Blogging, Criticism, Reviewing

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A recent discussion at The Reading Experience raises questions related to some I have raised before here and have been thinking about a lot again as I try to imagine how best to direct the energy I have put into blogging–issues such as whether ‘litblogging’ is at its best when used as a form of literary journalism or reviewing (focusing on the new), what kind of writing about ‘classic’ or old literature has appeal or relevance to modern readers, whether (or how) blogging can also serve as a medium for popularizing or making literary expertise accessible, or whether there really is any comfortable middle ground between academic specialization and standards and the interests and habits of common readers. From Dan’s original post:

What the litblogosphere promises to offer is the possibility of multiple sources of well-supported reviews and commentary (many more than have been available in print publications, whose numbers are only continuing to decline, anyway), which can only enrich the discussion of current fiction (and poetry) and in turn encourage writers to believe their work is getting serious attention.

And from the comments that followed (all are excerpts; other comments also appear in the original thread):

Which is precisely why I grumble over the fact that an awful lot of Litcritbloggage (not the majority, probably, but a worry-worthy chunk) seems wasted on texts long-established in reputation (and thoroughly colonized by academics; in some cases for centuries), not to mention being relatively impervious to casual analysis. (Steve Augustine)

But has it ever occurred to you that people who blog about texts that are “long-established in reputation” do so because they are new to them? Because they didn’t read them in school? And that the odds that they have been exposed to much of the critical apparatus is rather small? Are you suggesting that one should first read all the extant literature before deciding whether something ought to be blogged? (Richard)

Bloggers discover as we discover (not everyone’s put paid to the canon the way you have); their essential charm (I think it’s charming) is that they flatten the mountaintop elevating the critic-priest above the rabble and allow us to watch them form and respond to ideas. In other words, their discovery of Austen or James at the age of X is crucial to *them*, if not to us, it provides answers to questions *they’ve* wondered about, fills holes in *their* knowledge that they (well, some of them) are happy to admit to having had. I don’t think it’s necessarily a critical form, I think it’s often a form of self-expression, and I suppose that to gripe about someone’s preoccupation with Thomas Hardy when there’s so little attention going to Jerome Charyn is to cast that someone in a role they haven’t sought out. (Chris)

I find classics blogging among “serious” litbloggers (ie, those positioning themselves to take the baton when periodical print collapses) relatively useless; not because of the medium, but because there are already metric tons of readily accessible critical analysis of Shakespeare, Homer, you name it, in print. Seeing centuries-old opinions on Hamlet rehashed (or mutilated) online in a not-entirely-serious fashion doesn’t float my boat. If I have to read civilian (non-academic) takes on Hamlet, I prefer to read something that Anthony Burgess or Victor Pritchett or George Steiner sweated over for weeks or months… otherwise, the results are fairly back-to-High-Schoolish…I’d just like to see more critical litbloggers who take themselves seriously step up to the plate and provide more of the kind of content that *really can* give the best of what we called “print” (past tense because I’m thinking of a Golden Age) a run for its money… (Steve Augustine again)

I certainly agree with those who don’t think there’s any call to be prescriptive about these issues: individual motives for writing and reading blogs vary widely, and the distinctive features of the form are precisely its accessibility to all (internet-connected) people and its adaptability to all voices, styles, and agendas. The questions I raise above, then, really have to do with my own interests and aspirations as a blogger and a critic: what can or should I in particular be writing out here, particularly if I want to identify this blog as part of my professional work in more than a very peripheral way? I’m not an expert on, or even an avid reader of, contemporary fiction, particularly of the more experimental kind for which Dan Green is such a persistent advocate. I can contribute only as an amateur reviewer, then, where new releases are concerned, and while I enjoy writing up comments on my recent reading and sometimes feel I have found something of interest to say, I can’t afford the time (and lack much incentive) to turn these posts into genuine thought-pieces. I’m in a better position to talk knowledgeably about Victorian fiction, but Steve is certainly right that there are “metric tons of readily accessible critical analysis” on all the classic texts, including any on which I feel qualified to opine. So here my contributions will be better-informed, but they are not likely to be especially original–meaning the key issue becomes purpose and audience. If I aim for the kind of originality necessary for a scholarly publication, I’ll be back to writing esoterica for fellow academics, and the claustrophobia that practice induced was what drove me to the blogosphere in the first place. But is it any more useful or productive–any more of a contribution to literary understanding–to add my own 2-cents worth to what’s already available to a general reader (including on the internet) about Middlemarch or Jane Eyre? Someone like Michael Dirda or James Wood has the ‘street cred’ (or market appeal) to do this (though I’m currently reading Dirda’s Classics for Pleasure and I think the same questions could quite reasonably be asked about the need for or value of his contribution as well). I think a key point, made by a couple of the comments quoted above, is that the classics are in fact new to everyone at some point, so there is genuine pedagogical value in critical material that helps them make the most of their reading experiences. In the classroom (or in the right internet context) there’s always a good reason to explain (again) ways of reading and thinking about Middlemarch…

