This Week in My Classes

The warm-up period is over: now we're really getting down to work.

1. English 3032, 19thC Novel. This week, we start Great Expectations. In addition to placing the novel in the context of Dickens's career and a range of social and intellectual issues (from the alienation induced by modern urban professional society, to anxieties about the moral implications of Darwinism), I like to focus on Pip's retrospective narration and the ways his personal development prepares him, ultimately, to become the kind of man (especially the kind of "gentleman") who is capable of telling us this story. Great Expectations is also good for shaking up casually-held stereotypes about Victorian 'realism,' as from Pip's palindromic name to Miss Havisham's wedding feast to Wemmick's castle to Magwitch's splendidly eerie reappearance, nearly every element in the novel pressures us to read it literarily rather than mimetically. Plus, there's Joe's hat falling off the mantel in Volume II Chapter 8...

2. English 5465, Victorian Women Writers. Here, we are taking one more look at the 'real' life of a Victorian woman novelist before turning our attention to the novels themselves. But with Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bronte, we have the added interest of one Victorian woman writer writing about another, and in the process exploring the ideas of femininity, authorship, vocation, and duty that preoccupied them both, though in different ways, throughout their writing careers. Last week we considered Margaret Oliphant's writing her own story in response to a literary representation of George Eliot's life (she points to Cross's biography as having prompted her to begin the Autobiography). But Oliphant has been reading Gaskell's Life of CB as well, so as we read on, we are accumulating a range of interrelated ideas about these women and their work--from them and from their respondents, interpreters, and critics--to carry forward with us into our analysis of the fiction they produced. In class we struggled somewhat with the idea of Oliphant's Autobiography as a literary text because at times both its form and its content seem so unselfconscious, spontaneous, and diary-like that we weren't confident attributing intent or design (though we also considered, of course, that it has literary qualities and other effects regardless of how deliberately they were developed). Gaskell's biography of Bronte is much more conspicuously constructed with its own aims and purposes. Critics have disputed how far Gaskell's stated goals--such as defending Bronte against her critics and presenting a sympathetic portrait of someone we are often reminded was Gaskell's "dear friend"--are sincere or unproblematic and how much she is using Bronte as a prop to establish her own literary credentials or to resolve larger debates about the "vexed question of sex" in authorship, as she calls it (she is emphatic that whatever their domestic responsibilities, women also have a duty to use their God-given talents, even if that means stepping outside the 'normal' bounds of female propriety). I expect we will have some good discussion along these lines. Reading The Life of Charlotte Bronte right after Oliphant's Autobiography should also prompt some conversation about their very different views and experiences of being women writers.

Compact Classics

We've known these were coming for a while, but somehow the news hit me harder seeing this up on Amazon. I'm not sure what people will think they have read after finishing one of these volumes. A novel is not identical with its plot summary, after all: the complete reading experience includes aesthetic, formal, and intellectual aspects as well. And cutting is hardly a neutral activity: every choice represents an interpretation as well as a judgment (one reader's excess verbiage is another's delight). A further concern: I already feel I need to see most adaptations of novels I teach so that I can anticipate ways students may conflate original and adaptation (or recognize the signs that they have substituted watching for reading). Will I have to read these mutant versions too?

Blogs and Plagiarism

I check my sitemeter intermittently to see what searches land people over here. The results usually surprise me: not long ago I noticed that a lot of people seemed to end up here because they were looking for information on Margaret Oliphant, for instance, and lately a lot of people are looking for information on James Wood, on Brick Lane, and on Black and Blue. There is, of course, no way to know why people are searching these topics (though I think it's safe to assume it's not because they are anxious to know what I in particular have to say about them). Now, though, I'm seeing signs of the new academic term being underway--or at least, that's what it looks like--as more searches appear to come from students looking to get a little direct 'help' with their homework. Someone recently Googled "conclusion for emotional/moral paper," for instance, and ended up at my post on George Eliot and non-belief, while another Googled "revision questions Middlemarch" and ended up at my post on A.S. Byatt. Of course, I can't be sure that the former was hoping to find a conclusion for a paper s/he was supposed to write, or that the latter was hoping to answer whatever questions had been provided. Like many Google search strings, these ones are elliptical and ambiguous. And I don't expect that these (or other searchers with impure intentions) find much help on this site--these ones didn't stay long, anyway, which I incline to think is a good sign. But this has prompted me to think more about something that worried me when I began doing this, namely whether by blogging I am contributing to the problem of plagiarism that plagues me in my more formal role as a teacher and professional. I see that Acephalous and his commenters have been over this territory as well, and in particular over the problem that apparently TurnItIn.Com does not do well at catching blog posts. One suggestion made was that bloggers should stick to a 'bloggy' style, so that bits cut and pasted into supposedly formal assignments would stand out; the reasonable response was, basically, that academic bloggers hope to generate high quality material, and insisting on a highly colloquial style or otherwise restricting the character or form of blog posts would defeat that aim. Given all the other information readily available online, I guess I don't see that blogging literary texts (or potential essay topics) really gives would-be plagiarists that much more to work with / steal from. But teachers should presumably be aware that TurnItIn is not a one-size-fits-all solution and that you should also run key phrases through search engines yourself. I also recently heard an interesting story about plagiarism running the other way, from someone's published work to someone's blog--though what someone would achieve by turning things around that way rather eludes me. In any case, students should be aware that if they can find a source on the Internet, so can their instructors, and also that if their instructors post course-related material on a blog, they will almost certainly recognize their own ideas or phrases if their students incorporate them into their assignments.

Good Intentions Lead to Piles...

...of books, that is!

As the teaching term gets underway, one's good intentions regarding research are mostly (at least in my experience) manifested through stacks of books you fully intend (honest!) to read during the next interval you have set aside (ever the optimist!) for concentrated research time...but the stacks rarely diminish much, because (a) that time gets stolen away by meetings, because strictly speaking you don't really have something scheduled for that time and it's the only time the six other people on the committee can meet (I know, administration is important too), and (b) the other way you prove that, nonetheless, you are going to make progress on your research projects is that you drop by the library on your way back from class to pick up a few more books from your working bibliography (and you were going there anyway to get some caffeine, to keep you awake during your next meeting). Here are my most recent additions:

1. Robert Scholes, The Rise and Fall of English (This one will be sort of a 'reread,' but I felt I needed a refresher look.)
2. Richard Ohmann, English in America (ha--"Why, in America, they haven't used it for years!"--My Fair Lady)
3. Richard Ohmann, Politics of Knowledge (or, apparently, English in America 25 years later)
4. Jonathan Arac, Critical Genealogies
5. Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb, eds., Just Being Difficult?: Academic Writing in the Public Arena (this looks like an interesting review but I don't have a subscription)
   

On the bright side, these will all make a nice break--or a change, at least--from the emotional devastation of Oliphant's Autobiography or (next week's adventure in literature, depression, and death) Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bronte.

This Week in My Classes

Here's what my students and I will be reading and talking about this week:

1. English 3032, 19th-Century Novel: We are finishing up Trollope's The Warden, with a special focus on Trollope's redefinition of heroism on a small scale and on his interest in the way public questions are always "a conglomeration of private interests." We'll also be looking at the role of his intrusive narrator, and at his parodies of Carlyle (as Dr. Pessimist Anticant) and Dickens (as Mr Popular Sentiment) as he works towards his own theory of fiction. "What story was ever written without a demon?" he asks in Chapter XV; "What novel, what history, what work of any sort, what world, would be perfect without existing principles both of good and evil?" As every reader of The Warden comes to see, this novel does not allow us to perceive the world as consisting of such extremes, despite John Bold's frustrated exclamation, "If there be a devil, a real devil here on earth, it is Dr. Grantly."

2. English 5465, Victorian Women Writers: This week it's Margaret Oliphant's Autobiography, which shifts us sharply away from last week's more abstract discussion of Victorian arguments over femininity and women's 'mission' into a life full of contradictions and compromises, struggle and suffering (economic and mental). While Oliphant's consideration of her own fiction, and her comparisons (often rueful or resentful) between her own hard-earned modest success and her more triumphant literary 'sisters' (especially George Eliot and Charlotte Bronte) will be of much interest to us, I am sure we will also talk about the form, mode, and tone of the Autobiography itself, with its long passages of heartbreaking lamentation for lost children interwoven with (often, seeming to slice apart) its record of ordinary domestic life and travels. Here's an excerpt from just after the death of Maggie, aged 10, after a sudden and very brief illness:

I ask myself why, why, and I cannot find any answer. I had but one woman-child and she was just beginning to sympathize with me, to comfort me, and at this dear moment, her little heart expanding, her little mind growing, her sweet life blossoming day by day, God has taken her away out of my arms and refuses to hear my cry and prayer. My heart feels dead. . . . Now I have to go limping and anxious through the world all the days of my life. . . . Oh God forgive me and help me. O God convey to me a sense of my darling's happiness, a feeling that she will not forget me and that I shall find her again, and have pity upon a poor heartbroken creature who does not know what she is saying. . . .Those curls I was so proud of were never more beautiful than when they were all rippling back with the gold string through them from her dear head as she lay ill, and when they lay all peaceful and still with her white wreath of hyacinths and snowdrops, she as as lovely as the angel she is. Oh my child, my child.

