This Week in My Classes (October 10, 2008)

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Thankfully (which is appropriate, as we head into the Thanksgiving weekend), things were a bit quiet in my classes this week–for me, at least. The students in my intro class are working on their first formal papers, so we spent Monday’s class talking about how to develop a good thesis and argument for their assignment and then ‘worked’ a couple of sample passages from Night so that they could see how to put the literary vocabulary they’ve been learning to use. They had a draft due on Wednesday, and we did a peer-editing session. While I always hope they find the editing itself valuable, one of my main goals is quite practical: students often (for good and bad reasons) don’t start serious work on an assignment until very close to the due date, and then they print it out and hand it in as soon as it reaches the required word count. By forcing them to do a draft a week before the final deadline, I’ve given them the gift of time to rethink and revise. Many of them won’t take advantage of this, but those who do will be glad. Today I set aside our class hour for individual meetings–also a good opportunity for them, and I admit it’s nice not to have to be ready with lecture material for 9:30 a.m.

In my 19th-century fiction class, we wrapped up Vanity Fair on Wednesday. I offered up my theory of the novel as a deathbed revelation for its readers: it is full of characters who realize too late, if at all, the vanity of their lives (“all of us are striving,” as Lord Steyne says, “for what is not worth the having”). If only they had read Vanity Fair! The gist of my argument is in the post I made at The Valve a week or so ago. I handed around an excerpt from Robert Bell’s well-known criticism that “More light and air would have rendered [the novel] more agreeable and more healthy,” along with Thackeray’s response that making the novel lighter and airier would have defeated his purpose of leaving everyone dissatisfied. Dissatisfaction (as I also argue about George Eliot’s problematic endings, especially The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch) is essential if one of your goals is to stimulate your reader to moral or social action. What possible call is there, after all, at the end of Pride and Prejudice, to change anything in yourself or the world? Lizzie is the best and she gets the best guy and the best house. OK, Lydia’s stuck on the margins with Wickham, but she deserves it…and so on. But when the ending disappoints, we are prodded to asky why that is the best that could happen, who’s to blame, and what part we might have played in it. About half of my students are writing papers on Vanity Fair (the other half already wrote on Persuasion), so I set today’s class hour aside for consultations as well. Strategic, don’t you think, given how unlikely good attendance is on a Friday afternoon before a long weekend? And in fact, several of them did come by for advice. Next week, on to Jane Eyre–dedicated to Thackeray, which is always worth some class discussion, given how dissimilar the novels are.

Dear CBC Radio 2,

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Thanks! Now that all the music you play during the times I used to listen to you (morning drives to work and school, afternoons home from work and school) is pretty much ****, and because I have only a cassette deck in my car, I’ve had to go back into my stash of old tapes, most of which are recordings from old broadcasts of ‘Saturday Afternoon at the Opera.’ Recently I’ve been playing a 1990 performance of Semiramide with Lella Cuberli, Marilyn Horne, and Samuel Ramey in the big parts. As a lifelong Joan Sutherland fan, I tend to find most other performers disappointing in roles like Semiramide, and Cuberli certainly has nothing like Sutherland’s ability to throw off miraculous flights of coloratura. But she’s an energetic singer with a rich enough tone to stand up to Horne’s big voice. Horne (though not, as the NYT reviewer points out, in her prime by this time) is still spectacular, and of course Ramey booms out his part with his usual resonance and vigor. You never played much opera except on Saturday afternoons anyway, so now that you don’t play much else that I want to listen to, there will be some compensation in dusting off these old goodies. Still, if you want to restore your old shows (and let Tom Allen get back to his old form), that would be great.

Sincerely,

A Former Listener in Nova Scotia

P.S. Some of us are working between 10 and 3. People who aren’t retired like classical music too, actually. And kids, who are in school during those hours (and not, sadly, learning much about classical music there).

P.P.S. If anyone wants to hear a bit of Semiramide, I found a great clip at YouTube of Sutherland and Horne singing the Act III duet.

Weekend Miscellany

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For some reason, this weekend has felt particularly miscellaneous–something about the combination of a clutter of family chores and projects (groceries, laundry, a trip to the library, a swimming lesson, a chess tournament) and a clutter of ‘homework’ (tests and reading responses to mark, handouts and worksheets and overheads and lecture notes to prepare, emails to answer, and of course books to read). And yet there’s still time to look around a bit, and even read a little just for fun.