I realize that this is to put a fairly solipsistic spin on a more abstract discussion. But, hey, this is my blog, after all! Here are earlier some of the versions of this semi-internal debate, showing that, after over a year of blogging (and blog-reading), I have not moved very far ahead on these questions:

Literary journalism differs from literary criticism, it is usually assumed, in being prompted by an occasion needing a fairly prompt response to give it relevance. Criticism takes more of a long view. But without that occasion, that immediacy, what appeal does criticism have for the non-academic reader, especially in a medium like the internet? Is there an audience online for writing about Dickens or George Eliot? And what could be said that would matter, or appeal? The kind of stuff that gets written for academic audiences apparently (unsurprisingly) alienates almost everyone else, while the kind of stuff that gets written for popular audiences often seems trivial or redundant to those who read the academic stuff. And yet…books such as John Sutherland’s How to Read a Novel or Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer do get published, so there is presumably some interest out there in enhancing one’s experience of reading “the classics.” One approach might be to look for the contemporary relevance in past authors, as I attempted to do with my paper on George Eliot as “Moralist for the 21st Century.” But that means only highlighting authors and texts that lend themselves to modern purposes, which gets pretty tendentious and unsatisfactory pretty fast. (“The Occasion for Blogging,” May 24, 2007)

Of course, when past works are the ones at issue, there’s presumably no longer any question of reviewing them–or is there? Actually, that’s an interesting question, and one linked to my ongoing musings about the potential role of something like a blog in my own work. How or why could writing about a ‘classic’ be relevant, useful, desirable to a contemporary audience? I still hold to the fairly simple distinction that reviewing is a form of literary journalism that requires a specific occasion as an incentive, while criticism has more abstract (longitudinal?) interests. (“More on the Purpose of Criticism,” June 20, 2007)

The high degree of specialization in academia is one of the main reasons academic research is not particularly accessible, never mind interesting, to broad audiences. My own interest in blogging is motivated largely by a desire to escape or redefine the limits of specialization, not to reproduce them in an alternative medium. Cohen’s account of what makes a blog successful exacerbates my ongoing concern, though, that there’s not much point competing with thousands of other blogs for readers’ attention unless your own site offers something distinctive, some angle or attitude they can’t find anywhere else. To use my own blog as an example, I enjoy writing up my latest reading and I find it useful posting about subjects related to my embryonic project on ‘writing for readers,’ but if my ultimate goal is to provide something that will, in Cohen’s words, “frame discussions on a topic and point to resources of value,” I’m going to need to narrow, or at least define, my focus–ideally, in a way that still satisfies my desire to get out of the ivory tower and into a wider conversation. (“Professors, Start Your Blogs…,” July 18, 2007)

One aspect of this situation that I’ve been thinking about is the tension between generalization and specialization that academic blogs perhaps illustrate. It’s difficult to provoke comments on a specialized topic, except from other specialists. Non-specialists may be interested in reading or using your material, but they are unlikely to add to it. (I’m thinking, for instance, of the posts on The Little Professor about Victorian anti-Catholic texts: this is just not a topic on which many people can, or would, chime in, though now I know where to go if I want to learn something about them.) But if your offerings are general enough to interest a lot of people, they may lose their value in establishing a community of expertise, or in contributing to the development of your professional work. . . . Further to that last point, I’m starting to notice a divide in blogging between two kinds of literary sites, which I would roughly divide into ‘bookish’ and ‘academic’–and the academic ones really don’t seem that literary, in the sense of talking about, well, literature, as opposed to politics, philosophy, theory, and criticism. (I know, I know: talking about literature always involves politics, philosophy, and theory, etc….) I ‘m thinking especially at this point of The Valve, subtitled ‘A Literary Organ,’ after all. The bookish ones seem quite contemporary in their focus, so for those of us who spend most of our time reading loose baggy monsters from the 19th century, well, once again but for different reasons, we aren’t really equipped to jump in–and there too, I don’t see that much discussion, to return to my first point. (“If a Blog Falls in the Forest,” October 22, 2007)

