Novel Readings has moved...

Just a reminder to anyone who used to read or subscribe to Novel Readings and hasn't seen any activity over here recently: new posts are going up at the new address:

http://rohanmaitzen.com/novelreadings

Don't forget to update your blogrolls, subscriptions, or RSS feeds.

A New Home--Who'll Follow?

Yes, that's the title of a story of American settler life, by Caroline Kirkland. But it's also the state of affairs at Novel Readings, which as of today is relocating to its new address and becoming part of the family of blogs hosted by the online literary magazine Open Letters Monthly. Aside from the new address, it will be the same Novel Readings as always. I hope you'll update your RSS feeds, bookmarks, blogrolls, and so on, and keep reading and commenting. Here's a link to the new site:

Novel Readings at Open Letters

And here's the new URL:

http://openlettersmonthly.com/novelreadings

This site will stay where it is, but new posts will go up only at the new one. Hope to see you there!

3 Quarks Daily Arts & Lit Blogging Prize

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.

Novel Readings Discovered by the Spammers

For the first time since I started this blog three years ago, I've been spammed to such an extent that I've turned on comment moderation. I've always felt that this step slows down discussion--which is hard enough to generate as it is--but it's certainly preferable to having the comments sections littered with links to pornographic sites or essay mills. So, my apologies to the real readers and writers out there for what I hope will be short delays between when you post your thoughtful remarks and when they appear here.

Novel Readings 2009

It's time for my annual review of the highs and lows of my reading year.

Books I'm most glad I read, either for the intrinsic richness of the aesthetic, affective, or intellectual experience they offered, for the conversations they generated, or for the ideas and connections they offered for my teaching and research:

1. Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost. This book made by far the strongest impression on me of any I read this year. Devastating though it is, it also manages to be surprising, suspenseful, and sometimes even comical. Mendelsohn manages to be self-reflexive about his research and writing, about his own assumptions and limitations, without ever compromising his dedication to reaching after the truth of the story he is telling or his respect for the suffering of those whose story it really is. It's a remarkable accomplishment.

2. Naguib Mahfouz, Palace Walk. I ended up enjoying this novel as much for the way it implicitly chastised me for my own assumptions (about fiction, about families) as for the story it told. I'm happy to say that Santa (OK, my mom) sent me Sugar Street and Palace of Desire for Christmas, so I'll be reading--and, I expect, writing about--Mahfouz again in 2010.

3. Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns. Although (as I say also in my original review) I don't think this is actually a great novel by literary standards, and in retrospect I feel my own emotional reaction to it was the result of some heavy-handed narrative and ideological manipulation (pain! suffering! injustice! misogyny!), it's impossible to ignore the very real pain, suffering, injustice, and misogyny of the world it fictionalizes.

4. Mahbod Seraji, Rooftops of Tehran. Unlike A Thousand Splendid Suns, Rooftops of Tehran is not a sensational or particularly populist treatment of its material. It reaches across cultural differences to tell a story of yearning and love, emphasizing feelings that are universal, if differently embodied or characterized based on circumstances. At times a bit heavy-handedly pedagogical, it still avoids the trap of what I am now thinking about as 'moral tourism': it isn't an Iran packaged for mass consumption and political ends, but something more inward-looking and sincere.

5. Charlotte Bronte, Villette. This year's choice for our summer reading project at The Valve, Bronte's perverse exploration of thwarted desire, religious conflict, surveillance, and narrative unreliability offers all kinds of fun and surprises, especially for those who think the Victorians were all naive realists. (D'oh! But there really are people who think that. In my experience, many of them are specialists in late 20th-century fiction whose favourite straw man looks a lot like Trollope, but doesn't have his metafictional savvy.)

6. Ian Colford, Evidence. Understated, even insidious, these stories leave their mark on your consciousness, like inky thumbprints.

7. Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway. It seems somehow significant that I quoted from this novel instead of writing much about it. It's not that there aren't ideas in it, or that its form and technique isn't inviting to criticism, but for me this was a reading experience that was very much about easing up my critical grip (which seemed to be deforming my reading) and savouring the tactile quality of the language. My feelings about this book were also much affected by my thoughts about a special student, Samantha Li; I only wish I had read it before it was too late to talk to her about it.

8. William Boyd, Any Human Heart. Dear students: The main character in this book is not at all "relatable." Guess what--that doesn't matter! You don't have to like him (though by the end I was fond of him after all, as you are of someone you've known their whole life). You just have to go along, feeling the pulses of his idiosyncratic life and personality. He has no special insight, into himself or any larger contexts; he isn't even especially charismatic. But, as George Eliot points out in Adam Bede, most of the people around us are nothing special--we need to adapt our aesthetic to that reality, and it turns out to be a surprisingly moving experience.

9. Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall. Wolf Hall surprised me by not resembling any other historical fiction I've read. For one thing, there is almost no exposition. Mantel's trick of referring to Cromwell throughout as "he," though it does create the occasional awkwardness, also creates an oddly intimate atmosphere: we are with him, in close proximity, as if standing by his shoulder, but there's a little separation remaining. First-person narration would have overcome it, but then I think the novel would have felt more artificial, and the emotions would have had to run higher--a mistake in a novel remarkable for its restraint (yes, even at 650 pages, it feels tightly controlled). And the language: it is crafted with the precision of Ian McEwan's prose, but with a higher sheen of poetic possibility. Here's a little bit that describes and exemplifies the novel's characteristically taut balance of eloquence and repression:

There's a feeling of power in reserve, a power that drives right through the bone, like the shiver you sense in the shaft of an axe when you take it into your hand. You can strike, or you can not strike, and if you choose to hold back the blow, you can still feel inside you the resonance of the omitted thing.

The central conflict is not Henry VIII against God, or fate, or his wives, for denying him a son, or Anne against Katherine, or any of the other stock melodramas of Tudor fiction (and television), but Cromwell, the self-made man, the accountant, the bureaucrat, the statesman, the pragmatist, the modern man, against extremism, privilege, waste, indulgence--and especially against Thomas More, who delights in torturing heretics and seeks a pointless (to him, a martyr's) death.

10. Nadeem Aslam, The Wasted Vigil. Is it wrong to make something so beautiful out of material so terrible? Is terrorism really analogous to vandalism? Both obliterate the beauty (realized or potential) and the creativity of humanity.

This year I'll skip over the list of low points. There weren't many, happily--most of the other books I read were in the OK - to - mediocre range, which only irks me when they win awards.

In last year's post I noted the expansion of my blogging horizons that came with the invitation to write for The Valve. This year I have been pleased to contribute to Open Letters: I'm glad they made room for my piece on Trollope among their many astute and engaging essays and reviews, and I've got a little thing on Felix Holt appearing in their January 2010 issue, so stay tuned for that.

