The Seacoast of Bohemia

"It's like going to a Dylan concert"

2012-01-27T07:41:00.003-05:00

In our critical thinking classes, one of the elements of thinking that we discuss is point of view, and it's one that is a bit more difficult to talk about than it would seem at first. Sometimes it feels like I'm not quite explaining that my background, my role in a situation, my own present biases might make a difference in how I perceive a situation. And that this is true for the students as well. I'm better able to show students how this works in a particular narrative -- from Claudius' point of view things seem one way; from Hamlet's they're totally different. But application of it to our own lives, and particularly to our own thinking about literature, becomes more difficult for some reason. And it's true for me, just as much as it's true for my students.

This was driven home to me several times this week.

On Tuesday, I taught Richard Wright's "The Man Who was Almost a Man" to my intro to lit students. As always, with leading discussion, there are some things that I think are fairly obvious (Dave is African American, the story occurs in the deep south, most people in the rural deep south are sharecroppers), but that's because I already have a series of experiences and have prior information that helps me recognize that in the reading. Also, I've read the story at least once a year for the past 6 years. That might also help. But I think that's sort of the obvious point of view issue: I know things my students don't, and part of my job in teaching them is to lead them to discover that knowledge and use it to interpret the piece.

But the one piece of knowledge I don't have is actual knowledge of firearms. It often comes up, but this year I had a number of students who really focused on the idea in ways that I hadn't considered. And these are students who know a lot about firearms. Many of my students from more rural areas hunt, and they associate the power of the gun with manhood, or at least to adulthood (which I realize is different from the manhood of Wright's story, but the point is it raises different ideas in discussion). One of my students pointed out that for her, a gun is something that requires responsibility, which is what it takes to be able to go out hunting and to use the gun. I hadn't thought of it that way, and I told her so.

That might be an important part of my teaching -- a willingness to point out when a student not only brings up an important point, but acknowledging that a student brings to the table a different set of experiences that can influence interpretation.

It's something that I have to think about very carefully when I receive the discussion questions from my students in Restoration/Renaissance literature. Again, things that I find to be obvious are totally new to the students. I'm teaching Oroonoko for the third or fourth time,* and reading once again. And students are raising questions that I either hadn't really thought about (but that we'll deal with), or questions that might seem so obvious to me because I know the culture and the history, and particularly because I know the history of the novel. The exercise is one for me that emphasizes both the need to focus on student interests, and the need to remain humble in the face of teaching. I know a great deal of stuff (so do my students), but to get the students to a point of understanding the literature and culture of an era, I have to help them deal with their questions first. And we get there.

This week, I was also reminded of this issue -- outside of the classroom -- because we had the National Players on campus this week, performing Taming of the Shrew. In preparation for the play, I gave a lecture last Friday afternoon about Taming and a play written by John Fletcher called The Tamer Tamed (1609), during which I discussed the two different models of marriage that the plays propose and how those different models appeared in the early modern culture. I often forget that for many people who are not familiar with Shakespeare, the plays can be a bit overwhelming -- or just difficult to follow. I realize this with my students -- and I tell the students in my Shakespeare class, "Don't freak out on me ... you'll get it" -- but I sometimes forget that even when something is acted well, people may not always feel comfortable with it. I've read all of the plays -- most of them multiple times -- and I've seen a large portion of them in some form or another.

Not everyone has.

So it was somewhat rewarding when I heard from a colleague in the Religion department that my talk helped him make sense of the play; and it was particularly rewarding when a good friend explained that my talk helped him make sense of the play, because, like a Dylan concert, "it helps to know the words beforehand."

*I am now at a point where I officially cannot remember how many times I've taught some things. I've been doing this just long enough to start repeating things this much.

Intense concentration

2012-01-22T09:33:00.003-05:00

Tom loves the various windows around the house. He never tries to escape, but he watches the world go by all the time. We've had some birds in the trees right outside the window lately, and he can't get enough of them.

Collaborating on the semester

2012-01-15T13:36:00.000-05:00

On the second day of class in most of my 300-level courses, I have the students do two things: select about half of the semester's readings and practice asking discussion questions.

To facilitate the first part (and because my on-campus colleagues look upon me with some skepticism over this), I provide the students a handout with the list of what we will definitely be reading for the semester, the things in the anthology that are available to choose from, and brief descriptions of what might interest the students about those readings. I've now done this three times, and each time I've found that we come away with a set of readings that's balanced between the canonical heavy-hitters and writers on the margins of the canon (though, of course, the inclusion of any writer in the Norton does establish some degree of canonicity ... but that's another thing to think about).

The group on Friday was no different, though the large number of absences (I think there was a big basketball game/party on Thursday night) meant that the six English majors in the class made all the decisions. I gave the students a sheet, told them how many days they needed to select readings for and left for 10 minutes. The students negotiated and selected.

Then we moved to working on asking open-ended discussion questions. This is a central assignment in my course -- students have to submit 2 discussion questions via email by 30 minutes before class. So the rest of class on Friday was dedicated to practicing discussion questions. I give the students an assignment sheet (of course), explaining what makes up a good discussion question and demonstrating some poor and some good discussion questions.

That's the fun part of the assignment sheet (in my nerdy opinion). I always select something in relatively recent pop culture to model the types of questions that will and will not work. Actually, I should clarify, I always select some piece of pop culture that WB and I have recently been into. I've used The Prisoner, James Bond films, and Lost in previous courses. This time around, I went with WB's suggestion of reality television, most particularly Jersey Shore and College Hill.*

Anyway ... I set the students in pairs and have them come up with some discussion questions over an initial reading for the course (this time, over a couple of Pepys' entries about the Great Fire and an excerpt from Dryden's "Annus Mirabilis"). We put them up on the board and then we discuss the effectiveness of the questions for opening up discussion. We pay particular attention to whether or not the questions are significant and relevant to our overall course question, which for this semester is simply "What characterizes the literature of the Long Eighteenth Century? And what, in fact, makes it the Long Eighteenth Century?" We discuss the breadth of the question -- and whether or not it will actually open up the discusion; we also consider whether or not the question requires us to find supporting evidence, which is an important part of quality discussion of literature, quality interpretation. So next week, students will be submitting their own questions, and I'll be using those to begin class discussion. As we move through the course, the process of asking effective discussion questions becomes more organic for the students, and most students begin to really excel at this.

