The Case for the Humanities

In response to my previous post, a lurking friend sent me a link to a rousing piece by Mark Slouka from laast September's issue of Harper's. (Thank you! Also, you should comment here some time. Choose a sly pseudonym; we'll never know it's you.) Some excerpts:

You have to admire the skill with which we’ve been outmaneuvered; there’s something almost chess-like in the way the other side has narrowed the field, neutralized lines of attack, co-opted the terms of battle. It’s all about them now; every move we make plays into their hands, confirms their values. Like the narrator in Mayakovsky’s “Conversation with a Tax Collector About Poetry,” we’re being forced to account for ourselves in the other’s idiom, to argue for “the place of the poet/in the workers’ ranks.” It’s not working. . . .

What is taught, at any given time, in any culture, is an expression of what that culture considers important. That much seems undebatable. How “the culture” decides, precisely, on what matters, how openly the debate unfolds—who frames the terms, declares a winner, and signs the check—well, that’s a different matter. Real debate can be short-circuited by orthodoxy, and whether that orthodoxy is enforced through the barrel of a gun or backed by the power of unexamined assumption, the effect is the same.

In our time, orthodoxy is economic. Popular culture fetishizes it, our entertainments salaam to it (how many millions for sinking that putt, accepting that trade?), our artists are ranked by and revered for it. There is no institution wholly apart. Everything submits; everything must, sooner or later, pay fealty to the market; thus cost-benefit analyses on raising children, on cancer medications, on clean water, on the survival of species, including—in the last, last analysis—our own. If humanity has suffered under a more impoverishing delusion, I’m not aware of it. . . .

It can be touching to watch supporters of the arts contorting themselves to fit. In a brochure produced by The Education Commission of the States, titled “The Arts, Education and the Creative Economy,” we learn that supporting the arts in our schools is a good idea because “state and local leaders are realizing that the arts and culture are vital to economic development.” In fact, everyone is realizing it. Several states “have developed initiatives that address the connections between economic growth and the arts and culture.” The New England states have formed “the Creative Economy Council . . . a partnership among business, government and cultural -leaders.” It seems that “a new economy has emerged . . . driven by ideas, information technology and globalization” (by this point, the role of painting, say, is getting a bit murky), and that “for companies and organizations to remain competitive and cutting edge, they must attract and retain individuals who can think creatively.”

You can almost see the air creeping back into the balloon: We can do this! We can make the case to management! We can explain, as Mike Huckabee does, that trimming back funding for the arts would be shortsighted because “experts and futurists warn that the future economy will be driven by the ‘creative class.’” We can cite “numerous studies” affirming that “a student schooled in music improves his or her SAT and ACT scores in math,” and that “creative students are better problem solvers . . . a trait the business world begs for in its workforce.” They’ll see we have some value after all. They’ll let us stay. . .

The case for the humanities is not hard to make, though it can be difficult—to such an extent have we been marginalized, so long have we acceded to that marginalization—not to sound either defensive or naive. The humanities, done right, are the crucible within which our evolving notions of what it means to be fully human are put to the test; they teach us, incrementally, endlessly, not what to do but how to be. Their method is confrontational, their domain unlimited, their “product” not truth but the reasoned search for truth, their “success” something very much like Frost’s momentary stay against confusion. . . .

Alas, despite our eagerness to fit in, to play ball, we still don’t belong, we’re still ignored or infantilized. What we’ve earned is the prerogative of going out with a whimper. Marginalized, self-righteous, we just keep on keeping on, insulted that no one returns our calls, secretly expecting no less.

Read the whole thing here, if, like me, you missed it when it first came out, and then send it to anyone you know with an interest in truly higher education--or any influence! To be sure, Canada is not the United States, and some of the details don't apply here in quite the same way, but the basic idea--that we are making a painful and ultimately self-defeating category mistake when we try to justify our work in the terms provided by, suited for, something altogether different, is just as important in our context. It may be more important here, in fact, because we lack the habit of vigorous public debate and public spiritedness that is such a longstanding part of the American identity. We lack a national myth of self-assertion to buoy (or sell) any revolutionary rhetoric. But on all sides our current political landscape surely displays the inadequacies of our collective sense of "how to be."

Is Arguing for the Practical Utility of Literary Studies Ultimately Self-Defeating?

There's a review of Louis Menand's The Marketplace of Ideas up at Slate:

The Marketplace of Ideas is a diagnostic book, not a prescriptive one, and Menand's proposals for how we might invigorate the academic production of knowledge are added as afterthoughts. He thinks we ought to shorten the length of study required for graduate students; the fact that it takes three years to get a law degree and close to a decade to get a humanities doctorate, he writes, is just another symptom of professors' anxiety about the worth of their trade. We also ought to invite more applications from students who might not have self-selected as academic specialists. The notional aims of the academy—the lively and contentious production of new scholarship—would be better served by making academic boundaries more permeable rather than less.

But in the end, Menand's proposals, smart and coherent though they are, seem less important than the case study provided by his career. He has managed to stay accountable at once to his colleagues in English departments and to his audience of general readers, and he has pulled this off without sacrificing either rigor or range. Menand is proof that an academic can be a great prose stylist, and that a journalist doesn't have to be a dilettante—and that having a commitment to one community enriches one's contribution to the other. He makes it hard to take seriously the rhetoric of crisis, and helps us get on with the important business of creating the problems of the future.

Reading it led me to look back at the excerpt from it published in Harvard Magazine last fall. I had a few ideas in response to it which I wrote about then. One of my remarks at that time was this, made in the context of the difficulty of defining a coherent curriculum when our discipline has become so undisciplined that there is really no way to justify doing one thing rather than another, and thus it becomes increasingly challenging to justify doing any of the things we do at all:

Too often, I think, we resort to a rhetoric of skills (critical thinking!) that (as Menand points out with his remark about the dubious efficiency of studying Joyce to achieve more general ends) rather strips away the point of working through literature to achieve such general, marketable ends.

I heard similar arguments being made again this week as we worked on setting up a "capstone" course for our honours students: in response to my observation that some proposed ingredients were designed to groom the students for graduate school in English (something about which I am currently filled with anxiety, thanks to the kinds of discussions underway here and here and here and here, not to mention these classics of the scarifying 'just don't go' genre), I was reminded that good research and writing skills, as well as oral presentation skills, would benefit students in "law school or publishing or journalism or really any other jobs." And don't forget that we can teach them how to write a cv and a resume, and writing grant applications is not just for SSHRC but something you may have to do in many different contexts.