Looking ahead, I'm anticipating an unusually busy term coming up, with three classes including one all-new one and some new kinds of assignments. Still, I hope to have time to keep up my usual series on teaching, and also to fit in some reading for myself. Looking over my year-end posts for 2007 and 2008, it is notable how such 'pleasure' reading feeds into my research and teaching (the leading example being Ahdaf Soueif's In the Eye of the Sun, which went from being just another book I'd read to the lynchpin of a reconceptualized research program). Perhaps something I read in 2010 will end up turning me in another new direction, or adding in some other unanticipated way to my life. But in any case here are some of the books I'm most looking forwarding to reading or re-reading:

1. Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger. It's great to feel so confident that a book will be both extremely smart and extremely entertaining.
2. Hilary Mantel, A Place of Great Safety. Speaking of confidence, Wolf Hall gave me confidence in Mantel as both a stylist and a historical novelist.
3. Naguib Mahfouz, Sugar Street and The Palace of Desire.
4. Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf.
5. Marilynne Robinson, Gilead.
6. War and Peace. Somehow, it didn't get read in 2009, but I'm sure it will be there for me when I'm ready for it.
7. Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy. I'm going to keep putting this on my TBR list until I actually read it.
8. Dickens, Our Mutual Friend. I haven't read this since my undergraduate Victorian fiction class in 1989. Once every twenty years seems like a minimum for what I remember as one of the best of Dickens.
9. George Eliot, Romola. I've assigned this for my graduate seminar on George Eliot this term. It was a tough call between it and Felix Holt, but Romola has been on the back burner the longest. When it is good, it is very, very, very good. When it is bad, characters say things like 'You are as welcome as the cheese to the macaroni.'
10. Audrey Niffenegger, Her Fearful Symmetry. All appearances (and movie adaptations) to the contrary, The Time Traveller's Wife is a gritty, suspenseful, intellectual romance. Sure, you have to accept a wacky premise, but for me at least, it was worked through with surprising toughness. So I'm game to see how Niffenegger follows it up.
11. David Mitchell, Black Swan Green. Because you told me to!
    

Academic Blogging at ACCUTE

I've been meaning to say a little bit about the lunch-hour session on academic blogging that I convened at ACCUTE last week. As some of you will know, this session was the down-sized version of a panel I proposed for which there were, well, not many submissions. I'm not altogether sorry. Our informal discussion was certainly more fun and interactive, and probably more productive, than a series of well-rehearsed papers would have been. I enjoyed meeting other bloggers, including The Classroom Conservative and some of the founders of the new, and highly recommended, 19th-century blog The Floating Academy. (During the conference I also met a couple of lurkers: if you're still out there, thanks for introducing yourselves! Who says the Internet can't foster actual human interaction?) Also present were some academics who blog but don't necessarily define themselves as "academic bloggers," which in itself raised some interesting questions about how (or whether) we define our working or professional selves as distinct from our personal or other selves.

I began with a few words about how I stumbled into blogging and then some comments on what seem to me its benefits from a specifically academic perspective: writing often, writing for a potentially wider audience, getting feedback on work-in-progress, making contacts. I think I also mentioned the slow pace of academic publishing (not conducive to the steady or collaborative development of ideas) and the frustration with writing more for careerist than intellectual or scholarly reasons. The flip side of all this is (again, from a narrowly academic perspective) lack of professional recognition for this activity, which then raises questions about the time commitment, particularly for junior faculty. Then we just went around the room and everyone explained their own interest in or experience with blogging, academic or otherwise. I thought it was a friendly and productive discussion. Probably what emerged most strongly for me was that, just as it is difficult to define "blogging" because the form itself determines almost nothing about the content, so too "academic blogging" can take many forms, from the scholarly to the personal to the literary. As a result, academics who believe their blogging is contributing in some significant way to their professional development and therefore want some credit for it (and let's face it, most of us have an interest in moving forward, not just intellectually, but also professionally, so the issue of "what does this count for?" is bound to come up, given how many demands there are on our time) will have to make the case based on the specific kind of work they are doing. Still, it also seems to me that the primary value of blogging, whether academic or not, is and should be intrinsic. Whether you blog because you find the mental exercise stimulating or clarifying, or because you find it useful to have a repository for your unfolding ideas, or just because you enjoy it, then whatever else comes of it, you won't be sorry. And given the ways academic work tends to meld with everything else we do and think about, our work is bound to benefit, even if only indirectly. Many of us remarked, for instance, that the simple challenge of writing often and (implicitly) for a broader audience than other specialists was, in itself, one of the chief attractions and rewards of blogging: it brought us back in touch with the pleasure of writing. I'd like to hear any follow-up thoughts from others who were there.Thanks to all of you for coming! I was afraid it might be a lonely lunch for me.

As it turns out, there was another blogging panel at the Congress, sponsored by University Affairs; unfortunately I didn't know this one was on the schedule until I had already booked my return ticket for that day, or I would certainly have attended it as well. (If any of you were there, I'd be interested in your report. I found a bit more information about it, here and here.) I was surprised to see only one Canadian blogger on the panel, though perhaps I shouldn't have been considering my own experience trying to uncover other Canadian academics who blog.

Novel Readings: the Index

This is still very much a work in progress, but I've begun to set up the index to Novel Readings discussed in this post. Once I have filled in more of the contents, a link to it will become a permanent fixture in the blog sidebar. Let me know if you have suggestions about how to make the index clearer or more useful.

Second Anniversary Musings

My first post here went up on January 18, 2007.

A two-year anniversary seems as good a time as any for some reflections on my experience of blogging so far. I've written fairly often already about blogging and my interest in it as an extension of my academic work, my pedagogy, and my desire to find common ground between academic criticism and 'common' readers. So what else is there to talk about?

Well, for one thing, I have found that writing this blog has made me very aware of the things I can't (or at least don't) talk about here--this is a feeling enhanced by my recent reading of the anthology Dropped Threads (from the cover: "A beautifully woven tapestry of perspectives on the silences women still keep"). Now, I've never been a convert to the highly confessional version of blogging, not just because it seems at once solipsistic and exhibitionist, from the writing side, and voyeuristic, from the reading side. And even if I were inclined to blog about myself in a more personal way, because I use my own name rather than a pseudonym, self-disclosure risks impinging unfairly on others' privacy. Of course, there are no external inhibitors here, only my own sense of propriety and reserve. But maybe because the format of a blog makes it feel like writing in a diary, the gap between the (usually) calm, reasonable tone of my postings and my currently rather vexed and complicated life can sometimes be disconcerting. Blogging for me is another version of my calm public face. I certainly prize and respect self-control, but as the wise narrator of Middlemarch observes, "behind the big mask and the speaking-trumpet, there must always be our poor little eyes peeping as usual and our timorous lips more or less under anxious control." It's tempting, sometimes, to launch an anonymous blog in an attempt to tap into the same reservoir of kind, thoughtful people I've discovered are "out there" ready to contribute generously to conversations about books, to see what answers they might have to some questions about life. But don't worry: I'm never going to turn Novel Readings into naval gazing. I've been reading too much Carlyle recently to be tempted into that kind of self-indulgence!