She would lose all of her children before her own death, "writing steadily," as she says, "all the time" to support the ne'er-do-well sons who survived into adulthood and the array of relatives who came to depend on her industry and charity. The poignant conclusion:

And now here I am all alone.
I cannot write anymore.

Carlyle Letters Online

A fabulous new resource has just been opened up online by Duke University Press: the letters of Jane and Thomas Carlyle. I've only peered around briefly, but the site is very attractive and seems easy to use. More to the point, it gives us easy access to all kinds of gems, such as this one, from TC to Elizabeth Gaskell just after the publication of Mary Barton:

Dear Madam (for I catch the treble of that fine melodious voice very well),—We have read your Book here, my Wife first and then I; both of us with real pleasure. A beautiful, cheerfully pious, social, clear and observant character is everywhere recogniseable in the writer, which surely is the welcomest sight any writer can shew us in his books; your field moreover is new, important, full of rich materials (which, as is usual, required a soul of some opulence to recognise them as rich): the result is a Book seeming to take its place far above the ordinary garbage of Novels,—a Book which every intelligent person may read with entertainment, and which it will do every one some good to read. I gratefully accept it as a real contribution (almost the first real one) towards developing a huge subject, which has lain dumb too long, and really ought to speak for itself, and tell us its meaning a little, if there be any voice in it at all! Speech, or Literature (which is, or should be, Select-Speech) could hardly find a more rational function, I think, at present.

The letters are fully indexed and footnoted. Thanks to Jack Kolb on the Victoria listserv for making sure we found out about this right away! I can hardly wait to browse around some more.

Exit Rebus?

From The Guardian this week:

Rankin readers have known for several years that some kind of end was coming. Most series' authors freeze their heroes' birth-dates: realistically, John Le Carré's George Smiley and PD James's Adam Dalgliesh would have been beyond the care of the insurance industry in their later adventures. Rebus, however, has always passed a birthday during or between books and so his retirement from the force was always scheduled for November 2006, across 10 days of which Exit Music is set. Even this, as Rankin has scrupulously acknowledged in interviews, is strictly fantastical. Most cops get out as soon as they have piled enough years into their pension.

But the novels have always made it clear that Rebus remains a policeman because there is nothing else he can bear to be - he has failed in spells as husband, father, even, perhaps, as human being - and so Exit Music is underscored with a double line of heavy regret, Rebus wanting to go no more than the reader wishes him to. (Read the rest here--don't worry, no spoilers!)

I'll certainly be sorry to see him go; I'm a big fan of this series, which shows how an author can work within the structures and strictures of genre fiction to accomplish a wide range of literary and other effects. (P.D. James, another of my favourites, has said explicitly that the clear structure of detective stories frees her up to concentrate on other aspects of her fiction.*) I have taught the first Rebus novel, Knots and Crosses, twice in my course on Mystery and Detective Fiction (and plan to assign it again this winter), not because I think it's the best of the bunch but because Rankin works so well in it both with and against key elements of its genre that it 'teaches well,' as those of us in the lit biz say. Rankin claims that he did not intend to write a mystery novel (when I was prepping Knots and Crosses, I came across a story, perhaps an interview, in which he claims to have been dismayed to find it filed under mysteries rather than under fiction or literature). He was actually working on a Ph.D. in literature when he turned to writing fiction; he is wittily but ruthlessly dismissive of critical approaches to literature now (I've seen this in person, as he gave a reading and talk here a couple of years back)--this seems like a shame, as he is (despite his best efforts to hide it) clearly very knowledgeable about the history and craft of his chosen genre, as well as about literature and writing more generally. Does he think he'll alienate readers if he drops the whole "I spend all my time at the pub" routine? (He was very funny about that, though, claiming to pass Alexander McCall Smith's house on his way to and fro and always hearing the clickety-clack of the keys there heralding the completion of yet another bestseller.)

*To hear a wonderful talk by P. D. James on "The Craft of the Mystery Story," go here.

This Week in My Classes

I think one of the commenters on Footnoted is right that the most hostile reactions come from people who have an inaccurate idea of what goes on in 'lit departments.' I also think that essays like Wasserman's don't consider academics when they think about the state of literary culture because (a) for a mix of good and bad reasons, most academic writing and scholarship is not directly or visibly connected to or known in that culture and (b) our classroom work is typically forgotten, disregarded, or misunderstood outside the academy. 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. As I have just two classes this term, thanks to the teaching relief I get for coordinating the graduate program, the list won't be long (unlike most of the readings we're doing!). And so, without further ado...

1. English 3032, The Nineteenth-Century British Novel from Dickens to Hardy. Having begun Monday with an overview of literary and historical contexts for the novel in our period, we are launching today into our study of Trollope's odd little charmer The Warden. A small man in a big institution has a small problem that is a big one for his conscience; while sorting through this dilemma in his plot and for his characters, Trollope is also working out his own style of realism, in contrast to "Mr Popular Sentiment" (Dickens). Today I'll be offering some generalizations about Trollope, then zeroing in on his interest in individuals working in complex institutions (the Church of England, in our particular case), then looking at the characterization of the main players in The Warden, especially Mr Harding (love that imaginary cello!) and the chief combatants, John Bold (he's bold--get it?!) and Archdeacon Grantly ("Good heavens!").
   
2. English 5465, Victorian Women Writers--the Novelists. Here too we have begun with an overview of literary and historical contexts, this time with an emphasis on women's situation in the 19th century and how this affected (or, as Gilbert and Gubar notoriously argued, "infected") their literary options, attitudes, and styles. To kickstart the term's discussion, we read some 19thC essays on 'lady novelists,' one of them (of course) being George Eliot's (in)famous "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists." "Be not a baker if your head be made of butter" is a good line for anyone who ventures into print--perhaps especially for bloggers...
   

And now, off to class.

Mad as Hell--at Literary Critics?

This particularly virulent comment appeared quite promptly after excerpts from my previous post appeared at Footnoted (see also update below):

Lit crit should finally die the death it so much deserves. Lit departments have floundered for decades because they have forgotten the text. Instead, they have pandered to the politically correct idiots who can neither read with sense nor write with style. May they ALL be flushed down the toilet where they belong.

Hostility towards literary critics is an interesting subcategory of what Tim Burke discusses at intelligent length on his blog as "Anger at Academe". Now, I started writing on this blog in part because of my own frustrations with some aspects of academic literary criticism; I have vented once or twice about particular examples of it, here and in print; and I've spent a fair amount of time recently looking at books, journals, and blogs that inquire into it from a variety of historical, theoretical, sociological, and what I might call 'readerly' perspectives. I think it's not only fine but desirable for people both inside and outside 'lit departments' to ask questions about the nature and condition of our discipline. But I have been frequently surprised by just how angry or dismissive some people are--and not just anonymous "trolls" such as the Footnoted commenter, but also some prominent figures in contemporary literary culture, such as Cynthia Ozick, who in her essay "Literary Entrails," writes the following:

(Academic theorists equipped with advanced degrees, who make up yet another species of limited reviewers, are worthy only of a parenthesis. Their confining ideologies, heavily politicized and rendered in a kind of multi-syllabic pidgin, have for decades marinated literature in dogma. Of these inflated dons and doctors it is futile to speak, since, unlike the hardier customer reviewers, they are destined to vanish like the fog they evoke.)

(For some previous discussion of Ozick's essay, see here.) As I noted in another earlier post, "Daniel Green of the blog The Reading Experience ... writes about 'academic schoolmasters, who now only serve to inflict the miseries behind the thick walls of their suffocating scholastic prisons'...Ouch." Francine Prose is another in this chorus, though her language about the academy (while equally dismissive) is at least somewhat more temperate.