I do this, in part, to develop student ownership of the material. But I also have the students do this because I think that a huge part of writing a final paper in an English course depends on asking a significant question about the material.

Plus this really does keep me on my toes and does keep the course interesting. It also makes the course a lot of work (but mostly wonderful work), and I now have to go re-read "Absalom and Achitophel." Because, you know, they picked it.

*Incidentally you should go read WB's blog post on Jersey Shore over at the Bedford/St. Martin's Lit Bit Blogs, where he's now blogging regularly.

Common readings for first year students

2012-01-11T07:57:00.001-05:00

An article about an MLA panel got me thinking again about common readings for our incoming students. From what I can tell, the panel primarily discussed the sort of common readings encouraged by administrations to enhance a sense of community among first year students -- and it seems to be something that's brought in from above and deliberated on by a panel. It's also something, at least at the institutions represented on the panel, that generally winds up tied to the first year composition courses. I don't have much more to say about the article itself.

But it does get me thinking about our first semester Critical Thinking class. Historically, the course had all the students read Mitch Albom's Tuesdays with Morrie (a holdover from the earlier Freshman Seminar days). I taught it the first year the CT program was fully implemented at the freshman year; Bradley and I also probably had a lot to do with why the book is no longer part of the curriculum. We left it, a few years ago, at "Let's drop this and figure out something else later." And we've never done that.

Now that I'm coordinating the program, I think it's time to bring the common reading back. While the students certainly (theoretically) are reading the textbook in common, it would be nice to have another work for them to read. And I think that we can actually have students read something more challenging than some of my colleagues presume (Incidentally, I don't mean to be negative, but I do think we sometimes underestimate our students at our institution. Yes, many of them are not quite prepared for college, and many do have difficulty with readings. But they're not going to improve if they're not given the challenge and incentive to improve).

I've got two books in mind right now: Tolstoy's novella The Death of Ivan Ilych and Rebeca Skloot's recent The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Both are extremely well-written and reflective (my primary objections of the Albom). Both deal with various themes that would be of use to our students -- and both have so rich that each instructor could draw on a whole host of themes for class discusion and activities.

Skloot's book demonstrates her own perseverance in the face of research struggles -- something that most college students have trouble with. She doesn't give up when she can't get information, something that's particularly true when it comes to some of Lacks' children who for a long time refuse to be interviewed. Skloot persists and forges relationships with people different from her, all in the search for understanding and reconciliation. She explains the science behind the story -- both to the Lacks family and to reader -- clearly and without condescension. She also deals, I think pretty sensitively, the tension of race relations in America, especially as they play out in her investigation of the HeLa cells. I think that this works particularly well -- and becomes less about "the white lady helping the poor black folks" than other narratives of this sort -- because she goes to the Lacks family seeking information for this book, seeking research. She needs them and she was clearly very reflective in her work about how to involve the Lacks family in the research -- and she has worked to set up a fund to help them educate their children. One of the points, I think, is that Skloot is aware of that potential "white lady helping black folks" risk. She genuinely wants to tell this story, from a scientific interest in HeLa cells; and she follows the research where it takes her. Additionally, Skloot is justifiably outraged by the treatment of Henrietta Lacks at Johns Hopkins University -- and that outrage translates into an explanation of how our medical system for so long failed minorities in this country.

I just see so much potential for this book with our students: it deals with the idea of research; it covers science in a fascinating and readable way (particularly for the nonscientist); it deals thoughtfully with racial tensions between African-Americans and whites; it deals with the historic oppression of African-Americans; it deals with issues of poverty; and it occurs primarily in Virginia and Maryland. These are all things of interest to our students. The book might be a little long for the CT course, but it is a compelling read.

Then again, I also think that Tolstoy would be worthwhile. I mean, it's Tolstoy.

In all seriousness, though, I think that Ivan Ilych deals with a number of themes that are important in instilling into our students a need for life long intellectual autonomy and an understanding that material wealth is not necessarily what should drive us through life. When listening to students talk about their goals 10 years from now, I hear completely unrealistic expectations (you are not going to be a multimillionaire media mogul and FBI agent at the age of 29); and I want to talk to them about what's important in how we live our lives. Many first year students -- and not just mine, I don't want to sound like that -- are so focused on the material, on the moment to "get famous" through their rap careers or their reality television careers.* And many more of our students are doing things simply because it's the thing to do at that time (get that job that's expected, get married because it's expected, buy that house because it's expected ... hang those curtains that everyone else has ...).

The course is taught by people all across the university -- we've got tenure track faculty members, instructors, adjuncts, coaches, student life people, chaplains ...

We'd need some work before the semester, because I'm afraid that the novella might intimidate some people. But I think we could do it, and I think that it could help us inculcate some of the values that we're aiming for in the course.

Of course, this brings me back to the Inside Higher Ed piece. One of the concerns implied (I think) in the summaries of the arguments is about who actually teaches that first year common reading. I think that there's some resistance to the idea that non-English faculty can teach pieces of literature -- and I know I certainly share in that to some degree (I get a little territorial on days when I fee like we're a less than valued department). But literature professors teach literature like, well, literature. Which isn't to say that other people can't talk about it. Literature is something that everyone should be talking about -- I think students aren't getting enough exposure to literature as it is.

