This Week In My Classes

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

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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)

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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.

This Week (and Last) in My Classes (March 24, 2009)

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In Mystery and Detective Fiction, we have been working on examples of the police procedural, including short stories by Ed McBain, Peter Robinson, and Ian Rankin. Now we are nearly done with our discussion of Rankin’s Knots and Crosses. I initially chose this novel for this course because I admire the quality of Rankin’s writing and have generally gone with the first in a series, to avoid the sense that I need to fill in a lot of back story on the detective’s development. I have kept it on the list because I enjoy its self-conscious literary and gothic elements and the way it doesn’t really fit the conventions of the procedural. It also deals with themes about masculinity, brotherhood (especially as nurtured–or forced–through the army and the police force), and uneasy relationships between male sexuality and violence. In these ways I feel it provides a good complement to, say, Grafton’s ‘A’ is for Alibi (though in a very different register)–which also explores sex and violence but as linked through conventional romantic fantasies, and considered from the perspective of a female protagonist struggling to reconcile her own sexual desires with her autonomy. Knots and Crosses is also short (Rankin’s books get both better and much, much longer) and neatly structured (almost too neatly, I now think). In other words, it’s a pretty good teaching text. This year, though, I find I’m a bit tired of it. It’s creepy, for one thing (students have remarked this in past years as well), and there are signs in it of Rankin’s relative inexperience as a novelist (for instance, what I consider problems in his handling of point of view, such as shifting occasionally to the perspective of the serial killer or of one of his victims–this kind of thing can be done well, but here seems primarily aimed at increasing suspense, which I find manipulative if it doesn’t also serve some larger idea or balance). Especially since I think I’m going to concede the argument against An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (routinely an unpopular text, though one of the few books on the reading list that I like just as a book to read), I may consider either a longer P. D. James or a longer Rankin to represent the procedural. I’m tempted by Fleshmarket Close, but then a 400+ pager near the end of term might sink my evaluations altogether….

In Victorian Literature of Faith and Doubt last week it was a small sampling of Pre-Raphaelites, Swinburne, and Christina Rossetti. CR is the author of a couple of my favourite poems, including this one:

Echo

Come to me in the silence of the night;
Come in the speaking silence of a dream;
Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright
As sunlight on a stream;
Come back in tears,
O memory, hope and love of finished years.

O dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter-sweet,
Whose wakening should have been in Paradise,
Where souls brim-full of love abide and meet;
Where thirsting longing eyes
Watch the slow door
That opening, letting in, lets out no more.

Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live
My very life again though cold in death;
Come back to me in dreams, that I may give
Pulse for pulse, breath for breath:
Speak low, lean low,
As long ago, my love, how long ago.

It’s the sound and feeling of the words here that I respond to here, as much as, or more than, anything the poem is specifically saying. For the class, we read a selection of her religious poetry (I know, one way or another it can all be read as religious)–“Up-Hill,” “A Better Resurrection,” “The Three Enemies,” and a couple of others, and then “Goblin Market,” always fun to read and provoking to interpret. For today and Wednesday it’s Hopkins (faith today, with “God’s Grandeur,” “The Windhover,” and “Pied Beauty,” and doubt next time, with some of the ‘terrible’ sonnets). So a lot of our discussions over the past few classes have turned on relationships between aesthetic and sensual responses to the world and spiritual ideas and feelings.

This Week in My Classes (March 10, 2009)

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In Mystery and Detective Fiction, it’s time for ‘A’ is for Alibi. I have fun with this one, putting as much interpretive pressure on it as I can to test our Reverse Thurber principle (in our very first reading for the course, “The Macbeth Murder Mystery,” he shows it can be comical to read ‘real’ literature as detective fiction, while we turn the tables and read genre fiction as seriously as we would read MacBeth) . Will any of these novels collapse under the pressure? I’m helped a lot in this case by the fun Grafton is having playing with hard-boiled detective conventions as well as gothic and romance. That kind of self-consciousness is a critic’s good friend. I’ve been emphasizing the novel’s chronology, which places the story in the context of changes in gender politics and roles, particularly within marriage: the victim’s first wife marries him in 1957; they are divorced in 1970 (leaving her with bitter memories of her life as a Barbie doll); he is found dead in 1974 and his second wife is accused of the murder. Though she hires Kinsey Millhone to prove her innocence, she too recalls the deceased as controlling. I proposed last class that the poor fellow is doubly victimized, not only as the actual murder victim, but as the scapegoat for patriarchy. How much sympathy, if any, this earns him is another question: Grafton has said she devised the novel as a way to profit from her own revenge fantasies during a painful divorce. Tomorrow we’ll be focusing on the other murder plot, though, which involves the gender-bending “homme fatale” and culminates in Kinsey’s fairly unheroic last stand pant-less in a garbage can.

