This week will be our first ever week-long fall break, one of several adjustments to the academic schedule that have come into effect this year. I’m against it in principle, because no matter how long the break, more and more students (in my experience) leave early for it and come back late, which, along with the extra effort it always takes to get back into the rhythm of classes, means more lost time and attention at this point in the term than I’d like. However, I find myself completely in favor of it in practice: for one thing, it means I haven’t spent the weekend prepping for or worrying about my Monday classes, and I’ll have some time this week to do non-course-related reading and writing.
I do, of course, still have ongoing work to do. I’ve got a Ph.D. thesis chapter to read and comment on, for one thing, and some reference letters to get out. I would have managed these tasks in any case, in between classes, but for the thesis chapter especially it will be nice to be able to concentrate on it more completely. I can’t ignore that regular classes start up again the following week, and I am going to seize the opportunity provided by this mid-term break to rethink the way I’ve usually approached the last couple of sessions on Middlemarch for Close Reading — particularly by continuing my ongoing efforts to stop micro-managing class time on it, and by trying to come up with ways to help students feel genuinely involved in it. I’ve got Books IV and V of The Mill on the Floss to read for next Monday, as well. It’s lovely to be reading George Eliot for two classes at once! And it’s quite interesting, too, because both similarities and differences between the novels seem particularly evident to me. The Mill on the Floss seems, predictably, to be going over better — or going down more easily. I wonder if, for the students (and there are several) who are in both classes, Mill has made them feel better or worse about Middlemarch. What I’m most aware of right now is how much more sophisticated the narration is in Middlemarch — how much more fully integrated with the other aspects of the novel (though I do love the long expository sections of Mill). At the same time, it’s hard to miss how much more immediately gripping the personal drama of Mill is.
My other work-related ambition for this reading week is to buckle down and do more preparatory research for the Pulp Fiction class, specifically background reading for teaching Valdez Is Coming. It’s a first-year writing requirement class with a primary emphasis on learning basic literary critical and essay-writing skills: we are doing our readings in service of that broad mission, not with any ambition of getting really deep into theoretical or critical issues about the genres we’re covering. That’s not to say, though, that I don’t have to be reasonably well informed about those issues so that I can provide useful contextual information and frame our discussions appropriately. I’m not worried about that for our mystery readings, as I have been researching and teaching in that area for well over a decade, and I have a lot of preliminary ideas about the romance material already, but westerns represent a new frontier for me as a reader and a teacher, so that’s where I feel I need to put in the most advance work. I’m also thinking hard about how to deal with the language in the novel, plenty of which is not, as the phrase goes, “politically correct.” I think it will become clear as we work through the novel that Valdez Is Coming is not itself condoning racism, but we’ll need some conceptual tools (such as the use/mention distinction) and alertness to who is responsible for what gets said (and how the novel positions them in its values system), as well as some sense of changing historical norms, if we’re all going to have good discussions about this and not simply react by cringing or being offended by it. If anyone has suggestions about how to go about this, they would be welcome, as would recommendations for tersely authoritative histories of the American west.
Another priority for me this week is being a bit more sociable than I usually manage during the term. I already had a lovely time today warding off the November chill by drinking chai lattes and talking with a dear friend who has been sick off and on for ages, poor thing, and thus necessarily reclusive — making time with her especially precious. Tomorrow night my book club meets to talk about Jane Smiley’s Some Luck (which I quite enjoyed but haven’t been able to blog about yet, as I lent my copy to someone else in the group). Then on Thursday I am having lunch with a colleague I love to talk books with but rarely have a chance to, as we mostly just pass each other in the hallway en route to classes or meetings. For me, this is actually quite a flurry of social activity! I know it will lift my spirits, and it will also help distract me from brooding about the pending decision on my promotion appeal, which might arrive any time between now and January.
Finally, I hope to start revising and expanding my old Felix Holt essay, the first step towards shaping the various essays I’ve written on George Eliot’s novels at Open Letters and elsewhere into a collection. After much cogitation, I have decided to proceed with at least the initial goal of self-publishing them when I think they’re ready. Felix Holt seemed like a good place to start during the final week of the U.S. election cycle, which has made Felix’s ruminations on the hazards of democracy seem unhappily relevant.
