What We Talk About When We Talk About Academic Blogging

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

Logistics and institutional issues: how do you find time for it, where (if anywhere) should it go on your c.v., and how should tenure and promotion committees evaluate it?

At least, this is what the audience questions were almost exclusively about when I spoke about blogging at my faculty’s “research retreat” on Friday. Here’s a link to the Prezi I used, which is basically a condensed version of the one I prepared for the British Association of Victorian Studies conference in August. I was supposed to speak for only 8-10 minutes, so I just highlighted the arguments for and against blogging as I see them and quickly pointed out what the illustrative quotations were, on the principle that interested parties can easily find the Prezi and read them (and follow the links) themselves. What I really tried to emphasize in my own remarks is that if we think about why we do research and publish it in the first place–to advance or improve a conversation–then writing online makes perfect sense. I also stressed that for me, the real benefits are intellectual. I specifically invited follow-up questions about ways my blogging had affected my teaching, my research, my writing, and/or my intellectual life. I didn’t get any questions about that at all, leading me to think that the single most important quotation in the presentation is the one from Jo VanEvery: “Scholars lose sight of the fact that academic publishing is about communication. Or, perhaps more accurately, communication appears disconnected from the validation process.” What people wanted to talk about was “validation.” As I said at the close of the discussion, I think that preoccupation in itself is worth reflecting on. It’s inevitable, perhaps, because we are professionals trying to get and keep jobs and build careers, but I think concern about bureaucratic processes should follow on reaching a better understanding of the value of the activity, to the individual scholar, to the university, and to the broader community. Maybe people were taking for granted that blogging could be beneficial in the ways I was describing and so didn’t need to ask about it, but the impression I got (perhaps unfairly) was that they couldn’t quite imagine those benefits trumping the low likelihood of professional rewards for the time spent. The one specific positive benefit someone raised from the floor was that blogging might help lay the groundwork for a grant application–but as I noted, that assumes that getting grants is itself a priority. What if we don’t need them to do the work we think is important? (You certainly don’t need a grant to keep a blog.)

And my responses to the questions that were asked? Well, the “how do you find time” question is not one that gets asked about activities that we do not perceive as “extra” to our “real” work, so the answer to that would depend on how you find time for anything you think should be among your priorities. I don’t have a strong opinion about what heading the blog should be under on a c.v. except that I think it should in some way be treated as a research, writing, and publishing project, not as “service.” And I think tenure and promotion committees should evaluate it by reading it — not one post, or even a few posts at once, but ideally by following it for a while as well as exploring the archives. I think bloggers (and academics involved in any non-traditional kinds of work) need to help by explaining clearly what they are up to and contextualizing it so that people who have never read a blog before (and there are still many of these people in academia) have some appropriate frameworks for what they are looking at, and they should also help by thinking about how to curate their blogs so that newcomers can easily grasp their range as well as follow key examples. In my own case, I think (I hope!) the index pages I’ve built are useful in this way. As indicated in the new MLA guidelines for evaluating digital scholarship, I also think that tenure and promotion committees need to include people who understand new forms of scholarly communication, including as external reviewers. Someone who is also a blogger, for instance, is more likely to appreciate and fairly assess the quality and contribution of another blogger’s site than someone who reads only conventional scholarship.

The other panelists  were talking primarily about newspaper op-eds and letters to the editors. It was interesting to me that in general, they expressed more discomfort or dislike for the experience of being exposed to the unfiltered world of the internet. Being social scientists and historians, though, they were talking about writing on political topics, so they are engaging in conversations where stupid virulent attacks are more likely, not just because a national newspaper is much higher profile than my own quiet corner here, but also because politics rile people up more than whatever someone happens to think about The Good Soldier or Lightning Rods.* I can understand why one piece of advice they had, then, was simply not to read the comment threads that follow but to wait for the wave of attention to pass and hope to have made a small difference to the public conversation and perhaps to create further networking or writing opportunities for yourself by the exposure. I felt lucky, really, that though I am not Utopian or idealistic about the openness of the internet, my own experience of it has been, by and large, really positive and rewarding.

*Though it is possible to rile people up a bit on these topics, if you have the right audience!

The Summer of Somerville

Rohan Maitzen8 Comments

Now that the dust has mostly settled from the teaching term, I’ve begun organizing my plans for the summer. One of my top priorities is preparing for my new seminar on ‘The Somerville Novelists,’ which is the first official academic manifestation of the reading I’ve been doing about Vera Brittain, Winifred Holtby, and Margaret Kennedy. Oh, and Dorothy Sayers, except that my interest in her goes back longer and I’ve taught Gaudy Night several times before, so there I don’t feel I am starting so much from scratch.