In Victorian Literature of Faith and Doubt, ‘A’ is for Arnold, angst, and alienation. Our progression (as I was trying to explain in a rambling opening comment for the class yesterday) has been from writers wrestling with specific challenges to their faith (or, with Darwin, presenting findings with challenging implications) to writers reimagining society and morality in the absence of that faith (the secular fable of Silas Marner, in which the major value of church-going is that it fosters community and sympathy) or now, with Arnold, seeking in poetry and culture alternative sources of inspiration and spirituality. But while Eliot eases her readers through the transition, in his poetry at least Arnold captures the sense of dislocation and grief that could also be part of the weaning from religion. “Dover Beach,” of course, is the best known of his elegies for lost faith, but “The Buried Life” is also beautifully evocative:

But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us–to know
Whence our lives come and where they go.

I like the simplicity with which this poem resolves, as the speaker considers the soothing touch of “a beloved hand” and the “tones of a loved voice” carressing “our world-deafened ear” and the uneasy and irregular lines of pentameter and tetrameter that make up most of the poem soften, restfully, into easy (and rhyming) trimeter (actually, I guess the final line is anapestic):

And there arrives a lull in the hot race
Wherein he doth for ever chase
That flying and elusive shadow, rest.
An air of coolness plays upon his face,
And an unwonted calm pervades his breast.
And then he thinks he knows
The hills where his life rose,
And the sea where it goes.

“To Marguerite–Continued,” all built around the conceit of us “mortal millions” as islands isolated by “the sea of life,” but longing to be reunited as “parts of a single continent,” also ends well, with one of my favourite lines of 19th-century poetry, actually:

Who ordered, that their longing’s fire
Should be, as soon as kindled, cooled?
Who renders vain their deep desire?–
A God, a God their severance ruled!
And bade betwixt their shores to be
The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea.

If there isn’t already a novel called The Estranging Sea, maybe I should write one.

For show and tell, I can bring in my old New Yorker cartoon (sadly, I can’t find an image of it to post here) that shows a bemused couple watching Old Sideburns on their TV; the caption is, “Here as on a darkling plain swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night, Matthew Arnold, Fox News, Channel Five.”

This Week in My Classes (March 3, 2009)

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We’re back from reading week, and in true Maritime fashion the second phase (I think of it as the downhill rush) of the term was ushered in with snow, ice pellets, and several hours of freezing rain, meaning an awful lot of students didn’t actually get back. Maybe that will be the last storm of the season. Ha. (Remind me again why the first European settlers in this region didn’t just keep moving on when they realized what they were letting themselves in for? I guess you do have to go pretty far away from here, though, to get to a temperate, never mind a warm, climate.)

