October Fatigue Syndrome

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It all seems so easy and exciting and then the assignments start coming in and it’s almost SSHRC season and students need letters and things pile up….I have several topics in mind that I’d like to write up proper posts on if I had more time and energy, but I’ll have to settle for the thumbnail versions for now.

  1. Blogging as a spectator sport. I remain enthusiastic about the potential blogs show for generating scholarly conversation, but now that I follow some blogs fairly regularly I am noticing that those that actually get much discussion going in the comments section are heavily dominated by a fairly small handful of contributors, most of whom seem to know each other very well and thus to be engaged in their own special game of point-counterpoint. I’m not saying that nothing of interest or value goes on, and I’m sure there’s no intent to be exclusive and that what I’m seeing is partly the result of the particular blogs I’ve taken to watching. But it’s all a bit claustrophobic in its own way, and off-putting for newcomers, or at least for me. It’s kind of clubby, which seems ironic given the medium. Others offer a pretty steady stream of mildly to very interesting comments, reviews, or opinions, but again, not much goes on in the comments sections, although apparently they have hundreds of readers. (I’m not taking into account in these observations blogs that proffer primarily personal anecdote or that mostly collate links from elsewhere, or those that define themselves as literary or bookish, rather than academic, several of which I also now keep an eye on and enjoy. I’m thinking here about blogs that try to realize the idea of academic community idealized in some of the meta-discussions I’ve read.) All of these blogs are also American, and they reflect a particularly intense interest in relationships between academic work and the American political scene which is, of course, perfectly legitimate but not as compelling a context for people on the outside (following some of these threads has brought back unpleasant flashbacks of some of my own graduate school experiences at Cornell, back when ‘culture wars’ was not a historical reference…and in my imaginary longer version of this post, I meditate a bit on the differences between Canadian and American universities and wonder why there seem to be so few Canadian academics who blog).
  2. Undergraduate relativism, as discussed, for instance, in this little Chronicle piece. It is true that undergraduates are uneasy having evaluative conversations about art. I challenged my class today to argue for or against the inclusion of Lady Audley’s Secret on our syllabus and though there were several remarks about books that are good to read vs. books that are good to study, nobody seemed to have much stomach for saying it just isn’t very well written. In the longer (imaginary) version of this post I add a bunch of qualifications about defining “well written” and acknowledge reasons for including things in courses beyond aesthetic or formal ones (historical ones, for instance).
  3. Mark Kingwell’s off-hand proposal for a grade-free university at the end of this Globe and Mail article. It’s true that plagiarism is in the air (I know of three cases already being pursued in my department alone this term, and no doubt there are more), and for sure he’s right that if papers weren’t worth marks, there would not be much point in cheating on them, but how exactly he envisions the system working, especially given how fixated students are on credentials, rather than on the substance of their education, I have no idea. He mentions offering exams at the end of term for those who can’t do without evaluation. Does he imagine something like a British-style tutorial system the rest of the time? Assignments that we comment on but don’t put grades on?

This Week in My Classes (October 15, 2007)

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1. 19th-Century Fiction. This week is our second and last on Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret. I closed out last week with an overview of Pre-Raphaelitism, to help us think about the significance of Lady Audley’s portrait, which we are told must have been painted by a member of that movement:

No one but a pre-Raphaelite would have so exaggerated every attribute of that delicate face as to give a lurid lightness to the blonde complexion, and a strange, sinister light to the deep blue eyes. No one but a pre-Raphaelite could have given to that pretty pouting mouth the hard and almost wicked look it had in the portrait. . . . my lady, in his portrait of her, had something of the aspect of a beautiful fiend. (Ch. VIII)