Weekend Miscellany: Orientalism, Psychology of Fiction, Frowning on Smiley

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At the TLS, Robert Irwin (the author of Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents) reviews two other recent works of Orientalist revisionism, Daniel Martin Varisco’s Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid and Ibn Warraq’s Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism:

So many academics want the arguments presented in Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) to be true. It encourages the reading of novels at an oblique angle in order to discover hidden colonialist subtexts. It promotes a hypercritical version of British and, more generally, of Western achievements. It discourages any kind of critical approach to Islam in Middle Eastern studies. Above all, Orientalism licenses those academics who are so minded to think of their research and teaching as political activities. The drudgery of teaching is thus transformed into something much more exciting, namely “speaking truth to power”.

It is unlikely that the two books under review, both of which present damning criticisms of Said’s book at length and in detail, will change anything. (read the rest here)

A new blog, OnFiction, will focus on the psychology of fiction. Contributor Keith Oatley (author of the very interesting re-vision of Middlemarch, A Natural History, as well as a great many scientific papers and books) offers this interesting suggestion for what makes a ‘great’ novel:

From the point of view of the psychology of fiction, one of the criteria that may distinguish great novels from those that are merely entertaining, is that a great work is not about persuasion. There is no mental coercion of the reader to run only on rails laid by the writer. Of course there is structure, with settings, characters, conversation, and events, but along with these a great novelist offers what D.W. Winnicott, in his book Playing and reality, called a “potential space between the individual and the environment,” a space in which the reader’s imagination can expand, and in which, as the reader takes up the words of the writer, the experience of the book can become the reader’s own. George Eliot’s Middlemarch is one of the world’s great novels because the author offers the reader exactly this kind of space-in-between.

(Looking up A Natural History at Chapters in order to insert the link, I find that my tentative plan to assign it for a graduate seminar on “Middlemarch in/and the 21st Century” (along with Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun) will be complicated, if not foiled, by finding it apparently out of print.)

I happened upon a site called Open Letters Monthly; one of their reviewers really hated Smiley’s 13 Ways of Looking at a Novel:

Great Books was a bestseller, and many more books have since sprouted in the rut it plowed, with names like Book Lust, The Literary 100, The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books, and so on, each offering go-get-‘em homilies about Western classics, and each, it more and more appears, aspiring in a ponderous, paginated way to be a blog. We can vainly hope that the low point of this trend was realized in 2005 with Jane Smiley’s 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, in which the author reads 101 randomly chosen books and then, for no special reason, tells you what she thinks is wrong with them. This book is solely predicated on Smiley’s environmentally unsound conviction that whenever she happens to write something, no matter how trivial or self-involved it is, trees should die so that it may see print. One of the unexplored virtues of the blog may be its role in obviating bad or negligible books by acting as a valve for our more egregious writerly chatterers—in any case, if ever anyone needed a benignly ignorable blogspot account, it’s Smiley. (read the rest here)

A much more favorable review of Smiley can be found on this “benignly ignorable blogspot account,” right over here. In the meantime, I have ordered the Michael Dirda volume also mentioned in the Open Letters review, Classics for Pleasure, and will eventually review it here in my ‘books about books‘ series.

