I have to stop putting pressure on myself to make these update posts more than they have to be. When I started doing this, all I had in mind was opening up my classroom to anyone curious to know more about what English professors actually get up to–rather than fulminating against what they imagine we’re doing. The reality is both more mundane and (I think, anyway) more inspirational than people who think we should “ALL be flushed down the toilet” believe. I thought I could at least illustrate this widely misrepresented aspect of my professional life–the day to day (or at least week by week) effort I make to guide students towards being better (more thoughtful, more experienced, better informed) readers and writers–while also giving a sense of the kinds of books we read in my own classes and the kinds of discussions we have about them.

A lot of what I’ve written in this series is more or less straight reportage along those lines but then I began writing posts with more of a conceptual angle, and that seemed to raise the stakes. I still hope to do that, and often that’s actually what generates the teaching posts I look back on with the most satisfaction–but sometimes I just don’t have anything that profound to say! Lately that has made me hesitate about posting at all, and then I end up missing it. I like the process of it: as usual, I need to stop fretting so much about the product and just get on with it.

So, without more ado, here are some updates on my classes this week!

In Pulp Fiction we have just begun our discussions of Elmore Leonard’s Valdez Is Coming. I still feel as if I’m doing a lot of preparatory work in this class–maybe too much, I thought today, as I went on and on about issues of terminology and then the methods of close reading until by the time I actually tried to get the students involved in doing some close reading, they didn’t have much energy. That’s my fault: lesson learned! I also felt off my game the whole class: I was well prepared, in theory anyway, but the things I had planned to say didn’t come out that coherently, and once I started worrying about that and second-guessing myself, of course it just got harder to keep my focus! Self-consciousness is indeed, as Carlyle said, the beginning of disease: when things are going well I’m just absorbed in the discussion, with none of this meta-level anxiety. Of course, who really knows if that means I’m doing a better job then–or that today’s class really was in some way worse than usual! It was probably fine, and there are lots more chances to make up for it if it wasn’t.

I thought the discussion was a bit stuttering in Victorian Sensations this morning too–maybe that’s what set me up for my unease in the afternoon! We’ve been having very lively discussions of The Woman in White, but today was the first of our sessions focused on ‘critical approaches’: we read a selection of contemporary reviews, then a couple of modern critical essays, one from 1977 and one from 2006. My idea is that over the term these classes will add up to a mini-seminar in critical trends, though I haven’t chosen the readings that systematically–I just want us to engage with a range of different kinds of critical approaches and see how the conversation about these books has changed over time. That kind of meta-critical conversation is not as easy or familiar as talking directly about Marian’s subversion of gender norms or Count Fosco and the mysterious Brotherhood–and students understandably seemed less certain where or how to jump in. As always, a couple of students brought in discussion prompts for us, and these were very good. Next time I’m going to prepare a bit differently myself–particularly for the 19th-century material, which is (as we discussed) more diffuse and–to students more accustomed to working with very focused and analytical modern scholarship–more difficult to recognize or engage with as criticism, because the apparatus is much less explicit.

Friday is a very student-centered day: in Victorian Sensations we have our first group presentation, and I’m looking forward to that, as there’s usually so much intelligence and creativity on display, and then in Pulp Fiction it’s tutorials, which this week will be focused on a close reading activity.

I haven’t had much marking yet, beyond the reading journals I collect in random clusters in Pulp Fiction. That will change soon, though, and more generally I can already feel the term picking up speed. Next week we have Friday off for Munro Day, then it’s not long until Reading Week–and then it will feel like a mad rush to April and exams. But for now, it’s just one foot in front of the other. And that’s what’s up this week in my classes!

It’s week 2 of the winter term and things haven’t quite settled into a routine yet. One cause is my pet peeve, the too-long add-drop period: students are still joining my classes (which they can do online without so much as checking in with me first) even though they’ve already met four times each. The ripple effects of this are pretty significant for both instructors and students–but clearly we are never going to persuade the administrative Powers That Be (who are quite as inscrutable as their namesakes in Angel) that this system is pedagogically unsound, so I should probably stop complaining about it.

The other unsettling factor is winter, which has taken on its more accustomed form this week: after several spells of either fiercely cold (but dry) days and unseasonably warm (but very rainy) days, last night we had our first real dump of snow, and there’s more in the forecast for tomorrow. I am so happy that next winter term I’ll be on sabbatical! And the winter term after that (amazingly enough) I will no longer be chauffeuring Maddie to high school, so I will have much more flexibility about exactly when I venture out in the morning.

