Special Poetry Post

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

CATS

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

Ooooh, My Aching Head...

Grading exams is a tarafying experience. It is enough to drive me insain. You see, as the professor I feel responcable, as if I am the purpotrator of their leathal errors. It may be contraversal to make this cratique, but I have not reached the necasary level of acseptence of their ignorance of the convensions and rules of spelling. I would be a lie-er or guilty of hypocracy if I said otherwise or did not take this opertunity to expose it. It's enough to bring on post-pardom depression, even in someone whose manners are usually impecible. I have decended into marking purgatory. Someone should launch an investegation of the causes of this mass confusion.*

(I'm guessing reliance on spell-checkers has something to do with it.)

*Guaranteed 100% authentic spelling errors.

Literary Criticism and/in the Public Sphere

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

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.

Cruel Indeed!

Growing up in Vancouver, I never understood the whole thing about April being the cruelest month. Now, on the other hand, I get it. You see, in Halifax, where I live, we won't see tulips and daffodils until May, or leaves on the trees until June. In Vancouver, however, where I would like to live....The constraints on your location and the near-impossibility of 'lateral movement' are among the great cruelties of an academic career. After over a decade of resistance, I have faced the fact that in order to move 'home' I would need to change professions (or, somehow, belatedly, become a different kind of academic--a more 'successful' one, by some measures). It's frustrating, of course, to be less employable in my chosen field after 12 years of experience than I was when still ABD, but that's the way this game is played. I've gone through most of the stages of grief over this and moved a long way towards acceptance--but spring sure makes me homesick. Is the job worth it? Sometimes. But the likelihood of being separated from your family and your history is one of the aspects of this career that I emphasize most strongly when advising prospective graduate students, not least because I never really thought much about it until, in many ways, it was too late.








(Photo credits: RDS)

Weekend Miscellany

At the Guardian, Jane Smiley writes about Trollope's The Kellys and the O'Kelly's:

The Kellys and the O'Kellys was not a commercial success. It was published - perhaps unluckily - in the same year as Thackeray's Vanity Fair, Dickens's Dombey and Son and Gaskell's Mary Barton, all addressing the issue of what was wrong with life. The Kellys and the O'Kellys evoked much that was right. It must have seemed bland. It failed, selling 140 copies and earning Trollope no money. Although it was written in a wholly different tone from his first novel, The Macdermots of Ballycloran, its author gained no points for exhibiting his versatility. Both novels, scholars now feel, suffered commercially from being about Ireland - the famine was raging, and the English reading public did not want to think about it. It was destined to be a sleeper - a thoughtful, subtle novel published in an anxious year.

But one of England's greatest novelists had laid out his tools for all to see - the grace of his writing, the worldliness of his vision, the variety of his characters and scenes, the expansiveness of his geography. The story itself is the important thing, not the satiric tone, as in Thackeray, the social criticism, as in Gaskell, or the stylistic exuberance, as in Dickens. He delivered the whole package, but it was a modestly wrapped package and got lost. (read the rest here)

I have written before about how well I think Smiley talks about Trollope.

At the TLS, critic and novelist David Lodge writes with both pathos and humour about his hearing loss:

You might think that of all the professions a novelist is least affected by hearing loss and, up to a point, that is true. We compose books in silence, consumed in silence by solitary readers.

However, deafness restricts and thins out the supply of new ideas and experience on which the novelist depends to create his fictions. That former nun’s life story might have been priceless “material” and I regret its loss. I miss opportunities to eavesdrop on humanly revealing conversations on buses and in shops and to keep up with new idioms, coinages and catch-phrases that give flavour and authenticity to dialogue in a novel of contemporary life. (read the rest here)

Hmm: "it’s a cast-iron excuse for declining to serve on committees"? That might offset a lot of the disadvantages...

In the Globe and Mail's book section, Cynthia MacDonald reviews Emma Donoghue's latest, a neo-Victorian novel focusing on the 1864 Codrington divorce case:

It's amazing to think that 150 years ago, the British Empire was ruled by an actual married woman. As Emma Donoghue reminds us in her marvellous new novel, wives in the Victorian era were usually classed with "criminals, lunatics and children": devoid of legal identity, stripped of property, limited in their opportunities for paid work.

By way of illustration, she has chosen a thoroughly riveting courtroom drama. The Sealed Letter is a fictionalized version of the Codrington divorce case, which had le tout London squirming in its pantaloons over several months in 1864. Juicy, vicious, elegant and thoughtful, the book is a valuable addition to Donoghue's growing corpus of fine historical novels (including Life Mask and Slammerkin). (read the rest here)

I wasn't that taken with Slammerkin when I read it about a year ago (as George Eliot remarked a long time ago, historical fiction is a particularly demanding genre, though the risks are often underestimated). But I'll probably give this one a try, just to keep up-to-date on my neo-Victorian options.

Finally, the little comment-spat I've been involved in at The Reading Experience has led me back to this earlier post by Dan Green:

After eighty years of experimenting with the study of literature as an academic subject, those carrying it out (myself included) have made a complete hash of it. Literature itself is held in contempt not just by the majority of ordinary people but by those professing to teach it. "Literature Professor" has become a near-synonym of "lunatic." That literary study would come to such an end was probably inevitable, since the primary imperative of academe--to create "new" knowledge--is finally inimical to something so difficult to dress up in fashionable critical clothes as serious works of fiction or poetry. Once it was perceived that "aesthetic complexity" was a spent force (at least as the means for producing new monographs and journal articles), approaches to literature that essentially abandoned its consideration as an art form were practically certain to follow.

Nearly three years later, a conversation touching on many similar points is unfolding in a comments thread at The Valve even as Ronan MacDonald is announcing the death of the critic. Well, give us credit, at least, for not going gentle into that good night! Indeed, critics appear to have co-opted the story of their impending demise as yet another subcategory of metacriticism.

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.

Weekend Miscellany: Road Murder, The Neuroscience Delusion, HBO at The Valve

A few things of interest I've found while browsing around:

At the Guardian site, Kate Summerscale on the literary legacy of the infamous Road Hill murders:

Even after the confession and conviction of the killer in 1865, the case was attended with doubts and unease. Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone - described by TS Eliot as the first and the best detective novel - was suffused with the events at Road Hill. "It is a very curious story," observed Dickens when the book was published in 1868, "wild and yet domestic."

Collins diluted the horror - instead of a child-murder, there was a jewel theft; instead of bloodstains, splashes of paint - but he fashioned from it a template for detective fiction. A shrewd investigator strives to expose the secrets of the inhabitants of an English country house. His task is to distinguish the innocent from the guilty, real clues from red herrings. His methods are indirect, his reasoning inspired, and a highly improbable suspect turns out to have committed the crime. The novel borrowed many of the specifics of the Road Hill story: a sullied and missing nightdress; a laundry book that proves its loss; an inept local police officer; and a renowned detective summoned to the countryside from London. (read the rest here)

Also at the Guardian, Ian Rankin reviews Summerscale's book on the case's chief investigator, Inspector Whicher. Actually, he doesn't so much review it as recapitulate its central story; there's only one word in the piece that really constitutes any kind of comment on the book itself--fortunately for Summerscale, it's "engrossing."

