About Rohan Maitzen
Rohan Maitzen is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Her main teaching and research interests are the Victorian novel, gender and historiography, and ethical criticism. Her academic career is mostly an excuse to keep rereading Middlemarch.
Email Address: Rohan.Maitzen@Dal.Ca
Website: http://maitzenreads.blogspot.com
Posts by Rohan Maitzen
Monday, February 01, 2010
The End(s) of The Mill on the Floss
I’ve been re-reading George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss for a graduate seminar I’m offering this term (what luxury, to be reading five George Eliot novels in a row!) and I’m in love with it all over again, especially the end. Well, OK, not the very end, which is (as critics have been pointing out since 1860) jarring, confounding, and depressing. But the last several chapters thrill me--and as I read them this time, I’ve been trying to figure out why. They aren’t as beautifully written or evocative as the earlier parts of the book treating Tom and Maggie’s childhoods. There are some false notes of melodrama that betray, I think, some lingering uncertainty about authorial tone that would be resolved by the time Eliot wrote Middlemarch ("[she] glared at him like a wounded war-goddess” may be the worst of these). The machinery of the plot creaks a bit. Still, once we are launched into the turbulent seas of Maggie’s terrible dilemma, I feel that we are engaged, with her, in a struggle of genuine moral significance, a conflict over what the narrator aptly describes as “the shifting relation between passion and duty,” which, as she says, “is clear to no man who is capable of apprehending it"--that is, once you recognize the complexity of the problem, its solution becomes more, rather than less, obscure. When Maggie drifts away with Stephen, she temporarily abandons “the labour of choice” that has made her life so burdensome to her so often before. What a relief, to stop deciding! “All yielding is attended with a less vivid consciousness than resistance,” the narrator observes; “it is the partial sleep of thought; it is the submergence of our own personality by another.” That soothing condition is illusory, however: “the morrow must bring back the old life of struggle.”
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Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Should We Be Talking about Louis Menand’s New Book?
Louis Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas has come out and is generating a fair amount of discussion online. I found the excerpt from it published in Harvard Magazine interesting, particularly his emphasis on some of the indirect costs of professionalization. But the suggestions he made there about reforming PhD programs seemed at once wildly impractical and strangely dismissive of the content of humanities research--strange, that is, from someone who seems to have a fairly strong profile as a researcher himself. I’m interested enough, I think, to read the book and see what he’s really arguing for (or against, or about). The Valve seems like a place where a lot of people hang out who might have ideas about things like ‘reform and resistance’ in the academy. Should we have an informal book event of some kind? Perhaps just setting a date by which anyone interested will read it (in a month or so, say) and then we’ll have an opening post and everyone can jump in in the comments?
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Friday, January 15, 2010
Adam Bede Again
Remember the good old days, when we all read Adam Bede together and fretted about realism, Hetty’s eyelashes, and whether it was immoral or inevitable to want to crush kittens? Happily, I have an excuse to work through the novel again this year in a graduate seminar I’m teaching. In last week’s discussion we spent quite a bit of time on this passage:
At this moment a smart rap, as if with a willow wand, was given at the house door, and Gyp, instead of barking, as might have been expected, gave a loud howl. Adam, very much startled, went at once to the door and opened it. Nothing was there: all was still, as when he opened it an hour before: the leaves were motionless, and the light of the stars showed the placid fields on both sides of the brook quite empty of visible life. Adam walked round the house, and still saw nothing except a rat which darted into the woodshed as he passed. He went in again, wondering; the sound was so peculiar, that, the moment he heard it, it called up the image of the willow wand striking the door. He could not help a little shudder, as he remembered how often his mother had told him of just such a sound coming as a sign when some one was dying. Adam was not a man to be gratuitously superstitious; but he had the blood of the peasant in him as well as of the artisan, and a peasant can no more help believing in a traditional superstition than a horse can help trembling when he sees a camel. Besides, he had that mental combination which is at once humble in the region of mystery and keen in the region of knowledge: it was the depth of his reverence quite as much as his hard common-sense, which gave him his disinclination to doctrinal religion, and he often checked Seth’s argumentative spiritualism by saying, ‘Eh, it’s a big mystery; thee know’st but little about it.’ And so it happened that Adam was at once penetrating and credulous. If a new building had fallen down and he had been told that this was a divine judgment, he would have said, ‘Maybe; but the bearing o’ the roof and walls wasn’t right, else it wouldn’t ha’ come down;’ yet he believed in dreams and prognostics, and you see he shuddered at the idea of the stroke with the willow wand. (from Chapter 4)