In Mystery and Detective Fiction this week, it’s P. D. James’s An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, which is one of the few books on the course list that I would actually read just for my own pleasure and interest rather than out of professional obligation. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy many of the other readings, but I consider James a good novelist, not just a significant mystery novelist. Unsuitable Job reminds me of Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories (really, I suppose, it’s the other way aroud)–not in any specifics of the cases, but in the attention to evocative atmosphere and compelling characterization achieved with considerable economy. The lectures I’ve worked up on Unsuitable Job emphasize the continuities James herself identifies between her work and that of the 19th-century realist novel, particularly in terms of the novel’s insistence on the centrality of ethics. Though, as with all mysteries, there is a strong puzzle component here, a problem to be solved (and a grim one at that), I think it is Cordelia’s development that the novel is really about, particularly the way she grows into the strengths she has by virtue of her compassion and strong sense of justice. Detection is pitched (by others) in the novel as an “unsuitable job for a woman” because of the presumably masculine qualities of toughness, objectivity, and rationality it demands, but she shows, first, that a delicate-looking young woman can have those qualities too, and that she can exercise them in the service of “softer” and more conventionally feminine values including empathy and love. James’s usual detective, Adam Dalgleish, is notable also for the strength of his humanity and insight as well as intellect. Insofar as The Maltese Falcon is an indictment of modern society for making survival dependent on refusing to “play the sap,” I find Unsuitable Job a kind of antidote, because Cordelia refuses to abandon those she loves but incorporates justice to her feelings for them as part of her larger quest for what is right. I find her confrontation with Ronald Callender suspenseful less because we know there’s a murderer in the room but because it pits genuinely competing values against each other. By giving one set of them to a particularly repellent murderer, of course James is tipping the scales–but no worse, perhaps, than Dickens does by giving fairly similar values to Mr. Gradgrind.

In my Faith and Doubt seminar, we have moved on (sighs of relief all ’round) to Silas Marner, which is growing on me every time I read it. I so appreciate the rewards of re-reading George Eliot. In this particular case, the novel’s engagement with religion is more interesting to me after several weeks discussing the ways other writers responded to the challenges to their faith in the period. I think she is both sharp and subtle about the ways religion is experienced and understood by people who are caught up, not in abstract theological disputes, but in human needs and desires, such as the need for one’s labour, or suffering, to be (or at least feel) purposeful, and about the intricate ways in which religious practices are as much social and personal as spiritual or devout. We talked a bit yesterday, and I hope will talk more tomorrow, about the contrasts between Lantern Yard and Dolly Winthrop’s version of church-going, for instance. We also had some interesting discussion about the genre of the book, and what seemed perhaps a fruitful (or perhaps just an unresolved) tension between its fabular form–the pressure in it towards standing as a parable, a secularized version of a fall, a casting out from Eden maybe, and then a humanistic redemption–and its realist aesthetic (or George Eliot’s more general commitment to realism). After our work on Darwin before the break, I particularly enjoyed looking at the scenes which on the surface are most contrived and artificial, such as the convergence of Dunstan’s crime and Eppie’s appearance, the replacement of the gold coins with her gold hair, and seeing how these seeming coincidences or acts of what might (because so hard to explain at once) be attributed to divine (or just novelistic) intervention, are given such detailed backstories, so that we are reminded to be cautious about providing preternatural explanations when we are simply too ignorant to account for things naturalistically. Of course, that is one variation on GE’s consistent theme that the good and bad in our lives is attributable to human actions and complicated circumstances.

In other news, I’ve become the proud owner of a Sony Reader, which I requested as part of a grant with an eye to making my research materials more portable and my research overall more ‘sustainable.’ The portability is a huge thing for a Victorianist, I must say. It is dazzling to think that in that small machine, I already have about 20 nicely formatted Victorian novels (I had fun picking my 100 free classics from the Sony ebook store) and soon will have several books central to my Ahdaf Soueif project. No more debating at the end of the day which books to bring home from my office! And this model has an annotation feature that seems quite simple to use. I find reading on computer screens quite tiring, which is what made this seem a better option for a reading-intensive project (and person) than something like a Netbook, which is nearly as portable. I’ll report more on this later on, in case anyone else is brooding about the usefulness of an ebook reader for research or other purposes.

This Week in My Classes (February 20, 2009)

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Whew. This has been another week in which I have not been able to count on even getting to class. However, despite the best efforts of winter, children with mysterious abdominal pains, a non-responsive iBook (now recovered, thank goodness) and other threats to a well-ordered but precariously balanced life, all of my scheduled class meetings actually went ahead as planned. And next week is Reading Week! In celebration of which I am determined not to do anything specifically work-related this weekend…and tonight I’m going to watch ER (which I was too tired and busy to watch ‘live’ last night) and other suitably diverting things without, for once, feeling guilty about all the things on my “to do” list. (Alright, I confess: I’ve rented “Mamma Mia!” which looks suitably frothy and brainless, plus nostalgic, as once in my foolish youth I was an ABBA fan. Hey, it was the 1970s: lots of people were ABBA fans…and frankly, after tuning in briefly to the Grammy Awards this year, I find myself thinking we could do worse than churn out some songs with catchy tunes, nice harmonies, and lyrics you don’t mind teaching your 7-year-old daughter.) [Update: “Mamma Mia!” is absolutely terrible. Awful. Appalling. The acting is bad. The singing is worse–in fact, I ended up skipping through most of the musical numbers because I couldn’t bear it. I knew the storyline was going to be lame but it was worse than I expected watching it play out. Sigh.]