There are many PRB paintings that capture the quality Braddon evokes here; this is one of my favourites. This week we will focus on the cat-and-mouse game that unfolds between Lady Audley and Robert Audley, the investigator-hero of the novel (or is he?). Issues likely to come up include just what the stakes are for both of these characters in the batttle to reveal or conceal Lady Audley’s real identity and (presumed) crimes, and the displacement of Robert’s affection for his lost buddy George Talboys onto George’s eerily similar sister, Clara. When we get to the end of the novel, we will debate whether Lady Audley is ultimately offered to us as evidence of the danger dissatisfied women pose to social and sexual hierarchies or as a clever woman who uses her beauty as capital in a society that otherwise inhibits her access to capital and thus to social advancement. I’ve yet to be convinced that Braddon herself offers a coherent position on whether Lady Audley is more to be feared or pitied; the late chapter title “Buried Alive” seems to urge us towards the latter, but there’s only so much sympathy or feminist ire I can muster on behalf of a homicidal bigamist…. It is always a bit discouraging to me how popular this novel is with my students, full as it is of cheap tricks and thoughtless language. But I wouldn’t assign it if I didn’t think we would all learn from talking about it. The transition to Middlemarch next week may be hard on them, though: that is a novel that will ask them to think much harder about issues presented with much more complexity and subtlety.

2. Victorian Women Writers. My graduate seminar is taking up Gaskell’s North and South this week. It’s interesting coming to this novel right after two weeks on Jane Eyre: though both novels take up issues of rights, Gaskell places an equivalently high value on duties, including social duties, something Jane Eyre subordinates to a more individualistic standard of duty to self (equally principled, for sure, but different principles: “‘Who in the world cares for you? or who will be injured by what you do?’ Still indomitable came the reply–‘I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.'”) Also, though much criticism in the past 20 years has helped us understand Jane Eyre as a text inextricably part of its historical moment, there are still many elements in that novel that invite us to consider it in abstract or symbolic ways (the fairy-tale structure, the appeals to myth and legend, the gothic features, the allegorical character of sections such as Jane’s lonely wanderings, etc.). North and South does not seem to me to accomodate such interpretive moves. Even its preoccupation with right relations between master and men, though appealing to abstract concepts and theories, really makes sense only as an analysis of conditions at that particular time; the same seems to me true about its interest in “that most difficult problem for women, how much was to be utterly merged in obedience to authority, and how much might be set apart for freedom in working.” Formally, North and South seems to me as well structured and balanced as Jane Eyre, and as well suited to its themes–perhaps a little too pat in places, but also avoiding the sentimental and melodramatic extremes of Mary Barton. As we read several works focusing on the role and experience of women writers, I expect we will start with some questions about how Gaskell seems to be inhabiting that role in this case, but we’ll move on to the usual discussions of the relation between the novel’s industrial plot and its central courtship plot.

Alberto Manguel, The Massey Lectures (I)

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On Friday night I attended the first in the series of 5 Massey Lectures being given this year by Alberto Manguel. It was an erudite and occasionally eloquent performance, but by the end I was feeling distinctly underwhelmed. For one thing, for all the wide-ranging literary allusions and anecdotes, his points were wholly predictable, even banal, and certainly preaching to the choir on occasions such as this: books nourish our humanity, fictions of all kind offer us stories about how we do or could or should live our lives, language shapes as well as reflects our experience, and so forth. Perhaps he considered it necessary for the occasion and for his intended audience to speak in extreme generalizations, especially as this was the first in his series, but strip away the allusions to Plato and Doblin and I think there’s a pretty fine line between much of his talk and platitudes. Further, though, and more problematic (there’s nothing wrong, after all, with asserting general claims for the beauty and value of literature from time to time in prominent venues), I became troubled by two aspects of his characterization of literature.

First, he repeatedly invoked the difference between political language and literary language, without, I thought, sufficiently acknowledging the highly political dimension of much literature (or literary language). I don’t think he meant to imply that literature operates in an apolitical realm (indeed, his talk about the role of literature in imagining society and shaping identity, including national identity, at least implicitly pointed towards its political dimensions, which can of course be reflected in its form and language as well as in its content). But he did persistently point to political discourse as the opposite of literary.