At the TLS, Raymond Tallis is unimpressed with "The Neuroscience Delusion":

At first sight, the displacement of Theory, with its social constructivism and linguistic idealism, by talk of something as solid as “the brain” of the writer and “the brain” of the reader may seem like progress. In fact, it is a case of plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The switch from Theory to “biologism” leaves something essential unchanged: the habit of the uncritical application of very general ideas to works of literature, whose distinctive features, deliberate intentions and calculated virtues are consequently lost. Overstanding is still on the menu.

Much of his discussion is focused on A. S. Byatt's work on John Donne:

...by adopting a neurophysiological approach, Byatt loses a rather large number of important distinctions: between reading one poem by John Donne and another; between successive readings of a particular poem; between reading Donne and other Metaphysical poets; between reading the Metaphysicals and reading William Carlos Williams; between reading great literature and trash; between reading and a vast number of other activities – such as getting cross over missing toilet paper. That is an impressive number of distinctions for a literary critic to lose. But that is the price of overstanding. (read the rest here)

Finally, over at The Valve, the guys have been talking (again) about The Sopranos, Deadwood, and The Wire. I wonder: are these really the 'three most talked about HBO series'? Wouldn't that depend on who you're talking to? For instance, perhaps women viewers talk more about other shows--ones that aren't characterized by "boobs, cussing, and spectacular violence"? Sex and the City comes to mind, for instance. (OK, in its own way it has two of those three elements...)

George Eliot in 2009?

Speaking of contemporary interest in George Eliot, here's a question on a much smaller scale than my previous one: which George Eliot novel would you assign for a seminar on 'Victorian Literature of Faith and Doubt'? I'm scheduled to teach such a class in Winter '09 and though book orders won't be due until the early fall, I always prefer to plan ahead. Plus as this will be a new class for me, it will take substantial preparation--which I can't entirely do unless I know what I'm doing, if you see my point. Much of the reading list will be non-fiction and poetry (this will be my first chance to teach In Memoriam in several years, which will be a great treat). I expect to close out the term with Jude the Obscure; my very rough preliminary schedule suggests I have room for one more full-length novel. The Mill on the Floss, which will read particularly resonantly right after our 'unit' on Darwin, is my current first choice, but issues of 'faith and doubt' are perhaps more obviously front and center in Daniel Deronda. Or there's Silas Marner, which would leave me room for another short work of fiction--or, with some shuffling of other readings, even for Jane Eyre, which I don't usually teach with a religious emphasis. Or what about Scenes of Clerical Life? It's striking that one of the period's most profound thinkers about religion (in both its theological and its sociological aspects) actually treats the subject quite obliquely in her major works.

Suggestions?

Raise a Ruckus for Radio Two!

This post is a bit off my usual topics, but I love CBC Radio 2 and will be very sorry if the proposed radical programming changes go ahead, so I'm posting this press release prepared by the "Save Classical Music at the CBC' group on Facebook. If there are any other CBC listeners out there who will be mournful without Tom Allen's "Music and Company" on weekday mornings (Cage Match!) or Rick Phillips' "Sound Advice" on the weekends (to name just two excellent shows that will be axed), you may want to join the Facebook group or attend (or organize) the rally in your home town. CBC executives may want to keep in mind that trying to be all things to all people may well lead to a radio station that means nothing in particular to anybody. (post edited for brevity now that the date has come and gone).

On Friday, April 11th, 2008 at 12:00pm Eastern Time, the 12,500 strong members of a hastily arranged Facebook group entitled “Save Classical Music at the CBC” will be holding a NATIONAL DAY OF ACTION called “RAISE A RUCKUS FOR RADIO TWO!” in over a dozen cities across Canada.

In response to recently announced programming changes at CBC Radio Two and the planned axing of the famed CBC Vancouver Radio Orchestra, classical music fans, musicians and Radio Two listeners are planning to take to the streets in front of their local CBC installations in every province simultaneously. Demonstrations are to be held at CBC facilities in Victoria, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Toronto, London, Ottawa, Montreal, Halifax, Charlottetown and St. John’s; with possible demonstrations to be held in Regina, Kingston, ON, and Saint John, NB as well.

Being Barbara Hardy

As a proud new member of NAVSA (better late than never!), I have just received a copy of the latest issue of Victorian Studies. Of the many interesting features in this issue (Volume 50 No. 1), I particularly enjoyed George Levine's review of Barbara Hardy's George Eliot: A Critic's Biography, a book I own but haven't yet read. One of my clearest recollections of my early days as a graduate student is being asked by one of my new faculty mentors to name a critic whose work on George Eliot I admired. "Barbara Hardy," I promptly replied. The response was a tolerant smile and nod, and a bit of sage advice: "Of course, you can't be Barbara Hardy any more." True enough--unless, naturally, you actually are Barbara Hardy. Her steadiness in being herself is at the heart of Levine's admiration of this new book:

Negative hermeneutics has never been Hardy's mode, and her determination to take seriously what Eliot said said, without suspicion and cynicism as a premise of the reading, is one thing that might make this anti-biography suspect to modern critics. But that determination becomes a form of negative capability that is one of the most moving and satisfying aspects of the book. For Hardy, Eliot wrote as if she meant what she said and she said what she meant. In critical circles, this is an astonishingly fresh argument these days. (100)

I've put it at the top of my "t0 read" pile.

This Week in My Classes (April 7, 2008)

We're almost done--not forgetting, of course, that after classes wrap up, we all move into our "papers and exams" frenzy--and then it's May Administrative Madness.

In Mystery and Detective Fiction we go out on a depressing note, finishing up Knots and Crosses and then fitting in one more short story, Rankin's "The Dean Curse." When we get to exam review on Wednesday, I hope to have some general discussion of the issues I "led" with back when the course started and we read Thurber's "The Macbeth Murder Mystery": what, if any, are the essential differences between 'literary' and 'genre' fiction? And, equally important, if Thurber gets comic results by showing someone reading literature by the rules of genre fiction, what results did we get, reading genre fiction using the techniques of literary analysis? Of course, some of our readings had higher aspirations in the literary direction than others, but a course like this provides plenty of opportunities to wonder how and why those lines get drawn. I think I want to shake up the reading list for this course when I offer it again next year. One thing I'd especially like to do is add a Canadian novel, though at the moment I'm not sure which one to choose (suggestions welcome!). My criteria would be that it should be a novel that adds something distinctive to our consideration of the various genres of mystery fiction. I like reading Peter Robinson, for instance, but I'm not sure that I need him if I'm already doing P.D. James (and there, I think I might trade Unsuitable Job for a Woman, much as I like it, for A Taste for Death). Maybe Giles Blunt? I haven't read his books yet but I've got a couple out from the library and they look promising.

