Blogging Talk Follow-Up

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

There was a great turn-out and a lot of lively discussion at my talk on Friday about blogging. Several people suggested that they would like links to the material I highlighted, so I’m providing them below, grouped by where I used them in my presentation. First, though, here are some of the things I’ve taken away with me to think about more.

Because I framed my discussion of blogging with some material on academic publishing, one topic that got a fair amount of attention in the questions after was peer-review; this was no surprise, and also it’s something that is addressed a lot among academics who blog. One colleague made the interesting observation that debates about academic blogging seem always (including in my talk) to be set up in terms of its potential contributions to or value as research; much less consideration is given to how it might relate to our teaching. I know there are people using blogging as a pedagogical tool, as a way for students to communicate with each other about course material, for instance, or as a version of reading responses (Miriam Jones does course blogs, for instance). But I think this comment was not so much about how we might add student blogging to our array of assignment options (though others picked up on this possibility as appealing) as about how writing as an academic blogger might put a kind of public face on our own pedagogical activities and ideas (along the lines of what I have been doing with my posts on ‘This Week in My Classes,’ perhaps). The ‘routine’ or everyday character of blogging also matches the rhythm of teaching, in which you are incessantly rethinking your material and looking for ways to bring it to life (intellectually and affectively) in your classes. Writing up this work requires conceptualizing it in ways that perhaps we don’t always do otherwise–and also, I’ve found, brings out connections I might not have seen otherwise. I’ve seen some suggestions that, of the categories used to measure academics’ professional contributions, blogging should be considered ‘service’; I guess I think that’s just a way out of trying to evaluate the substance of the writing.

Another suggestion, from the same colleague, was that academic scholarship has a wider audience outside the academy than is often supposed. I’m not sure how we would go about testing this hypothesis, but it would be interesting to know. And another colleague observed, also in discussion about our relationship to the wider public, that teaching is too often overlooked (in my dozen years of teaching, how many students have passed through my classes? it’s tricky to measure, especially as many students take two or more classes with me–I’ve had some take five or six!–but certainly the number would be somewhere around 2000). As others pointed out in response, even so, that’s only a fraction of the reading public, and only for a limited part of their lives (and when they are under compulsion to pay attention!). But when measuring our impact on literary culture, it’s true that we ought to take teaching into account. (That said, one of the reasons I’ve been thinking again about my own research projects is that they tended not to resemble very much the work I do for my teaching. This is where the trouble starts, for me.)

Finally, another colleague proposed that, overall, the internet is great for connections, comments, and other ‘lighter’ forms of scholarly interaction (I’m paraphrasing) but not suited for sustained analysis. I think this is true in a way, but more because of how we use the internet than because of any necessary limits on its forms. Among the disincentives to long, thoughtful posts is that they don’t ‘matter’ or ‘count’ professionally, for example. But if we re-imagine scholarly discourse to accommodate or value some kinds of on-line exchanges as professional contributions (CV-worthy, in other words), I don’t see why they should be taken any less seriously by writers or readers than, say, ‘responses’ to articles that sometimes appear in journals by invitation–which are not, strictly speaking, peer-reviewed in the same way as anonymous submissions. Participation in book events is a form of on-line academic discourse that seems basically equivalent to publishing a book review, with the extra burden of having to respond to other scholars’ queries or dissenting views. (Update: See Dan Green’s thoughts on these issues at The Reading Experience.)

Overall, then, much to continue thinking about. As the point of my presentation was to get just this kind of conversation going, I consider it a success. Thanks to everyone who showed up!

Links:

First, I compiled a number of links about academic blogging previously; see here. Also, if I referred in my talk to a source I haven’t included here and you’d like to follow it up, let me know; it wasn’t feasible to put in every single cited source.

