me very effective writing–effective, that is, as a means to its end, which is suspense, to be sure (and if we are too easily dismissive of plot when we make up the terms for ‘literary merit,’ what, if any, room do we make for suspense?) but also the elaboration of a range of images, symbols, and ideas–that Lady Audley’s very presence on those “straight pathways,” for instance, represents a catastrophe for the ‘house’ of Audley. This section also effectively complicates the previously two-dimensional morality of the novel: the anxious activity of Lady Audley shows her to be more than “just” a villain, no matter how resolutely Robert seeks to contain her in that role. An actress, an infiltrator, a subversively ambitious woman who will not stop at anything to keep the gains she has made–but still capable of feeling “terror” in her soul as she awaits confirmation of her crime. Shortly, she will also give an account of her life and motives that forces the reader (if not necessarily her audience within ‘story space’) to entertain the possibility that she acts in self defense, or at least, like Becky Sharp (an obvious progenitor), she is simply using the limited means available to her, as a woman in a profoundly patriarchal world, to get–and stay–ahead. It’s provocative stuff, and entertaining, and if it’s inconsistently crafted (and, as I tend to think, inconclusively ‘argued’), it succeeds at what it seems to set out to do. I suppose that’s one definition of ‘well-written.’ Indeed, that’s George Henry Lewes’s definition: he describes Jane Austen as the “greatest artist that has ever written, using the term to signify the most perfect mastery over the means to her end.”

And that idea of “mastery over the means to her end” brings me to something I hope to write more specifically about soon, namely, how fast I think we (should) move, when the question of “literary merit” comes up, from the aesthetic to the ethical. Even supposing we could arrive at some resilient definition of good writing, it would have to (I think) make something like Lewes’s dodge here from the suggestion of universality implied in “mastery” to the issue of writing suited to a particular “means.” That’s why we can call both Dickens and Ian McEwan “good” (accomplished, skilfull, successful) writers. But at some point in that discussion, the question surely arises: how do we judge the ends? As Orwell famously said, “the first thing we demand of a wall is that it shall stand up”:

If it stands up, it is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp. In the same way it should be possible to say, “This is a good book or a good picture, and it ought to be burned by the public hangman [well, OK, that makes me uncomfortable, though he does go on to suggest this book burning may be a mental, rather than a literal, result]. Unless one can say that, at least in imagination, one is shirking the implications of the fact that an artist is also a citizen and a human being.

This Week in My Classes: September 28, 2009

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My recent venture into list-making brought something into focus for me about my reading habits: left to myself, I incline towards the kind of fiction defended by Wilkie Collins in one of his Prefaces to The Woman in White:

I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of a work of fiction should be to tell a story; and I have never believed that the novelist who properly performed this first condition of his art, was in danger, on that account, of neglecting the delineation of character — for this plain reason, that the effect produced by any narrative of events is essentially dependent, not on the events themselves, but on the human interest which is directly connected with them. It may be possible, in novel-writing, to present characters successfully without telling a story ; but it is not possible to tell a story successfully without presenting characters : their existence, as recognisable realities, being the sole condition on which the story can be effectively told. The only narrative which can hope to lay a strong hold on the attention of readers, is a narrative which interests them about men and women — for the perfectly obvious reason that they are men and women themselves. (see here for the rest)

Of course I recognize that there are, in fact, other ideas of fiction that have produced great results, many of which I have enjoyed. And of course I would not want my larger conception of (or my work in) literature to be framed or limited by this admittedly quite conventional theory…though I suppose it’s worth pointing out that telling a story can be done in many different ways, as can presenting characters, and even the idea of characters as ‘recognisable realities’ is surely amenable to the kind of recognition we get from, say, a character in Dickens whose outrageous exaggerations nonetheless strike us as somehow fundamentally truthful about how people live in the world. Even the ways in which we can be interested ‘about men and women’ are manifold. So it’s not, I think, as narrow an idea of the novel as it might initially seem. But its commitment to some kind of human interest at the heart of the novel is one I share, and I falter and sometimes stall reading novels that don’t offer the forward momentum of a well-constructed plot. Of course in the best of all possible worlds, and the best of all possible books, plot and character are used in support of deeply considered philosophies and the whole is composed in well-crafted prose (though just try defining that in a way that makes room for both Dickens and McEwan, Austen and Rushdie!). But if I had to choose, I’d take the novel with story and heart over the novel with beautiful words or experimental form. If I wanted to pause a lot and think, “how deft and original!” or “what a striking image!”–well, I’d be reading poetry.