I’ve been really enjoying the back issues I ordered of The Reader. I got No. 17 (especially on women writers) and No. 27 (“The Reader Tries for Happiness”); highlights for me include, in No. 17, Josie Billington’s “Why Read Mrs Gaskell Today?” and Jane Davis’s “Letters from the Hidden Life” (primarily on reading George Eliot’s letters,” in No. 20, Raymond Tallis’s “Concerning Saturday: Does Implausibility Matter?” (though I disagree with his criticisms), and in both, the “Ask the Reader” Q&A section. I’ve just downloaded No. 30 and look forward especially to reading Philip Pullman on “The Storyteller’s Responsibility” and Tessa Hadley on “Crying at Novels” (download it for yourself here).

I just finished Rachel Cusk’s Arlington Park. I’d like to write more about it than I have time for, as it raised many questions for me–some of them about myself, as it struck me as a very angry book, bitter even, and yet even as I chafed at how improper the anger seemed in some ways (given how privileged the protagonists all are), I sympathized with it too. Does the bitterness arise from the realization that social and material privilege make anger seem petulant (such spoiled children, her women seem!) even when there is genuine cause? Is the book satirizing its women for wanting even more than they already have, which is considerable? Or is it acknowledging dark truths about what lies beneath the surface of privilege? It’s interesting how many of the critics quoted in the blurbs use words like “fearless” and “frank,” as if the stories resonated with them as well, spoke out in some way they think others (other women in particular, I suppose) are too polite, too self-conscious, too shamefaced, or too repressed to do.

I’m reading Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children now as my “fun” book–alternating it, quite jarringly, with Clockers. The Emperor’s Children is leaving me a bit cold so far.

I’ve ordered Auster’s City of Glass for my detective fiction course. I conferred with a helpful colleague who has more ‘postmodern’ experience and expertise than I, and he says it has been very popular with students when he has taught it–including in his first-year class. Now I’m looking forward to the intellectual challenge of learning about it and making it work in my own class, especially since I know I can go next door and get ideas from him. I really appreciate all the suggestions I got while I was thinking about this. If I do the course again in 09-10, I may revamp the reading list altogether to incorporate more of them.

George Levine on Vanity Fair

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Unsurprisingly, eminent Victorianist George Levine writes well about “Vanity Fair and Victorian Realism” in his newly released How to Read the Victorian Novel:

In refusing the satisfactions of closure, Thackeray is implicitly affirming the importance of the realist enterprise; in rejecting the comic ending and the possibility of a satisfactory conclusion (“Which of us is happy in this world?” the book’s final paragraph asks), Thackeray is, with some fatigue, turning away from the literary forms that in fact give spine and structure to his own enormous book. Thackeray arrives at what might be seen as the ultimate attitude of the realist, something like contempt for the impossible enterprise and for the fantasies to which it aspires.

I’m reading the book in order to review it along with Harry Shaw and Alison Case’s equally new Reading the Nineteenth-Century Novel, Austen to Eliot. So far I’m impressed with both books, though both also leave me puzzling a bit about their function. If I assigned either one as a companion in my 19th-century fiction class, for one thing, there wouldn’t be much need for me to be in the room! Case and Shaw more clearly have a student reader in mind: their language is deliberately non-technical and their tone is companionable and relaxed. (Perhaps their analysis also reads comfortably to me because Shaw was my thesis supervisor and I had the pleasure of working as the TA for his 19th-century fiction class once: the approach and the examples in many cases are familiar to me.) Levine’s text is denser and more overtly engaged with recent theoretical and critical approaches. I happily anticipate having my own ideas and habits refreshed as I work my way through both books.

When I get my hands on Philip Davis’s forthcoming Why Victorian Literature Still Matters, I think Blackwell Publishing will have met all my needs.

This Week in My Classes (September 29, 2008)

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I didn’t post anything about my classes last week. Mental clutter is my lame excuse–that, and I used what ‘extra’ energy I had to get done one of the book reviews I’ve been working on, and to read two quite long graduate thesis chapters. So really, I wasn’t slacking off! Actually, since one thing I was doing was launching Vanity Fair in my 19th-century fiction class, the little piece I posted on that at The Valve sort of counts. Anyway, here’s what’s up at this point.