First of all, I totally agree. Research and writing and oral presentations are all excellent things to be good at, as are synthesizing a range of material and learning to build a strong evidence-based argument and proofreading and making a persuasive case for the value of a project you want other people to pay for and filling out forms and all the other transferable skills we know are part of what our students are learning and practising through their work in our classes.

That said, the more I think about it the more I wonder whether, in playing the game of "we're useful too" we don't actually end up rendering ourselves irrelevant by so happily setting aside the specificities of our work. Isn't literary analysis (not to mention the extensive reading of, you know, literature, that it requires) a fairly roundabout route to those practical goals? If that's what the students really want from us, we could save them a lot of time by not making them read so much Chaucer or Dickens or Joyce or Rushdie, that's for sure. If we play the game that way, it seems to me we are bound to lose eventually. Yes, like writing, critical thinking requires content: "writing across the disciplines" makes sense because you need something to write about, and you can't teach critical thinking unless you have something to think about either. But if you can learn to write anywhere, you can learn to think (and all the rest of it) anywhere too. Why English?

We need a pitch for ourselves that makes literature essential, but not in the self-replicating terms Menand rightly identifies as characteristic of professionalized literary studies (that is, by contributing to our profession according to existing norms and as judged by the profession itself, and the profession alone). We need to justify the study of literature for reasons literature alone can satisfy. We need to stand up, not for our methodology (doing so, after all, has meant warping that methodology to make it look as much as possible like some kind of science, or being so inscrutable that outsiders can't tell what we're doing anyway), but for the poems and novels and plays we take with us into the classroom every day. We need to be arguing, not that studying literature is just another way to do the same things every other discipline does (what university major won't help you with critical thinking, research, writing, and presentation skills?), but that there are things--valuable things--about literature that you just can't get any other way.

I'm thinking the way there is through aesthetics, on the one hand, and ethics on the other, and that the pitch should somehow involve a commitment to the importance of cultural memory and cultural critique, to character building and self-reflection, and to the needs as well as the ideals of civic society. If that sounds old-fashioned, I guess I don't mind, though I'm not sure it needs to be.

In his account of utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill famously urges us away from too narrow a notion of the pleasures to be valued under his system:

Now it is an unquestionable fact that those who are equally acquainted with, and equally capable of appreciating and enjoying, both, do give a most marked preference to the manner of existence which employs their higher faculties. Few human creatures would consent to be changed into any of the lower animals, for a promise of the fullest allowance of a beast's pleasures; no intelligent human being would consent to be a fool, no instructed person would be an ignoramus, no person of feeling and conscience would be selfish and base, even though they should be persuaded that the fool, the dunce, or the rascal is better satisfied with his lot than they are with theirs. They would not resign what they possess more than he for the most complete satisfaction of all the desires which they have in common with him. If they ever fancy they would, it is only in cases of unhappiness so extreme, that to escape from it they would exchange their lot for almost any other, however undesirable in their own eyes. A being of higher faculties requires more to make him happy, is capable probably of more acute suffering, and certainly accessible to it at more points, than one of an inferior type; but in spite of these liabilities, he can never really wish to sink into what he feels to be a lower grade of existence. We may give what explanation we please of this unwillingness; we may attribute it to pride, a name which is given indiscriminately to some of the most and to some of the least estimable feelings of which mankind are capable: we may refer it to the love of liberty and personal independence, an appeal to which was with the Stoics one of the most effective means for the inculcation of it; to the love of power, or to the love of excitement, both of which do really enter into and contribute to it: but its most appropriate appellation is a sense of dignity, which all human beings possess in one form or other, and in some, though by no means in exact, proportion to their higher faculties, and which is so essential a part of the happiness of those in whom it is strong, that nothing which conflicts with it could be, otherwise than momentarily, an object of desire to them.

Whoever supposes that this preference takes place at a sacrifice of happiness- that the superior being, in anything like equal circumstances, is not happier than the inferior- confounds the two very different ideas, of happiness, and content. It is indisputable that the being whose capacities of enjoyment are low, has the greatest chance of having them fully satisfied; and a highly endowed being will always feel that any happiness which he can look for, as the world is constituted, is imperfect. But he can learn to bear its imperfections, if they are at all bearable; and they will not make him envy the being who is indeed unconscious of the imperfections, but only because he feels not at all the good which those imperfections qualify. It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides.

We should similarly urge our administrators away from too narrow an idea of the useful. Our motto could be, "Don't be a pig."

First Day of Classes

Doubtless some ancient Greek has observed that 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.

How many years, exactly, do I have to do this before I no longer feel jittery on the first day?

Back to School Round-Up

My first classes meet tomorrow. Then things get progressively busier and busier and busier...until they stop after December exams are marked and grades submitted. I have done everything I need to prepare for tomorrow except download my class lists, which I have learned to leave to the last minute because of all the adding and dropping going on. (Pet Peeve #873: Dalhousie's long add-drop period, which is designed for the convenience of the customers students, with no regard for the pedagogical chaos it creates as students appear and disappear quite at will for the first two weeks of a term that's barely twelve weeks long anyway. Just how far backwards is one supposed to bend for a student who has missed the first six or eight class meetings and so has no idea about the books, the assignments, or the attendance policies?) (Oh, and there's also Pet Peeve #781: students who register for your class but don't show up for several days, or maybe ever, but don't drop the class so that you know there's a spot available for someone on your waiting list. If only we were empowered by Customer Service the Registrar's Office to remove students from the course if they missed, say, the first two class meetings. Imagine how attendance, and thus engagement, would improve!)

Anyway, it's the time of year when academic work becomes a lot less academic (in that other sense of the word) and practical concerns press heavily on us all. Herewith, therefore, an idiosyncratic round-up of relevant tips or sites for students and professors alike.

How to E-Mail Your Professors. The guidelines in this post seem entirely sensible to me. Even if (like some of the commenters) you quibble with the details, I think everyone would agree that you should approach any communication with your professors (indeed, with anyone you hope will take you seriously) responsibly and professionally. Above all, never forget the First Law of Electronic Communication: once you click "send," you can't get it back. (The same goes for posts on your blog and status updates on Facebook, just btw.)

Dear Students... There are my own somewhat snarky (but still well-founded!) suggestions from this season last year.

I Worked So Hard! In her inimitable style, The Little Professor considers the relationship between effort, ambition, and success. See also her piece on Dealing with Professors. I especially like the reassurance that "most of us ... are not necessarily evil." True: in my own case, it's a lifestyle choice. He he.

On Teaching Evaluations. Professors: remember, it's impossible to please all of your students all of the time. Students: remember, not everyone is just like you, so perhaps what the professor should do instead of whatever you don't like is not as obvious as you think.