Even as an expression of my public or professional personality, my blogging has seemed to me lately to have become a bit bland. Not that it ever was particularly edgy! And by some, I know, my approach has always been dismissed as 'middle-brow' at best (that's not, by the way, an epithet I'm altogether averse to). Still, in person, even at work, I think I'm a bit more acerbic and prickly, or funny and irreverent, than I have been here, where of late "a common greyness silvers everything." Also, I've become more inclined to avoid topics on which I feel snarky and know I might generate some controversy (however small in scale). In some ways it is responsible to think twice about statements which, thanks to the wonders of electronic memory, you can't ever really take back. I also believe reciprocal courtesy and avoidance of cheap ad hominem slurs should be the standards for blogging as much as for any kind of intellectual exchange. Still, one of the initial attractions of blogging was the freedom it offered to express my opinions without layers of qualifications or justifications (or footnotes). Though of course with tenure I have, officially, all the leeway I could want to say what I think, I do try to get along with my colleagues, and I have a responsibility to my students to present a variety of perspectives and to teach a range of material that is variously congenial to my own critical commitments and temperament. Being polite and responsible like this can sometimes feel intellectually dampening, that's all, and for a while, I felt relatively uninhibited here, and so took a few more risks than usual. I don't want to seek controversy or be contrarian just for the sake of it, but I don't want my commitments to remain wholly implicit here: I'd like to define myself more sharply as a critic and make Novel Readings stand out more distinctly as a source for a more particular kind of commentary. We'll see how that goes.

On another topic, since I started putting time in as a blogger I have inevitably asked questions about the value of doing this instead of doing other things that lead more directly to professional credit or advancement. In the next year or so I'd like to discuss some of the things I've learned or considered more formally with first our departmental and then our faculty administration. I've already proposed to our departmental committee on professional development that we move towards a 'portfolio' approach to to evaluating academic publications. Given how strongly worded the MLA's recommendations on scholarly publishing were, it is a bit shocking to me how little impact they appear to have had so far on ordinary practice--or even on thinking about ordinary practice. I'm not claiming anything in particular for Novel Readings here, except insofar as exploring the world of academic blogging and electronic publication has opened my eyes to the inadequacies of our entrenched assumptions about what 'counts.'

Finally, blogging for this long starts to raise questions about the value of the archived material. I recently did some downloading and sorting of old posts, with an eye to drawing on them for some more formal writing projects. Doing so made me very aware of the sheer quantity of writing I have done here over the past two years (hundreds of pages worth, it turns out). The material varies widely in quality and depth, but I would like to do something to ensure that the more substantive posts are accessible in a useful way: one aspect of literary or academic blogging that has always bothered and puzzled me is that writing about books is not properly subject to quite the same time pressures as, say, writing about current events (or even, dare I say it, writing about pop culture). The blog format, though, persistently favours the new, always moving older posts down and then off the page as if somehow critical insights get dated like any other story. I'm going to work on setting up something like a 'table of contents' for the blog that will work better than the 'labels' function to direct visitors to what I think of as the "back-blog" of material here. There's no reason in principle why despite the unbreakable convention of 'latest first,' a blog couldn't work less like a newsfeed and more like a constantly expanding volume.

Globe and Mail Book Section Goes Online

The Toronto Globe and Mail, which fondly declares itself "Canada's National Newspaper," has, like many other newspapers, recently eliminated their stand-alone books section. I haven't found the Globe's book section very stimulating for some time, so to me the loss is more symbolic than intellectual. (One of my theories about why the section is so often disappointing is that they ask too many authors--as opposed to, say, critics--to write their reviews.) Literary coverage will continue, but as part of the Focus section (odd, maybe, that it's not the Review section?). At the same time, however, the paper has dramatically expanded its online books coverage. I haven't had time to explore the site very thoroughly, but it seems to include many of the same features that the print version had as well as a range of interactive pieces, including a couple of blogs and an "Ask the Author" feature that looks like fun--P. D. James is scheduled for later this month, and she's an author I'd like to ask a few questions myself. I see that their Blogroll so far is exclusively other Globe and Mail blogs. I wonder if they will get outside that box a bit and link to some of the wide range of other book blogs (affiliated with newspapers and not) in and out of Canada.

Novel Readings 2008

One of the best features of blogging is turning out to be the record it provides of my reading experiences. 2008 doesn't seem to have been my most rewarding year of novel reading (being on sabbatical for part of last year accounted, in part, for the greater number and variety of books I went through in 2007), but there have certainly been highlights. Some of my most stimulating reading in 2008 was re-reading, and some was non-fiction. Here's my look back at the highs and lows of my reading year.

Books I'm most glad I read, either for the intrinsic richness of the aesthetic, affective, or intellectual experience they offered, for the conversations they generated, or for the ideas and connections they offered for my teaching and research:

1. Ann Patchett, Bel Canto. Without a doubt, this was my favourite new novel of the year: exquisite, finely tuned art about the beauty, value, and fragility of art.
2. Olivia Manning, The Balkan Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy. Though the prose throughout these books is consistently, almost perversely, flat, I found the series consistently interesting, especially in its depiction of ordinary, flawed, but mostly likable people trying to organize meaningful lives for themselves amidst the constantly unfolding chaos and danger of war. The understated style comes to seem appropriate for characters who are never really dramatic, always on the periphery of the 'real' action and yet, of course, always the protagonists of their own stories.
3. George Eliot, Adam Bede. I hadn't read Adam Bede in a couple of years and have never paid it as much attention as my favourite George Eliot novels. When it emerged as the front-runner for our summer reading group at The Valve, I was uncertain how things would go, if relieved to be on somewhat familiar territory. In the end, I gained a greater appreciation of the uneven beauties and oddities of the novel. I also found it constantly stimulating seeing how other readers responded to it and learning from the range of approaches and expertise that inflected their readings. Of the many memorable passages, this is the one that I find has echoed in my mind since we wrapped things up:

   "It would be a poor result of all our anguish and our wrestling, if we won nothing but our old selves at the end of it--if we could return to the same blind loves, the same self-confident blame, the same light thoughts of human suffering, the same frivolous gossip over blighted human lives, the same feeble sense of that Unknown towards which we have sent forth irrepressible cries in our loneliness. Let us rather be thankful that our sorrow lives in us as an indestructible force, only changing its form, as forces do, and passing from pain into sympathy--the one poor word which includes all our best insight and our best love."

4. James Wood, How Fiction Works. Though my assessment of this much-hyped book from today's most talked-about literary critic was not altogether positive, Wood is certainly an inspiration to anyone who would like to see the gap between academic and public criticism bridged without false populism.
5. Ronan McDonald, The Death of the Critic. Like How Fiction Works, The Death of the Critic stood out in my reading year more because of the conversations it generated than because of its intrinsic merits. I'm still thinking about the emphasis McDonald (and others) places on evaluation as the key to critical relevance, and I'm still inclined to think that people's everyday reading practices have at least as much to do with ethics (broadly construed, as Booth does in The Company We Keep). Eventually I hope to make this case--and, further, the case for ethical criticism as a useful framework for public criticism--in a careful way.
6. The Reader. I've been so happy to discover this excellent publication from The Reader Organization. I first came across it through this article on Scott and have since read several back issues and both of the issues made available as PDFs for download. I've been promised that a two-year subscription is part of my Christmas haul this year, and I really look forward to keeping up with its stimulating blend of intelligent but accessible literary analysis, readers' reports, and new fiction and poetry.
7. Vanity Fair and Bleak House. The enormous pleasure and challenge of teaching both of these books in the same class nearly compensates for an academic year in which I am not teaching Middlemarch even once (I'll have to make up for that in 2009-10).
8. The Wire. OK, it's not a novel...but it was certainly one of the most enthralling narrative experiences of my year, and in its social and thematic ambition and its attempt to convey the connections between multiple layers of a complex socio-economic world and a sprawling cast of characters, it has much in common with the 19th-century 'condition of England' novels.
9. Two recent additions I haven't had time to write up properly: Kate Atkinson's Case Histories and One Good Turn. I first read the former on the way home from a trip to Sydney. I'm not a happy flier and I was fairly well medicated, which must be why I didn't appreciate it much at the time and wantonly gave it away on landing. After hearing a number of people speak very highly of both of Atkinson's mysteries, I got One Good Turn from the library last week and enjoyed it so much that I picked up a new copy of Case Histories, which I just finished reading and found thoroughly impressive.
   