In fact, as I think about it, perhaps that exactly why we ought to go with Tolstoy (though I'd count Skloot's book as a piece of literature as well). Having students read a piece of literature with someone other than a literature professor (since they'll get that in second semester) could help us break through the idea that this old stuff only belongs in the English classroom.

Okay, I think I've talked myself into this for absolute sure.

Anyway ... are there other books that I should be thinking about? I really ought to take these to my committee before being completely tyrannical about my own tastes.

*I once had a student, in all seriousness, tell me that her life goal was to be a participant on The Bad Girls' Club. Statements from students have depressed me more, but not by much.

Second Semester

2012-01-10T09:03:00.001-05:00

Today is the first day of the second semester at our university. I've been away from the classroom -- and the students -- just long enough to be happy to see them this week.

This semester, I'm teaching three courses: English 102, Critical Thinking 102, and English 340.

This is now my fourth time teaching English 102 (fifth, if you count the summer session). While in some ways, I'm afraid that the course is getting a bit stale, I do remember that the material is new to the students. Since I run a classroom that's primarily discussion- and activity- based, it's always the type of challenge that I enjoy in teaching. Students notice new things in the readings -- or notice same old things, but have different responses. It's also the course where I probably become most animated with explanations (I described it to colleagues as the course where there's "lots of arm waving and sarcasm"). I don't quite get down on the floor at the end of "The Yellow Wallpaper," but I definitely creep around the room and look over my shoulder; and teaching "Coy Mistress" to students who have never encountered it is always fun. Plus, it's really the first time students see that I am a terrible artist, yet am insistent on drawing on the board constantly.

I mean really terrible. So terrible, that I have no problem when the students in the upper division courses openly make fun of me for it.

Critical Thinking 102 is going to be fun, I think. Or at least I felt that way while putting the finishing touches on the syllabus on Sunday (which my spouse took as a sign of my impending mental breakdown ... but anyway ...). The course is one where we introduce students to the basic parts of the critical thinking framework we're using in our program. Each course has a theme selected by the faculty member teaching it -- and we use that material as the way to help the students learn to apply the framework. This semester, people are teaching things as varying as horror, the Vietnam War, the science of Frankenstein, and mental illness in world leaders. Bradley and I are team teaching the course using Edith Hamilton's Mythology. And that's why I'm excited about it -- and students registered for the course very, very quickly.

And the third course -- English 340 -- is one I've taught before (Restoration and Eighteenth Century Literature). But this time I'm teaching it with a "CT" designation. I always enjoy the 300-level courses, particularly in the spring. We begin the course by selecting readings and learning how to ask significant discussion questions (a fairly major assignment of the course). And then we dive in. Usually the spring semester means mostly English majors in my courses -- though I have a few more non-majors this time around, with that CT designation. I think that even more than Renaissance Literature (about which the students have a vague awareness that they should appreciate its importance), Restoration and Eighteenth Century literature surprises the students. We're reading Moll Flanders and Oroonoko. The students have the opportunity to pick "The Rape of the Lock"(we're reading "Essay on Man" excerpts) or Fantomina. Once students begin reading the works, they generally realize that these people in big powdered wigs had interesting things to say -- and engaging ways to say it.

Second semester also always brings much craziness. I'm presenting at two academic conferences this semester: College English Association and Shakespeare Association of America. (And if you're familiar with SAA, you know that I have to have my paper done and circulated to my seminar group well in advance of the conference. And that I have to respond to two members of my seminar group. And I have to read lots and lots of other things in preparation. It's an awesome conference -- but it requires a lot of work). In addition to that, I'm giving a lecture this month on Taming of the Shrew and The Tamer Tamed; in March I'm giving a lecture on women's history; and in April, I promised to give a paper at our faculty symposium. So I did that all to myself. But honestly, this is the sort of thing that I love to do -- and I love that this job allows and even encourages this type of over-commitment (okay loving that the job lets me overcommit might be an overstatement of my part, but still).

Anyway ... there's lots and lots more things going on this semester. And right now, I'm excited by all of it. My goal is to stay positive about things. I've started running again partly to do that (also ... the healthiness thing).

So ... here's to the new semester.

New Year's Reflections

2012-01-01T11:39:00.002-05:00

It's one of those new year's days where I'll admit that I'm glad to see the last year go. It was a difficult year for many people -- both those people I know well and those people around the world who suffered through all sorts of major catastrophes. But 2011 was also a remarkable year: the Arab Spring, the Occupy Wallstreet protests, the protests in Wisconsin's capitol building, the current protests in Moscow (oh yeah, some dictators being overthrown, and that one other guy). I'm always astounded by the changes in the world -- and I want to focus more on the positive when it comes to those changes.

And that's actually just it. I want to focus on the positive. I failed to blog for most of November and December partly out of simple neglect: lots of things were going on and I didn't make time to sit down and write in almost any form. But I also realize that part of the reason that I didn't blog is because I spent much of the end of the semester feeling like I was in what I kept calling "a swirling vortex of negativity." This past semester was challenging and frustrating, and since I often blog about teaching, I try to focus primarily on the positive, on the success. I don't want to simply come to this space and complain. (That's what warm nights on my front porch are for.)

I spent many of the past days thinking about how happy I am that the year is over. That 2011 was horrible. And in some ways, it was.

But then I remember that actually, it wasn't. It was, like every year, a time of enriching experiences for me: even the challenges that I faced in the year brought about reflection and knowledge. Sometimes I get mired in the negative and forget about the positive -- and I've become even more susceptible to thinking that my life is stagnant or boring as social media has become such a fixture in my life. Everyone else's lives look exciting on Facebook and Twitter. But when I sit back and think, I realize that my own life has been full of wonder and excitement as well. I just happen to know about all the boring parts, too. (And the amount of laundry I washed this year.)