Did I Miss Anything? This poem by Tom Wayman remains the best response I know to a professors' most hated question, though this year I think I'll go with "you'll never know, will you?"

ProfHacker. This newly launched site, established by Jason B. Jones of The Salt-Box and collaborators, is already a goldmine full of nuggets of advice about pedagogy, technology (yay, help with wikis!), and academic business (for instance, ideas for reforming bad meetings)

Confessions of a Community College Dean. This blog always has thoughtful, and thought-provoking, discussions of administrative and pedagogical issues. Dalhousie faculty wondering how the university's policies on "Academic Continuity" in the event that the campus is hard hit by the H1N1 virus will affect their plans and policies may want to look at this post and its comment thread.

OWL. Purdue's Online Writing Lab remains one of the best online writing resources I know.

Teaching Writing Across the Curriculum. I like a lot of things about this book; I've adapted the letter-writing assignment described on pages 30-34 for my 19th-century fiction classes and will be using my version of it again this year, after reverting last year to more traditional papers.

More as occasions warrant. In the meantime, time to go test the PowerPoint slides and double-check that all the links on Blackboard are working as planned.

Your Vote Counts!

At least, it might. Pretty soon I have to finalize book orders for a new course I'm teaching in the winter term, a second-year survey of "British Literature Since 1800." I feel strongly that despite the pressure it will put on the very limited time I have available to cover a vast range of material, I can't teach such a course without including at least one 19th-century novel and one 20th-century novel--but picking just one puts a lot of pressure on each choice! I'll be using the second volume of the Norton "Major Authors" anthology, which will take care of poetry, non-fiction, and short fiction. I've been thinking that if you're going to showcase a single Victorian novelist, it simply has to be Dickens, and as we have at most two weeks and I will mostly have students without much literary experience, I've been thinking it has to be one of the shorter Dickens, meaning basically Hard Times or Great Expectations. Before I put the order in, though, I thought I'd see how many people agreed with me and how many would consider someone else the "must read" author of that century, or another book a better choice. So I've put a little poll at the side; feel free to place your vote there and/or to put a suggestion in the comments. For what it's worth, my underlying theme in the course will be something like "what do people think literature is for, and how do they use literary form to get this done?" And the 20th-century novel I've almost decided on is Atonement, for lots of reasons, one of which is that it is kind of a two-for-one deal, given its engagement with Woolf-ian modernism (which we will address through readings from the anthology too).

Weekday Miscellany: Reading, Writing, Teaching

It sure is quiet around the blogosphere, including around here. Must be summer! It's not that I haven't been reading, but for some reason--no particular reason--I haven't been writing up as many of the books I read as I used to. At this point I'm more likely to do a full write-up only if a book has deeply engaged me, for better or for worse. This approach makes some sense, but it also means a certain slackening of discipline, so perhaps I'll try to get back in the habit of finding at least something to say about most of my current reading....we'll see. Right now I'm working on quite a varied collection, including Evidence, by fellow Dalhousian Ian Colford, Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (I'm only 400 pages in, but I'm pretty sure I disagree with Val McDermid's claim that I won't "read a better book this year"), and, of course, Villette. I just finished re-reading Villette this afternoon, and I was completely drawn in by the intensity of both the language and the vicarious experience of Lucy's passions and sorrows. In the end, I think I like her because she's a fighter; she has pride, and wit, and perseverance, even sheer cussedness. But I like her best when she cries out, "My heart will break!" More about that tomorrow. Discussion at The Valve has rather petered out, but I'm hopeful that we'll see a surge of energy around the novel's conclusion. Overall there have not been nearly as many comments as during last year's Adam Bede reading, but on the other hand the comments have been extremely interesting and thoughtful. I kind of wish more of the regular Valve authors had participated...but then, catch me reading some of the stuff they post on! So no hard feelings.

As another project, I've been working on a piece about Trollope at the invitation of Steve Donoghue at Open Letters. Now, I'm very enthusiastic about Trollope, and so, it turns out, is Steve, and I love having this opportunity to put my thoughts into some kind of readable form. It turns out, though, that a lot of the self-conciousness I thought I had fought off by blogging all this time has come back: all the material I have so far seems both dry and obvious, and I'm riddled with anxieties about tone and audience. I guess the only thing to do is to keep writing, in the spirit of Trollope himself, who famously said, "I was once told that the surest aid to the writing of a book was a piece of cobbler’s wax on my chair. I certainly believe in the cobbler’s wax much more than [in] inspiration." (Ah, but he didn't know about the internet, which lets you stay quite fixed in your chair but wander, mentally, far from the task at hand....)

And, as September comes relentlessly closer, even as I cling to the hope that I'll make more real progress on my major research projects, I find I can't stop thinking about my fall and winter classes. I actually really enjoy planning classes, setting up the syllabi and assignments, organizing the reserve lists and Blackboard sites and so on. Of course, this is a good thing--but it's also a bad thing, when in fact I don't need to do this stuff so early and should be leaving it until the very eve of my first class, as apparently most of my colleagues do (hence the crowds at the photocopier in early September). I like the concrete tasks involved: there's something satisfying in checking specific items off the to-do list, like "first day handouts" or "links for BLS" or "study questions for Aurora Floyd". But as a result, I often choose to do these tasks instead of the more amorphous, mentally demanding, never-really-done tasks that make up my research. Really, it's a question of self-discipline, so starting tomorrow, I vow to spend at least half of every work day on research and writing. Or maybe I can use a rewards system: for every two hours spent in concentrated work of other kinds, I can spend half an hour getting something in order for the fall or winter.

One of the biggest distractions related to my upcoming teaching is that I want to try some new things (new to me, that is, not new in any sense of breaking pedagogical ground), and so I have to figure out how to make them work. For a winter term class, for instance, a lecture class on "British Literature Since 1800," I am thinking of a wiki assignment that I hope will help students attend to and process the material they hear in lectures, taking more responsibility for it and engaging with it more creatively. My idea (still in development) is to have each tutorial group responsible for its own wiki; a specific student would be responsible for posting his or her notes on each lecture, with the whole group responsible for editing and amplifying them until, by the end of the term, they have a collaboratively-produced study guide for the whole course. I thought perhaps we could liven things up by making a bit of a game of it, with a prize for the best wiki (pizza for the group?). I quite like this idea, in theory anyway. I try hard to make my lectures engaging (though I now understand that I really do talk pretty fast), but I also try hard to make students see that just sitting listening, passively, is not enough. I imagine that this exercise will not only make sure at least someone is listening hard some of the time, but also reveal to them that each of them may hear me differently, may pick up on an example or an argument and think differently about it. I think the wiki format will give them room to challenge each other's interpretations as well as mine, and to put in counter-arguments, link to additional contexts, and so on. But I am only just learning how to use PBWorks (formerly PBWiki), and before I can assign something of this kind for credit I have to be quite confident about the technology myself, and I have to think hard about how to explain it to them and how to define the requirements and expectations. (If any of you have used wikis in your teaching, advice would be welcome, now, before it's too late!)