Books I could have done without (happily, a shorter list than last year's):

1. Inger Ash Wolfe, The Calling. There's a good book--even a good series--to be had from the materials in this creepy thing. Maybe the sequel will abandon the cheap thrills in favour of intelligent plotting and character development.
2. Paul Auster, City of Glass. Actually, I wasn't sure which list to put this one one. I hated it and yet I thought it was very smart, and I'll be teaching it in April. Wish me luck!
   

Books I'm most looking forward to reading in 2009:

1. Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy. Yes, this was on my books to read in 2008 list too. I don't blame the novel at all for my failure to get through it; I was enjoying it, but other things intruded and my attention wandered.
2. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace. My Christmas wish list this year reflected a certain impatience with hot new books that rather disappointed; War and Peace is one of those Great Classics that I have read only once (years ago, trying to look smart) and have often thought I should read properly. Now I have it in a highly praised new translation and I'm excited to get started.
3. John Galsworth, The Forsyte Saga. This is another from my wish list. I've never read it, but it looks like just the kind of thing I'll enjoy.
4. Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited. See above.
5. Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca. I read this many times in my youth, but it was part of our family library and since I moved away from home I've never owned my own copy. Now I do!
6. Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep. For someone who teaches a course on detective fiction, this one is probably my "Humiliation" winner. I'm tiring a bit of The Maltese Falcon, so I figure it's time I tried the other obvious one.

Not directly related to reading novels but of much significance to Novel Readings in 2008 was the invitation I received to become a contributor to The Valve. It has been invigorating, if sometimes intimidating, to share my posts with a wider audience and to participate in the lively exchanges that go on among the diverse community of readers and thinkers that write and comment there.

I have no bold new plans for Novel Readings in 2009 except to keep it up. Thanks to everyone who came here to read or comment!

Wordpress Experiment

I'm not much of a "techie," and I also generally use technology as a convenient support for my "real" work, rather than as an end in itself, so I'm always looking for the easiest ways to get things done. Currently I use FrontPage for making my departmental web pages, but I like the convenience of web-based tools, so I was wondering about adapting a blog site into a more general home page, perhaps even phasing out my Dalhousie-based page. One option is to add Google Pages to this site, but for no reason I can really articulate, I kind of like having a little distance between this place and my other sites. Also, I gather Google Pages is sort of on hiatus until Google Sites is up and running. Anyway, I have been poking around with Wordpress a bit and figured out enough to build this little site. Does anyone have any particular thoughts about or experience with using Wordpress that they'd like to share, or any different suggestions? I admit, I started this site on Blogger for the simple reason that it was the one I had heard of, back in the day. Also, is there a way to use something like Wordpress but have it come up at my "myweb.dal" URL?

'Tis Aw a Muddle...or Is It?

I've been trying for a while to find a conceptual framework that will unify the various reading and writing activities I've been doing. The immediate, pragmatic motivation for bringing things into some kind of order is that it's about time I applied for some research grant money to support those activities (and by "support," I mean pretty basic stuff, like buying ink cartridges for my office printer or paying for research-related xeroxing, not to mention buying books, renewing memberships in professional associations, or upgrading my take-home computer equipment--all expenses that are not covered by my department or faculty). There is money to be had, internally and externally, but of course to get any of it you need to have a research project defined clearly enough to justify your demands. I have a couple of objections to this system. One of them is just to the principle of the thing: doing research is part of my job, so I've never understood why I have to scrounge up the money necessary to get it done. Another is to the inflationary effect of the grant application process. Except for the occasional conference trip, I don't actually need much money--what I really need is time to think and read. In terms of funding, what I'd like is enough to cover the basics (cartridges, xeroxing, books) on an ongoing basis. I'd like to feel I can keep reading and thinking and looking things up and writing things until I reach a point at which I can't express my ideas and findings adequately in short form but need the time and resources to produce a book that will do them justice. Instead, I have to start the process assuming I'm writing a book, because that's the kind of project that gets grants. So I have to inflate the significance and scope of what I'm currently doing, and what I plan to do next, so that I can ask for enough money to get taken seriously. (SSHRC standard grants, for instance, now require a minimum budget of $7000, but we're generally advised to ask for a lot more). Our main internal source of research funding clearly spells out in its terms that it is seed money for SSHRC-fundable projects, so it is also not hospitable to exploratory work, and it also rules out what it calls "basic research overhead," which it declares is the responsibility of our departments and faculties. It doesn't say exactly what counts as "basic research overhead," but I'm thinking that category probably includes things like printing and xeroxing, and maybe books (which I know SSHRC used to refuse to pay for)--and it specifically excludes computer equipment. So some fancy footwork is required to explain one's research needs in a way that will at once meet the approved criteria and actually provide the things one needs for one's research. And, to get back to my main point, the whole thing has to be framed as an attempt to accomplish some clearly defined research endeavor...ideally, one that builds in some coherent way on past research accomplishments.

Of course, I have applied for research funding before, and I have used the resources I obtained responsibly and gotten things done--published, even. I haven't made a successful SSHRC application yet; my one attempt (which, in retrospect, I admit was enthusiastic but naive in its presentation) was slapped down hard enough that I wasn't very motivated to try again, though it's interesting to me that I have, after all, gone on to do some key parts of the 'program of research' described in it, so it can't have been altogether wrongheaded. The most recent internal money I got was to help me get the Broadview anthology taken care of. But now that's all gone, and so is my last print cartridge and any remaining credits on my copy cards. So it's time to go back and ask for some more. But for what?

My problem is (and I realize that I have brought it on myself by the choices I've been making about how to use my time) my attention has been increasingly diffused over the past couple of years. Instead of picking one critical problem and pursuing it consistently, I've been looking around at a lot of different things. Why have I been doing this? Well, for one thing, I can't seem to bring into focus any one critical problem that feels urgent to me: I can't find something to work on that seems truly necessary and exciting, and I've chosen to indulge--or respect--my weariness with the flood of academic microcontributions that has resulted from the incessant pressure to publish as soon as possible and as often as possible. I felt that academic scholarship tended too far away from the liveliness and urgency of literature and I wanted to look outside to see how non-academics talked about books, or how academics talked about books outside of 'work' that maybe had more mobility and potency. And the first thing to really hit me once I started looking around in this way was just how ignorant my own specialized research had made me. Behold, I knew not anything! Or at least not anything that anybody else was likely to take an interest in--or so it seemed.