So, if you'll indulge me, I want to reflect on 2011 with a bit of cataloging.

Travel: I always look at the travel photos of my Facebook friends. And then I get really jealous: I love to travel (okay, I hate the airport part, but once I'm in the place, it's delightful). I always think about how I'm not travelling while I look at those photos. But 2011 was a year of a lot of travel for me -- even if it was primarily in March and April. A lot. In March, through the generosity of the "Bank of my Mother," I was able to go to London with a group from our university. In April, I went to the Seattle area for a conference and to Albuquerque for a Bradley family event (thanks to the generosity of the in-laws). In July, I went to Berkeley again -- and I got to walk around San Francisco with a colleague who was game enough to walk for miles and miles and eat some sketchy looking Chinese food. (She was also game to eat at the Pakistani restaurant and we found a wonderful Italian restaurant that served bottomless glasses of wine. That's just some of why she's a wonderful colleague.) And November, we headed to Atlanta for a conference.

Albuquerque

Dr. Johnson's cat

Stonehenge

From my hotel room in Bellevue, Washington

Work: Despite my disappointments and frustrations in teaching this fall, I also had some wonderful experiences with my students. In the spring, I had a student write a strong capstone paper on the poetry of World War I; I also had several students present their research at our campus-wide student conference (and I think it was a record number of students from our department -- Bradley and I have been pushing our students to do this more and more). I also had this moment.
One of the most significant changes for me this year was my shift in work. In May, I became the coordinator of our Critical Thinking program, which is a quasi-administrative position. It's a challenge I'm enjoying -- and I think that I'm making positive contributions to the program. This position opened up because the person who developed the program -- our Dean of Arts and Sciences -- left our university for another institution.

And our former Dean's job change reminds me of the final important reflection ...

Friends: Bradley and I were friends with that Dean. And we were incredibly sad to see him go (though of course I wouldn't be coordinating this program without that circumstance). One of the things about being an academic is that we all work on the same schedule. Groups of people begin the job at the same time; groups of people all leave at the same time. So at the end of one year, not only do we see our students graduate (and two of my favorites graduated last spring), we see some of our favorite colleagues leave as well, for retirements, other jobs.
So we lose people -- though of course with the magic of Facebook, we're able to see how their lives are going. But as academics, we also always have new people coming in each fall. New students. New colleagues.
We have some remarkable new colleagues this year, and we've been happy to be able to have them join our social circle (Bradley and I seem to have fostered a movement among the younger, childless faculty to see one another outside of work); and most importantly, we became good friends with a large number of our colleagues, both old and new. We tend to compare friendships in life -- or I do, at least -- and I'm very happy that we've found a group of friends who we feel about as close to as we did some of our grad school friends. Some of our new friends are colleagues; some are people who live in town (though they're all transplants, like us). We're working with friends to improve our town; we're working with others to continue to foster a rich intellectual life on our campus.

It was quite a year in many ways. I've been fortunate enough to have wonderful friends and a loving husband. My cats are healthy and sweet, though frequently a little bit obnoxious. And my family is supportive through it all. We've all had our challenges, and while I'm in some ways pleased to see that it is a new year, I also know that it's simply another day. New Year's Day is just a marking post where we should stop and take stock.

Teaching and making connections

2011-11-04T08:18:00.000-04:00

One of the things I always love about teaching is the new (or at least new to me) connections that I make across literary works while teaching.

For example, I've been thinking a lot about two poems that I taught my Intro to Lit Studies students recently: Tennyson's "Ulysses" and Yeats' "Sailing to Byzantium." I've taught them both before -- and I've taught them even in the same course (the semester someone thought it might be a good idea to have the Shakespearean teach a class on British literature after 1800).

In Intro to Lit Studies, though, I work to encourage students to see connections across a broad range of texts -- and part of doing that is having students read things out of order chronologically; instead we tend to work thematically -- or at least we tend to work on things in conjunction with literary critical styles that are conducive to reading certain works. So, we're less focused on how a poem or a story is of its particular moment, and more on the act of interpretation itself. This lends itself to new ways of looking at the texts.

As I was talking to students about things that they could do for their final research projects, I pointed out, fairly spontaneously, that they might consider both of these poems together, because they use sailing as a metaphor for aging.

It's that simple. And I had never really thought of connecting the two poems. While this might be something that's old hat for people who work in more closely related fields, chronologically, this was new to me. And it's that discovery that's the fun of teaching literature, even teaching the same classes, the same texts over and over again.

This is particularly on my mind, because I'm getting ready to give a presentation at SAMLA this weekend, talking about teaching critical thinking with early modern poetry. We've seen many arguments in favor of the humanities: they often fall into two competing camps: those who want us to teach literature and the arts simply for their own sake and those who want us to talk about the practical value, the practical skills of teaching the humanities. Part of my argument is that these are not mutually exclusive, particularly when we get down to the fundamental level of planning our classes -- particularly when we are dealing with student populations that are not exclusively English majors. We can teach literature with an eye to both: for many students, the intuitively grasped skills that we laud in the humanities actually do need to be taught.

Teaching under the influence of exhaustion

2011-11-03T09:18:00.000-04:00

It's that time of the semester where everyone is exhausted. We've gotten through midterms and we've settled into some doldrums. We're just beginning the projects that will be culmination of the semester.

And I, at least, keep waking up stressed out at four in the morning. I've got too much to do and not nearly enough time to do it: I've barely made a dent in my to-do list this week because new, more pressing things keep happening. And we're in the middle of advising students for next semester, so that takes some time. Also, meetings. And travel for conferences. And ... and ... and ...

It's exhausting and I'm exhausted.

I was thinking about that this morning while jogging. (I decided to forgo the extra sleep I could have taken this morning to instead continue week four of getting back in shape. I thought that would be better for my stress levels, since there's always coffee. Though maybe not enough.) It occurs to me that my teaching really declines when I'm exhausted.