Second, he repeatedly described literature as posing, rather than answering, questions, as allowing for ambiguity, confusion, and profundity rather than insisting on clarity, definition, or systems. I have found that people working on the relationship between literature and moral philosophy (such as Martha Nussbaum, Cora Diamond, or Jane Adamson) also typically characterize literature in this way, thus opposing it to what they consider the reductive tendencies of analytic philosophy. But as Adamson’s essay “Against Tidiness” clearly shows (but does not seem self-conscious about itself), this is not a universal or historically constant view of literature, and applying its standards strictly could mean ruling out some pretty important writers (such as Alexander Pope, say, or George Eliot) as not truly literary precisely because they do offer some strong prescriptions. As I have written about elsewhere, I think this is why Nussbaum starts off her theory of literature as moral philosophy with Henry James, explicitly setting George Eliot aside. (Actually, as I discuss in that article, she really works in the other direction, starting from her favourite novel, James’s The Golden Bowl, and looking for a way to find or explain its philosophical significance.) Although typically these people (including Manguel) mean to be boosting literature by emphasizing its difference from dogma, by insisting on its irrational or unphilosophical or subjective or mystifying aspects, they risk limiting its relevance (or its perceived value) in today’s world in just the ways their supposed opponents (Plato, utilitarians, scientists, politicians, analytic philosophers, etc.) do. Though I’m sure most readers share George Eliot’s view that it is not desirably for fiction to lapse “from picture to diagram,” it does seem important that we not restrict our thinking about the role of literature in society (or philosophy) according to an essentially Romantic notion of it.

Harris and Rushdie on Ayaan Hirsi Ali

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From this week’s LA Times, a good op-ed piece by Sam Harris and Salman Rushdie, both of whom know something themselves about living with threats from religious fanatics:

Hirsi Ali may be the first refugee from Western Europe since the Holocaust. As such, she is a unique and indispensable witness to both the strength and weakness of the West: to the splendor of open society and to the boundless energy of its antagonists. She knows the challenges we face in our struggle to contain the misogyny and religious fanaticism of the Muslim world, and she lives with the consequences of our failure each day. There is no one in a better position to remind us that tolerance of intolerance is cowardice. (read the rest here)

I was somewhat disappointed in the arguments of The Caged Virgin, which I thought relied too heavily on personal experience and anecdote to draw large conclusions (sometimes, to say “I saw such a thing happen” or “I was a Muslim, so I know” is not enough to go on, however compelling it may be as individual testimony)–this despite, of course, my strong sympathy for and general agreement with those conclusions. I haven’t had a chance to read Infidel yet. But Hirsi Ali’s story is truly both remarkable and horrifying, and everything I’ve seen and read about her, including her interview with my former UBC classmate Irshad Manji in her documentary Faith without Fear, has increased my respect for her dignity, forthrightness and courage.

The Rape of the Lock: The Novel

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Well, I suppose it had to happen sometime. OK, it didn’t, but it does sound sort of amusing:

Arabella is renowned as a great beauty, the prize of London. Meanwhile, her childhood friend, Robert Petre, is plotting against Queen Anne, although the revelation of his Jacobite affiliations could ruin his family and end his life. Reunited as adults, the two begin a torrid affair that could destroy her reputation and thus her chances of marriage. Despite being a Catholic, the charismatic Lord Petre can have his pick of London’s women and so the affair is particularly ill-advised for Arabella; even for a catch like Miss Fermor, a proposal from Lord Petre would be a foolish thing to hope for, as his family would never permit the match.

Meanwhile, Arabella’s cousins, the Blount sisters, come to London for the season, along with their great friend and admirer Alexander Pope. On the periphery of this glamorous and decadent set, successful but not yet celebrated, he watches the affair from its inception to its dramatic finale, events that ultimately inspired the poem that made his fortune. From the ashes of Miss Fermor’s reputation rose the making of Alexander Pope’s. (read the rest at The Guardian)

We’re told that the author has “a PhD from Harvard in ‘pollution, filth and satire in 18th-century London'”…

This Week in My Classes

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We have a short week because of the Thanksgiving holiday yesterday, but that doesn’t mean we won’t be busy (that little bit of extra time to catch up on reading is probably what most of my students were thankful for–well, maybe).

