I was reminded yesterday that SSHRC has awarded a large sum to help start up a Canadian version of The Conversation. I have followed links to the other national iterations of this site before and thought it seemed like a good idea. “Academic rigor, journalistic flair”: what’s not to like?
Well, actually, I don’t altogether like the tone that tagline sets — as if there isn’t journalistic rigor, as if academics can’t have flair, as if the twain otherwise don’t meet. Okay, folks, you’re different, but maybe not that different: people with “deep expertise” do write for other outlets, after all, and once in a while “facts and evidence” actually do get into the public arena from other directions. It’s a great idea to make the kind of expertise academics have more widely available, but that good impulse is somewhat offset, for me, by the site’s faint air of condescension. Am I being uncharitable or oversensitive? Does it strike anyone else this way?
Thinking about The Conversation got me thinking, in turn, about some other academic “crossover” sites I’m familiar with. Almost all of these have occasionally (again, despite their manifest good intentions and the often very high quality of their content) irritated me in the same way: Stanford’s Arcade site, for instance, or the Public Books site (which has another tagline that I don’t like, implying as it does that the “curious public” is passively awaiting delivery of “cutting-edge” ideas); or, in a more niche category, the Branch Collective. Obviously, these sites aren’t all trying to do the same thing, and they have quite different personalities of their own, but they have in common that they are deliberate attempts to bridge the divide between the ivory tower and the rest of the world. Also, they all seem very keen to differentiate themselves, implicitly or explicitly, from the masses of other sites offering analogous content, playing up the scholarly qualifications of their contributors or their replication of key academic processes (notably, in the case of the Branch Collective, peer review).*
I think what rubs me the wrong way is exactly what these sites (with some justification) play up as their strengths — that they may be out in public, but at heart they are still academic. They are careful to explain and assert their own authority, in (mostly) implicit contrast to the many other sites that are equally public but not created or curated by academics. To me, this all has a whiff of the all-too-familiar academic mistrust of the actual “public arena,” in which credentials are neither necessary nor sufficient for authority and peer review neither filters nor stifles contributions to the conversation. It’s not that there aren’t good reasons to get frustrated with the resulting chaos of information and opinion, but to me there’s something a bit precious about setting up special academic enclaves and calling them “public” instead of just joining in. (If you don’t think Wikipedia is good enough, why not make it better?) It also seems to me in some cases as if, alongside the desire (genuine, I’m sure) to offer something of value to people outside the academy, there’s some concern about ensuring that the form that offering takes will pass muster inside the academy — because for all the big talk these days about “knowledge mobilization,” in practice universities are profoundly conservative institutions, and the more familiar an “innovation” looks, or the more it is “branded” as a ground-breaking institutional or disciplinary project, the more likely it is to be praised and given professional credit.
Again, I’m not disdaining the quality of the sites I’ve mentioned. There is just something about their tone or atmosphere that I sometimes find off-putting. I have also been frustrated at having them held out by other academics as exemplary in ways I do not believe they actually are. In my own promotion case, for instance, one of my external reviewers praised the editorial process she (or he, I don’t actually know) had experienced at Public Books, suggesting more or less directly that it was more rigorous than that at Open Letters Monthly because she had found some of my reviews there “repetitive” (which ones, she didn’t say). Well, of course, equally rigorous readers can still disagree about judgments like that — and it’s a hard claim to assess or dispute anyway, without specifics. (I didn’t appreciate the slur on my co-editors, however, even setting aside the criticism of my own writing!) However, in my turn, I’ve read a few things at Public Books that I found ponderous, pretentious, or just too long for me to care enough about to finish, so I don’t see any reason to assume that either venue can claim a uniquely effective process. (I certainly feel confident that contributors to Open Letters get pretty arduous treatment in what we fondly call the “shark tank” of general edits.) I also have academic colleagues who are keen to write essays for Branch but cannot bring themselves to contribute to Open Letters — it’s pretty clear that the academic imprimatur motivates them in a way that our masthead does not. (Or perhaps, as has been suggested to me a couple of times, the prospect of going public quite so openly, even on the modest scale Open Letters offers, is intimidating. As Alex Reid has observed, “the Journal of narrowly-focused humanities studies is a good place to hide,” and I admit it takes a while to get used to just saying what you think without the protective shelter created by peer review and obscurity. Or perhaps they just don’t think very highly of Open Letters but are too tactful to tell me: my speculation should not be too partial!)