An anonymous commenter on one of my own less temperate posts remarked that "The mere existence of theory-driven, 'difficult' literary criticism does not rob the amateur book lover of one micron of reading pleasure. " I think s/he is is right about this, but some of the hostility directed at us does seem to come from a sense that academics have betrayed or spoiled something that these lovers of literature cherish. As some of the scholarly work I've been reading also suggests, there is a grain of truth to this (see, for instance, the quotation from John McGowan's Democracy's Children included in this post). And that leads me to wonder how far I agree with that same commenter when s/he asks why academic literary specialists should be expected to write for a general audience any more than "specialists in quantum mechanics" should be expected to "write up their research in such a way that fans of Stephen Hawking can understand it." It does seem to me that there are important differences between literature and quantum mechanics as areas of study, though pinning them down at all (much less in an uncontroversial or tendentious way) may be challenging. I guess I'd start by pointing out that the texts we study in 'lit departments' typically originate as acts of communication aimed at readers or other forms of a general audience, not scholars, often with urgent purposes (whether aesthetic, social, political, or other). I realize that this does not at all render them inappropriate objects of study or theory--but it does mean that non-scholars have a different relationship with our primary materials than with subatomic particles. Does this justify such vitriolic response to our professional work? Not at all, but it may be the seed of at least a preliminary explanation for it, and some justification for making sure at least some of our work reaches beyond the academy.

Update: There's more, and no better. And these are readers of the Chronicle of Higher Education website, not Guns and Ammo or something, though it appears that they visit the site only to fan the flames of their antipathies:

It is in academia where you DO NOT find down to earth people. It is academia the home of obnoxious, arrogants who can not read for pleasure but can destroy a good book or poem through stupid literary criticism.

Most academic critics are irrelevant because they publish enough for the world to know what they think and how they think.

I understand why people interested in a reasoned discussion are not jumping in over there, but what's a girl gotta do to get some discussion going on over here? (September 10)

Academics and Literary Culture

There's a thoughtful piece in the latest Columbia Journalism Review by Steve Wasserman, former editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review (among other things). Wasserman presents a mix of good and bad news about the current state of book reviewing and contemporary literary culture more generally. It strikes me as interesting that his analysis, which considers demographic and economic factors in publishing and newspapers, anti-intellectualism in American culture broadly speaking and in newsrooms more particularly, changing technologies for reading and writing, and many other factors, says nothing in particular about the role of professional academic critics. Perhaps they are implicitly included here--but somehow I don't think so:

It is through the work of novelists and poets that we understand how we imagine ourselves and contend with the often elusive forces—of which language itself is a foremost factor—that shape us as individuals and families, citizens and communities, and it is through our historians and scientists, journalists and essayists that we wrestle with how we have lived, how the present came to be, and what the future might bring.

And again, implicitly, perhaps both Mark Sarvas and Richard Schickel mean nods in our direction when they outline what they see as prerequisites for good reviewing, but again, somehow I don't think so:

Mark Sarvas, among the more sophisticated of contemporary literary bloggers whose lively site, The Elegant Variation, offers a compelling daily diet of discriminating enthusiasms and thoughtful book chat, recognizes the problem. In a post last spring about the fate of newspaper reviews, he wrote: “There’s been an unspoken sense in this discussion that Book Review = Good. It doesn’t always—there are plenty of mediocre to lousy reviewers out there, alienating (or at least boring) readers…Too many reviews are dull, workmanlike book reports. And every newspaper covers the same dozen titles…There’s much talk about the thoughtful ‘literary criticism’ on offer in book reviews but you don’t get much of that literary criticism in 850 words, so can we stop kidding ourselves?” But neither does Sarvas find such criticism on the vast Democracy Wall of the Internet, which he is otherwise at pains to promote. He confesses that, for him, the criticism that counts is to be found in the pages of such indispensable publications as The New York Review of Books or the pages of the upstart Bookforum.

What Sarvas is reluctant to concede but is too intelligent to deny is what Richard Schickel, the film critic for Time magazine, eloquently affirmed in a blunt riposte, published in the Los Angeles Times in May, to the “hairy-chested populism” promoted by the boosters of blogging: “Criticism—and its humble cousin, reviewing—is not a democratic activity. It is, or should be, an elite enterprise, ideally undertaken by individuals who bring something to the party beyond their hasty, instinctive opinions of a book (or any other cultural object). It is work that requires disciplined taste, historical and theoretical knowledge and a fairly deep sense of the author’s (or filmmaker’s or painter’s) entire body of work, among other qualities.”

(Quite rightly, Wasserman banishes the false dichotomy some, including Schickel, have proposed between print and online reviewing: "Moreover, the debate over the means by which reviews are published—or, for that matter, the news more generally—is sterile. What counts is the nature and depth and authority of such coverage, as well as its availability to the widest possible audience. Whether readers find it on the Web or on the printed page matters not at all. Content rules.")

Anyway, I'm wondering: Do academic critics have a part in the story Wasserman is telling? Should we? Is his omission a sign of our irrelevance to it, or his neglect of our relevance, or our failure to make our relevance visible and understood, or something else altogether?

Even in Blogging, Everything New is Old

I've been reading through the archives of some lively blog debates related to my own questions about the terms and tendencies of contemporary academic literary criticism (see, for instance, here, here or here). Following the long chains of arguments and rebuttals, examples and counter-examples, I'm struck with a familiar sense of futility: when so much has been said by so many so often, what can I hope to add? I'm also struck, though, by just how unaware I was that conversations of quite this kind were going on. It's not that I did not know that the terms of criticism have long been debated,of course, including in polemical and political ways as they often are in these blog exchanges--I did my graduate work at Cornell in the early 90s, after all. It's more that I literally had never heard of blogs until last year, and until early this year, I had no idea that there was such a category as 'academic blogs.' So what seemed to me like something new and experimental, like casually posting some notes on my current reading online, turned out to be entirely old and, as far as rethinking criticism goes, hardly experimental, especially as I did not know enough about the blogging scene to have any particular critical or theoretical agenda when I started.

I'm not really sure why my obliviousness to these online forums and debates--at a time when, after all, I was hard at work on other specialized reading and writing--strikes me as somehow symptomatic of more than just my own individual ignorance. Maybe the point is just that the ideal often expressed by academic bloggers (e.g. here or here) about opening up lines of communication is still a pretty long way off: at least in my immediate circles, blogging is definitely still seen as a fringe activity. In a way, it is 'just' (or just like) another academic specialization, in that academic bloggers know each other and link to each other and talk to and about each other, as do, say, medieval historians or Christina Rossetti scholars. I am persuaded that blogging has the potential to change a lot about our working and thinking lives (this was useful in clarifying some of the issues, as was this, to pick just two of the long and growing list of materials I've bookmarked), but old habits die hard and skeptical attitudes abound. Then, when it comes to joining in the debates, precisely because this form of publication and discussion is so diffuse, it feels like a particularly difficult conversation even to eavesdrop on, never mind to participate in. Also, while in typical academic publishing, with its glacier-like pace, it's hard to feel that you are coming in too late, somehow reading these blog archives on the function of criticism makes further comment seem SO 2005...how does one 'make it new,' on or off line?

Leslie Stephen, "Charlotte Bronte"

Just a few choice bits from the latest essay I've been editing for my forthcoming anthology, Leslie Stephen's piece on Charlotte Bronte from the Cornhill Magazine. First, an apt description of the uneasy balance required of either reviewer or critic between sympathy and analysis, charity and judgment:

Undoubtedly it is a very difficult task to be alternately witness and judge; to feel strongly, and yet to analyse coolly; to love every feature in a familiar face, and yet to decide calmly upon its intrinsic ugliness or beauty. To be an adequate critic is almost to be a contradiction in terms; to be susceptible to a force, and yet free from its influence; to be moving with the stream, and yet to be standing on the bank.

Stephen's own analysis of CB does, I think, display something like the desired balance. Here, for example, he proposes a standard against which to measure her overall achievement:

Miss Brontë, as her warmest admirers would grant, was not and did not in the least affect to be a philosophical thinker. And because a great writer, to whom she has been gratuitously compared, is strong just where she is weak, her friends have an injudicious desire to make out that the matter is of no importance, and that her comparative poverty of thought is no injury to her work. There is no difficulty in following them so far as to admit that her work is none the worse for containing no theological or philosophical disquisitions, or for showing no familiarity with the technicalities of modern science and metaphysics. But the admission by no means follows that her work does not suffer very materially by the comparative narrowness of the circle of ideas in which her mind habitually revolved. Perhaps if she had been familiar with Hegel or Sir W. Hamilton, she would have intruded undigested lumps of metaphysics, and introduced vexatious allusions to the philosophy of identity or to the principle of the excluded middle. But it is possible, also, that her conceptions of life and the world would have been enriched and harmonised, and that, without giving us more scientific dogmas, her characters would have embodied more fully the dominating ideas of the time. There is no province of inquiry--historical, scientific, or philosophical--from which the artist may not derive useful material; the sole question is whether it has been properly assimilated and transformed by the action of the poetic imagination. By attempting to define how far Miss Brontë’s powers were in fact thus bounded, we shall approximately decide her place in the great hierarchy of imaginative thinkers.