I. Questions About Academic Publishing

MLA Task Force Report
FitzPatrick, “On the Future of Academic Publishing, Peer Review, and Tenure Requirements
Krause, “Considering the Value of Self-Published Websites”

II. Questions About Audiences: Ourselves, Other Academics, Other Readers

Erin O’Connor, “Relatively Sincere”Lisa Ruddick, “The Near Enemy of the Humanities is Professionalism”

III. Blogging in Particular

Tedra Osell (BitchPhD), Academic Blogging and the Public Sphere
John Holbo, “Form Follows the Function of the Little Magazine”
Miriam Jones, “What I Told the Tenure Committee”

IV. Varieties of Literary and Academic Blogs (samples)

Bookish
DoveGreyReader
Conversational Reading
The Elegant Variation
The Reading Experience
PaperCuts

Academic (Administrative, Literary, and Other)
Confessions of a Community College Dean
Deans’ Weblog
BitchPhD
The Little Professor
Michael Berube
The Long Eighteenth
Blogging the Renaissance
Crooked Timber
The Valve

V. Long-time Bloggers Reflect

An Enthusiast’s View of Academic Blogging
A Skeptic’s Take on Academic Blogging
Academic Blogging Revisited

Say it isn’t so!

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

Bad news from the west coast: Murchie’s Tea and Coffee is in receivership:

The company has been importing, blending and selling its specialty teas and coffees for the Victoria and Vancouver markets since John Murchie founded the company in 1894.

The elegant tea rooms and shops remained a family operation under current president Gwen Murchie, but now the company is up for sale. (read the full CBC story here)

What does this have to do with literature or criticism, you ask? For me, lots, as I have been sitting down with a book and a cup of Murchie’s tea for more than three decades! Here’s hoping they find a sympathetic and savvy buyer who can keep the tradition alive–and all my favourite blends available.

This Week in My Classes (November 14, 2007)

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

It’s a short week, thanks to the Remembrance Day holiday. It’s also the last week on Middlemarch in both my classes. My graduate seminar has already met; following a good presentation raising questions about the relationship of different characters (especially Dorothea) to political reform, we had some lively discussion about the feminist critiques (and defenses) of Middlemarch raised in our cluster of secondary readings for the day, and then moved to questions about the role of desire in the novel and about Rosamond and how far the novel realizes its ostensible project of sympathy where she is concerned. Inevitably there were topics we wanted to talk about but couldn’t. The same will be true in my undergraduate class this afternoon: it’s always a challenge deciding what to cover, with a novel so capacious in its interests and complex in its plot and structure. I’ll use some time to clarify ways the novel’s final events, especially, of course, the climactic encounter between Rosamond and Dorothea, work out the novel’s central ideas about egotism, altruism, and sympathy. Then I think we’ll debate whether Dorothea’s ending is a failure, and if so, of what, and with what effects. I like to bring in some of the many criticisms of Will Ladislaw, whom Henry James early on called “the only eminent failure in the book”: “he is, in short, roughly speaking, a woman’s man.” Then there’s Gilbert and Gubar’s rather different take: “Will is Eliot’s radically anti-patriarchal attempt to create an image of masculinity attractive to women.” In Approaches to Teaching Middlemarch, Juliet McMaster notes that “[her] students have strong responses to Will…and that their responses are often (though certainly not always) aligned with their sex. Usually, the women like him, the men don’t. As a way of setting the cat among the pigeons, I have sometimes suggested to my classful of young men and women that the male reader tends to object to Will because he is jealous of him.” I like to encourage students to look for thematic reasons why Will does (or does not) make the ‘right’ partner for Dorothea, at least of the options she has. And as for the debate about whether the ending is happy, I usually bring in other novels with less problematic romantic conclusions (Pride and Prejudice, for instance) and ask them to think about the effects of satisfaction vs. the effects of dissatisfaction. A. S. Byatt remarks (in the DVD feature we watched last week) that one thing Virginia Woolf may have meant by calling Middlemarch a novel “for grown-up people” is that it is a novel that does not “pander” to the fairy-tale form. And yet Dorothea herself is happy in her choice: it seems important to separate our own possible dissatisfactions from her judgment–as well as to think about the implications of or reasons for our differences of view (a very Middlemarch thing to do!).

