It’s that time again: through the haze of the August heat you can sense the faint glimmers, atmospheric shivers of anticipation and dread. That’s right, the fall term is coming!

I’ve already been doing a bit here and there to prepare, because I prefer that to doing it all in a big push when it’s absolutely too late not to. I understand the desire to keep summer work (and play) uncluttered with the business of the teaching term, and if that works for you, great, but I find many of the necessary chores tedious enough as it is without being in a rush. So I  started picking away at my fall to-do list around mid-July, and as a result I have my Brightspace sites mostly set up already, including draft syllabi and a lot of the other supporting materials.

One thing I’ve been thinking about a lot is what more I can do this year to discourage plagiarism. I brought more cases to our Academic Integrity Officer (AIO) last term than ever before. It wasn’t just me, either: various forms of plagiarism seem to be on the rise across the department.  I do already address academic integrity in my course materials and in class, of course, and I have always tried to shore students up in a positive way, with lots of advice and support and discussion about their assignments, as well as being clear about the risks and penalties of plagiarizing. Still, my own experience last term, and my discussions with the colleague who has the fairly thankless job of AIO as well as with other colleagues who also had many cases, made me think I need to do more–and gave me some ideas about what.*

Because I really hate interacting with my students as if they are all potential criminals, I don’t want to focus on increasing surveillance. Rather, I want to focus on two of the three main reasons I think students plagiarize, which in my experience are panic, insecurity, and indifference.

There’s not a lot I can do about the last category: students who really don’t care about the material we’re studying or the skills I’m trying to teach, who just want to get the course credit as easily as possible. There are a few of these students in almost every class (and more than a few in writing requirement classes) and for them I have only two strategies. One is to try to win them over by making our work as interesting, challenging, and valuable as I can, which does sometimes work. The other is to emphasize the practical risks of trying to pass off someone else’s work as your own: you might not get caught, but you also might, and then instead of saving yourself trouble, you are in trouble.

My only new idea for this group is to recommend very explicitly that they do the math. If you submit an honest attempt at most essay assignments that is more or less in full sentences, that at least circles the assigned topic, and that makes at least a nod or two to actual textual evidence, it is pretty unlikely you’ll flat out fail–your worst case scenario is almost certainly a D. But suppose you do get an F: at least in my classes, that’s a 49%, which is much better for your final average than 0%, which is the typical penalty for a first-time academic offense. Also, if that F paper is actually your work, the feedback on it might steer you towards a better grade the next time–if you care. (What value is there for you, after all, in my comments on something cribbed from Shmoop?) But even if you don’t care, you’ll still do yourself a favor mathematically if you just–as one of my colleagues put it rather colorfully– vomit something up and turn it in. 

I’m more hopeful that there’s something constructive I can do for the other two groups–those who have run out of time and those who don’t trust their own work. Students with these problems need a better process for writing their essays. Our AIO said that what he’s hearing from a lot of students is some version of “I did the reading and then I went online to find out what to think about it.” These students either aren’t willing or able to put in the time to come up with their own ideas or, and this seems quite likely to me, they don’t actually know how they are supposed to come up with their own ideas. That’s where I want to catch and help them: in that moment before they decide to just let the internet tell them what they think.

I do already talk about the process of essay writing in class; I have even begun incorporating a workshop on it in my upper-level classes, while of course it is a major component of my first-year writing classes. I’ve also been trying for some time to clarify how our other class work is related to the kind of writing I ask them to do. But still I seem to spend a lot of time in office hours talking to students who think, for example, that their first step is to come up with a thesis statement. They always look bewildered when I tell them they are doing it backwards: that they will realize (or at least close in on) their argument only after doing the messy and painstaking work of rereading, note-taking, and free writing that generates the raw material that eventually coagulates into an essay. I’ve talked with students who are trying to articulate a thesis before even having finished the reading! That will never work!

As I said, I do talk about process already, but my plan is to do more of this, more of the time, and get them doing more process-related things in class as well, making explicit connections between these exercises and their longer writing assignments. I think I’ll also do up some handouts–maybe even with flowcharts! The hard truth, of course, is that they have to be prepared to spend some time in the muddy, muddy middle, and for a while it will feel like they don’t know where they are going or what they are going to say–until they figure it out. They can’t avoid that time: they have to plan for it, and not panic, and not turn to Google instead. Maybe, if I talk even more often and more positively to them about this process and provide them even more explicit advice and models, I can help them find the confidence to be uncertain for a little while, because they have a better plan than plagiarism.

