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It’s All in the Frame: Reasons For Writing

Rohan Maitzen15 Comments

I’ve been brooding (and pacing, and swearing, and procrastinating) about starting a new essay project, and what I find myself most stymied by is how to frame it. This is a problem I don’t have with blogging, which is perhaps why I find this such a liberating form. Here, having read something is reason enough to write something about it, and all that’s at stake is my own thoughts about it. I don’t have to attach my comments to anything or make them relevant or prove that they are somehow current or significant to anyone but me. They don’t need to be contributing to an ongoing debate or solving a critical problem. I don’t have to be engaging with someone else, or acknowledging everyone else, who has written on the same topic. Any or all of this kind stuff may emerge as I write, but the writing needs no further occasion for itself.

I think it is possible to write this way in any venue if you either are or believe yourself to be sufficiently wise and important that people ought to take an interest in your thoughts just because they come from you. But the rest of us usually need some sort of justification for writing–which is, after all, an implicit claim on other people’s attention. At least, that’s very much how I am feeling right now.

In academic writing about literature, there are a few fairly standard ways to build a frame around your specific analysis. All of them turn on the idea that you have something new to say. Probably most common nowadays is to claim a new insight into an ongoing interpretive argument: a revision, refinement, or refutation of some element of an established critical debate. This might be text-specific or have a broader reach, but you construct the frame by outlining the existing contributions and then explaining where you come in: ‘In the ongoing debates about Jane Eyre‘s implication in British imperialism, inadequate attention has been paid to the source of Jane’s drawing paper. Closer attention to the history of the production and importation of artists’ sketch pads shows that in the very art work often assumed to express Jane’s defiant Romantic individualism, Jane is dependent on a resource deeply embedded in an exploitative economic system’–most of you know the drill. A variation on this is the application of a particular theoretical model or idea to a particular text or body of texts: ‘Reading Jane Eyre through the lens of Levinas, we discover that…’ There’s also the ‘newly discovered’ frame: a text or author is unfamiliar and requires placing within appropriate theoretical, critical, and/or historical contexts. And so on. Both the preparatory and the rhetorical moves are well established. You do the reading and thinking and research that leads to the formulation of your idea. You do more  research, to be sure that your idea is novel and so that you can set up your account of what people have said so far in relevant discussions. Your introduction lays out the debate and sets up your new contribution, and then you write it out in detail, engaging as you go along with the other people in the critical conversation you are now part of. One of the hardest parts is defining just which conversation that is, so that you don’t end up trying to include, say, everything anyone has ever said about Jane Eyre since it was published! Lots of things about this kind of writing, in fact, are difficult. But as academics, we learn how it is done–usually by the implicit example of the other criticism we read (though some people are fortunate enough to get explicit instruction).

I’ve been trying to get a sense of the range of possibilities for framing writing about literature in non-academic contexts. The most obvious form is the basic ‘review of a new release.’ The occasion for the writing is the novelty of the book itself. Within that there is certainly room for different strategies, from contextualizing the book within the author’s oeuvre or within its genre to just giving a plot summary and a few remarks on style or form. For books that are not new, things are a bit more complicated. A book may get renewed attention because of an occasion or event–the author’s death, for example, or its anniversary, or perhaps an invocation of the book by another book or author (the way, say, novels about Henry James give us a reason to talk about Henry James’s novels). A film or TV adaptation is likely to prompt a flurry of attention to “the original.” A scandal is an attention-getter: if a book is banned by a school library, for instance. Hot-button issues like (to cite a recent example) debates about whether Young Adult fiction is too dark and dreary these days can also prompt lots of discussion of back-list or even out of print titles. Fads like vampire novels or Scandinavian crime fiction give us an excuse to write again about Dracula or the Martin Beck books. These all strike me as journalistic reasons: in all of these cases, books become (or are made into) news.

Then there’s book writing of the “personal journey” or “what it meant for me” variety–a combination of autobiography and literary essay or commentary. There seem to have been a lot of examples of this recently, from Elif Batuman’s The Possessed to Rebecca Mead’s “Middlemarch and Me” or William Deresiewicz’s A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things that Really Matter (this one I haven’t read yet, so I may be making unfair assumptions about it, but I did read the excerpt at the Chronicle). This is literature in the service of self-knowledge. That’s fine, but it assumes a fairly extensive interest on our part in the autobiographical subjects. That seems reasonable if they are people of substance and significance, and they know it, and they aren’t afraid to assert it: we’re back, again, at a certain kind of self-confidence, even egotism, something inherent in all writing–again, a claim on other people’s attention–but more pronounced in this form. This form makes the books new by making them personal. (I’m not a huge fan of this approach, because I feel that too often the books get subordinated to, well, personal stuff. My own attempt at something in this vein is the essay I wrote on rereading Gone with the Wind, though I don’t think personal revelation was ultimately the main issue there, as I tried to use my own reading experience as a way to think hard about the novel itself.)

It seems to me to be harder to find book writing outside of blogs that simply, without special excuse or occasion, focuses on a particular book or author. One example I’m familiar with is Zadie Smith’s essay on George Eliot, originally published in The Guardian and now included in her book Changing My Mind. I can’t get at the Guardian version any more, but assuming she didn’t revise the beginning substantially, this essay has no journalistic or personal hook: she just starts talking about Middlemarch. But then, she’s Zadie Smith, so the novelty here is that she in particular is talking about Middlemarch: she is the news, her attention itself the frame needed to create an occasion for the piece. The pieces I wrote for Open Letters Monthly on Trollope, Felix Holt, and Vanity Fair are also examples of essays without occasion or special justification. Felix Holt was easiest in some ways because it’s Eliot’s least (or second-least) popular novel, so there’s some novelty just in focusing on it instead of Middlemarch. I motivated the Trollope piece (in my mind, at least) by figuring that he doesn’t have anything like the general popularity of Jane Austen so it was safe to imagine an audience that needed some kind of general introduction; focusing on The Warden (which I love, but which is hardly either his best or his best known novel) gave it a little helpful specificity. And I also felt reasonably sure Vanity Fair is not widely read these days, so again there’s some intrinsic novelty in trying to talk about it to a general audience. It surprises me a little, though, looking back, that I wrote all of these pieces with as little anxiety as I did about their place or reason. It didn’t even occur to me, for instance, to try to frame the Vanity Fair piece by talking about either the BBC adaptation or the weird Reese Witherspoon film (which Amardeep Singh appreciated much more than I did).

Do you think book writing needs to be framed in some way that makes the book new or relevant? Can you think of other strategies (ones you like? ones you dislike?) for writing about books, besides the ones I’ve thought of? Can you think of other examples of recent (mainstream, published [in print or online]) writing about books outside of the journalistic frameworks I’ve described? Do you worry about framing your writing? There has to be a reason to write something, doesn’t there? But can the reason be, ultimately, the book itself? Must it come from somewhere else?