I assume, though I stand ready to be corrected, that the "great writer" to whom he refers at the beginning of this passage is George Eliot (if anyone knows of any particularly forceful contemporary comparison of CB and GE, I'd be happy to be pointed in the right direction).[*see update below] Stephen concludes that CB's place is "a very high one," but he also has a standard for literary and novelistic greatness that includes linking one's particular genius to broader philosophical and historical insights, and on his view, CB's failure to make such a connection keeps her from reaching the very highest eminence. His main example here is his analysis of Paul Emanuel in Villette. Stephen considers M. Paul a great triumph, a wholly compelling and believable character, but he finds his "intense individuality" limits his literary significance:

He is a real human being who gave lectures at a particular date in a pension at Brussels. We are as much convinced of that fact as we are of the reality of Miss Brontë herself; but the fact is also a presumption that he is not one of those great typical, characters, the creation of which is the highest triumph of the dramatist or novelist. There is too much of the temporary and accidental--too little of the permanent and essential.

Seen from an intellectual point of view, placed in his due relation to the great currents of thought and feeling of the time, we should have been made to feel the pathetic and humorous aspects of M. Emanuel’s character, and he might have been equally a living individual and yet a type of some more general idea. The philosopher might ask, for example, what is the exact value of unselfish heroism guided by narrow theories or employed on unworthy tasks; and the philosophic humourist or artist might embody the answer in a portrait of M. Emanuel considered from a cosmic or a cosmopolitan point of view. From the lower standpoint accessible to Miss Brontë he is still most attractive; but we see only his relations to the little scholastic circle, and have no such perception as the greatest writers would give us of his relations to the universe, or, as the next order would give, of his relations to the great world without.

There is much to be said, of course, about the assumption that typicality is the mark of greatness, including about how far this standard is gendered. But not least because it is currently unfashionable to consider whether one kind of thing, one literary approach, is in fact better (higher, more significant, more admirable--choose your terms) than another, it is interesting to see a clear, temperate attempt to make just such an evaluative comparison. And Stephen is eloquent in his appreciation of CB:

We cannot sit at her feet as a great teacher, nor admit that her view of life is satisfactory or even intelligible. But we feel for her as for a fellow-sufferer who has at least felt with extraordinary keenness the sorrows and disappointments which torture most cruelly the most noble virtues, and has clung throughout her troubles to beliefs which must in some form or other be the guiding lights of all worthy actions. She is not in the highest rank amongst those who have fought their way to a clearer atmosphere, and can help us to clearer conceptions; but she is amongst the first of those who have felt the necessity of consolation, and therefore stimulated to more successful efforts.

I share something of Stephen's prejudice in favour of those who "help us to clearer conceptions" (though fiction is often most celebrated today for its ability to confound and complicate moral and philosophical questions, there does seem some advantage to working through the fog to what Stephen calls "some more comprehensible and harmonious solution"). CB resolves some of her thornier problems by highly artificial means, as Stephen points out: "What would Jane Eyre have done, and what would our sympathies have been, had she found that Mrs. Rochester had not been burnt in the fire at Thornfield? That is rather an awkward question." Indeed. Overall, he sees her unable to sustain a consistent answer to what I think he rightly identifies as a persistent problem in her major novels (as in so many others from the time): "Where does the unlawful pressure of society upon the individual begin, and what are the demands which it may rightfully make upon our respect? . . . She is between the opposite poles of duty and happiness, and cannot see how to reconcile their claims, or even--for perhaps no one can solve that, or any other great problem exhaustively--how distinctly to state the question at issue." Notoriously, her more philosophical contemporary would insist on the primacy of duty, a position that has cost her the devotion of many feminist readers today (Lee Edwards, for instance, who in her essay "Women, Energy, and Middlemarch," famously declared that the novel could no longer be "one of the books of [her] life").

One more passage, though for now I have no time to add commentary on it:

The specific peculiarity of Miss Brontë seems to be the power of revealing to us the potentiality of intense passions lurking behind the scenery of everyday life. Except in the most melodramatic--which is also the weakest--part of Jane Eyre, we have lives almost as uneventful as those of Miss Austen, and yet charged to the utmost with latent power. A parson at the head of a school-feast somehow shows himself as a “Cromwell, guiltless of his country’s blood;” a professor lecturing a governess on composition is revealed as a potential Napoleon; a mischievous schoolboy is obviously capable of developing into a Columbus or a Nelson; even the most commonplace natural objects, such as a row of beds in a dormitory, are associated and naturally associated with the most intense emotions. Miss Austen makes you feel that a tea-party in a country parsonage may be as amusing as the most brilliant meeting of cosmopolitan celebrities; and Miss Brontë that it may display characters capable of shaking empires and discovering new worlds. The whole machinery is in a state of the highest electric tension, though there is no display of thunder and lightning to amaze us.

Update: Today as I was editing Walter Bagehot's 1860 essay on George Eliot, I was reminded that there is a fair amount of comparison of CB and GE there, though not really addressing the specific grounds of philosophical thinking. A brief example:

[In George Eliot's novels], there is nothing of the Rembrandt-like style of Miss Brontë: the light flows far more equally over her pictures; we find nothing of the irregular emphasis with which Currer Bell’s characters are delineated, or of the strong subjective colouring which tinges all her scenes. George Eliot’s imagination, like Miss Brontë’s, loves to go to the roots of character, and portrays best by broad direct strokes; but there the likeness between them, so far as there is any, ends. The reasons for the deeper method and for the directer style are probably very different in the two cases. Miss Brontë can scarcely be said to have had any large instinctive knowledge of human nature:--her own life and thoughts were exceptional,--cast in a strongly-marked but not very wide mould; her imagination was solitary; her experience was very limited; and her own personality tinged all she wrote. She “made out” the outward life and manner of her dramatis personæ by the sheer force of her own imagination; and as she always imagined the will and the affections as the substance and centre of her characters, those of her delineations which are successful at all are deep, and their manner broad.
George Eliot’s genius is exceedingly different. There is but little of Miss Austen in her, because she has studied in a very different and much simpler social world; but there is in the springs of her genius at least more of Miss Austen than of Miss Brontë. Her genial, broad delineations of human life have more perhaps of the case of Fielding than of Miss Austen, or of any of the manners-painters of the present day. For these imagine life only as it appeals in a certain dress and manner, which are, as we said, a kind of artificial medium for their art,--life as affected by drawing-rooms. George Eliot has little, if any, of their capacity of catching the undertones and allusive complexity of this sort of society. But though she has observed the phases of a more natural and straightforward sphere of life, she draws her external life from observation, instead of imagining it, like Miss Brontë, out of the heart of the characters she wishes to paint.

Bagehot's is a tremendously interesting essay. It contains, among other choice bits, his [in]famous remark about Maggie's relationship with Stephen Guest in The Mill on the Floss being an "enthusiastic homage to physiological law, and seems to us as untrue to nature as it is unpleasant and indelicate"--a remark which is, in context, less prudish and more philosophically significant that it seems in its sound-bite form--but that's a subject for another post altogether!

Academic Etiquette

Wise words from the Little Professor on "dealing with professors". My favourites:

3. If you want to know the assignment for the next day's reading, please look at the syllabus. That's why it's there.

and

8. Do not ask your professor "Did I miss anything?" or "Will I miss anything?" or "Is there something important we're going to talk about?" Just don't.

Actually, I often have a version of #8 right there in my course syllabus...along with the list of books for the class, deadlines for assignments, my office hours, my policies on late assignments and missed classes, my mother's maiden name, my home phone number...OK, not the last two, but I do work hard to put everything you need to know about the course in the syllabus, so really my basic advice would just be:

Before you ask me anything at all, read your syllabus carefully.

And since it's posted on WebCT, it doesn't matter if you left your copy on the bus, or your dog ate it, or you don't think I gave you a copy last class: you can find it 24/7.

(This posting is dedicated to the anonymous student who complained in my course evaluations last year that whenever s/he asked me a question, I always said "go look in your syllabus." In case you ever read this, there's a relevant saying that is something about giving someone a fish vs. teaching them to fish...)

God's Incompatible Warriors

I've just finished watching the three installments of Christiane Amanpour's CNN series "God's Warriors," and although I appreciated the information and the varied perspectives the series offered us, I ended up frustrated (though not surprised) that the most important question of all was never asked (or at least never aired), namely, "What makes you so sure that you are right in your beliefs and the guys in the other episodes are wrong?" Over and over her interviewees proclaimed their absolute conviction about what God wants of them, but they can't all be right (and this applies not only across the three monotheisms that were her main topics but internally as well, as she met with Jews, Christians and Muslims who profess widely divergent views of the obligations and teachings of their own religions as well). Of course, the problem is that at bottom, their answers could only be of these three kinds:

1. I'm absolutely sure I'm right because I have faith/belief; I feel it in my heart/soul.
2. I'm absolutely sure I'm right because I was raised in these beliefs.
3. I'm absolutely sure I'm right because I have read the infallible word of God in [fill in title of book here].