However! These various sources of stress aside, the business of the term is underway and really, as far as I can tell, it’s actually going pretty smoothly so far. In Pulp Fiction I’m done with warm-up material and we’ve started our unit on Westerns. Yesterday was mostly about context–the history and myth of the American West and the origins and conventions of the Western. The reading I assigned was Sherman Alexie’s “My Heroes Have Never Been Cowboys”: from the discussion we had, and from the reading journals the students submitted, most of them seem to have found his critique and subversion of Western tropes engaging and thought-provoking. It’s also a good text for introducing the importance of point of view, which we’ll want to be self-conscious about throughout the term. Tomorrow we’ll be talking about Dorothy Johnson’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” which has many elements of a classic western but takes some unexpected turns. We’ll work through two more short stories before starting our main text, Valdez Is Coming, next week. So far the energy seems good in the classroom: I really hope that persists, as last year I really struggled to get much participation. It’s a lot more fun for everyone when the discussion is lively, and as I’ve been really emphasizing in my own comments so far, English is a discussion-based discipline (yes, I’m going to bring up “coduction” eventually), so talking and listening are also key ways to hone the relevant skills.

In Victorian Sensations we are also done with our warm-up material, though there was less of it there as it’s a 4th-year class. I set things up for the term with one lecture on “the rise of the novel” and some specific features of sensation fiction. This year there are a lot of students in the seminar who have taken at least one of my 19th-century fiction courses, which means some of this was review for them, but a little reinforcement never hurts, and this brings those without that previous experience in the genre up to speed. With that preliminary work out of the way, we’ve begun our discussions of The Woman in White. What a lot of fun the novel is! I haven’t taught it (and thus haven’t reread it) since 2012, and I am reveling in its twists and turns and excesses and absurdities, from Walter’s pathetic pining after Laura–the perfect and, as students quickly concluded, perfectly dull representative of ideal Victorian womanhood–to her indomitable half-sister Marian–Magnificant Marian, as the effusively charming and sinister Count Fosco calls her. Here too the energy seems good so far, with plenty of people already chiming in: this is not just desirable but essential in a seminar, of course, so I’m glad to see it. I really enjoy the more open-ended style of a seminar class–although I find it takes every bit as much concentration, and is every bit as tiring, as a lecture class precisely because I’m not as much in control of where the discussion goes but I have to be very responsive to it.

So here we are: well launched on another season. There are administrative wheels turning as well, which means meetings and paperwork, and I hope to get some writing done in the interstices, but even more, right now, I hope to get some better reading done–besides the reading I’m doing for class, of course. I’ve just started Dr. Edith Vane and the Hares of Crawley Hall, which looks just about perfect for this time of term.

We’re hunkered down bracing for the big storm that is working its way up the Eastern seaboard. It isn’t clear yet whether Halifax will get much snow or mostly rain and freezing rain, but the biggest threat seems to be strong winds and thus power outages. Happily, the school board cancelled classes preemptively and classes at Dalhousie don’t start until Monday, so none of us has anywhere to go. [January 5 update: Our power went out almost as soon as I pressed ‘publish’ on this post and we just got it back. It got pretty cold in the house but otherwise we got off easy–and there was no measurable snow in Halifax at all, so no shoveling!]

I also don’t have much I have to do, as with the forecast in mind, I went in to campus the last couple of days and finished up most of my materials for the new term. My syllabi and Brightspace sites were already mostly done: I prefer to chip away at work over the break rather than have a big panic when it’s over and everything needs to be ready in a hurry. (I know this is contrary to the oft-heard advice to academics to take a “real” break, and I certainly understand the way our work’s porous boundaries can become debilitating, but this is what works best for me.)

So what lies ahead? I have just two courses again this term, and they are at opposite ends of our undergraduate curriculum, so that will keep me alert. I have taught them both before, but as always, I hope I can teach them better this time! One is Pulp Fiction, which I am offering for just the second time. I haven’t changed much since last year’s iteration: individual classes (as all teachers know) develop their own personalities and that can skew one’s sense of what readings, discussions, and assignments worked or didn’t work. That doesn’t mean I didn’t learn anything last time, of course, or that I haven’t changed anything at all.

One specific innovation–a modest but, I hope, a valuable one–is that this year I am going to take some time to talk explicitly about note-taking strategies. Particularly for class meetings that are discussion based, I often get the sense that students do not know what to write down. Many clearly do not record anything at all, while those that think of themselves as conscientious note-takers often seem to be trying to transcribe every word. I’ve been reading up on the Cornell system and I think it’s easily adapted to the kinds of class sessions I typically run, so that’s what I’m going to focus on. Once I’ve gone over it, I will try to make it a common practice to take the last few minutes of a class to have students literally compare notes. (The image here is from the JMU website; many universities advocate or adapt this format.)