I suppose “more of the same but better” isn’t a particularly grand plan on my own part–it’s not going to win me any awards for innovation!–but at least I feel clearer about where I think my intervention is needed and my guidance could be useful. Also, I like making up handouts! It’s a lot more fun than doing the paperwork for, much less sitting through, yet another academic integrity hearing.

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*A lot of advice about thwarting plagiarism puts the responsibility squarely on instructors to devise assignments that are plagiarism-proof, or at least plagiarism-resistant. I agree that we should think creatively about the kind of work we ask our students to do, but I actually resist (and resent) that victim-blaming response, which, among other things, weirdly absolves students of responsibility and also ignores that there may be sound pedagogical and disciplinary reasons for specific types of assignments.

 

 

Classes have been over for a while now, but the business of the teaching term isn’t quite over. I mentioned before that one unfortunate feature of marking season is academic integrity hearings: I had more this year than I’ve ever had before, which has taken up a lot of my time and also given me a lot to think about. Individual cases are confidential, of course, but at some point I plan to write a separate post about some trends I’ve noticed around plagiarism and some ideas I have about how to address both its causes and its consequences. Some of what I’ve been dealing with and thinking about is addressed in this article in University Affairs, but I’m wary of focusing too hard on how we design our assignments. For one thing, though there are many things I might do in an ideal world that would be helpful, it seems likely that before long we won’t have any writing classes in our department with fewer than 120 students, and an awful lot of “best practices” simply don’t scale up, especially given strict contractual limits on our use of Teaching Assistants. At the end of the day, too, I’d like to see the responsibility for not cheating rest with the students, who always do have the choice not to cheat. That doesn’t mean we and our pedagogy don’t play a role, of course, including in making sure they understand what constitutes cheating…but more about that thorny topic later.

On a happier note, this is also the time of year when we award departmental prizes and scholarships; I have a committee meeting this afternoon dedicated to this task, which–though it can get a bit thorny in the details–is a pretty good job to have, as we get to focus on the many students who are doing really splendid work. It’s not just top academic marks that get rewarded: we also have prizes for students who shine creatively or who stand out for taking intellectual risks. One of our perennial favorites is the Paul McIsaac Memorial Prize, for example, which is dedicated to a student “who demonstrates an enquiring and original mind.” Reading the nomination letters for this and our other discretionary prizes is always uplifting, though we do sometimes wish donors would be slightly more specific or, as in the case of the memorably named “Throw the Switch Igor” Bursary, maybe a bit  less colorful! Our committee meeting is in preparation for Wednesday’s May Marks Meeting, which, as I’ve written about before, is “one of our department’s most cherished and loathed rituals.”

Since classes ended, I’ve been thinking a lot about what seemed to work and what didn’t this term. It’s always hard to know what are actual lessons about pedagogy that you can carry forward and what are idiosyncratic reactions or developments based on the specific and unpredictable population of a particular class. For instance, I thought that overall Pulp Fiction went much better this year than last. What did I do differently? Not much logistically: I used the same readings and course structure, and more or less the same assignments. Class participation was way up, though, and most of the time the atmosphere felt happier: is that because (anxious to avoid whatever went wrong last year) I tried even harder than usual to be positive, friendly, and encouraging? Did we all benefit from my having broken in this material last year and so being more adept with it this time? Or did I just get lucky and have a larger proportion of reasonably talkative students who softened the atmosphere for others to join in and thus helped increase overall engagement?

Even though I thought the class in general went well, I still finished it wondering if I want to teach it again. One reason, as I mentioned in an earlier post, is that I felt a bit worn out by the effort of making these readings interesting enough to keep talking about. I spent time in class talking about the concept of ‘horizontal reading’ as an important strategy for working with genre fiction: you need a broad sense of norms, tropes, and conventions to be able to talk with insight and confidence about specific examples and how they use, subvert, or revise expectations. This isn’t to say that our readings didn’t reward deep or close reading, but the interpretive process for them required (or so I thought, anyway) a fair amount of hand-waving towards what you might call the geographies of the different genres, territory that students who are mostly beginning readers of these kinds of fiction had no initial familiarity or ease with. If I do the course again, I will have to keep thinking about that challenge and whether I got the balance between generalizations and specifics right.

If I do teach Pulp Fiction again I think I will change the main readings. There are practical reasons for this: once there are marked papers out in circulation, for example, there’s a risk that they will be recycled. (Of course, there are ways to make this more difficult, and to check for it.) I have other reasons for making some changes, though. Chief among them is that The Maltese Falcon is a brilliant novel but a plagiarism nightmare, and I’m fed up with dealing with this problem. In case any students are reading this, let me make one point that should be obvious but clearly isn’t: your professors are also familiar with Shmoop! More generally, anything you turn up using Google we can find just as easily. If you’re struggling, for any reason, to put your own ideas about the readings into your own words, consulting your instructor is a much better move than going online to see what you can find.