I'm also thinking about having the students in my George Eliot graduate seminar help me build up a really good website (very primitive version started here): I've been surprised at the relative dearth of good web resources on GE. Here I'm more confident about the mechanics of it, but I need to think through the academic and scholarly aspects: the what, why, and how of the information we would present. I feel as if this kind of project might help them define an audience and purpose for their work that might motivate them more than sticking to the conventional seminar-presentation-and-paper format, though probably a paper would still be part of the course requirements as well. I asked one of my PhD students, now done with her coursework, what she thought of the idea, and she was very enthusiastic, which was encouraging. But again, more thinking and experimenting to do. At least this, like the wiki idea, is for a course that won't start until January.

For fun, I've also just watched both seasons of In Treatment, which I found totally mesmerizing. Gabriel Byrne can come and listen to me any time.

Napoleon was Defeated at Watergate...

...and George Osborne died during the civil war. Jane Austin eloped with a married man, Charle's Dickins wrote Bleak Houses, and Maggie Tulliver doesn't share the values of her aunts the Duncans. Night is a non-fiction novel, realism is when you decide to write realistically about reality, and unreliable narration is when you don't believe what you are saying.

Yes, I'm grading exams.

Sigh.

Well Marked

A couple of weeks ago, Nigel Beale posted some tips from Mortimer Adler on 'How to Mark Your Books "Fruitfully and Intelligently."' The recommendations sounded pretty familiar, though understandably there's no mention of my own must-have accessory, the Post-It Note. I think anyone who teaches literature has to get over any initial reservations about making a mess on the page; a large part of what we want to convey to our students is that reading is an active process, for one thing, and writing on the text is one way to make sure you are actually engaging with it. Textual annotations can also serve as prompts and guides for lecture and discussion. As someone who mostly teaches 'loose baggy monsters,' I also feel that one of my primary responsibilities is just being able to find important passages to help students make their observations and analyses specific. Herewith, some samples of a well-used teaching copy of Middlemarch, marked up Maitzen style.

First, the Big Picture Post-It Index and Finder's Guide.


Next, the Inside Cover Index to Essential Information:

Here's a sample of a key passage annotated for teaching point of view and free indirect discourse:


And a sample of a Cross-Referencing Post-It--probably the most important kind (it's blue because it marks the blue-green boudoir passages, of course!):


Here's this year's Post-It opus:


See how you can track Jo through the novel? And the hot pink tabs point to the clues to Lady Dedlock's past. Hmmm. It starts to look a little obsessive, doesn't it?

Score One for Our Team!

It's easy to get discouraged when you're teaching first-year English. A lot of people in the room don't really want to be there and don't see why they should care much about the course, except that they need to fufill a writing requirement. Sometimes they even tell you as much. That can make you cranky, defensive, or even a little bit sad. Still, you show up with your game face on and do the best you can to show them reasons to care. You try not to let your own commitment or enthusiasm flag. You teach as if they are all with you, because that's the highest compliment you know how to pay them, as well as the only way to face coming to class again and again. And of course many of them are with you: they are basically well-meaning and open-minded kids, and even if they do see your class primarily as a requirement, they'll put in the effort and see what they learn from it. Still, you're always aware of those lurking skeptics, which is why it is especially nice to hear, from the very student whose earlier words rankled so, "I'm changing my major ... to English."

Dear Students,

Welcome back! I'm sure we're all looking forward to a lively and intellectually stimulating term together. Here are some tips about getting off on the right foot with me. I'm guessing that they'll work with your other professors too.

1. Just because you can e-mail me doesn't mean you should. Sure, there's only one of you in particular, but overall there are a lot of you, and I can't realistically attend to each of you individually. If you remain determined to try the personal approach, take a look at these excellent tips on how to e-mail your professors. Are you sure that you want me to know you as 'hotpants@mymail.com'?
2. Still on the subject of e-mail, do your homework first. You'd be surprised how much information is online about almost everything you are planning to e-mail me about...and if you were really as dedicated to taking my particular course as you claim, you'd probably have found that out already. E-mails that begin "Dear Sir" are a dead give-away.
   
3. Surprise: I know the degree requirements for our programs! I helped draft them! I voted on them! That means I also know whether my course is "absolutely necessary" for you to graduate. I appreciate your apparent interest in getting into it, but let's not start out lying to each other.
4. If you think I'm grouchy, try this site. Or this one. Or, worst of all, this one. When I'm not jet-lagged, I'm actually pretty cheerful and accommodating. And so far, I have answered every one of your messages, usually within 24 hours. I hope that if you do take my course, you'll be prompt and courteous too.
   

See you soon!

My Teachers: An Appreciation

This post is my 200th at Novel Readings, and I'd like to turn it into something of a special occasion.

A month or so ago, finding myself in "a bit of a posting slump" after wrapping up my series on "This Week in My Classes," I asked for suggestions about things to write about. I recently received this nice suggestion by email from Tom Wood: "How about a post on a teacher/scholar whose work has had a significant influence on you?" I really liked this idea, because I still think with admiration and gratitude of several teachers whose influence, support, and guidance shaped my life in ways exceeded only by the love and direction provided by my parents. So, for this 200th post, I thought I'd take up Tom's suggestion and celebrate them.* Now that I'm a teacher myself, I reflect often on the potential we have, in this profession, for making a difference in someone's development. If you had a particularly memorable or influential teacher, I hope you'll post a comment telling me about them!