What interested us is the stress placed on this moment by the different priorities and perspectives it attempts to do justice to simultaneously. Some felt that the narrator’s commentary spoiled the affect of the scene, its mystery and suspense, by distancing us from Adam’s emotional response, blaming it, somewhat condescendingly, on his peasant blood: it’s a kind of anachronism in his mental constitution for which we are not to blame him. Yet we are not to go along with it, either: we aren’t allowed to experience what he experiences, the shudder and trembling of belief in the supernatural. “Nature has her syntax,” as we are told in another place, but we don’t understand it, not yet. The weight of the book overall, though, as of this moment, is against reading it as supernatural or revelatory. Adam’s capacity for belief in the supernatural is a relic, a tradition: he’s a man of his time. Is it George Eliot the historian, then, as much as George Eliot the philosopher, who feels the need to make sure we don’t go along with Adam too far here? If we did, the genre of the novel (its commitment to realism, as well as to a kind of scientific naturalism) would come under threat: it’s a gothic moment that’s contained, or at least inhibited, by the narrator’s cool analysis. What do we do, then, when we discover that in fact the rapping at the door does presage Thias Bede’s death? If you’re going to ruin the atmospheric spell by discrediting the magical thinking it requires, why retroactively render Adam’s fear anything but “gratuitous”?
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Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Vanity Fair Then and Now, and Really Now
The TLS reminds us that the first part of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair was published on New Year’s Day, 1847; they’ve rerun the column published in their pages on its centenary. It’s an odd sort of column; its author finds the novel much softer than I do:
We can touch hands with that Regency world and breathe in it as easily as in our own. He has shut some of its cupboards, but he leaves us chinks enough. In this he was at one with the convention of his age on which Victorianism was settling down with voluminous skirts. He had flogged hypocrisy and stupidity in his greener day. Now he had a melancholy awareness of what was due to the Amelia Sedleys; and, even in the flow of his creative fullness, of what a modern dramatist meant by “Aren’t we all?” Novels had become family reading, to be read aloud by Mamma on her sofa, with a candle throwing its discreet light on the page and her daughter doing needlework in the outer dusk. Thackeray was a gentleman – the word is not used disparagingly – and he would not have them blush in the dimness.
He has no far-reaching thought – no ideology, shall we say. Yet Charlotte Brontë saw him as “the first social regenerator of his day.”
If anyone at the TLS is reading this, I’d happily write you up something a little more current (it’s not as if nobody has read or written about Vanity Fair since 1947, after all). But any attention to such a splendid novel is good attention.
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Tuesday, December 01, 2009
Academic Blogging Panel
Some interesting remarks here:
Participants were Tedra Osell (BitchPhD), Claire Potter (Tenured Radical), Eva Amsen (Easternblot.Net), and Jenny Davidson (Light Reading).
(via)
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Monday, November 23, 2009
The Impact of the Humanities
At the TLS, Stefan Collini has a trenchant critique of the British government’s “Research Excellence Framework” for research funding in the universities. A key factor will the assessment of “impact”:
approximately 25 per cent of the rating (the exact proportion is yet to be confirmed) will be allocated for “impact”. The premiss is that research must “achieve demonstrable benefits to the wider economy and society”. The guidelines make clear that “impact” does not include “intellectual influence” on the work of other scholars and does not include influence on the “content” of teaching. It has to be impact which is “outside” academia, on other “research users” (and assessment panels will now include, alongside senior academics, “a wider range of users”). Moreover, this impact must be the outcome of a university department’s own “efforts to exploit or apply the research findings”: it cannot claim credit for the ways other people may happen to have made use of those “findings”.