English 1010: This week we start our work on Elie Wiesel’s Night. I chose this text for this course because it seemed to epitomize the idea I pitch in the class about great writing not being aimed at college classrooms and anthologies but being a form of intervention in the world. Night is a highly-wrought text, conspicuously literary, deliberate in its language and devices, and urgent in its attempt to reach us on an important subject. It’s also enormously moving–and (not an insignificant consideration for a first-year class) it’s very short. My experience has been that students arrive in class without much historical background (my own view would be that, at the very least, modern history should be a graduation requirement for all high school students, but here at least, it is optional). I opened today, therefore, with an overview of the Holocaust, beginning with the rise of the Nazi party in the 1930s and going briefly through the steps towards the ‘final solution.’ Throughout I emphasize the problems Wiesel and others have raised about finding appropriate language to refer to the mass murders, including objections to the term “Holocaust”; I also (again, following Wiesel’s prompts) try to balance a sense of the overwhelming scale of suffering and death with attention to individual faces and stories. In my introductory lecture I also talk a bit about Wiesel himself, about the textual history of Night, and about its status (and, perhaps, limits) as a memoir, rather than a comprehensive or authoritative history. Finally, I try to give some fresh urgency to his mantra of “never forget” by mentioning some notorious contemporary Holocaust deniers.

I worked hard on my PowerPoint slides for this lecture, trying first to put faces on the abstractions, but also to provide starting points for the problems of language and representation that we will work on. It is an almost unbearable job to do; I found myself in tears several times, particularly as I worked on the topic of “selection.” In the Preface, Wiesel asks,

Was there a way to describe . . . the vanishing of a beautiful, well-behaved little Jewish girl with golden hair and a sad smile, murdered with her mother the very night of their arrival? How was one to speak of them without trembling and a heart broken for all eternity? . . . And yet, having lived through this experience, one could not keep silent, no matter how difficult, if not impossible, it was to speak.

Here’s the account of that incident he gives:

An SS came toward us wielding a club. He commanded:

“Men to the left! Women to the right!”

Eight words spoken quietly, indifferently, without emotion. Eight simple, short words. yet that was the moment when I left my mother. There was no time to think, and I already felt my father’s hand press against mine: we were alone. In a fraction of a second I could see my mother, my sisters, move to the right. Tzipora was holding Mother’s hand. I saw them walking farther and farther away; Mother was stroking my sister’s blond hair, as if to protect her. And I walked on with my father, with the men. I didn’t know that this was the moment in time and the place where I was leaving my mother and Tzipora forever.

Tzipora was seven, the same age as my own daughter. It’s the mother I mourn for most, though: she would have known, or feared, more of the truth, and felt the devastation of walking her child towards it.

Did it seem trivial to move to Vanity Fair for my afternoon class? It did, a bit, and though I got my head into it and enjoyed myself, and I think it was a pretty good session, I find that now, having returned imaginatively and emotionally to that scene on the platform at Auschwitz, I don’t feel like writing it up. Instead, here are some links to some remarkable online resources for learning about (and teaching about) the Holocaust:

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

USC Shoah Foundation Institute

Yad Vashem: The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority

Holocaust Denial on Trial

The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity

Elie Wiesel Nobel Prize Interview

Elie Wiesel Academy of Achievement Interview

Night on Oprah’s Book Club

CFP: LitCrit 2.0

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The calls for papers for ACCUTE 2009 are now posted, including my own for a session on “LitCrit 2.o: Academic Blogging and Other New Forms of Scholarly Publishing” (scroll down this list). Panels like this are old news in other venues, but I haven’t seen much about it up here, at least not through ACCUTE (which, for any American readers who don’t know this, is our MLA-like thing). My own thinking about these issues was somewhat focused by the presentation I gave to my department on academic blogging last fall.

The version of the CFP I submitted actually had more apparatus, including hyperlinks that I had hoped would be retained in the posted version. For those who might be interested, here’s the full text with links.