1. 19th-Century Novel. The students are completing their letters on Great Expectations. I got the idea for this assignment from Art Young’s Teaching Writing Across the Curriculum, in which (on pages 30-34) he discusses using letters for an assignment on Heart of Darkness What intrigued me the most was his description of the improvement in clarity and liveliness in the students’ work in this form, compared to their attempts at more overtly ‘academic’ essay-writing. He accounts for this partly as follows:

I think the social nature of the assignment was important. The students had interpreted my “critical essay” assignment as the familiar school assignment, what Susan called “busy work”–show the teacher that you read The Importance of Being Earnest and can think of some things to say about it. You are not really helping the teacher understand the play any better because the teacher has read and taught the play several times, read many professional books and essays about it, and you
have spent a week reading this play while taking four or five other classes at the same time. The advantage of the letters is that they are written for a specific individual, a peer, who is asking real questions, asking for help, and for whom you can play the role of colleague or teacher as mentor. The letters demonstrate students communicating to a real audience rather than practicing at communicating to the pretend audience of professional scholars who read and write essays about literature. In addition, the letters are contextualized within the classroom community.

In my version of this assignment, I try to emphasize these features: I urge them to set questions they would genuinely like to get answers to; I bring the partners face to face with each other and encourage them to discuss what interests, attracts, repels, or confuses them in the novel; I remind them that they are writing to someone they know has also read the novel (so, among other things, they should know not to include excessive plot summary); I urge them to draw on and to cite lectures and class discussions, to listen for and create connections between their writing assignment and our other work. When I first tried this system out, it was because I had tired of the Perfunctory Paper, written to meet requirements rather than out of any genuine intellectual curiosity and often taking students’ attention away from our shared class work as they focused on their individual topics. This way everyone writes something on every novel, with (in general) a much higher level of engagement. Students who really want to write a longer paper get the opportunity to do so late in the course. I certainly like this system better than what I used to do, and the feedback from students has been quite positive.

They turn their papers in tomorrow, at which point I get the ball rolling for our next book, Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret. This is a fun teaching text, with lots of suspense and thus helpful momentum for the students and lots of interesting features for analysis and interpretation. In the end, I don’t think LAS is a very good novel, mostly because I don’t think Braddon has really worked out what her idea is about the problems she highlights, or even the characters she develops. The plot is fairly well constructed, but the language is pretty uninspired, especially right after Great Expectations. But I’m sure we’ll have some good discussions (Lady Audley: Victim or Villain? Robert Audley: Hero?). We’ll get to talk about sensationalism in relation to realism, which will set us up to move to our next book, which is Middlemarch–not, as critics have noted, free of sensational elements, including a suspicious death, some near-adultery, and a convenient thunder storm.

2. Victorian Women Writers. Jane Eyre, week two. I’ve assigned a cluster of readings on JE and colonialism (Spivak, Meyer, O’Connor), but I leave it mostly up to the students to take up issues from the criticism (or n0t), so I don’t know how much the issues raised in those articles will dominate our discussion. We also read some interesting essays focusing mainly on narration last week, and some of the problems they focus on (such as Jane’s reliability) will need reconsidering now that we’ve all read to the end of the novel.

About Academic Blogging: A Round-Up

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As a relative newcomer to blogging, I’ve been especially interested in thinking and learning about reasons for academics to blog, so I’ve been collecting links to articles and posts on this topic (or ones that would stimulate thought about it, one way or another). I thought I’d put the list up here, as it takes time to prowl around and find them in blog archives and so on. I’d be happy to be pointed to others (I’m sure there are many). All of these, of course, include links to other related posts or sites.