Collini’s main interest is in the “potentially disastrous impact of the ‘impact’ requirement on the humanities”:
the guidelines explicitly exclude the kinds of impact generally considered of most immediate relevance to work in the humanities – namely, influence on the work of other scholars and influence on the content of teaching
Collini points out a number of profound “conceptual flaws” in the proposed process, among them the assumption that all disciplines across the university can and should be assessed in the same way, and the pressure on researchers to devote their time not to the “impact"-free zones of writing and teaching in their areas of specialization (because influence on work in your field, for instance, does not count as “impact") but on marketing. His concluding peroration:
Instead of letting this drivel become the only vocabulary for public discussion of these matters, it is worth insisting that what we call “the humanities” are a collection of ways of encountering the record of human activity in its greatest richness and diversity. To attempt to deepen our understanding of this or that aspect of that activity is a purposeful expression of human curiosity and is – insofar as the expression makes any sense in this context – an end in itself. Unless these guidelines are modified, scholars in British universities will devote less time and energy to this attempt, and more to becoming door-to-door salesmen for vulgarized versions of their increasingly market-oriented “products”. It may not be too late to try to prevent this outcome.
Though I agree it is essential to make the argument about the intrinsic value of “the humanities,” it seems at least as important to challenge (as he does) the mechanisms for measuring impact, because the “end in itself” argument risks perpetuating popular misconceptions about the insularity of humanities research, when in fact it is quite possible to argue that our impact on the wider world (particularly, but not by any means exclusively, the cultural world) is already substantial, but probably too diffuse to be measured even by the “thirty-seven bullet points” comprising the “menu” of “impact indicators.” Two academic articles I read recently provide some supporting evidence for this claim.
Here’s Cora Kaplan, for instance, in a recent essay in The Journal of Victorian Culture:
Continue reading "The Impact of the Humanities"Sarah Waters has a PhD in literature . . . ; she has said that her research on lesbian historical fiction suggested to her the potential of an underdeveloped genre. In its citation and imitation of their work, Fingersmith paid generous tribute to Victorian novelists; it also has a considerable indebtedness to feminist, gay, lesbian and queer critics and social and cultural historians of Victorian Britain. It would not be too frivolous to see Fingersmith - together with other examples of fictional Victoriana - in their synthesis of the detail and insights of several decades of new research on the Victorian world and its culture as one measure of the ways in which Victorian Studies has developed over the last half century. (JVC 13:1, 42)
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Friday, November 20, 2009
Virginia Woolf on the Victorians: “I’m a good deal impressed.”
From Virginia Woolf’s letters:
Whatever one may say about the Victorians, there’s no doubt they had twice our - not exactly brains - perhaps hearts. I don’t know quite what it is; but I’m a good deal impressed.
She had just been reading “the entire works of Mr. James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, so as to compare them with the entire works of Dickens & Mrs Gaskell; besides that George Eliot; & finally Hardy.” About the experience of reading “G.E.” she writes to another friend, “I was so much struck by her goodness that I hope it wasn’t my article that you thought hard. She is as easy to read as Tit Bits: and it was a surprise to me; magnificent in many ways.” The “article” to which she refers is her piece on George Eliot for the Times Literary Supplement, originally published exactly 90 years ago today. It is a wonderful essay, at once stringent and sympathetic:
(You can read the whole essay here.)[T]hough we cannot read the story [of GE’s early life] without a strong desire that the stages of her pilgrimage might have been made, if not more easy, at least more beautiful, there is a dogged determination in her advance upon the citadel of culture which raises it above our pity. Her development was very slow and very awkward, but it had the irresistible impetus behind it of a deep-seated and noble ambition. Every obstacle at length was thrust from her path. She knew everyone. She read everything. Her astonishing intellectual vitality had triumphed. Youth was over, but youth had been full of suffering. Then, at the age of thirty-five, at the height of her powers, and in the fulness of her freedom, she made the decision which was of such profound moment to her and still matters even to us, and went to Weimar, alone with George Henry Lewes. . . . By becoming thus marked, first by circumstances and later, inevitably, by her fame, she lost the power to move on equal terms unnoted among her kind; and the loss for a novelist was serious. Still, basking in the light and sunshine of Scenes of Clerical Life, feeling the large mature mind spreading itself with a luxurious sense of freedom in the world of her ‘remotest past’, to speak of loss seems inappropriate. Everything to such a mind was gain. All experience filtered down through layer after layer of perception and reflection, enriching and nourishing.
The books are astonishingly readable and have no trace of pomposity or pretence. But to the reader who holds a large stretch of her early work in view it will become obvious that the mist of recollection gradually withdraws. It is not that her power diminishes, for, to our thinking, it is at its highest in the mature Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people. But the world of fields and farms no longer contents her. In real life she had sought her fortunes elsewhere; and though to look back into the past was calming and consoling, there are, even in the early works, traces of that troubled spirit, that exacting and questioning and baffled presence who was George Eliot herself. . . .