LitCrit 2.0:
Academic Blogging and Other New Forms of Scholarly Publishing

[A]nyone engaged in any aspect of academe, from teaching to administration to libraries to research, would do well to take a look at what some of their colleagues are doing on the internet. (Miriam Jones, “Why Blog?” @ ScribblingWoman)

I do think that the solution to the problem of poor circulation of ideas (not paper) has to involve making room for something that blogs do well. There has got to be healthier conversation, keeping up the circulation of ideas regarding books and articles. Blogging isn’t scholarship, but scholarship may need blogging in quite a strong sense. (John Holbo, “Form Follows the Function of the Little Magazine” @ The Valve)

Peer-review thus demands to be transformed from a system of gatekeeping to a mode of manifesting the responses to and discussion of a multiplicity of ideas in circulation. (Kathleen FitzPatrick, “On the Future of Academic Publishing, Peer Review, and Tenure Requirements” @ The Valve)

The 2006 report of the MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion urged us to reconsider the primacy of print publications, particularly monographs, in assessing each other’s contributions to scholarship. Most of us recognize that academic publishing in some respects serves institutional needs better than intellectual or scholarly ones; ideally, as Kathleen Fitzpatrick argues, our professional advancement should not depend on “whether the vagaries of any publishing system did or did not allow a text to come into circulation, but rather on the value of that text, and on the importance it bears for its field.” The challenge both conceptually and institutionally, is developing alternatives to a system the protocols of which are so well-established.

Among the recommendations of the MLA Task Force is that we adopt “a more capacious conception of scholarship,” including “establishing multiple pathways to tenure, and using scholarly portfolios,” and that we “recognize the legitimacy of scholarship produced in new media.” Certainly the opportunities for self-publishing and scholarly networking via the internet are transforming our ideas about what is possible as well as what is desirable in academic discourse. Websites, wikis, and blogs may not render the old forms (books, refereed articles, print reviews, conferences) obsolete, but they do make it necessary to identify what the traditional methods—slow, rigid, resource-intensive, and often exclusionary—nonetheless do better than the alternatives, and they should motivate us also to imagine and develop the aspects of our intellectual and scholarly work that can be done more effectively using new forms. Many academic bloggers, for instance, have already discovered the value of what Matthew Kirschenbaum has called a “public academic workbench,” of putting their ideas into circulation faster and among a much wider variety of audiences than conventional publication allows and thus enabling a remarkable immediacy of response and debate. Some bloggers have observed that blog comments can constitute a form of post-publication peer review, offsetting the seemingly intractable problem of quality-control in self-publication.

This panel invites proposals for papers on the changing nature of, and new possibilities for, academic publishing in the era of Web 2.0. Analyses of specific blogging or other interactive or collaborative web-publishing experiences would be particularly relevant. In order to allow time for demonstrations of research or publication in new media as well as discussion among both panel and audience members, slightly shorter papers (15 minutes, or 8-10 pages) are encouraged. A/V needs should be clearly specified in the proposal.

Submissions should be sent electronically by 15 November 2008 to:

Rohan Maitzen
Department of English
Dalhousie University
Rohan.Maitzen@Dal.Ca
Subject: ACCUTE Panel

Please note that submissions must follow the same guidelines as those for the general call (Option 1), as specified on the ACCUTE website. In particular:

  • submitters must be ACCUTE members in good standing
  • an electronic copy of the proposal, a completed copy of the Proposal Submitter’s Information Sheet (available online), and a file containing a 100-word abstract and a 50-word bio-bibliographical note must be submitted to the panel organizer by 15 November
  • proposals (maximum 700 words) should clearly indicate the originality or scholarly significance of the proposed paper, the line of argument, the principal texts the paper will speak to (if applicable), and the relation of the paper to existing scholarship on the topic

How Not to Talk to Your Professor

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On the stairs of an academic building, 3 minutes before class time:

Student: Professor!

Professor (thinking is this one of mine?): Yes?

Student: I’m in your English 1010 class.

Professor (at least this one knows which English class): What is it?

Student: I just wanted you to know that I’m in sciences and I’m just taking your class because I need my writing requirement.

Professor: (here it comes) . . .

Student: The thing is I really don’t get English.

Professor: (Oh no, she’s heard about our secret code! I can’t just hand that out to someone in the sciences!) Well, you can meet your writing requirement in lots of subjects besides English.

Student: Honestly, I have to take this course because it’s the only writing class I can take and still fit in all the science classes I need.

Professor: Hmmm. Well, that’s unfortunate.

Student: Yes, it’s really awful.

Professor: . . .

Paul Auster, City of Glass

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I’ve just finished reading City of Glass, one of many suggestions I’ve received for expanding the reading list for my upcoming ‘Mystery and Detective Fiction’ course.