Victorian Goodies from The Guardian

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

Jenny Uglow on Gaskell’s Cranford, now being dramatized by the BBC:

This is not entirely escapist territory, despite its air of nostalgia. The Amazons of Cranford, like the ladies of Mr Harrison’s Duncombe and Lady Ludlow’s Hanbury, are not sheltered beings.
They have been through much a youthful love affair stifled, a life threatened by bankruptcy, an estate lost through gambling. And while they squabble over the sedan chair and settle down to cards, they also hear in the distance the rumble of the new, speedy world with its railways and new-fangled medical treatments, its factories and mines. The stories are wonderfully funny, but the ridiculous is bathed in a poignant, dreamlike mood found nowhere else in fiction, and profound ideas and strong values sleep beneath everyday details of bonnets and cakes. (read the rest here)

And a new ‘neo-Victorian’ novel, The Journal of Dora Damage, by Belinda Starling (a good Dickensian name):

Starling skilfully conjures up a dank, deviant London, although at times the plot seems as bewildering and overcrowded as the city itself – opium dens, blackmail, the American Civil War, the slave trade. Yet the novel’s twin themes of subjugation and emancipation are interesting and well balanced; the idea of intense satisfaction gained through sexual pleasure and meaningful work is gratifying, as are the memorable characterisation and plush imagery. (read the Guardian review here; see also the LA Times review here)

Recent Reading

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

I’ve fallen behind in writing up my recent reading, but I have in fact read a few things besides the books for my classes this term. Here are at least some brief comments on them–so that I can tidy them back onto my bookshelves.

1. K. M. Peyton, the Pennington series. These are old, old favourites of mine; the copies I have are battered old Vancouver Public Library discards, and as the series does not appear to be in print any longer, I’ll continue to cherish these. I picked them off my shelf again when I was thinking about the issues touched on in my post about ‘just right’ books for children. Although these books are written for young readers, they seem to me to assume fairly adult interests; Pennington’s Heir, for instance, turns to a large extent on the drama and demands of Penn’s learning to play Liszt’s B-minor sonata. The vocabulary also aims high: one short paragraph, for instance, includes both ‘assuage’ and ‘punctilious,’ words I’m sure I didn’t know when I first read the books. Now, as then, it’s the characters–driven, complicated, impulsive, trying to find their way–that draw me into the story.

2. Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I hadn’t read this in years but, perhaps for the same reasons that I was drawn back to the Pennington books, I couldn’t resist it when I came across it in a second-hand bookstore recently. The style seemed remarkably blunt to me when I began reading; with the exception of the central motif of the tree, it’s almost wholly non-‘literary,’ just moving along from one person and even to the next. Yet the cumulative effect is powerfully evocative of a time and place. I didn’t find Francie altogether believable or compelling, especially towards the end. Perhaps it’s a sign of how my own position in life has changed that it was her parents whose story moved me the most!

3. Anne Tyler, Digging to America. Anne Tyler has written some of my favourite novels, including Ladder of Years, Back When We Were Grown-Ups, The Patchwork Planet, and The Accidental Tourist. I have always agreed with Wayne Booth’s remark (about Back When We Were Grown-Ups) that with her, you always feel she is giving you the best she has got. (I believe the comparison he is drawing is to Peter Benchley’s Jaws, which Booth does not consider very flattering to its implied audience.) Tyler’s prose is spare but deft; her lightness of touch often conceals, or eases us into, more difficult feelings of regret, poignancy, and loss. But typically her protagonists, who often begin their novels as wistful or wry misfits in the lives they are living, come through their process of exploration only to find themselves happy, after all, with what they have made or found. Somewhere recently I came across a comment about her realism being of a “conservative” type. I’m not sure if it is because of the form and style she uses (there’s nothing metafictional or postmodern about it) or because of this tendency to teach her characters to appreciate what they already have. (I’ve written a bit about this before when comparing the fate or attitude of Tyler’s heroines to those of Joanna Trollope’s and George Eliot’s.) Tyler’s novels also typically operate on quite a small scale: marriages, families, with only implicit engagement with the larger social systems that shape them. The Amateur Marriage moved that domesticity into a larger historical frame; to me, the novel seemed (perhaps as a result?) to be moving too fast for itself, so the kinds of intensely evocative tiny moments, and the nuances, of the novels I like best were diffused. Digging to America also takes on more, and in this case I found that the lightness of handling I usually appreciate seemed inappropriate to the topics it touches on, including the tensions of post-9/11 America. But at the same time, I appreciate what I take to be Tyler’s ideas, that big political conflicts are experienced very personally, and that national, ethnic, or religious stereotypes lose their potency when we focus on the individual–on what, in her other books, we also see as the “quirkiness” of people seen up close. This may be a novel that grows on me.

4. Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach. This is a book that has been written on plenty recently by all kinds of terribly serious book types; I find I don’t have much to say about it myself. I admired Saturday enormously. This novel seemed to think too much of itself and its subject. I was struck, page after page, by the technical control McEwan shows: every word seemed solid, judicious, effective. But I just didn’t care for the purpose he was using them for. On Friday I showed my class the excellent documentary included with the DVD of Middlemarch. It includes interviews with David Lodge, Terry Eagleton, A. S. Byatt, Kate Flint, and Claire Tomalin, all, of course, supremely articulate. At one point Tomalin remarks (I forget a propos of just what question) that “George Eliot writes about sex perfectly: she never mentions it, and of course that’s the best way to write about it. Who needs the penis and the pubic hair? That’s not sex. Sex is the feeling” (that might not be the exact quotation–but close enough to get the point). Perhaps the distinction might be that you don’t need the explicit elements of sex to achieve eroticism; is there a more erotically charged scene in ‘proper’ Victorian literature than the moment in which Stephen Guest kisses the inside of Maggie Tulliver’s arm in The Mill on the Floss? McEwan writes like a clinician; even the feelings his couple have are dissected, presented for our analysis and judgment. It seemed a tired cliche to me (despite his careful historicization of their attitudes) that he is keen and she is uninterested, even frigid. It also struck me as unfair that at the end, it becomes his novel. For most of the book, their perspectives are balanced, one against the other. Somewhere there’s a paper to be written (no doubt, being written) on McEwan’s late fiction and “Dover Beach”…

5. Jane Smiley, Moo. I picked this up soon after reading Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Novel, which I wrote about, mostly admiringly, before. This one, I’m sorry to say, I haven’t finished yet, though I began it months ago. It turns out it is arch. I don’t enjoy arch, at least not in long stretches.

6. Elizabeth von Armin, The Enchanted April. This was delightful. In many ways, it was exactly what I expected, light but touching, warm but poignant. Without extended explicit social commentary, it shows its women realizing, emotionally more than intellectually, how the constraints of their usual world confine them, but also how they contribute to their own diminishment. More than the movie version, the novel maintains some skepticism about the rapprochement of the women and their husbands (for instance, we always know, though Lotty doesn’t, that Mellersh is well-behaved mostly because he hopes to gain clients, and we also know the comedy of errors that nearly erupted because Frederick comes to see the wrong woman). But what I wasn’t expecting was the marvellously tactile quality of von Armin’s prose:

The cherry-trees and peach-trees were in blossom–lovely showers of white and deep rose-colour among the trembling delicacy of the olives; the fig-leaves were just big enough to smell of figs, the vine-buds were only beginning to show. And beneath these trees were groups of blue and purple irises, and bushes of lavendar, and grey, sharp cactuses, and the grass was thick with dandelions and daisies, and right down at the bottom was the sea. Colour seemed flung down anyhow, anywhere; every sort of colour, piled up in heaps, pouring along in rivers…

The obvious comparison is with A Room with a View (and I learned from the afterword in my edition that Forster tutored von Arnim’s children for a time). But this novel is about adults coming to terms with their lives and loves, and so it has more wistfulness, and more lurking pathos, than Forster’s. I loved Mrs Fisher’s gradual emergence from what Lotty calls her “cocoon” (even if it is, like Lucy’s awakening in A Room with a View, basically at the expense of the Victorians): “Her great dead friends [Ruskin, Arnold, Tennyson…] did not seem worth reading that night. . . . No doubt they were greater than any one was now, but they had this immense disadvantage, that they were dead. Nothing further was to be expected of them; while of the living, what might one not still expect?” The afterword remarks, rather unexpectedly, “The novel is the lightest of omelettes, in the making of which the least possible number of eggs gets broken. Only an incorrigible pedant would try to judge it at a deeper level.” Well, call me incorrigible, and a pedant (I’ve been called worse, goodness knows), but I enjoyed the novel so much it lit a little spark of scholar’s curiosity in me and made me curious to look up a former M.A. student of mine I haven’t heard from in a while whom I recall had proposed a Ph.D. project on von Arnim. It also (especially in combination with our first snow of the season) made me dream of going back to Italy!