  1. “Form Follows the Function of the Little Magazine” (John Holbo, The Valve, March 31, 2005)
  2. “Academic Blogging and Literary Studies” (John Holbo, Crooked Timber, April 18, 2004)
  3. “Why Blog?” (Miriam Jones, Scribbling Woman, November 3, 2005)
  4. “The Blogosphere as Carnival of Ideas” (Henry Farrell, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 7, 2005)
  5. “Against Phalloblogocentrism” (Scott McLemee, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 3, 2007)
  6. Scott Eric Kaufman‘s Blogging Panel Paper (presented at the 2006 MLA Convention)
  7. “Bloggers Need Not Apply” (‘Ivan Tribble,’ Chronicle of Higher Education, July 8, 2005)
  8. “They Shoot Messengers, Don’t They?” (‘Ivan Tribble,’ Chronicle of Higher Education, September 2, 2005)
  9. “Can Blogging Derail Your Career?” (Chronicle of Higher Education, July 28, 2006)
  10. “Blogging!” (Michael Berube, July 25, 2006)
  11. Workbook (April 3, 2006)
  12. “Why I Blog Under My Own Name (and a Modest Proposal)” (Matthew Kirschenbaum, University of Maryland, College Park)
  13. “Historical Scholarship and the New Media” (Panel featuring Tedra Osell, Scott Eric Kaufman, Brad DeLong, Ari Kelman)
  14. “I’m Nobody, Who Are You?” (Tedra Osell discusses pseudonymous blogging in the context of 18thC periodicals; posted at The Long Eighteenth)
  15. Discussion on “In the Middle” of Michael Berube’s Midwest MLA Address (November 13, 2006)
  16. “Theorizing Blogging, Theorizing Theory” (Amardeep Singh, The Valve, April 19, 2006)
  17. Tim Burke, Easily Distracted (“The Trouble with Tribble,” “Publishing Presentation on Academic Blogging,” “Berube Stops Blogging“)

I would also be interested in hearing from any academic bloggers who happen across this post what level of interest or awareness there is in blogging in among their colleagues in their home departments. Are blogs and blogging seen as fringe activities, in relation to conventional modes of scholarly research and communication, or are they moving towards the mainstream? Are your colleagues skeptical, curious, enthusiastic, uninterested?

Elizabeth George, What Came Before He Shot Her

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What Came Before He Shot Her is a good idea: a “whydunnit,” as one of the reviewers’ blurbs calls it, the backstory of the 12-year-old boy arrested near the end of With No One as Witness for the shooting of Inspector Lynley’s pregnant wife Helen. However, it is not, in the end, a very good novel. Its story is moderately compelling: knowing, as we do, more or less how it ends (or thinking we do–note the tell-tale “apparently” on the back cover), there’s still some interest in seeing how we get there, George’s characters are varied and carefully individualized, and many of the situations she imagines for them are full of pathos. But the book is primarily a treatise in criminology or sociology–a dramatization of George’s understanding of what forces would compel a young kid to commit a horrible, and horribly random, murder. In her concern to cover the many failings in “the system,” she seems to have let her literary sensibilities lapse almost completely. Particularly jarring to me was the dissociation between the narrating voice and the characters’ perspectives. Of course, it is legitimate to incorporate commentary that comes from outside “story space” and offers insights not available to those acting out the drama. But too often here the comments have no bearing on the unfolding catastrophe, belonging to nobody in particular, as when one character gets a cell-phone, described intrusively as “the late-twentieth-century’s most irritating electronic device” (183). Too often, as well, the narration sounds like it is excerpted from a textbook: Ness has “fallen through the cracks” at her school, for instance (62), or a counsellor does not realize that to her clients, she appears as “an adversary incapable of relating to a single element of their lives” (604). To Ness, the overheard sounds of her aunt having sex “comprised auditory torture, a blatant statement about love, desire, and acceptance, a form of imprimatur upon her aunt’s desirability and worthiness” (330); later Kendra’s emotional turmoil is summed up as “an amalgamation of the physical and emotional in a pitched battle with the psychological” (349). “In a society in which handguns had once been virtually nonexistent among the thieving and murdering clsses, they were now becoming disturbingly prevalent. That this was a direct result of the easing of borders that came along with European unification–which was, to some, just another term for opening one’s arms to smuggling into the country everything from cigarettes to explosives–could have been mooted forever, and Sergeant Starr had not time for such mooting” (367)–we get it, here and everywhere–the author has been doing homework. But for me, at least, there’s too much evidence of it here, too much the tone and attitude of a case study. The story of Joel’s descent into crime is superficially plausible, but evaluating it requires someone with social science, not literary training. And don’t even get me started on the fact that really, we are given 707 pages of “whydunnit” for the wrong “whodunnit” anyway…