Another minor innovation is a new policy I’m experimenting with to help students who have a crush of overlapping deadlines. Pulp Fiction is a pretty big class (90 students) so it isn’t practical to be endlessly flexible about when our major assignments are due–plus ultimately it doesn’t help students to be stuck working on older material well after the class as a whole has moved on–but sometimes there are cases when a day or two would make a big difference to a student’s workload and stress level, so I thought I would try to formalize a way for them to ask for it. Under this new policy, students can request a penalty-free extension on a paper if they can show that they have another paper or a midterm due on the same day. (They already have options covering illness or other emergencies.) It’s an incremental change but one that I hope will be helpful for the students who need it while keeping things fair and transparent. There have always been students who have asked for extensions or chosen to accept a late penalty in this kind of situation, so this makes clear what principle will guide the process.

The overall structure of the course will be the same, though, as will the readings, which means I can draw on the notes I had to develop more or less from scratch last year. We’re starting with some general discussion about how and why “pulp” and “genre” fiction get differentiated from “literary” fiction. Then we’ll work through our examples of Westerns, mysteries, and romances, with Valdez Is Coming, The Maltese Falcon, and Lord of Scoundrels complemented by a selection of short fiction and, for Westerns, one poem (Sherman Alexie’s “My Heroes Have Never Been Cowboys”). The only one of the readings I really had second thoughts about was The Maltese Falcon, not because it wasn’t perfect for the course but because it is the only one of our three novels easy to cheat about. This year I will take that into account in the paper topics I assign about it. (Sadly, that means nobody gets to write about Brigid O’Shaughnessy as a femme fatale.)

My other course is a 4th-year seminar on Victorian sensation fiction. I have taught it several times before but not recently–in fact, to my surprise, I realized I haven’t taught it since 2009! I have, of course, assigned a couple of the key texts we’ll be reading in it for other courses: I have often covered both The Woman in White and Lady Audley’s Secret in 19th-Century Fiction. Even The Woman in White hasn’t been on my syllabus since 2012, though. I started rereading it yesterday and I am really looking forward to discussing it with my students. I’ve never taught Ellen Wood’s East Lynne in any other course: it is such a strange novel! In previous versions of this course the fourth sensation novel on the reading list was Braddon’s Aurora Floyd, but I always thought it was less than ideal to have two novels by the same author, however different they are, so this year I have substituted Rhoda Broughton’s Cometh Up As a Flower. Yes, when I read it this summer I wasn’t entirely sold on it–but as is so often the case, it got more interesting as I read and thought about it, and it is refreshingly unlike the other three. I think it will provoke good discussion. We will wrap things up with Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith, one of my favorite novels and always a class favorite as well. There was a terrible time last summer when it looked as if we wouldn’t be able to find a Canadian distributor for it, but our diligent bookstore buyer found an available stash and it’s ordered and ready.

In many ways, I’m looking forward to the term. There are only two real sources of anxiety (besides the usual anticipatory stage fright). One is just that it’s winter, which always brings complications. The other is that it’s a bargaining year and negotiations between the administration and the faculty association seem to be dead ended. Last time around, they were right up against the strike deadline when a deal was finally reached, and it was very hard on everyone but especially the students. I’m not in the faculty association myself (technically I am appointed to the University of King’s College, an affiliated but independent and non-unionized institution). My classes are all Dalhousie classes, though, and if there is a strike we’d almost certainly all be locked out in any case. The parties are heading to conciliation: we can all hope things get sorted quickly and reasonably.

It’s all done: final essays have been returned, final exams are marked, Excel has worked its (carefully supervised) magic, and I’ve submitted my final grades for Fall 2017. As usual, it’s a relief and also an anti-climax, as one of the first things that happens after you click the button to “approve grades” for one term is that you start thinking about what needs to be done in preparation for the next term!

Still, it’s the in-between time now, and that means I can stop and breathe and think for a bit, including about what went well in my fall courses and what didn’t, and what I might be able to do about it next time around. My winter term courses are quite different from my fall ones in both size and objectives, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing I can carry forward to them, and then next fall I’m teaching 19th-Century Fiction again (though the Dickens to Hardy version), so it’s worth contemplating whether things there are working the way they should.

My first thoughts, though, are about Close Reading, which I am not teaching next year, and which frankly I rather hope I don’t have to teach again, at least for a while. It’s not that I don’t believe it’s a valuable course. In some respects I believe it is the most useful one I teach: that is certainly what many students over the years have reported–though, and this matters, they often reach this conclusion after they’ve completed it, when they discover ways that the close attention we paid to textual details pays off in their work for other courses. I am also still satisfied with the conceptual framework I developed for it, which emphasizes both the literary and the ethical implications of an author’s choices. We’re always trying to get at the difference it makes to say things one way rather than another–or to say one thing rather than another thing. This can mean minute attention to individual words, brainstorming about the political dimensions of a particular organizing metaphor, or discussions about the implications of writing in first-person or third-person, just for example. These discussions can get really interesting!