Next up? I picked up A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell on my last expedition to Doull’s (Haligonians know all about Doull’s and its temptations). But I’ve also got Suite Francaise and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in my ‘to read next’ pile–and first priority is Margaret Oliphant’s Hester to begin again for my graduate seminar.

Rehabilitating Rhett Butler?

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

The New York Times Sunday Book Review includes this review by Stephen L. Carter of Rhett Butler’s People, a recent novel by Donald McCaig. I’m not sure the review inspires me to read McCaig’s novel, but it does increase my desire to re-read Gone with the Wind, a book I read more than two dozen times in my youth but have not returned to since I turned professional. Even in my earliest readings, I think I knew enough, as an avid reader and history buff (and daughter of a civil rights activist) to recognize that idealizing the Old South was unacceptable, but my recollection is that I always felt it was the movie that played the nostalgia card, not the book. The opening text of the movie, for instance, none of which (except the phrase ‘gone with the wind’ itself, of course) is taken from the novel, reads,

There was a land of Cavaliers and cotton fields called the Old South…Here in this patrician world the Age of Chivalry took its last bow…Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave…Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind…

I copied out that text from the movie once so that I could use it when I teach Scott’s Waverley; part of what I argue (drawing, of course, on a number of critics including the wise man who taught me to appreciate Scott, Harry E. Shaw) is that Scott avoids such idealization of the past, attaching that kind of naivete to Waverley himself before “the romance of his life has ended and its real history [has] begun.” My memory of the novel has always been that it is not sentimental in this way, and that while it is about people fighting for “the Cause,” it does not, itself, embrace that Cause as obviously worth their blood and tears. For one thing, the most loyal characters (Melanie, for instance) are the weakest and least able to survive; the momentum towards the future is powerful, with Scarlett’s selfish pragmatism outpacing any other ideological commitments (though she operates unthinkingly with the racist assumptions of her upbringing, slavery is primarily a means to an end for her, readily replaced with white convict labour as times change–her readiness to use people of all kinds to achieve her goals is her moral trademark, as is true of her closest Victorian counterpart, Becky Sharp). But here is Carter’s summary of the novel’s attitude:

“Gone With the Wind” was published in 1936, and despite heroic efforts over the last seven decades to transform it into something else, the novel stands as an apologia for the Old South — the South of gallant white plantation owners and darkies too foolish for anything but slavery, a civilization ruined by a vengeful North that subsequently flooded that idyllic world with rapacious Union soldiers, greedy carpetbaggers and the despotic power of the Freedmen’s Bureau. That Mitchell was able to defend this vision in a novel of such power, beauty and depth is a tribute to her literary genius. But the vision is no less terrifying for having been brilliantly presented.

These generalizations seem (again, in my recollection of the novel) open to a number of counter-examples (there actually aren’t many “gallant plantation owners,” for instance, except the Wilkeses, with the other county families of varying degrees of wealth and pretty mixed manners [and the whole community carefully historicized], and Mitchell apparently found quite comic the way Tara was transformed from her idea of a prosperous farmer’s home into a pillared mansion–and while I remember black characters who conform to the negative stereotype Carter invokes, I also remember characters like Dilcey, and I wonder if Mammy’s role is so simply degraded and degrading).

I think part of what we might return to is a question I raised earlier in thinking about the film Far from Heaven, which was also, as I look back, a point at which I thought about Gone with the Wind as it might look to me today. The main character in “Far from Heaven” suffers socially for her liberal views on both race and, as it turns out, homosexuality, which are shown as highly atypical in her community and social circle;

I found myself wondering if it would be impossible to do a sympathetic story in which a character who is not tolerant of such divergence from the norms was the protagonist: Kathleen’s best friend, for instance, who feels sorry for her having a gay husband (but has no liberal views on homosexuality), and whose sympathy seems to dry up when Kathleen admits her feelings for a black man. Of course we do not accept or want to sympathize with those attitudes, but does her (historically typical) mindset put her outside the pale? Is this why Gone with the Wind is not an entirely respectable novel today–because, among other things, its main characters are almost all quite satisfied with racial discrimination and slavery? But isn’t that realistic, in terms of majority opinion in the antebellum south? Can you depict that society as it was historically, depict its Weltanschauung without a layer of overt critique, and not appear to be (or really be) endorsing past values which we have learned to reject as immoral?