This was the point at which I began a relatively systematic exploration of books about books, as well as books about the relationship between academic criticism and what we might call 'public' criticism. This was also the point at which I began taking more time writing blog posts and tentatively looking for a place for myself (small, no frills, just a corner of my own) in the wider world of book talk. It took me almost no time to realize that I am very poorly equipped to be a public intellectual: graduate training does not produce generalists, and life pre-tenure, not to mention life post-babies, does not make it any easier to broaden your reach. Still, my professional work has given me some equipment for analyzing books that aren't Victorian novels, and it was both educational and fun to see how that might work. I have also written about academic issues and about my teaching, both exercises in mobilizing what I know in new ways. Along the way, I think I've done some decent thinking and writing. (I've written before about the intrinsic benefits of blogging; making connections with other readers and writers, academic and not, has been the very best part of this experiment so far.) I've also completed the Broadview anthology and puttered along with my inquiry into Ahdaf Soueif's In the Eye of the Sun as an engagement with Middlemarch, so it isn't as if I've been doing nothing but playing online. However, I do feel that I have fallen behind in my supposed area of specialization, because while I was looking the other way, the flood of new publications continued. Now I feel inadequate in two directions!

Overall, though, I've been doing so much reading and writing that it seems as if it must add up to something. So far, however, I just can't see what. I can see a strong convergence between my metacritical inquiry into the nature of academic criticism and its alienation from the wider reading public, on the one hand, and my attempt (primarily through blogging) to find a different kind of criticism, though so far that attempt is not systematic or particularly ambitious. I can see links, too, between those issues and my work on 19th-century criticism (very much an activity of the public sphere). But I don't really want to do a project about criticism so much as I want to do criticism differently...but it's hard to see how to do writing about the literature I'm best prepared to write about (Victorian literature) in a non-academic way, because non-academic book talk seems (reasonably enough) preoccupied with contemporary writers about whom, and about whose contexts, I discover I am in many respects an amateur. So perhaps the Soueif project stands as a way of bringing 19th-century literature into a modern discussion because that is what Soueif herself does by taking Middlemarch as in some way her starting point?

Well, I'm not going to arrive at any answers tonight, and there may in fact be no answer that draws these different threads together. Maybe what I need to do for the grant application is articulate fully the interests and goals of the Soueif essay and never mind the rest. But I'd like to think there's a point to the rest of it too. I'm also aware that exploring without a shaping purpose eventually becomes dilettantism, and I'm convinced of the importance of being earnest even without a research grant to strive for, so any time I can clear some mental space, I'll think about it some more.

CFP: LitCrit 2.0

The calls for papers for ACCUTE 2009 are now posted, including my own for a session on "LitCrit 2.o: Academic Blogging and Other New Forms of Scholarly Publishing" (scroll down this list). Panels like this are old news in other venues, but I haven't seen much about it up here, at least not through ACCUTE (which, for any American readers who don't know this, is our MLA-like thing). My own thinking about these issues was somewhat focused by the presentation I gave to my department on academic blogging last fall.

The version of the CFP I submitted actually had more apparatus, including hyperlinks that I had hoped would be retained in the posted version. For those who might be interested, here's the full text with links.

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LitCrit 2.0:
Academic Blogging and Other New Forms of Scholarly Publishing

[A]nyone engaged in any aspect of academe, from teaching to administration to libraries to research, would do well to take a look at what some of their colleagues are doing on the internet. (Miriam Jones, “Why Blog?” @ ScribblingWoman)

I do think that the solution to the problem of poor circulation of ideas (not paper) has to involve making room for something that blogs do well. There has got to be healthier conversation, keeping up the circulation of ideas regarding books and articles. Blogging isn't scholarship, but scholarship may need blogging in quite a strong sense. (John Holbo, “Form Follows the Function of the Little Magazine” @ The Valve)

Peer-review thus demands to be transformed from a system of gatekeeping to a mode of manifesting the responses to and discussion of a multiplicity of ideas in circulation. (Kathleen FitzPatrick, “On the Future of Academic Publishing, Peer Review, and Tenure Requirements” @ The Valve)

The 2006 report of the MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion urged us to reconsider the primacy of print publications, particularly monographs, in assessing each other’s contributions to scholarship. Most of us recognize that academic publishing in some respects serves institutional needs better than intellectual or scholarly ones; ideally, as Kathleen Fitzpatrick argues, our professional advancement should not depend on “whether the vagaries of any publishing system did or did not allow a text to come into circulation, but rather on the value of that text, and on the importance it bears for its field.” The challenge both conceptually and institutionally, is developing alternatives to a system the protocols of which are so well-established.

Among the recommendations of the MLA Task Force is that we adopt “a more capacious conception of scholarship,” including “establishing multiple pathways to tenure, and using scholarly portfolios,” and that we “recognize the legitimacy of scholarship produced in new media.” Certainly the opportunities for self-publishing and scholarly networking via the internet are transforming our ideas about what is possible as well as what is desirable in academic discourse. Websites, wikis, and blogs may not render the old forms (books, refereed articles, print reviews, conferences) obsolete, but they do make it necessary to identify what the traditional methods—slow, rigid, resource-intensive, and often exclusionary—nonetheless do better than the alternatives, and they should motivate us also to imagine and develop the aspects of our intellectual and scholarly work that can be done more effectively using new forms. Many academic bloggers, for instance, have already discovered the value of what Matthew Kirschenbaum has called a “public academic workbench,” of putting their ideas into circulation faster and among a much wider variety of audiences than conventional publication allows and thus enabling a remarkable immediacy of response and debate. Some bloggers have observed that blog comments can constitute a form of post-publication peer review, offsetting the seemingly intractable problem of quality-control in self-publication.

This panel invites proposals for papers on the changing nature of, and new possibilities for, academic publishing in the era of Web 2.0. Analyses of specific blogging or other interactive or collaborative web-publishing experiences would be particularly relevant. In order to allow time for demonstrations of research or publication in new media as well as discussion among both panel and audience members, slightly shorter papers (15 minutes, or 8-10 pages) are encouraged. A/V needs should be clearly specified in the proposal.

Submissions should be sent electronically by 15 November 2008 to:

Rohan Maitzen
Department of English
Dalhousie University
Rohan.Maitzen@Dal.Ca
Subject: ACCUTE Panel

Please note that submissions must follow the same guidelines as those for the general call (Option 1), as specified on the ACCUTE website. In particular:

• submitters must be ACCUTE members in good standing
• an electronic copy of the proposal, a completed copy of the Proposal Submitter’s Information Sheet (available online), and a file containing a 100-word abstract and a 50-word bio-bibliographical note must be submitted to the panel organizer by 15 November
• proposals (maximum 700 words) should clearly indicate the originality or scholarly significance of the proposed paper, the line of argument, the principal texts the paper will speak to (if applicable), and the relation of the paper to existing scholarship on the topic

"Ruined by the Academics": More on the Decline of Criticism

At The Guardian, John Sutherland adds to the chorus of lamentations about the death of literary criticism:

The UK has always had the world's liveliest and most expansive lit-crit pages. A new book over here can hope for reviews in a dozen or more places in its first couple of weeks. It's not just the (former) broadsheets, the nationals, the weeklies and the "heavies". For my money, some of the fizziest reviews in London will be found in David Sexton's Monday Evening Standard (always something pleasantly malicious), Private Eye's "Bookworm" (where an anonymous DJ Taylor wields his assassin's hatchet) and the Camden New Journal. (You don't believe me? Pick up a copy next time you're in NW1. It's free.)