In The Victorian 'Woman Question' we finish up with The Odd Women, a novel that sometimes seems designed to act as a concluding primer on the 'woman question,' as it features marriages (or courtships) that appeal to, subvert, explode, or reject all the Victorian models we've been considering in our other novels. I expect we'll have some good discussion about Rhoda and Everard and their bizarre "romance." Why does it end as it does? What's against them that it is so difficult for them to know, or state, or claim, what they want? (What do they want?) And I'm sure Monica and Widdowson's marriage will provoke comparisons to the Trevelyans' in He Knew He Was Right. Speaking of He Knew He Was Right, will I use it again, the next time I offer this seminar? I may have to wait for the course evaluations for honest declarations of how the students felt about it; I really enjoyed our work on it, not just because of its contributions to the big thematic arcs of the course, but because of the conversations it inspired about why and how we value and criticize different kinds of novels.

Next week, when I don't have classes to post about, I'll post some thoughts about doing this series of posts on my teaching (yes, more metablogging).

File Under "Hmmmm..."

Subcategory A: Well, that's OK, then!

"[P]ostcolonial critics inevitably homogenize as 'imperialist' critics did before them. The difference is that they typically profess an awareness of the problematics to a degree the others did not."

Subcategory B: Inadvertant Irony and Foregone Conclusions

"[Postcolonial cultural studies] involves a dialogue leading to the significant insight that the Western paradigm (Manichean and binary) is highly problematical."

Middlemarch in the 21st Century?

(cross-posted to The Valve)

I’ve been going through a book of essays called Middlemarch in the 21st Century. It’s an interesting enough collection, with contributions by a lot of the big names in current George Eliot scholarship. It is also at least as much about criticism in the 21st century as about Middlemarch. Of course, it is self-consciously so (in these metacritical days, how could it not be?); the editor is intelligently expressive on the intevitable interplay between text and (our) context:

The essays in this volume attach Middlemarch to the twenty-first century by way of their aesthetic, ethical, and social concerns, but each reading also dwells within the confines of the pages of the novel and its communities. We move constantly between the early and later nineteenth century and to the start of the twenty-first century, respecting the differences without allowing them to become obstacles in our way. (4)

That’s all fine, and so are the essays I’ve read, though to be sure I find some of them more engaging than others. What I’ve been thinking as I read, though, is that really none of them really presents a version of Middlemarch for the 21st century: that is, none of them addresses ways Middlemarch (or, for that matter, any other past literary work) might have special relevance in the 21st century beyond those interpretive contexts selected by the contributors--none of which contexts, in turn, seems pointedly or necessarily fixed in the 21st century (except by accident of critical history, e.g. “this year, we’re doing materiality,” or “Lacanian readings are so 1990s”). I think it’s accurate to say that typically we take our “aesthetic, ethical, and social concerns” to our texts and see how they answer back. Is there a way to “attach” them to our century starting, as it were, from the other direction? How might Middlemarch, for instance, “read” the 21st century? What “aesthetic, ethical, and social concerns” might it bring to us? What would such a criticism look like? What (or who) would it be for?

I tried my hand at something of the sort for a panel called (coincidentally) “George Eliot in the 21st Century” at ACCUTE a couple of years ago. My presentation was called “George Eliot: Moralist for the 21st Century”; its major contention (stripped of nuance) was that her secularized morality offers a philosophical perspective of great potential benefit to our times, and that its presentation in compelling fictional form could help her stand as "the friendly face of unbelief.” Now, on the one hand, I realize there is something reductive about such an approach. At the same time, we know that George Eliot herself conceived of her work as fundamentally ethical, which means (as I argued in my paper) that she offered it as (in part) an answer to the basic question of moral philosophy, namely “how ought I to live?” Many (though certainly not all) of the academic approaches now in vogue have little in common with this project. At this moment, (well, not at this moment, as clearly I am procrastinating by writing this instead) I am working on a proposal for a conference paper about Ahdaf Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun; Soueif has been called “Egypt’s George Eliot,” and In the Eye of the Sun takes the “squirrel’s heartbeat” passage as its epigraph (and refers to Middlemarch at many other points as well). Although I am still in the early stages of thinking through the relationship between the two novels, my feeling is that part of what Soueif does is bring the ethos of Middlemarch forward into a very different historical and cultural context, almost as if to ask, herself, “Can Middlemarch help us with this?” (The other part of what she does, I think, works in the other direction, testing that ethos against these new contexts; that Soueif uses a radically different form of novel suggests that, in some respects, “it won’t do, you known, it won’t do.”)

Thoughts? Do I exaggerate the difference between taking our concerns to the text and bringing the text’s concerns to us? Do I underestimate the risks or wrongs of the approach I took in my earlier paper? Or, in the spirit of the “public academic workbench,” if you’ve read In the Eye of the Sun, any ideas about the direction I’m taking in the new one? (Or about whether working on an Egyptian novelist writing in a post-colonial context necessitates using post-colonial theory? Just wondering...)

This Week in My Classes (April 1, 2008)

I sure went on and on about last week's classes! I guess in my own small way I'm trying to answer Martha Nussbaum's call for critical writing "that talks of human lives and choices as if they matter to us all"... Plus it feels good to get some mileage out of some of that 19th-century criticism I spent so much time editing ... But to compensate, here's this week's update in thumbnail form:

Mystery and Detective Fiction: Ian Rankin, Knots and Crosses. Grim, gothic, graphic.

The Victorian 'Woman Question': George Gissing, The Odd Women. Also grim. And graphic, in its own way. But not gothic.

Weekend Miscellany

A few things of interest I've come across while browsing this weekend:

Margaret Atwood on Anne of Green Gables in the Guardian:

"God's in his heaven, all's right with the world," Anne whispers in the very last lines of Anne of Green Gables. She's fond of Victorian poetry, so it's appropriate that she ends her story by quoting from a song sung by the optimistic heroine of Robert Browning's dramatic poem "Pippa Passes"; doubly appropriate because Anne Shirley herself acts a kind of Pippa throughout the book. Pippa is a poor Italian orphan girl who slaves away in a silk-spinning mill, yet manages to preserve a pure imagination and a love of nature despite her lowly status. Like Pippa, Anne is an unselfconscious innocent who, unbeknownst to herself, brings joy, imagination and the occasional epiphany to the citizenry of Avonlea, who are inclined to be practical but drear. (read the rest here)

Keith Oatley on Middlemarch for the Globe and Mail's '50 Greatest Books' Series (once again, a novelist scores the good gig in the book section):

Middlemarch is a generous book. It is one of the world's great books because, between the three streams of writing, George Eliot enables a space to grow: a space for the reader's emotions and thoughts. You feel things you have not felt, think things you have not thought. It's a book for grown-up people. (read the rest here)

Charles Nickerson proposes an obscure 'inspiration' for Miss Havisham in the TLS:

Much discussion has arisen over Miss Havisham’s genesis. The numerous sources proposed – including, most frequently, a theatrical skit by Charles Mathews, articles in Household Words and The Household Narrative of Current Events, and Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White – have been ably surveyed by both Peter Ackroyd and Harry Stone. Although a good case can be made for Miss Havisham’s evolution from a mix of these sources, none of them contains anything like the intense psychological dynamic that develops between Miss Havisham and Estella. One work in which Dickens might have found the germ of that dynamic is Disraeli’s seventh novel, Venetia (1837), a thinly disguised fictionalization of various episodes in the lives of Byron and Shelley. (read the rest here)

And one more knock against James Wood (keeping in mind that in many respects, I'm a fan!): he's a spoiler!