(It occurs to me that the best example I know of a novel that knowingly makes us intimate with a wrong-headed protagonist is Ishiguro’s brilliant The Remains of the Day, though even there, it’s not Lord Darlington we are brought to sympathize with.) At any rate, Carter’s view that “the filmmakers were in fact trying to sanitize Mitchell’s novel” does not seem obviously true to me in terms of its overall attitude–though he is right to point to the indirection introduced about “the Klan” as an example of easing our relationship to one of the novel’s most dramatic but also problematic incidents. It’s interesting that Carter acknowledges “power, beauty, and depth” in the novel while also rejecting it ethically and politically; this seems like a good case for the kind of analysis Wayne Booth experiments with in The Company We Keep, in terms of how far we can separate ethical and aesthetic judgments.

A further question Carter’s review raised for me–or, really, the whole project of the novel he’s reviewing raised–is what does it mean to “rehabilitate” someone who never actually existed?

The Klan question, the woman he dishonored, the rumors of a bastard in New Orleans, the money supposedly pilfered from the Confederate treasury — all of this McCaig explains away while keeping the story moving at a nice clip, faster even than the original….

McCaig pierces the mystery in which Mitchell shrouded Rhett Butler. He gives Rhett a life. We begin to understand where he came from, and why he was the way he was and did the things he did. McCaig discards Ripley’s cumbersome tale and invents fresh lives even for the characters necessarily common to both sequels. The new story has its own integrity. It makes sense.

It’s not as if what he has provided is the real backstory of the character (any more than Jean Rhys provided the true story of Mr Rochester’s first marriage when she wrote Wide Sargasso Sea–an oddly common perception among students, which suggests that they are getting it from their teachers…). To what extent does, or should, this new story infiltrate our interpretation of the original? Carter concludes his review by suggesting that “after finishing Rhett Butler’s People, it may be impossible to read Gone With the Wind in quite the same way.” I can’t test that theory unless I read McCaig’s novel, but once the pressure of the term lets up, maybe I can at least read Gone with the Wind again for myself.

It’s Application Season Again…

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

…so here’s what you’ve all been waiting for: “the template that a nation of anxious undergrads [and MA students!] has been looking for”:

This project was deeply influenced by your thinking and I am very grateful for that will you please advise my Ph.D. dissertation.

Oh!!!! And Your Institution also has that Awesome Institute/Center/Program-Thing! Which I know absolutely nothing about but am totally totally prepared to praise to the skies because I just know it will be crucial to my research!!! (read the whole thing here).

It’s easily adaptable to SSHRC applications, too, so no need for anyone to bring by any more for me to vet! Thanks to Footnoted for the link.

Resistance to Theory, Middlemarch Style

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

Dorothea: “And then I should know what to do, when I get older: I should see how it was possible to lead a grand life here–now–in England. I don’t feel sure about doing good in any way now: everything seems like going on a mission to a people whose language I don’t know.”

J. Hillis Miller: “The discontinuity of a repetition blasts a detached monad, crystallized into immobility, out of the homogeneous course of history, in order to take possession of of it in a present which is no present. It is the cessation of happening in a metaleptic assumption of the past, preserving and annulling it at the same time. This repetition disarticulates the backbone of logic and frees both history and fiction, for the moment, before the spider-web is re-woven, from the illusory continuities of origin leading to aim leading to end.”

Dorothea: “What could be sadder than so much ardent labour all in vain?”

J. Hillis Miller: “The set of assumptions common to both Western ideas of history and Western ideas of fiction are not–it is a point of importance–a collection of diverse attributes, the distinctive features which happen to be there. They are on the contrary a true system, in the sense that each implies all the others.”