Olivia Manning, The Fortunes of War

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This two-volume set is actually a sextet of shorter novels, the first three comprising The Balkan Trilogy, the second The Levant Trilogy. According to my Penguin editions, Anthony Burgess described this series as “the finest fictional record of the war produced by a British writer.” The war in question is, of course, the second World War, but if Burgess’s remark leads you to expect a sweeping war-time saga full of action, heroism, drama and suspense, you’ll be surprised–as I was. In the first volume, set first in Romania and then in Greece, our protagonists are at the periphery of the conflict, which is spreading through Europe and gradually encroaches on their lives without ever directly reaching it, as they leave both Bucharest and then Athens on the eve of German occupation. All of the motley array of characters are versions of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, bit players with no important part to play in the real story, except that theirs is the story, and it’s not comic–or tragic, either. (Some textual evidence that Manning herself conceived of her characters in this way comes in the Coda to The Levant Trilogy, in which she compares them to “the stray figures left on the stage at the end of a great tragedy”). The novels unfold in a strangely muted register that matches the characters’ global insignificance even as the interest, and pathos of their circumstances and their endearing and irritating individual characteristics eventually win us over to believing in and caring about them.

I was fascinated with the picture Manning offers of the British abroad in this particular historical moment; the novels are highly autobiographical, or at any rate follow closely the historical and geographical situations she and her husband experienced, and Manning was clearly an astute observer of the both the local and the expatriat cultures she participated in. She is particularly understated and yet pointed (if that’s not too paradoxical a description) about the anti-Semitism in Romania, illustrating its character and effects while keeping its worst realities just off-stage. The horrible truths are shown most explicitly through the story of the banker Drucker, whose son Sasha the Pringles eventually shelter in their flat. Imprisoned by the Romanians ostensibly for trading in currency on the black market but really, it is clear, for the crime of being a rich Jew, he is eventually released for trial, and Harriet Pringle goes on Sasha’s behalf to get a look at how he has fared:

Harriet, who had seen Drucker only once, ten months before, remembered him as a man in fresh middle age, tall, weighty, elegant, handsome, who had welcomed her with a warm gaze of admiration.
What appeared was an elderly stooping skeleton, a cripple who descended the steps by dropping the same foot each time and dragging the other after. The murmurs of ‘Drucker’ told her that, whether she could believe it or not, this was he. Then she recognised the suit of English tweed he had been wearing when he had entertained the Pringles to luncheon. The suit was scarcely a suit at all now….
From the bottom step he half-smiled, as if in apology, at his audience, then, seeing Harriet, the only woman present, he looked puzzled. He paused and one of the warders gave him a kick that sent him sprawling over the narrow pavement. As he picked himself up, there came from him a stench like the stench of a carrion bird. The warder kicked at him again and he fell forward, clutching at the van steps and murmuring “Da, da,” in zealous obedience.

Harriet’s specific emotional response is not elaborated on, and why should it be? We have, presumably, shared it, and we understand her decision, arriving home, to “deceive Sasha. He was never likely to see his father again.” She reports only “‘Your father looked very well,'” and that kind, protective lie speaks eloquently of the destructive inhumanity of the truth. Key moments of high suspense or emotion are treated in this cool, matter-of-fact way throughout, as when the Pringles arrive home to find that Sasha has been taken in a raid:

The bed-covers were on the floor, and as Harriet piled them back on to the bed, the mouth-organ fell from among them. She handed it to Guy as proof that he had been taken, and forcibly. Under the bed-covers was the forged passport, torn in half – derisively, it seemed.
Remembering her childhood pets whose deaths had broken her heart, she said: “They’ll murder him, of course.”

The next day, “Harriet [is] surprised that she felt nothing.” The risk, in both her consciousness and the narrative, seems to be that, in such circumstances, the only options are feeling nothing or being overwhelmed with feeling. Cumulatively, though, for this reader anyway, the effect of the persistent resistance to melodrama is a story nearly stripped of its human essentials and thus of a sense of what the novels stand for in the face of totalitarianism. Towards the end of their stay in Athens, for example, a major character whose quirks and (mis)fortunes we have followed since the first pages is unexpectedly and unnecessarily shot, more or less accidentally and at random. Is it because destruction and death are always at the margins of their lives, because the war has taken normalcy from them, that his companions feel more inconvenienced than anything else?

The manager agreed to let the body rest for the night in one of the hotel bathrooms. The four friends followed as it was carried away from the terrace and placed on a bathroom floor. As the door was locked upon it, the all clear sounded. The manager, offering his commiserations, shook hands all round and the English party left the hotel. Alan, hourly expecting an evacuation order, had decided to spend the night in his office. Ben Phipps, on his way to Psychico, dropped the Pringles off at the academy.