As I wrote in a previous post about the way reading changes when it becomes research, I am having to think now not just about what I’m interested in but also about what I need to know to do the job. But since there’s no pre-existing definition of “the job,” this early phase has to be both open-ended and creative: ‘there’s the whole “tempting range of relevancies called the universe,” and then there’s your part of it, but where that begins and ends, and why, is something that, in literary research at least, is rarely self-evident.’

I’ve actually been thinking that I’d like to preserve that lack of definition going into the course, rather than trying to get everything under control according to a template of my own. I’m enjoying the sense of discovery as I read in this new (to me) material, and ideally that’s something the students will feel too: that together we are finding things out, rather than that they are trying to catch up with my expertise. I don’t think my seminars are usually stifling, but they do often focus on material I know very well and have gone through often with students. This has the advantage that I can steer our discussions in what I know will be significant directions and give guidance on research and assignments that I feel confident about, but it has disadvantages too, not least of which is that there aren’t a lot of surprises, and the level of personal commitment from students isn’t that high. I don’t mean that students don’t work hard and aren’t often very engaged, because I’ve had some great seminar groups and usually the students are enthusiastic about them (at least judging from their course evaluations). But I’d like to see them working together on something they think is important–on something they feel collectively responsible for, rather than accountable to me for.

I’m going to be thinking through the summer about how to organize the course to create this kind of atmosphere, and especially about what kinds of assignments and course requirements to include. I’ve been thinking in terms of class projects – a wiki, perhaps, to go public at the end of term, or a collaborative Prezi (I’ve seen some that cover an enormous amount of content in really interesting ways). I’m also thinking less about critical essays or research papers of the conventional academic kind and more about writing projects that show off the class material for a general audience. If anyone has suggestions, especially of assignment sequences that have worked well when exploring non-canonical material for which there simply aren’t a lot of academic resources, I’d be very interested!

In the meantime, I’m brainstorming lists of things I need to know about that will probably become part of our class discussion, including historical, biographical, and literary contexts and connections. Here’s the list so far, in all its unpolished open-endedness:

  • Individual writers from our list (Brittain, Holtby, Sayers, Kennedy)
  • Core readings (Testament of Youth, South Riding, Gaudy Night, The Constant Nymph)
  • Other books by them not officially assigned to class (perhaps for student projects or presentations)
  • critical / theoretical approaches and contexts
  • History of Somerville / women at Oxford (perhaps women in Canadian universities?)
  • Boer War
  • WWI, especially women in the war (nursing)
  • Suffragist movement
  • Women’s / feminist press, e.g. Time and Tide
  • Other contemporary writers–Olive Schreiner, Rebecca West, Virginia Woolf, Robert Graves, maybe D H Lawrence?
  • Genres, e.g. autobiography
  • Literary movements, e.g. modernism, in relation to our writers
  • Virago Press

I’m thinking in terms of a giant Venn diagram, with all these topics overlapping in different ways. The central artifice of the course is that there’s something coherent about our group of four, but part of what’s so interesting is that there isn’t, really, except that they all went to Somerville at roughly the same time and all became novelists. I’m used to organizing courses that are much more strongly unified by some kind of internal logic, usually thematic (the one I’ve offered most often is ‘The Victorian “Woman Question,”” for instance). Probably (though it’s too early to be sure) we will return regularly to the question of whether we’re doing something that makes any sense, and whether that matters. The diffusion of topics could lead to confusion in the course, so one of my jobs this summer is to bring it under control without spoiling the fun. You can expect lots of updates as I explore.

I’ve started, because it seemed pretty fundamental, with the history of women at Oxford, which has been really interesting to learn about. One of the first things I realized was that this aspect of the new class actually follows much more closely than I had realized from my usual teaching, including the  ‘Woman Question’ seminar, because an instigating factor in the movement of women into Oxford was the pressure to educational reform stimulated by the difficult situation of governesses in the mid-Victorian period (Jane Eyre!) and the statistical imbalance between men and women highlighted in the 1851 census and of increasing concern towards the end of the century (The Odd Women!). Many of the names of early advocates for women’s education are moderately familiar to me from my 19th-century studies: Emily Davis, Barbara Leigh Smith (later Bodichon), Matthew and Thomas Arnold, Mary (Mrs. Humphrey Humphry) Ward. George Eliot donated to the founding of Girton College, Cambridge — a modest £50 only, but evidence of the precedence she gave to education over political rights.

And on that note, it’s back to the Oxford History of Oxford!

We did it again! Another issue of Open Letters Monthly goes live!

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The May 2012 issue of Open Letters Monthly went live yesterday. As usual, it is about as eclectic and, we fondly believe, substantial as any literary review you’ll find on the internet. Now, if only we could find the magic button to make it one of the most widely read literary reviews on the internet … so please, tell two friends about it, and if they tell two friends, and they tell two friends, and so on and so on, well, that would be nice! And also, if you are interested in writing for us, email us (openlettersmonthly at gmail dot com) with your interests and ideas. I speak from experience when I say that our editorial process is at once rigorous, passionate, and unfailingly constructive.