This Week in My Classes

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1. 19th-Century Novel. We’re still on Great Expectations this week, moving through the phase that I lecture on as “Great Revelations.” While I tend to emphasize the moral pressures of the novel in class, while re-reading it this weekend I found myself pleasurably reminded of what an emotionally powerful and intensely literary book it is. Here’s Pip confronting Estella and, indirectly, Miss Havisham, after he has learned the truth about his benefactor and been forced to reconsider the kind of ‘gentleman’ he has become:

‘You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read, since I first came here, the rough common boy whose poor heart you wounded even then. You have been in every prospect I have ever seen since–on the river, on the sails of the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the light, in the darkness, in the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the streets. You have been the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become acquainted with. The stones of which the strongest London buildings are made, are not more real, or more impossible to be displaced by your hands, than your presence and influence have been to me, there and everywhere, and will be. Estella, to the last hour of my life, you cannot choose but remain part of my character, part of the little good in me, part of the evil. But, in this separation I associate you only with the good, and I will faithfully hold you to that always, for you must have done me far more good than harm, let me feel now what sharp distress I may. O God bless you, God forgive you!’
In what ecstasy of unhappiness I got those broken words out of myself, I don’t know. The rhapsody welled up within me, like blood from a wound, and gushed out. I held her hand to my lips some lingering moments, and so I left her. But ever afterwards, I remembered–and soon afterwards with stronger reason–that while Estella looked at me merely with incredulous wonder, the spectral figure of Miss Havisham, her hand still covering her heart, seemed all resolved into a ghastly stare of pity and remorse. (Vol. 3 Chapter V)

Of the many things that could be said about this passage, I’ll just point to the way Pip’s impassioned speech associates Estella with the evocative landscape he describes to us much earlier in the novel, the horizontal lines broken only by the beacon and the gibbet–symbols that seemed to oppose hope and death, beauty and despair, love and crime, Estella and Magwitch–oppositions that by Volume 3 have proved not just illusory but dangerously so, as Pip now sees. Contemporary novelists are often described as “Dickensian,” usually for writing long, diffuse novels with lots of plots and characters and a bit more emotional exhibitionism than is the norm in ‘serious’ fiction. I rarely think they deserve the label, because to me it’s moments such as this one, combining dense symbolic allusiveness, rhythmic and evocative language, high sentiment, and urgent moral appeal–all bordering on the excessive, even ridiculous, but, at their best, not collapsing into it–that distinguish Dickens from other novelists. I’m not sure any modern novelist takes such risks.