[Her heroines] do not find what they seek, and we cannot wonder. The ancient consciousness of woman, charged with suffering and sensibility, and for so many ages dumb, seems in them to have brimmed and overflowed and uttered a demand for something - they scarcely know what - for something that is perhaps incompatible with the facts of human existence. George Eliot had far too strong an intelligence to tamper with those facts, and too broad a humour to mitigate the truth because it was a stern one. Save for the supreme courage of their endeavour, the struggle ends, for her heroines, in tragedy, or in a compromise that is even more melancholy. But their story is the incomplete version of the story that is George Eliot herself. For her, too, the burden and the complexity of womanhood were not enough; she must reach beyond the sanctuary and pluck for herself the strange bright fruits of art and knowledge. Clasping them as few women have ever clasped them, she would not renounce her own inheritance - the difference of view, the difference of standard - nor accept an inappropriate reward. Thus we behold her, a memorable figure, inordinately praised and shrinking from her fame, despondent, reserved, shuddering back into the arms of love as if there alone were satisfaction and, it might be, justification, at the same time reaching out with ‘a fastidious yet hungry ambition’ for all that life could offer the free and inquiring mind and confronting her feminine aspirations with the real world of men. Triumphant was the issue for her, whatever it may have been for her creations, and as we recollect all that she dared and achieved, how with every obstacle against her - sex and health and convention - she sought more knowledge and more freedom till the body, weighted with its double burden, sank worn out, we must lay upon her grave whatever we have it in our power to bestow of laurel and rose.
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Wednesday, November 18, 2009
What Defines an ‘English’ Course, Anyway?
Yesterday my department debated a motion to cross-list a course on Dante offered through the Italian Studies program*--that is, to enable students to take it as an English course, and thus, among other things, to let English majors count it towards the number of English courses they need to fulfill their degree requirements. There was a fair amount of discussion, some of it about practicalities, but some of it about principles. Nobody questioned that it was a good thing to encourage English majors to study Dante, but should their doing so be considered part of their work in ‘English’? If so, why not Boccaccio, Proust, Flaubert, or Tolstoy? It was pointed out that we already cross-list a Russian course on Nabokov. We also offer courses ourselves that feature literature in translation: World Literature, for instance, or Canadian literature (Quebec, remember?). We used to have a course on the Bible as literature. So the working definition of ‘English’ as a discipline is not ‘the study of literature written in English.’ Is it ‘the study of literature written in English, or highly influential on English writers, or in the context of Anglophone colonialism’? Or is the discipline defined, not by its content, but by its methodology? But there is no one ‘methodology.’ What does it mean, in theory but even more pressingly in practice, if we can’t point to anything and say ‘that is not what we do,’ or, to a student, ’this is what we do here’? To be sure, departmental or disciplinary boundaries have many arbitrary or circumstantial features. My university, like most these days, is keen on interdisciplinarity, and most of us recognize that English has been interdisciplinary all along. And yet I couldn’t help feeling during yesterday’s discussion that our inability to explain (or our refusal to delimit) what counted as an ‘English’ course and what didn’t reflected a broad and, in some ways, disabling incoherence in my field. It is certainly pedagogically disabling, at least in classes with a literary-historical framework, because you can’t count on any student having learned anything in particular before he or she shows up, even in a 4th-year seminar. For example, in my seminar on Victorian sensation fiction, many of the students have not studied any Victorian literature before. As far as they are concerned, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Ellen Wood are representative Victorian novelists--and so, in some senses, they are, except that essential to critical work on their novels is some sense of how and why they had until fairly recently been excluded from ‘the canon.’ it is very difficult to engage the class with the implications of our reading Wood at all when they haven’t read any Dickens or George Eliot. Now, English students have yet one more course they can take towards their degree instead of The Nineteenth-Century Novel (or Romantic Poetry or Restoration Drama or African-American Literature or Science Fiction). It’s a zero-sum game for them, after all.
And yet it’s hard not to see it as a good thing that more of ‘our’ students might read The Divine Comedy. I never have, and I know it is my loss.
*The course is taught in English and the works are read in translation.
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Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Yet Another Established Writer Swats at the ‘Loud-Buzzing’ Blogger
Unintentionally, mind you. And present company excepted, of course.