It seemed harder than usual to carry the class along with me this year, though, especially when we were working through Middlemarch: though I know at least a few students were deeply engaged with it (one even described her experience of reading it as “life-changing”), a lot of them at least gave the impression that it was an unwelcome chore. I have taught Middlemarch a lot over the years, and there is always some resistance, even some resentment, about it: I’m used to that, and generally just carry on. My impression that it was worse this time may be mistaken: I might have been projecting my own anxiety or defensiveness about assigning it onto the students, who may actually have been fine with it–but that it was so hard for me to tell how they were doing became its own source of stress, which led to various forms of  overcompensation, including lecturing too much because discussion seemed to be flagging. I still think Middlemarch is a great text to use for a course with these purposes, but it is also true that students signing up for Close Reading have not self-selected for reading long Victorian novels the way students in 19th-Century Fiction have. If I ever do teach the course again, I might reconsider.

Having said that, I have to acknowledge that discussion flagged a fair bit in 19th-Century Fiction this term too, especially towards the end of term. I know I am not the only one in my department who thinks that our inordinately long fall break made things worse instead of better: students did not come back refreshed and invigorated but rather seemed deflated, and the time remaining seemed very short and hectic. I blame myself, though, for not having taken action earlier to break what eventually became a fixed pattern of limited participation. I had unusually lively groups last year in both of my Victorian classes, and that made me overly sanguine about just letting things take their course without deliberate strategies (simple stuff, like pair-and-share exercises or break-out group discussions) to make sure more people were actively involved. When I finally did do some of that, it was really too late to change the overall classroom dynamic. Once or twice, I also let my frustration show, and that is never a good idea! After all, who wants to speak up when the prof is visibly cranky? Next fall I will intervene earlier (and more cheerfully) if it starts to seem that a handful of students are going to carry everyone else.

Who knows: that might be a lesson I’ll need to apply sooner than next fall! I’m teaching Victorian Sensations this coming winter term, and a seminar is even more dependent on widespread participation. There will be a lot of familiar faces in it, for me and thus presumably also for them, so I hope that makes everyone more comfortable about pitching in. The readings are such a lot of fun that surely everyone will want to jump in! But you never know. I’m teaching Pulp Fiction again next term and last year I expected a lot of discussion given the provocative and highly entertaining readings I’d chosen for that class–but no matter what tricks I tried it felt like pulling teeth to get students to speak up. Was it me? Was it them? It was both, probably: there’s always that mysterious alchemy that gives every class its own personality. I so hope that this year’s group gets a bit more excited!

Something else I’ve been thinking about (and again it is very hard to know if my impression of what was going on reflects what was really happening) is that this year students seemed to struggle more than usual to keep up with the readings. I also had an unusually high proportion of students just struggling this term, one consequence of which is that I will have an unprecedented number of assignments coming in next month from students who were unable to complete their courses on schedule. The university has protocols for these situations and of course I’m happy to support students who need them; it’s just striking how many more there were than usual. Primary duties of empathy aside, the increase in these cases raises administrative challenges for me: I already realized this term that I need a more formal system to track accommodation requests, as there are many more of them than there used to be (and thus more forms to fill out and more exams to drop off early and pick up again), and I’ll also need a better plan than usual to follow up on this unfinished work.

I mentioned before that it seemed like kind of a difficult term; this post dwells on the reasons why. I don’t want to leave the wrong impression, though. A lot of the time classes clearly went well, or at least just fine, and despite my own nagging concerns during the term I’ve had some very generous feedback from students since classes ended, which is always encouraging as well as a salutary reminder of something a frequent reader of Middlemarch should hardly need to be told: things often look quite different from someone else’s perspective.

Today is the last day of fall term classes. I’ve felt a bit confused all day because while it is a Tuesday really, we had Monday classes, thanks to a scheme some committee cooked up to “equalize” the exact number of days every class meets. (Next term the same geniuses have ordered that we have thee “Fridays” in a row, one actually on a Friday, then two more on the following Monday and Tuesday. You tell me how much sense that makes if your Friday meetings are usually tutorials…)

Anyway, today was a faux Monday, so I had my usual morning and afternoon classes. In Close Reading, I ended with a heartfelt peroration about the value of close reading, not (just) for literary analysis but for life. Then in Nineteenth-Century Fiction it was exam review time. With our class meetings over with, we all move on now to the “essays and exams” phase. I have one set of unit tests still to mark, then papers come in on Friday from my Close Reading students (who have no final exam). The two students who chose the final essay option for 19th-Century Fiction turn those in soon after, and then the rest of that class writes their final exam next Wednesday. I feel lucky this term that neither of my classes is particularly large (both are around 40) — it will be a push to get it all done in a timely way, but it won’t be as overwhelming as when I have groups of 90 (as I will next term for Pulp Fiction).