So! What’s in this latest issue? You should click on over and take a look for yourself at the whole table of contents. Highlights for me this time include a thoughtful and thought-provoking essay on the provocative poetry of Sylvia Plath; an in-depth commentary on Derek Walcott’s Omeros; my fellow-editor Greg Waldmann’s take-down of Rachel Maddow’s Drift; and the one-two punch of my own essay on a life-long infatuation with Richard III and Steve Donoghue’s brilliant review of a new biography of the man who stole his crown, Henry VII. I had fun with the Richard III essay because I got to work in so many different interests of mine, including detective fiction (via Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time), historical romance, and historiography, even including a bit of obscure 19th-century material. The essay as a whole is underwritten by ideas arising from my academic research first for my thesis and then for my book: like my Gone with the Wind essay, which put to use the time I’d spent working on ethical criticism, this one is an experiment in loosening up what expertise I have and trying to make it interesting and useful for more people than will ever work their way through Gender, Genre, and Victorian Historical Writing. Unlike the Gone with the Wind essay, however, this new one includes a rare archival photograph of me in full geeky 1980s splendor, complete with big glasses and embarrassing (but very practical) rubber boots–so get on over and check it out before I have second thoughts about that!

Good Exposition is Hard to Find

Rohan Maitzen10 Comments

People often sound off about the value of showing over telling in fiction. I think this is a pretty stupid contest to set up: what’s important is finding the right technique to get the work done. As I emphasize in my class on close reading, you can do some things by telling that you can’t do otherwise–establishing historical context, for instance, or philosophizing or otherwise commenting on the action of the story. Huge swathes of brilliant writing from the nineteenth century is basically telling: I could never embrace any putative standard of excellence in fiction that doesn’t put Chapter XV of Middlemarch pretty high up the list. It’s not as if telling is the easy way out, either. It’s hard to manage information in a compelling and elegant way, as I was reminded by some joltingly awkward moments in a book I just finished, Julie James’s About That Night. Here’s an example:

She had a week off before her summer job started, during which she planned to do nothing more strenuous than roll herself out of bed every day by noon and mosey over to the university’s outdoor pool, which was open to students.

‘I hate to burst the bubble on your daydream, but I’m pretty sure they don’t allow alcoholic drinks at IMPE,’ Rae said, referring to the university’s Intramural Physical Education building, which housed said pool.

James’s challenge here is that Rae, who’s familiar with the campus, would naturally use the acronym, but the reader, who isn’t, needs it glossed. She is right, then, to gloss it, but it feels like an awkward afterthought when the explanation is tacked on like that. Why didn’t James’s editor work with her on this bit? What is the solution, anyway? My first thought is that it would help to put the details in sooner, maybe here: “mosey over to the university’s Intramural Physical Education building, where the pool was open to students.” Then we’d recognize the source of the acronym when Rae uses it, wouldn’t we? And then the awful phrase “housed said pool” could go too.

Here’s another bit of awkward explaining:

Dex smiled at Rae, then turned to Rylann with a curious expression. ‘Oh, Ry-linn,’ he said, pronouncing her name. ‘I’d been saying it wrong after I saw the picture of you and Kyle in the paper.’ He cocked his head. ‘Not a very common name, is it?’

I’d been saying her name wrong since page 1, and this is page 149. Obviously this is something James knows is a likely problem. To me, it makes more sense to address it sooner, though admittedly I may just be sensitive on this point because my own name is not very common and often mispronounced and I’ve had to explain or correct it for 40-something years. Why not include the pronunciation and provenance of the name in an early bit of characterization? We hear all about her hair colour and amber eyes right away, after all. But it’s the ‘pronouncing her name’ bit that’s really an editorial wobble. What else could he possibly be doing?

Another one, still later:

With a smile curling at the edges of his lips, Kyle held up a Starbucks cup. ‘Drink this. My mother used to get migraines. I remember her saying something about caffeine helping.’

‘Sweet Jesus, you are a god,’ Rylann said, taking the cup gratefully. She’d had luck with caffeine before but hadn’t had the energy to stop at a Starbucks on her way home from work.

This is the first we’ve heard about her even contemplating a stop at Starbucks. It makes sense that a regular migraine sufferer would know about and have tried various fixes (though this is also the first time in the novel that she’s had a headache at all), so I can see why it felt necessary to say something to fill that in–but again, I think it makes more sense to integrate her previous experience as well as her idea to stop for coffee into the actual description of her coming home from work–‘By the time she left work at six thirty, her head was throbbing, she felt nauseous, and even the hazy pre-sunset light outside made her eyes hurt so much that even stopping at Starbucks for the caffeine that had helped her headaches before was intolerable’–or something like that. Then Kyle arrives bearing his Starbucks cup and the scene can just go on.