He is already to be classed as a “general writer,” corresponding to the comprehensive wants of the “general reader,” and with this industry on his hands it is not enough for him to keep up the ingenuous self-reliance of youth: he finds himself under an obligation to be skilled in various methods of seeming to know; and having habitually expressed himself before he was convinced, his interest in all subjects is chiefly to ascertain that he has not made a mistake, and to feel his infallibility confirmed. That impulse to decide, that vague sense of being able to achieve the unattempted, that dream of aerial unlimited movement at will without feet or wings, which were once but the joyous mounting of young sap, are already taking shape as unalterable woody fibre: the impulse has hardened into “style,” and into a pattern of peremptory sentences; the sense of ability in the presence of other men’s failures is turning into the official arrogance of one who habitually issues directions which he has never himself been called on to execute; the dreamy buoyancy of the stripling has taken on a fatal sort of reality in written pretensions which carry consequences. He is on the way to become like the loud-buzzing, bouncing Bombus who combines conceited illusions enough to supply several patients in a lunatic asylum with the freedom to show himself at large in various forms of print. If one who takes himself for the telegraphic centre of all American wires is to be confined as unfit to transact affairs, what shall we say to the man who believes himself in possession of the unexpressed motives and designs dwelling in the breasts of all sovereigns and all politicians? And I grieve to think that poor Pepin, though less political, may by-and-by manifest a persuasion hardly more sane, for he is beginning to explain people’s writing by what he does not know about them. Yet he was once at the comparatively innocent stage which I have confessed to be that of my own early astonishment at my powerful originality; and copying the just humility of the old Puritan, I may say, “But for the grace of discouragement, this coxcombry might have been mine.”
Pepin made for himself a necessity of writing (and getting printed) before he had considered whether he had the knowledge or belief that would furnish eligible matter. At first perhaps the necessity galled him a little, but it is now as easily borne, nay, is as irrepressible a habit as the outpouring of inconsiderate talk. He is gradually being condemned to have no genuine impressions, no direct consciousness of enjoyment or the reverse from the quality of what is before him: his perceptions are continually arranging themselves in forms suitable to a printed judgment, and hence they will often turn out to be as much to the purpose if they are written without any direct contemplation of the
object, and are guided by a few external conditions which serve to classify it for him. In this way he is irrevocably losing the faculty of accurate mental vision: having bound himself to express judgments which will satisfy some other demands than that of veracity, he has blunted his perceptions by continual preoccupation. We cannot command veracity at will: the power of seeing and reporting truly is a form of health that has to be delicately guarded, and as an ancient Rabbi has solemnly said, “The penalty of untruth is untruth.” But Pepin is only a mild example of the fact that incessant writing with a view to printing carries internal consequences which have often the nature of disease.
And however unpractical it may be held to consider whether we have anything to print which it is good for the world to read, or which has not been better said before, it will perhaps be allowed to be worth considering what effect the printing may have on ourselves. Clearly there is a sort of writing which helps to keep the writer in a ridiculously contented ignorance; raising in him continually the sense of having delivered himself effectively, so that the acquirement of more thorough knowledge seems as superfluous as the purchase of costume for a past occasion. He has invested his vanity (perhaps his hope of income) in his own shallownesses and mistakes, and must desire their prosperity. Like the professional prophet, he learns to be glad of the harm that keeps up his credit, and to be sorry for the good that contradicts him. It is hard enough for any of us, amid the changing winds of fortune and the hurly-burly of events, to keep quite clear of a gladness which is another’s calamity; but one may choose not to enter on a course which will turn such gladness into a fixed habit of mind, committing ourselves to be continually pleased that others should appear to be wrong in order that we may have the air of being right.
I tell you, that George Eliot was prescient, as well as snarky.
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Friday, October 30, 2009
The Wit and Wisdom of George Eliot (I)
In 1871 an enthusiastic young reader named Alexander Main received George Eliot’s permission to publish a collection of inspirational excerpts from her works; the volume was put out in 1872 by her usual publisher, John Blackwood (who nicknamed Main “the Gusher"), under the title Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings of George Eliot. As I make my way through Middlemarch yet again, I sympathize with his project: I am, as always, struck repeatedly by the sheer pleasure the novel affords, precisely because it is so wise, witty, and tender. It’s endlessly tempting to grab anyone who happens to be nearby and say, “just listen to this bit!” Alas, too often there’s nobody nearby, or at least nobody with time and attention to spare. But on the internet, there’s always somebody around--or at least so I can fondly imagine. So, as a self-indulgent supplement to my regular teaching posts, I’m going to do a little series of favorite “wise, witty, and tender” excerpts as I go along. I hope that they will give others, too, some pleasure, whether by reminding them of their own experience of reading Middlemarch or by introducing them to some more of the reasons why so many people love this novel. The Valve is supposed to be a literary organ, after all! The challenge will be choosing just one or two excerpts for each category! Goodies below the fold.
