This Week In My Classes

This Week in My Classes (October 29, 2007)

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

It’s all Middlemarch, all the time this week (and next week, and the week after that). And even so, I know I will end up worrying about all the things we didn’t talk about. In my undergraduate lecture class, we’ll focus today on the novel’s structure and how it reinforces important ideas and themes. In particular, we will examine the complex chronology of some key sections, looking at the way the narrative goes back in time in order to bring us to an event from a different perspective. One of my favourite examples is at the end of Chapter 27 (the chapter which, appropriately, begins with the famous pier glass passage). It’s a chapter mostly chronicling the developing relationship between Lydgate and Rosamond; it concludes with Sir James Chettam’s servant stopping Lydgate as he walks with Rosamond, to take him to Lowick. As we learn, he is needed there because Casaubon has had some kind of heart attack. In Chapter 27, the incident is important, not as part of Casaubon’s story, but as part of Rosamond’s (more evidence for her satisfied theory that Lydgate is a cut above her other Middlemarch suitors) and part of Lydgate’s (a sign that his practice is beginning to flourish, despite his having alienated some of Peacock’s former patients by his innovative methods). The incident (we figure out later) takes place in March. But Chapter 28 begins in January, taking us back to Dorothea and Casaubon’s return from their dismal honeymoon and then following the stories of her growing disillusionment, his creeping jealousy about Will Ladislaw, and his diminishing health–bringing us up to the attack in Chapter 29. “But why always Dorothea?” asks the narrator as Chapter 29 opens–and of course the novel models the morally necessary movement of our attention and sympathy among different points of view. I often invite the class to come up with some kind of graphic representation of many people arriving at the same event (our class meeting, say), but coming from many different perspectives and all having slightly different experiences. The results, usefully, tend to look either like a tangled web or a giant hairball (the latter once they realize the advantages of working in 3-D for showing simultaneous but different strands). How can a narrative recreate these effects? I usually end up quoting Carlyle’s remark that “narrative is linear, but action is solid.” The formal challenge for the novelist is substantial, as are the mental demands on the reader. Later (probably next week) we will look at another pattern of repetition in which a place (such as Dorothea’s blue-green boudoir) or an event (such as the first time Dorothea sees Will and Rosamond together) is revisited in light of new information. In these cases we have internal or mental movement working to the same ends as the chronological and other disruptions in today’s examples.

In my graduate seminar, the discussion will be less choreographed, which means I can look forward to some surprises–always refreshing with a novel you teach often. I know we will begin with a presentation on Dorothea and women’s education, which is a promising lead in to many key issues in the novel. Our secondary readings for this week are primarily contextual: George Levine on George Eliot’s determinism, and Bernard Paris on her ‘religion of humanity.’ We are certainly getting a third distinct model of authorship: we have worked with Charlotte Bronte, who (at least as quoted in Gaskell’s biography) emphatically demanded freedom for her imagination and refused to write except as the spirit moved her; then with Elizabeth Gaskell, whose strongest motivation is social reform and reconciliation; and now with a writer whose vision of fiction is highly philosophical. In her commitment to the novel’s capacity to cause change, even improvement, GE is closer to Gaskell than to Bronte. Levine argues that to GE “a belief in the possibility of some kind of occurence not usually produced by the normal workings of the laws of nature became to her one of the positive signs of moral weakness. . . . [she] believed it morally reprehensible to rely on the unlikely or unusual, even if there is a remote chance that it might happen” (272). I don’t recall any specific comments from GE herself about this aspect of Jane Eyre, including Bronte’s own defence of the mysterious communication between Jane and Rochester (about which Gaskell quotes Bronte saying, “But it is a true thing; it really happened”). (In an 1848 letter, young Mary Ann, having just read Jane Eyre, sounds a critical note: “I have read Jane Eyre, mon ami, and shall be glad to know what you admire in it. All self-sacrifice is good–but one would like it to be in a somewhat nobler cause than that of a diabolical law which chains a man soul and body to a putrefying carcase.” We might want to discuss how far her concept of the nobility of self-sacrifice has shifted by the time she gives us Dorothea’s “submission” to Casaubon’s needs, characterized in Chapter 43 as the reassertion of a “noble habit of the soul.”) The Levine and Paris articles are both from the early 1960s: given my recent fretting about the pressure to turn our critical attention to ourselves, or to a text’s unconscious aspects (the things it says without knowing or meaning to) rather than to the conversation it is overtly trying to have with us, these are interesting examples of rather different priorities. I certainly think that they are more broadly valuable than some of the more esoteric readings of Middlemarch: any responsible reader of the novel needs, or would benefit from, some grasp of its philosophical underpinnings. But we’ll be looking at some samples of other readings that work against the grain as well, including another “classic” with J. Hillis Miller’s “Narrative and History,” and we’ll ‘go meta’ ourselves when we consider the vexed status of the novel among feminist critics.