The first position gives us no way to distinguish the religious believer from someone who believes, say, that she is the reincarnation of Joan of Arc: the latter may be equally convinced on internal 'evidence' and strong feeling, but nonetheless we don't hesitate to call her delusional. The second is really an admission that the person might well have believed something else altogether if raised in another family, parish, or country (as in fact we know to be the case, since religious beliefs vary widely according to geography). And the third simply returns us to the original problem--there's more than one book that purports to be the definitive word of God, and they can't all be it. How do you know that yours is the right one and your neighbour's (or enemy's) is not? Here we have people prepared to sacrifice their own lives, take the lives of others, engage in time-consuming, sometimes self-destructive, often expensive rituals, influence the outcome of elections, subvert the teaching of science, put their children at risk of STDs by denying them sex education...and on what solid basis? None at all. Overall, the series was very depressing. I ended up feeling a lot of sympathy for Richard Dawkins's provocative notion that religious education is a form of child abuse. We intervene to ensure medical treatment for children when their parents' beliefs would deny it to them; why not consider it equally unacceptable for children to be raised to idealize martyrdom, or raised in dangerously controversial settlements in occupied Palestine, or denied the benefits of a modern scientific education because their parents cling to superstitious, magical ideas about the world and their role in it? There's no question that, historically, religious belief has contributed to what George Eliot calls "the growing good of the world" as well as to its cruelties, irrationalities, and evils, but we can see now that the foundations of modern faiths are no stronger, no more defensible, than, say, the Greek or Roman beliefs in their deities (as Sam Harris likes to point out, we're all atheists now with respect to Zeus and Poseidon). So why should we accept them as guides for living--or killing, or dying?

I hope Amanpour's planning a follow-up series on "Reason's Warriors."

Blogging Trollope IV

So much goes on in He Knew He Was Right that it's hard for me to focus for long on any one point of interest while this reading of it is still so fresh. Since I've been remarking the novel's relationship to sensation fiction, I'll add that while I knew the main plot of the novel was 'sensational,' I was surprised at the way Trollope puts other sensational bits into the novel's most comic segments and registers, especially the saga of Mr Gibson and the two Misses French. Here's Camilla reflecting on Mr Gibson's possible perfidy:

A sister, a mother, a promised lover, all false,--all so damnably, cruelly false! It was impossible. No history, no novel of most sensational interest, no wonderful villany that had ever been wrought into prose or poetry, would have been equal to this. It was impossible. She told herself so a score of times a day. And yet the circumstances were so terribly suspicious! (Ch. LXXIV)

As the tragic drama at Casalunga advances towards its painful conclusions, so too the ridiculous affair at Heavitree lurches along, until this:

The maid-servant, in making Miss Camilla's bed and in 'putting the room to rights,' as she called it,--which description probably was intended to cover the circumstances of an accurate search,--had discovered, hidden among some linen,--a carving knife! . . . The knife [Camilla] declared, had been taken up-stairs, because she had wanted something very sharp to cut,--the bones of her stays. (Ch. LXXXII)

At times I found myself impatiently skimming these sections, as my interest and sympathies were far more engaged with the Trevelyans' trials and, eventually, most of all with Nora and her steadfast determination to achieve a new (indeed, a manifestly modern) marriage with Hugh. But at the same time they pique my critical curiosity: are they simply diversions, a break into silliness to offset the sometimes lugubrious development of the 'main' plot? The overt mock-sensationalism suggests Trollope is having fun with generic conventions and disrupting the sensation/realism distinction he rejects in his critical writing (e.g. his Autobiography) while also amplifying many of his main themes, including the not-so-mock desperation of surplus women on the marriage market and the degradation of morals that results. Still, why do so comically, when the serious plot lines of the novel offer a pretty complete theme and variations along these lines? Perhaps the best answer is just "because he can."

More evidence of self-consciousness about genre and form comes (in true Trollope style) through narrative intrusions. There aren't many extended ones, at least for a novel of these proportions, but there's a really good one at the opening of Chapter LXXXVIII:

It is rather hard upon readers that they should be thus hurried from the completion of hymeneals at Florence to the preparations for other hymeneals in Devonshire; but it is the nature of a complex story to be entangled with many weddings towards its close. [insert faint sigh of relief at the idea of 'its close'] In this little history there are, we fear, three or four more to come. We will not anticipate by alluding prematurely to Hugh Stanbury's treachery, or death,--or the possibility that he after all may turn out to be the real descendant of the true Lord Peterborough and the actual inheritor of the title and estate of Monkhams, nor will we speak of Nora's certain fortitude under either of these emergencies. But the instructed reader must be aware that Camilla French ought to have a husband found for her; that Colonel Osborne should be caught in some matrimonial trap [there's a motif that runs throughout the novel, sometimes without much hint of humour];--as, how otherwise should he be fitly punished? [and the number of characters who end up reflecting on marriage as a punishment or threat is actually remarkable]--and that something should at least be attempted for Priscilla Stanbury, who from the first has been intended to be the real heroine of these pages [interesting, that, since to me Nora emerges as the finest female character]. That Martha should marry Giles Hickbody, and Barty Burgess run away with Mrs MacHugh, is of course evident to the meanest novel-expounding capacity; but the fate of Brooke Burgess and of Dorothy will require to be evolved with some delicacy and much detail [do we detect a bit of glee in that last phrase, as he cracks his knuckles and settles in for another 100 pages?].

Trollope's world has an odd and, in my reading experience, unique quality: his novels are at once so fully realized and capacious that he can link them together with coy little cross-references (in this one, we get both Phineas Finn and Lady Glencora, from the Pallisers series, and Bishop Proudie from Barchester), and so contrived and overt in their artifice that they defy what would otherwise seem simple categorization as 'naive' realism. It's like being in some kind of virtual reality simulator, in which you are always aware at some level that you are playing a game but can look all around without really seeing its limits.

There's no doubt this is a great novel to consider in a course on the 'woman question'. It's as direct in its confrontation with women's political, social, and marital rights and obligations as any 19thC novel I know, if perhaps more ambiguous or ambivalent in its attitudes than some. But its 903 pages are difficulty simply to carry around, or hold while reading, and it's hard to imagine just how to manage it pedagogically to maintain students' enthusiasm when they are taking four other courses. If they've read Mill's Subjection of Women and Cobbe and others on 'old maids,' though, along with the other novels I have in mind, won't they find it irresistible? And failing those intellectual reasons, won't they love it because of all the friends they'll make reading it? I guess I'll find out.

Blogging Trollope III

I may just be preoccupied with these comparisons because of having spent so much time and thought on sensation novels this summer, but He Knew He Was Right continues to seem like a reworking of a number of key sensation themes and elements. (I haven't looked around yet to see if there's 'official' criticism addressing the connections.) I'm struck, for instance, by the close proximity between Louis Trevelyan and Robert Audley: both are motivated by intense suspicion of a woman and are driven to what others perceive as madness because of their relentless pursuit of justification for these suspicions. The key differences, of course, are first that Louis's suspicions are groundless, and second, that his monomania thus truly puts him on the wrong side of what both authors describe as the thin line separating sanity from insanity. One result of these differences is that while Lady Audley's Secret can be read as confirming all of Robert's worst fears about women, He Knew He Was Right reads like an indictment of just those fears, a critique of that kind of misogynistic paranoia. The comparison brings out the darker side of Robert's quest for justice: he is on a quest for control and domination as much as for truth, as is also clearly the case in HKHWR.

Blogging Trollope II

The further I read (and I'm now about 2/3 through, which is no small feat, let me tell you), the more I am enjoying thinking about how He Knew He Was Right would play off against the other novels I have in mind for my class. It's a seminar on the Victorian 'woman question,' and I have taught it several times before, always with a reading list that includes a fair mix of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction prose. I have always thought (and the students have always seemd to agree) that it has been successful, and discussion has always been vigorous, but I decided it was time for a change, and so this time I'm focusing on novels, and in particular on novels that follow couples past the 'matrimonial barrier.' That means I'll keep The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and The Odd Women, two of my favourites, but I'm going to replace The Mill on the Floss with Middlemarch and (I'm now thinking) bring in HKHWR...and maybe East Lynne also, for a more 'sensational' take. I'm finding HKHWR has a lot of links to The Odd Women in particular, starting with the obvious similarity of an excess of female characters. The notes to my edition of HKHWR suggest links between Priscilla Stanbury and Dorothea in Middlemarch; at the moment I don't really see it, but I'm interested in the possibility. East Lynne has an actual infidelity that would provide an interesting comparison with the suspected offense in Trollope's much more literal (and yet, in many ways, 'sensational') novel. If the students don't get completely overwhelmed with the reading load, this could be a lot of fun. (That does seem like a big 'if' at this point. Well, I haven't actually ordered the books yet, so there's time to pull back.)