These are not fatal flaws, though there are other similarly graceless moments in the book–more of the same after-the-fact fillers as in these examples (after a comment about ‘Keith, Kellie, Dan, and Claire’ in conversation, we get ‘Keith, Kellie, Dan, and Claire had been their “couple friends”‘), or the occasional info-dump (as when Kyle arrives at his old campus and we get a whole paragraph describing the computer science building), or problems with modifiers (‘Now in his late fifties, there was gray in Sharma’s black hair’). Not fatal–but at the same time, they send the signal that this book has relatively low standards when it comes to its prose and its craft: not just the writer but the editor either didn’t see or didn’t care that it could be better written. It’s not that my ideas for tweaks would move the novel any closer to the depth and richness of the exposition in Middlemarch, but there’s no need to give telling a worse reputation than it already has by doing it so clumsily.

In fairness, I should add that the book overall is not so bad.

Sandra Beasley, Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl

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My daughter has a severe peanut and tree nut allergy and a fairly serious egg allergy. I’m a worry-wart by nature (just ask my kids!) but worrying about her allergies has added a whole different dimension to worry-warting. I am working hard, though, to be realistic and constructive, and to train her to navigate as safely as possible in a world that is not and should not be nut and egg free. The biggest challenge is finding the right line between taking precautions and being prepared–and figuring out what’s reasonable to hope for or expect in terms of accommodation. I have never seen a topic attract as much vitriol as this one on comment threads: I get really depressed about the people who feel there’s no sacrifice to their convenience worth making to help protect someone vulnerable in this way. I can understanding wanting to balance everyone’s rights and interests, and to decide based on fact rather than paranoia, but people are both callous and self-righteous about it, which is painful when it’s your beautiful child they are talking about. Happily, in real life I have found pretty much everybody would rather be helpful than not. We don’t try to create a safe bubble for our daughter, but it sure makes her life more fun and ours more relaxing if, just for instance, the cake at a birthday party is not laced with peanut butter. We always send along safe alternatives for her, though, and she brings benadryl and her epipen along at all times. Now that she’s older, she takes more responsibility herself, including reading lists of ingredients and declining food if someone can’t show her that list. “Don’t assume,” is our number one safely rule, and “no epi-pen, no food” is the other.

But it’s one thing to convince yourself (and her) that she’ll be OK if she’s sensible and prepared, and another to control the anxiety. So there’s lots to appreciate about this memoir, including the author’s frank descriptions of how difficult her allergies made her life, and her parents’. She has a much wider range of allergies than my daughter, and reading her story I felt selfishly grateful that my daughter’s are fewer and more or less easier to control for. The technical stuff about allergies was not that interesting because we’re reasonably familiar with it. The author is rightly emphatic that people who claim to have allergies but don’t aren’t helping people with life-threatening ones get taken seriously. At the same time, she makes some good arguments about problems with attempts to create allergen-free zones–she is, or at least positions herself as, an advocate for good information and sensible policies, a moderate (despite the severity of her own allergies) amidst extremists on both sides.

This all seems like a good way to go forward, except that I felt, reading along, that her repeated insistence that she knows the world does not revolve around her allergies (e.g. she can’t and shouldn’t try to control other people’s choices, homes, air plane snacks, lunch boxes, etc.) is undermined by her many, many stories of derailing outings, vacations, parties, and so on by having reactions severe enough to require trips to the hospital. Her determination to get out there and live with everybody else has clearly had consequences for everybody else and I wondered if eating out a lot (she spends a lot of time talking about restaurant food) and either having reactions or sending plates back that weren’t prepared quite as specified is really as non-confrontational as all that. Is it really better to end up curled on the floor ill and needing rescue from parties than to negotiate safer food choices with your friends? In her case, given the range of her allergies, maybe there’s just no degree of compromise possible and I can see resolving that it’s worth some risks not to live like a hermit. But couldn’t you ask your boyfriend to give up milk if the option is not kissing you? Which would he really prefer? Live and let live sounds like a good policy but it doesn’t really operate as ‘let live’ in practice. But these are really tough choices and negotiations.

A Meta-Blogging Moment

Rohan Maitzen6 Comments

There seems to be a touch of meta-blogging going around. Some of it’s implicit and seems to have resolved (for instance, Bookphilia‘s transmogrification into Jam and Idleness). But an extensive conversation broke out around Dr. Crazy’s “what is the point” post at Reassigned Time 2.o, a post that clearly struck a chord with a lot of people who have been blogging for a while, including with Miriam Burstein, who wrote her own follow-up at The Little Professor. For a lot of people, changes in their situation have affected their time for writing, or their freedom to write, or their urge to write–some folks who were job-hunting or untenured are now tenured, for instance, and preoccupied in different ways. Changes in technology have made a difference: between Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr there are more ways to communicate online than were once dreamt of in our philosophies. For some, there’s also a fatigue factor, too, or discomfort with something that once felt liberating and expansive becoming routine or obligatory. Or, perhaps most simply of all, doing anything for a long time prompts reflection on the value of continuing the same way, or continuing at all.