Pop psychology terms like “coping strategies” come to mind: these non-combatants are struggling for survival themselves, but their enemies are not the Nazis so much as the moral and social rootlessness they experience, with military victory, and thus the survival of their ‘home’ countries and values, uncertain, and with reminders of their own mortality and insignificance nearly constant.

In this context, Guy Pringle is a fascinating figure (though I don’t see why he’s the one Burgess highlights as “one of the major characters in modern fiction,” given the much greater priority given to the experience and perspective of his wife). Guy is a lecturer in English literature notable for his expansive energy, which in The Balkan Trilogy he invests in two major theatrical productions. The one treated in most detail is an amateur production of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, a project for which he recruits many of the other major characters–but, tellingly, not Harriet, with whom he declares he cannot work, because she will not take him or his effort seriously enough. His goals include raising the morale of the British residents and their friends in Bucharest as well as asserting the importance of British culture and history in the face of the military setbacks that have eroded the nation’s stature abroad–they are, after all, on the losing side at this point. The German Propaganda Bureau keeps a map in its window indicating German advances across France with “broad arrows.” “For Bucharest,” we are told, “the fall of France was the fall of civilization….With France lost, there would be no stay or force against savagery….the victory of Nazi Germany would be the victory of darkness.” In this context, Guy’s preoccupation with his play is suggestive of fiddling while Rome burns, and yet at the same time it seems defiant, an assertion of the value of art and beauty and imagination. Emerging from the theatre, the audience learns that Paris has fallen: “Chastened, they emerged into the summer night and met reality, avoiding each others’ eyes, guilty because they had escaped the last calamitous hours.” They have been experiencing freedom of the mind, the kind of freedom that these novels make you feel is the most to be cherished in wartime. And yet where is the heroism in going to the theatre while around you suffer millions unable to escape in the most literal way?

Ambivalence to Guy’s cultural projects, and indeed to Guy more generally, intensifies in The Levant Trilogy, written more than a decade after The Balkan Trilogy but picking up the story of most of the same characters as they move through another phase of displacement, this time in Egypt. Harriet’s relationship with Guy has always been strained by his inability to put her needs even on the same level as the demands placed on him by everyone else he knows, as well as by his own obsession with his work. Harriet’s discontent takes concrete form occasionally, as in a near-romance that evolves in Athens in the third novel of The Balkan Trilogy. In The Levant Trilogy, we see more of Harriet’s efforts to develop an independent identity in the face of Guy’s physical and emotional absence. In this series, though the war is brought much closer, through the character of Simon Boulderstone (is the redundancy of his surname significant?), with whom we travel to the front at last. Simon comes literally face to face with the horrors of the desert campaign:

Before him was a flat expanse of desert where the light was rolling out like a wave across the sand. Two tanks stood in the middle distance and imagining they had stopped for a morning brew-up, he decided to cross to them and ask if they had seen anything of the patrol or the batman’s truck. It was too far to walk so he went by car, following the track till he was level with the tanks, then walking across the mardam. A man was standing in one of the turrets, motionless, as if unaware of Simon’s approach. Simon stopped at a few yards’ distance to observe the figure, then saw it was not a man. It was a man-shaped cinder that faced him with white and perfect teeth set in a charred black skull. He could make out the eye-sockets and the triangle that had once supported a nose then, returning at a run, he swung the car round and drove back between the batteries, so stunned that for a little while his own private anxiety was forgotten.

We see, too, that the violence of war has the capacity to reach ‘civilians’ with no easing of its horrors. Very early in this volume, for instance, a child is brought in who has been killed by the explosion of a hand grenade he picked up while playing in the desert. In what may be the most surrealistically gruesome and disturbing scene I’ve ever read, his distraught parents refuse to interpret the signs that he has been fatally wounded and attempt to revive him by pouring gruel into a hole blown into his cheek: “The gruel poured out again. This happened three times before Sir Desmond gave up and, gathering the child into his arms, said, ‘He wants to sleep. I’ll take him to his room.'” His death prompts Harriet to think of “all the other boys who were dying in the desert before they had had a chance to live. And yet, though there was so much death at hand, she felt the boy’s death was a death apart.” Suffering was nearby throughout The Balkan Trilogy, but here we live in a community of the physically and spiritually wounded.