This Month in My Sabbatical: Reading and Writing

Rohan Maitzen1 Comment

Though nothing especially momentous marks this month in my sabbatical, I am pleased that I have continued to move fairly steadily through the various projects I set for myself back in January. Though I appreciate having the time to read, reflect and reconsider, though, I have to say that this month I have felt particularly isolated, because it’s the two aspects of this job that you are relieved of on sabbatical (administration and teaching) that actually bring you into regular contact with other people. Without classes and meetings, much of what we do is strictly solitary, and during a regular term that quiet can be very welcome, precisely because teaching and committee work are hectic, demanding, and often as annoying as they are stimulating. At first, it was just a relief to be free of the incessant demands on my time and attention. But after a while, it’s lonely, even a bit depressing, puttering away by myself. That’s one reason this post on academic blogging (thanks to Jo VanEvery for the link) resonated with me, especially this bit:

a college of one’s own is essential to scholarship. Sometimes we get lucky and our collaborators are able to participate in that world, but more often they need us for narrower purposes: our technique, students, or grants. Who then to bump ideas off of? Who to share our latest little discovery or epiphany? How to communicate the interest of an article or book? Where to find a reader? Who will forgive us our latest and dumbest ideas? How to feel that slight flare of getting the last word in a debate among learned colleagues?

It’s true, as the author continues, that “a blog can provide those things, and more besides,” and I’ve been grateful for the interest and input I receive from so many of you on my posts here. (The post I link to also gives a thoughtful account of changes in the culture of academic life that have made that collegial interaction more difficult to achieve–if anything, I think he underestimates the role played by sheer day to day busy-ness.) I was thinking that it’s no accident I first began blogging on my previous sabbatical: without really knowing much about it, I was looking for more ways to communicate with other people, and it was exhilirating to discover the conversations going on online and then to become part of them myself. I wonder sometimes why I feel this lack, even when I’m not on sabbatical, and (as far as I can tell) most of my colleagues don’t. It’s true I’ve always been a chatty type (if my parents are reading this, they are muttering “no kidding” and recalling their coinage “talkit” … ) so there’s that; some of my colleagues are just more reclusive or scholarly by instinct, happy to burrow away in their research; some, I think, for whatever reason have a better network of peers and collaborators that provide input, support and energy; others might enjoy blogging but haven’t tried it, or think it would be a distraction from their “real” reading and writing. In any case, the solitude of sabbatical work has made me appreciate my online network more than ever. And it has also made me realize how much of the return I get for my investment in this career comes from my students, from the challenge and the fun of getting them involved in our readings, from their curiosity and energy and enthusiasm. I miss students! (Remind me I said this when I’m whining about grading their assignments in the fall, would you?) I miss my colleagues, too, a little bit … but it’s not like we do spend much time on the kinds of conversations evoked above. When we do talk about work-related topics, it’s more often griping conferring about workload, curriculum, or policy issues, about pedagogical problems–or about each other! Well, it’s a workplace, after all. (Those colleagues who are also personal friends are another matter, of course.)

So: what have I done? I’ve read and commented on more thesis material–and another 120+ pages sit in my inbox at this minute. I’ve read, or scrolled through, a large number of the nearly 100 reviews and articles I downloaded, getting “caught up” on–or at least refreshing my sense of–recent work in Victorian studies. That has not been as disheartening as I frankly expected it to be. The sheer quantity of scholarship in this field is potentially overwhelming if the idea really is to internalize all of it. It quickly becomes apparent, though, that most of it is of peripheral signifiance: the accumulation of it, trends and directions, are more revealing than any particular arguments, and even at that level I haven’t seen anything that suggests a paradigm shift on the scale of, say, feminist criticism or post-colonial criticsm: I haven’t seen anything that makes me think I need to fundamentally change what I think about or say about the material I teach. It’s possible to acquire lots of little insights, or to file things away in case they become relevant to some future class or project, but most of what I’ve read has left me unmoved. This result, in turn, has me reflecting on the pleasures of learning new topics. I have one colleague whose list of teaching interests struck me, back when I was first interviewing for my job here, as astonishingly diverse–but there’s an intellectual buzz that comes from discovery, and it’s hard to get that feeling at the level of highly specialized research. On the other hand, it is easy to get it when you don’t already know the central problems and paradigms of a field you are just starting to explore for yourself, so I can see the appeal of turning to new things, like a kind of learning junkie who can’t be satisfied anymore with yet another way to read the economics of Bleak House or the poetics of Goblin Market!

I’ve read more books that I thought might be appropriate for my classes, including Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress and more of the Martin Beck mysteries–and in the last week or so I’ve drafted up a schedule for the course that actually includes Devil in a Blue Dress and The Terrorists. Other course-related reading included most of Rhoda Broughton’s Cometh Up as a Flower (which I ultimately decided not to assign),  a text book called Close Reading and the TOCs of numerous anthologies of crime fiction. I haven’t made the call yet about Close Reading but I did finally discover a Dover anthology of crime fiction that includes all the authors I wanted and is economical too–this is one more small testimony to the value of a sabbatical, because it took me ages to find and consider the alternatives here and if I had been in the midst of teaching, I would have given up and stuck with one of the books I’ve used before, even though for various reasons I wasn’t happy with them. (I have now ordered almost all the books for my fall classes and set up preliminary websites for them.)

I’ve also read a lot that wasn’t strictly for teaching or research, but then, as I say so often, in this job you never really know what reading will end up affecting your work, and I’ve been finding Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby so interesting I am now wondering if at some point I could put together a course on the “Somerville Novelists”–not least because we have no in-house specialist in 20th-century British literature (crazy, I know) so I’d actually be helping round out our curriculum a bit if I did so. Just think: another excuse to assign Gaudy Night! (There’s that lure of the new, again: this would involve a whole process of learning and discovery.) Coming up for my two reading groups I have Somerset Maugham and Elizabeth Bowen–so more 20thC British fiction there too.

As for writing, well, there’s the blogging that goes along with all that reading, and I also decided to review Marjorie Garber’s The Use and Abuse of Literature after all. Following on my meditation about “giving myself permission,” I thought it might help overcome my writer’s block if I worked in a form I am very familiar with, so I did the review as a kind of feedback form. I thought it suited, because the book, though full of interesting and provocative threads, really read to me like something unfinished. I don’t understand why it got published without further revision, to be honest: what editor would be satisfied with something so amorphous? Despite my anxiety that it would seem unforgivably snarky to treat the book as I did, I did find it freeing to write it that way: for better or for worse, that is who I am, after all. And just as I do when responding to student work, I made sure to give credit for strengths as well as weaknesses, and to try to be constructive in my criticisms…

Giving Myself Permission

Rohan Maitzen12 Comments

Among the many thoughtful comments on my post about the “PhD Conundrum,” one that really struck a chord with me is a remark by Joanna Scutts about “typical grad-student behaviors,” which she notes include asking for permission and working for praise. I would say that these are not grad-student behaviors only but good-student behaviors, in that they are typical among academically high-performing undergraduates as well: it makes sense that they appear in exaggerated form among graduate students (who were all strong undergrads to begin with) and are exacerbated by the grad school experience. I am surprised at how much I am still affected by the habits of asking for permission, the key difference at this level being that the person I really need to ask is myself. I’m also distressed at how much I seek praise for my work and feel disappointed in myself when it is not forthcoming: though I realize that my ongoing craving for external validation is inappropriate to my status as a qualified professional, that sense that if you do your work right you will get an A has never quite gone away. (I suspect that the years of being graded for our efforts set us up for the anxiety with which most of us look at our course evaluations.)