I like destroying the tyranny of plot. I always ask people who are recommending me a novel to tell me the entire story right out, and I make a point in my reviews of describing the entire book. I don't think I need a plot to sustain my enjoyment. Formally speaking, if you really did believe in plot you'd say, "I can't re-read Anna Karenina because I know what happens." But it's obvious that there are deeper, more sustaining beauties underneath. (emphasis added; read the rest here)

Of course, he's right about re-reading, and about the "beauties underneath" that sustain multiple readings, but I believe sometimes plot and the surprise, suspense, confusion, pleasure, and emotional and other reactions it can generate are more meaningful than he allows. Consider the ending of The Mill on the Floss, for instance (and no, I'm not going to give it away here!). Our shock and surprise provoke all kinds of important social and moral questions for us. Re-reading and re-thinking both help us answer them, but our demand that this result be accounted for motivates us to interpretation. Also, I encourage my students to question plot elements: after all, things could always have unfolded in some different way, so how is this plot element suitable for this project? What do we learn from it about the underlying ideas of the novel? (Useful classroom exercise: try tweaking the plot and see how fast the whole book begins to change its shape...or, for The Mill on the Floss, try coming up with an alternative ending that satisfies all the pressures developing from the beginning of the novel...) We read better in some ways once we know the book's whole shape, and knowing the plot helps us attend to other elements, but plot is often where the social, political, and moral aspects of the novels have their strongest presence. Further, there's a readerly experience (for lack of a better word) that is simply spoiled by spoilers.

This Week in My Classes (March 27, 2008)

We finished up Grafton's 'A' is for Alibi in Mystery and Detective Fiction yesterday. Drawing on ideas from sources such as Peter Rabinowitz's very smart essay "Reader, I Blew Him Away: Convention and Transgression in Sue Grafton," I invited the class to consider Charlie Scorsone not just as a male Brigid O'Shaughnessy but also a version of the Byronic hero, who is tempting to our heroine in part because he is masterful and domineering. Although the novel emphasizes women's desire and struggle for autonomy, especially in marriage, through Kinsey, Grafton clarifies that autonomy is valuable and (politically and personally) essential, but also exhausting. What a relief, perhaps, not to have to stand alone but to give yourself over to someone whose power, after all, may simply be greater! We puzzled over why the final chase sequence is so unheroic for Kinsey, who ends up partly undressed and hiding in a garbage can...leading me eventually to one of those classroom questions you can't quite believe you've asked, but there you are anyway: "How is her sleeping with Charlie like her hiding from him in a trash can--besides that both situations involve taking her pants off?" Hmmm. Tomorrow we are working with a cluster of rather quirky stories, all by women authors: Amanda Cross's "Arrie and Jasper," Sue Grafton's "A Little Missionary Work," and Sarah Caudwell's "An Acquaintance with Mr Collins"--the last of which, delightfully, proves the practicality of a degree in English and a specialization in the Victorian novel...if you want to commit murder. Hmmm again. Maybe this is not the way to make our departmental pitch for more of the university's resources. On the other hand, if we sounded menacing enough...

In The Victorian 'Woman Question' we dealt with murder and sex as well, as we reached the end of Middlemarch. Especially as we read East Lynne earlier this term, it is interesting to consider the 'sensational' elements that permeate the final sections of this famous example of realism: while in He Knew He Was Right, Trollope relegates his sensational elements to the comic margins of his unfolding Shakespearian tragedy (Camilla and her carving knife--wonderful!), here with Will and Rosamond we have an adultery plot that is never realized--two, I suppose, if we consider Casaubon's suspicions of Will and Dorothea. And the Raffles plot brings us close to an actual sensation case, except that here the suspicious death is ambiguous in every possible way. As for sex, well, I began our work on the novel with some consideration of the famous Bernini sculpture of the ecstasy of Saint Teresa, and of course we have paid attention throughout to Dorothea's struggles to reconcile her spiritual yearnings with her other passions, beginning with the 'jewel scene' in Chapter I. Asserting your own will is important to finding the necessary balance between altruism and egotism (without a candle, after all, the scratches on the pier glass remain wholly random, rendering interpretation and thus action impossible). At the same time, willfully declaring your own desire seems necessary to embracing a fully human life: your ardour needs outlets both philosophical and physical. There's never enough time to talk about everything, but I did bring up some of the critical objections that have been made to Will so that we could debate how suitable a partner he seems for Dorothea and what relation their marriage bears to the novel's larger themes, especially regarding reform, vocation, and women's roles in society. A couple of times this week we worried about Rosamond and Casaubon as possible limit cases for the narrator's theory of sympathy. I've become increasingly worried about a line from The Mill on the Floss: "the responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision." Both Dorothea's and Lydgate's marriages proceed to some extent according to this principle, and the moral beauty of Dorothea's efforts to subdue her own needs in generous response to Casuabon--in the wonderful conclusion of Chapter 42, for instance--is certainly made apparent. At the same time, Lydgate's submission to Rosamond is unquestionably shown as a tragedy, for him and perhaps for medicine, so even as we can't wish him a more selfish or cruel person, one who could put his parasitic wife aside in pursuit of his own higher aims, we can hardly applaud the result. And Dorothea is rescued by the novelist from a similarly dismal fate: as my students pointed out, Casaubon's death is altogether too convenient to be realistic, and we therefore have to consider its effects in other ways. Perhaps that near-death experience for Dorothea is meant to sharpen our own awareness, for instance, of the extraordinary risks of submission and renunciation--or of marriage, if undertaken on those terms.

Although we have talked a lot about fictional form in this seminar, I am starting to feel as if the other thing we are doing, indirectly, is a tutorial on men, women, courtship, relationships, marriage, domination, autonomy.... So many of the books we are reading are designed to provoke thought on just these issues, after all, and they adapt their forms in part as coaching strategies (the incessant shifting of point of view, or interruptions of chronology, in Middlemarch, for example, which force us to re-consider people and events from other perspectives, as parts of other stories). Some of my students have admitted that they are looking differently at their own relationships as a result of the stories we've been analyzing. Well, as far as that goes, they are only doing as the authors expected or hoped. Here's Trollope on 'Novel Reading,' for instance:

There it is, unconcealed, whether for good or bad, patent to all and established, the recognised amusement of our lighter hours, too often our mainstay in literature, the former of our morals, the code by which we rule ourselves, the mirror in which we dress ourselves, the index expurgatorius of things held to be allowable in the ordinary affairs of life. No man actually turns to a novel for a definition of honour, nor a woman for that of modesty; but it is from the pages of novels that men and women obtain guidance both as to honour and modesty.