Dorothea (putting out her hand entreatingly): “Please not to call it by any name. You will say it is Persian, or something else geographical. It is my life.”

J. Hillis Miller: “Nevertheless, for those who have eyes to see it, Middlemarch is an example of a work of fiction which not only exposes the metaphysical system of history but also proposes an alternative consonant with those of Nietzsche and Benjamin.”

Narrator: “There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men.”

J. Hillis Miller: “!”

Seriously, though, although Hillis Miller’s essay* (which I acknowledge is very smart, taken on its own terms) is more than 30 years old now, I think it illustrates a tendency that continues in some professional criticism to set aside the overt and often pressing social, ethical, political, or aesthetic interests of the text itself in favour of fairly esoteric theoretical and metacritical questions, or questions that seek out a text’s ‘unconscious’ effects or meanings. Without insisting that these questions are unworthy ones for inquiry and scholarship, I would suggest that in some respects they serve the majority of readers (and texts) less well than critical approaches that engage us with what the text actually takes itself to be about (in Denis Donoghue‘s terms, we don’t allow the text to have its theme–though in this case, Middlemarch works well for Hillis Miller’s purposes because it is “always already” self-conscious about and thematizing his themes of history, narrative, and (mis)interpretation).** For one thing, the results are likely to preserve the differences between texts more than approaches like Hillis Miller’s (any novel that becomes grist for his argument here would end up sounding pretty much the same, deconstructing the oppositions, undoing metaphysics, etc.). In his essay “What We Talk About When We Talk About Ethics,” in this collection, Lawrence Buell notes the “longstanding reluctance on the part of many if not most literary scholars to allow the central disciplinary referent or value to be located in anything but language.” I think there’s some truth in that generalization, and that this reluctance leads us into conversations of the sort I’ve pasted together above, a “missing of each others’ mental tracks,” as George Eliot says about Rosamond and Lydgate’s marriage, because we talk past, or about, rather than with, our primary sources.

But mostly I just wanted to have a little fun…

*”Narrative and History,” ELH 41:3 (Autumn 1974), 455-73.

**I realize that it remains an open and controversial question whether or how professional / academic critics should have the interests of non-specialist readers in mind. Over at Crooked Timber recently there was a long thread in the comments about professional philosophers which seemed to touch on some of the same issues that come up when literary critics think about this. In both cases, of course it’s not an either/or question–specialist and non-specialist discourses can and do coexist.

This Week in My Classes (November 5, 2007)

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

Despite the best efforts of Tropical Storm Noel, it looks like our regularly scheduled programming can go ahead this week. So it’s Middlemarch again, and after working hard the last two weeks on sympathy, morality, and point of view at a more or less personal level, I think this week we’ll shift our focus to politics. My undergraduates (unless this group is wildly atypical) will have at best only a dim idea of the novel’s historical context, so it’s time for a walk-through of some basic information about the 1832 Reform Bill. Then we can consider Mr Brooke as a ‘progressive’ candidate. We’ll take another look at the party in Chapter 10, in which Brooke invites a “rather more miscellaneous” crowd than Mrs Cadwallader quite likes. Then we’ll look closely at the visit to Dagley’s farm in Chapter 39, a section which ties class and political perception to aesthetics and point of view:

Mr. Brooke got down at a farmyard-gate, and Dorothea drove on. It is wonderful how much uglier things will look when we only suspect that we are blamed for them. Even our own persons in the glass are apt to change their aspect for us after we have heard some frank remark on their less admirable points; and on the other hand it is astonishing how pleasantly conscience takes our encroachments on those who never complain or have nobody to complain for them. Dagley’s homestead never before looked so dismal to Mr. Brooke as it did today, with his mind thus sore about the fault-finding of the ” Trumpet,” echoed by Sir James.