It’s the whole asking for permission thing that is most bothersome to me these days, particularly in the context of my writing. One of the payoffs I expected from my blogging is that I would shake off that nagging, doubting voice that tells me I’m not qualified or ready to write about something: that I haven’t read enough or done enough research, that my own opinion doesn’t count for anything unless it’s backed up and depersonalized and abstracted, that I haven’t justified or adequately theorized my approach. As a student, I found deadlines eventually forced me to write what I could, though I was often wracked with despair as I handed something in or presented it in seminar, sure it was a disastrous misfire. The feedback I got almost never (though not quite never) confirmed my worst fears, but somehow my confidence was never boosted. Since graduate school, I have hardly been the world’s most prolific scholar, but I’ve placed my pieces well and in general I’m satisfied that they are good work. Still, I usually declare something finished with a strange mixture of defiance and resignation, rather than satisfaction, and I have a terrible time starting to write something, because to do so I have to silence that voice. (Sometimes I try to drown it out with music!)

By and large I don’t hear that voice when I’m blogging, though, and that has been wonderfully liberating. It helped that I started my blog with no particular goals except to keep track of my reading: it was my space, and it was a kind of space outside the usual parameters of academic judgment. Also, blog posts don’t claim to be definitive or authoritative, the way academic writing does: when blogging, it’s OK (maybe even preferable) to show that you’re still thinking things through, that intellectual life is an ongoing process prone to discoveries, reversals, and confusions. By the time anyone besides my immediate family and friends was reading it, I was comfortable enough to just keep going as I had begun. Some early controversies in the comments set me back and made me more cautious in some respects (which is probably good, though I worry sometimes that the self-censorship I practice keeps my blogging blander than I am in other contexts). Overall, though, I have no inhibitions as a blogger that compare to the insecurities that slow me down when I write anywhere besides here in this WordPress box. My frustration is that the increased confidence I have found in my own voice and views as expressed here has not made a noticeable difference to my other writing. It feels as if I have given myself permission to write as myself, but only within this specific framework. Everywhere else, the old rules still apply! I notice this particularly when writing for Open Letters, where I have been encouraged to write more like I blog (this is not the only feedback I’ve gotten, and I think my co-editors are happy with the pieces I’ve done for OLM–but there I go again, worrying about external validation!). Even though OLM pieces specifically and deliberately are not supposed to sound academic, the minute I know I’m writing something official for publication, I get all serious and anxious again, laboring over every word. It’s nuts!

Yesterday I tried an experiment. When I decide to post on something here, my rule is: write it (online), tidy it, post it. No second-guessing, no (major) rewriting.  I think the longest I’ve spent on a post is 4 hours (oddly, that was the Sex and the City 2 post), but more often I write for an hour or two at most, and usually I’m pretty satisfied with the results–not that there’s nothing more to be said, or nothing that could be said any better, but I have said what seemed important to say, said it pretty clearly, and been myself. What if (I wondered) I wrote the review I’m currently working on right here in WordPress, pretending it was a blog post? Maybe at the very least in a couple of hours I’d have a draft I could work with.

Sadly, as my daughter pointed out, it’s hard to pretend to yourself, because you know too well what you are really doing. An hour or so in, I was not reviewing (as I would have been if I’d known it was really a blog post) but still taking notes. I gave up and pasted what I had into a Word document. What I need is not to fool myself into thinking I have permission to write: somehow, I need to believe it.

3 Quarks Daily Arts and Literature Blogging Prize

Rohan Maitzen7 Comments

The fine site 3 Quarks Daily is once again running its Arts and Literature blogging contest, to be judged this year by blogger, essayist, novelist, and teacher Laila Lalami. I think these contests are a great way to draw attention to the engaged, passionate, articulate writing to be found in blogs: contrary to the whingeing of the nattering naysayers, I think there’s far more to celebrate than to lament in the wonderfully open, curious, diverse and generous conversation about books that the internet has enabled. I was truly honored to be among the finalists in last year’s competition, judged by Robert Pinsky, for my review of Daniel Mendelsohn’s remarkable book The Lost (yes, there’s some irony there, as he seems to be the Naysayer-in-Chief). I encourage everyone to think about posts they think represent the best of arts and literature blogging (whether their own or someone else’s), to post a nomination at 3QD, and then to spend some time browsing through the other nominations, which I’m sure will be full of treasures.

Novel Readings 2010

Rohan Maitzen9 Comments

My turn! Here’s my traditional look back at the highs and lows of my reading and blogging year.

Book of the Year:

Hands down, and entirely to my delighted surprise, since I had no particular expectations going into it, my favourite book of the year was Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom. I raved about this book in my original post, and I’d like to emphatically repeat what I said there:

If you ever read a book, or were a child, or read a book to a child–if your childhood was shaped in any way by the books you read–then you should buy this book and read it immediately.

I don’t usually do this, but I feel strongly enough to provide a link straight to Amazon so you don’t waste any time getting your own copy. Mine was a gift, and for that, many, many thanks to the amazing Steve Donoghue of stevereads, book-giver extraordinaire.

More books I’m particularly glad I read:

After featuring it three times running on my ‘most looking forward to’ list and making at least one false start, I did finally read Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy (it took two posts to cover it, here and here). I enjoyed it thoroughly, proving my long-held theory that sometimes books simply have to ripen a while on the shelf before the reading experience can be perfectly tasty. “Would I read A Suitable Girl?” I asked, rhetorically, I thought; “You bet I would.” Imagine my pleasure in learning that just such a book is forthcoming!

Lynne Sharon Schwartz’sLeaving Brooklyn proved every bit as rich and satisfying a read as my long-time favourite Disturbances in the Field, though in quite a different style and register. It’s a coming-of-age story, “an intensely personal but also profoundly commonplace experience, movingly represented in a book by a woman, about a woman, that [I concluded my original review] I think deserves to be called ‘important.'” It would have been my ‘book of the year’ if it hadn’t been edged out by Dear Genius–but that’s OK, because Dear Genius is a book that advocates for all other books!

Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety took longer to grip me than Wolf Hall, but once I was well into it, it really wouldn’t let me go, even though there was absolutely nobody in it to like or even (except sort of theoretically) to root for. A bit like A. S. Byatt, Mantel is resolutely severe, not only towards her characters, but also towards her readers, giving them little comfort or even encouragement as they press on:

if, as I recently suggested, reading Ian McEwan’s prose is like getting acupuncture to your brain, I found reading A Place of Greater Safety akin to walking barefoot across a stretch of gravel towards a graveyard: you aren’t particularly enjoying the experience, but it has its own vividness and particularity, and there’s a morbid fascination in the direction you know you’re headed.

Even at the end–the guillotine for pretty much everyone, as we know it will inevitably be–she avoids what I called “tumbril sentimentality” of the Tale of Two Cities variety (I can’t imagine Oprah ever assigning this novel to her followers). Impressed as I was by Wolf Hall, I read several other novels from Mantel’s back catalogue this year and was repeatedly startled by her range of styles and interests (not one, not even A Place of Greater Safety, really fits the marketing tag ‘by the author of Wolf Hall‘ as they are all simply too dissimilar). The other that resonated most deeply with me was The Giant, O’Brien. Fludd was under the tree for me this year, so there will be at least one more Mantel novel in 2011.

Penelope Fitzgerald, The Bookshop. I found this “a gem of a book: spare but revealing, quirky but unsentimental” (hmm, I’m noticing a trend away from sentimentality this year–even A Suitable Boy, though full of sentiment, does not ultimately cater to our more wistful or wishful emotions).  I’m glad finally to have begun my relationship with Fitzgerald; I’ve been meaning to read The Blue Flower for years and I look forward to doing so in 2011.

Elizabeth Hardwick, A View of My Own. When I grow up, I want to be Elizabeth Hardwick. Well, OK, not exactly, but I envy her the force and confidence of her critical voice. Even when I disagree with her, I really want to talk to her about what she says. I was particularly interested in her essay “George Eliot’s Husband,” which sets a high standard for biographical thinking not met at all by a particular more recent attempt to write about my favourite novelist–Hardwick says more worthwhile things in a few pages than that author comes up with in a couple hundred.

A. S. Byatt, The Children’s Book. Another tough-minded, unsentimental novel, as expansive in its own way as A Suitable Boy or A Place of Greater Safety. I called it “history as information management,” and I meant that as a tribute of a sort. Byatt is an accomplished novelist; while Seth’s abundance (though I loved it) occasionally seemed cluttered, Byatt’s somehow has a tautness to it. If Mantel writes historical fiction that defies conventional expectations of the genre, Byatt does the same with the ‘sweeping family saga.’

Laila Lalami, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits. I called this “a quietly harrowing account of hopes turned back and diminished,” and concluded that “hope is a dangerous pursuit, not just because of the risks of the pursuit itself, but because sometimes the chance you take brings you only further away from what you really wanted.”

Morley Callaghan, Such is My Beloved. This book, a classic of Canadian modernism, took me out of my comfort zone as a reader; talking about it with the new book group I belong to took me out of my comfort zone in other ways–but salutary ones! I ended up finding some kinship between Father Dowling and a couple of Victorian protagonists who founder, similarly, on the mismatch between their most strongly felt principles and the pragmatic realities of their world. But Callaghan’s setting, contexts, and language are not Victorian at all.

May Sarton, The Small Room. In the end I didn’t love this novel, but it interested me enormously, as did the conversation it generated on (and around) the Slaves of Golconda reading group. Its central themes certainly struck a chord with my ongoing anxieties about my professional work and the public discourse around higher education:

So much about the discourse of education today seems to disregard the value of that connection to the whole person–it’s all about outcomes and measures and productivity and, of course, jobs after graduation. Is that really what we want? We as teachers? or as parents? as students? If Lucy’s view seems dangerously personal, the current obsession with students as consumers seems dangerously limited and limiting. If we can’t ever hope to teach students as people, or to be people ourselves when we teach, who will ever, in the end, actually learn anything worth knowing?

Daphne du Maurier, Frenchman’s Creek. Dare I say that they don’t write pulp fiction like they used to? Purple prose, absolutely, but as I said in my original post, it’s ‘royal purple, richest velvet.’ I haven’t worked my way through the rest of the du Maurier collection on my shelf, but what’s a sabbatical for, if not to catch up on books you otherwise have no excuse at all for reading?

Books that disappointed, for one reason or another:

Happily, once again there weren’t very many of these. Leading the pack is certainly Brenda Maddox’s George Eliot in Love, which I reviewed for Open Letters Monthly. Here’s the money quote:

I wasn’t just disappointed in George Eliot in Love—by the time I finished it I was equal parts astonished and enraged. The book is not just George Eliot ‘lite’–it is superficial, prurient, and at times simply offensive. Maddox comes across as naively underqualified for her task: her good intentions are as painfully evident as the bad judgment and limited expertise she displays throughout. Focusing persistently on the pettiest details of Eliot’s biography, Maddox strips her of both dignity and intellectual substance and leaves us with an impoverished version that belies Elizabeth Hardwick’s confidence (expressed in her marvelous essay “George Eliot’s Husband”) that it was impossible to make this accomplished woman “look foolish and small.”

I was pleased (though hardly surprised!) that George Eliot in Love also won a spot in the ‘Worst Nonfiction, 2010‘ smackdown at stevereads: “Maddox should chronicle Paris Hilton next and leave the deep end of the pool to the grown-ups.” Ha! Between us we perhaps give the lie to the old saw about the only thing worse than not being talked about.

I was underwhelmed by Louis Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas:

I really wish that, having grabbed people’s attention, Menand would have seized the opportunity, not to lob another petty grenade at his struggling colleagues but to insist that we not concede too much to either the rhetoric or the pressures of the marketplace. Surely an English professor who is also a public intellectual is uniquely positioned to make the case for, not against, the rest of us.

For quite different reasons, Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures was also distinctly unremarkable: “The subject of the book is intrinsically interesting, but if a novelist can’t do any better than this, we might as well read non-fiction, or, better yet, poetry”–the salient example of the latter being, of course, In Memoriam A.H.H.

I think my expectations were just too high for David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. I really enjoyed reading some parts of it, but I don’t ordinarily seek out work in some of the genres he plays with (notably, science ficton) and I was frustrated by the way so many different kinds of storytelling were shoehorned into one book–even though Mitchell is dazzlingly smart (too conspicuously so, I sometimes thought) about the unifying threads. My conclusion after reading it was “after a while I found I was more aware of  his virtuosity and the ingenuity of the nesting narratives than I was actually engaged in them.”