He goes on to consider particularly the potential value of the novel as a training ground for young lovers. "There used to be many," he remarks, "who thought, and probably there are some who still think, that a girl should hear nothing of love till the time comes in which she is to be married." But "While human nature talks of love so forcibly, it can hardly serve our turn to be silent on the subject," and novels, for better or for worse, provide necessary as well as pleasant guidance:

We do not dare to say openly to those dear ones, but we confess it to ourselves, that the one thing of most importance to them is whether they shall love rightly or wrongly. . . . It suits us to speak of love as a soft, sweet, flowery pastime, with many roses and some thorns, in which youth is apt to disport itself; but there is no father, no mother, no daughter, and should be no son, blind to the fact that, of all matters concerning life, it is the most important. That Ovid’s Art of Love was nothing, much worse than nothing, we admit. But nevertheless the art is taught. Before the moment comes in which heart is given to heart, the imagination has been instructed as to what should accompany the gift, and what should be expected in accompaniment; in what way the gift should be made, and after what assurance; for how long a period silence should be held, and then how far speech should be unguarded.

By those who do not habitually read at all, the work is done somewhat roughly,--we will not say thoughtlessly, but with little of those precautions which education demands. With those who do read, all that literature gives them helps them somewhat in the operation of which we are speaking. History tells us much of love’s efficacy, and much of the evil that comes from the want of it. Biography is of course full of it. Philosophy deals with it. Poetry is hardly poetry without it. The drama is built on it almost as exclusively as are the novels. But it is from novels that the crowd of expectant and ready pupils obtain that constant flow of easy teaching which fills the mind of all readers with continual thoughts of love.

Though I would not want our class hours to be taken up with personal reflections, I can't say I think it's a bad thing if our readings are encouraging them to think more deliberately about their own lives! Marriage may be a very different institution today than it was in the 19th century (and we have certainly talked at length about the specific political, economic, and social contexts that made marriage such a momentous step for women especially), but even so, there may still be "something even awful in the nearness it brings." One thing it seems to me we are all certain to take away from reading Middlemarch is precisely how demanding it is to live in close physical and mental proximity to someone who is not ourselves, for whom "the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference." In a world in which Wuthering Heights (Wuthering Height?!) has recently been voted the greatest love story of all time, it seems like a little corrective realism tinged with pessimism is called for. And to ward off despair, we can always think of Fred and Mary, whose "solid mutual happiness" starts to seem anything but middling after all we've been through.

James Wood, How Fiction Works

(Cross-posted to The Valve. Thank you to the regular Valve folks for the invitation to do some guest posting!)

The dust jacket describes How Fiction Works as Wood's "first full-length book of criticism." Anyone led by this blurb to expect sustained analysis supported by extensive research and illustration will be disappointed, as in fact How Fiction Works turns out to be essentially a 'commonplace book,' a collection of critical observations and insights of varying degrees of originality and sophistication, developed with varying degrees of care and detail. Wood acknowledges having set deliberate limits on his project, likening it in his introduction to Forster's Aspects of the Novel, proposing to offer practical "writer's anwers" to "a critic's questions," and admitting (though with no tone of apology) that he used only "the books at hand in [his] study." To some extent I agree with other reviewers who consider it only fair to evaluate the book Wood wrote, rather than regretting he didn't write another one. Yet even within the parameters Wood sets, I think there are grounds for wishing he, with his exceptional gifts and qualifications as both reader and critic, had not sold himself (or us) short in fulfilling them. Further, beginning with the invocation of Forster but going well beyond it, the book has pretensions to grandeur: for instance, also in his introduction Wood remarks that Barthes and Shklovsky "come to conclusions about the novel that seem to me interesting but wrong-headed, and this book conducts a sustained argument with them" (2). With gestures such as this, Wood claims an elevated stature for his critical contribution that is undermined by its casual construction and over-confident approach to scholarship. Though How Fiction Works provides many further proofs of Wood's critical gifts and considerable erudition, I think it also proves that even the best practical critic flounders when working only with what he has already to hand or in mind.

Right off the bat I was irritated by the book's structure. Wood has said that he felt liberated by using the numbered "paragraphs" or sections, but allowing yourself to skip from thought to thought in this way means letting yourself off the hook too often. Frequently in the margins of my students' work I write "And so? Finish the thought!" One effect of crafting, first paragraphs, and then longer pieces as sustained wholes is that in working out the overall movement of your ideas and building in appropriately specific transitions, you confront both the logic and the further implications of your claims: the form pressures you to think better. Numbered bits, however, relieve that pressure: you can just stop with one topic and start the next, and as long as they are more or less related, you can claim to be producing a unified whole, even if you are only papering over gaps. In How Fiction Works, the breaks often seem unnecessary: a new number sets off what is really just the next sentence in the idea already unfolding. Most of the time, however, they are substitutes for careful transitions. They allow a certain stream-of-consciousness effect to creep in: that last bit reminds me of this exception to a general principle, or of a writer who also does that, or of another favourite excerpt, or of a time I went to a concert with my wife. Well, OK, I guess, and no doubt it would have been much more difficult to do a coherent chapter offering a theory of, say, fictional character, realism, or morality and the novel. And I suppose it's true that non-academic readers don't want the kind of detail and complexity such a full account of these topics would require. Even so, the numbered bits felt lazy to me. The footnotes too had an aimlessness about them. Some of them covered ideas or examples that seemed no less important to their chapter than most of the bits allowed their own numbered section (note 53 on p. 150, to give one example) while others appeared entirely unnecessary to the book (note 40 on p. 121, or note 41 on p. 124, for instance).