I haven’t been blogging as long as some of these others (Miriam notes that The Little Professor has been around in some form for about a decade!). Novel Readings just turned five in January, and I’m not really in the mood for deep reflection or reevaluation. I’m doing more or less what I’ve always done, and I’m basically still fine with it: I post about books I’ve read, I post about my teaching, I post about academic issues that interest or vex me, I post once in a while about personal things.

That said, I am aware of some changes in my blogging habits. I used to write more short posts, for one thing. I also used to write more posts that jumped off from something someone else had posted, whether in the “MSM” or at another blog. And I used to do more round-up posts of links to other things to read.

I’m not sure why my book posts have gotten longer, but I don’t really worry about that. I write what I’ve thought of to say, in as much detail as I feel like writing! For some books, that’s a lot. For a smaller number of books, that’s not much. Lately, sometimes, it’s nothing at all. I like writing the longer posts better, by and large, because they are more satisfying to work on and to look back on. They do take time, though, and that’s probably why I don’t post as often as a number of the other book bloggers I follow, who seem to manage a post every couple of days at least. Though I have friends who say I must read very fast and all the time, I also feel, reading other book bloggers, that I actually read slowly and not nearly as much as they do!  I also used to post about pretty much every book I read–in fact, for the first couple of years that was kind of a principle of mine, as it kept me posting and prevented internal debates about which books were or were not worth posting about. When I finished a book, it went in the “to be blogged pile” and stayed there until it was done! If I thought I had nothing to say, I still had to give it a go–and it was surprising how often I found I did, after all, have at least something to say. That would probably be a good practice to revive, not least because it was good for me intellectually to be surprised in that way.

I never made a deliberate choice not to write more response posts. Since in theory that kind of cross-blog conversation is a big part of what I like about blogging, I wonder what happened. Perhaps it’s that reading blog posts by lots of different bloggers over the past five years tired me out a bit, especially because conversations come in waves–fads, even. Do I really want to have another exchange about the sorry state of contemporary book reviewing or the off-hand assumption that academics contribute nothing of interest to it? Or if a conversation is going on vigorously on something I am interested in, I don’t feel very motivated to add my two-cents’ worth just to be in the game. Right now, for instance, Jonathan Rees is writing all kinds of great posts about the wrong-headed embrace of technology, including Blackboard, on our campuses. I’m not anti-technology but I’m anti-Blackboard and skeptical about lots of other things getting a lot of hype from corporate-ed types. But Jonathan Rees is covering these topics just fine and I don’t really expect anyone is aching to get my perspective on the same issues, at least not in more depth than I can offer in a comment on his posts–so commenting makes more sense. Still, I do think conversations are one of  the great things about blogging, so I’m going to be more self-conscious about my decisions to blog or not to blog about something seen elsewhere, and try to make more decisions to blog rather than not. Just blogging about my own thing all the time does not exemplify the ethos of generosity and expansiveness that drew me to blogging in the first place.

The same goes for linking to and commenting on other people’s blogs, which I have been doing far too little of. Link posts don’t need to be as overwhelming as zunguzungu’s Sunday Reading lists (which leave me feeling that I don’t spend enough time on the internet–not a feeling I get very often!): they can be a nice way to point anyone who stops by my place to  some of the good stuff I’ve enjoyed, and they are a way, too, of acknowledging the pleasure I get from the efforts of other bloggers. As for commenting, well, I blame Google Reader, actually, for a decline in my commenting: I faithfully  read everyone on my blogroll and then some, but because I read them all handily aggregated, I’m not actually there at the other site, which means commenting requires a little extra effort. But it’s not much, and I should do it more. Again, conversation is a big part of the point, and I really appreciate it when someone comments here. Mind you, some of the sites I’d comment on already get a healthy dose of comments, and again it sometimes seems pointless to join the chorus if I don’t have much really specific to say. But when I do, I should say it, even if it’s just a little thing, because it’s good to make connections as tangible (and as generously) as possible.

I guess if I do have a concern about Novel Readings, then, it’s that it has become a bit hermetic. I don’t want to perform blogging and hope people do me the favor of reading: I want to be involved in blogging as an activity. I still am, but not as much as I once was. We’ll see what happens about that. My overall interests as a blogger haven’t changed, though, and my experiences on other forms of social media haven’t really affected the way I feel about this space, though they do let very welcome air and light into it.

End of Term Decompression

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

I wrapped up my winter term courses last week. It’s always a bit discombobulating after the final grades are submitted and I look around and realize the pressure is off. It hasn’t been my busiest term ever–fall was much busier, for instance–but even so there’s that constant awareness of something to get done, those weekends with Monday’s 9:30 class looming over the horizon, the steady of hum of guilt in the background when reading ‘for fun’–and all those odds and ends of bureaucratic business: things to post to Blackboard, doctor’s notes to collate with attendance records, reading responses to alphabetize, record, and return… And then there’s not! Hooray! And, now what?