Obviously this issue is personal to me, especially at this particular moment in my career, which is why I freely acknowledge that my inverse snobbery about these erudite and high-minded projects may well be symptomatic of my own anxieties about the choices I’ve made, rather than an accurate reflection of anything they’re actually doing or saying. Clearly, I have approached working in public in a different way — not as part of an institutional or specifically professional enterprise (not that we have anything like, say, the Public Humanities program at Western — but even if we did, that’s not what I want to be doing), not in a special space that privileges academics. I have just tried to find a place for myself in the ongoing public conversation about literature, to figure out what I could bring to it and how. In this conversation, unlike at The Conversation, we share and create authority for each other; mine, such as it is, doesn’t inhere in my credentials. I am not saying this is the right or best model for all public academics (it almost certainly would not work for nuclear physicists), and I’m also not saying that the enclave model is wrong — though I do think it should not be insisted on or valued more highly just because it preserves, even relies on, distinctions between the university and the world. I think that for me personally, the problem with the enclaves is that they represent, or resemble too closely, what I came out here to get away from, is all.**
*I can’t decide where The Valve fits in here. I think it always had more of a hybrid quality, and certainly while I was writing for it its boundaries seemed fairly porous. But maybe it struck other people as insular in this same way.
**My way has the advantage of not requiring a SSHRC grant to get on with it — though actually to some people that it’s free (except, of course, for the investment of time) apparently counts against it, because getting grants is a thing we’re supposed to do.
I started reading Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon four years ago. I’m still reading it – or, more accurately, I am reading it again. I didn’t stop reading it then because it was no good or I wasn’t interested. On the contrary, I was fascinated and endlessly impressed. But the very thing that so fascinated and impressed me – the astonishing density and rhetorical brilliance of 
Now that I’m almost half way through the book, I am still impressed above all by West’s writing. In his introduction, Christopher Hitchens (after acknowledging some of the idiosyncrasies and problems of West’s commentary on the world she was exploring) concludes that “writing on this level must be esteemed and shown to later generations, no matter what the subject.” I’m not sure that quality of prose (even if we had a 100% reliable and universal measure for it) is or should always be a sufficient condition for reading something. One of the challenges of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon for me is that it is so vast and complex that I doubt my own ability, even when I finally finish it, to evaluate its worth on other grounds, though. At this point I do feel some frustration, in fact, at being so immersed in details and yet still so unable to perceive, never mind assess, larger patterns.
I was struggling over what to write about in this post, which begins the 10th season of my 
I opened Close Reading on Wednesday with a lecture focused primarily on choices: first ours, in the department, to include the course among our suite of requirements; then theirs to take it, which includes their choice to major in English (not something I’ve ever heard of anyone being pressured into); then, moving into the course materials, the choices writers make, from the biggest (to write anything at all) to the smallest (to use this word or that one). My broader pitch is for the connection between aesthetics and ethics; I quote Wayne Booth, which won’t surprise regular visitors here:
In today’s tutorials we looked at one writer’s specific choices, comparing Robert Frost’s “In White” to the later, much more famous version, “Design.” You can see the two poems side by side 
For a somewhat different perspective, we’re also reading Margaret Oliphant’s essay “The Condition of Women.” (Both are in Susan Hamilton’s excellent 
I decided to ease out of the summer with some light reading on this long weekend — first 
The novels of 
The case itself is cleverly contrived but not, I think, particularly meaningful. On a completely personal and thus mostly irrelevant note, I enjoyed that it turned on the victim’s fondness for retsina: retsina is actually the first wine I ever drank, back when I was a regular in a Greek dance performing group, so for some time I didn’t realize just how distinctive (many would say, just how disgusting) it actually is. I haven’t had any in years, but now I’m tempted to see if our local wine store carries any. As I recall, it certainly goes well with the robust flavors of Greek cooking — garlic, lemon, and lamb especially. It isn’t really key to the crime, though, except that because nobody likes it but the victim, it proves a useful vehicle for delivering the fatal poison. (This is not a spoiler, as the method of the murder is one of the first things we find out!)