In Mystery and Detective Fiction we finished with The Maltese Falcon this week. I continue to find it one of the saddest books I know. We had some fun thinking about whether Sam’s line “If they hang you I’ll always remember you” is actually kind of romantic. Although I can still work up some enthusiasm for discussing this novel, I am planning to do The Big Sleep in its place when I teach this class next year. After a while, it’s hard to feel you have anything fresh to say, and there’s a temptation to rely too hard on last year’s notes. I have never even read all of The Big Sleep, so working it up to teaching pitch will be a fun part of next year’s planning.

In Victorian Literature of Faith and Doubt, on Wednesday we had our class presentation on Darwin, which concluded with a “test what you’ve learned about Darwin”-type game called (yes, you guessed it) “Natural Selection.” I always enjoy students’ ingenuity. I challenge them to think about how they feel when their classmates present–what strategies keep them engaged, what kind of activities they feel are productive, and so on. Their game questions were open-ended enough that (once we stopped worrying about our team’s extinction, or who would get the prize cupcakes) we had some good general discussion about the impact of Darwin’s ideas on Victorian literature as well as on more contemporary issues. Today we discussed Browning’s “Caliban Upon Setebos.” I was quite anxious coming into class, as things have not been as lively in this seminar as I am used to, and this is not the most accessible of poems. However, we did at least as well today as we have been lately, for which I give Browning all the credit. It’s such a strange, interesting poem that I think at least some of the students were simply drawn in by that, while the dramatic monologue form provides a lot of useful starting points for analysis. Though it is not explicitly a poem about evolution, one aspect of it that we discussed was the way Caliban observes with world in the manner of a naturalist. We were pretty well prepared to consider the ironic revision the poem offers to Paley’s Natural Theology (the poem’s subtitle is “Natural Theology on the Island”), and to compare Caliban’s inferences about the design or purpose of the universe based on his observations to the conclusions our other authors have suggested. All in all, then, I thought it went quite well. Still, I think we’ll all be happy to get to Silas Marner next–after the break!

This Week in My Classes (February 11, 2009)

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It’s all about violence in both classes this week–Chandler, Hammett, and mean streets in Mystery and Detective Fiction, and the struggle for survival in Victorian Literature of Faith and Doubt. Now that I think about it, another interesting commonality is that in both contexts the violence is approached with detachment: cool, wry cynicism in the hard-boiled detective stories and scientific curiosity in Darwin.

Today in particular I wanted to loosen everybody up: in the faith and doubt seminar, discussion continues to be a bit lackluster compared to what I’m used to in fiction-focused classes (is it me or them or the material? probably some of each), and in the mystery class, the larger format and the wide range of material (all requiring a good dose of literary and historical context to set up the examples) means more straight lecturing than I ordinarily do. In both courses, though, the goal is always to enable them to carry on well-informed, precise conversations about the material themselves, so it is crucial for me to shut up (or at least quiet down) sometimes and let them try out the ideas and skills we’ve been accumulating.