Now, again, this is what I do left to myself; this is what I like best, which is really a reflection of who I am as a person as much as who I am as a critic or a scholar or a teacher. At the same time, this reading personality of mine inevitably affects these aspects of my life and work, though cause and effect may be hard to distinguish. Am I a Victorianist because these are my reading preferences, or have my reading preferences been shaped by many years of rereading a certain group of Victorian novels and working out how best to explain them so as to engage the attention, the interest, and finally (I always hope) the hearts of undergraduates?

In any case, for someone like me, this is a good week, because I’ve been reading The Woman in White with one class and I’m heading into Great Expectations with another. Now, there are passages of great expressiveness and even beauty in Great Expectations: Dickens is a writer who knows how to turn a phrase, who can go from blunt force to arresting image without slowing down. The Woman in White, too, has some marvellous description: the moonlit quiet of Hartright’s Hampstead walk, for instance, on which he has his first thrilling encounter with the mysterious woman in white. But in neither case is it really appropriate, or even possible, to linger over these aesthetic effects. These guys are masters of plotting, and their people! Once you’ve read them, they become part of your mental life–Fosco and Marian and Pesca, and even tediously insipid Laura, and Jaggers and Joe and Wemmick, who teaches us all the invaluable lesson not to grow up to be a mailbox. And though both novels deal, at bottom, with serious questions about values, social relations, power, prejudice, love, hate, and death (!), they also both communicate a great sense of fun. Pleasure in reading can come from many things, many effects and styles and devices and voices. For sheer imaginative exuberance, these novels would have to rank right up near the top.

This Week in My Classes (September 22, 2009)

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Nearly two weeks in, we’ve moved past the throat-clearing stage in both of my classes and are deep into our first novels.

In The Nineteenth-Century British Novel from Dickens to Hardy I’m leading off with Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South this year. Last time I taught it I opened with Trollope’s The Warden, which I thoroughly enjoy, but I like to give Gaskell a turn too. Like her first novel, Mary Barton, North and South is a ‘condition of England’ novel, addressing the tensions between “masters and men” in the industrial north (yes, there are always a couple of students who are surprised that it is not a novel about the American civil war). Mary Barton is a passionate, sometimes gripping, deeply sincere but rather melodramatic novel. I quite enjoy it, especially the climactic boat chase (!), but I think North and South is both artistically and intellectually a better book. Its structure is more deliberate, its treatment of the central class conflicts more sophisticated, and its characters more complicated. Its protagonist, Margaret Hale, is a particularly interesting figure. Gaskell sets her up from the very first scenes as a woman not quite at home or at ease with the conventional feminine values of her time. It’s not until she is torn away from her idyllic country home to the rough environment of Milton-Northern (a.k.a. Manchester), however, that she begins to see what kind of work there is to be done in the world, and then to puzzle out her own role in it. The charismatic Milton mill owner John Thornton of course plays an important part in Margaret’s changing perspective, though in the tradition of Pride and Prejudice, it turns out that he has a lot to learn from her as well (ah, the courtship of the mind, truly the most seductive kind). Yesterday we wound up at the dramatic scene between Thornton and his striking workers. Goaded by Margaret into going down to speak with them “like a man,” Thornton confronts the mob:

Again she took her place by the farthest window. He was on the steps below; she saw that by the direction of a thousand angry eyes; but she could neither see nor hear any-thing save the savage satisfaction of the rolling angry murmur. She threw the window wide open. Many in the crowd were mere boys; cruel and thoughtless,–cruel because they were thoughtless; some were men, gaunt as wolves, and mad for prey. She knew how it was; they were like Boucher, with starving children at home–relying on ultimate success in their efforts to get higher wages, and enraged beyond measure at discovering that Irishmen were to be brought in to rob their little ones of bread. Margaret knew it all; she read it in Boucher’s face, forlornly desperate and livid with rage. If Mr. Thornton would but say something to them–let them hear his voice only–it seemed as if it would be better than this wild beating and raging against the stony silence that vouchsafed them. no word, even of anger or reproach. But perhaps he was speaking now; there was a momentary hush of their noise, inarticulate as that of a troop of animals. She tore her bonnet off; and bent forwards to hear. She could only see; for if Mr. Thornton had indeed made the attempt to speak, the momentary instinct to listen to him was past and gone, and the people were raging worse than ever. He stood with his arms folded; still as a statue; his face pale with repressed excitement. They were trying to intimidate him–to make him flinch; each was urging the other on to some immediate act of personal violence. Margaret felt intuitively, that in an instant all would be uproar; the first touch would cause an explosion, in which, among such hundreds of infuriated men and reckless boys, even Mr. Thornton’s life would be unsafe,–that in another instant the stormy passions would have passed their bounds, and swept away all barriers of reason, or apprehension of consequence. Even while she looked, she saw lads in the back-ground stooping to take off their heavy wooden clogs–the readiest missile they could find; she saw it was the spark to the gunpowder, and, with a cry, which no one heard, she rushed out of the room, down stairs,–she had lifted the great iron bar of the door with an imperious force–had thrown the door open wide–and was there, in face of that angry sea of men, her eyes smiting them with flaming arrows of reproach. The clogs were arrested in the hands that held them–the countenances, so fell not a moment before, now looked irresolute, and as if asking what this meant. For she stood between them and their enemy. She could not speak, but held out her arms towards them till she could recover breath.

‘Oh, do not use violence! He is one man, and you are many; but her words died away, for there was no tone in her voice; it was but a hoarse whisper. Mr. Thornton stood a little on one side; he had moved away from behind her, as if jealous of anything that should come between him and danger.

‘Go!’ said she, once more (and now her voice was like a cry). ‘The soldiers are sent for–are coming. Go peaceably. Go away. You shall have relief from your complaints, whatever they are.’

‘Shall them Irish blackguards be packed back again?’ asked one from out the crowd, with fierce threatening in his voice.

‘Never, for your bidding!’ exclaimed Mr. Thornton. And instantly the storm broke. The hootings rose and filled the air,–but Margaret did not hear them. Her eye was on the group of lads who had armed themselves with their clogs some time before. She saw their gesture–she knew its meaning,–she read their aim. Another moment, and Mr. Thornton might be smitten down,–he whom she had urged and goaded to come to this perilous place. She only thought how she could save him. She threw her arms around him; she made her body into a shield from the fierce people beyond. Still, with his arms folded, he shook her off.

‘Go away,’ said he, in his deep voice. ‘This is no place for you.’

‘It is!’ said she. ‘You did not see what I saw.’ If she thought her sex would be a protection,–if, with shrinking eyes she had turned away from the terrible anger of these men, in any hope that ere she looked again they would have paused and reflected, and slunk away, and vanished,–she was wrong. Their reckless passion had carried them too far to stop–at least had carried some of them too far; for it is always the savage lads, with their love of cruel excitement, who head the riot–reckless to what bloodshed it may lead. A clog whizzed through the air. Margaret’s fascinated eyes watched its progress; it missed its aim, and she turned sick with affright, but changed not her position, only hid her face on Mr. Thornton s arm. Then she turned and spoke again:’

‘For God’s sake! do not damage your cause by this violence. You do not know what you are doing.’ She strove to make her words distinct.

A sharp pebble flew by her, grazing forehead and cheek, and drawing a blinding sheet of light before her eyes. She lay like one dead on Mr. Thornton’s shoulder.