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Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Aurora Floyd is Pretty Bad, But It’s also Pretty Good.
My rereading of Dracula has rather lapsed, through no particular fault of the novel’s. It’s just that I’m also reading a lot of other things, some for fun (Wolf Hall), some, as always for work. In the latter category is Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s 1862 novel Aurora Floyd. Aurora Floyd is an example of what is known as a ‘sensation novel,’ a genre that is generally considered to have emerged in the 1860s: Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White is often considered the novel that launched the genre, largely because it was seen by contemporary reviewers to be doing something new and shocking, though just how firm a line can in fact be drawn between sensation novels and other novels of the period is debatable. Just why the Victorians perceived, or wanted to perceive, sensation fiction as something distinct is another interesting question, but one for another day. Until quite recently, sensation novels were not just noncanonical but basically unknown, inside and outside the academy; The Woman in White and Collins’s later masterpiece of crime fiction, The Moonstone (also, in its day, understood more or less as a kind of sensation novel) are the exceptions. In recent years, however, there has been a surge of interest in sensation novels, motivated by increased attention to popular and ‘genre’ fiction of all kinds as well as to ‘women’s fiction’ (Elaine Showalter, in A Literature of Their Own [1979] was one of the first critics I know of to have taken sensation fiction at all seriously). The recent Palgrave volume Victorian Sensation Fiction: A reader’s guide to essential criticism maps the now substantial array of scholarly sources available.
Though I was never assigned a sensation novel myself in any graduate or undergraduate course, I have included Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret on the syllabus for my 19th-century novel courses almost since I began teaching them. I think there are lots of good reasons for doing so. First, it’s a whole lot of fun and most of my students love it. Second, it’s a genuinely interesting novel that engages with all kinds of issues that come up in our other readings as well: social mobility, particularly for women; the morality of marriage; gender roles (Lady Audley’s Secret is particularly playful about standards of masculinity); aesthetics; literary traditions and conventions, especially the Gothic (sensation fiction is essentially updated and domesticated Gothic fiction); and literary devices, including strategies of narration, characterization, symbolism, and so forth. Finally, it gives me a chance to talk to them about questions of canonicity and literary merit, including ways categories and standards shift over time. When Great Expectations was first reviewed, some, including Margaret Oliphant, considered it Dickens’s excursion into sensation fiction; one reviewer considered George Eliot’s Mrs. Transome, in Felix Holt (1866), Lady Audley’s cousin. But today, both Dickens and George Eliot are obviously canonical, and these novels are (typically) not considered ‘sensational.’ Can we understand why? Do we agree with those critics (then and now) who see Braddon’s work as conspicuously inferior, artistically or morally? Does Braddon’s work have other merits, distinct, perhaps, from the qualities we value in those other writers? What are the qualities of a ‘good’ book? Must they be aesthetic qualities, or should entertainment, or ingenuity, or political subversiveness, or philosophical acuity, also be taken into account? (Are we sure those are not ‘aesthetic’ qualities? Is artistry the same as craft? Is plot an aspect of craft or, as some critics held, and hold, is it juvenile or at least of secondary importance? What about suspense? Is it a ‘literary’ quality?) Is popularity a good reason to single a book or author out for attention in our course, given that inevitably, any syllabus is a zero-sum game? Especially because the students usually, in a straightforward readerly way, like Lady Audley’s Secret a lot (many report that it is their favourite book of the term), it is fun and, I think, productive and instructive, to involve them in thinking about why, and about the relationship between that readerly pleasure and other ways to measure the quality or value of a novel.