In Mystery and Detective Fiction today, then, I asked them to use our reading, Chandler’s (long) short story (is it really a novella?) “Trouble Is My Business,” as the chief exhibit in a debate about the literary capacity of genre fiction. We read “The Simple Art of Murder” for Monday, in which Chandler claims that Hammett proved “the detective story can be important writing.” In making this case he focuses primarily on Hammett’s realism, but he also argues for the effectiveness of Hammett’s prose for his purposes. So I invited them to hold his story up to that standard, or indeed to any standard they might have for what makes literature “important.” Half of them were asked to develop the argument for its importance, the other half against. They rose well to the challenge. Originality, realism, style, and depth seemed to be the basic qualities they expected to find in important literature–but, as we’ve discussed more than once this term, originality in particular is a tricky question when dealing with genre fiction, as it is defined through its adherence to conventions. Some of the more interesting specific debates were about Chandler’s language, from the tough talk (how realistic is that smart-alec patter? and if it’s not realistic, do we appreciate it for other reasons?) to the “poetic” language (all those colorful similes! or are they too often cliches?). One of my own standards for importance is having ideas–not necessarily being overtly or didactically philosophical, but engaging us by aesthetic means in a process of thought about something that matters, something below or beyond the mechanics of plot. I didn’t think “Trouble Is My Business” offered much in the way of ideas. I do think The Maltese Falcon does–which is why I agree with Chandler’s assessment of its merits. In any case, the main point was to let them exercise their wits on the readings and test some assumptions about how they might (or do) judge different forms of writing. Are we satisfied with concluding that something is good “of its kind,” or do we accept a hierarchy of kinds? When the more relativist position was put forward at one point, I asked how many would choose not to see a film simply on the grounds of the kind of film it was–a large majority raised their hands. While this could be considered simply an expression of taste (“I just don’t like things of that kind”), if pressed, I think we would defend our tastes, or our choices, on the grounds that some kinds of things seem more worth our while than others–not our taste in ice cream or pizza, of course, or of red wine over white, but our taste in something requiring intellectual and emotional engagement, such as a book or a movie. I think this is a worthwhile conversation to have, if only to keep us thinking about why we like or value the things we do. I was pleased to get a lot of participation, including from people who had not put up their hands before.

In the faith and doubt seminar, I also devised a discussion exercise. We’re reading excerpts from Darwin this week and a large part of what I want them to take away from it is a sense of how awareness of Darwin’s scientific work and theories affects literary forms and interests in other writers we’ll be reading. Scholars such as Gillian Beer and George Levine have done wonderful work showing how diffusive the influence of Darwin was on Victorian poets and novelists, from bringing scientific topics explicitly into their work to encouraging different ways of looking at the world or conceiving of the work of the novelist–no longer, for instance, modelled after the creative design of God but after the observations and inquiries of the natural historian. I made up a handout with excerpts from different works and invited them to consider how they might read through a ‘post-Darwinist’ lens: what ideas or strategies in the writing do they pick up on, what detail becomes more telling? Here are a couple of the passages I gave them:

I had often watched a large dog of ours eating his food; and I now noticed a decided similarity between the dog’s way of eating, and the man’s. The man took strong sharp sudden bites, just like the dog. He swallowed, or rather snapped up, every mouthful, too soon and too fast; and he looked sideways here and there while he ate, as if he thought there was danger in every direction, of somebody’s coming to take the pie away. He was altogether too unsettled in his mind over it, to appreciate it comfortably, I thought, or to have anybody to dine with him, without making a chop with his jaws at the visitor. In all of which particulars he was very like the dog.

It is one of those old, old towns, which impress one as a continuation and outgrowth of nature as much as the nests of the bower birds or the winding galleries of the white ants: a town which carries the traces of its long growth and history, like a millennial tree, and has sprung up and developed in the same spot between the river and the low hill from the time when the Roman legions turned their backs on it from the camp on the hill-side, and the long-haired sea-kings came up the river and looked with fierce, eager eyes at the fatness of the land. It is a town ‘familiar with forgotten years.’

Even with a microscope directed on a water-drop we find ourselves making interpretations which turn out to be rather coarse; for whereas under a weak lens you may seem to see a creature exhibiting an active voracity into which other smaller creatures actively play as if they were so many animated tax-pennies, a stronger lens reveals to you certain tiniest hairlets which make vortices for these victims while the swallower waits passively at his receipt of custom. In this way, metaphorically speaking, a strong lens applied to Mrs. Cadwallader’s match-making will show a play of minute causes producing what may be called thought and speech vortices to bring her the sort of food she needed.

In general terms, we’ve talked about how Darwin’s theory gives everything a history (or, as he says in Origins, a genealogy), as well as emphasizing the interconnectedness of all things. It starts to become clear why Henry James would have complained that Middlemarch is “too often an echo of Mssrs Darwin and Huxley”–not a reading that I think would come intuitively to the modern reader, so accustomed have we become to Darwinian ways of seeing.