Exciting stuff! In the reiterated imagery of storms and surging seas, and also in the emphasis on men driven beyond reason by hunger, ignorance, and powerlessness, you can hear echoes of Carlyle’s French Revolution. Margaret’s passionate and breathtakingly public intervention is charged with political and erotic energy, much of which is beyond her control–it seems nearly impossible for her to express her individual agency, to control the meaning of her own actions, so entangled do they inevitably become in other people’s assumptions (or what we might, if you’ll forgive a little jargon, call systems of signification). Of course everyone watching, not to mention Thornton himself, assumes that she is in love with him. As Dorothea Brooke will say about her own efforts to change the world, “How can one ever do anything nobly Christian, living among people with such petty thoughts?” (We will be reading Middlemarch later this term, and I hope we will make many such connections between these two women intensely struggling to answer the ultimate question of vocation–“What could she do, what ought she to do?”–in terms beyond those usually set for their sex, but without denying their own sexuality.)

In Victorian Sensations, we have begun with Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White. This novel is enormous fun: intricately plotted, with Collins’s special trick of multiple narrators stringing us along as we puzzle our way through its various mysteries. Each time I read it I am surprised all over again at how subversive it is: its noblemen are ignoble bastards (sometimes literally); its women have moustaches (OK, just one of them) and its men lounge around on sofas (again, just one of them, but another wears flowered waistcoats and embroidered trousers while fondling his pet mice); characters aren’t who they say they are, or who they look like, to the point that they aren’t always sure who they actually are. Dickens famously called the first encounter with the ‘woman in white’ one of the two best moments in 19th-century literature, and it is a great moment, but surely just as thrilling is the reappearance of **** (sorry, no spoilers allowed) from literally beyond the grave. Why just be suspenseful if you can be funny about it at the same time? For this course we are reading four of the most (in)famous examples of Victorian ‘sensation’ fiction and then considering a range of critical questions about them, from their contemporary reception to current critical approaches, to the meta-question of how far (and for what purposes) they can be distinguished from their canonical cousins. Inevitably, the question of their literary merit will come up, which will give us an opportunity to discuss how we measure “literary merit” anyway. I think The Woman in White is awesome by pretty much any standard except philosophical–but who says intellectual or theoretical substance is any kind of necessity in a novel? Henry James thought George Eliot’s philosophical tendencies interfered with the quality of her novels. East Lynne raises, well, different issues, about which, more when we get there!

This Week in My Classes Revisited, with Some Thoughts on J. C. Hallman

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

Another year, another edition of the ongoing saga “This Week in My Classes.” I began this series of posts two years ago as a response to what seemed to me exaggerated and unwarranted claims that English professors routinely wage war on literature, destroying (or indoctrinating) young minds in the process. Here, for example, is a comment from a thread on Footnoted (apparently now defunct, this site at the Chronicle of Higher Education once rounded up interesting posts from academic blogs):

Lit crit should finally die the death it so much deserves. Lit departments have floundered for decades because they have forgotten the text. Instead, they have pandered to the politically correct idiots who can neither read with sense nor write with style. May they ALL be flushed down the toilet where they belong.

The folks at Footnoted had linked to a post of mine in which I wondered why professional literary critics were either ignored or villified in some very public discussions going on at the time about the state of reading, literature, and criticism. I had been reading, for instance, Cynthia Ozick’s piece “Literary Entrails,” which appeared in Harper’s in 2007 and included the following aside (or “asnide,” a great neologism I just learned):

(Academic theorists equipped with advanced degrees, who make up yet another species of limited reviewers, are worthy only of a parenthesis. Their confining ideologies, heavily politicized and rendered in a kind of multi-syllabic pidgin, have for decades marinated literature in dogma. Of these inflated dons and doctors it is futile to speak, since, unlike the hardier customer reviewers, they are destined to vanish like the fog they evoke.)