As that excerpt shows, Lodge enjoys the opportunity to have his post-structuralist cake and eat it too. And his novel overall is built around the difference between theory and practice as embodied in the inconsistency between Robyn’s theoretical beliefs and her insistent engagement with the world as if it is made up of individuals acting out of their own agency — something Vic Wilcox eventually points out to her: “If you don’t believe in lofve, why do you take such care over your students? . . . You care about them because they’re individuals.”
It’s an entertaining story, and like Gaskell Lodge does a good job exposing both the pride and the prejudices of his main characters without condemning them: both have simply taken their own insular worlds for granted, and both benefit from having someone challenge their starting premises as well as their daily practices. Unlike Austen or Gaskell, however, Lodge does not carry them (or us) forward to a happy resolution of the conflicts that initially divide them: the allusive thread he lets go of is the romance plot (Vic and Robyn do have sex, but that, as Robyn vehemently insists, is not at all the same thing as love). I think this is not just consistent with the cynical tone of Nice Work (which, like all of Lodge’s academic novels, is primarily satirical) but also a sign of a broader rejection of the hope that personal transformation makes much difference in a world riven by systemic injustices. That’s one way, then, in which Nice Work moves on, or away, from North and South. More generally — and this is only partly a function of the novel’s genre, I’d say — Lodge has little of Gaskell’s compassion for his characters, which means his fiction also does not radiate any warmth outwards towards his readers. His is too modern a sensibility for that, which you might think means Nice Work has more to say to us than North and South. For me, though, the effect is the opposite: Lodge’s lack of faith in any transcendent values or virtues made Nice Work actually seem more dated to me than North and South ever does. To put it another way, North and South can be updated precisely because there’s something lasting about its central commitments (to learning, to changing, to caring), whereas Nice Work itself, while clever and amusing, is a literary dead end.
Our reading for today in The Victorian ‘Woman Question’ was Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1850 short story “
Gaskell’s most obvious literary device in the story is pathos. 
Gaskell was a minister’s wife and “Lizzie Leigh” casts its story of forgiveness in explicitly Christian terms. Susan “is not one to judge and scorn the sinner,” Anne insists to her son Will, for instance (soothing his horror that she has shared Lizzie’s story with one he sees as “downright holy”); “She’s too deep read in her New Testament for that.” What I think is so powerful about the story is the way Gaskell pits Anne’s (and Susan’s) definition of Christian virtue against the “hard, stern, and inflexible” judgments, first of Anne’s husband James (who had forbidden her to seek out “her poor, sinning child”) and then of Will, who has inherited his father’s patriarchal role and with it his rigid righteousness. Anne grows into her own authority as the story progresses, eventually confronting Will directly:
There are definitely things about “Lizzie Leigh” that are hard to take, including the fate of “the little, unconscious sacrifice, whose early calling-home had reclaimed her poor, wandering mother” as well as the extreme seclusion that is Lizzie’s fate after her reclamation. She’s not (like Hetty, or Little Emily) sent entirely out of her world, but Gaskell can’t quite imagine a place for her fully in it either. What I love about “Lizzie Leigh,” though, is the same thing I love about Mary Barton, North and South, and 
From the Novel Readings Archives: I still find myself thinking a lot about the questions raised by Brian McCrea’s book Addison and Steele Are Dead, which I wrote about during my first year of blogging. Apparently I’m in something of a minority, or presumably I’d be able to find the actual cover image online somewhere! But rereading this post nearly a decade later, McCrea’s theory about the relationship between literature, professionalism, and teaching still seems well worth considering.