By that I don't mean that I'm totally terrible in the classroom. I still bring the energy to the classroom (which in my case often involves some melodramatic arm waving and rather performative readings of texts). I still have a lot to say about whatever we read. I still love the literature and I think the students are listening.

But that's the problem: I'm talking, the students are listening. We've lost the type of engagement that I want to foster in my classroom. While it's true that in my class yesterday, my majors did have a fair amount of things to say about "The Lady with the Dog" (enough, even, that we ran out of time), I feel like we missed an element of discovery that comes with student leadership in the classroom. It became more about my walking the students through a story that I love and less about the students engaging directly with what they noticed about the story, less about the messy work of their developing interpretations of the story.

Perhaps the students don't mind that. They're exhausted, too.

But this does remind me of how very time consuming student centered teaching is. It is so much easier, somehow, to simply go to class and hold forth. I'm just not sure that it's better.

Midsemester panic dreams

2011-10-20T08:29:00.001-04:00

We've just passed the midsemester mark and we're heading into nonstop craziness. That would be part of why I haven't written anything lately. The other part would be that I'm already incredibly busy. Last week, I observed two CT courses. This week I observed one upper level education course and two CT courses. I need to write those reports. Also, I had to turn in midsemester grades for my students. That meant actually finishing grading (which I did not manage to do).

So, yeah, it's that time of the semester.

It's also that time of the semester when I wake up at 4 in the morning (or am woken up by a cat who thinks it's time to play, more likely) and start panicking about everything possible. This morning's 4 a.m. panic was about whether or not my mechanic would be able to fit me in for an inspection next week, so that I can renew my license plate by the end of the month. Yeah.

But it's also that time where I'm having strange panicky dreams. Two nights ago, I had terrible dreams about writing -- I was weeping to my department chair that I wasn't getting any writing done and that what I was getting done wasn't any good. And he agreed that it wasn't really good, but that it was probably because I was too emotionally invested in the subject (I have no idea, either. I don't get too moony over Ben Jonson). Last night, I started panicking in my dreams because I realized that while we had rented a wonderful vacation house on the shore (and the cats were loving the three stories and the spiral staircases), we had also forgotten to have anyone pick up our mail and our mailbox must be overstuffed.

I don't know either.

And here I am, blogging instead of actually finishing up a draft to send to my writing group. This might explain the time constraint thing.

Update two: Presentations

2011-10-09T11:43:00.001-04:00

The students presented their work on the cemetery/poem project last week, and it went pretty well. I've got some ideas for how to revise the project -- overall, it works, but I should probably spend more time in the preparation stages getting students to read physical objects. We wound up with a lot of focus on text on gravestones (which is fine), but not always paying as much attention to the decorative and other physical aspects (though there was some of that).

Some students like this style of interpretation; some do not. That's completely to be expected (in fact, one of the students asked if I would dock the grade if the response paper explains why this style of literary criticism is flawed. I have no problem with that).

Within the presentations, though, I found some wonderful insights from students. One student payed particular attention to the engraving that the person "sleeps with Jesus." Someone else explained the passage on a tomb that describes death as "the suburbs of Elysium" (and found the original passage from Longfellow that was quoted on the tomb).

Yet another of the students began her analysis of the tombstone by focusing on the way that the stone dated the death of the person: not only does the stone include the years of birth and death, but it also includes the number of years, months and days that the person lived. (And several students observed this about the stones.) This student, though, remarked on what that means, drawing our attention to the idea that this is a finite amount of time in a life. Death comes for us all, she suggested, but what do you do with the time that you're given? This linked nicely with the poem that the student was reading. It also led the student to explain her thought process: she had a moment when she looked at this tombstone and said "Okay, Penelope, what did you do?"

So, all in all, I think that the project works. I think I'll stick to it for the future.

But it also is going to require, as I said, some revision and reflection on my part. One of the things that I realized in discussing the project with the students is that it's hard to get students to think beyond "compare and contrast." I'm not quite sure how to express the idea of reading two texts or objects against one another without just reverting to the language of compare and contrast. While what we do in literary studies often comes out of that particular idea, we're doing something more than strictly lining things up to say what they have in common and what they don't. I'm just not sure how to get there yet.

Update one: after the cemetery visit

2011-09-27T09:08:00.000-04:00

We went to the cemetery yesterday. It was a bit overgrown and damp, so I told the students that sometimes research just means that we have to get out in the muck.

And they did.

Detail of Uriah Vaughan's tombstone

And they seemed to enjoy it -- some of the students spent a lot of time with their cameras taking close up shots of various details. I'm excited to see what they do with it.

Together we worked to decipher the words carved on some of the more worn down gravestones (I'm pretty sure the words "suburbs of Elysium" were on one of the headstones); we looked at various details (like the top of the stone that looks a bit like a canopy for a bed; and we talked about the fact that several of the stones included "A.D" as if someone would be confused about 1885 being AD or BC (we actually talked about why that might be relevant to pious people, too).

I was really impressed with how game the students were for this. I'm hoping that this produces some good presentations next week -- and some good conversation about the different types of research that we can do in English.

I'll have further updates as we complete this project.

Cemeteries and poetry

2011-09-25T10:36:00.000-04:00

One of the main goals of our Critical Thinking Program is to move beyond the standard forms of assessment (tests, quizzes, term papers) and to move towards projects that actually have the students doing the work we do in the fields. While in English we write papers, the traditional term paper isn't always quite the same as the approach we take in the research we do as literary critics.

Case in point: literary criticism. I've had students write papers where they use the research of other people -- and we all continue to rely on other people to do research. But as scholars we also all do our own primary research, whether it's through careful original close reading, through shifting through original documents in a research library, or through actually looking at the material objects of the era that we want to work on. Our students tend to write simply based on other people's research and shy away from original research of their own.