Here’s part of what I wrote at the time:

I too find much recent published criticism pretty unappealing, and many aspects of professional academic discourse alienating, for a range of reasons. But I don’t think what goes on in my classroom, or in the classrooms of a great many “dons and doctors,” deserves to be so sweepingly ignored or distorted. Here’s a similar bit from the “statement of purpose” with which Green launched his blog: “the academy, once entrusted with the job of engaging with works of literature, has mostly abandoned it altogether in favor of ‘cultural studies’ and other forms of political posturing.” Again, however accurate this may be as a description of academic criticism (and that’s surely arguable), “the academy” (not, of course, monolithic in the way Green implies) does a lot of other things too, much of which involves exposing students to a variety of writers and styles, thinking about literary history and the history of genres, learning a vocabulary to talk about how writers get different kinds of things done and to what ends–aesthetically, ethically, and yes, also (but not exclusively) politically. One thing those of us in “the academy” do is send at least some of our students out into the “real” world excited and inquring and serious about literature, and equipped with some knowledge and some expertise as readers. I like to point out to my students that they will be assigned “required” reading for only a small fraction of their reading lives–after that, the choices will be theirs, the engagement and the satisfaction only as deep as they choose to make it. It’s my goal to give them some tools and strategies to go deeper if they want to, as well as to broaden their textual horizons. Ozick (rightly, I think) laments that “Amazon encourages naive and unqualified readers…to expose their insipidities to a mass audience.” You don’t need an English degree to be insightful about books–but some education as a reader is surely one way to become the kind of reader novelists such as Ozick (or, for that matter, critics such as Green) hope to have.

As I brooded about these sweeping condemnations of my life’s work, I found I was most troubled and perplexed by the enormous gap between what I (and most if not all of my colleagues, mentors, and friends) are doing, or trying to do, or aspiring to, in our classrooms and the way that work was being characterized. In my own 23 years in the academy, I’ve had only one experience in a classroom that seemed anything like what these people are describing, and I write as someone who was a student through some of the most intense years of the so-called “culture wars.” Only ignorance–some of it surely willful–and prejudice (some of it based, I thought, on the kinds of things Tim Burke had written about as “Anger at Academe,” including both personal experiences and what he calls “social antagonisms”) could sustain such hostile misrepresentations. And so the best–really, the only–response I could think of that might do a little good was to shine some light on what really happens in at least one English professor’s classroom on a regular basis. Not, as I wrote then, that I assume “my own classroom is either wholly typical or exemplary,” but it’s the one I know best.

I’ve kept up the series for two years. While I don’t think I reached any of the skeptics who motivated it originally, it has turned out to be, intrinsically, a useful and interesting exercise for me. Here’s an excerpt from the “Reflections on Blogging My Teaching” that I wrote up after the first year:

As the weeks went by, though, I more or less stopped thinking about these lost souls. So who was I writing for? Well, as other bloggers often remark, your only certain audience is yourself, so you have to find the effort intrinsically valuable and interesting, which I almost always did. Teaching is, necessarily, something you do in a state of rapid and constant motion (and I mean not just mental but physical, as the Little Professor has recently proven). Classes follow on classes, and on meetings and graduate conferences and administrative tasks and attempts to meet proposal deadlines, in what becomes a blur of activity as the term heats up…and though a great deal of planning and preparation typically goes into each individual classroom hour, I hadn’t usually taken any time to reflect further on what just happened, or what’s about to happen. I found that taking this extra step each week not only helped me identify the purpose, or, if writing retrospectively, the result of each class, but it made each week more interesting by giving me an opportunity to make connections or articulate puzzles or just express pleasure and appreciation in ways that went beyond what I had time for in class. I pursued links between my teaching and my research projects, for example, as well as between my teaching and my other ‘non-professional’ interests and activities. I articulated ideas suggested by class discussions that otherwise would have sunk again below the surface of my distracted mind. Blogging my teaching enhanced my own experience of teaching. That in itself is a worthwhile goal.

I felt the same after the second year of posting. Though I am doing some repeat teaching this year, there’s enough new material–and there are always different connections, ideas, and challenges–to make me look forward to another round, more of the same but perhaps, as I go along, with some differences in format, just to keep things lively.