It is impossible to overestimate the importance the right teacher at the right time can have on a student, though it may be impossible to foresee what will turn to be "right" ahead of time. In my own case, I think of my sixth grade teacher, Mr. James. I hadn't wanted to be assigned to his class, as he had a reputation for being brilliant but eccentric and sort of scary--all of which he was, and indeed still is! But he was the right teacher for me after all: he saw something in my moody, bookish 12-year-old self that caught his interest enough for him to lend me extra books and encourage me to be less fearful about the differences between my own strengths and the qualities that earned other students ease and popularity with their peers. I think, too, of the indomitable Joni MacDougall, who browbeat me into being a better writer and let me, as a nerdy tenth grader, visit her History 12 class to give a presentation on Richard III (when I say "nerdy," I mean that I was the youngest member--at least to my knowledge--of the Richard III Society of Canada). Later, when she had moved to a different school, she invited me to speak to her social studies class on the Industrial Revolution. Both teachers intimidated, bullied, and pressured me; both also, in equal measure, inspired and motivated me. Somehow, they had an idea of what I was capable of that exceeded my own, and by urging me to cultivate my own interest in reading and history, they started me along my career path well before I could have articulated anything like academic ambition for myself.

But probably the most influential moment, and the one I never saw coming, was my enrollment in D. G. Stephens's first-year English class at UBC. I nearly missed it: I had registered for another section, but after the first class meeting I was told that I had to switch to what they called a "Z" section (I had done well on a placement test, I think). So I showed up in Dr. Stephens's class for the next meeting (and, I distinctly remember, had to write an in-class essay on the seven deadly sins, about which everyone else had been forewarned). Prior to taking his class I had fully intended to major in history. I was a lifelong avid reader, but a complete skeptic about literary interpretation: when I thought about literary criticism at all, which was almost never, it seemed to me an exercise in second-guessing, or just plain guessing--in seeing what wasn't there. In retrospect, I think this dismissive attitude was partly the result of growing up in a house full of devoted readers: I took reading for granted and didn't see why or how it could be complicated.

So what happened to me in Dr. Stephens's class? Obviously, whatever it was, it changed my mind about a lot of things. But it wasn't because he was messianic. His teaching style is probably best described as "understated," in fact.** I particularly remember the way he would make a comment and then scan the room, looking for responses, which were slow and hesitant in coming (his demeanor was, or I remember it as being, a bit intimidating--wryly ironic, a bit cynical). Many of his remarks were actually very funny, and I came to believe he was looking around to see if anyone got the joke. (I do that too, now: it's a good way to see who's paying attention.) But I don't remember that he ever cracked a real smile himself. When he asked the class a question, I often wondered what mysterious answer he had in mind. Whatever I was thinking seemed too obvious to be right, and clearly hardly anybody else would hazard a guess. But it was frustrating not to have more discussion, and one day we had read a poem I really liked (it was Robert Graves's "The Cool Web") and I finally put my hand up and ventured some replies to his questions about Graves's language and how particular words fit the central ideas of the poem. He seemed pleased! My answers were good! I knew what he was talking about! Things started to fall into place. He wasn't making things up, because I could see them there too, in the poem, and thinking about how the details of form and language built up the whole piece made the poem better, more pleasurable, more exciting to read. It was like something coming into focus, something I (as someone who had always loved to read both fiction and poetry) had always seen, but had never really looked at.

I actually have all of my old undergraduate essays (it's a good exercise in humility to look them over, especially during marking season). I certainly didn't get all As in his class. What I did get was a sense of the rewards of interpretation, of lingering over details, of making a specific connection with a text. It probably helped me that Dr. Stephens was not a showy teacher, and it certainly helped me that he was a rigorous one as well as a witty one. I didn't give up the idea of majoring in history. Instead, I became the first UBC student to do a combined Honours degree in English and History (back in the olden days, interdisciplinarity was not the norm). I had many excellent teachers in both departments, and superb mentors for my Honours thesis in James Winter and Jonathan Wisenthal. But I dedicated my thesis to Dr. Stephens, with gratitude.

*I realize that Tom's question may have been meant to elicit more about scholarly and critical, rather than personal, influences. I'm still thinking about that dimension of influence. No question, I have learned a lot from many teachers and scholars. But is that the same as having been "influenced" by them? And have any of them actually inspired, moved, or motivated me? (If not, is that a problem or a loss?)

**My search of the UBC website for pictures or other details about Dr. Stephens to link to revealed that he won a "Master Teacher" award in 1974 and 1977 (fully a decade before I took his class), so clearly I wasn't the only student he impressed. This raises the further question for me of whether UBC had, at that time, a deliberate policy of putting senior and well-regarded faculty in their first-year classrooms.

A Note on Course Evaluations as a Guide to Future Conduct

They don't help (much). Here's why...

Should I change the reading list next year?

"There were a LOT of texts. Too many, really. It was impossible to keep up with the readings."

"It would have been interesting to add a few more books...I found the course load light enough that a few more (enjoyable) readings wouldn't have been oppressive."

"I loved the Moonstone--everything comes back to that."

"I really enjoyed the Moonstone; I thought it was the most interesting and hard to figure out."

"Great reading list except for the Moonstone. It was too long and boring."

"I think one of my favourite books from this course is The Murder of Roger Ackroyd."

"I thought Roger Ackroyd was unfair and not a clear example of Christie's usual style."

"Knots and Crosses a bit freaky."

"Do not drop Knots and Crosses, best book I have ever read."

"I found it more stimulating to examine actual books and stories rather than musty old course books." [?]

I know I talk quickly, but how much of a problem is that, really?

"Her lectures were indecipherable because of how rapidly she spoke."

"Maitzen speaks too fast. Slowing down would be helpful to take clear notes."

"I found the lectures interesting and stimulating (I didn't fall asleep in class once)."

"I do not think you talk too fast. I thoroughly enjoyed this class and look forward to taking classes taught by you in the future."

"I actually liked Maitzen's upbeat, fast-talking teaching style. It kept me from being bored and it kept me really listening."

"She spoke too quickly at times; it was difficult to take notes in this manner."

"I do not find she speaks too quickly. People need to take more condensed notes."

What about the assignment structure and methods of evaluation?

"Assignments are a great way of getting us to think about the material. 75-word limit was also a good challenge."

"I liked the way we had two assignments, and the in-class quizzes definitely were motivation to stay on track in class."

"I think the homework assignment format should be re-evaluated."

"The assignments were short and concise while still being challenging, which was a nice change from lengthy papers."

"Your response to the first assignment was completely inappropriate and extreme, you wasted 2 classes and called the class 'illiterate.'"

"I particularly appreciated the amount of time you dedicated to correcting in class the mistakes made on assignments. It genuinely helped and clarified my understanding of good writing!"

"She gives great constructive feedback on assignments and even gives us exercises that would help with our assignments."

"Actually enjoyed quizzes, felt questions were fair."

"For the quizzes I felt that there were too many questions on what were sometimes subtle statements made in class."

"Increase the value of attendance."

"Unsympathetic with the occasional absence."

"Group work was a nice change of pace."

"I hate group work and found those classes monotonous and unhelpful."