And I keep coming back to the idea that I don't do this with undergraduate students -- why we don't do this with undergraduate students. Much of this is admittedly due to lack of resources: I cannot have my students study the material culture of early modern England in a direct way, because we cannot simply hop over to a relevant museum. We're sort of isolated and we don't have that sort of money. But my geographical area does have a variety of potential resources. It's just a matter of figuring out what they are and how we can use them.

To that end, I've devised a project for my Intro to Literary Studies students -- and it's a project that's probably most based on my own love of the old cemeteries in the area. *

Tomorrow, the students and I will be going to the cemetery downtown (it's a 3 block walk from campus). They're going to find tombstones from the nineteenth century to read -- and we'll talk about how to read and interpret physical artifacts. Their assignment will then be to take that tombstone and hold it against a poem by Emily Dickinson. They'll present on the question "How does the view of death exhibited on this tombstone illuminate the reading of the Emily Dickinson poem?" (They will then write an explanation of what they learned about this particular style of literary criticism.)

I don't know how it will go, but I'm hopeful that this will be a good experience for the students.

At the very least, it should cement my reputation as a weirdo.

*Actually, I should also note that I was inspired by the Biodiversity class' annual pizza project. Students have to create a pizza that is the most diverse, biologically speaking, and tasty. The judges are the prof's children, so you know it's serious.

Why working with college students is great

2011-09-08T08:25:00.000-04:00

I had a great moment yesterday afternoon.

One of my students walked into my office and said something to this effect: "Dr. Isaacson, I've realized something about that Ben Jonson poem."

And the student proceeded to tell me about an interesting idea that he had about "On My First Son."

That.

Re-reading poetry

2011-09-02T07:38:00.001-04:00

I think as English professors, we try to explain to our students that it's important to not only read, but always re-read any work of literature in order to make sense of it. It generally takes some time to convince students of this (I know I resisted it as a busy undergraduate trying to get all of my homework done). With poetry, it's a bit easier to convince students of this, since we'll read and re-read the poem in class.

Even a few re-readings doesn't always make us really get it.

Case in point: W. B. Yeats' "The Lake Isle of Innisfree." I've been reading this poem for several years for classes, which means I re-read it about every year or so. I'm teaching it today -- mostly because it's in a set of Yeats' poems in our anthology.

But this time was the first time I really got it. I've always loved the line about the "bee-loud glade" -- a descriptor that does exactly what poetry should do. It's a line that reminds me of Emily Dickinson's description of a good poem: "If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry." But I never really got beyond thinking that it was a great description of an isolated cabin, away from the buzz of the city.

Yesterday, though, I re-read the poem. And re-re-read it. Several times. Previously, I've been particularly drawn to Yeats' poems about aging ("Sailing to Byzantium") and apocalyptic visions ("The Second Coming"). And the pastoral nature of "Lake Isle" hadn't really appealed to me -- or even really made sense to me. Finally, though, I recognized it within the tradition of many writers who eschew the city for the country. The poem itself is reminiscent of other writers who have sought solitude (Thoreau's beans are an image that kept coming to mind as I read). I also saw the way that it begins and ends with the moment of beginning -- that notion of "I will arise and go now." There's an urgency behind that, but not a rushing one.

The poem also has the quality of memory that Wordsworth talks about in "Tintern Abbey." In the last stanza, Yeats writes

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core. (9-12)

Like Wordsworth, he comes back to the memory of the pastoral landscape when in the city. But for this speaker, the memory is something internalized -- something that it always there, unlike the speaker in "Tintern Abbey" who finds himself working to remember to bring himself mental solitude in the busy city. Moreover, it's the idea that the things that sticks with him in the city is the sound of the lake.

I'm not entirely sure why it took me to this point in reading Yeats to finally make sense of this poem (and probably make sense of it in ways that are fairly obvious to other people). I'm not sure if it's a matter of not spending enough time with it previously or not reading enough criticism on Yeats.

It does, however, point to the joy of discovery. Even though these ideas might be particularly clear -- even simplistic -- observations for a Yeats scholar, I found the joy of realization, the joy of identification worthwhile.

And perhaps that's one of the things that we want to tell our students.

Hmm. Perhaps that's one of the things that I want to tell my students this morning.

Stormy Weather

2011-08-30T17:12:00.001-04:00

Trying to set the rhythm for the new semester is always difficult.

Add to that a minor earthquake on the first day of classes (one so small I didn't actually realize what was happening until I ran into very frightened coworkers) and a hurricane that led to a (thankfully short but major) power outage, and things get a little rough.

But the hurricane has shown me an important aspect of my town: neighborliness. We were fortunate to sustain only minor damage: our roof leaked into the kitchen and our sycamore tree lost a fair number of branches. We were also fortunate to have many, many friends and neighbors willing to help us out during the power outage. And we're trying to pay back in kind.

Lots of wind and rain: the cotton field near the house

To do this, we decided to encourage our CT 101 students to write thank-you notes to the senior staff members who made the decisions over the weekend -- the people who field the angry and frightened calls from parents and students, the people who make the important decisions that relate to the students' welfare, really the people who have to worry about the students even as they worry about their own homes and families.

Little birdies found shelter under the neighbor's porch

In doing all this, I hope that we help instill a sense of gratitude in our students -- and really a sense that it's important to tell people when you're thankful for the work that they did. (I also admit that this wasn't my ideas, but in fact was Bradley's. I just explained to the students the format they ought to take when they emailed their thankfulness. My grandmother and mother instilled in me the need for a good thank you note.)

It was surprisingly beautiful the next morning

Our tree damage was minor

We're also incredibly conscious of the fact that many of our friends and neighbors in town still are without power. We've offered up our own hospitality, though I'm not sure we've reached anything near the hospitality and sharing that we ourselves received in the storm.