Well, for starters, I usually treat myself to two things at the end of term: some housecleaning in my office, and some guilt-free down time. This time, that included breezing through some books by long-time favorites Dick Francis and Robert B. Parker. My public library has got quite a good selection of both authors now in their e-books, so all I have to do is point and click and I can load them up on my Sony Reader. I finally got God Save the Child, which I haven’t reread in ages–it’s the second one, right after The Godwulf Manuscript. Just one book later, it’s already more like the Spenser series I came to know and love, but most important, it’s where we first meet Susan Silverman. Spenser does a lot of cooking, and everyone wears fab seventies clothes described in tedious and inexplicable detail. I’m glad Parker started paring things down. Now I’m reading Sixkill, the last Spenser novel Parker finished before he died. The Dick Francis novels I read through were Reflex, Banker, and Decider–all good ones, but of these I think I liked Decider the best. Like Parker, Francis has a formula, but another way to think of a formula is as a recipe: if it works, why not make it again? I like the later Dick Francis books better than the earlier ones that were more closely focused on racing. Though horses are still always involved somehow, the protagonist usually has some interesting job that we get to learn all about: he may be a chef (Dead Heat) or a painter (To the Hilt, one of my favorites) or a glass blower (Shattered, another favorite). As a character, he’s pretty much the same every time: an everyday guy of relentless integrity who rises to the occasion and proves himself, not exactly a hero, but certainly heroic. Best of all, he always admires and usually falls in love with strong, intelligent, independent women. It’s true that, as in the Spenser books, it’s a man’s game overall, but that’s OK because if I get tired of looking at the world from that direction I can always skip over to my collection of Sara Paretsky or Sue Grafton mysteries!

I mentioned on Twitter that I enjoyed Francis’s incorporation of various exotic (to me) professions and my Romance-Land buddies suggested I might find something similar in some of Nora Roberts’s novels. So another book I downloaded was Vision in White, featuring a leading lady who’s a wedding photographer (side note: Nora Roberts is sure popular! pretty much all of her many, many books are checked out from the library’s e-book collection, most with multiple holds on them! I had to wait a few days for Vision in White too). I did enjoy the technical stuff, and I confess that though I’ve never been much of a wedding junkie, the wedding planner business was also entertainingly presented, though I don’t think I could stay interested in it for a whole series. My favorite part of Vision in White was definitely the cute English teacher, though as usual when anyone or anything remotely academic is presented I find it equal parts funny and annoying that the details are usually so inaccurate (not only does this guy enjoy marking student papers, but no distinction is drawn between being a literary scholar and being a creative writer–he has a Ph.D. but “of course” has a short story on the go, just for instance). Hmmm. Maybe all the glass blowing and haute cuisine and banking and architecture stuff in Dick Francis looks just as lame to professionals in those fields! No. Impossible–heresy!

I have been doing some work, including working through some of a revised thesis chapter on which I owe comments and also warming up (but definitely not warming up to) our latest installation of Blackboard. And I’ve had several hours of meetings, including a three-hour appeal hearing this morning, and I’ve had some reference letters to do, all for students I think very highly of and all for the same position–that’s a rhetorically tricky situation, I must say. Now it’s time to adjust to the new reality and start making up to-do lists and setting goals for the time between now and when classes start again. I’m not very good at summers, so I’m going to try and set up some structure for myself…starting tomorrow!

Vera Brittain, Honourable Estate Part I

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Vera Brittain’s Honourable Estate turns out to be a bit hard to get out here. I’ve been reading a copy that came (via “document delivery” or interlibrary loan) from the Winnipeg Public Library–who knew. It said it wasn’t renewable: the good folks at our library managed to wangle one renewal for me, but its revised due date is today, so I’ve missed the window to try for a couple more weeks. Whose bright idea was it, anyway, to order in a 500-page novel right at the end of term? However, I found what looks like a decent copy at AbeBooks, so I should be able to finish it up at my leisure.

In the meantime, I have read the whole of the first part. The novel is structured in three volumes. Parts I and II both cover approximately the same stretch of time–Part I is 1894 to 1919, and Part II is 1906-1919. Part III picks up in 1920 and carries us on to 1930. It’s a rather clever structure, if I understand how it’s going to work out: Parts I and II take us through the story of two different families who are problematically interconnected–exactly how, Part I doesn’t say, except to recount that its main characters, after settling near the family featured in Part II, have to make a sudden departure after some sort of crisis. So I expect Part II will fill us in.