Blogging Trollope I

I'm rereading He Knew He Was Right with an eye to assigning it in a winter term class. I have remarked a couple of times on this blog that there's something about Trollope that makes his novels not entirely amenable to the kinds of critical analysis we are most accustomed to. For one thing, he's (almost) all about plot and character--there's a tremendously literal quality about his approach that makes much reading between the lines seem beside the point. I have always loved his accounts of walking in the woods imagining what his characters would do and say in the scenes to come, and his insistence that his people were entirely real to him; once I am immersed in one of these big blockbuster books, its very expansiveness, almost excessiveness, gives me the same sense of having spent my time among actual people whose lives have all the dimensions of ours. Here's a little example from fairly early on in HKHWR that contributes to this sense that Trollope is putting his immediate plot together by selecting among dozens, even hundreds or thousands, of untold stories; this is a bit of background on the wonderful Miss Jemima Stanbury ("All change was to her hateful and unncessary"!):

It need not be told here how various misfortunes arose, how Mr. Burgess quarrelled with the Stanbury family, how Jemima quarrelled with her own family, how, when her father died, she went out from Nuncombe Putney parsonage, and lived on the smallest pittance in a city lodging, how her lover was untrue to her and did not marry her, and how at last he died and left her every shilling that he possessed. (Ch. VII)

Of course the story is "told here" after all, but he passess off in one paragraph what could easily be enough plot for another whole novel--it's just that he is telling us a different one and sets this one aside. Though it is in a much more comic register, this passage reminds me of the bit in Carlyle's French Revolution about the five act tragedy inside every man, or of the roar on the other side of silence evoked (again, with quite a different tone) in Middlemarch. If there can seem to be a certain formlessness about the way his novels just keep going on and on and on and on (I have been known to refer to him as the "Energizer Bunny" of Victorian fiction), at the same time they capture in their own way that notion of the multitudinousness of human experience and stories.

Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer

This book has a simple premise--that the best way for aspiring writers to learn their craft is to read (closely, attentively, alertly, appreciatively) the work of other novelists. Prose proceeds to elaborate on what she sees as the pedagogical benefit of close reading by moving through a sequence of chapters addressing specific aspects of novel-writing, each illustrated with examples from writers she admires. Her intended audience is primarily creative writing students; she offers her close-reading approach as a counter-balance to what she describes as the fundamentally negative tactics of writing workshops: "Though it also doles out praise, the writing workshop most often focuses on what a writer has done wrong, what needs to be fixed, cut, or augmented. Whereas reading a masterpiece can inspire us by showing us how a writer does something brilliantly" (11). I'm not in a position to evaluate how well either strategy would work for someone trying to produce an original work of fiction, though it does seem to me that Prose's emphasis on writing as a craft that presents technical challenges needing to be acknowledged and worked through intellectually (rather than transcended through inspiration) is probably useful.

Prose's subtitle ("A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them") suggests that she also hopes to appeal to and help out avid readers (the same ones who might pick up Smiley's Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Novel or Sutherland's How to Read a Novel. It may be this hope that leads Prose to avoid most specialized vocabulary. For instance, in her chapter on narration, she acknowledges briefly that there are types of narrators ("should the narrator be first or third person, close or omniscient?" [85]) but does not explain in any systematic way just what these options are or that they are not exhaustive. As a result, her discussion of examples tends towards the impressionistic, rather than the analytical; she often seems to take for granted, too, that her reader will recognize the qualities she admires or finds effective, that she does not need to explain or justify her praise or her interpretation. Here is some of her commentary on a long quotation from Richard Price's Freedomland:

Everything in the paragraph contributes to the speaker's credibility, as a fictional character and as an honest human being: the diction, the rhythms, the slight repetitions for emphasis, the way that the tenses keep shifting from present to past and back. The choice of words and phrases ("used to like his cocktails," "never raised a hand," "passed on") make us feel that this is how this woman might really recount an incident from her life. The language, the story itself, the specificity of the details (Jimmy Durante singing "September Song") convince us that the woman is telling the truth. (91)

I can tell that she is convinced, but she has not explained the basis of her conviction to me in a persuasive or useful way. What aspects of the speaker's diction are indicative of credibility and honesty? Why should including specific details convince us that someone is telling the truth? What are the signposts of unreliability?

I was also concerned at times about the qualities of Prose's own reading. In some cases, she seemed to me an unduly trusting reader. Here's some of her commentary on the opening scene of Pride and Prejudice, for example:

Lest we receive a skewed or harsh impression of the Bennets' own marriage, Mr. Bennet compliments his wife by suggesting that she is as handsome as their daughters. In fact, as we are discovering, theirs is a harmonious union, and indeed the whole conversation, with its intimacy, its gentle teasing, and with Mr. Bennet's joking reference to his old friendship with his wife's nerves, is a double portrait of a happy couple. (127)

Well, maybe, and the same needs to be said about her confidence in Nelly Dean as "the most credible witness" in Wuthering Heights. But she writes well about the significance of details (they "aren't only the building blocks with which a story is put together, they're also clues to something deeper, keys not merely to our subconscious but to our historical moment" [207].

I think that what struck me as weaknesses in the book, particularly in its analysis of particular examples, come at least in part from Prose's own deliberate distancing of herself from academic approaches to literature. "Only once," she tells us in her account of her own development as a writer,

did my passion for reading steer me in the wrong direction, and that was when I let it persuade me to go to graduate school. There, I soon realized that my love for books was unshared by many of my classmates and professors. I found it hard to understand what they did love, exactly, and this gave me an anxious shiver that would later seem like a warning about what would happen to the teaching of literature over the decade or so after I dropped out of my Ph.D. program. That was when literary academia split into warring camps of deconstructionists, Marxists, feminists, and so forth, all battling for the right to tell students that they were reading "texts" in which ideas and politics trumped what the writer had actually written. (8)

I have written before on this blog about my own frustrations with aspects of "literary academia," but I have also resisted (even resented) this kind of dismissive attitude to scholarly and theoretical expertise. It is possible to turn such expertise (including attention to ideas and politics) precisely to understanding "what the writer had actually written," and the result will be a better, fuller reading--and thus, if Prose's own pedagogical theory is correct, better new books.

Becoming George?

I was interviewed recently by our campus news service about Becoming Jane--not about the movie exactly (fortunately, as I haven't actually seen it) but about Austen's popular appeal. I found myself thinking that really, if movie makers (and movie audiences) want a bio-pic about a woman writer's interesting, sexy life, they should really be working on Becoming George. Isn't the transformation of country girl (and preachy evangelical) Marianne Evans into leading intellectual, free-thinker, strong-minded woman, and renowned novelist George Eliot really as good as (really, better than) anything someone could make up about a 19th-century woman's life, and true, to boot (which is more than can confidently be said about Becoming Jane)? If I were directing, I'd begin (and possibly end) with Marian and Lewes leaving on the boat for Germany in 1854:

George: "You know what they'll say about us--about you...There's no going back from a step like this; it will mean the end of your life as a respectable woman."

Marian: "I've made my decision. And every ending is also a beginning..."

And then flashbacks (with lots of voice-overs drawing on her letters and diaries) to take us from her childhood through her intellectual awakening and 'holy war', to her life among the London intellegentsia, the interlude with Chapman (I guess there would need to be some speculative in-filling there), the disastrous 'romance' with Herbert Spencer, and the development of her relationship with Lewes, complete with asides about his unconventional domestic arrangements. The story has everything: rebellion, romance, and ideas. Casting would be challenging, of course. You'd need someone graceful, charismatic, low-voiced, and plain for the main part (sorry, no place for Anne Hathaway here), and someone sprightly, charismatic, maybe slightly manic, and homely for Lewes (any ideas?).

Such a film would accomplish for a general audience what one of her contemporaries (reviewing John Cross's biography) hoped for: "the salt and spice will be restored to the records of George Eliot’s entirely unconventional life." It might even send people to her novels with a new appreciation for what she risked and achieved in them. Of course it will never happen, will it? Too bad! But then, apparently there is a big-screen version of Middlemarch in the works, so maybe her time is coming.

Best bad book?