But this traditionally vibrant sector, with its myriad outlets, is on the wane. Terminally, it would seem. Pages are falling away, like leaves in autumn. They used, for example, to call the literary pages in the New Statesman "the back half". Now it's "the back sixth (in a good week)". Why is lit-crit - as a main item in our cultural diet - going down the tubes?

Among the "hypothetical answers" he proposes to his own question, we get the familiar one, "blame the blogs" ("The most plausible explanation for hard-print lit-crit melting faster than the Arctic icecaps is flickering on the screen in front of you. . . .As literary pages have withered, literary blogs have bloomed"). And the "Emeritus Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English LIterature at University College London"* also blames "academics"--but not, as is more usual, because of jargon-bloated prose, incessant politicization, or refusal of evaluation. Sutherland argues, rather, that academics were discovered by literary editors to be cheap sources of labour, "that would write for pennies, had oodles of spare time and could spell":

At the TLS party a couple of weeks ago, I overheard this paper's senior political correspondent, Michael White, in conversation with the TLS editor, Peter Stothard. Having recently done a couple of pieces for Stothard's journal, White asked - in evident perplexity - "Can anyone actually live on reviewing?" No, Stothard conceded. Staff journalists can, but not freelance reviewers. For pointy-headed profs, it doesn't matter. Many would sell their children into slavery to pay for the privilege of a lead piece in, say, the Saturday Guardian Review. Unfortunately, excellent value (ie dirt cheap) as they are, academic reviewers come with heavy baggage. They can be dull. Really dull.

How unfair--one of my children, at most, at least for the Guardian Review. (For the TLS, on the other hand . . .) And my head's not really that pointy. And I'm not dull. Well, rarely. OK, define "dull." Does going on and on about Trollope qualify?

Meanwhile, Chris Routledge at The Reader Online points out a recent Guardian feature that once again pits bloggers against critics:

It appears that consumers no longer feel the need to obtain their opinions from on high: the authority of the critic, derived from their paid position on a newspaper, is diminished. Opinion has been democratised. . . .

The advent of the net has been described as a revolution. If so, one of its most heated battles is being fought over the right to claim expertise. In the US the ancien régime, in this case the salaried critic, appears to be in retreat. The question is what will happen here? We need only look at television criticism, a once-noble calling pursued for this newspaper by both Julian Barnes and Clive James, for clues. In May the Daily Telegraph decided it no longer needed a daily TV review. Regular TV reviews have also gone at the Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday and London's Evening Standard. Could the same happen to other arts?

The British critical tradition is long and rich and deep: from the pamphleteering of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele in the early 18th century, through the literary criticism of Oscar Wilde in the 19th to Graham Greene's film reviews and Kenneth Tynan's first-night theatre notices in the 20th, we have never been short of confident people to tell us what is good and what is not and why.

'We have a wonderful tradition of criticism in this country,' says Brian Sewell, art critic of the Evening Standard for nearly 25 years, 'and it would be a tragedy if we lost it. The onlooker sees most. We are the skilled onlookers.'

Such discussions have been going on for a while now; I think Chris is entirely right when he says,

I can’t help feeling that this is a non-argument. Either ‘old media’ will ‘get’ the Internet or it won’t (as it happens I think The Guardian/Observer does). It’s more likely to end up being about what the words are printed on than it is about who wrote them and why.

The problem is not one of form; it's one of filtering. It takes time, patience, diligence, and discernment to distinguish among the vast number of blogs offering criticism and commentary of one kind or another; the challenge is that there's no established review process to create evaluative hierarchies or provide qualitative guidance (no, Google Blog Search does not count). But, as many have pointed out, it's not as if there aren't trashy print publications too, some of which sell millions of copies. Sure, it is discouraging to read ignorant nonsense parading around as serious criticism, but the best response seems to me to encourage what Sewell, above, calls "skilled onlookers" to show the value of their expertise, not to encourage a seige mentality. And, of course, many print publications are in the blogging game now, including The New York Times and the TLS. It was never an either/or option.

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*from the author blurb on How to Read a Novel

Adam Bede at The Valve

At my instigation, The Valve is hosting a Reading Project this summer. We'll be collectively working our way through George Eliot's Adam Bede; here's the schedule:

June 17 Book 1 Chapters 1-5

June 24 Book I Chapters 6-11

July 1 Book I Chapters 12-16

July 8 Book II (Chapters 17-21)

July 15 Book III (Chapters 22-26)

July 22 Book IV (Chapters 27-35)

July 29 Book V (Chapters 36-48)

August 5 Book VI and Epilogue

August 12 General Discussion

Anyone interested is welcome to read along. The idea is to complete the specified chapters by the date given. A post will then go up at The Valve soliciting comments. People who keep their own blogs are free to do their posts at 'home' and put links to them in the Valve threads. At least to begin with, there are really no other rules. Come over and play!

Related Links:

The Victorian Web’s George Eliot page

George Eliot Resource Page (Mitsuharu Matsuoka, Nagoya)--includes information about the George Eliot Fellowship

BBC Warwickshire George Eliot Photo Archive

George Eliot biography (from a nice student project at the University of Virginia)

Adam Bede searchable etext (Princeton)

Adam Bede etext (Adelaide)

“George Eliot" by Virginia Woolf

Buy the Book:

From the Book Depository (UK)

From Chapters.Indigo.Ca

From Amazon.Com

For your Kindle

The Death of the Critic, Reprise

Bill Benzon kindly pointed out this Salon piece to me:

Louis Bayard: The signs are ominous, Laura. Book reviews are closing shop or drastically scaling back inventory. Film critics at newspapers all over America are getting tossed on their ears. TV reviewers are heard no more in the land. All the indicators suggest that America's critics are becoming an increasingly endangered species.

Or maybe something a little more than endangered, judging from the title that's just come across our desks: "The Death of the Critic." Ronan McDonald, the author, is a lecturer in English and American studies at Britain's University of Reading, and he's particularly exercised by what he sees as the loss of the "public critic," someone with "the authority to shape public taste." It's only in the final chapter that the mystery behind the critic's disappearance is solved. The culprit is none other than ... cultural studies! (With a healthy assist from poststructuralism.) By treating literature as an impersonal text from which any manner of political meaning can be wrung, cultural studies professors have robbed criticism of its proper evaluative function -- the right to say this is good, this isn't, and here's why.

So, Laura, it seems that, if we aren't quite dead, we critics are on something like life support.