Part I, though not particularly artful in its style or form (it’s pretty much just one thing after another, in relentless succession), is emotionally quite intense and (to me) also quite depressing. It centers on Janet Harding, the discontented young wife of a country clergyman whose autocratic preferences intensify in reaction to her increasingly militant feminism. Janet is quite an unusual character. She marries ignorant of the facts of life and is not impressed (to put it mildly) when she learns them; she is particularly upset to find herself pregnant, as she feels no maternal urges at all. When the novel opens, she’s actually in labour, and her husband is struggling with his anger and abhorrence after reading in her diary about her revulsion from the whole situation: “I see nothing before me,” she has written, “but the sacrifice and the pain and the lasting cares and the cruelty of it all. I suppose it sounds inhuman, but my great hope now is that the child may not be born alive.” It’s understandable that Thomas is is upset, but it’s also made perfectly understandable that Janet would resent being cornered, which is how she feels, by a combination of biology and patriarchy. She suffers physically during the birth and blames indifferent medical care. The record in her diary for the date of her son’s birth is “the terse, unembroidered entry: ‘Women doctors? YES!!'”

Things don’t get any better for Janet and Thomas. Janet hates being a mother and finds her only fulfillment in her suffragist activism. She gets pregnant a second time and deliberately terminates the pregnancy. The means are not very clear but I gathered that abortifacents were involved–“I am acting on the assumption that I have a child,” she writes to her only confidante, “and I am doing my best to destroy its life.” When Thomas finds out, he’s practically hysterical (he’s not the most stable man to begin with–he reminds me a bit of Louis Trevelyan in He Knew He Was Right, and in both cases, interestingly, the authors link frantic attempts to control wives to insanity). He eventually coerces her into confessing and repenting, and then to submitting to him sexually (“she lay still and passive, shivering a little as he came towards her”). So much for marriage as an ‘honourable estate.’

The rest of the volume follows this miserable couple as the tensions between them worsen. Thomas considers Janet’s feminism a disease, a corruption, while she finds in it and in her friendship with a successful playwright Ellison Campbell some reason for living and even, occasionally, some transcendent sense of purpose to her unhappy life. Brittain really pits political commitment against family obligations here, though by making the family deeply dysfunctional she can be seen, not as rejecting marriage and motherhood altogether (and after all, she herself was married and a mother), but as showing the need for families in general and husbands in particular to reform in order to accommodate women who rightly have other occupations. Janet pays a high price for her activism: not only does she finally walk out on her marriage, but she loses Ellison’s friendship too when she chooses to attend the funeral procession for Emily Davison (the suffragist who threw herself in front of King Edward’s horse ) instead of celebrating Ellison’s latest theatrical success. She persists, however, and Thomas gets crazier and crazier–and poor Dennis, their unwanted son, grows up in the midst of all this and turns out not badly. He makes his way eventually to Oxford, and as he becomes more independent and self-aware, he defends and supports his mother’s cause. When Part I ends, he has finally overcome medical obstacles to enlistment, but the Armistice is declared before he ever gets to France.

I was surprised over and over by the dark brutality of the story and its main characters. Brittain makes none of the concessions to convention that many 19th-century advocates for women make: I’m thinking, for instance, of Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which makes a powerful case for the need to improve women’s position in marriage but does so by way of a heroine, Helen, who exemplifies crucial ideals of femininity and demands change in order to realize, not transform, the promised balance of power and influence between the sexes. Helen’s cause is not herself but her son: it’s unthinkable that she would wish he not be born alive, much less abort a potential sibling. Janet fails all the ‘relatability’ tests imaginable. I find this a strategically interesting decision: Brittain’s work would surely have been easier if Janet were nicer, even if she still had no interest in keeping house or looking after Dennis. She risks confirming misogynist prejudices about feminism as an outlet for ‘unwomanly women’–as if, of course, there is any definition of ‘womanly’ besides what women themselves are individually. Maybe the idea is to focus us on the principle of the thing: no matter whether we like her or not, we have to see Thomas’s treatment of her as unjust and repellant.

I’m genuinely interested in seeing what Parts II and III do. For now, though, it’s back to the library with this one.

Not Blogging But Drowning

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

OK, I’m not really drowning, as this is my ‘light’ term and I’m also lucky enough to have a TA to share the essays with in my larger class. But working through papers and exams is really sapping my psychic energy right now. I hope–no, plan!–to have the last of the essays done tomorrow. Then I’ll be back! There’s nothing like being immersed in student writing to make you question your teaching and assignment strategies, and so Mark Bauerlein’s provocative post on his own decision to assign “all summary, no critical thinking” in his freshman comp class next time is timely and may provoke me all the way to a post of my own. I’m certainly wondering if the ‘critical essay’ will continue to be a standard part of my assignment sequences, even for upper-level classes. Marc Bousquet’s equally provocative post “Robots are Grading Your Papers!” is also timely: though I’m not (happily) teaching in anything like the kind of mechanical context he describes, and I’m not sure that working with students to produce writing that is more academic is what I want to do, I will be thinking about how to change my assignments to increase the amount of genuine engagement, not just between the students and the material, but between me and the students. I have the very strong feeling this term that I was asking students to do too many things at once that were new, difficult, and poorly understood, and that my own expectations about how they should prepare for and accomplish these things were not congruent with their own habits and expectations. This may be just the usual slump that comes from working through a large pile of assignments in a short period of time, but at this point my own level of dissatisfaction is high enough that I’m pretty motivated to think about how else to proceed next time.