Germaine Greer, in The Guardian:

In 1978, a guest at my little house in the Tuscan hills left behind a paperback copy of Colleen McCullough's The Thorn Birds. Having nothing else with which to read myself to sleep, I took it to bed with me. When the clatter of the nightingales (the original thorn birds) gave way to the pre-dawn chorus, I was still reading, utterly engrossed in the best bad book I had ever read.

I was engrossed in The Thorn Birds once too, though I don't think I had the excuse of having nothing else available to read. I haven't looked at it in many, many years. I wonder if I re-read it now if I would find it "the best bad book" I've read. Until I re-read it and find out (if I ever do), I wonder which book is the current winner in that category. What exactly does it mean to be "the best bad book"? The book you like best, even knowing that by some standard it's pretty bad? Bad in what way? Bad writing? Bad politics? (Greer says "It would probably be over the top to denounce The Thorn Birds as a sneakily racist and sectarian book, but it is definitely contrived and insidious.") Bad (improbable?) plot? Bad dialogue? Just a bad idea? Maybe I'll nominate Lady Audley's Secret (it's fresh in my mind because I just finished teaching it). Any further nominations?

Wuthering Heights Named Greatest Love Story

From The Guardian:

Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, recounting the doomed affair between sweet Cathy Earnshaw and the brutal outsider Heathcliff, has seen off Shakespeare, Gone With the Wind and everything by Barbara Cartland in a survey which shows the lasting power of classic works.

Almost all the entries in the top 20 choices of 2,000 readers are major works of English literature, with Jane Austen pipping Shakespeare as runner-up and Emily's sister Charlotte coming in fourth with Jane Eyre."It's really heartening to see how these stories, written so long ago, retain the power to captivate 21st century audiences," said Richard Kingsbury, channel head of UKTV Drama, which commissioned the study. (read the rest here)

"Sweet" Cathy Earnshaw? Hmmm. Maybe these 2000 people (and the article's author) read a different version of Wuthering Heights than the one I know or Jane Smiley compared unfavorably to Justine. John Sutherland and Martin Kettle are also skeptical.

The more I think about this poll the odder the results seem. It seems as if, at least as far as Wuthering Heightsis concerned, we have three options: either most of these people have not read Emily Bronte's novel at all and are voting on the basis of some received idea about it; or they have read it and (dismal thought) really find its version of love (obsessive, possessive, selfish, destructive) romantic; or they have read it and completely misinterpreted it. Occasions like this (as the responses from Sutherland and Kettle already make clear) can certainly highlight the gap between "common" and expert readers (though in this case I'd like to think it does not take professional training to find Heathcliff and Cathy's relationship and behaviour at least somewhat troubling), but what's particularly interesting here is it's not a contest of values (it's not, for instance, more about Harry Potter vs "the classics") but a problem of misreading and thus misrepresenting a particular text. As Kingsbury says, it is "heartening" that readers still find these "long ago" stories compelling, but it's less heartening that they don't seem very clear on their content. It makes me think again about the question of readers' responsibilities--if not to the author, then to their reading (as I recall, Wayne Booth spends a fair amount of time on this issue in The Company We Keep; I'll have to go back and take another look).

Searching for Mrs Oliphant...?

I've recently noticed that an unexpectedly large number of 'hits' on this blog result from Google searches for Margaret Oliphant or one of the two Oliphant novels I've posted on (Hester and Miss Marjoribanks). I'm guessing that the explanation is not a surge of interest in Oliphant among internet surfers but rather a dearth of other internet sources on her, which would make my small contributions more visible. (It would be nice if it were a sign of something else too, of course.) In case anyone lands here who is looking for more substantial sources, I recommend Mary Husemann's bibliography at the Victorian Web and the collection edited by D. J. Trela called Margaret Oliphant: Critical Essays on a Gentle Subversive as useful starting points for research. And if you haven't read it, Oliphant's Autobiography is engaging and often moving.

A.S. Byatt on Middlemarch

From The Guardian:

What do I think of Middlemarch? asked the great American poet Emily Dickinson. "What do I think of glory?" And Virginia Woolf called it "The magnificent book, which with all its imperfections, is one of the few English books written for grown-up people". Many of what Woolf thought were imperfections are in fact strengths. It is possible to argue that Middlemarch is the greatest English novel. (read the rest here)

The special features on the DVD set of Middlemarch include an excellent hour-long feature on the novel featuring interviews with a number of writers and critics including David Lodge, Terry Eagleton, and Byatt; a great moment is Byatt remarking that if she envies another novelist anything, she envies George Eliot the moment when she realizes what she can do with her web metaphor in Middlemarch. The occasion for this piece is the reissuing of Middlemarch along with Byatt's Possession in the Vintage Classics Twins series. I must say that though I am a fan of both novels, they seem an odd pairing.

(HT: Conversational Reading)

More on Professional vs. Public Criticism

Brian McRae accepts the decline of literary criticism as a public activity as a trade-off for the benefits of professionalization. In contrast, others continue to believe that criticism (including that of professional academic literary scholars) can and should be relevant and accessible to non-specialists. In Uncommon Readers, Christopher Knight points to Denis Donoghue, Frank Kermode, and George Steiner as examples of critics who insisted "that the scholar find a way to engage the larger educated public in conversation" (8); because, as a result, they often worked outside the forms of academic criticism, "professionals have been loath to recognize their contributions" (12). In Double Agent: The Critic and Society, Morris Dickstein posits the alienation between professional critics and a non-academic readership as a central problem in the discipline: "the main task for criticism today is to recapture the public space occupied by the independent man or woman of letters not only between the wars but throughout the nineteenth century. The first step," he continues, "would be to treat criticism as a major form of public discourse" (6), making the critic a "mediator between art and its audience" (7). In his turn, Dickstein points to Helen Vendler, John Bayley, and Christopher Ricks as academics who have bridged the gap between professional and amateur readers, particularly through their literary journalism. But need an academic critic have a broad public in mind, any more than a specialist in any other field has an obligation to popularize his or her work? Or, ought literary journalism or other critical contributions not made through the formal routes of academic publishing to be given professional weight? It seems to me at this point that one's answers to questions like this will turn on one's idea of literature, once, as Dickstein argues in his more recent book The Mirror in the Roadway, conceived of primarily as a kind of imaginative negotiation with or refraction of the real world--a view now, Dickstein points out, that is "completely out of fashion . . . except among ordinary readers" (1).

Brian McRae, Addison and Steele are Dead

In parallel to my reading of 'books about books' aimed at non-specialist readers, I have been reading scholarly books that treat the development of English studies and/or academic criticism in historical as well as theoretical contexts. (Examples include John Gross's The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, Morris Dickstein's Double Agent: The Critic and Society, and Geoffrey Hartman's Minor Prophecies: The Literary Essay in the Culture Wars. My notes on these have been largely maintained off-line, though my post on Denis Donoghue's The Practice of Reading comes out of the same line of research.) All of these books (and many more like them, of course) make explicit that what now appear to be the "givens" of professional literary criticism and the discipline of English studies are highly contingent and far from exempt from scrutiny, evaluation, or (presumably) further development.

McRae's Addison and Steele Are Dead: The English Department, Its Canon, and the Professionalization of Literary Criticism (1990) is certainly among the more lively and provocative books in this collection. As his title suggests, McRae frames his consideration of English departments as professional and institutional spaces with arguments about what features in the work of Addison and Steele "render it useless to critics housed in English departments"--not, as he is quick to add, that "their works are without value, but rather, that they are not amenable to certain procedures that English professors must perform" (11). The opening sections of the book look first at the express intentions of Addison and Steele as critics and men of letters, particularly at their desire to be popular, widely read, accessible, un-mysterious. The short version of his story is that professional critics require difficult, complex, ambiguous texts to do their jobs (e.g. 146); the "techniques of simplicity" that characterize Addison and Steele propel them, as a result, out of the canon. (McRae reports that the last PMLA essay on Addison or Steele appeared in 1957, and that Eighteenth-Century Studies, "the publication of choice for the best and brightest in the field," published only two short pieces on them in 20 years.) (As an aside, I wonder if a similar argument could be made about Trollope, whose novels often seem difficult to handle using our usual critical tools.)