Yet even as the action and emotion of this trilogy had an intensity not often displayed in the earlier volume, it also seemed to me more directed at the unfolding of interior dramas for the characters, many of whom are struggling to define themselves against the expectations of others, or in the absence of well-defined or well-understood roles for themselves in the war-time conditions and foreign locations they are negotiating: Simon himself, for example, who has come to Egypt in part to follow in his brother’s footsteps, or Harriet, who eventually hitches a lift into Syria in an attempt to claim some meaning for herself beyond being Guy’s wife. Guy’s obtuseness about Harriet’s independent needs is highlighted more specifically here and his incessant busyness seems more irresponsible than it did in the first volume, perhaps because it’s not seen as serving any greater purpose. The one major cultural event ends…unexpectedly…without any of the triumphant possibilities of Troilus and Cressida, though perhaps it has as much symbolic significance of its own, maybe even marking a rejection of the idealism that Guy represented.

I haven’t really reached many interpretive conclusions about these books, but I have a lot of lingering questions. How far, for instance, do these books seek simply to chronicle how people lived through the exile from home and from normalcy imposed by the war, and how far do they prompt us to think about the global conflict as a reflection, an externalization, of abstract forces and values playing out on a personal scale as well? Is Manning’s understated style itself some kind of statement about the limitations of aesthetic responses to catastrophe, or about the necessity we are under of living life on our own small scale, however grand the larger narrative? Is Guy offered up as the embodiment of some essentially British quality, and if so, how far is it critiqued and how far accepted or encouraged?

Virtual Roundtable on Hamlet Tonight

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From Nigel Beale @ Nota Bene Books:
Please know that I am, as you read this email, hosting an online roundtable discussion of Hamlet. Participants are as follows:

Ed Champion, Filthy Habits

Sarah Weinman, Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind

Anne Fernald, Furnham

Amateur Reader, Wuthering Expectations

Initial take on Act 1 has just been posted. Commentary on the rest will appear within the next 48 hours. Discussion will continue throughout the weekend. Please, take the three hours required to reread the play (you won’t regret it), and pull up a chair in the comments section.
Great idea, Nigel; I hope you get some good discussion.

A Note on Course Evaluations as a Guide to Future Conduct

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They don’t help (much). Here’s why…

Should I change the reading list next year?

“There were a LOT of texts. Too many, really. It was impossible to keep up with the readings.”

“It would have been interesting to add a few more books…I found the course load light enough that a few more (enjoyable) readings wouldn’t have been oppressive.”

“I loved the Moonstone–everything comes back to that.”

“I really enjoyed the Moonstone; I thought it was the most interesting and hard to figure out.”

“Great reading list except for the Moonstone. It was too long and boring.”

“I think one of my favourite books from this course is The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.”

“I thought Roger Ackroyd was unfair and not a clear example of Christie’s usual style.”

“Knots and Crosses a bit freaky.”

“Do not drop Knots and Crosses, best book I have ever read.”

“I found it more stimulating to examine actual books and stories rather than musty old course books.” [?]

I know I talk quickly, but how much of a problem is that, really?

“Her lectures were indecipherable because of how rapidly she spoke.”

“Maitzen speaks too fast. Slowing down would be helpful to take clear notes.”

“I found the lectures interesting and stimulating (I didn’t fall asleep in class once).”

“I do not think you talk too fast. I thoroughly enjoyed this class and look forward to taking classes taught by you in the future.”

“I actually liked Maitzen’s upbeat, fast-talking teaching style. It kept me from being bored and it kept me really listening.”

“She spoke too quickly at times; it was difficult to take notes in this manner.”

“I do not find she speaks too quickly. People need to take more condensed notes.”

What about the assignment structure and methods of evaluation?

“Assignments are a great way of getting us to think about the material. 75-word limit was also a good challenge.”

“I liked the way we had two assignments, and the in-class quizzes definitely were motivation to stay on track in class.”

“I think the homework assignment format should be re-evaluated.”

“The assignments were short and concise while still being challenging, which was a nice change from lengthy papers.”

“Your response to the first assignment was completely inappropriate and extreme, you wasted 2 classes and called the class ‘illiterate.'”