Also, though I no longer really expect to make a dent in people’s prejudices against my profession, it turns out that there’s still plenty of hostility out there that deserves to be countered. Just this week, for instance, DorothyW tipped me off to this discussion of a forthcoming anthology by J. C. Hallman, whose statements about academic critics are very much in same spirit as Ozick’s, whose “Literary Entrails” he cites in his Introduction. His parting shot is at the “the dry, tenure-desperate prose of critics, who already have far too much say over how literature is perceived in the world.” “Writers,” he says, “set out to celebrate the work rather than exhaust it.” Hallman admits to not being a scholar, but he offers up a breezy two-paragraph account of the history of literary criticism since 1910 that is apparently meant to justify his eventual conclusion (after his own apparently unrewarding venture into critical debates about Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw) that “maybe the whole business of criticism ought to be chucked”–or better yet, he decides, reinvented according to his own idea of “creative criticism.”

I stand by the position I originally took against Ozick. Thanks to the passionate, diligent, rigorous work of highly-trained professional critics in thousands of classrooms every day, many, many students read and appreciate many more “good books” than they would otherwise; rather than being, as Hallman says, “inoculated against the effects of good books,” they learn to enhance, expand, or challenge their personal responses with attention to craft, genre, literary history and influences, social, historical, and political contexts and implications, aesthetic theories and effects, language, rhetoric, and much more. It’s true that “celebrating” the work is not the usual tactic, but enthusiasm for it is a necessary–just not a sufficient–condition for successful teaching. Yes, a lot of published academic prose is pretty dry, even alienating, especially when read by those never intended to be its audience (the same is true of technical writing in other fields, as is often pointed out in these debates). I worry about the quantitive pressure created by our systems of tenure and promotion, the log-jammed peer review process, the disincentives for taking a long view, or a long time, in a project. I’ve spent a fair amount of time myself wondering how to do critical writing that is lively and accessible but still responsible and well-informed. I’ve reviewed a lot of books that show how non-academics, including creative writers, “write about reading.” It’s not that I’m complacent about the state or style of academic literary criticism. Even so, I resent having this dismissive remark from James Wood stand as a fair assessment of our situation and efforts:

Having been caught out, the poem is triumphantly led off in golden chains; the detective writes up his report in hideous prose, making sure to flatter himself a bit, and then goes home to a well-deserved drink.

James Wood is an excellent reader and critic; I’m sure he enjoys a “well-deserved drink” after a day at the Harvard job he got without having to serve the usual soul-crushing academic apprenticeship, or after publishing a book for which he was not required to support and complicate his arguments with extensive research outside his personal library.

Anyway, it’s another term, and I still think it’s worth keeping up this series. Next time, some specifics about my Fall 2009 courses.

This Week in My Classes (April 9, 2009)

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

This was our last week of classes for the term. Though it is a relief to be done with the insistent pressure to be ready for the next class meeting (an anxiety that kicks in for me about as soon as I walk out of the classroom), in its own way the next phase is also pretty tiring. For instance, I have about 25 papers left in my half of the batch from Mystery and Detective Fiction, and I hope to return them at the exam on Tuesday, which didn’t seem unrealistic until it really sank in that this is a four-day weekend, meaning concentrated quiet time will be sparse until at least 9 p.m., by which time my mental functioning has, shall we say, diminished. Once that set of papers goes back, the exams come in, as do the 21 papers for the Faith and Doubt seminar–but the latter should be relatively interesting and enjoyable to work through, not least because the students already submitted (and received detailed comments on) proposals. It’s a lot to get done, and in addition I am accutely (!) aware that time is running out to get a draft of the Soueif paper together to present at ACCUTE in May. (What am I doing writing this post, then, you ask? Well, you see, it has been a long day already, and I have a cold. You can’t mark papers under those conditions: you need a shred of generosity remaining so you don’t snark too cruelly when someone writes about [real example] “hardnosed” instead of “hardboiled” detection.)