I suppose, though, that's part of the point: we can simply do the best that we can. We call one another, we stop by to make sure everything is okay. We ask to see what we can help with, even though we've got work of our own to do. While I hate the fact that we had this storm -- and I'm saddened that any lives at all were lost -- I'm reminded of the important things that we all share.

Going in a new direction

2011-08-10T10:02:00.000-04:00

As I mentioned in a previous post, I've taken on the position of the Coordinator of the Critical Thinking Program. This is a not-quite-administrative position (about equivalent to a department chair, just without much of a budget and with a interdisciplinary faculty who have home bases in traditional disciplines). It's also a position that's going to take me out of the regular classroom to some degree -- I have a course reduction -- and take me into the new space of faculty development. (Okay, the position also involves recruitment of faculty, curriculum development, and assessment of the program -- and the last of these involves writing the 5-year and 10-year reports for our acreditors. Hooray.)

And in that capacity I've been staring blankly at the computer screen trying to figure out workshops that I need to run in the next week.

I've got a two-hour workshop on Friday (which I'll repeat on Monday -- with fixes!) for new instructors to our CT 101 course (this course combines an introduction to college [wear shower shoes. learn the registration system] with an introduction to the critical thinking paradigm that we're using, particularly the intellectual dispositions or traits of the critical thinker). Then I'm running one-hour workshops for the full faculty next Thursday, to reintroduce (or introduce for the first time) the paradigm and to remind the faculty of what our program entails (and that everyone needs to participate in some degree).

Like I said, I've been staring blankly at the computer lately.

Part of the blank stare comes from feeling a bit overwhelmed -- overwhelmed by the responsibility, by the information, by my own ideas for the program. Part of the blank stare comes from the fact that I want to start shifting the faculty training from where it's been before. Our previous administrator of the program, a Dean who has left our campus for greener pastures of his home state, operated with one model -- and it was a model that worked for him, and it worked for some people.* I know that I operate differently -- and that I think different modes of instruction and promotion of the program will both work for me and hopefully increase faculty buy-in to the program. It's easier to hear some things about improving instruction -- even transforming instruction -- from a fellow faculty member than from an administrator. But I also know that what I do won't work for everyone.

As I write this, I realize that I sound fearful -- or at least anxious about all this. And I am. I ran a workshop about teaching Writing Intensive courses effectively, and it felt like an audition or a job interview. And this does, too.

But they have faith in the fact that I can do this -- and I'm quite excited about it. I have some ambivalence about the program itself, but I think that the fact that I hold that ambivalence may help me win people over. After attending the conference this summer, I've got a new set of ideas about how to explain the concepts of -- and the purpose behind -- the particular paradigm that we're using for our Q.E.P.

And perhaps, ultimately, the anxiety comes from the simple problem of change and moving in a new direction. While I've always tried to embrace change (with wildly varying levels of success -- I'm pretty good at retrenchment), it always makes me anxious about failure.

That change means, I think, something of a change to the format of this blog -- perhaps. I'll still blog about what I'm reading. But blogging about what I'm teaching also means blogging about the act of teaching itself.

So let's see how this goes.

*I also want to say that this Dean's departure made me sadder than any other administrator's -- or fellow faculty member's -- could have made me. He was fantastic to work with. And was becoming a good friend to both WB and to me. He even let me lead people through Gordon Square in London, just to satisfy my Virginia Woolf needs. (I say this with the assumption that my department chair will NEVER retire and that the new Dean will remain at the institution forever and ever as well. Basically, I've gone over to the dark side where I recognize many of the administrators in the academic unit as friends and allies.)

Unrealistic Expectations and Rural Living

2011-08-08T11:58:00.001-04:00

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a piece in the career section that suggests that we need to think not only about "fit" with the university, but also "fit" with the town.

This, in and of itself, is not bad advice. Our jobs are not our entire lives: professors live in the real world, with mortgages and town councils and volunteer work. We are a part of our communities, and not only in our capacity as representatives of our institutions; we are citizens of our towns.

However, the article misses much of that point. The tone is snide, and the author is completely dismissive of small towns and rural areas of the country. I think that her attitude about the small towns is what makes her actually rather provincial, rather than the sophisticate she claims to be. (Incidentally, WB suggests that The Chronicle seems to be doing some affirmative action for jerks lately. He responded to a differently obnoxious article the other day.)

The article annoyed me from the opening question:

Can a Ph.D. who wears perfume made by an obscure order of French monks find happiness working in a town where everyone buys their clothes at Farm King?

This just drips with pretension -- and maybe even a little desperation. And it just gets more frustrating.

The basic story is that the author interviewed for a job as an assistant professor of history at a state university. She explains that she had to travel to "far-off part of the country" for a job interview (she clearly forgets that New England is not the only part of the country -- and that for many people that "far-off part" is actually quite close). To get to this school, she took a plane, then a four hour train ride, and then was picked up at the train station by the department chair. The train ride, which she describes as dreary, was less pleasant than the department chair suggested it would be (seriously, do you not know that the committee is actually also trying to sell you on the place? They're going to play up certain features. When I interviewed for my current job, the department chair described the area as "pastoral"). The train ride itself brings about a crisis in confidence:

Something told me that there was little chance of a world-class orchestra or art museum being even within driving distance of the town. I started to get depressed on the train, because then I had to really think about whether or not the job was right for me. I had been so busy pursuing the interview that I had failed to take into consideration the one thing that would have saved me and everyone else a whole lot of time: Did I really want the job? Was it right for me?