The best of the not-entirely-satisfying collection is Ian McEwan’s Solar. I’d rather read an imperfect novel by Ian McEwan than any novel by probably the majority of other contemporary writers. I actually couldn’t quite decide which category to put Solar in, it’s so nearly excellent–but in the end, I decided McEwan set too high a standard for himself with Atonement and (for me, at least) Saturday, so for failing to live up to it, here he is down here.  A bit of my original post:

Of course it is not a universal prescription for excellence that a novel satisfy both heart and head, but that’s what I want, that’s what I think takes a novel from good to great, and Solar seems quite content to leave my heart untouched. I think this is a missed opportunity for a novelist with McEwan’s gifts. Why not set against the shabby opportunism of the protagonist (who is both brilliantly drawn and wholly unsympathetic) either some idealism not undermined by the general attitude of cynicism that permeates the novel–even if only to show it up as ineffectual against the absurd realities of political and scientific institutions–or some unembodied but evocative commitment to the beauties of the planet Michael Beard only pretends to cherish? Bleak House is an unforgettable critique of the stupidities of a system that serves, at most, only those who constitute it, because we see beyond it, unrealized, an idea of human flourishing, of love and justice, worth yearning for. Thus we find the yammering of innumerable lawyers both comic and tragic. Where is Miss Flite, or Lady Dedlock, never mind Jo the crossing sweeper, in McEwan’s universe?

Books I’m most looking forward to reading in 2011:

There are too many to enumerate, really, including all the treasures delivered for Christmas from my lovely family, but here are a few titles, if only to motivate me as the new year gets underway.

  1. Tolstoy, War and Peace. This is the new Suitable Boy: it will be on this TBR list until I get it read! Surely being on sabbatical, if only for half  the year, will remove most of the standard excuses.
  2. Flaubert, Madame Bovary. Yes, the new Lydia Davis translation. I’ve begun this, but it got pushed aside during the Great Cough and Cold of late 2010.
  3. Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children. I’ve been curious about this since reading about it in Hardwick’s A View of My Own.
  4. Sigrid Undset, Kristin Lavransdatter. This one is another object lesson in why you should never “purge” your book collection, no matter how often you move or how many times someone close to you mutters baleful warnings about running out of space. I owned this trilogy as a girl, never got around to reading it, purged it, and now–older and wiser–rejoice to have found a nice Penguin edition in a local bookstore.
  5. A delicious stack of old Virago Modern Classics, including novels by Margaret Kennedy, Antonia White, Rebecca West, and many others.
  6. Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games. I’ve owned this for a couple of years without reading it–I think its time has come.
  7. Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai. The discussion at Conversational Reading piqued my interest about this novel, which I’ve owned for many years without reading (note again the value of the ‘ripening on the shelf’ theory to justify these habits!).
  8. Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory. This is the next book up for the book group that read Such is My Beloved. I read it many years ago but Greene is an author I haven’t done anything with since turning ‘pro,’ and I’m finally, belatedly, interested.
  9. Colm Toibin, The Master and Brooklyn.
  10. Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf. I’ve made some progress on this one, helped by an excursion into Woolf’s letters and diaries. I’d like to finish it in 2011!

I observe that not one of these is a work of literary history or criticism! There’s some chance that being on sabbatical will also give me a chance to recover some energy for that kind of reading! Certainly I will be doing some of it, as I am working (still!) on at least one academic paper which I hope to get into publishable form by the end of my leave.

Other Novel Readings highlights:

In 2008 I noted the invitation to contribute to The Valve as an important development in my blogging life. 2010 saw my farewell to The Valve, following on a resolution to “Get On With It!“–whatever, exactly, “it” is. The biggest development in 2010, congruent with this shift in emphasis, was the invitation from the fine folks at Open Letters Monthly, first to move Novel Readings to its new home, and then to join their editorial team. Both steps have been good ones for me, helping to sustain my blogging energy, bringing me into contact with all kinds of interesting writers and readers, even providing an excellent excuse for a trip to New York. Under the influence of these developments I increased my contributions to Open Letters, taking advantage of the flexibility and outstanding editorial input the magazine offers to write some more pieces on Victorian literature (Felix Holt and Vanity Fair), a couple of reviews (in addition to George Eliot in Love, I reviewed Claire Harman’s Jane’s Fame) and an essay on Gone with the Wind that took me a little outside my usual 19th-century ‘beat’ but reflected  my ongoing interest in ethical criticism–and my desire to write in a more personal voice. The Gone with the Wind essay earned me a link from Arts & Letters Daily, which helped me believe that I do have something interesting and even valuable to say as a critic–something that I have rarely felt in my almost 20 years as a practising academic critic. Looking ahead to 2011, I hope I can continue to build my confidence as a writer and critic, keep discovering what I have to say and saying it as well as I possibly can, in my own voice.

To everyone who reads and comments here at Novel Readings, and to all of you who keep up your own wonderfully thoughtful, diverse, and stimulating book blogs, thank you, and Happy New Year.

Metablogging: Three Interesting Posts

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

Like conventional academic criticism, lit-blogging is subject to fits of self-consciousness culminating in metablogging. While a few years ago such posts were likely to be forward-looking and exploratory, about the possibilities of blogging as a new frontier in criticism, the latest round of posts from Dan Green, Scott Esposito, and Steve Mitchelmore are more equivocal. Actually, Dan Green is pretty much just negative:

Literary blogs are (unwittingly, I hope) abetting the capitalist imperative to get out “product” as quickly as possible. New books appear, are duly noted, presumably consumed, and then we’re on to the next one. While sometimes lit bloggers consider an older title, it’s usually by an already established author or a “classic” of one sort or another. Little time is spent considering more recent books that might not have gotten enough attention, or assessing a writer’s work as a whole. Once the book has passed its “sell by” date, nothing else is heard of it and every book is considered in isolation, as a piece of literary news competing for its 15 seconds. The more potential readers come to assume that this is the main function of lit blogs, the less likely it is that the literary blogosphere will have any lasting importance. Literary blogs might let you know who reviewed what in the New York Times, but that The New York Times might not be the best place to go for intelligent writing about books is not something they’ll have the authority to suggest. (read the whole piece here)

Stephen Mitchelmore’s response is almost elegaic, but there’s still a hint of that early utopianism:

I have to admit that for years I was mystified why my blog writings have gone apparently unnoticed, at least in terms of page views. While the most popular blogs were getting thousands a day, I was lucky if This Space gathered 300. I thought, isn’t my review of Littell’s The Kindly Ones better than almost all the others, and didn’t my post on a road traffic accident say more about life’s relation to literature than any journalist’s exposé of an author’s life? Perhaps, however, these explain why it is relatively unpopular. Anyway, I have a difficult relationship with praise and criticism, with self-effacement vying for dominance with aggressive resentment. It is probably best to write, as in those early days of Spike, as if nobody is watching. After having published a dozen or so reviews in print media, I’m nowadays genuinely happier to work for weeks on long reviews or essays and have them disappear into the gaping void. Finding a way to talk about the reading experience is, I’ve realised, the greatest pleasure of writing; where it ends is of no importance. Still, over the last fourteen years of online work, I’ve seen the names of my key writers – Thomas Bernhard, Maurice Blanchot and Gabriel Josipovici – become familiar whereas before they were marginalised. If I have had only a minor role in this, it has made the effort worthwhile.