And the intellectual substance?

"Maitzen posed questions that forced you to think!"

"Extremely interesting books were featured and taught in an intellectually stimulating manner."

"Often lecture topics were repetitive or had little to do with the day's reading."

"Lectures were quick-paced and extremely informative. I never wanted to miss a class because so much material was covered in each lecture."

"Feminism within the texts wasn't over-emphasized."

"TOO MUCH FEMINISM. This isn't gender studies."

So, overall how did I do?

"The teaching was mediocre."

"One of the best profs I have had at Dal."

"No complaints."

"Pretty successful."

"Sort of funny."

"A great prof, very funny."

"______"

"Dr. Maitzen is a superstar!"

Anything else to add?

"Thanks for keeping a blog--helps with some insight from time to time."

I think the problem should be obvious. It's not that the feedback isn't welcomed or taken seriously, but if it's not at all consistent, it's hard to do anything in particular in response!

I should say (just for the record) that these are not the actual questions on our departmental course evaluation forms; these are the things I worry about as I look ahead to next year's classes. I specifically asked them about the fast talking, as it has come up a few times in my evaluations before. All of the responses, though, are taken verbatim from the forms.

Updated Classics

At the TLS, Margaret Reynolds calls our attention to the relaunch of the Oxford World's Classics editions. The article includes a survey of some available editions of Jane Eyre. A sample:

Oxford World's Classics
Jacket Clean and striking but she's too sulky.
Introduction By Oxford prof Sally Shuttleworth. Covers all bases and is excellent on the ending.
Text Based on first edition of 1847. Actual print a bit small.
Extra material Plenty on the text and publication of the novel.
Price £5.99. Good value.

Penguin Classics (Black)
Jacket A painting by Millais. Jane would never have worn this dress.
Introduction By novelist and critic Stevie Davies. Very good on the political context.
Text Revised edition of 1848, with some emendations. Clear print.
Extra material Chronology, notes and “Opinions of the Press”.
Price £5.99.

Vintage Classics
Jacket Clever, intriguing and spot on for the story.
Introduction No.
Text Based on the revised edition of 1848. Nice print.
Extra material Little life of Charlotte. Quote from Sarah Waters: "One of the most perfectly structured novels of all time". Meaning?
Price £5.99. Hmm.

I'm not entirely sure that this is quite the information I need to make my selection. Let's see: put me down for one copy of the sulky version with the introduction that "covers all bases" (I'm sure I usually miss one or two in my lectures) and one copy with the "clear print" for my aging eyes... Also, a testimonial about novel structure from the author of Fingersmith is good enough for me! The slide-show of the various covers is nice. I'd like to point out a good option that gets no mention at the TLS:

Broadview Edition
Jacket excellent-- see illustration at right
Introduction by Richard Nemesvari (my near neighbour, at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish): thorough and interesting.
Extra material is Broadview's specialty; in addition to the introduction and a chronology of Charlotte Bronte's life and publications, this edition includes selected correspondence as well as contemporary pieces on governesses, girls' education, race, and empire
Price Wow--only £4.99! ($12.95 US or Canadian)

Further information on the OUP relaunch is to be found at the OUP blog, where "Senior Commissioning Editor" (now that's a title) Judith Luna explains,

We wanted a new look that would be fresh and contemporary and appeal to general readers and browsers who might previously have thought Oxford World’s Classics were a bit too academic for them. So we have a clean white title panel, and white back and spine, and we have chosen dramatic crops of appropriate illustrations to intrigue and entice the reader. We also wanted a sense of continuity with the old look, so we have retained a red strip at the top of the spine and back cover, and added a tantalizing detail from the cover image in a small thumbnail on the spine (older readers may remember that we used to have a similar feature on a previous incarnation of the series, but at the bottom of the spine, not the top). We also chose a new typeface for the cover, Capitolium, a modern take on classic lettering, based on classical Roman inscriptions and Renaissance calligraphy and designed by Gerard Unger. The insides of the books are unchanged, and we will continue to publish high-quality editions and translations with outstanding introductions and notes at truly affordable prices, editions that are designed to satisfy the needs not just of students, but of the lively general reader as well.

Since I've already ordered my fall term books, including many World's Classics titles, I'm relieved to hear that the "insides are unchanged," though it strikes me, given this, that they are rather encouraging (or expecting) people to judge a book by its cover. Still, I'll be jealous if my students all have spiffy new covers on their books while I'm still wielding my battered old versions. (Hint to OUP reps: send Maitzen new desk copies...) (On the other hand, replacing all the post-its in my teaching copies would be a lot of work. There are a lot of them, because I consider it one of my primary obligations when teaching, say, Bleak House, to be able to find key passages quickly. Browsing through 900 pages muttering "I know it's here somewhere" wastes a lot of class time.)

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.

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?

Why I Teach Literature" (with some thoughts about James Wood appended)

Not long ago there was a 'meme' going around on the question "Why Do I Teach Literature?" (Joseph Kugelmass's comments on this topic at The Valve include links to further contributors). Reading around in my files today (where I am in search of an organizing pattern for future research--but that's another post for another day) I came across this passage and it struck me as nicely encapsulating both the central problem of teaching literature (that it is, paradoxically, always about feeling as well as knowing) and its greatest lure:

Critics, before and after Northrop Frye, have distinguished between literature and experience and literature and knowledge. The distinction, though plausible in some theoretical contexts, blurs nearly every day, in nearly every classroom. I am content that it blurs. Unlike physicists, who teach not nature but physics, we teach both literature (how it feels, how it thinks, to have read a literary work) and the rules and facts about reading literature. As Gertrude Stein once said to an obtuse interviewer: "But after all you must enjoy my writing and if you enjoy it you understand it. If you did not enjoy it, why do you make a fuss about it?" That is why I finally became a teacher of literature, to live in the vicinity of that joy.

This is from Ihab Hassan's essay "Confessions of a Reluctant Critic or, The Resistance to Literature" (New Literary History 24, 1993). Other critics have also written eloquently about the experience of following that lure of joy into a professional life that does not--perhaps cannot--reinforce or reward it, and may even work actively against it. John McGowan, for instance, in his book Democracy's Children (2002), notes,

[T]here remains a tension between the experience of reading literature and the paths followed in studying. . . . To give one's allegiance to the academic forms through which literature is discussed and taught is to withdraw (at least partly) allegiance to literature itself" (65).