I’m just been working through Lady Audley’s Secret again, not just with my survey class on the 19th-century novel, but also in an upper-level seminar focused exclusively on sensation fiction. We’re reading four ‘major’ examples of this ‘minor’ genre: The Woman in White, Lady Audley’s Secret, Aurora Floyd, and Ellen Wood’s East Lynne. Then we’re taking some time to examine Victorian responses, and then contemporary critical responses, before reading Sarah Waters’s brilliant revision of sensation fiction, Fingersmith (2002) (which, just by the way, I highly recommend). This is definitely a context in which the (in)famous question ‘But is it any good?’ is bound to be on my mind, along with the other kinds of questions that came up in the recent thread about reasons for teaching (or not teaching, or liking or not liking) Dracula. I have to be honest and say that to my mind, the quality of the writing as writing in this week’s novel, Aurora Floyd, is not that impressive. Lady Audley’s Secret is more efficient and artful (not much more, mind you); Aurora Floyd rather rambles on, with what often strikes me as too much--too much description, too much repetition, too much foreshadowing, too many narrative intrusions, too much writing for not enough plot. I feel this as I read, though it is difficult to point to any specific example and say, “here, this strikes a false note,” or “this has to go.” After all, my favourite and most-admired novels are also long and full of narrative intrusions. Still, I believe Aurora Floyd is a badly written novel. And yet I also think it is a good novel, considered from a different perspective, or held to a different standard. Basically, it is a very interesting novel, taking up themes that are found in many other 19th-century novels and manipulating them in unexpected ways. It is also quite readable, for all of its faults, suspenseful and full of highly charged bits and pieces, of which this is the most notorious:
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Tuesday, October 06, 2009
‘Dracula’ Is Really Very Good. It’s Also Very Bad.
As previously mentioned, the lively bunch at InfiniteSummer are cleansing their palates with Dracula (before, apparently, moving on to 2666 after Christmas, in case anyone just can’t get enough of online group readings). I’m on schedule with them, through Chapter 7 and heading into Chapter 8.
I have read the novel once before, fully a decade ago. I read it for myself, not for work, and never returned to it. I have never taken a personal interest in vampire literature or horror novels, and even professionally, I have given only perfunctory attention to Gothic fiction. I’ve included Matthew Lewis’s The Monk in courses on the history of the British novel, but that’s about it. As mystery and detective fiction is also a teaching area for me, I have a historical interest in permutations of the Gothic, and I often teach examples of mid-Victorian ‘sensation’ fiction, which is essentially a form of domesticated Gothic (just this week, it’s Lady Audley’s Secret, for instance). When I confess that I sometimes mutter to myself, when preparing for these classes, “This is as low as I’m willing to go,” you may be prepared for my (admittedly preliminary) response to rereading Dracula: It’s a well-written, cleverly conceived--even artful--novel, but I can’t help thinking at the turn of every page that this book represents energy (from both writer and reader) expended in a dubious cause. My objection, in other words, is not literary, but ethical.
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Friday, October 02, 2009
People Who Like Dracula Will Find This the Kind of Thing They Like
Once upon a time, some snide remarks about someone who liked Dracula led to this, and then this, and then (among other things) this. Serendipitously, the folks who organized the Infinite Summer project are detoxing from DFW with none other than Dracula (details, including a reading schedule, and some introductory comments from noted Dracula expert Elizabeth Miller and Bram Stoker’s “great-grand-nephew” Dacre Stoker are posted here). I think some of us should read along. I’ve pulled my old paperback from the shelf. Anyone else interested? I’m coming to this a little belatedly, but they’re only on Chapter 1 as of today.
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Tuesday, September 15, 2009
This Week in My Classes Revisited, with Some Thoughts on J. C. Hallman
I don’t usually cross-post my teaching posts at The Valve, but it has been kind of quiet around here lately and I thought some Valve readers might be interested in the J. C. Hallman anthology I discuss towards the end of this post--and perhaps in some of the other issues the post raises along the way. So, here is the latest installment in a series I’ve been running at my own place since 2007, “This Week in My Classes.”
Continue reading "This Week in My Classes Revisited, with Some Thoughts on J. C. Hallman"Sunday, September 13, 2009
Julie & Julia: The Reading Group Guide; or, Why English Professors Aren’t Welcome in Book Clubs
More and more books are published now with appendices aimed at book clubs. Typical features are interviews with the author, questions for discussion, and suggestions for further reading ("if you liked this book, you’ll also like...") . I’m always struck by how different the discussion questions are from the kinds of questions I would ask of, or prepare for, my classes. I just finished Julie & Julia, which comes with a set of “Questions and Topics for Discussion” which epitomize what I think of as the book club approach. Here they are, with my answers, and then some reflections on where or why things fall apart for me.
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