“I particularly appreciated the amount of time you dedicated to correcting in class the mistakes made on assignments. It genuinely helped and clarified my understanding of good writing!”

“She gives great constructive feedback on assignments and even gives us exercises that would help with our assignments.”

“Actually enjoyed quizzes, felt questions were fair.”

“For the quizzes I felt that there were too many questions on what were sometimes subtle statements made in class.”

“Increase the value of attendance.”

“Unsympathetic with the occasional absence.”

“Group work was a nice change of pace.”

“I hate group work and found those classes monotonous and unhelpful.”

And the intellectual substance?

“Maitzen posed questions that forced you to think!”

“Extremely interesting books were featured and taught in an intellectually stimulating manner.”

“Often lecture topics were repetitive or had little to do with the day’s reading.”

“Lectures were quick-paced and extremely informative. I never wanted to miss a class because so much material was covered in each lecture.”

“Feminism within the texts wasn’t over-emphasized.”

“TOO MUCH FEMINISM. This isn’t gender studies.”

So, overall how did I do?

“The teaching was mediocre.”

“One of the best profs I have had at Dal.”

“No complaints.”

“Pretty successful.”

“Sort of funny.”

“A great prof, very funny.”

 

“______”

“Dr. Maitzen is a superstar!”

Anything else to add?

“Thanks for keeping a blog–helps with some insight from time to time.”

I think the problem should be obvious. It’s not that the feedback isn’t welcomed or taken seriously, but if it’s not at all consistent, it’s hard to do anything in particular in response!

I should say (just for the record) that these are not the actual questions on our departmental course evaluation forms; these are the things I worry about as I look ahead to next year’s classes. I specifically asked them about the fast talking, as it has come up a few times in my evaluations before. All of the responses, though, are taken verbatim from the forms.

Speaking of Updated Classics…

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…apparently Ellen Page has been signed to star in a new film version of Jane Eyre:

BBC Films has signed the 20-year-old Halifax native in the latest adaptation of the Charlotte Bronte novel, with Page in the lead role.

The movie, scripted by Moira Buffini, still doesn’t have a director or lead actor.

Page has become a Hollywood darling of sorts after being nominated for an Academy Award for her turn as a wise-cracking pregnant teen in the comedy Juno. The movie captured a best screenplay Oscar for Diablo Cody.

This would mark Page’s first period piece. Bronte’s 1847 book chronicles the melodramatic love story of a governess and her employer, Edward Rochester.

It’s a piece of literature that has become a popular screen adaptation, with more than a dozen productions created for both television and cinema.

Any nominations for her leading man? Colin Firth, anyone?

I just hope they keep a lot more of Bronte’s dialogue than adaptations of the novel usually do. It’s much more crackling than the stuff the screenwriters usually come up with.

Update on New ‘World’s Classics’ Edition

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Further to Miriam’s comment on my previous post about the re-launch of the Oxford World’s Classics edition, my OUP rep tells me that “the cover art and ISBN will change but the pagination will remain the same.” The exceptions, of course, will be books coming out in entirely new editions (the OUP blog post indicates, for example, a new edition of Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall–which, for a change, I am not actually teaching next year.)

In other news, I’m (obviously) in a bit of a posting slump. I blame the end of classes, which, for all the relief it brings, also sucks the life out of this job for me. I’m thinking about ways to liven things up again, though, at least until my spring session class begins in June. Maybe another modest series, something along the lines of “favourites from my bookshelf,” or “favourite literary moments” with glosses. We’ll see. (Any ideas? Any preferences? Anybody out there?)

Updated Classics

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

At the TLS, Margaret Reynolds calls our attention to the relaunch of the Oxford World’s Classics editions. The article includes a survey of some available editions of Jane Eyre. A sample:

Oxford World’s Classics
Jacket Clean and striking but she’s too sulky.
Introduction By Oxford prof Sally Shuttleworth. Covers all bases and is excellent on the ending.
Text Based on first edition of 1847. Actual print a bit small.
Extra material Plenty on the text and publication of the novel.
Price £5.99. Good value.

Penguin Classics (Black)
Jacket A painting by Millais. Jane would never have worn this dress.
Introduction By novelist and critic Stevie Davies. Very good on the political context.
Text Revised edition of 1848, with some emendations. Clear print.
Extra material Chronology, notes and “Opinions of the Press”.
Price £5.99.