I have also concluded that Valdez Is Coming is not a good choice for my representative Western. When I read it on my own, I thought it was gripping, fast-paced, and rich with discussion points from race and identity to masculinity, violence, and heroism. It turns out that for quite a lot of students, it is dull, a bit confusing, and too subtle in its effects (literary and thematic) to analyze effectively. This is not to say that none of them wrote well about it–but overall, across both years, it was by far the least popular of our three major texts. Lord of Scoundrels overall was more successful as a novel to write about, and though of course individual responses to it varied, more people seemed more engaged with it. I’m not sure at this point what substitutions I would make. These three novels made a nice sequence, especially for thinking about masculinity: a triumphant but problematic tough guy, then a tough guy who pays a high price for refusing to be vulnerable, and finally a tough guy who is “cured”  of the compulsion to be a certain kind of man and as a result gets to live happily every after. Having a through-line like this helped us layer our discussions as the term goes on, so I’d want to find another trio of books that also work well together, though they wouldn’t have to be unified by that same theme.

As for Victorian Sensations, I thought it was quite a successful seminar. Participation levels were consistently high and (as important) were of high quality; as I told the class at the end of term, I genuinely looked forward to showing up and talking with them about our readings. The only novel I hadn’t taught before was Cometh Up As A Flower; we found it provocative and sometimes puzzling, and quite a few students chose to include it in their term paper, which is a sign that they were engaged with it. It might be fun to include it in one of my standard Victorian fiction class, where it would fit well with other novels in which passion and duty collide (The Mill on the Floss, for instance), or in which the ‘romance’ of marrying for money is overtly stripped away. One slight surprise for me was that discussion flagged a bit for Fingersmith. Everyone seemed to  really enjoy reading it, but it was conspicuously harder to get them to talk about it. This might have been (a bit paradoxically) because they found it fun to read and so their critical faculties shut down in ways they really can’t with a novel like East Lynne (which is pretty hard work to slog through, honestly); it might also have been that we read Fingersmith last, and by the final weeks of term everyone’s tired and overwhelmed with work.

Less of a surprise, but still a challenge, was how difficult it was to generate discussion on the classes I’d set aside for “critical approaches” to our novels. After the first of these sessions I realized that I needed to approach them differently, so I ran those classes more overtly than I usually do in a seminar class, adding some contextual information about the history of literary criticism and devising a set of “metacritical” discussion questions to supplement students’ questions on the specific readings. Even so, discussion was halting. I think the main reason was actually closely related to my goals for these readings. In my experience, when students read criticism they are often mining it for usable quotations, which they then drop into their own arguments as if the fact that somebody else said it proves their claim. I wanted to get them to engage with other scholars in a more equal and conversational way, learning how to see what kind of criticism they are reading (by considering its original date of publication, the venue it was published in, the kinds of questions it asks, and the kinds of evidence it considers) and then if they use it in their own work, signaling how and why in a different way. Just saying “As Critic Smartypants argues” instead of “Critic Smartypants argues” is an improvement: it implies “I’ve thought about this and agree,” not “Smartypants said it, so it’s true.”

The other thing I hoped to do with these sessions is spark some interest about the ways literary criticism has changed between the 19th century and today: for each of these classes, we read some reviews or essays contemporary with our novels as well as a selection of modern academic criticism. This is a longstanding interest of mine, and we read a couple of pieces that are included in my Broadview anthology, as well as others included with the Broadview editions of East Lynne and Cometh Up As A Flower. Again it was hard to get discussion going, though it got better when I opened up some more general questions about things like the difference (in their experience) between reviews and what they think of as “criticism,” or whether they expect or want criticism to include clear evaluative statements or (as is often found in the Victorian examples) moral judgments. In the end I don’t know how much the students felt they gained from these exercises. Will I include designated criticism sessions again? Probably not, at least not in quite this way. We would probably have had more fun reading another novel–or some short fiction, as the reading load was already quite heavy.

After Wednesday, Winter 2018 will (I hope) be really and truly cleared away–not just at work, but here in Halifax, where very gradually things are turning green and coming to life again.