25 Years after Hassan's remarks, I think it remains true that it is in the classroom rather than in their scholarship that many academic literary critics feel and communicate their love of their subject. One of the reasons I shifted research directions altogether a few years ago (significantly, after achieving the professional security of tenure) was that I wanted my research activities to give me, or be driven by, the same kind of intellectual and affective immediacy I find in teaching, and I couldn't see how that would happen if, among other things, much of my work continued to be on second-rate material, no matter how historically revealing it was--or how useful for generating publishable, if niche, material of my own. To a large extent I succeeded, and as an unanticipated bonus, I think I became a better teacher because of the synergy that developed between my class preparation and my other work. It's interesting, actually, that it seems to be widely taken for granted (or is it?) that undergraduate teaching and scholarly research leading to publication are very different kinds of things, and overwhelmingly the professional priority is with the latter--even though (or, perhaps, because) its tendency is to drive all joy away!

Follow-Up (to be developed later): Also as part of sorting through my files, I've been re-reading some of the James Wood essays I've gathered up, and (aside from being overwhelmed with envy at his erudition, elegant style, and intelligent craftsmanship as an essayist), I'm struck by how much closer they are to the kind of criticism we--or at least I--do in the classroom than anything that ordinarily passes for academic or professional criticism (and here I think it's important to distinguish, as mainstream writers often don't, between criticism and reviewing). It's not that I think I'm as smart, articulate, or insightful as Wood,or as well-read either, though I hope I have my good moments! My point is really about the genre of criticism he works in, which seems to me to lie somewhere in between the poles of academic scholarship (which he clearly knows about, but relies on more implicitly than explicitly most of the time) and popular book reviews (which would rarely seek the kind of broad perspective or level of sophisticated analysis he deploys). I've ordered How Fiction works from The Book Depository, along with The Irresponsible Self, and I've got The Broken Estate from the library. I sense a Wood-fest coming on, perhaps as a way to draw together some of the scattered elements of my recent browsing and brooding about the function of criticism at the present time. Conveniently, as a motivator, there's a conference panel on Victorian criticism for which I'm hoping to submit an abstract. One of the questions in the CFP is about what the relationships envisaged by the Victorians between "different forms of cultural production and the work of the critic" might tell us "about how criticism was imagined during the Victorian era, and what they might tell us about the more professionalized forms of criticism practiced today." If this isn't an opportunity (and a challenge) for me to make something of my work on the Broadview anthology along with the 'work' I've been doing on this blog, I don't know what is! Whether anyone would want to hear it is, of course, another matter altogether.

Fun with Miss Clack (with a nod to the 'value' of the humanities)

My Mystery and Detective Fiction class was great fun this morning--and educational, too! We focused on Miss Clack, one of Collins's narrators in The Moonstone, first as an example of first-person narration, reading some excerpts closely to see how her voice reveals her character, in the manner of a dramatic monologue (allusions to Browning are inevitable, and often helpful, as students are not always accustomed to paying the same kind of minute attention to fictional speakers as they are to poetic ones). As I collected students' insights and observations about the particular words, phrases, and intonations that give the game away for her, we found many connections between her individual quirks and flaws (so tremendously comic, as rendered by Collins) and themes of the novel--from the limitations of eye-witness testimony to the disruptive potential of sexual desire. Here are two of the excerpts we examined:

1. I find my insignificant existence suddenly remembered by Mr. Franklin Blake. My wealthy relative — would that I could add my spiritually-wealthy relative! — writes, without even an attempt at disguising that he wants something of me. The whim has seized him to stir up the deplorable scandal of the Moonstone: and I am to help him by writing the account of what I myself witnessed while visiting at Aunt Verinder’s house in London. Pecuniary remuneration is offered to me — with the want of feeling peculiar to the rich. I am to re-open wounds that Time has barely closed; I am to recall the most intensely painful remembrances — and this done, I am to feel myself compensated by a new laceration, in the shape of Mr. Blake’s cheque. My nature is weak. It cost me a hard struggle, before Christian humility conquered sinful pride, and self-denial accepted the cheque.

2. When I answered for a loving reception of him at the Mothers’ Small-Clothes, the grateful heart of our Christian Hero overflowed. He pressed my hands alternately to his lips. Overwhelmed by the exquisite triumph of having got him back among us, I let him do what he liked with my hands. I closed my eyes. I felt my head, in an ecstasy of spiritual self-forgetfulness, sinking on his shoulder. In a moment more I should certainly have swooned away in his arms, but for an interruption from the outer world, which brought me to myself again.

Who wouldn't want to "gloss" these passages? This session was a good reminder to me that if you are pretty well prepared, you don't need to script everything in order to generate both interest and substance for your students. The issue of relying on lecture notes has been discussed a couple of times recently at RYS (scanning the posts over there is a kind of guilty pleasure for me--the folks over there say some of the things I'm sure we all think at times but bite back because, well, we're polite). "Winging it" is risky, though (I certainly didn't come with just my book and a prayer): you have to have some idea of where you hope the discussion will go, and you also need the cooperation of your students. This group is great, especially for a class its size (about 70): plenty of bright, curious, smart people willing to raise their hand and add something. Mind you, Miss Clack makes our work easy by being so thoroughly despicable and yet so entertaining. Now, what exactly is our Christian Hero doing with her hands?

2 hours later: I had nearly as much fun with a good discussion of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in my 'woman question' seminar, where formal issues about point of view fed into analyses of the way Helen and Huntingdon's marriage exposes the critical gaps between the ideal and the reality. Without actual power, influence is no better than nagging; without accountability, power mutates rapidly into abuse. As well as dramatizing moral crises, the novel is formally organized to both teach and model moral development. Mornings like these invigorate me, intellectually but also emotionally. With all these heavy discussions going around about the "value" of the humanities and why we do what we do and dare to love it, it's a relief to be in a context where that value at least feels palpable, even if it is difficult to articulate it.

Next Term in My Classes: An Anticipation

I haven't finished with this term's classes yet (my 19thC Novel students wrote their exam this afternoon, and I have papers coming in tomorrow and Friday)--but I've raised my head just high enough above water to notice that next term's classes aren't quite ready to be launched yet. If I don't want to be competing for the photocopier with everyone else on January 7, I'd better get the details sorted soon. Because book orders were due months ago, though, I do at least know what we'll be reading, and, since I'm a stickler for chronological order, what order we'll read them in. Here's what's in store:

English 2040, Mystery and Detective Fiction:

• The Oxford Book of Detective Stories, with all kinds of goodies classic and contemporary
• Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone
• Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
• Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon
• P. D. James, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman
• Sue Grafton, 'A' is for Alibi
• Ian Rankin, Knots and Crosses
  

English 4604, The Victorian 'Woman Question':

• Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors, ed. Susan Hamilton (I agree with the blurb calling this "an indispensable volume")
• J. S. Mill, The Subjection of Women
• Anne Bronte, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
• Ellen Wood, East Lynne
• Anthony Trollope, He Knew He Was Right
• George Eliot, Middlemarch
• George Gissing, The Odd Women
  

I've enjoyed Mystery and Detective Fiction a lot when I've done it before. Part of the fun is getting outside my usual territory a bit, not just in the reading list but in some of the questions we kick around, such as why Agatha Christie, apparently the best-selling English language author of all time, is not a staple in literature classes, or how to acknowledge the impositions of genre conventions or requirements without dismissing the results (for instance, characterization is a victim of the puzzle mystery form, since you need a lot of plausible suspects). I'm looking forward to it.