It has felt like a somewhat difficult term, though I can’t really explain why and it is probably too soon to reflect on it anyway, as we aren’t, after all, quite done. I had another reminder today, too, that you can’t always tell when you are making a positive difference in someone’s life just by turning up and doing the best you can to show why the work you’re all engaged in is both interesting and important. So for now I’ll just press on, buoyed by that heartening message, and just keep doing the best I can until it’s really all over for this round.

In this brief lull before the papers and exams come in, I do get to unwind a bit. I might even get a little good reading done! I started Elizabeth Taylor’s A View of the Harbour a week or so ago and had to put it aside as I was having trouble concentrating: I was really liking it, though, so I’d like to return to it. I also need to finish a book review that has been hanging over my head: I’ve been plugging away at it over the last couple of evenings and it is about half done now. I’d like to do a little Christmas shopping too, because by the time the marking is in and done, there won’t be much time left, and rushing never seems very festive.

I was about to open this post by saying “it has been a tough week” when I realized it’s only Monday! On the other hand, it has been a challenging week if we start it back at last Monday, and since I haven’t posted here since then, I think that’s fair enough.

It’s nothing in particular making things difficult: just the usual end-of-term craziness. I had four different assignments to grade last week. In 19th-Century Fiction, the students who’d opted to write their first paper on Jane Eyre had turned those in, while the students who’d opted to write theirs on North and South submitted their proposals; and most of the class also wrote our unit test on North and South. Then in Close Reading the students who had opted to do their second assignment on Middlemarch (which was most of them) turned those in. I’m pleased to say that as of this morning I had returned all of these assignments, meaning I’ve cleared the deck for the North and South papers coming in on Wednesday, after which nothing else is due until the Great Expectations test next week.

I know I’m not the only one feeling a bit overwhelmed: my students are too. I’m doing what I can to keep up my own spirits and bring a lot of energy to class, but I admit I faltered today when all my efforts to spark discussion of Great Expectations seemed to dead end. I’ve never struggled to get people talking about Wemmick and his Aged Parent before! Things have been a bit quieter than I’m used to in 19th-Century Fiction for a while now, and today after class I was worrying that I’ve made it worse by talking more myself to compensate, and then by showing my frustration, which is always a bad move. I haven’t felt this stymied in class since the last time I taught Waverley–which was the time I decided to stage an “intervention” and see if we could bust out of our collective slump. It worked pretty well, and I think I need to try something similar on Wednesday, if probably less elaborate: we have only two sessions left on Great Expectations and it will be a real shame if they all go the way today’s did.

In Close Reading we are nearly finished with The Remains of the Day. Discussion is going better there: I always feel that I get a bit of a bump just because a lot of students are so relieved to be done with Middlemarch that Remains looks especially good to them! But of course it is a genuinely great novel and full of artful and important things to talk about. I should say, too, that although I felt at times that as a group we were struggling with Middlemarch, I did hear from a couple of students who appreciated the novel a lot, which I found very encouraging, as I did the excellent work a number of them did on their assignments. I do think it is worth giving students the opportunity to read it and think about it even if they don’t enjoy it: I try every trick I can think of to boost their pleasure in it, but ultimately a literature class is a place to learn, after all. I have resolved, however, that the next time I teach Middlemarch it will be in a 19th-century fiction class where nobody can reasonably express surprise or resentment at being assigned a very long book.

It’s going to stay pretty busy for the next week, and then the pace changes as daily classes end and we move on to final essays and exams. I usually steal a little time for Christmas shopping before these last assignments come in, as once they do they have to be my top priority until grades are filed. I’ve also got an outstanding review to finish: I’ve read the books (two of them, on Golden Age crime fiction) but my notes and draft have been malingering because I’ve just been too tired to concentrate on writing after my other work is done. When my brain is otherwise too addled to use, I’ve been working on this website, especially on updating my blog indices so the links go to addresses on this domain. It occurred to me last night that this is barely half the battle, as so many of my posts have internal links as well…wish me luck! And if you know of any shortcuts to getting this stuff done, do tell.

I was talking with some colleagues last night and we all agreed that it is going to be hard to regain the momentum we’ve lost in our classes after this unusually long fall break–it’s extended because today is a holiday “in lieu of Remembrance Day.” A fall break itself is a relatively new thing: last year was the first year Dalhousie worked it into the schedule (adding a day or two at the beginning and end of the semester to make up for the “lost” time). I was (indeed, I am) a bit skeptical about it in some ways, especially pedagogically, but it certainly has been nice to have my schedule ease up for a bit, and I’m sure our students have been grateful too to have the day-to-day pressure lifted. But when we go back, will we find ourselves restored and energized, ready to throw ourselves back into the work that remains, or will we be sluggish and struggle to get going again?