Unprofessional reaction: I hated this book. It’s too clever by half, full of cute intertextual, metatextual jokes and tricks, and all too predictably and preeningly post-modern about the elusiveness of meaning, the fracturing of identity, and the gaps between signifieds and signifiers. It’s fiction as word- and mind- games, all metaphysics and no humanity.*

Professional reaction: This book is utterly unlike the other novels on my syllabus, and yet deliberately and intricately engaged with them and what they represent and investigate (I realized that all by myself, even before I read through this smart critical essay). You could say that it offers a philosophical and theoretical as well as literary response to the rest of the syllabus. In its own way, it takes the metaphysical premises and literary conventions of detective fiction more seriously than any of the other assigned works–and, again in its own, postmodern, self-conscious way, does more with them (or should I say, to them?). Pedagogically, I can certainly see the case for teaching it, and I’m sure I and my students would learn from the experience.

So here’s where I’m left for now: I hate the novel, I’d be happy never to read it again, it’s everything I don’t like about postmodern fiction (and theory)…but it just might be the right book for my course, and assuming I can learn to engage with the novel intellectually, my visceral dislike of it will either be rendered irrelevant or even subside. Maybe.

* Update: This review of Auster’s recent Man in the Dark over at the TLS tells me mine is not a wholly idiosyncratic response to Auster: “for the first time, perhaps, in an Auster novel the heart is more important than the head.”

This Week in My Classes (September 17, 2008)

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As always, the chaos of the first week has settled into the confusion of the second, and by next week we should all be in the groove. I’m still flummoxed by students asking questions such as “what’s the reading for Friday?” when I have told them, with tedious frequency, since September 5, that they will find all the guidance they need in their course syllabi. But in general they seem to be figuring out how things work, and I’m beginning to learn some of their names–a process that gets discouragingly more difficult for me every year.

In English 1010, I tried an experiment this year and assigned an in-class essay last week. An article I was reading on pedagogy recommended an early assignment as a way of focusing their attention on the class and showing them that you mean business, and I thought that made sense. Also, I thought it would be useful for me and them to see early on what they know how to do already and what we need to work on this term. Though in retrospect I should have allowed myself more than two days to read through them all (even Woolf’s “The Death of the Moth” collapses under the weight of 50+ first-year papers), it was definitely an informative experience, and I was able to generate a list of “Things to Work On” that we will keep track of over the term. First up today was “its” vs. “it’s” (and all other things apostrophe-related). Honestly, as I told them, there’s no reason to get so muddled about apostrophes, as their rules are so specific–unlike commas, for which a great deal of fine judgment can sometimes be required. Then we moved on to the higher-order task of improving their vocabulary for analyzing literature, with some work on diction, tone, and irony. Our reading for today was Brent Staples’s “Just Walk On By: A Black Man Ponders His Power to Alter Public Space” (better known by the shorter title “Black Men and Public Space,” I think). It’s a good case study for considering the importance of tone, I think. One aspect we discussed was how he might have pitched the essay given its original audience: it first appeared in Ms. Friday we’ll keep going with tone but also consider some aspects of formal argumentation with Shelby Steele’s “Affirmative Action: The Price of Preference.”

It’s Persuasion in my 19th-Century Fiction class this week. Having talked about the navy quite a bit last week, this week I tried to lay out some ideas about the novel’s historiographical implications (when a war is going on, or has just ended, or may just start, what counts as an ‘important’ or historical event? where does history happen? how do people experience historical change? how does Austen let us know that her characters live in history?) and then, today, to move from big social and political issues to the presentation of Anne’s interiority and her (and the novel’s) struggle with strong feelings and desires. I went over the concepts of limited omniscient narration and indirect discourse, and tried to introduce some issues about narration and point of view more generally that will be important for our thinking about all of our novels. Towards the end of class today we talked about what to make of Anne’s self-control or reserve, which can come across as repression and seem highly problematic in the context of the contemporary feminist valorization of speaking one’s mind or demanding what one wants. With Jane Eyre coming up, I thought it would be good to raise some questions about that novel’s iconic status in the feminist canon and to consider how far Austen is endorsing a different model of feminine strength. It’s a problem for Anne, of course, that she doesn’t speak out enough: she nearly loses everything! But Louisa Musgrove’s fall can be seen as a caution about being too clamorous.

I’m looking forward to Vanity Fair next week. I think the class will be pleasantly surprised by how much fun it is.