As he develops his argument, McCrea offers an interesting overview of the 19th-century and then 20th-century critical reception of Addison and Steele. He explains the Victorians’ admiration for these 18th-century predecessors largely in terms of the different understanding that prevailed about the relationship of literature, and thus of the literary critic, to life. Rightly, I’d say (based on my own work on 19th-century literary criticism), he sees as a central Victorian critical premise that literature and criticism are public activities, that their worth is to be discussed in terms of effects on readers; hence the significance attached, he argues, to sincerity as well as affect. Especially key to McCrea’s larger argument is his observation that the 19th-century writers were not “academicians” or “specialists in a field”:
While we can all share a shudder at the very idea, to me one strength of McCrea’s discussion is his admission that marginalizing affect, pleasure, and aesthetic response is, in a way, to be untrue to literature, and that the professional insistence on doing so also, as a result, marginalizes our conversation, alienating us, as McCrea says, “from our students, our counterparts in other academic departments, our families [unless, he allows, they include other professional critics–otherwise, as he points out, even they are unlikely to actually read our books and articles], and, ultimately, any larger public.” (In Democracy’s Children, John McGowan makes a similar point: “There remains a tension between the experience of reading literature and the paths followed in studying. . . . To give one’s allegiance to the academic forms through which literature is discussed and taught is to withdraw [at least partly] allegiance to literature itself”).
I’ve been feeling a bit downcast since Friday, because attendance absolutely plummeted in the tutorials for my Close Reading class and I can’t stop worrying about why — and wondering what to do about it.
But that is a general pet peeve that’s probably never going to get resolved, while Friday’s collapse is a specific instance that I’d actually like to get to the bottom of. Is it because we’re spending so many weeks on Middlemarch that this first tutorial seemed expendable? (But why would anyone think that, given how much material we clearly have to work through? It isn’t as if we’re going to spend all those weeks on Book I.) Are a lot of students finding the novel difficult to engage with? (But wouldn’t that be an incentive to come to class and learn and talk more about it, rather than opt out — to increase the odds that you’ll enjoy the next 4 weeks?) Do some of them figure they’ve got this covered and don’t need to do the tutorial exercises? (But in that case, they could still come and help out their classmates with their insights, raising the quality of the experience for everyone — and maybe even learning a little something new themselves.) Is the pay-off from our tutorial work in general not clear enough, or actually less than I fondly imagine? On Friday we worked on tracking the movement of point of view in particular passages — but we also just talked about the themes and characters set up in the first section of the novel: both activities seemed pretty valuable to me, at least.
There’s realism, and then there’s utterly, relentlessly, graphic and gruesome realism, which is very much the aesthetic principle of The North Water — McGuire offers not just a vision of the world warts and all, but of the world as warts only. I’ve also been reading Tessa Dare’s Do You Want to Start a Scandal? and the juxtaposition of the novels got me wondering about whether we have a label for McGuire’s style that would be the grim equivalent to the kind of (usually pejorative) terms used for romance writing — “flowery language,” “purple prose.” The implication of such labels is typically that the writing is excessive rather than expressive, that it’s artlessly out of control, rather than artfully serving its own purposes. (I still struggle with this reaction to some of it, but 
The absence of meaning can, of course, itself be meaningful, but The North Water didn’t read to me like an investigation or revelation of existential vacancy, and certainly not like a purposeful response to the possibility that “there is no why.” Compare 
First of all, where did this past week even go? It feels like just yesterday I was writing my previous post, in a flush of enthusiasm about 
In Close Reading, we’ve just started Middlemarch — always a happy occasion for me, of course! Here’s hoping I can make it a good experience for the students as well. In a break from the usual rhythm of this course, I open with a fairly formal lecture to establish some biographical and philosophical context: as I explained to the class, with short texts it’s reasonable to expect them to be able to put specific details into the context of the whole right away, but with a text this long we can’t do meaningful close reading exercises without my providing some preliminary interpretive frameworks. I’ll do a bit more of that tomorrow, and then they’ll have some general concepts to guide their reading and analysis as we keep going. We’re only reading Book I this week: it’s always nice to move through it relatively slowly (we’ll take about two more weeks on it in Close Reading than I usually allow for it in my 19th-century fiction class).