This Week in My Classes (October 22, 2007)

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

1. 19th-Century Novel. Today we begin three weeks on Middlemarch. To me, this is what going to university should be about: this novel challenges us intellectually and philosophically, and it is aesthetically and formally brilliant. As if that’s not enough, it’s also very funny (“‘He has got no good red blood in his body,’ said Sir James. ‘No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass, and it was all semicolons and parentheses,’ said Mrs Cadwallader”). I’ll open today with a lecture on George Eliot’s very interesting life as well as an overview of some key ideas governing her fiction (realism, determinism, sympathy). Then we’ll get started on the particulars of Middlemarch itself next time, probably with a focus on Dorothea’s marriage and the ways it (and, of course, its treatment by the narrator and in the narrative) highlights the central issue of (mis)interpretation.

2. Victorian Women Writers. It’s week two on North and South. Last week we ended up talking quite a lot about the obviously crucial scene in which Margaret confronts the striking workers on the steps of Thornton’s mill. One of the key interpretive questions about the novel is the relationship between the private or romance plot and the social or political plot. We read some interesting articles on this last week and no doubt our discussion of it will continue, now that everyone has read to the end of the book. I hope we will also focus on what the novel says about the problem of women’s vocation: one of this week’s critical articles puts the novel in the context of the Crimean War and makes a number of connections with Florence Nightingale, which is interesting. As we begin Middlemarch in our seminar next week (yes, I get to work on it in two classes at once, which I call luxurious!), we will also be able to put Margaret’s efforts to find meaningful occupation up against Dorothea’s. Does Margaret perhaps fare better than Dorothea in the end, at least in this respect? Is that a problem, in the end, for Gaskell’s social analysis?

This Week in My Classes (October 15, 2007)

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

1. 19th-Century Fiction. This week is our second and last on Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret. I closed out last week with an overview of Pre-Raphaelitism, to help us think about the significance of Lady Audley’s portrait, which we are told must have been painted by a member of that movement:

No one but a pre-Raphaelite would have so exaggerated every attribute of that delicate face as to give a lurid lightness to the blonde complexion, and a strange, sinister light to the deep blue eyes. No one but a pre-Raphaelite could have given to that pretty pouting mouth the hard and almost wicked look it had in the portrait. . . . my lady, in his portrait of her, had something of the aspect of a beautiful fiend. (Ch. VIII)

There are many PRB paintings that capture the quality Braddon evokes here; this is one of my favourites. This week we will focus on the cat-and-mouse game that unfolds between Lady Audley and Robert Audley, the investigator-hero of the novel (or is he?). Issues likely to come up include just what the stakes are for both of these characters in the batttle to reveal or conceal Lady Audley’s real identity and (presumed) crimes, and the displacement of Robert’s affection for his lost buddy George Talboys onto George’s eerily similar sister, Clara. When we get to the end of the novel, we will debate whether Lady Audley is ultimately offered to us as evidence of the danger dissatisfied women pose to social and sexual hierarchies or as a clever woman who uses her beauty as capital in a society that otherwise inhibits her access to capital and thus to social advancement. I’ve yet to be convinced that Braddon herself offers a coherent position on whether Lady Audley is more to be feared or pitied; the late chapter title “Buried Alive” seems to urge us towards the latter, but there’s only so much sympathy or feminist ire I can muster on behalf of a homicidal bigamist…. 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. But I wouldn’t assign it if I didn’t think we would all learn from talking about it. The transition to Middlemarch next week may be hard on them, though: that is a novel that will ask them to think much harder about issues presented with much more complexity and subtlety.