I finished Honest Doubt thinking that, though I didn’t love it this time either, I should reread more of the series. Even 2000 was a long time ago in my own academic career, and for all that aspects of Honest Doubt seemed faintly archaic already, some of its truths hit home in a way they didn’t before. Even its title, in fact, has new resonance to me, taken as it is from Tennyson’s lines (from In Memoriam) “There lives more faith in honest doubt / Believe me, than in half the creeds.” My own doubts about a range of academic values and practices have made me seem to some, I think, like a negative force, maybe even a threat (or, and I’m not sure if this is better or worse, like an irrelevance). I’ve described myself as feeling sometimes like “a nonbeliever in church”: to me, though, my doubts have always been indications of my faith that what we do not only is valuable but can be even more so.
September is here, which means that even though technically it’s still summer, it feels like fall. From now on, every nice day is to be cherished and even the sunniest Sunday will be under the shadow of Monday’s impending classes — though not quite yet, because my first class meetings of the new term aren’t until Wednesday. And as it happens, I will be able to wind up my summer without too much angst: yesterday I realized that right now, though as always there are plenty of things I could be doing, there’s really nothing I must be doing. All the writing I’d promised has been sent along to editors; my courses are prepped, including handouts, lecture notes, and slides for the first day(s); other odds and ends of administrative tasks have been completed. I suppose this is my reward for not really taking a vacation: though I did take it easy when I could, I didn’t travel, and I was in my office almost every weekday getting things done. As a result, I will head into the last long weekend of the summer without either the ambition or the pressure to be working.
I had intended to create another book club site, probably for The Mill on the Floss, but in the end the time that would have gone into this project went instead into doing more book reviews than I had anticipated. One of my more general goals has been to get more experience and also more recognition for my criticism by writing for a wider range of venues. Because reviews are usually commissioned rather than pitched, I wasn’t sure quite how to do this, but I reached out to a couple of editors and was contacted by a couple of others, and in the end I was kept fairly busy! I consider this time very well spent for a number of reasons. First, I read and thought about a lot of books, some of them ones I would probably not have sought out if left entirely to my own devices. Then, in addition to the intellectual and literary benefits of engaging with a wide range of books, I had to work to deadlines and within space constraints set by other people, and also work with their editorial feedback. I cherish the freedom I have at Open Letters, but sometimes it paralyzes me a bit as I look for “just the right book” to review. I also think my colleagues there are among the very best editors around, but it’s bracing to venture outside, if only to find out what else I might learn. And I do feel that I’ve learned a lot this summer, partly about the genre of reviewing, and partly about my own writing process. I had hoped that writing more and faster would make me, ultimately, a more confident as well as a more widely competent writer, and I think it has.
Here’s the tally of my summer reviewing, meaning books read and written about since classes got out in April:
It happens so gradually at first: there’s a slight chill in the evening air, the sky is a little darker on my morning run, the leaves look just a little less green. Then a faint hum begins on campus: more people are in their offices, the sidewalks are a bit more crowded, signs of arrivals and departures — abandoned sofas and mattresses, extra trash bags, boxes for recycling — appear in the neighborhood. It’s at once depressing and enlivening: summer is over, and soon we’ll be back at school.
So, what will I be busy with this term? I have just two classes, both ones I usually enjoy teaching very much and both of which I haven’t taught since 2011-12. The first is English 3000, Close Reading, which is part of our suite of required classes for majors and honours students. They don’t have to take English 3000 in particular: they have to chose one of our ‘theory and methods’ courses, which also include The History of Criticism and Contemporary Critical Theory. The first time I taught English 3000, in 2003, that wasn’t the case: then, it was one of two classes we’d introduced that were to be core requirements for every student in our program (the other was a survey, Literary Landmarks). Then, it had an enrollment of 120; this year, it is capped at 60 and right now has 42 students in it — so, quite a different undertaking. Still, my approach to the class was shaped by thinking about it as something that should be as useful and as engaging as possible to every English student — to every reader, in fact. It is actually the most conceptually interesting class I’ve ever developed (for me, at least) because it isn’t organized around content, the way my classes usually are, but around a method, a habit, a practice.