First, though, I have ten more essays to mark. And one revised thesis chapter to attend to.

‘You were made men’: Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

In a recent post about choosing The Road as one of the texts for my Introduction to Literature class next year, I mentioned that I’m also assigning Eli Wiesel’s Night. In the comments, Dorian said that he considered Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz “the more compelling text, both formally and conceptually.” As I said to him then, I’ve known for a while that I should read Levi, and his remark  was just the instigation I needed to make it a priority.

I finished reading Survival in Auschwitz this afternoon, so it’s too soon for me to say whether I think it is better or greater than Night. It is certainly a very different book, and as I work up my notes on Night again in the fall I know I’ll be thinking a lot about the contrasts. My first impression is that it is a much less overtly literary book than Night—Night is heavily symbolic, organized around motifs and vignettes and characterized (at least in the translation I’m familiar with) by striking images and words freighted with significance. Levi’s approach is more indirect, his vignettes or episodes more elusive or ambiguous. In some ways, I think Night is more artful, but also, as a result, it feels more artificial. There’s a raw quality to Levi’s book: it’s not sleek, he’s honest about things he forgets, there are awkward but heartfelt gestures towards people he remembers. The book is unified in a different way than Night  is–not emotionally or symbolically but associatively, conceptually, a section at a time. It does not conclude but ends, again awkwardly, without flourish. Though both books immerse us in the horror of Auschwitz, Levi’s account seems somehow less visceral, more appalled than angry, more inquisitive than despairing. It is not any less devastating. It is, perhaps, more morally challenging: where Wiesel deals in searing absolutes, Levi puzzles us, as he was puzzled: “We now invite the reader to contemplate the possible meaning in the Lager of the words ‘good’ and ‘evil’, ‘just’ and ‘unjust’; let everybody judge, on the basis of the picture we have outlined and of the examples given above, how much of our ordinary moral world could survive on this side of the barbed wire.”

The differences between the books are not superficial, but at the same time I don’t think they are fundamental: both books are ultimately preoccupied with the loss or preservation of humanity under conditions that deliberately seek to exterminate it, conditions so psychically brutalizing that physical death seems little more than a bureaucratic afterthought. The original English title of Survival in Auschwitz was If This Is a Man, which is a direct translation of the Italian title. The current title seems apt to the book’s attention to literal survival: a lot of Levi’s attention is given to the complex economy of the camp, driven by desperation but also fueled by people’s endless ingenuity: spoons, shoes, bowls, bread–the things that mean, for just a little longer, endurance. The title has another dimension, though, more consonant with the Italian title, which is the survival of the person: memories, dreams, knowledge. For Levi, his knowledge of chemistry, which helps define him, to himself, as a man (“Yet I am he, the B. Sc. of Turin, in fact, at this particular moment it is impossible to doubt my identity with him”) also contributes to his physical survival, as his job in the laboratory protects him from a second winter of hard labor. But one of the most profound and moving sections of the book for me was section 11, “The Canto of Ulysses,” in which Levi tries to teach a fellow prisoner Italian by reciting and translating some of the Divine Comedy:

Here, listen Pikolo, open your ears and your mind, you have to understand, for my sake:

Think of your breed; for brutish ignorance
Your mettle was not made; you were made men,
To follow after knowledge and excellence.’

As if I also was hearing it for the first time: like the blast of a trumpet, like the voice of God. For a moment I forget who I am and where I am.

Pikolo begs me to repeat it. How good Pikolo is, he is aware that it is doing me good. Or perhaps it is something more: perhaps, despite the wan translation and the pedestrian, rushed commentary, he has received the message, he has felt that it has to do with him, that it has to do with all men who toil, and with us in particular; and that it has to do with us two, who dare to reason of these things with the poles for the soup on our shoulders.

Levi’s urgency increases as their time runs out and he can’t remember the lines, can’t bridge the gaps in his memory, can’t explain, can’t hold on. The poetry is unbearable because it awakens what the camp refuses–what you too must refuse to survive the camp (“oh, Pikolo, Pikolo, say something, speak, do not let me think of my mountains which used to show up against the dusk of evening as I returned by train from Milan to Turin”). But the loss of the poetry is also unbearable, because it is the negation of the camp. It is the antidote, not to the regimented brutality, the beatings and murders, the starvation, but to what Levi calls early in the book “the demolition of a man.”