I am certainly hoping that students in Close Reading have used some of their extra time to catch up on reading Middlemarch. It seemed pretty clear to me before the break that only a handful of them were really in the game during class discussions. I don’t know if the proportion of students who are engaged with the novel is actually that different from last year, but it has felt harder to me to draw people out, or in, and naturally I have been brooding about why. Is it me? Is it them? It’s both, no doubt–there’s always that mysterious classroom alchemy. (Maybe I can blame our windowless concrete block room, too, just a bit? It does have such a gloomy aspect.) The resistance I often experience to the novel in Close Reading is also, I think, partly a function of the class being one none of the students chose in order to read Middlemarch in particular (or any other 19th-century fiction): it’s a program requirement, a hoop to jump through. When I assign it in the ‘Dickens to Hardy’ class, at least nobody can claim they didn’t expect to read any long books! I do sometimes point out to students in Close Reading who say Middlemarch is too long to read in a one-term class that in my other one-term class it is one of five Victorian novels . . .

Anyway,  I hope those who needed it have take this opportunity to catch up, and that our  class discussion on Wednesday, which will be our last on the novel, shows the results. I’m keeping my own lecture notes for that day to a minimum to make sure there’s enough time and flexibility for the things they want to talk about. After that, we will be hurtling towards the end of term: their Middlemarch assignments are due next Monday, when we will also be starting The Remains of the Day, which is our last reading and, with Middlemarch, the subject of their term papers.

In Austen to Dickens, we’ve got a couple more sessions on North and South – which I also hope students will have caught up on! Then it’s time for Great Expectations, which is our final book in that class. The students who chose Jane Eyre for their first paper will be submitting them this week: there are a lot of them (for some mysterious reason, Vanity Fair was not as popular a choice!), so I’ll be busy marking these and then the North and South tests and papers, and then we are on to proposals for final essays and/or preparation for the final exam.

The end of term always feels like a mad rush for all of us. We have  had such a mild fall that I think it added to the illusion that we were somehow still just starting up: both the time change (which means dark afternoons) and the precipitous drop in temperatures have shifted us abruptly into more wintry conditions. From the relative quiet of our last day off, it’s hard to imagine getting it all done, but somehow we always do!

I am, mostly, but today I had my doubts about my students, many of whom seemed pretty tired and some of whom I’m reasonably certain were also (probably not unrelatedly) too behind on the reading to have anything to say in class.

That’s OK: it happens, especially around this time of term. It is startling to realize how far through the term we are, actually. We had an unusually warm October, and I think all the pleasant, sunny weather contributed to the sense that we were still in the opening phases. But here we are on November 1, and by the time we get back from our protracted study break (all of next week, plus the following Monday ‘in lieu of Remembrance Day’) we will be hurtling towards the end of it.

So what are we keeping up with? Well, in Close Reading we are working our way through Middlemarch. By today’s class everyone was supposed to have read to the end of Book V, which includes my favorite chapter (42) as well as the chapter in which Casaubon asks Dorothea to promise that if he dies, she will “carry out my wishes … avoid doing what I should deprecate, and apply yourself to do what I should desire.” It’s a painful moment for Dorothea, who is confronted with an impossible moral choice. (See for here for a more detailed commentary on that choice and its tangled ethics.)

I was worried going into class this morning because I spent most of Monday’s class talking at the students instead of with them. Sometimes when I’m teaching this novel, which I love so much and know so well, I have trouble getting out of my way — and out of theirs! I had been fretting, leading up to Monday’s class, because of the long break we’re going to have before we come back and finish our work on the novel, and I overcompensated. (In my defense, I think I did a pretty good job explaining the novel’s intricate structure with the help of my “Skwish” toy.) Today, however, I asked them to generate topics for discussion and then we just worked through the ones we had time for, with some left over for Friday’s class. One of the things we talked about was that terrible promise and why she should or shouldn’t (or, must or must not) say yes to it; one of the things I was asked to do next time was explain the Raffles connection, which I will certainly do.

So that class went better than expected, but then my afternoon class went a bit worse: participation was pretty minimal (though everything that was proffered was really useful) and there was a lot of that whole “look down intently at your book every time she asks a question” thing that clearly signals “don’t ask me! don’t even look at me!” Again, that’s fine–up to a point! Everyone’s busy and reading for my class can’t always be everyone’s top priority, even if it is North and South. I was disappointed, though, because usually it’s a class favorite and today’s was a good installment, taking us right through the strike to the remarkable scene on the steps of Marlborough Mill:

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.

We didn’t actually discuss that scene today, partly because it was clear a lot of them weren’t ready, but we did lay the groundwork, talking about Margaret’s character and her difficult transition from her idyllic country home to the bustle and jostle of Milton-Northern, and about her ability, as a sympathetic outsider, to bridge the gap between the classes caused by misunderstanding and (as they see it) antagonistic interests. She’s not perfect herself, so we are looking at how her Milton experience begins to change her from someone who takes her own preeminence for granted and disdains “shoppy people” to someone eager to be engaged with the industrial world that initially horrifies her. The reeducation is mutual, of course, so eventually (when everyone’s caught up) we will also talk about the changes wrought in Mr. Thornton by Margaret’s influence.