Last week and this week, actually. That’s not quite all I’ve been doing since classes wrapped up on April 10: there has been a spate of committee work, and also (one of the less pleasant features of this time of term) some academic integrity hearings, which take up a fair amount of time. Then on the home front, Maddie was in her high school’s production of The Drowsy Chaperone, which had its four-performance run April 19-21, so in addition to ferrying her to and from rehearsals and doing what I could to mitigate the stress on her schedule in other ways, I’ve also been to two performances–which, on the bright side, was the most fun I’ve had in ages. (In case you know the musical, she played Mrs. Tottendale, with great comic flair. The whole cast was great, actually, as was the production, especially the costumes.)

I’d say the end is in sight, though still further away than I’d like. I am making good progress on the second of two batches of essays; then I have two (out of three) sections left to mark on the Pulp Fiction exam. I have high hopes that it will all be done and I’ll have final grades filed by the end of this week–though if I’m right and I’m coming down with the cold that Maddie sadly got just as the show opened, it might be harder and thus slower going. Tonight is not a good night to do any more of it, though: I’m exhausted, because we were up at 4 a.m. to get Maddie onto a flight to Washington D.C. She is spending a whirlwind three days there with her I.B. History class. I’m envious: I’ve only been to Washington once and barely had time to get started on the sights.

I’ve been too busy and distracted to settle in for any intense reading, though I did join a few Twitter friends in reading The Warden last weekend. Then I had to take all the books off my mystery bookcase (we needed to move it out of the way temporarily, to do a household project) and in the process of sorting them I was reminded how long it has been since I read most of my P. D. James collection. I’ve put An Unsuitable Job for a Woman back on the reading list for Mystery & Detective Fiction in the fall, so it seemed like a good time to revisit one or two. As a result, I’m happily rereading Death in Holy Orders, which turns out to follow very well on The Warden as it has a number of explicit references in it to  Barchester Towers. James herself said she saw the 19th-century novelists as her predecessors more than the Golden Age mystery writers, and in a book like this, that genealogy is clear. There are plenty of murderous moments in Trollope but his world is (mostly) too genial a place, his morality too committed to shades of grey, to allow for outright irremediable violence. (There are exceptions, of course). Like Trollope, James is very good at depicting institutions, with all their intricate politics and emotional dynamics. She’s also exceptionally good at setting, something I emphasize when we discuss Unsuitable Job (where the beauty of Cambridge makes a poignant contrast to the horrors of the novel’s central crime). After reading several hastier or lazier stylists in this genre recently, I am appreciating the leisurely pace of her descriptions, along with the meticulous depth of her characterizations. I don’t like all of her novels equally, but when she is good, she’s very very good.

As if things in this term’s classes aren’t busy enough (and about to get busier, as next week I get in both sets of term papers and give the final exam for Pulp Fiction) but book orders for next fall were also due. It’s not a set-in-stone deadline, and quite reasonably a lot of my colleagues put it off until the summer, but I’ve actually been playing around with possible book lists for my Dickens to Hardy class since Austen to Dickens wrapped up last term, so I figured I could at least get that one settled.

You can see in the photo above which choices I made. The course title makes both Dickens and Hardy obligatory, of course. I don’t have to unify the reading list around a theme, and I didn’t used to think about that at all: I just picked 5 (or, years ago, 6) novels that represented a range of forms and authors. Last term Austen to Dickens was just “5 books I really like,” and as always, plenty of interesting comparisons emerged from their juxtaposition. But for Dickens to Hardy in Winter 2017 I picked books about “troublesome women”–Bleak House, Adam Bede, Cranford, Lady Audley’s Secret, and Tess of the d’Urbervilles. (Clearly, they are all troublesome in different ways, though having three novels explicitly about “fallen” women was particularly interesting.) That was fun, so this time I’m flipping it and choosing books about “men in trouble”: again, their troubles are of different but sometimes related kinds. I don’t usually include two “short” novels, but both David Copperfield and The Woman in White are pretty long, so this way the overall reading load seems reasonable. I wonder what unexpected insights juxtaposing these particular books will shake loose! That’s the fun of teaching the two 19th-century fiction courses so often but never in exactly the same way.

In the end I also submitted my book order for Mystery and Detective Fiction today. If I’d waited I might have made more changes to what has become my ‘standard’ book list for the course, but though I have been considering some more recent Canadian books for inclusion, I wasn’t completely convinced either of them would work well in class (not every book does, which is something I think about a lot) and so as I was in the mood to cross this task off my list, I went with the usual suspects. The one change from the course’s last incarnation is that I’ve switched out The Terrorists and put An Unsuitable Job for a Woman back in. I think The Terrorists is brilliant, and it usually provokes good discussion (though some students understandably find it heavy-handed by the end). But I also really like Unsuitable Job and have missed it.