Yet I still like to imagine an ideal literary website in which the design, the writing and, most of all, the editorial vision offers a unique and dynamic approach to literature and culture in general, countering the banalities of commercial literary sites. So what might it look like? I have an idea but it requires an exceptional amount of work by people who have to earn a living elsewhere. Perhaps such a website is only ever the green ray as the sun sets on one’s hopes. Such a feeling is nothing new and we may learn something from previous attempts in strikingly similar times. (read the whole post here)

Scott Esposito picks up the thread:

I’m not sure how ironic Stephen was being about not understanding why his reviews were lesser-known than those elsewhere (and generally his are of much higher quality that what you’re likely to find in other places), but it’s not too hard to explain. Likewise, the method of building a literary site with high amounts of traffic is not mysterious. Go have a look at the Huffington Post books section, where every week you can find gossip about celebrity memoirs and counter-intuitive lists along the lines of “10 Most Outrageous Outfits From New Book ‘Critical Mass Fashion’ (PHOTOS).” Just make sure to have enough important names within your h1 header, say something contentious but not terribly complex that will generate a billion links, and keep it all short and with a lot of photos. Copy that with your own stable of writers, and you too can build a fairly well-trafficked site. This is not rocket science.

Obviously, some people would shoot for other things in a site besides high traffic, and this points out the problem with focusing on hits as a measure of a website, even though the first question anyone ever asks me about my sites is how many hits they get. But as Stephen’s site demonstrates, you can be influential even without getting major traffic. So choose what you want your site to be, and then do it. (read his whole post here)

“Choose what you want your site to be, and then do it” strikes me as excellent advice. Like every blogger, I wonder at regular intervals what I do this for. I think it’s disingenuous for bloggers to suggest they write purely for themselves: no need to post online, in that case. We all write online in the hope of getting readers. But it doesn’t have to be thousands, or hundreds, to be a satisfying experience (in my case, I average barely 100 hits a day, at least based on the Sitemeter tracking, and we all know that not every hit is an actual reader). If you take Scott’s advice and write what you want–and invest in Mitchelmore’s insight that “finding a way to talk about the reading experience is … the greatest pleasure of writing,” which I think is a large part of the truth–your site will have integrity and reflect your own values as a reader and critic. Then the readers you get will be those you want to enter into conversation with, and the extension to criticism represented by your site will be sincere. I think Dan Green’s disappointment stems from his having had very specific hopes or ambitions for lit blogging. His was one of the first blogs I started reading, and the seriousness with which he took the work and the potential of blogging as an alternative form of criticism was really important to my own developing sense of what the form might allow, what purpose it might serve. While he’s right that there’s a real loss if the overall direction of the ‘litblogosphere’ is towards commercialization and marketing, the form itself remains infinitely malleable. The risk (indeed, the likelihood) is that the good stuff–the thoughtful, independent, eclectic voices–will be drowned out by the louder ones that pander and preen and sell (out). So here I agree with Scott that it’s no good to ‘persist in this “take your ball and go home” attitude.’ The New York Times may not be the be-all-and-end-all of criticism, but it would be nice to be able to harness some of the power of the prestige print publications, now all with notable online presences. If only their blogs and reviewers would play nicely with others and actively seek out interesting independent voices online who represent serious critical alternatives, showcasing them rather than insisting on the tiresomely reductive ‘critics vs. bloggers’ debate. If they really care about the condition of criticism in the present day, they would join in the effort to sustain good discussion, which–whatever its provenance–actually supports their own work by continuing to take books seriously.

Bloggers and Critics: Everything new is old again

Rohan Maitzen7 Comments

My previous post on appreciating book bloggers was in progress as the discussion unfolded on Twitter about ‘book bloggers ruining everything’ (via Ron Hogan, for one, who was watching a discussion from earlier this year between Charles McGrath and Daniel Mendelsohn* that involved a fair number of pot shots at book bloggers [see here if you want to watch it for yourself]). I’ve been thinking that one of the reasons these reductive and dismissive attitudes towards bloggers have any traction at all, and come from such otherwise very smart people, is the problem of filtering.

In blogging (as in every medium) there is good stuff (even some great stuff) and bad stuff (even some really truly terrible stuff). It is probably true, just because of the lack of inhibitions on blogging and other forms of self-publication, that the bad-to-terrible stuff  outweighs the good-to-great stuff by a larger margin than in old forms of print media. It takes patience, curiosity, time and open-mindedness to trawl the vast array of blogs (even in the subset of book blogs) looking for the good stuff. Lots of us do it, because there are real rewards for lovers of books and criticism and conversation. But it’s vanishingly unlikely that someone who gets all their links from the Big Established Sites, including their blogs, will find most of the sites we write for or read, because they all seem to read and link to exclusively other Big Established Sites. The Book Bench at the New Yorker, for instance, has its own often engaging posts, but it links around pretty much exclusively to places like the Nation, or the Guardian, or the Wall Street Journal, or PEN. These are worthy sites, of course, but anybody who’s interested in the Book Bench is probably already following them, one way or another. At most, all the Book Bench is doing is letting us know which pieces in these esteemed sources were of particular interest to them, or saving us the trouble of sorting through more than a couple of our RSS feeds for the day. The blogroll at the Book Bench has 24 links–not a bad start, but all, again, high profile already (mostly other mainstream media outlets, plus Maud Newton, Sarah Weinman, and a couple of the best-known online book sites–The Millions, The Second Pass). Again, all worthy of our attention–well, there’s one on their list I’m not sure about, actually, and why it’s there and not some of the ones I admire, I have no idea.  The Guardian has a smaller and even odder selection; at the TLS, both Peter Stothard and Mary Beard have small blogrolls too, though ones that reflect a bit more idiosyncrasy, which is nice. Still, none of these sites (or a number of other blogs associated with major papers and magazines) seem genuinely bloggish, in that there’s really no sense of the reciprocity I suggested distinguishes blogging as an especially open and generous form. The major aggregator sites (I’m thinking of Arts and Letters Daily, for instance, or Three Quarks Daily) also rarely step outside the rarified world of the ‘top’ sites. It would be refreshing, and good for the general conversation about books (which we’re all passionate about–or at least amateur book bloggers are), if these Big Established Sites would participate in the remarkable opening up of the cultural conversation that the internet has enabled.  Right now, I think  followers of the big sites are bound to feel a bit claustrophobic after a while, not to mention excluded. The exercise of looking for the good stuff among the bad would be tiring and discouraging some of the time, but acknowledging the smart, articulate blogs that are more than what Mendelsohn calls “unchecked effusions”–and doing so in a forum that already has  a little credibility in the world of old media–might help people like McGrath and Mendelsohn stop conflating form and content–or just ignoring content altogether. A good place to start would be with the handful of sites I listed.