It is true that an observer, under that softening influence of the fine arts which makes other people’s hardships picturesque, might have been delighted with this homestead called Freeman’s End: the old house had dormer-windows in the dark red roof, two of the chimneys were choked with ivy, the large porch was blocked up with bundles of sticks, and half the windows were closed with gray worm-eaten shutters about which the jasmine-boughs grew in wild luxuriance; the mouldering garden wall with hollyhocks peeping over it was a perfect study of highly mingled subdued color, and there was an aged goat (kept doubtless on interesting superstitious grounds) lying against the open back-kitchen door. The mossy thatch of the cow-shed, the broken gray barn-doors, the pauper laborers in ragged breeches who had nearly finished unloading a wagon of corn into the barn ready for early thrashing; the scanty dairy of cows being tethered for milking and leaving one half of the shed in brown emptiness; the very pigs and white ducks seeming to wander about the uneven neglected yard as if in low spirits from feeding on a too meagre quality of rinsings, — all these objects under the quiet light of a sky marbled with high clouds would have made a sort of picture which we have all paused over as a ” charming bit,” touching other sensibilities than those which are stirred by the depression of the agricultural interest, with the sad lack of farming capital, as seen constantly in the newspapers of that time. But these troublesome associations were just now strongly present to Mr. Brooke, and spoiled the scene for him.

I find it useful to bring students’ casual assumption that universal suffrage is an obvious good up against Dagley, which of course is just what George Eliot wants to do as well. To give them a fuller sense of the intellectual context for ‘progressive’ intellectual opposition to the rapid expansion of suffrage, I usually bring in bits of Carlyle, such as the “Democracy” section of Past and Present, which juxtaposes impassioned lamentation for “the lot of those same dumb millions of toilers” (“Do we wonder at French Revolutions, Chartisms, Revolts of Three Days? The times, if we will consider them, are really unexampled.”) with an equally impassioned refusal to accept democratic solutions:

Liberty? The true liberty of a man, you would say, consisted in his finding out, or being forced to find out the right path, and to walk thereon…. You do not allow a palpable madman to leap over precipices; you violate his liberty, you that are wise; and keep him, were it in strait-waistcoasts, away from the precipices! … Liberty requires new definitions.

I might bring in some of Mill’s cautions about the tendency of democracy towards mediocrity: “No government by a democracy or a numerous aristocracy, either in its political acts or in the opinions, qualities, and tone of mind which it fosters, ever did or could rise above mediocrity, except in so far as the sovereign Many have let themselves be guided … by the counsels and influence of a more highly gifted and instructed One or Few” (On Liberty). And there’s always Culture and Anarchy, too, for some choice tidbits about the pros and cons of the Englishman’s fetishization of his “right to do what he likes.” (“And certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it,” as George Eliot points out.) These examples prepare students for what they often, initially, find the oddity of George Eliot’s cautious approach to democracy, which I usually illustrate with examples from Felix Holt and the later “Address to Working Men (by Felix Holt)”:

“And while public opinion is what it is—while men have no better beliefs about public duty—while corruption is not felt to be a damning disgrace—while men are not ashamed in Parliament and out of it to make public questions which concern the welfare of millions a mere screen for their own petty private ends,—I say, no fresh scheme of voting will much mend our condition. For, take us working men of all sorts. Suppose out of every hundred who had a vote there were thirty who had some soberness, some sense to choose with, some good feeling to make them wish the right thing for all. And suppose there were seventy out of the hundred who were, half of them, not sober, who had no sense to choose one thing in politics more than another, and who had so little good feeling in them that they wasted on their own drinking the money that should have helped to feed and clothe their wives and children; and another half of them who, if they didn’t drink, were too ignorant or mean or stupid to see any good for themselves better than pocketing a five-shilling piece when it was offered them. Where would be the political power of the thirty sober men? The power would lie with the seventy drunken and stupid votes; and I’ll tell you what sort of men would get the power—what sort of men would end by returning whom they pleased to Parliament.” (Felix Holt–the Radical?)

Now, the danger hanging over change is great, just in proportion as it tends to produce such disorder by giving any large number of ignorant men, whos notions of what is good are of a low and brutal sort, the belief that they have got power into their hands, and may do pretty much as they like. (Address to Working Men)

“Would you want Dagley to vote?” is a crudely reductive version of the questions George Eliot is raising–but at the same time, it rather goes to the heart of the problems she identifies for us, and I think it will generate some useful discussion. In turn, our consideration of the novel’s class politics (if that’s the right way to label these issues) prepares us to consider its gender politics once we’ve read to the end.