But this year I'm particularly excited and apprehensive about the 'Woman Question' class. I've taught it several times before with a mixed genre reading list that I have always thought was very successful: lots of formal and thematic variety, lots of stimulating juxtapositions. I always particularly enjoy the 'fallen woman' cluster: "Jenny," "A Castaway," "Lizzie Leigh," "Gone Under," Aurora Leigh, The Mill on the Floss.... But I thought it would be good for me to shake things up a bit, so I reconceptualized it as a fiction-only course with a special focus on novels that take us past the 'matrimonial barrier' (or, in the case of Gissing, see that barrier as insurmountable). You see where this got me, though: with more pages than I have ever assigned in any one course before. Book ordering somehow makes me all giddy with the sense of possibilities--and now I'm facing the consequences. I'm not regretting my choices; I'm just well aware that careful planning and handling is called for. While I was invigilating my exam today, I doodled around with ideas for assignments that would keep some kind of steady buzz going about the readings without overwhelming the students with busywork when they need to keep reading (and reading and reading). I'm a firm believer in the pedagogical value of frequent short written pieces, so that they can practice focusing and expressing their insights and get regular feedback as they move towards their big essays. I also like to make sure everyone has to write at least something on everything we read! But I want a lighter touch than usual this time, I think, so that they stay energetic but also engaged. Given what I've been doing myself lately, naturally I've been wondering about some kind of class blog arrangement. BLS (once WebCT) has a blog option built in which would overcome some of the privacy issues that arise if you required students to post their ideas in an open-access forum. Ideas welcome, blog-ish or otherwise! I have a couple of weeks to make my final decisions.

And then before too much longer (since they are doing the timetable so early this year, with an eye to recruiting, I think) we'll be facing requests for course descriptions for 2008-9 [update: they're wanted by January 25, as it turns out--yikes]. I doodled around with ideas for those too today, resolving (among other things) that I really am going to take a break from Jude in the Dickens to Hardy course. I'm thinking Tess: maybe a change is as good as a rest? Hey--I could do a whole 'bad girls' theme, with Maggie, and Lady Audley, maybe Bleak House, and Ruth... (you see how it goes!).

This Week in My Classes (November 20, 2007)

The great Middlemarch festival is, sadly, over for this year (well, for this term, at any rate--I get to go through it again in my winter seminar on the Victorian 'woman question'). Here's what's up:

1. 19th-Century Novel. This course is in the Calendar as "The 19th-Century British Novel from Dickens to Hardy." So we started with Great Expectations and now we've arrived at Jude the Obscure. Perhaps it's not the kindest thing in the world to wrap up our term's work with a novel that focuses on ruined hopes, blighted scholarly aspirations, failed love, and death. On the other hand, usually (to my dismay) my students love this stuff. Certainly we will find lots of continuities between Jude and our other readings, despite some dramatic differences in tone or attitude. We began with Trollope's quizzical look at wordliness in the Church of England, for instance: though it's hard to imagine two books that read more differently than Jude and The Warden, both urge us to consider the role of institutionalized religion in social as well as spiritual affairs. Great Expectations gives us another ambitious young man whose aspirations are complicated, if not wholly dashed--and Estella, as well as Lady Audley, provides intriguing points of comparison to both Arabella and Sue. Middlemarch sets us up to consider Hardy's indictment of social mores, especially in relation to marriage; we'll also talk about both novels' inquiry into morality, especially in the absence of faith. I usually take as the epigraph for our class work on the novel the narrator's remark, "nobody did come, because nobody does." (There's also a late Hardy poem called "Nobody Comes.") I don't usually find much to say about the form of the novel, though when we get to Father Time we'll consider what this heavy-handed allegorical element is doing in what seemed, until then, like a realist novel, and we'll talk about it a bit in terms of tragedy. I find Hardy a pretty clunky stylist; there's not much aesthetic pleasure in his sentences for me.

2. Victorian Women Writers. Here we are taking up our last 'lady novelist' with Margaret Oliphant's Hester. We began the course with Oliphant's Autobiography, in which she famously remarks that nobody will ever speak of her in the same breath as George Eliot. While putting one of her novels up right after Middlemarch might seem a bit unfair, well, she asks for it. And Hester is reading well so far, on this time through. It's particularly interesting to come at Hester herself after spending so much time with Margaret (in North and South) and Dorothea: all these energetic young women looking so hard for something useful to do! They make Jane Eyre seem quite self-centered...interesting how much more attractive she has been to feminist critics. The editors of our edition remark that Oliphant shares the "mysterious literalness" of Trollope. That seems right to me; as I've remarked before, both writers seem to have a kind of "a spade is just a spade" quality to their plots and prose, making symbolic readings seem perverse. At the same time, the social reach of the story is extensive. Oliphant's characterizations, though they strike me as somewhat more haphazard than Eliot's, are one of her strengths, I think. Along with the novel, we're reading some critics who make various interesting and fairly plausible arguments for the subversive potential of Oliphant's approach to literary conventions, or for the ways her pragmatic approach to novel-writing undercuts some kinds of claims about women's relationship to literary authority or tradition. I think (I hope) the relative lack of criticism about Hester in particular will be liberating for our class discussion. Jane Eyre and Middlemarch are especially difficult to work with because it seems so difficult to find something fresh to say.

Blogging Talk Follow-Up

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

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

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

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

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

Links:

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

I. Questions About Academic Publishing

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

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

Erin O'Connor, "Relatively Sincere"Lisa Ruddick, "The Near Enemy of the Humanities is Professionalism"

III. Blogging in Particular

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

IV. Varieties of Literary and Academic Blogs (samples)

Bookish
DoveGreyReader
Conversational Reading
The Elegant Variation
The Reading Experience
PaperCuts

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

V. Long-time Bloggers Reflect

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