*I admit that I was particularly disappointed at the tone of Mendelsohn’s comments (though he does acknowledge that there are some good lit blogs, and his point about chasing ‘hits’ by writing what gets attention is a fair one) because I wrote what I still consider one of my best blog posts about his remarkable book The Lost. What difference does it make that I wrote this sitting in my basement fairly late at night? (I’ll spare you the detail of whether or not I was actually in my pyjamas: the blogger’s wardrobe seems to be an issue of surprising concern to some people.) It’s either good writing and analysis or not. It’s true that I wrote it without the benefit of an editor (well, besides myself–and I’m pretty tough on myself, as I am on others), but the unmediated scrutiny of online readers is another way to test the merits of the result. In my case, I was gratified to be recognized for my work by Three Quarks Daily, where the editors named this post a finalist in their arts and literature blogging contest last year (these contests, by the way, are a great step towards the kind of sorting project I wish sites like this should do–but I don’t notice 3QD linking regularly to the winners or finalists in their regular posts).

Book Bloggers: An Appreciation

Rohan Maitzen7 Comments

Last week was Book Blogger Appreciation Week. I wasn’t involved in it at all directly. I’m not exactly a “book blogger,” I suppose–more of a blogger who often writes about books, if there is such a distinction. I haven’t really been very bloggy lately, either: I haven’t been linking around a lot, or writing posts that respond to other people’s or that intervene in debates that are circulating around the blog world. I used to do more of that kind of thing, and I kind of miss it, as you get more of a feeling of connection if you do, in fact, make connections. But it requires more immediacy than my blogging has had for a while, partly because my writing attention has been spread a little thin recently. I do like taking the time to write longer reviews, but I worry that in a blog, that kind of thing can start to seem rather self-absorbed! And I think it’s not true that, as one fellow blogger recently suggested to me (perhaps tongue-in-cheek?), blogging is all about narcissism and craving attention. Well, OK, there has to be a little of that, even though we all probably insist both to ourselves and others that we do it for the instrinsic satisfaction. We do, but if that was all we wanted, we could just use a scribbler and a pen. But the attention we crave is that of like-minded people, people who will enter into our idiosyncratic interests and share their own, people at once curious and generous enough to come into our space. And we try to get their attention by freely offering our ideas about books, which is also a pretty generous thing to do. So in the spirit of reciprocity that I think is really fundamental to blogging, I’d like to note my appreciation for some other bloggers who write about books. I appreciate in particular that in the world of these blogs, unlike in the world of mainstream book reviewing, you don’t get overwhelmed with multiple and thus inevitably repetitious reviews of the same handful of new books. This is very much the world of publishing’s long tail. It’s a world in which books published in 1798, or 1817, or 1946, or 2007 are all equally vital. It’s a world in which there’s room for personal responses, but it’s not the taste-test world of Amazon “top” reviewers: in this world, it’s expected that you’ll think about your reactions and write about them as well as you can. This is not an exhaustive list of the blogs I follow (neither is the blogroll on the right, which reminds me–I should update that), but it’s a start on acknowledging some of the sites that consistently replenish my own stock of ideas and enthusiasms about books and blogging, as well as my TBR lists.

Wuthering Expectations: ‘Amateur Reader’ has just celebrated the third anniversary of his wonderful blog. This is the site that brought us the Scottish Literature Reading Challenge (eep! I haven’t finished The Perpetual Curate! But I did read all of The Antiquary) and Sympathetic Character Week, among many other finely themed interludes. His posts are smart, entertaining, and often unexpected in the direction they go or the insight they discover. AR manages to have fun with writers from John Galt to Elizabeth Gaskell to Thomas Carlyle (and you’ve gotta love a blog that turns up 19 posts tagged ‘Thomas Carlyle’).

Tales from the Reading Room: ‘Litlove’ is another of my go-to bloggers. The tone is more introspective than at ‘Wuthering Expectations’ but the effect is just as engaging. Each post, whether personal or bookish, is patient and nuanced. You could do a lot worse than spend an hour browsing in the Reading Room archives, where you will find thoughtful encounters with writers as diverse as Orhan Pamuk and Jeanette Winterson, Steig Larsson and Henry James. At the top of the page today is a wry (and, to me, familiar) story about disagreeing over Facebook. I have litlove (and DorothyW of ‘Of Books and Bicycles,’ below) to thank for recommending Rosy Thornton, whose gently incisive academic novel Hearts and Minds I just finished.

Necromancy Never Pays: Jeanne wins the prize for most unusual blog title! (Its provenance is explained in the sidebar, if you click on over.) In addition to reviews and reflections on recent reading, lately including Franzen’s Freedom and Temple Grandin’s Animals Make Us Human,  NNP offers regular doses of poetry (often her choices are new to me) and Trivial Pursuit for Book-Lovers (discouragingly, for a supposed professional, I almost never know the answers!).

Bookphilia: Bookphilia’s Colleen is another blogger who offers not just sharp and refreshingly personal reviews of a wide range of reading material (particular interests include Japanese, French, and 19thC British literature),  but also special features, in her case including ‘Curious Creepy,’ in which she spies (for lack of a more tactful word) on what people around her are reading, and ‘I Interview Dead People’ (including Wordsworth, just for example). Her posts on George Eliot’s Romola are not only spectacularly interesting but were also well timed to show my graduate seminar last term (a) how to work well with such difficult material and (b) how to write great blog posts that invite high-level conversation.

stevereads: Is there anything Steve doesn’t read? With his inimitable energy and enviable fluency, Steve covers  everything from the weightiest historical biography to the fluffiest Harlequin Romance with equal rigor and in equal detail. Wondering which edition of Moby Dick to read? Steve’s your man. Wondering what’s new in comics? Once again… Steve keeps tabs on the ‘Penny Press‘ (those lowly competitors of OLM!), reviews Penguins on Parade, and shares the very different beauties of National Geographic and Paul Marron. He offers his original takes on classics (Green Eggs and Ham, anyone?) and illuminates corners of the book world so obscure we can all only wonder: has he, in fact, read everything?

Of Books and Bicycles: Unlike me, DorothyW has finished The Perpetual Curate, and her write-up is as clear and inviting as her book reviews usually are. She has a knack for making me feel inadequately sporty, what with the whole cycling thing (but I run! not far, not fast, but I do run!). She also writes about teaching and about a wide range of writers, from Sara Caudwell to W. G. Sebald. Like litlove, she participates in the Slaves of Golconda reading group, which has always looked like a fun thing to do. Hmmm…do you think I would want to belong to their club if they were willing to have me as a member?