The TLS reviewer objects to Wood's "grace notes": "It is sometimes hard to distinguish a gasp of admiration for another’s skill from the contented sigh when the books in one’s study satisfy one’s own theories." I shared this reaction, not least because "how fine that is" (139) is an expression of taste, not criticism. But Wood is a compelling reader of details, even passages. It's when he makes broader assertions that he leaves himself more open to objections. For one thing, he has some governing assumptions about what fiction is for that he treats as universal rather than historically or theoretically specific. In his chapter on "Sympathy and Complexity," for instance, as a footnote to his remarks on fiction as a means of extending our sympathies (the occasion for one of his shockingly few references to George Eliot!), he adds this:

We don't read in order to benefit in this way from fiction. We read fiction because it pleases us, moves us, is beautiful, and so on,--because it is alive and we are alive. (129)

Well, maybe, but not everybody, and not all the time: for instance, most of the Victorian critics I have been editing for my Broadview anthology would not have recognized this highly aestheticized motive for novel reading. Is it fair, or even sensible, to say that they were simply wrong? Or to ignore how the formal developments of the Victorian novel furthered ends not adequately respected by Wood's post-Jamesian formulations? His is in many respects a teleological account of the history of the novel. "Progress!" he exclaims after a quotation from Proust: "In Fielding and Defoe, even in the much richer Cervantes, revelation of this altering kind occurs at the level of plot" (125). But were Fielding and Defoe trying to do what Proust did and failing? How much better we might understand them if we allow them what James calls their "donnee. "It is subtlety that matters," he declares in his chapter on character; "subtlety of analysis, of inquiry, of concern, of felt pressure": "I learn more about the consciousness of the soldier in Chekhov's The Kiss than I do about the consciousness of Becky Sharpe [sic] in Vanity Fair." But Becky Sharp's consciousness is surely not the point of Vanity Fair; indeed, I argue in my own lectures that too close a focus on Becky risks diverting us from Thackeray's grand gesture of holding the mirror up to ourselves, so that the novel becomes an opportunity for us to reflect on our own morality and mortality. "Was she guilty or not?" the narrator asks--and, remarkably, will not tell us, because ultimately she is not the point but the occasion, the device. Thackeray is not a failed Chekhov any more than Dickens is a failed Flaubert. To Wood, "the history of the novel can be told as the development of free indirect style" (58), but that history is partial and often distorting. (About the operations of free indirect discourse and the importance of knowing who 'owns' which words, on the other hand, Wood is typically astute. Here's one place where examples from Middlemarch would have served him well, though at the risk of undermining his generalizations. Consider this passage from Chapter 1, for instance:

And how should Dorothea not marry? -- a girl so handsome and with such prospects? Nothing could hinder it but her love of extremes, and her insistence on regulating life according to notions which might cause a wary man to hesitate before he made her an offer, or even might lead her at last to refuse all offers. A young lady of some birth and fortune, who knelt suddenly down on a brick floor by the side of a sick laborer and prayed fervidly as if she thought herself living in the time of the Apostles -- who had strange whims of fasting like a Papist, and of sitting up at night to read old theological books! Such a wife might awaken you some fine morning with a new scheme for the application of her income which would interfere with political economy and the keeping of saddle-horses: a man would naturally think twice before he risked himself in such fellowship. Women were expected to have weak opinions; but the great safeguard of society and of domestic life was, that opinions were not acted on. Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.

Think how much is lost on a reader who improperly identifies the source of that word "naturally"--or the last two sentences altogether!)

Wood is good on the telling detail as well and the quality he calls "thisness": "any detail that draws abstraction towards itself and seems to kill that abstraction with a puff of palpability" (54). But again, when he moves into prescription, he becomes less persuasive, as when he objects to the "layer of gratuitous detail" in 19th-century realist fiction. Again, the challenge is in defining "gratuitous" (as, clearly, Wood himself is well aware), but he can't propose any principle except, perhaps, his idea that "insignificant" details avoid irrelevance if they are "significantly insignificant" (68). After recounting an incident in which he and his wife had "invented entirely different readings" of a violinist's frown at a concert, he claims that a "good novelist would have let that frown alone, and would have let our revealing comments alone, too: no need to smother this little scene in explanation" (72). Again, well, maybe. I can imagine at least one "good novelist" who might have done great things with their "different readings" of that little moment, perhaps even using their "revealing comments" as a chance to reveal even more about perception and reality as well as human relationships ("these things are a parable..."). Doesn't it depend on what your novel is about and on the formal methods you are using to realize those goals?

I'd like to return before I close to the "Sympathy and Complexity" chapter, because this is a topic close to my heart, one on which I have spent a lot of my own critical energy recently, and one I expected Wood to handle particularly well. "Perfunctory" is the best word I can think of to describe it. I've mentioned already his dehistoricizing assumption that "we" don't read in order to receive moral benefits. I doubt this is true in practice, and I also question the separation he implies between moral and aesthetic readings. Here is a case in which even a little research outside "the books at hand in [his] own study" would have immeasurably enriched his discussion: Booth's The Company We Keep, for instance, would have helped him complicate exactly that separation. And the conversation about how fiction might do "what [Bernard] Williams wanted moral philosophy to do" (135) has many participants besides Williams (Martha Nussbaum comes promptly to mind!). Further, not all novels avoid providing "philosophical answers" (here, he replicates Nussbam's error in generalizing about "the novel," but as a professional novel reader, he should know better). Here the hybrid character of How Fiction Works proves a genuine weakness, I think. This chapter is not a full, responsible, or authoritative inquiry into its subject. Of course, it does not pretend to be (remember, the book promises only "a writer's answers" to "a critic's questions"). But then how should we evaluate it? Doesn't Wood do even his non-specialist audience a disservice by taking up complicated subjects on which there already exists a rich body of scholarship and offering his own fairly casual observations with the confidence of real expertise? What a much greater contribution it would be to distill that complex material and present it accessibly! To grab what's at hand and say just what comes to mind bespeaks an enviable but also problematic degree of confidence. And while the non-expert reader is in no position to object, the expert reader is easily deflected with the excuse that she is not the intended audience...

After I read How Fiction Works I re-read some of my collection of Wood's essays, including his reviews of Never Let Me Go, Saturday, and Brick Lane. This is really wonderful stuff, as I have remarked before; I admire it wholeheartedly for its critical acuity, its literary elegance, and its moral seriousness. But considering How Fiction Works strictly as one among many books about books (and Wood is wrong, or perhaps disingenuous, when he says "there are surprisingly few books" of this kind about fiction [1]), I think there are many better choices available. I continue to recommend David Lodge's The Art of Fiction, for instance, which takes up many of the same topics as Wood, though under a less grandiose umbrella of prescriptive claims. I think it's an exciting development that Wood has landed a job in Harvard's English Department. In taking this now unconventional route from journalism to the academy, he is following in the footsteps of many eminent Victorian critics (David Masson, for instance). But considering how bitterly difficult it is for those following the established professional route to land any academic job at all, it's frustrating to think that he may not be held to anything like the same standard of rigour as many critics far less lauded and applauded. Here's hoping that he has more books in him as good as The Broken Estate.

This Week in My Classes (March 19, 2008)

Because this week in my life has been a bit complicated, I'm a bit late posting on this week in my classes. In fact, as I don't teach Thursdays and Friday's a holiday, for this week, my classes are now over! But it was a good week, an interesting week, I thought.