This Week in My Classes (February 5, 2009)

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Between winter storms, snow days, and miscellaneous family scheduling crises, I have to say it feels like a triumph just to show up in my classes right now.

Fortunately, in Mystery and Detective Fiction we have been reading The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which I have lectured on a few times before, so though there are logistical preparations to make, the intellectual effort has not been tremendous. I did find the moral problems of puzzle fiction more pressing than usual this time because a particularly tragic local murder case (as if there are any other kinds!) wrapped up recently, really bringing home to me the peculiarity of treating violent death as lightly as Christie’s books do. Where is the sense of horror or violation? Even Poirot, though his perspective is more somber, seems more interested in the moral degeneration in the culprit (“His moral fiber is blunted. he is desperate. He is fighting a losing battle, and he is prepared to take any means that come to his hand, for exposure means ruin to him. And so–the dagger strikes!”) than in injustice and cruelty of Ackroyd’s death. I have to agree with critic Julian Symons that one of the costs of this genre is “the sense that the author has any feeling for the people in the story.” On these grounds, at least, I’ll be glad to move on to hard-boiled detection next week, and especially to P. D. James a bit later. I think the Victorians were right in the emphasis that they placed on literary treatment when evaluating literary ethics. The murder in An Unsuitable Job for a Woman is even more horrible than that in Ackroyd (if these things can or should be measured), but the detachment necessary to solve the mystery is always highlighted as a problem, an unsuitable reaction, if you like, for a human being facing evil.

In Victorian Literature of Faith and Doubt, we have wrapped in In Memoriam. Our discussion last week was really faltering, and one cause I identified was the general unfamiliarity of the class members with scansion. Many of the beauties of In Memoriam are subtle ones, brought about by variations on the consistent and superficially limiting form. Paying attention to the rhythm of the lines is one way to slow your reading down enough to appreciate other effects as well. So we did a class workshop on scanning, working towards an understanding of why T. S. Eliot (not a very Tennysonian poet, at least on the surface) would have said of In Memoriam that it gives us “132 passages, each of several quatrains in the same form, and never monotony or repetition.” Section VII is usually my lead example. Take the final quatrain, for instance, with the almost brutal effect of the extra stresses and harsh alliterative consonants in the last line:

He is not here; but far away
The noise of life begins again,
And ghastly through the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.

In a poem that is preoccupied, among other things, with “the sad mechanic exercise” of “measured language” (V:6-7), we should feel acutely the moments in which grief disrupts the meter.

I think this session helped us move past some of the problems they were having integrating discussion of content and themes (what is Tennyson saying about faith, trust, hope, death, science?) with poetic analysis, which should help us when we get to Arnold a bit later, and then to Hopkins.

I’m now working hard on Darwin in preparation for next week’s readings. I admit, I have a bit of science envy, so I was particularly excited to come across the series of lectures from Stanford’s “Darwin’s Legacy” course, which I found first at iTunes U (and what an amazing resource that can be!) and now, I discover, also available on YouTube. Of particular relevance to our literary focus will certainly be George Levine’s talk on Darwin’s work and/as literature, but I took a look at the introductory one and couldn’t resist watching the whole thing, and since then I’ve also watched the second one, on “Religion and Science: Probably Not What You Think” (given by Eugenie Scott, the Director of the National Center for Science Education), and most of the third one (by Darwin biographer Janet Browne). I’d better get down to my business and watch Levine’s lecture this weekend. I know I could review his books instead, but I do enjoy the lecture format. I miss being a student! What a pleasure it is to listen to such smart, passionate, articulate, knowledgeable people.

Last Week in My Classes (January 2009)

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Last week started badly (or well, I suppose, depending on your perspective), with Dalhousie actually closing for the morning due to winter weather. This is one of a handful of times the university has closed since I came here in 1995; many times I have trekked out in blizzard-like conditions wondering why, exactly, anyone should be expected to carry on under the circumstances. Monday’s problem was a bit unusual: we had a sizable dump of snow last Sunday which turned to freezing rain and rain overnight, but rather than the rain washing the streets clean, it collected on top of what became a layer of solid ice. The result was a mess of puddles (some as deep as car doors) over a skating rink. It was a relief not to have to decide for myself whether I would cancel my morning classes or struggle in. And fortunately, from a pedagogical standpoint, the cost was minimal, or at least easily made up for, as we were doing the same readings all week, so we could make up for lost time by covering more in the days remaining.