Laura Miller: I suppose it's only natural that McDonald, being an academic himself, would blame the academy. He believes that substantive scholarly criticism acts as a foundation for serious non-scholarly criticism -- such as reviews and essays in newspapers and magazines -- lending credibility to the idea that criticism (specifically, literary criticism) is a job for trained experts. When academia falls down on the job of, as you put it, saying what's good and what's not, then all criticism starts to look arbitrary and dispensable. We don't have celebrated "public critics" now because critics don't care about the public, not because the public doesn't care about critics. What do you think: Is criticism responsible for its own demise?

I didn't see any great revelations in their discussion, but there are some good moments. Here's one I liked:

Bayard: I like that phrase "go home with" because, when I think about the critics I love the most, they're not necessarily the ones I agree with, they're the ones I'd like to date. I argue with them, but when they're gone, their music is still bopping around in my brain. Many years ago, Susan Sontag, in "Against Interpretation," argued for "an erotics of art." Is it time now for an erotics of criticism? Instead of bemoaning the decline of literature, should we be doing a better job of showing people what they're missing: the excitement of unexpected insights, the thrill of new voices, the sex of ideas? That sounds like a lot more fun than figuring out which fiefdom we're going to defend in the Theory Wars. (I've a hunch Ronan McDonald would be on our side.)

Miller: You're right! Why pillory theory, when even the people who used to espouse it are saying it's dead? Let's talk about what makes for a good critic. I often think that there are two kinds: the ones whose taste I find simpatico -- the ones I come to for recommendations on what to read -- and the ones who are themselves terrific writers, irrespective of what they recommend. Sometimes there's an overlap, but not often.

There are critics, like Wood, that I go out of my way to read, although I have no intention of ever opening the books they tout. That's indicative of an additional aspect to criticism besides evaluation (which McDonald wants to bring back to academic criticism) and interpretation (that is, elucidating the work and its many meanings, which we could use more of in journalistic criticism). It's the literary worth of the criticism in and of itself, and the chance to see a sophisticated reader at work.

Yes: "the chance to see a sophisticated reader at work"--that sums up a lot of the pleasure I too take in reading James Wood. And they also offer a couple of unusually reasonable remarks on the usual straw targets, bloggers and English professors:

Bayard: Yeah, the blogosphere is the elephant in the room that McDonald never really gets round to discussing, but to my mind, it's a far more pressing issue for criticism than theory is. Why pay a professional critic to evaluate something when you have a gazillion volunteer evaluators ready to fire off at any given moment? . . . I myself don't have any particular training or qualifications to be a reviewer, other than my own experience as a reader and writer, so I feel silly arguing that someone else isn't qualified to deliver an opinion. And believe it or not, I've learned things from Amazon reviews, from letters pages, from literary blogs, from all sorts of non-traditional outlets. The quality of writing is certainly variable, but then so is the quality of traditional journalism. [that "believe it or not" seems gratuitous --why should it be hard to believe?]

and

Miller: . . . It hardly matters whether or not an English professor actually likes to read novels and poetry, does it? Books are the salt mine, and the academics are the miners. If anything, literary enthusiasm can be a detriment if your job is to prosecute books for their ideological crimes. When even English professors won't stand up for literature, is it any wonder it's failing? [Sigh!]

But in reply, Bayard: Well, it's been a while since I was in college, but I do remember professors who loved English literature every bit as much as I do, so I don't want to tar the whole profession out of hand. [Whew! Because I'm pretty sure some other people would be right there with feathers to finish the job!]

I wrote up some thoughts of my own about McDonald's book here. McDonald and I share an interest in reviving the role of the "public critic," but I can't quite get on board with his emphasis on evaluation as the necessary method. I give some reasons for that here, in response to an inquiry from Nigel Beale--and, more facetiously, here!

Blogging, Criticism, Reviewing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Novel Readings--Not So Much!

I was thinking today that for a blog called 'Novel Readings' this one hasn't shown many signs of novel reading lately (not counting, of course, the ones I've been teaching). Appearances are somewhat misleading. I'm in the grading zone right now: papers and exams! This means not much time (or mental strength) for other things. But I am reading, and hope to write soon about, Olivia Manning's Balkan Trilogy and its follow-up, the Levant Trilogy. And I have an enticing stack of books to read in the summer months, when required reading no longer takes up most of my evenings and weekends (or lunch hours, or time spent in waiting rooms--this is the price I pay for being a Victorianist). A Suitable Boy, for example, top on my Christmas wish list and still waiting for me, along with Affinity and Austerlitz (speaking of which, didn't someone at The Valve propose a Sebald book event? I expect I'm going to need a little support with this one--again, something to do with my being a Victorianist) and Bel Canto and The Grave-Digger's Daughter and ... Plus I have finally joined the Trollope discussion group, and though I think it's too late for me to get in on the ongoing exchanges about Orley Farm, I'm game for whatever's on their summer schedule too.

But the other thing I've been thinking is that a lot of what I've been doing here continues to be metacriticism, and I'm not altogether pleased about that. I was drafting a longer post, for instance, on criticism in/and the public sphere, putting together some pieces from various things I've been reading on- and off-line as well as some of my work on the Broadview anthology of 19thC criticism I have been working on--sort of a make-up exam for a CFP I didn't manage to submit a proposal for. But today I found have lost interest in it. I started blogging precisely in order to free myself to write about fiction straight up, as it were. Only that's hard to do when you're trained to frame every reading you do with an elaborate critical apparatus. It's also just plain hard to do, or at least to do well. Where do you even begin, after all? And why, if you aren't writing about the latest thing (that is, if you aren't offering up a review)? In some ways, it is easier to do "the other thing," if only because often there's an argument ongoing just waiting for you to put in your two cents' worth. I've been puttering away at ideas for a grant proposal for some kind of project on the purposes of and audiences for criticism...but really, that's not what I was hoping would come out of this experiment. Anyway, I'm not swearing to give up writing about criticism altogether. I'm just resolving to do more literary posting, if only to see what purpose I discover for my efforts. Also, tonight while pacing in the strange state of mental suspension that is exam invigilation, I thought I had an idea about how to conceptualize a different kind of project...but maybe it was just lack of oxygen, so no more about that now.

Reflections on Blogging My Teaching

I began my series of posts on 'This Week in My Classes' back in September, in response to what I felt were inaccurate and unfair representations of what English professors are up to in their teaching. As I said then,

I don't suppose that my own classroom is either wholly typical or exemplary, but I think it might contribute somewhat to the demystification of our profession, now that the teaching term is underway, to make it a regular feature of my blog to outline what lies in store for me and my students each week.

(April 16 update: Somewhat more temperate but equally dismissive attitudes appeared again here just this morning). The resulting entries range from brief commentaries on key passages to meditations on larger critical or theoretical issues prompted by a particular reading or class discussion (on October 1, for instance, there's some of each); from notes on pedagogical strategies or favourite discussion topics (such as 'giant hairball' day) to protracted afterthoughts on the central issues of a class meeting or reading (such as the didactic or instructional aspects of 19th-century courtship and marriage novels).