In Mystery and Detective Fiction, we wrapped up our discussions of P. D. James's An Unsuitable Job for a Woman with some discussion of the novel as a kind of Bildungsroman, with Cordelia's development as a detective coinciding with her moral and emotional development. For me, one sign that the novel is not "just" a mystery is simply that it is not over when the mystery is solved: in particular, it seems to be important that Cordelia be brought face to face with Dalgliesh, who has served as both mentor and antagonist throughout the novel. So we looked pretty closely at the interview they have and considered what is at stake, not just for her, but also for him--I think it's interesting, for example, that he is shown to have learned from her to regret not having taken more care over Bernie's fate. The other scene we focused on was the climactic encounter between Cordelia and Sir Ronald, in which his utilitarian (rational, scientific) outlook is explicitly pitted against her more 'humane' (sentimental, perhaps aesthetic) one: "what is the use of making the world more beautiful if the people who live in it can't love one another?" Can you tell James sees herself as working in the tradition of the 19thC novelists?

Today (in the spirit of "and now for something completely different!") we started on Sue Grafton's 'A' is for Alibi. I played an excerpt from the interesting documentary "Women of Mystery," which features interviews with Marcia Muller, Sara Paretsky, and Grafton. The clip I played puts women's detective fiction in the context of sensation fiction; the other highly relevant context for this novel is clearly hard-boiled detective fiction, so I spent some time recapping some of the features of that subgenre with special attention to its gendered aspects. I also began some discussion of the relationship of these feminist PI novels to the feminist movement; both Grafton and Paretsky began their series novels in 1982, and the influence of first-wave feminism is pretty obvious (Grafton says her goal was to "play hardball with the boys"). In 'A' is for Alibi, the plot itself highlights changes in women's roles: it features one marriage that begins, by my calculations, in the late 1950s, and another that begins in 1970. I put some general questions to the class to consider as we work our way through the novel, particularly about possible problems with women rewriting hard-boiled conventions--for one thing, many of them change a lot when you reverse the genders, as Sara Paretsky has pointed out, and for another, well, is it necessarily progress to show women too can be tough, rude, and emotionally detached? Grafton begins her novel with Kinsey's discomfort at having just killed someone, so she is clearly problematizing the conventions even as she adopts and adapts them.

In The Victorian 'Woman Question, it's week 2 on Middlemarch. It does seem to be true that coming to it right after reading He Knew He Was Right makes some of its features really stand out. For instance, comparing the power struggles between Dorothea and Casaubon to those between Emily and Louis Trevelyan proves quite interesting, not least because I haven't been in the habit of seeing Dorothea's struggles as being quite about power--but what is his attempt to get her to promise total compliance even after his death but as extreme an attempt to usurp her moral (and economic, and intellectual, and sexual) agency as Louis's persecution of his wife? The Garths stand out on this reading because of the healthy balance of respect and love so evident in their relationship--though it's clear that Mrs Garth has a very traditional theory of marital hierarchy! I think the class is doing pretty well with it, though it comes at a hard time of term when they are swamped with work in all of their courses: the discussion has been not just lively but empathetic towards the characters in a way that does not always happen in my 'lecture' classes. Maybe my tendency to emphasize the novel's formal properties and philosophical abstractions gets in the way of people responding emotionally to the story--next time I teach the novel in a lecture/discussion format instead of a seminar, I'll keep this in mind, as GE herself was urgent that fiction should not 'lapse from picture to diagram.' I'm quite excited that the group doing the presentation is, among other things, working up some kind of class activity involving string that will get across the giant hairball effect of the novel's structure...

The Dead (Critics, That Is)

Dan Green alerts us to William Deresiewicz's essay "Professing Literature in 2008" in The Nation, in which the author draws some dire conclusions about the profession of English literature from the evidence of this year's MLA job listings:

This year's Job List confirms the picture of a profession suffering from an epochal loss of confidence. It's not just the fear you can smell in the postings. It's the fact that no major theoretical school has emerged in the eighteen years since Judith Butler's Gender Trouble revolutionized gender studies. As Harvard professor Louis Menand said three years ago, our graduate students are writing the same dissertations, with the same tools, as they were in 1990. Nor has any major new star--a Butler, an Edward Said, a Harold Bloom--emerged since then to provide intellectual leadership, or even a sense of intellectual adventure. The job market's long-term depression has deepened the mood. Most professors I know discourage even their best students from going to graduate school; one actually refuses to talk to them about it. This is a profession that is losing its will to live.

Twenty years after Professing Literature, the "conflicts" still exist, but given the larger context in which they're taking place, they scarcely matter anymore. The real story of academic literary criticism today is that the profession is, however slowly, dying.

I've also just finished reading Ronan McDonald's The Death of the Critic--hmm, suddenly I don't feel so well! Both authors present their material in what strikes me as an unfortunately tendentious way. Deresiewicz, for instance, in arguing that the "profession's intellectual agenda is being set by teenagers," apparently does not entertain the possibility that departments might be genuinely embracing the priorities he sees reflected in the latest wave of job ads, rather than cravenly appeasing their undergraduates. McDonald similarly attributes most changes in critical practice to everything but the conviction that the method in question might have intrinsic merit, as when, discussing the establishment of English "as a university discipline" in the early 20th century, he says that the critics of the time "sought to imbue [English] with some procedural and disciplinary muscle" (89). No doubt showing that English could have "procedural and disciplinary muscle" was crucial to proving its academic credibility, but McDonald repeatedly implies the primacy of self-interest over scholarly commitment--a move which in turn bespeaks a hermeneutics of suspicion on his part to match any he might point to in 'cultural studies.' Both of these writers, in other words, seem to consider their colleagues and peers singularly unprincipled and opportunistic--or (a bit more generously, as they might prefer to be interpreted) they see them as particularly susceptible to fads because they lack foundational commitments (Deresiewicz) or have tried too hard for too long to appear what they are not, namely scientists (McDonald).

Still, both Deresiewicz and McDonald are describing features of this profession (historically and currently) recognizable to anyone working within it, even if we might quarrel over how they are characterized or explained. That priorities in teaching and scholarship have changed often, sometimes dramatically, is not news; neither is it a revelation that English as a discipline seems particularly prone to self-doubt, internal convulsions, and obsessive self-scrutiny and meta-criticism. Is it on its death-bed, though? In my own department we are going through yet another round of curriculum reform--the third or fourth since I was hired just over a decade ago. I have come to see we aren't actually moving towards any final goal but that each such round is part of an ongoing, probably never-ending process driven by many things, from our own changing research interests and strengths to the ever-mutating condition of the 'canon' of material and methods we feel responsible for presenting and the fluctuating needs and interests of an evolving student population. How far is this instability a symptom of disease, and how far is it a healthy process, warding off stagnation and sustaining our connection with a wider (and itself endlessly evolving) life outside the academy? To be honest, at different times I have felt both ways about it myself, depending on just what's on the table and how closely I am involved! Overall, though, surely it does not make sense to expect talk about literature to be the same now as it was 10, 20, or 50 years ago. Neither Deresiewicz nor McDonald provides particularly convincing evidence for the conclusion that criticism (as either a practice or a profession) is in a far worse state right now that at other times, and the pressure they both apparently feel towards polemical generalization means they obscure all kinds of qualifications and nuances as well as many potential signs of life.