This is just our classroom work, of course. For all of us there are also papers and midterms, and we’re getting into reference letter season, and I’m reading a PhD thesis chapter, and there are committee meetings … I admit I was a bit scornful about having a fall reading week when it was first discussed, but I’m looking forward to the break in the routine, not least because on top of everything else I have some writing deadlines coming up! It’s busy, but mostly it’s a good kind of busy.

In both of my classes this week we are focusing on young women making mistakes. It’s interesting for me (and I hope also for the students who are in both classes) to compare the very different ways their novels approach their rather different errors.

Both of them do wrong things for right reasons. Jane Eyre, for starters, is angry, rebellious, vengeful, even violent, in her early days at Gateshead Hall, but she is this way because she is miserable and unfairly treated and yearns for both justice and love. When she gets to Lowood, she continues to resist injustice and insist on her right to strike back against her oppressors: “you are good to those who are good to you,” she tells her new friend Helen Burns,

It is all I ever desire to be. If people were always kind and obedient to those who are cruel and unjust, the wicked people would have it all their own way: they would never feel afraid, and so they would never alter, but would grow worse and worse. When we are struck at without a reason, we should strike back again very hard; I am sure we should — so hard as to teach the person who struck us never to do it again.

But Helen counsels her to “read the New Testament, and observe what Christ says, and how He acts; make His word your rule, and His conduct your example.” “You will change your mind, I hope, when you grow older,” she tells Jane; “as yet you are but a little untaught girl.” Jane never does stop fighting for what she thinks is right, but she learns to control (or repress) her anger, and we know she takes Helen’s lesson to heart when adult Jane describes Helen’s grave: “now a grey marble tablet marks the spot, inscribed with her name, and the word ‘Resurgam.'” One formal aspect of the novel that is easy to miss on a first reading, because the narrative of her childhood is so gripping and feels so immediate, is precisely that retrospective aspect: it would be our mistake to identify too completely with young Jane, to think she’s in the right–just as we would be replicating Jane’s own error if we didn’t see, well before she flees Thornfield, that her (initial) relationship with Mr. Rochester is all kinds of wrong. (If she read more novels, she too would quickly recognize the split chestnut tree as a warning sign!)

Dorothea Brooke’s errors are easier to spot, because George Eliot gives us not just Dorothea’s perspective but that of everyone around her and, most important, of the narrator. It mystifies every person in the novel that Dorothea chooses to marry Mr. Casaubon: they all believe that it’s a terrible mistake. We understand why she marries him, though, because we know all about her, meaning not just her desire to lead a spiritually significant life but also her impetuous nature and her tendency to interpret things according to her own desires. Of course, that last bit is at once her greatest failing and the one thing we all have in common with her, as the narrator will take pains to teach us. We are given more information in Middlemarch, but we are also kept at more of an emotional distance–both formal choices that serve the novel’s larger purposes.

In my experience, students sometimes find it frustrating that Dorothea is not more “relatable”: the things she wants are strange to them, and thus her decision to marry Mr. Casaubon just seems perverse, rather than something to sympathize with or pity her for. Also (and they aren’t wrong about this) they find her annoying–inconsistent, prone to displays of superiority (“How can one ever do anything nobly Christian, living among people with such petty thoughts?”). Working through this initial response is usually good for helping students see some key things about reading the novel–for instance, that you aren’t supposed to sympathize only with people you like, or who are like you, and that Dorothea too has some work to do, especially in learning to understand and sympathize with Mr. Casaubon. Like Jane, she will grow into greater wisdom. Also, as the students read on they will probably come to see her strangeness as a good thing. It is not actually better to be Celia and fit in than it is to be Dorothea and stand out, even though Celia never makes mistakes (not even when she gets the shocking news of Dorothea’s engagement–“The paper man she was making would have had his leg injured, but for her habitual care of whatever she held in her hands”) and Dorothea makes a lot of them.

The 2016 U. S. election has given some books I regularly teach new resonance–and not in a good way. In March 2016, Hard  Times was indeed “for these times,” with Mr. Bounderby running for President:

He was a rich man: banker, merchant, manufacturer, and what not. A big, loud man, with a stare, and a metallic laugh. A man made out of a coarse material, which seemed to have been stretched to make so much of him. A man with a great puffed head and forehead, swelled veins in his temples, and such a strained skin to his face that it seemed to hold his eyes open, and lift his eyebrows up. A man with a pervading appearance on him of being inflated like a balloon, and ready to start. A man who could never sufficiently vaunt himself a self-made man. A man who was always proclaiming, through that brassy speaking-trumpet of a voice of his, his old ignorance and his old poverty. A man who was the Bully of humility.