And so? What did I accomplish by writing all this up--and by putting it all out in public? I think there's no way to tell if I made any difference at all to the kinds of pervasive and (in my view) pernicious attitudes towards literary academics expressed in the Footnoted posts that prompted me to do this. It seems pretty unlikely! How would these angry people even know my blog exists, after all? And even if they did come across it, the odds of conversion would surely be pretty slim for a determined anti-academic. Still, I think it was worth making the effort and putting some evidence against their version out there, just in case. Where in my posts would these people find evidence that I hate literature and spend my time on political indoctrination? (April 16: or, again with reference to this post, that I dismiss aesthetics, hold in contempt the notion of literature as "record and register of literary art," and oppress my students with my hyperliteracy? Sigh. A classroom is large and can contain multitudes--of ideas and voices and critical approaches.)

As the weeks went by, though, I more or less stopped thinking about these lost souls. So who was I writing for? Well, as other bloggers often remark, your only certain audience is yourself, so you have to find the effort intrinsically valuable and interesting, which I almost always did. Teaching is, necessarily, something you do in a state of rapid and constant motion (and I mean not just mental but physical, as the Little Professor has recently proven). Classes follow on classes, and on meetings and graduate conferences and administrative tasks and attempts to meet proposal deadlines, in what becomes a blur of activity as the term heats up...and though a great deal of planning and preparation typically goes into each individual classroom hour, I hadn't usually taken any time to reflect further on what just happened, or what's about to happen. 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.

But isn't that a goal I could have achieved by keeping a teaching journal off-line? Well, sort of, but not altogether. For one thing, blogging (again, as other bloggers have remarked), precisely because it is a public form of writing, puts a different kind of pressure on you as a writer. Though perhaps nobody will read your posts, somebody actually might! And once you realize that, you try to write better--just in case. Maybe there are all kinds of dedicated prose stylists in the world who laboriously craft the entries in their private notebooks. But even they probably have their eye on posterity ("one day, when I'm famous, these notebooks will sell for a fortune on eBay!"). It's true, too, that the 'blogosphere,' with its millions of members, includes many samples of writing done, as far as anyone can tell, with no care at all. But for me at least, the accessibility of writing in this medium (and the impossibility of ever really taking something back once it has been 'published' on the internet) raises the stakes, even while the relative informality of the blog post as a genre has been a welcome change from the demands of professional academic writing.

Further, I like the idea that I might write something that other readers find interesting, useful, or mentally stimulating. My teaching posts in particular seem to me likely, if chanced upon, to be welcomed by readers outside an academic setting who are, nonetheless, interested in learning more about the kinds of reading contexts and strategies I work on with my students. Looking through my posts, I think there is nearly enough in them for someone to do an 'independent study' of my reading lists for any of the four classes I taught this year. The frequent publication of 'books about books' aimed at non-academic audiences suggests an appetite for what you might call 'reading enhancement.' Maybe other teachers, too, would get some ideas for how to approach some of the texts I've discussed, just as I have often sought ideas from posted syllabi or from the blogs of other people in my field or, more generally, my discipline. At its best, the 'blogosphere' is a great reservoir of information and insights made generously and collaboratively by people of all kinds; we can learn from each other and contribute to each other's learning. This is not something that can happen off-line. (Here, of course, is the justification for blogging at all, not just for blogging about teaching.) And in the year or so that I have been blogging, I have been contacted by a few readers who have seemed genuinely appreciative of my efforts in this direction.

Finally, as a blogger, I found that carrying out this plan to do a regular series of posts on one theme added a helpful structure to my posting habits: it was a kind of productive discipline. Like all academics, after all, I'm used to working to deadlines. Often, I began my week thinking I had nothing in particular to say. But I 'had' to post about my classes (also like all academics, I have an over-developed sense of obligation and I'm used to generating my own necessities). And once I started writing, most of the time I quickly found I was invigorated by discovering that I did have something to say after all.

Overall, then, I'm glad I set myself this task, and reading through my posts, I'm pleased with the results. No doubt other English professors do very different things, including with the same primary materials I took on. No doubt there are some who would be alienated, rather than won over, if they happened upon this material; no doubt some who have read it have turned away impatiently (or worse), for their own theoretical, political, or other reasons. But my posts represent my classroom well, and thus I admit, they represent me well too. Yup, that's me: the one who cries over Oliphant's Autobiography and finds passages in Dickens poetic, who admires George Eliot's stringent morality but worries about the way her better people seem driven to sacrifice themselves to their petty partners because 'the responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision,' who watches House and Sex and the City and finds Agatha Christie clever but shallow, who goes all pedantic when homework comes in but relishes her students' creativity and humour in devising class activities, whose children delight and torment and distract her. That's the thing about teaching--and about blogging too. You put yourself out there, try to be your best self most of the time, have moments of irritability and moments of eloquence--and then you sit back and see if anyone was paying attention.

The Shelf Life (Half-Life?) of Blog Posts

In a piece on the role (or not) of public intellectuals, Russell Jacoby raises some questions about blogging that I've wondered about too:

On the Internet, articles, blog posts, and comments on blog posts pour forth, but who can keep up with them? And while everything is preserved (or "archived"), has anyone ever looked at last year's blogs?

"Rapidly produced," he concludes, blog posts are "just as rapidly forgotten." Jacoby is interested in how blogging has affected "the quality or content of intellectual discussions." I'm interested in that too, but for now I'd just like to pick up on the issue of the status of past posts. For instance, as I familiarized myself with academic and literary blogs that looked interesting to me, I often found myself trailing through archives sometimes three or four years old. Some of the discussions--the most 'occasional' ones--obviously had become outdated, but others, including discussions of books, retain their currency just fine. But do they really? Well, not in practice, of course. Especially with the backwards chronology blogs impose, with newest always first, they do seem designed to keep us moving on. I'm also not aware of an easy way to locate material in blog archives unless the blogger has a particularly thorough index or set of labels or categories. Especially when discussions link back and forth across different blogs, the process of following older threads is extremely laborious. I guess I'm basically wondering about a couple of things: first, is there some "netiquette" principle that governs when a post 'expires' and ought not to be commented on any more? and second, does the perhaps fleeting nature of the attention any given blog post can have, as it is relentlessly shuttled down and down into the archives, add an extra dimension of futility to writing in this form?

Meanwhile, on the subject of public intellectuals, there's much discussion at The Valve about Stanley Fish, who is busy actually being one, for better and for worse, with his own blog at the New York Times. The enormous chains of comments on his recent posts on 'the uses of the humanities' (the first one reached around 500 comments, I believe, while the second one is up to 244 as I write this) suggests the rapidly diminishing returns at this extreme end of the commenting scale. A recent comment thread at the Valve raised questions about the importance of commenting for measuring the success or value of blogging; I've noted a couple of times the generally low level of discussion on literary topics and, in a more general way, felt that without active back-and-forth blogging is not as worthwhile or rewarding as I'd initially hoped it would be. But, as blogging skeptics have often noted, the greater the quantity, typically the lower the quality of the discussion. I have only scanned the replies to Fish. In general, they seemed to stand up well to the threads over at the Guardian blog, which degenerate pretty quickly. But even so, who can process so many replies or synthesize them in any kind of meaningful way? (I recommend reading the Valve comments instead; there are "just" about 80 of them, including a number of extremely thoughtful and illuminating ones.)