That said, there are certainly some features of McDonald's argument with which I do find myself in sympathy, or which ring changes on themes that have preoccupied me for some time. Key among these is his interest in closing, or at least bridging, the gap between "the academic critic and a wider public audience" (ix). Though every history of criticism notes the same phenomenon and agrees with McDonald that it dates more or less from the early 20th century, with the professionalization of literary study and the bifurcation between criticism and literary journalism / reviewing, I think McDonald's specific diagnosis is distinct: he blames critics' abandonment of evaluation for the alienation of the wider public:

The question in which the reading public would have taken a primary interest - 'Is this book / artwork worth my attention and time? Is it of any merit?' - was not one that exercised the cultural theoretician. (23)

"If criticism forsakes evaluation, it also loses its connections with a wider public" (134): this loss and its roots in the history of criticism are the book's major focus, though McDonald also considers other phenemona that have contributed to the diminished relevance of academic critics, particularly the democratization (or relativization) of criticism, or attitudes towards critical expertise, enabled by new media such as blogs or Amazon-style customer reviews. His focus on evaluation is reiterated in his prescriptive closing section, which calls for a renewed aestheticism and concludes,

Perhaps the critic is not dead, but simply sidelined and slumbering. The first step in reviving him or her is to bring the idea of artistic merit back to the heart of academic criticism. 'Judgement' is the first meaning of kritos. If criticism is to be valued, if it is to reach a wide public, it needs to be evaluative. (149)

There seem to be some internal inconsistencies in McDonald's analysis of criticism's decline in public significance. His chief grievance with the movements he groups together as 'cultural studies' is that they treat literature instrumentally, as a means to other (usually political) ends. On his own account, though, most major critical movements have done some version of this, from promoting or sustaining civil society to "fill[ing] the breach left in religion's absence" (69), and in fact the whole idea of 'evaluation' always has to be grounded in a set of extrinsic standards which (again on McDonald's own account) have almost never been strictly aesthetic (if such a thing is even possible). Though McDonald believes that emphasizing aestheticism will bring about a "rapprochement between academic and non-academic criticism," and thus, apparently, between critics and general readers, aesthetic evaluation is surely as problematic as any other kind. Further, McDonald actually praises Virginia Woolf precisely for "enrich[ing] aesthetic formalism with political and gender consciousness" (86)--so Paterian obsession with the immediacy of the aesthetic encounter is presumably not his ideal. So what is it, exactly, that he means to invoke with his mantra of 'evaluation'? He objects to the levelling effects of considering every cultural artefact equally worthy of critical attention ("To be concerned with everything is, ultimately, to be concerned with nothing" [127]), but he resists the notion of an unchanging canon ("Who would not welcome the rediscovery of unjustly forgotten women writers, or the efforts to hear the voices of the marginalized and disempowered . . . ?" [21]; "the criteria for admission [to the 'canon'] needed to be renovated . . . 'quality' is not an eternal and unchanging facility, but rather one that mutates along with the cultural evolution of a society" [23]). Once you've acknowledged the 'problematics' of literary judgment, how then are you supposed to answer what he proposes is the common reader's key question ("Is this book ... worth my attention and my time?")? For what it's worth, I think most academic critics would in fact be quite happy to answer that question about any book, but first we would all want to develop the question further (along the lines I laid out here, for instance).

Still, I share McDonald's concern about the isolation of academic expertise from today's reading culture more generally. I was struck particularly by his note that "Vintage are launching a new series of classical novels to rival Penguin, but they have decided to use journalists and novelists, not academics, to write the 'Introductions'" (25). If true, this certainly marks a change and a lost opportunity for scholars interested in demonstrating the interest and value of their work to a wider readership. (Journalists and creative writers certainly dominate the book review section of Canada's "national" newspaper, The Globe and Mail.) I think, too, that he is right to be looking at questions of judgment and how they are understood and articulated as one of the flashpoints for misunderstanding or resentment between academics and other readers. I just don't see how his prescription to be more evaluative is an adequate response, unless (at the minimum) it is accompanied by a commitment to showing why the question "Is it of any merit?" requires substantial complication before a worthwhile answer is possible. The responsibility here is not all ours: ideally, readers would want, not to be dictated to, but to be engaged in debate worthy of the books they are considering. Imagine a reader who takes this position, for example:

[Great thinkers can] rouse, excite, and elevate our whole natures—set us thinking, and therefore enable us to escape from the fetters of ancient prejudice and worn-out platitude, or make us perceive beauty in external nature, or set before us new ideals of life, to which we should otherwise have been indifferent. But we have to co-operate in the result, if it is to be of any real value. We are not passive buckets to be pumped into . . . mere receptacles for ready-made ideas, but fellow-creatures capable of being roused into independent activity.

Such a reader wants, not to be told whether a book has "any merit" (McDonald's formulation), but to collaborate in forming a judgment--and accepts responsibility for his or her own "independent activity." Now there's a hope to get even the most moribund critic up off her sickbed! (The quotation, by the way, is from Leslie Stephen's 1881 essay "The Moral Element in Literature.")

One final note: McDonald points to James Wood as an example of a new wave in critical possibilities, "an avowed evaluative critic of the novel" who has "moved not from academia to journalism . . . but rather from journalism to the university" (147). (In my text, he notes that this is not "the usual root" [sic]--one of many egregious editing errors in the volume, including missing words and faulty punctuation.) Wood is certainly an interesting example of someone who approaches criticism as a serious public task requiring both insight and erudition, judgment and learning. Is the highest standard of criticism, though, to be someone with strong opinions and the erudition to explain them well? Is Wood's evaluation of novels really what makes his criticism important, or is it his ability to analyze literary particularities while taking into account (as McDonald argues Woolf does) the situatedness of the work in history and life? I would say the latter; even Wood has trouble articulating his standards (such as his foundational assumption that everything valuable in the modern novel begins with Flaubert) without their seeming like prejudices that ultimately add little to our ability to understand and appreciate other kinds (as the exceptions he often admits to in How Fiction Works seems to confirm--oops, for instance, but then there's Dickens!).

Update: I just noticed John Mullan weighing in (favorably) on McDonald in the TLS here: "there has been something comical about the eagerness of academics to scorn the notion that some books are better than others..." Honestly, (setting aside objections to the incessant pretense that all 'academics' speak with one voice), surely these smart, literate people know that "better" is a meaningless measure unless we can explain better at what? You just can't take the next step in the conversation without refining the question (and simply revising it to "better written" will not do). Shouldn't readers and critics alike have to scrutinize, articulate, and defend the grounds of their evaluations? And isn't the conversation itself, as much as (maybe even more than) the conclusion what will be exciting, revealing, instructive? Finally, is it so terrible to take time for something that is interesting or important, even if on some measures you might conclude it is not the best, even of its kind?