Those are my only two courses for the fall and then I’ve got a half-year sabbatical next winter, so that’s it: my book orders for next year are done! For the first time in a long time I’m not teaching a first-year class in 2018-19. I’m glad, not because I don’t enjoy teaching introductory classes but because I want to think carefully about which one I’ll teach next, and especially about whether I’ll put in for Pulp Fiction again. We recently revised our suite of first-year classes, which means that the two that used to be my standard offerings (our full-year Introduction to Literature and our half-year Introduction to Prose and Fiction) aren’t options any more. Pulp Fiction is still on the books, and I’m certainly not ruling it out. In many ways I have really enjoyed teaching it: conceptualizing my approach to it was intellectually challenging, as was choosing my readings and preparing materials on them. If I do teach it again, though, I probably don’t want to use all the same novels–and even with different ones, I think I might still miss teaching a different kind of readings. Introductory classes are the only place I get to play with writers like John Donne and Adrienne Rich and Virginia Woolf and James Joyce and Alice Munro and Carol Shields. There’s lots to say about the books I’ve assigned in Pulp Fiction, no question, but after going through them twice I can’t imagine sustaining my own interest in them at that level of detail for another round–which is not something I’ve ever felt about “Death Be Not Proud” or A Room of One’s Own. Anyway, I’m glad to step off that particular moving sidewalk for a bit. I’ll have to put in my 2019-20 course requests in the fall, and I’m sure a first-year class will be among them, but I’m going to think hard about which one it should be.

And that’s all the time I have for dreaming about the future! The next two to three weeks will be focused entirely on this term’s courses.

 

 

“Springing forward” seems an optimistic way to put the feeling I always get at this time of term that we are hurtling downhill towards its end: papers and tests and proposals come in even as you’re still planning lectures and making up slides and handouts and trying not to show up without your books … Add in the time shift and a series of storms to remind us that it’s definitely still winter and it has been a busy and tiring week.

But good things happen in the second part of term too. For one thing, students have got their bearings in the course materials and expectations, so I can spend less time on logistics and reminders and saying “it’s in the syllabus.” And for another, the reading and discussion continues and sometimes even gets better because we’ve all warmed up. In Pulp Fiction last week, I thought there was a noticeable improvement in the students’ Reading Journals, as if they “get” The Maltese Falcon better than they did Valdez Is Coming–which, I’ve belatedly realized, is a more subtle novel than I thought, hard to get an interpretive grip on if you aren’t used to reading that way. Though the actual plot of The Maltese Falcon is plenty bewildering as it unfolds, the prose and the issues and the characters give us more to grab on to. The class is writing their papers on it now: we’ve got an editing workshop for their drafts on Friday, then they turn in revised versions next week and we start our unit on romance, which I’m quite looking forward to. I hope they are too!

In Victorian Sensations we’ve started Rhoda Broughton’s Cometh Up as a Flower. When I first read it I wasn’t convinced of its merits, but it turns out the magic trick is to read it right after you finish reading East Lynne! What a relief to turn from Wood’s dreary moralizing and Isabel’s unrelenting gloom and repentance and the whole tawdry, disorganized assortment of subplots to a sassy young heroine who hates her sister, canoodles with a handsome soldier in the garden and finds it blissful, not shameful, and just adores her dear old dad! Not much actually happens in Broughton’s novel, but in the context of our discussions of other sensation novels, that in itself has provoked some discussion, as has figuring out what made Broughton’s very different work equally scandalous–mostly, Nell herself. In general, the consensus in the class seems to be that Nell is refreshing, if not altogether likable; there will be lamentations, I’m sure, about the turn her story is about to take as well as the shift in her tone from defiant to repentant by the end. I’m so impressed with this group of students: often on the way to class I’m wondering a bit anxiously if we’ll find enough to talk about, and  I always end up surprised that we’ve run out of time and I have to shut down discussion. One factor is that there are always two students charged with bringing in talking points to get us started, and of course I bring notes and materials myself–but basically, they’ve got this, which is great.

In Pulp Fiction, this is our second and final week on The Maltese Falcon (no, it does not seem like enough time, but we have other work to do too!). Leading up to our discussions of the novel I made a big deal about Raymond Chandler’s claim that the novel “demonstrated that the detective story can be important writing. The Maltese Falcon may or may not be a work of genius,” he says in “The Simple Art of Murder,” “but an art which is capable of it is not ‘by hypothesis’ incapable of anything.”