2. Victorian Women Writers. My graduate seminar is taking up Gaskell’s North and South this week. It’s interesting coming to this novel right after two weeks on Jane Eyre: though both novels take up issues of rights, Gaskell places an equivalently high value on duties, including social duties, something Jane Eyre subordinates to a more individualistic standard of duty to self (equally principled, for sure, but different principles: “‘Who in the world cares for you? or who will be injured by what you do?’ Still indomitable came the reply–‘I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.'”) Also, though much criticism in the past 20 years has helped us understand Jane Eyre as a text inextricably part of its historical moment, there are still many elements in that novel that invite us to consider it in abstract or symbolic ways (the fairy-tale structure, the appeals to myth and legend, the gothic features, the allegorical character of sections such as Jane’s lonely wanderings, etc.). North and South does not seem to me to accomodate such interpretive moves. Even its preoccupation with right relations between master and men, though appealing to abstract concepts and theories, really makes sense only as an analysis of conditions at that particular time; the same seems to me true about its interest in “that most difficult problem for women, how much was to be utterly merged in obedience to authority, and how much might be set apart for freedom in working.” Formally, North and South seems to me as well structured and balanced as Jane Eyre, and as well suited to its themes–perhaps a little too pat in places, but also avoiding the sentimental and melodramatic extremes of Mary Barton. As we read several works focusing on the role and experience of women writers, I expect we will start with some questions about how Gaskell seems to be inhabiting that role in this case, but we’ll move on to the usual discussions of the relation between the novel’s industrial plot and its central courtship plot.

This Week in My Classes

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

We have a short week because of the Thanksgiving holiday yesterday, but that doesn’t mean we won’t be busy (that little bit of extra time to catch up on reading is probably what most of my students were thankful for–well, maybe).

1. 19th-Century Novel. The students are completing their letters on Great Expectations. I got the idea for this assignment from Art Young’s Teaching Writing Across the Curriculum, in which (on pages 30-34) he discusses using letters for an assignment on Heart of Darkness What intrigued me the most was his description of the improvement in clarity and liveliness in the students’ work in this form, compared to their attempts at more overtly ‘academic’ essay-writing. He accounts for this partly as follows:

I think the social nature of the assignment was important. The students had interpreted my “critical essay” assignment as the familiar school assignment, what Susan called “busy work”–show the teacher that you read The Importance of Being Earnest and can think of some things to say about it. You are not really helping the teacher understand the play any better because the teacher has read and taught the play several times, read many professional books and essays about it, and you
have spent a week reading this play while taking four or five other classes at the same time. The advantage of the letters is that they are written for a specific individual, a peer, who is asking real questions, asking for help, and for whom you can play the role of colleague or teacher as mentor. The letters demonstrate students communicating to a real audience rather than practicing at communicating to the pretend audience of professional scholars who read and write essays about literature. In addition, the letters are contextualized within the classroom community.

In my version of this assignment, I try to emphasize these features: I urge them to set questions they would genuinely like to get answers to; I bring the partners face to face with each other and encourage them to discuss what interests, attracts, repels, or confuses them in the novel; I remind them that they are writing to someone they know has also read the novel (so, among other things, they should know not to include excessive plot summary); I urge them to draw on and to cite lectures and class discussions, to listen for and create connections between their writing assignment and our other work. When I first tried this system out, it was because I had tired of the Perfunctory Paper, written to meet requirements rather than out of any genuine intellectual curiosity and often taking students’ attention away from our shared class work as they focused on their individual topics. This way everyone writes something on every novel, with (in general) a much higher level of engagement. Students who really want to write a longer paper get the opportunity to do so late in the course. I certainly like this system better than what I used to do, and the feedback from students has been quite positive.