Bibliographing: Nicole at bibliographing is another blogger I count on for fresh, pithy, but thoughtful perspectives in all kinds of books. She recently weighed in on a little-noticed title by some guy named Franzen, for instance, but she’s as like to write on Melville (didn’t he also write a Great American Novel?) or Roberto Bolano. (You know, as I write up these little blurbs, I start to wonder how, with all the reading going on out there, anybody actually gets any of their real work done…)

The Little Professor: Miriam Burstein’s Little Professor blog may have been the first one I started reading, and it’s still the very best place to go for detailed write-ups of completely obscure 19th-century religious novels. If that sounds dry, well, it’s a testament to Miriam’s style and savvy that while I have never finished one of these posts with any desire at all to read the book under discussion, I have never regretted reading the post itself! She exemplifies the possibilities for academics who want to bring their expertise out into the public eye. A good example is her recent post on Roger Scruton and Newman’s Idea of a University. For something completely different, but also typical of her wit and creativity, try LP in the House.

To all these bloggers, and to everyone else on my blogroll and Google subscriptions, thank you for bringing your intelligence, humor, and passion to writing about books–for free, and for everyone. It’s much appreciated!

Another Year of Blogging My Teaching

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

My annual series of posts on ‘This Week in My Classes‘ has come to an end, once again, with the end–not of term, since I won’t file my grades and move on until the 125 exams coming in later this week are marked–but of class meetings. So it’s time again to reflect on what it meant for me to write here about my teaching.

Not much has changed since I first wrote about the experience back in 2008. Then, I emphasized how my initial motivation, to make my work as an English professor more transparent to a skeptical public, had been replaced by a sense of the intrinsic value of being more self-conscious about one of the most important and time-consuming aspects of my job:

I found that taking this extra step each week not only helped me identify the purpose, or, if writing retrospectively, the result of each class, but it made each week more interesting by giving me an opportunity to make connections or articulate puzzles or just express pleasure and appreciation in ways that went beyond what I had time for in class. I pursued links between my teaching and my research projects, for example, as well as between my teaching and my other ‘non-professional’ interests and activities. I articulated ideas suggested by class discussions that otherwise would have sunk again below the surface of my distracted mind. Blogging my teaching enhanced my own experience of teaching. That in itself is a worthwhile goal.

I also noted the benefits of writing more, and more openly: “Though perhaps nobody will read your posts, somebody actually might! And once you realize that, you try to write better–just in case.” And I liked contributing what I hoped might be useful material to the vast reservoir of expertise and enthusiasm that is the ‘blogosphere.’ All of these things are still true, though as I cycle through my classes over the years I am finding that it seems pointless to reiterate what I’ve said before about the readings or themes. I do change up the book list almost every time I offer a course, but rarely by more than one or two books (or else I lose the hard-won benefits of having “prepped” most of the material before–which can be a huge and essential time-saver as I become more senior and take on more administrative responsibilities, and as class sizes, also, creep up, creating more paperwork and demand for my attention from students). Still, this year with the Mystery class in particular it felt a bit repetitive writing up the weekly reports. Yet I still find that when I sit down and make myself give it some thought,  I pretty much always get caught up in writing about something that I find interesting. Indeed, my posts seemed to just keep getting longer!

The biggest teaching challenge for me this year was this term’s Brit Lit survey. I wrote often about the rapid pace of it and the disorienting experience of teaching a great deal of material well outside my comfort zone. Intellectually, though it was exhausting, it was also exhilirating, not least because of the treat of returning to writers I hadn’t paid much attention to since my own undergraduate survey class–though it was also interesting to note how the list of potential inclusions had expanded since those long-ago days (I’m quite sure, for instance, that we didn’t read any Elizabeth Barrett Browning back then, not even “How do I love thee?”). Although the day to day prep was intense for this course (the pay-off will be in the fall, when I get to do it all again), the hardest work I put in was before it started, when I researched and then committed to an assignment sequence involving having the tutorial groups build their own Study Guides using PBWiki. I’m in the middle of evaluating the finished projects now, and I am certainly glad I thought so hard about how to explain the assignment and the evaluation criteria. I was full of zeal and enthusiasm about the wikis when the course began, then I began to feel frustrated when I saw what my current review is confirming: most of the students did just fine on their assigned topic but very few entered with any spirit or creativity into the collaborative aspects of wiki-building. On the other hand, as I read through the final versions of all the pages, I’m satisfied that on the whole they put together a valuable resource–something I expect they are realizing now too, as they turn to them to study for their final exam. Some of them put in a lot of effort, too, and some of them, I think, had a little fun. They all learned something about using computers actively, rather than passively consuming content. These seem like good results to me. I don’t know what they thought about having to do this. I’m sure their course evaluations will tell me!

The other experiment I tried was having my graduate students maintain a course blog. Once they warmed up and got over their self-consciousness, they did a great job: they posted question sets and then followed up with comments, and every week there was a lot of lively online discussion that I thought made our classroom time more focused and energetic. I’m hoping they will post some retrospective thoughts about the pros and cons of incorporating that kind of writing into the seminar. I didn’t think it was that different from posting questions and responses to a discussion board, but several of them hadn’t done that for classes before either, and those that had seemed to find this form more exposed, even though the blog was (and so far, remains) password protected.

Writing this post, I realize that though blogging about my teaching has been interesting but not that revelatory this year, blogging has clearly affected my teaching, by giving me experience in new forms of writing and thinking that I think are worth using in pedagogical contexts and by exposing me to a community of innovative scholars like those at the very successful Profhacker site whose posts on using wikis in the classroom gave me courage (and know-how) to be a little bit innovative myself.

3 Quarks Daily Arts & Lit Blogging Prize

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

If you’d like to show your appreciation for good blog writing about literature and the arts, click on over to 3 Quarks Daily and take a look at their nominees for the 2010 3QD Prize in Arts and Literature. The editors invited nominations of blog posts of no more than 4000 words, written since February 21, 2009. I’ve begun browsing through the entries and it seems like a lively and predictably eclectic selection. Since they encouraged self-nominations, I threw one of my own posts into the ring, my review of Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost. I chose it because the book absolutely topped my list of notable reads last year, because writing about it as well as I could was important to me, and because I was reasonably satisfied that I had said what I wanted to about it. Also, one of my most trusted readers wrote me to say that she thought it was the best thing I’d ever written on my blog. I have no idea how it holds up to whatever the standard will be for winning the competition, though I think it’s a safe bet, given my obscurity, that it won’t win in the public voting–if you think it’s any good, though, do come by and click on the button for me. Or, if in general you think it’s a good thing that people write thoughtfully about literature and the arts for love, for free, and for everyone to read, vote for whichever post you think exemplifies the best of public criticism.

March 10: I’m very proud to say that my post has been selected as one of the finalists to be judged by Robert Pinsky. Thanks to any of you who went and voted for me or were otherwise encouraging, and thanks also to the editors of 3 Quarks Daily for making me one of their ‘wild card’ picks.