I’m not sure I admire The Maltese Falcon quite as much as all that, or that I think the detective story hadn’t already shown its literary potential, though much depends on what you rule in or out as an example (if The Moonstone counts, then that’s pretty old news by 1930). But it’s a great starting point for discussion, especially about what we think it takes for writing to be “important.” One suggestion about what distinguishes The Maltese Falcon from the kind of mystery Chandler’s contrasting it with in his essay (basically, the Golden Age detective novel) is its thematic ambition: the crimes its plot is organized around are really just devices for raising questions about what is worth living and dying for–about what, if anything, gives life meaning. Any murder mystery will address motives and consequences at a literal level, but in The Maltese Falcon the black bird takes on symbolic significance in excess of those requirements. I never feel any need to interpret the dagger in Roger Ackroyd’s throat symbolically: it’s enough to know that it came from the table with the glass lid in the drawing room that Dr. Sheppard examines so attentively when he comes to visit Ackroyd the night of the murder. That’s the difference, right there.

Two of the questions I asked my students to think about for class discussion this week were what the falcon ultimately stands for–to individual characters and, perhaps not the same thing, in the book as a whole; and how they viewed Brigid O’Shaughnessy by the end–as a femme fatale or a woman fighting for survival in a man’s world. Today we also considered what it means that the actual statuette the characters have been chasing (and have killed and died for) in the novel turns out to be a fake. It’s one thing to imagine what it might mean to actually get whatever it is that you most want: what if it isn’t worth it after all, or it is but now you don’t know what to do next? But what if you think you’ve got it and it isn’t real? Gutman recovers quickly and proposes they keep looking: after all, the real one is still out there, isn’t it? Isn’t it the quest itself that really matters? Or in chasing their dream are they missing their chance to actually live?

It seems pretty clear that Sam is missing some kind of chance by following his dream, except that his is a dream of justice for his murdered partner. One of my favorite things about this novel–which in many ways I find deeply unpleasant–is how shadowed Sam’s choices are by their consequences. In the end he chooses justice over love, which is (as Effie comments) the right thing to do; Sam himself gives a long list (literally numbered) of reasons why he should turn Brigid in, against which there is only “the fact that maybe you love me, and maybe I love you.” “It isn’t always easy to know what to do,” he tells Brigid when she first comes to see him pretending to be the innocent and vulnerable “Miss Wonderly.” He may in fact know exactly what to do, but the ending to the novel shows that that, too, isn’t easy: he may live up to his principles, but he also has to live without love, without trust, and probably without happiness. In a different novel, the alternatives might not be so stark, but Sam lives in world where “if they hang you, I’ll always remember you” really does, I think, count as romantic. While Effie may agree with him in principle, though, she also recoils from him, a judgment I share.

In Victorian Sensations we finished up East Lynne this week–with some relief, I think, though I was glad to hear some students saying they did enjoy it: curiosity about what would happen next helped them keep going, even though it dragged a bit at times. One of the reasons I think this novel falls short of being “important writing” is its ineptness, artistically speaking: a lot of it seems quite haphazard or just plain incoherent, and our well-trained desire to find patterns and unities was frequently frustrated. That’s not to see it doesn’t contain many interesting elements, but I don’t really think that, through them, Wood is saying something worth really thinking about. She does have plenty to say, but it’s the very heavy-handedness of her overt message that becomes tedious. I said before that the novel reads very clearly like a cautionary tale–but so, of course, is Vanity Fair, which has a similar moral lesson for us: live well so you have no regrets on your deathbed. “Oh, Barbara,” says the tediously honorable Mr. Carlyle after presiding over the pathetic deathbed of his first wife:

never forget–never forget that the only way to ensure peace in the end, is to strive always to be doing right, unselfishly, under God.

Why does that solemn conclusion make me go “yeesh!” while I find Chapter LXI of Vanity Fair both touching and morally compelling? It’s not just that Wood is so prescriptive (and it’s not as if Thackeray isn’t prescriptive). Thackeray has in common with Hammett a rich awareness of social and human complexity, for one thing, and a wry understanding of what drives us: in fact, his indictment of the vanity of human wishes fits nicely with the ultimately futile quest most of Hammett’s characters are on–“everyone is striving for what is not worth the having,” as Lord Steyne remarks, and yet both authors also see that that’s where the drama, the energy, is. Wood’s moral world seems simplistic by comparison. If Hammett makes us wonder about the meaning of it all, Wood seems too quick to tell us, and to reduce it to following the rules. One of the critical articles we read concludes that “it is clear that Mrs. Wood does not possess the insight of a major novelist.” That’s not the kind of conclusion a more recent critical article is likely to hazard (this one is from 1976, a simpler time in literary criticism, for better and for worse)–but I have to agree.