They turn their papers in tomorrow, at which point I get the ball rolling for our next book, Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret. This is a fun teaching text, with lots of suspense and thus helpful momentum for the students and lots of interesting features for analysis and interpretation. In the end, I don’t think LAS is a very good novel, mostly because I don’t think Braddon has really worked out what her idea is about the problems she highlights, or even the characters she develops. The plot is fairly well constructed, but the language is pretty uninspired, especially right after Great Expectations. But I’m sure we’ll have some good discussions (Lady Audley: Victim or Villain? Robert Audley: Hero?). We’ll get to talk about sensationalism in relation to realism, which will set us up to move to our next book, which is Middlemarch–not, as critics have noted, free of sensational elements, including a suspicious death, some near-adultery, and a convenient thunder storm.

2. Victorian Women Writers. Jane Eyre, week two. I’ve assigned a cluster of readings on JE and colonialism (Spivak, Meyer, O’Connor), but I leave it mostly up to the students to take up issues from the criticism (or n0t), so I don’t know how much the issues raised in those articles will dominate our discussion. We also read some interesting essays focusing mainly on narration last week, and some of the problems they focus on (such as Jane’s reliability) will need reconsidering now that we’ve all read to the end of the novel.

This Week in My Classes

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

1. 19th-Century Novel. We’re still on Great Expectations this week, moving through the phase that I lecture on as “Great Revelations.” While I tend to emphasize the moral pressures of the novel in class, while re-reading it this weekend I found myself pleasurably reminded of what an emotionally powerful and intensely literary book it is. Here’s Pip confronting Estella and, indirectly, Miss Havisham, after he has learned the truth about his benefactor and been forced to reconsider the kind of ‘gentleman’ he has become:

‘You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read, since I first came here, the rough common boy whose poor heart you wounded even then. You have been in every prospect I have ever seen since–on the river, on the sails of the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the light, in the darkness, in the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the streets. You have been the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become acquainted with. The stones of which the strongest London buildings are made, are not more real, or more impossible to be displaced by your hands, than your presence and influence have been to me, there and everywhere, and will be. Estella, to the last hour of my life, you cannot choose but remain part of my character, part of the little good in me, part of the evil. But, in this separation I associate you only with the good, and I will faithfully hold you to that always, for you must have done me far more good than harm, let me feel now what sharp distress I may. O God bless you, God forgive you!’
In what ecstasy of unhappiness I got those broken words out of myself, I don’t know. The rhapsody welled up within me, like blood from a wound, and gushed out. I held her hand to my lips some lingering moments, and so I left her. But ever afterwards, I remembered–and soon afterwards with stronger reason–that while Estella looked at me merely with incredulous wonder, the spectral figure of Miss Havisham, her hand still covering her heart, seemed all resolved into a ghastly stare of pity and remorse. (Vol. 3 Chapter V)

Of the many things that could be said about this passage, I’ll just point to the way Pip’s impassioned speech associates Estella with the evocative landscape he describes to us much earlier in the novel, the horizontal lines broken only by the beacon and the gibbet–symbols that seemed to oppose hope and death, beauty and despair, love and crime, Estella and Magwitch–oppositions that by Volume 3 have proved not just illusory but dangerously so, as Pip now sees. 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.

2. Victorian Women Writers. Here it’s week 1 of Jane Eyre. Perhaps the greatest challenge here is trying to approach the novel in any fresh way, given not just how familiar it is to me after many readings, but also how dense is the accretion of criticism around it. Just selecting a handful of critical articles to assign was an incredibly fraught process: at this point, what are the most important things to be known or said about it? So much of the discussion, too, is ultimately all about us, the critics, and how what we have seen in this novel, how we have read it, reflects our own assumptions or desires about literature, feminism, romance, realism, narration. And how to find something new to say? Find something that others have neglected or misunderstood, point out what this tells us about those other readings, and posit your own, corrective analysis. You thought it was a happy ending? Think again! Rochester’s still a patriarch, Ferndean is unhealthy, Adele is exiled, it’s really a revenge story, Jane’s narrative strategies undermine what she appears to be saying about living ‘happily ever after.’ The key to the novel’s themes or politics is not Jane but Bertha, or Grace Poole, or Bessie. Miss Temple is barely an improvement on Brocklehurst. Bertha is Jane’s repressed double, or is she the oppressed Other? You thought the novel was a woman’s (or a woman writer’s) declaration of independence–look how you failed to see that version of feminism as complicit with racist exclusion, or reliant on imperialism. Or, look how you have subjugated the novel to your own theory about race or empire. And on and on it goes. It’s not that I don’t find some of these readings interest or compelling, but after a while, it starts to seem odd that one book should attract such a weight of other people’s ideas, should stand for so many things. While recognizing that there can be no such thing as “just” reading the novel (any more than what I’ve said above is “just” about Great Expectations “itself” in some transparent way), I do find myself thinking that, especially in some of the more ‘suspicious’ readings, those that go most determinedly against the grain, we have left the novel behind, refusing, as Denis Donoghue says about another text, to let it have its theme.