So what did we do, when we got back on campus? Well, in Mystery and Detective Fiction we finished up The Moonstone. On Wednesday we talked especially about Rachel, Franklin, and Ezra Jennings; I tried to move us towards the novel’s emphasis on the importance of getting outside ‘conventional English’ perspectives to resolve its crimes–not just the ostensibly central crime of the novel, the theft of the diamond, but the other injustices that reveal themselves, including class and gender prejudices and colonialism. My excellent TA took the final class, and gave a smart and thorough talk on science in the novel (a topic that, in addition to its intrinsic interest and relevance to Collins’s work, sets us up well for this week’s transition to Sherlock Holmes). Then she led us into a discussion of the novel’s conclusion and the solution of the mystery, and how far the broader issues opened up by then are in fact resolved. Is justice served at the end? The class consensus seemed to be that Godfrey got what was coming to him (though we considered how far he is a scapegoat for larger forces) and that the diamond is finally where it belongs. Here, as with so much crime fiction, we are pressed into making moral distinctions that we might not ordinarily be so comfortable with (is suffocation a kinder and thus more acceptable method of murder than multiple stab wounds? is death a reasonable punishment for opportunistic thieving? is killing for religious reasons, instead of for materialistic ones, somehow excusable?).

In my Faith and Doubt seminar, we were reading A Christmas Carol this week. It was not an obvious choice for this class, but it is included in its entirety in our anthology, and I wanted both to read some Dickens and to use as much of our assigned text as possible (to repay their financial investment in it). I thought it worked well, actually, as it raised a lot of questions about how far Dickens is secularizing Christian ideas and mores, how far he is rather trying to translate them into a non-sectarian (but still largely Christian) vision, how much of the story’s religiosity is lost on (most of) us because we don’t catch a lot of the Biblical or doctrinal allusions, and so on. Because we’ve been talking about Victorian religious controversies and ideas of faith and doubt, certain moments stood out more sharply than usual (Scrooge’s debate with the Spirit about restrictions on Sunday leisure activities, for instance, in which the Spirit repudiates such evangelical measures). In Friday’s class we had our first student presentation. I always enjoy seeing the results of the students’ creativity applied to our class readings; it tends, also, to energize the larger group to see their classmates so involved. This week’s group used clips from two film adaptations of the story to help us focus on ways its religious elements are changed and downplayed–though even in the Muppet version, as we discussed, the key note is struck through Tiny Tim’s “God bless us, every one” and the song “Bless us all”. If our initial impression is that the story has been revised for a secular era, maybe we can only see and hear it this way because we have become accustomed to religious language stripped of its sacred meanings (as in “Oh my god!” “Good Heavens!” and “Jesus Christ!”–all expressions used incessnatly today purely as expostulations). In the face of several comments about ways the adaptations lose or give up on many of the more serious elements of Dickens’s original (such as its social criticism and calls for reform), one student objected to our giving the original too much credence or authority: she said she found it heavy-handed and not well written. I grant it’s not Dickens’s most subtle story, but there is a genre issue here as much as an evaluative one, I think: it’s a moral fable, so it seems inappropriate to criticize it for being, well, moralizing! It’s a separate and probably unanswerable question how far we can or should value such a genre. We didn’t have time to parse her claim that it’s not “well-written,” but I wonder too if that would hold up against patient reading. Large swatches of the story, at any rate, are great examples of Dickens’s gift for imagery and sensuality in his descriptions; the excess of metaphor, and even of sentiment, seems well-suited to his affective designs on us; and of course, generations of readers have taken pleasure in it. Still, the underlying question is always an interesting one when it comes to adaptations: should faithfulness to the original be the measure of success? (Having just seen two fairly uneven adaptations of novels by Ian McEwan, I have been pondering this question a bit lately. FWIW, I thought the recent film of Atonement was at least brave in trying to capture the novel’s interest in modernist aesthetics as well as its metatextuality; I’m not altogether sure that the makers of Enduring Love read that novel all the way to the end.)