“Remember,” I wrote sadly this February, “when the possibility that he would actually win…seemed absurd?” In the wake of Trump’s victory last November, Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day felt (as its author intended) like a cautionary tale, one we can only hope it isn’t too late to heed.

This week I am teaching Vanity Fair, and now it’s Sir Pitt Crawley who seems unhappily familiar:

Vanity Fair — Vanity Fair! Here was a man, who could not spell, and did not care to read — who had the habits and the cunning of a boor: whose aim in life was pettifogging: who never had a taste, or emotion, or enjoyment, but what was sordid and foul; and yet he had rank, and honours, and power, somehow: and was a dignitary of the land, and a pillar of the state. He was high sheriff, and rode in a golden coach. Great ministers and statesmen courted him; and in Vanity Fair he had a higher place than the most brilliant genius or spotless virtue.

Vanity Fair isn’t really about what a bad man Sir Pitt Crawley is, or even what a bad woman Becky Sharp is. It’s at least as much about their enablers: the toadies and sycophants and patsies and stooges who either actively or passively make it possible for bullies and boors to rule the world.

Yesterday was our last class hour on the novel, and I used part of it to lay out the argument I make here: that the novel isn’t really about its characters, but in fact is primarily about us, its readers, the ones who might rise to the moral challenge the novel sets them of asking ourselves (before it’s too late!) how far we are complicit in the evils and injustices, both petty or grandiose, of the world we live in. Nobody in Vanity Fair is without vanity; even the most loving and loyal characters are prone to delusions, or are selfish even in their devotion, and their generosity does not excuse (and often exacerbates) their reluctance to face harsh truths or take decisive action.

If there’s something disheartening about such a grim evaluation of our moral lives, there’s also something bracing about it, as there is about Dickens’s closing injunction: “Dear reader!” he says, “It rests with you and me,” and Thackeray’s implication is the same–the kind of world we live in is ultimately up to us. It’s not that we can individually fix everything that’s wrong: Dickens does put a fair amount of faith in personal actions, but Vanity Fair shows us a tangled web of interconnected systems of wrongdoing, including sexism, racism, class antagonism and snobbery, and colonialism. Still, all these “isms” are embodied in individuals with at some agency, and lest we think there’s no point even trying to exert ourselves against their systemic force, we get Lady Jane Crawley, née Sheepshanks,  who takes a decisive stand against our heroine Rebecca:

“Upon-my word, my love, I think you do Mrs. Crawley injustice,” Sir Pitt said; at which speech Rebecca was vastly relieved. “Indeed I believe her to be —”

“To be what?” cried out Lady Jane, her clear voice thrilling and, her heart beating violently as she spoke. “To be a wicked woman — a heartless mother, a false wife? She never loved her dear little boy, who used to fly here and tell me of her cruelty to him. She never came into a family but she strove to bring misery with her and to weaken the most sacred affections with her wicked flattery and falsehoods. She has deceived her husband, as she has deceived everybody; her soul is black with vanity, worldliness, and all sorts of crime. I tremble when I touch her. I keep my children out of her sight.”

“Lady Jane!” cried Sir Pitt, starting up, “this is really language —” “I have been a true and faithful wife to you, Sir Pitt,” Lady Jane continued, intrepidly; “I have kept my marriage vow as I made it to God and have been obedient and gentle as a wife should. But righteous obedience has its limits, and I declare that I will not bear that — that woman again under my roof; if she enters it, I and my children will leave it. She is not worthy to sit down with Christian people. You — you must choose, sir, between her and me”; and with this my Lady swept out of the room, fluttering with her own audacity, and leaving Rebecca and Sir Pitt not a little astonished at it.

Though Rebecca is not one to be kept down forever, Lady Jane’s judgment prevails to the extent that Rebecca never is welcomed again into her house, and Lady Jane’s influence helps point the next generation towards a future that’s at least not altogether discouraging. If only more people in a position of power today would show a fraction of Lady Jane’s courage and take a decisive stand against the false and heartless person currently imperiling the world with his vanity…

I’ve been thinking that another novel for our times is Winifred Holtby’s South Riding. It has none of the Victorian Sage’s tendency to prophesize and declaim from on high: instead, it has a bracingly practical focus on what ordinary people without extraordinary power can actually do locally to make things work a little better. We don’t all have what it takes (personally or logistically) to be a literal politician, but one thing all of the novels remind us is that the root of the English word “politics” is the Greek word polis, which Merriam-Webster explains means “city or community”: “Words from Greek polis and polītēs have something to do with cities or communities or the citizens who live in them.” It really is all about us.