This Week in My Classes

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

The warm-up period is over: now we’re really getting down to work.

1. English 3032, 19thC Novel. This week, we start Great Expectations. In addition to placing the novel in the context of Dickens’s career and a range of social and intellectual issues (from the alienation induced by modern urban professional society, to anxieties about the moral implications of Darwinism), I like to focus on Pip’s retrospective narration and the ways his personal development prepares him, ultimately, to become the kind of man (especially the kind of “gentleman”) who is capable of telling us this story. Great Expectations is also good for shaking up casually-held stereotypes about Victorian ‘realism,’ as from Pip’s palindromic name to Miss Havisham’s wedding feast to Wemmick’s castle to Magwitch’s splendidly eerie reappearance, nearly every element in the novel pressures us to read it literarily rather than mimetically. Plus, there’s Joe’s hat falling off the mantel in Volume II Chapter 8…

2. English 5465, Victorian Women Writers. Here, we are taking one more look at the ‘real’ life of a Victorian woman novelist before turning our attention to the novels themselves. But with Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Bronte, we have the added interest of one Victorian woman writer writing about another, and in the process exploring the ideas of femininity, authorship, vocation, and duty that preoccupied them both, though in different ways, throughout their writing careers. Last week we considered Margaret Oliphant’s writing her own story in response to a literary representation of George Eliot’s life (she points to Cross’s biography as having prompted her to begin the Autobiography). But Oliphant has been reading Gaskell’s Life of CB as well, so as we read on, we are accumulating a range of interrelated ideas about these women and their work–from them and from their respondents, interpreters, and critics–to carry forward with us into our analysis of the fiction they produced. In class we struggled somewhat with the idea of Oliphant’s Autobiography as a literary text because at times both its form and its content seem so unselfconscious, spontaneous, and diary-like that we weren’t confident attributing intent or design (though we also considered, of course, that it has literary qualities and other effects regardless of how deliberately they were developed). Gaskell’s biography of Bronte is much more conspicuously constructed with its own aims and purposes. Critics have disputed how far Gaskell’s stated goals–such as defending Bronte against her critics and presenting a sympathetic portrait of someone we are often reminded was Gaskell’s “dear friend”–are sincere or unproblematic and how much she is using Bronte as a prop to establish her own literary credentials or to resolve larger debates about the “vexed question of sex” in authorship, as she calls it (she is emphatic that whatever their domestic responsibilities, women also have a duty to use their God-given talents, even if that means stepping outside the ‘normal’ bounds of female propriety). I expect we will have some good discussion along these lines. Reading The Life of Charlotte Bronte right after Oliphant’s Autobiography should also prompt some conversation about their very different views and experiences of being women writers.

This Week in My Classes

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

Here’s what my students and I will be reading and talking about this week:

1. English 3032, 19th-Century Novel: We are finishing up Trollope’s The Warden, with a special focus on Trollope’s redefinition of heroism on a small scale and on his interest in the way public questions are always “a conglomeration of private interests.” We’ll also be looking at the role of his intrusive narrator, and at his parodies of Carlyle (as Dr. Pessimist Anticant) and Dickens (as Mr Popular Sentiment) as he works towards his own theory of fiction. “What story was ever written without a demon?” he asks in Chapter XV; “What novel, what history, what work of any sort, what world, would be perfect without existing principles both of good and evil?” As every reader of The Warden comes to see, this novel does not allow us to perceive the world as consisting of such extremes, despite John Bold’s frustrated exclamation, “If there be a devil, a real devil here on earth, it is Dr. Grantly.”