We’re back from our February break and now nothing stands between us and the end of term except everything we have to get done before then!

In the short term, that means pressing on with East Lynne in “Victorian Sensations.” The portion we are reading this week could be subtitled “Crime and Punishment”: Lady Isabel, having, in a fit of jealous pique, abandoned her kind but somewhat distracted husband for a handsome cad, has been living abroad, miserable and repentant, for a year. Things only get worse after she gives birth to the sad little baby who could have been legitimate if only her lover weren’t such a complete jerk. How much of a jerk is he? Well, after initially hiding from her the news that her divorce is final so that she can’t insist he marry her, he then tells her that he can’t lower himself to marry a divorced women–even though her husband’s grounds of her divorce is her affair with him! Double standards ftw.

On the bright side, by that time she wants nothing more to do with him–even though her only other options are poverty, despair, and death. Then [spoiler alert] a train wreck (a bit conveniently, we thought) kills the poor baby and everyone thinks it has also killed Isabel, so she is free (if that’s the right word) to roam the world like a miserable, repentant ghost…an opportunity she uses to go back to the home and children she abandoned, where thanks to the literally defacing effects of the accident and her “grief and remorse,” she is able to serve, unrecognized, as her own children’s governess under the management of her husband’s new wife.

Although I am more and more convinced that East Lynne is overall a pretty bad novel, it is certainly a provoking one, and our discussions have been much livelier than Isabel herself ever is. Our previous two novels have offered significant critiques of the many constraints on Victorian women’s lives–economic, social, political, and sexual. The most transgressive women don’t necessarily fare well–Marian Halcombe, for instance, may outwit her enemies and climb around on rooftops in the first half of The Woman in White but she loses her gumption in the second half and ends up happy just to be an honorary aunt, while Lady Audley is “buried alive” (metaphorically! but still…) for her sins. Still, it’s impossible to read either of those novels and not appreciate these subversive characters as contrasts to the tedious passivity of their more angelic counterparts. Isabel’s grievances, on the other hand, are mostly in her mind, and while we can see that things would have gone better for her if she’d been differently raised and more self-sufficient, it’s hard to conclude that she’s anything more than a cautionary tale. “Oh reader, believe me!” exclaims our narrator:

Lady–wife–mother! should you ever be tempted to abandon your home, so will you waken! Whatever trials may be the lot of your married life, though they may magnify themselves to your crushed spirit as beyond the endurance of woman to bear, resolve to bear them; fall down upon your knees and pray to bear them: pray for patience; pray for strength to resist the demon that would urge you to escape; bear unto death, rather than forfeit your fair name and your good conscience; for be assured that the alternative, if you rush on to it, will be found far worse than death!

Lady Isabel certainly thinks so: she is not so unladylike as to pray for her own death, the narrator reassures us, “but she did wish that death might come to her,” which seems rather a hair-splitting distinction to me. I think my students would be glad if she used her undercover job as a chance to strike back at the woman who has taken her place, as Lady Audley surely would in such a situation–but alas! From here to the end of the book things are only going to get more miserable, for her and thus for us.

Lady Audley has a closer cousin in Brigid O’Shaughnessy, whose acquaintaince we are just making in Pulp Fiction. Like Lady Audley, she’s a dame making her way in a man’s world, using her beauty as a resource, playing the damsel in distress (the noir version of the angel in the house!) when it suits her purposes and showing her more demonic side when she can’t win any other way. Sam is a better match for her than Robert Audley is (at first) for Lady Audley, though, because he is never under any illusions: he’s always suspicious, of everyone, and so never beguiled by her beauty. Or is he? One of the subtler mysteries of The Maltese Falcon is whether he does in fact love her–a question which in its turn provokes more questions about what exactly we mean by “love.” “If they hang you, I’ll always remember you” may not sound very romantic to us, but coming from Sam it’s a lot, I’d say. And yet of these two novels I think it is The Maltese Falcon that–if only implicitly–puts the higher value on idealism and tender feelings. By the end of Lady Audley’s Secret it’s pretty clear that to be a hero Robert has to toughen up and fulfill his role and duties as a real man. Sam lives up to a similarly hardhearted standard in The Maltese Falcon, but I always find Effie’s “broken” request that he keep his distance–“You’re right. But don’t touch me–not now”–suggestive of the price he has paid, as is the fate he faces with his own shiver of distaste: “Iva is here.” Braddon’s novel concludes, as she blithely declares, with “all the good people happy and at peace.” There’s little peace and even less happiness for Sam.