In addition to working on how to read attentively (including learning precise vocabulary for explaining what we read), I try to focus our attention on why it matters to read carefully, not just for class but for life. In working out my approach, I drew especially on Wayne Booth’s The Company We Keep and on the ways he links aesthetics to ethics. My hope is that this connection motivates students to see our work, not as an intellectual parlor game, but as something with vital implications for living an examined life. We’ll be reading a selection of poetry and short fiction, and then really digging into Middlemarch and The Remains of the Day. The juxtaposition of these two very different novels has proven extremely fruitful in past iterations of the course. There is always some grumbling about Middlemarch (“it’s TOO LONG to read in a one-term course,” a student once exclaimed in her course evaluation — which amuses me because of course I always teach it in one-term courses, which are all we offer now, and usually with four other fairly long books). My justification is that if we’re going to pay really close attention to a novel, it should be a novel that I am confident will reward that attention. And we take five whole weeks to read it, so we don’t exactly rush through it.
My other fall class is an upper-level seminar, The Victorian ‘Woman Question.’ It has 23 students in it, which is actually pretty big for a seminar — it’s going to be a tight fit, for instance, getting in all the student presentations. But if past years are any indication, the discussion should be fairly robust. I’ve done this class with an exclusive focus on fiction, but this year I’m doing my more standard mix of genres. We’ll start with some non-fiction, including Mill’s The Subjection of Women and essays by Frances Power Cobbe and Margaret Oliphant (included in Susan Hamilton’s excellent Broadview anthology Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors), then we’ll read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, The Mill on the Floss, Aurora Leigh (all of it, hooray!), The Odd Women, and an array of other short poems and stories. From the outset I emphasize that there wasn’t just one ‘question’ about women’s roles, and there certainly, too, wasn’t just one ‘answer.’ I provide some historical context at the outset, including information about women’s legal, economic, political, and educational realities, and then we approach each of our readings to see what terms it sets for the debate: how it poses and answers the ‘woman question.’
I had hoped that 
But to me that same art sometimes felt just a bit too conspicuous: I often thought about how well-crafted the novel was, structurally as well as at the sentence level. Is that even a fair thing to say, I wonder? That a a book is too clearly well-written, that a writer’s sentences are a little too good? Here’s the novel’s opening line, for example: “On the morning after the Feds burned down her house and took her father, Havaa woke from dreams of sea anemones.” I bet you didn’t see those sea anemones coming! That surprise is excellent: right away, I’m intrigued, and it turns out, too, that sea anemones aren’t an incidental choice. Here’s another sentence from quite a bit further along, though: “The silver Makarov pistol was all Ramzan thought about for the two weeks preceding Dokka’s disappearance, in which he failed to produce a single bowel movement.” Surprise again! And maybe now you see what I mean. This is an effect Marra likes. He is good at producing it, but it risks being gimmicky, and these lines, to me, smack of the journalistic imperative to have a good “lede.” There’s something a bit self-conscious about it: there’s a bit of self-display.
Al Aswany avoids a simplistic “us vs. them” account: some of his English characters are intensely sympathetic to and involved in the nationalist movement, and some of the Egyptian staff at the Automobile Club collude in their own subjugation, partly through need and fear, but also partly through habits ingrained through a long cultural history of deference to authority. The cruelties of the Egyptian characters to each other is often more overt than the evils of colonialism, but it’s also always clear that the systemic injustice of occupation undermines all efforts for progress and moral improvement. Though the novel is pointedly political, it manages never to be didactic: instead, Al Aswany’s quietly persistent differentiation of his cast of characters just keeps undermining the insulting abstractions on which people’s prejudices depend.
I mentioned in my last post that I had recently read a new academic book that I ultimately decided not to review, partly because I didn’t want to scapegoat the author for my alienation from the genre it belongs to. I’m still not going to name it (and that’s my own book pictured at left, just so there’s no confusion), not just because I’ve made that ungenerous mistake before but because I have had the same question about a lot of academic books lately. This is just the most recent one to leave me wondering: what is this book worth?
If there were such an expectation and people routinely met it or else paid a professional price, 
Novel Readings 