2. English 5465, Victorian Women Writers: This week it’s Margaret Oliphant’s Autobiography, which shifts us sharply away from last week’s more abstract discussion of Victorian arguments over femininity and women’s ‘mission’ into a life full of contradictions and compromises, struggle and suffering (economic and mental). While Oliphant’s consideration of her own fiction, and her comparisons (often rueful or resentful) between her own hard-earned modest success and her more triumphant literary ‘sisters’ (especially George Eliot and Charlotte Bronte) will be of much interest to us, I am sure we will also talk about the form, mode, and tone of the Autobiography itself, with its long passages of heartbreaking lamentation for lost children interwoven with (often, seeming to slice apart) its record of ordinary domestic life and travels. Here’s an excerpt from just after the death of Maggie, aged 10, after a sudden and very brief illness:

I ask myself why, why, and I cannot find any answer. I had but one woman-child and she was just beginning to sympathize with me, to comfort me, and at this dear moment, her little heart expanding, her little mind growing, her sweet life blossoming day by day, God has taken her away out of my arms and refuses to hear my cry and prayer. My heart feels dead. . . . Now I have to go limping and anxious through the world all the days of my life. . . . Oh God forgive me and help me. O God convey to me a sense of my darling’s happiness, a feeling that she will not forget me and that I shall find her again, and have pity upon a poor heartbroken creature who does not know what she is saying. . . .Those curls I was so proud of were never more beautiful than when they were all rippling back with the gold string through them from her dear head as she lay ill, and when they lay all peaceful and still with her white wreath of hyacinths and snowdrops, she as as lovely as the angel she is. Oh my child, my child.

She would lose all of her children before her own death, “writing steadily,” as she says, “all the time” to support the ne’er-do-well sons who survived into adulthood and the array of relatives who came to depend on her industry and charity. The poignant conclusion:

And now here I am all alone.
I cannot write anymore.

 

This Week in My Classes

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

I think one of the commenters on Footnoted is right that the most hostile reactions come from people who have an inaccurate idea of what goes on in ‘lit departments.’ I also think that essays like Wasserman‘s don’t consider academics when they think about the state of literary culture because (a) for a mix of good and bad reasons, most academic writing and scholarship is not directly or visibly connected to or known in that culture and (b) our classroom work is typically forgotten, disregarded, or misunderstood outside the academy. I don’t suppose that my own classroom is either wholly typical or exemplary, but I think it might contribute somewhat to the demystification of our profession, now that the teaching term is underway, to make it a regular feature of my blog to outline what lies in store for me and my students each week. As I have just two classes this term, thanks to the teaching relief I get for coordinating the graduate program, the list won’t be long (unlike most of the readings we’re doing!). And so, without further ado…

  1. English 3032, The Nineteenth-Century British Novel from Dickens to Hardy. Having begun Monday with an overview of literary and historical contexts for the novel in our period, we are launching today into our study of Trollope‘s odd little charmer The Warden. A small man in a big institution has a small problem that is a big one for his conscience; while sorting through this dilemma in his plot and for his characters, Trollope is also working out his own style of realism, in contrast to “Mr Popular Sentiment” (Dickens). Today I’ll be offering some generalizations about Trollope, then zeroing in on his interest in individuals working in complex institutions (the Church of England, in our particular case), then looking at the characterization of the main players in The Warden, especially Mr Harding (love that imaginary cello!) and the chief combatants, John Bold (he’s bold–get it?!) and Archdeacon Grantly (“Good heavens!”).
  2. English 5465, Victorian Women Writers–the Novelists. Here too we have begun with an overview of literary and historical contexts, this time with an emphasis on women’s situation in the 19th century and how this affected (or, as Gilbert and Gubar notoriously argued, “infected”) their literary options, attitudes, and styles. To kickstart the term’s discussion, we read some 19thC essays on ‘lady novelists,’ one of them (of course) being George Eliot’s (in)famous “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists.” “Be not a baker if your head be made of butter” is a good line for anyone who ventures into print–perhaps especially for bloggers…

And now, off to class.