In my seminar on the Victorian ‘Woman Question,’ we started work last week on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s 1856 verse-novel Aurora Leigh. It’s usually kind of hard going for the students: although it does have many of the familiar features of a Victorian marriage plot novel, it also includes (among quite a bit of more miscellaneous material) long meditations on, and also arguments about, the nature and purpose of poetry in the modern world — and its 9 books of blank verse add up to a total of approximately 15,000 lines of iambic pentameter, which, let’s face it, is not the easiest reading even when the verse itself is thrilling … which, frankly, for long stretches Aurora Leigh is not.
That Aurora Leigh has not lost its radicalism — that we are still fighting on some of the same fronts — was made unexpectedly clear to me this past weekend, as with so many others I watched the story of Donald Trump’s now-infamous bus tape break, and then one pontificating man after another denounce it in the name of his daughters (or his wife or his great aunt or whatever). For some men — too many men — women are still seen primarily as complementary, their value uncomfortably entangled with ownership (all those possessive pronouns!), their right to respect and dignity somehow contingent on their belonging to someone else (someone else male, of course). My 
Over the past few weeks in Close Reading we have been working on disentangling specific elements of poetry and fiction in order to improve the precision of our analysis. We’ve focused, for instance, on tone and diction, on figurative language, on imagery, on symbolism, on rhythm, on point of view, on narrative voice, on characterization, and on setting. Often separating these elements is quite an artificial exercise, but there’s value in it nonetheless, as it helps us moves from impressionistic responses to focused observations that can be the foundation of critical conversation and analysis.
The other day while idly browsing the ever-changing array of titles on ‘special’ at Kobo, I happened across Laura Kinsale’s Flowers from the Storm for only $1.99. Not long ago, the same thing happened with Loretta Chase’s Lord of Scoundrels. What serendipity — two of my favorite romances! The alacrity with which I snapped up both titles (hooray – no more waiting for library copies) was a reminder of how much has changed for me since my first forays into reading romance.
I have read some things badly that I know I could learn to read better — Ford Madox Ford’s 
For me, romance is an interesting in-between case. I had no external obligation to get anywhere with it. But my curiosity was roused by following discussions about it among other readers who clearly enjoyed it and found interesting things to say about it. I think what stood out the most is how often they talked about reading romance in terms of pleasure — which is not to say the conversations didn’t get critical, or didn’t address complicated topics. But it seemed like for a lot of people reading romance (and talking about it together) was really fun, and that was enticing. Given that my early experiments in the genre were not very successful, I might not have tried again, FOMO notwithstanding, if it weren’t for those other readers both challenging and encouraging me — and finding, before I’d soured on the project, some romances that were easy for me to like. That line crossed, I pretty rapidly got better at reading in the genre. This is not to say I have any special insights about it: just that I have acquired a reasonable working awareness of important conventions and styles. Because I’ve also now done some reading about romance, and have followed and even contributed to a lot of informal and formal discussions about it, I also have a decent, if still somewhat superficial, understanding of the history of and cross-currents within the genre. I don’t like every romance novel I try any more than I like every mystery novel I pick up, but in both cases I feel equipped to read them, if that makes sense.
Getting back to Lord of Scoundrels, the problem I had with it at first is that I thought it was ridiculous: melodramatic, overwritten, heavy-handed. I still think it is some of these things, some of the time — but I experience them quite differently: as playful, as tongue-in-cheek, as intertextual, as sexy. Now I enjoy the novel’s wit in a way I couldn’t before, because then I was too distracted by my initial negative reactions; now I appreciate its strong-minded heroine, not just on her own merits but because I have met more of her literary sisters. I can’t remember exactly the sequence that brought me back to Lord of Scoundrels in a more receptive frame of mind: my 2012 progress report notes that “I have yet to read a ‘historical’ that I really like” and mentions Heyer’s Sylvester in particular as a failure — and Sylvester, too, is now a favorite, though not nearly as much as Venetia or Devil’s Cub. (Jessica and Mary Challoner would get along just fine: they could compare notes on the beneficial effects of shooting alpha males in the shoulder — a link between the novels that I’m sure Chase makes quite deliberately.)
Novel Readings 