As he develops his argument, McRae offers an interesting overview of the 19th-century and then 20th-century critical reception of Addison and Steele. He explains the Victorians' admiration for these 18th-century predecessors largely in terms of the different understanding that prevailed about the relationship of literature, and thus of the literary critic, to life. Rightly, I'd say (based on my own work on 19th-century literary criticism), he sees as a central Victorian critical premise that literature and criticism are public activities, that their worth is to be discussed in terms of effects on readers; hence the significance attached, he argues, to sincerity as well as affect. Especially key to McRae's larger argument is his observation that the 19th-century writers were not "academicians" or "specialists in a field" (89):

For Thackeray and his contemporaries, literature is a public matter, a matter to be lectured upon before large audiences, a matter to be given importance because of its impact upon morals and emotions. For the present-day academic critic, literature no longer is a public matter but rather is a professional matter, even more narrowly, a departmental matter. The study of literature has become a special and separate discipline--housed in colleges of arts and sciences along with other special and separate disciplines. The public has narrowed to a group of frequently recalcitrant students whose need for instruction in English composition--not in English literature--justifies the existence of the English department. (92)

As McRae tells the story (which in its basic outlines is pretty similar to that told in other histories of criticism) this decline in the critic's public role has had both significant costs (among them, the critical 'death' of Addison and Steele) and significant benefits. At times the book has a nostalgic, even elegaic sound:

People who want to become English professors do so because, at one point in their lives, they found reading a story, poem, or play to be an emotionally rewarding experience. They somehow, someway were touched by what they read. Yet it is precisely this emotional response that the would-be professor must give up. Of course, the professor can and should have those feelings in private, but publicly, as a teacher or publisher, the professor must talk about the text in nonemotional, largely technical terms. No one ever won a National Endowment for the Humanities grant by weeping copiously for Little Nell, and no one will get tenure in a major department by sharing his powerful feelings about Housman's Shropshire Lad with the full professors. (147)

While we can all share a shudder at the very idea, to me one strength of McRae's discussion is his admission that marginalizing affect, pleasure, and aesthetic response is, in a way, to be untrue to literature, and that the professional insistence on doing so also, as a result, marginalizes our conversation, alienating us, as McRae says, "from our students, our counterparts in other academic departments, our families [unless, he allows, they include other professional critics--otherwise, as he points out, even they are unlikely to actually read our books and articles], and, ultimately, any larger public" (164-5). (In Democracy's Children, John McGowan makes a similar point: "There 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]).

But why, McRae goes on to consider, should we expect such cross-over between our work--our professional lives and discourse--and our personal lives? McRae's answer to this question (we shouldn't) puts the professionalization of English studies into the context of professionalization more generally, which he argues (drawing on sociological studies) was a key feature of American society during the last half of the 20th century. Perhaps the most distinctive feature of McRae's book, in fact, seems to me to be his insistence that, in this respect at least, 'professing English' is (or has now become) just another job, and indeed that its success at establishing itself professionally at once accounts for and has depended on its investment in theory and metacommentary: "The ultimate step in the aggrandizement of any professional group is for its members to get paid to talk about how they do what they do rather than doing it" (17). If one result is isolation from and (perceived) irrelevance to the broader public, including the reading public, the gains for criticism and even for literature are also, McRae argues, substantial:

Rotarians no longer look to us for uplift, future presidents no longer turn to us to increase their 'stock of ideas,' nor do ex-presidents attend our funerals, undergraduates no longer found alumni associations around us, family members can no longer read our books, and plain English has disappeared from our journals. But professionalization has liberated us from a cruel Darwinian system in which one white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant male emerged at the top while others struggled at the bottom, grading papers in impoverished anonymity. It has liberated us from the harsh economic realities of eighteenth-century literature . . . while [today's critics] might wish to share STeele's influence, I doubt they would want to share his life. He practiced criticism in a world in which there was no tenure, a world devoid of university presses, National Endowments for the Humanities, and endowed university chairs in literature. . . . (213)

In a society in which no one outside the classroom reads Pope, professors can earn handsome incomes by being Pope experts. The five top Pope experts compete with each other, but probably not with the Tennyson experts, and certainly not with the Chaucer experts. The quest for autonomy has cost us Addison and Steele, has cost us the ability to treat literature as a public, moral, emotional phenomenon. But it has left us with a part of literature, with a canon of works complicated in their technique and tone, and with a classroom in which we have a chance to teach those works, to keep them (and whatever value they hold) alive. (215)

Provocative, as I said, not least in reversing the oft-heard line that (undergraduate) teaching is the price professors pay for the opportunity to do their research and as much as declaring that, to the contrary, academic criticism is the price they pay to preserve literature and its values.

Evaluating East Lynne

Working through Ellen Wood's 1861 best-seller East Lynne with my sensation fiction seminar yesterday, I decided to come clean with my students: for all that I find many aspects of the novel interesting, even fascinating, and certainly worth our time in class, I also think that as a novel--that is, as an aesthetic artefact, an artistic production--East Lynne is second-rate at best. But, as I also told them, it's challenging to justify this judgment. There's no universal standard for greatness in novel-writing, after all, no ready measure of skill or accomplishment. G. H. Lewes praised Jane Austen for her perfect "mastery over the means to her end"; we need such a flexible notion of greatness in a genre that accommodates both Dickens and George Eliot, both Virginia Woolf and, say, George Orwell among its acknowledged geniuses. 200 years of novel criticism have taught us to be eclectic in our tastes and adaptable in our reading practices, to be wary of defining great traditions. And yet is it really so out of order to ask "but it is any good?" How could we answer this question, absent some template for first-rate fiction? (For the record, the class has been enjoying the novel, and it certainly has its defenders!) The only strategy I could think of was comparative. Since we obviously could not do point-by-point comparisons between entire novels, and because my primary interest was in the quality of the writing, rather than broader issues of theme, plot, or characterization, I put together some short passages for us to consider. Of course it's an imperfect exercise, but I tried to be fair. The passage from Wood is both key to the novel and (I think) representative of her tone and style; the same (I think) is true of the other samples. All use intrusive (and moralistic) narration; all describe "fallen" women. Here they are:

How fared it with Lady Isabel? Just as it must be expected to fare, and does fare, when a high-principled gentlewoman falls from her pedestal. Never had she experienced a moment's calm, or peace, or happiness, since the fatal night of quitting her home. She had taken a blind leap in a moment of wild passion, when, instead of the garden of roses it had been her persuader's pleasure to promise her she would fall into, but which, in truth, she had barely glanced at, for that had not been her moving motive, she had found herself plunged into a yawning abyss of horror, from which there was never more any escape--never more, never more. The very instant--the very night of her departure, she awoke to what she had done. The guilt, whose aspect had been shunned in the prospective, assumed at once its true frightful color, the blackness of darkness; and a lively remorse, a never-dying anguish, took possession of her soul forever. Oh, reader, believe me! Lady--wife--mother! Should you ever be tempted to abandon your home, so will you awake. Whatever trials may be the lot of your married life, though they may magnify themselves to your crushed spirit as beyond the nature, the endurance of woman to bear, resolve to bear them; fall down upon your knees, and pray to be enabled to bear them--pray for patience--pray for strength to resist the demon that would tempt you to escape; bear unto death, rather than forfeit your fair name and your good conscience; for be assured that the alternative, if you do rush on to it, will be found worse than death. (Ellen Wood, East Lynne)

Poor wandering Hetty, with the rounded childish face and the hard, unloving, despairing soul looking out of it—with the narrow heart and narrow thoughts, no room in them for any sorrows but her own, and tasting that sorrow with the more intense bitterness! My heart bleeds for her as I see her toiling along on her weary feet, or seated in a cart, with her eyes fixed vacantly on the road before her, never thinking or caring whither it tends, till hunger comes and makes her desire that a village may be near.

What will be the end, the end of her objectless wandering, apart from all love, caring for human beings only through her pride, clinging to life only as the hunted wounded brute clings to it?
God preserve you and me from being the beginners of such misery! (George Eliot, Adam Bede)

What were her thoughts when he left her? She remained for hours after he was gone, the sunshine pouring into the room, and Rebecca sitting alone on the bed’s edge. The drawers were all opened and their contents scattered about—dresses and feathers, scarfs and trinkets, a heap of tumbled vanities lying in a wreck. Her hair was falling over her shoulders; her gown was torn where Rawdon had wrenched the brilliants out of it. She heard him go downstairs a few minutes after he left her, and the door slamming and closing on him. She knew he would never come back. He was gone forever. Would he kill himself?—she thought—not until after he had met Lord Steyne. She thought of her long past life, and all the dismal incidents of it. Ah, how dreary it seemed, how miserable, lonely and profitless! Should she take laudanum, and end it, to have done with all hopes, schemes, debts, and triumphs? The French maid found her in this position—sitting in the midst of her miserable ruins with clasped hands and dry eyes. The woman was her accomplice and in Steyne’s pay. “Mon Dieu, madame, what has happened?” she asked.
What had happened? Was she guilty or not? She said not, but who could tell what was truth which came from those lips, or if that corrupt heart was in this case pure? (Thackeray, Vanity Fair)

The discussion that followed was certainly lively. Perhaps rather than recapitulating it, I'll stop this post here and see if anyone out there would like to comment on how the passages compare.