The final teaching event of the week was my participation in the WHiPS event on Friday. In retrospect, I think I would have been a more interesting case study for the audience if I’d chosen to work on a blog post, so that they would see more new words actually being generated and tinkered with. But I was told it was fine just to bring my current writing project, so I worked (or tried to work) on my book review of Case and Shaw’s Reading the Nineteenth-Century Novel and Levine’s How to Read the Victorian Novel. I’m not much further ahead on the review, because a lot of time was taken up with fielding questions about my “writing process”–but also with explaining to the constantly shifting audience just what I was doing, where I had gotten so far and what issues I was (am) still struggling with. Because a number of these issues are conceptual ones (e.g. what is most useful or important to say about these books?), a lot of what I’m currently doing is thinking–not really a spectator sport, even when (as requested) you are giving an informal running commentary on your efforts. I did show (as I think most of the participating writers did) that writing is not a matter of starting at the beginning and keeping on until the end, but rather putting pieces down and considering their coherence and usefulness, roughing in outlines, shuffling things around, adding quotations, shuffling things around again, and so on. One of the Ph.D. students I’m supervising was there for a while and remarked that, for her, it was indeed helpful seeing that I myself do the kinds of things I’m always urging her to do (for instance, writing things out before you are sure you have got them right or know what to do with them). But I don’t know how much other observers got out of the experience. In trying to explain why I had the rough pieces they could see in the document, I did end up explaining in various ways some of the issues I’m interested in regarding differences between criticism as we practice it in the classroom and criticism as we (usually) publish it–this is the ‘angle’ I think I’m going to use to motivate the discussion of the particular books. Explaining this many times helped me think about how I was actually going to weld this general issue to the specific review portions, but I’m pretty sure it was all more interesting to me than to them. Some of the chunks of prose I’m working with in the draft of the review are taken from earlier blog posts on related topics, so there was some discussion about differences between how I write for the blog and how I do other things. I emphasized that for me, blogging is, deliberately, a less formal and self-conscious kind of writing. I always compose posts online, and I allow them to be more open-ended and stream-of-consciousness. In some ways, then, blogging is a kind of pre-writing for me when I’m dealing with material I also work with professionally. Several people seemed interested in my comments about how writing often on my blog has (I think) made me a more confident writer in other venues–the best way to become a better writer, after all, is to write! One student asked if I prefer to work for long intervals (a few hours at a time, say) so that some momentum can develop; I had to laugh at the idea of ever having a few hours straight without interruptions or other commitments interfering. Still, no question, to my mind the single most important quality of a successful writer must be discipline. Trollope was spot on when he said that the essential tool for a writer is glue on the seat of his pants!

One interesting conversation that broke out a few times was about technologies of/and writing. A couple of people asked about writing by hand vs. composing online. I explained that I still find some stages of the writing process much easier or more comfortable to do by hand. One issue for me, for instance, is taking notes from a book. Physically, it is easier to hold the book with one hand and write in a notebook with the other than to prop the book open and look back and forth from it to a computer screen while using both hands to type. We talked about working with electronic files and ebooks: I don’t yet have experience with using ebooks for my work, but I can imagine naturalizing note-taking on the computer once I can have the book (or an article) open in one window and my word-processor in another. In theory, I can do this already with articles, but I don’t (yet) have software that enables me to highlight or comment right in the margins of a PDF file, and this remains a typical step in my processing of sources. I still feel there’s something in the physical, tangible connection between pen and paper that helps me own the material and the ideas it is generating. There are also things I don’t know how to do on a computer, such as roughing out brainstorming ideas in diagrams and charts. Sometimes I need to be messy, and I don’t know that a computer can let me do this–though I did learn that there is software that lets you simulate the mapping-out steps of brainstorming. While in some ways I draft much more efficiently now that I do almost all of my actual composing on my computer, then, my own process is still a hybrid one. Of course, the limits of the technologies I have or know how to use are important factors here. How much time do I want to invest in learning to use new toys, though, rather than, say, actually getting words in order? (Relatedly, we wondered if concerns about electronic waste are going to inhibit the current momentum towards going paperless.)