Not only is February a short month already but it includes two of the winter term’s time-outs (times-out?): Munro Day and Reading Week. Because February is often one of our most difficult months weather-wise, it’s usually a big relief to have the pressure ease up at work a bit, even if there’s always still plenty to do. This year, the February weather actually hasn’t been that bad, but the change of pace is welcome just the same.

So what’s on my to-do list for this week? Well, of course, though there are no classroom hours, I still have teaching-related work to do. The students in Pulp Fiction turned in their first formal assignments last week, and I’d like to make a dent in my portion of them before lectures start up again. They’ll also be wanting details about their next assignment soon, so I will be finalizing the topics and instructions. Then I have to be ready to go for next Monday’s class, which means rereading our first installment of The Maltese Falcon and refreshing my lecture notes–which reminds me that I also need to post the topic for their next Reading Journals in time for them to write on it for Monday, which is just the kind of routine business it’s easy to lose track of when we aren’t otherwise following our weekly routine! For Sensation Fiction, I need to keep rereading East Lynne and prepare some notes for our class discussion. In this class I have the luxury of a group of students who are generally both well prepared and keen, so I get to play coach and prompter more than teacher, which is as it should be (but isn’t always) in an upper-level seminar.

I’d have all that to do even if we didn’t have a week “off.” But in that case I wouldn’t also be hoping to write a book review (I finished reading the book for the first time this morning, so that’s one task well underway), and I wouldn’t have been able to schedule nearly two full days’ worth of meetings–I’m one of two members of an “internal review committee” for the MFA in Creative Nonfiction at King’s. Reviews of this kind are a regular part of academic life; I’ve been on many such committees doing reviews of individual departments in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and this year my own department is itself the subject of just such a review. The review I’m working on now is on behalf of the Faculty of Graduate Studies, but the process is basically the same; we’ve got a lot of documents to read and this week we will be interviewing faculty, staff, and students. It’s a program I’ve taken a peripheral interest in since it was launched, so I’m glad to be getting a closer look.

Finally, in terms of formal obligations, I have two reference letters to take care of a.s.a.p. This has been kind of a slow year for reference requests (though that can always change). I think one factor is that fewer and fewer students are asking me for letters to MA or PhD programs (and thus for letters for SSHRC funding). Students applying to graduate programs need multiple letters, as do graduate students moving into the academic job market, so when their numbers decline there’s an exponential decline in references. One reason I don’t have a lot of these requests this year is presumably that I’m not teaching in our own graduate program right now, so I’m not a highly visible resource for them, but I’ve also stopped actively encouraging students I know to apply for MA or PhD programs. This puts me somewhat at odds with some of my colleagues, who in response to the decline in applicants to our own MA and PhD programs (and thus a corresponding slump in admissions) have been urging the rest of us to do what we can to improve the numbers. If students approach me about graduate school on their own, I’m happy to talk over the pros and cons and support them if they are sure about their direction, but knowing what I know, I just can’t bring myself to recruit them. (On that topic, I thought this recent piece in University Affairs did a good job pointing out some problems with the narrative about how valuable PhDs are for non-academic jobs.) In any case, more of the letters I’ve been asked for in recent years have been for options such as Dal’s MLIS or MPA programs, as well as (as always) for law school and education degrees.

I haven’t started a new book since I finished Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, though I did reread Georgette Heyer’s Devil’s Cub last week after recommending it to a Twitter friend looking for a Valentine’s Day present for his wife. I hope she liked it! Sometimes I reread just the final third but this time I started from the beginning. It does take a little while for all the pieces of Heyer’s plot to get lined up, but once they’re in place it’s comedy gold, I think, and also pretty romantic–though YMMV depending on your tolerance for bad boy heroes. (But Mary is so having none of his self-indulgent nonsense!) It’s also good preparation for teaching Lord of Scoundrels, which will be up in Pulp Fiction in just a few weeks!

Then when I’ve had enough of feeling busy and just want to relax and be entertained, I’m watching Bones, which I am really enjoying. It’s strangely perky for a show about grisly deaths and serial killers! The plots can be kind of absurd (I just finished Season 3, and the whole Gormogon plot was pretty annoying, especially the twist ending!) but I like the camaraderie between Booth and Bones a lot. Although I have avoided more specific details, I do know that their relationship eventually changes, but for now what I like best about it is precisely that it is a partnership and not a romance. The idea that a man and a woman actually can be just colleagues and friends seems not just realistic and refreshing but, in this #metoo era, valuable.

And that’s how my February break looks from here! I’ve had busier ones, and snowier ones: this one looks like it might be a good balance of useful work and welcome diversion, with minimal shoveling.