Vintage Classics
Jacket Clever, intriguing and spot on for the story.
Introduction No.
Text Based on the revised edition of 1848. Nice print.
Extra material Little life of Charlotte. Quote from Sarah Waters: “One of the most perfectly structured novels of all time”. Meaning?
Price £5.99. Hmm.

I’m not entirely sure that this is quite the information I need to make my selection. Let’s see: put me down for one copy of the sulky version with the introduction that “covers all bases” (I’m sure I usually miss one or two in my lectures) and one copy with the “clear print” for my aging eyes… Also, a testimonial about novel structure from the author of Fingersmith is good enough for me! The slide-show of the various covers is nice. I’d like to point out a good option that gets no mention at the TLS:

Broadview Edition
Jacket excellent– see illustration at right
Introduction by Richard Nemesvari (my near neighbour, at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish): thorough and interesting.
Extra material is Broadview’s specialty; in addition to the introduction and a chronology of Charlotte Bronte’s life and publications, this edition includes selected correspondence as well as contemporary pieces on governesses, girls’ education, race, and empire
Price Wow–only £4.99! ($12.95 US or Canadian)

Further information on the OUP relaunch is to be found at the OUP blog, where “Senior Commissioning Editor” (now that’s a title) Judith Luna explains,

We wanted a new look that would be fresh and contemporary and appeal to general readers and browsers who might previously have thought Oxford World’s Classics were a bit too academic for them. So we have a clean white title panel, and white back and spine, and we have chosen dramatic crops of appropriate illustrations to intrigue and entice the reader. We also wanted a sense of continuity with the old look, so we have retained a red strip at the top of the spine and back cover, and added a tantalizing detail from the cover image in a small thumbnail on the spine (older readers may remember that we used to have a similar feature on a previous incarnation of the series, but at the bottom of the spine, not the top). We also chose a new typeface for the cover, Capitolium, a modern take on classic lettering, based on classical Roman inscriptions and Renaissance calligraphy and designed by Gerard Unger. The insides of the books are unchanged, and we will continue to publish high-quality editions and translations with outstanding introductions and notes at truly affordable prices, editions that are designed to satisfy the needs not just of students, but of the lively general reader as well.

Since I’ve already ordered my fall term books, including many World’s Classics titles, I’m relieved to hear that the “insides are unchanged,” though it strikes me, given this, that they are rather encouraging (or expecting) people to judge a book by its cover. Still, I’ll be jealous if my students all have spiffy new covers on their books while I’m still wielding my battered old versions. (Hint to OUP reps: send Maitzen new desk copies…) (On the other hand, replacing all the post-its in my teaching copies would be a lot of work. There are a lot of them, because I consider it one of my primary obligations when teaching, say, Bleak House, to be able to find key passages quickly. Browsing through 900 pages muttering “I know it’s here somewhere” wastes a lot of class time.)

Special Poetry Post

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My daughter has been studying poetry in her Grade 1 class. I approve! I especially like the careful way she reads poems aloud, as if every word is important and meaningful–just as it should be. Getting in the spirit of Poetry Month, we bought a bunch of the Poetry for Young People books through her school’s Scholastic Book Club: our (somewhat miscellaneous and heavily American) pack includes Whitman, Dickinson, Coleridge, Poe, Frost, and Shakespeare. I’m impressed with these books, not least because the editors have definitely not dumbed down the content or made painfully kid-friendly selections. As a result, she’ll be able to grow into them, rather than rapidly growing out of them. However, the real point of this post is to showcase an early effort of hers. OK, it takes a sort of prosaic turn towards the end…but she’s a practical sort of girl.

CATS

I love cats!
Anything is not better
than cats.
If you have a cat
don’t come near
because
my Dad is allergic to
Cats.

Literary Criticism and/in the Public Sphere

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

I did, after all, recover my interest in the small metacritical project mentioned in my previous post; it has gone up at The Valve. It revises some earlier posts from this blog, particularly my account of Brian McRae’s Addison and Steele are Dead, touching especially on the gap between academic criticism and the interests or needs of a more general readership. It concludes by inquiring in a preliminary way into whether a return to aesthetic evaluation is, in fact, the direction required for academics to come back to life.