2. Victorian Women Writers. Here it’s week 1 of Jane Eyre. Perhaps the greatest challenge here is trying to approach the novel in any fresh way, given not just how familiar it is to me after many readings, but also how dense is the accretion of criticism around it. Just selecting a handful of critical articles to assign was an incredibly fraught process: at this point, what are the most important things to be known or said about it? So much of the discussion, too, is ultimately all about us, the critics, and how what we have seen in this novel, how we have read it, reflects our own assumptions or desires about literature, feminism, romance, realism, narration. And how to find something new to say? Find something that others have neglected or misunderstood, point out what this tells us about those other readings, and posit your own, corrective analysis. You thought it was a happy ending? Think again! Rochester’s still a patriarch, Ferndean is unhealthy, Adele is exiled, it’s really a revenge story, Jane’s narrative strategies undermine what she appears to be saying about living ‘happily ever after.’ The key to the novel’s themes or politics is not Jane but Bertha, or Grace Poole, or Bessie. Miss Temple is barely an improvement on Brocklehurst. Bertha is Jane’s repressed double, or is she the oppressed Other? You thought the novel was a woman’s (or a woman writer’s) declaration of independence–look how you failed to see that version of feminism as complicit with racist exclusion, or reliant on imperialism. Or, look how you have subjugated the novel to your own theory about race or empire. And on and on it goes. It’s not that I don’t find some of these readings interest or compelling, but after a while, it starts to seem odd that one book should attract such a weight of other people’s ideas, should stand for so many things. While recognizing that there can be no such thing as “just” reading the novel (any more than what I’ve said above is “just” about Great Expectations “itself” in some transparent way), I do find myself thinking that, especially in some of the more ‘suspicious’ readings, those that go most determinedly against the grain, we have left the novel behind, refusing, as Denis Donoghue says about another text, to let it have its theme.

“Just Right” Stories

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I have been interested in these recent discussions about what books ought to be assigned to young readers. Like the seemingly endless array of articles about Harry Potter’s success and what, if anything, it means for the literary tastes and aptitudes of current and future readers, these exchanges have made me think back on my own youthful experiences with books. For instance, I’m not in a position to assess whether in fact the boom in literature aimed at “young adults” has created readers ready and eager to move on to other books (books for “old adults”?). But I do have reservations about sending the message to younger readers that there are books that are for them and books that are not, either because of their content or because of their more demanding or sophisticated style and vocabulary. Judging difficult, depressing, or confrontational books inappropriate for young readers in fact seems to me the most likely way to contribute to a “decline in literary reading.” I read Judy Blume and Jean Little pretty enthusiastically as a “tween” and teenager, for instance, and Barbara Willard and K. M. Peyton, among authors who wrote with readers more or less my age in mind. But I also read Charlotte Bronte, Dorothy Sayers, Dorothy Dunnett, Jane Austen, John Steinbeck, James Michener, Louisa May Alcott, Tolstoy, Dick Francis, Jean Plaidy, Margaret Mitchell…anything that looked interesting to me, that fed my love of language and of story, or that I hoped would help me live up to my aspirations to be a bookish person, involved in what I saw as a highly-valued adult activity. I read books that I did not understand, books that disturbed me, books that were trashy, books that were philosophical, books that were innovative, books that were formulaic, books that I’ve completely forgotten and might as well not have read, books that I still love today. My reach often exceeded my grasp–but what strikes me, in retrospect, is that I was grasping, and that I was encouraged to do so, rather than encouraged, as my daughter now is, to seek out books that are “just right” (which, we’ve been told, means books in which no less than 90% of the vocabulary is familiar, and are also, as far as I can tell from the assigned books she brings home, entirely wholesome and entirely flavorless, like pablum). Admittedly, she’s in Grade 1, and it’s a reasonable goal to want her to get confident about reading. And it was my parents, rather than my teachers (with rare and memorable exceptions), who made reading seem to me such an exciting pursuit–largely by reading incessantly themselves. But in Grade 1 I was reading The Young Mary Queen of Scots, to my teacher’s surprise, and loving it. Comfort with reading quickly becomes a pretty limiting standard, and one that no doubt lies behind some of the complaints academics hear so often about the kinds of books we assign–too long, too hard, too boring. I’m not really worried about my daughter: she will do her homework with the “just right” books, but she’ll have lots of books around to challenge and excite her, lots of support with moving beyond her comfort level. That way I hope she’ll feel bold, critical, and confident not just reading but also responding to whatever books she’s assigned, as well as any she picks off the shelf for herself. But I worry about how pervasive the theory seems to be that what is taught should meet or reflect, rather than raise or challenge, the reader’s current interests and abilities. It seems all to easy, to me, for “just right” to settle into “just enough”–and no more.