The last two weeks of both classes seemed to go well enough. I wish the energy had been higher all term in Faith and Doubt. It’s no surprise that Jude the Obscure did not bring us to a rousing conclusion, though as usual the novel proved provocative enough to stimulate some good discussion, especially about Sue. I’m not sure how much of this is my fault (as several class members have studied the novel with me before) but the consensus seemed to be that she is thoroughly annoying, which is certainly my own reaction to her. The problem, of course, is that Jude adores her–idealizes her, even. Is this just another of his follies (Jude “Fawley,” get it?), like his early worship of Phillotson and his dreams about Christminster? Is she to him as, say, Amelia is to Dobbin, unworthy of the beauty and endurance of his love? Or is she some kind of ideal form of intellectual femininity freed from the animality of sex (the “not-Arabella”) and yet unable to escape the mundane realities of earthly relationships? Are we too supposed to yearn for her, and thus for the happy fulfilment of their love? The novel is sad either way, but it’s only really tragic if what Sue and Jude struggle for would be worth having, and the novel as a whole does seem to put its weight behind them, especially towards the end when even Widow Edlin asserts the truth of their illegitimate marriage over Sue’s legal (but appalling) union with Phillotson. Jude is so depressing I’d never teach it again, except that (a) it’s always a hit, (b) its themes resonate really well with those of other novels I teach, and (c) I don’t really look forward to exploring other Hardy options. I’ve assigned Tess a couple of times in seminars but never lectured on it; it’s equally depressing. Still, maybe a change would be as good as a rest. As part of the final group presentation, we got to play “Survivor: Christminster Edition,” which was fun, and appropriately ruthless (no help allowed–because after all, “nobody did come, because nobody does”).

In Mystery and Detective Fiction, we ended with City of Glass. I had hoped that working it up for teaching would temper my initial reaction. It did, somewhat. Given the context of the course, we mostly discussed it as an “anti-detective novel,” examining the ideas put forward via Quinn and his pseudonymous work as mystery novelist William Wilson about reading and writing detective fiction, and then the ways Quinn’s adventures as detective Paul Auster undermine the assumptions of certainty and meaning typically associated with the genre. For instance, with our other books we had talked quite a bit about the significance of objects as clues (sometimes comparing this fairly literal deployment with the “literary” use of objects as symbols): in City of Glass the expectation that one way or another objects or incidents (or characters) will be replete with meaning and cohere, over the course of the story, into a revealing pattern is pretty obviously frustrated. We touched (a bit lightly–as it’s not really that kind of course) on some underlying philosophical or theoretical ideas, such as poststructuralist critiques of the idea of a unified self, or slippages between signifieds and signifiers, or metaphysical problems about naming and identity (e.g. through Auster’s example of the malfunctioning umbrella). In some interviews I turned up, Auster has rejected the idea that he writes cerebrally, claiming that his books are about the music of language. Uh huh. I also invited us to look back across our earlier readings and see how far they correspond to the fairly reductive view Quinn gives of detective fiction. In their own ways, a number of them also unsettle supposed certainties–if not metaphysical, then certainly moral and epistemological. I don’t know how successful an addition the novel was to the course. I know already that a few students really liked it but others disliked it intensely, but then popularity is not always the best measure of pedagogical value. It certainly met my goal of introducing something very different from the other readings, and it challenged me intellectually, which is always a good thing for a teacher. I felt a bit uncertain working with it, but I’ll do better the second time (tune in next April for a full report…). Though I won’t know until I see the course evaluations later on whether the students felt the same way, I thought that overall the course went well this time, better than last year. Attendance was good, a lot of students were willing to put their hands up and pitch in with good ideas, they were very cooperative with group exercises–the energy in the room almost always seemed positive. I hope they felt that too.

What lies ahead? I’m not teaching this summer, which I regret a bit, as I always enjoy summer classes–but I think it was the right decision, as I need to sort out the various strands of my research. I’m also taking a real holiday, a trip to England, for the first time since 1986. I’m very excited about this! We are going just to Oxford (where my little hotel is directly across from Balliol) and London, so we will be able to concentrate our energy rather than rushing all over the place. Then here’s my teaching line-up for 2009-10:

Fall:

The Nineteenth-Century British Novel from Dickens to Hardy

Victorian Sensations

Winter:

British Literature From 1800

Mystery and Detective Fiction

George Eliot

I am thinking that I will ‘blog my teaching’ more selectively or in a different way next year, especially as some of these courses are ones I have covered before, if in slightly different versions. I still feel about this exercise, though, much as I did last year: it is at once a useful supplement to and a valuable record of the activity that takes up most of my professional time and energy.