The ensuing description of the interview suggests that the author really isn't aware of what goes on in most job interviews (or perhaps she does, but she just didn't like this group). She's dismissive of the fact that at the breakfast, someone started asking her questions about the Holocaust (and the question she was asked is one that sounds exactly like the sort of question that you'd hear in a job interview); she's dismissive of the types of questions that she was asked in her job talk (because, you know, it's actually pretty fair to ask questions about Bakhtin when you're talking about the festive nature of the hippie movement); and she's dismissive of the committee at the dinner, because they talked to one another and she felt, at times, a bit left out (which is a pretty good sign both of the committee's fatigue and fact that you've tanked the interview).

What gets me most of all, though, is the insistence that there cannot possibly be "culture" or "civilization" in rural places, even rural places centered around a college or university (she writes that "I hated the place with a passion born from a desire to live above the minimal standard of living." Excuse me?).

Actually, no. That's not what gets me most of all. It's the fact that she insists that she's not being a cultural elitist.

I realize that our university is located in a rural region that's relatively close to a major metropolitan area -- and closer to an urban area than the college that this author visited (most of the commenters on The Chronicle posited that the school is somewhere in the midwest and that she flew into Chicago. And I totally admit that midwestern small towns are more dispersed than small towns on the eastern seaboard). But we are rural; we are in a very small town. And I'm from Chicagoland.

But I love it.

I recognize that not everyone will be happy at a small school in a small community (don't apply for them, folks), but I think that dismissiveness of such places is uncalled for. Working at small university in a small town has transformed my life in many ways. For one thing, I'm now the type of person who shows up at the Folger Library to do research in a skirt and heels (I used to do it in jeans) -- essentially, I'm more of an adult.

But I'm also now the type of person who knows the people who run for town council -- and I know that I'm able to have impact on my community, to be able to contribute to the town in ways that make it a better place. When we lived in Florida, I didn't know anything about local politics -- and frankly, I didn't really care.

Being in a small town has also meant that I've had to learn new things, that I've had to broaden my own culinary skills. When we lived in Columbia, I was able to eat Indian food anytime I wanted (I still miss that restaurant) -- and the author of the article is correct that we don't generally have a wide variety of food choices in small towns. But I have learned to make a couple of Indian style dishes. And Japanese style dishes.

In many ways, it's about resourcefulness -- and about realizing that I'm not actually entitled to the "civilized" things in the city. We travel enough that we can still eat sushi and pad thai and naan bread; we can get to an airport (almost as quickly as I could when living in Chicagoland); we still are able to do all of the things we enjoy doing (it just takes a tiny bit more effort); and we're really, really happy to be able to own a home.

It's not a perfect place to live -- but then again, what is?

With an eye on the rest of the summer

2011-07-08T10:50:00.000-04:00

And so it ends.

I will give a final exam this afternoon and await the final papers and exams from my online course tonight. It's been an interesting summer session, both in terms of the online course and the on campus course. I've had some very good conversations with students in both courses and I have seen some good progress in my 102 students' writing. I'm reminded, once again, that I enjoy blogging and I need to do more of it.

I've also been spending some time thinking about how to better use technology in my teaching in general. I'm interested, particularly, in figuring out how to teach students about technology that will enhance their experience as students -- and improve their study skills, among other things. Thus, one of the things I'm going to work on for the rest of the summer is getting to know online services like Evernote and Dropbox. (I've also started following various blogs like ProfHacker and CollegeHacker and LifeHacker on Twitter. It's been enlightening.)

The focus of the rest of the summer needs to be two-fold, ultimately. I have some scholarly writing to do -- and some articles to try to finish and send out. I also have to attend to my new position at the university. I'm now the coordinator of our critical thinking program, which means that I have a lot of work to do in terms of creating faculty workshops and learning about assessment. (Honestly, I had to by "Excel for Dummies" so that I can learn to use the program for more than simply calculating grades.)

So, while I have some time off (sort of) to recharge, I've got lots of exciting new things to think about and to learn. And summer session has been a convenient excuse for not doing some of those things. I guess when my daily to-do list pops up on my computer, I'll have to actually write for 30-60 minutes like it says.

A General Map of Man

2011-07-05T10:43:00.000-04:00

In ENGL 201, the students are reading excerpts from Alexander Pope's An Essay on Man, which juxtaposes (for me at least) nicely with the fact that I'm teaching Hamlet in ENGL 102. I bring this up because I hope that my students (particularly those who have read a lot of early modern literature with me) will note that there's a shifting understanding in the place of humanity within the world. That it, Pope (and Hamlet) both deal with the question "What makes a human human?", but they answer that in different ways, and it reveals a fundamental shift in world view between the early modern period and the empirical, encyclopedic eighteenth century.

Most specifically, I'm thinking of Hamlet's complaint to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern here:

I have of late -- but wherefore I know not -- lost all my mirth, foregone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition, that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhaging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why it appeareth to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving, how express and admirable in action, how like an angel in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world; the paragon of animals; and yet to me what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me. (2.2.288-302)

Hamlet is certainly not happy with the state of the world, and he does not particularly see the world in positive light. But his speech acknowledges that this is how it should be. He should recognize the special place of the human in the universe -- and the amazing beauties of the world. It's simply his current humour does not allow him to see humanity in all its rightful glory. Man should be viewed as elevated. I point to this example as simply one of many philosophical examples of the philosophical elevation of humanity in the early modern period (particularly because I discussed this particular passage with students on Friday).

And then we get to Pope and the eighteenth century.

Pope sets out, as he explains in his introduction, to catalog the human, planning "to begin with considering Man in the abstract, his nature and his state: since to prove any moral duty, to enforce any moral precept, or to examine the perfection or imperfection of any creature whatsoever, it is necessary first to know what condition and relation it is placed in, and what is the proper end and purpose of its being." Pope desire to fully catalog -- to outline all the aspects of the human being -- is indicative of a larger trend of thought in the rather scientific (and empirical) eighteenth century.

From this point we see the entire poem as one of explaining Man's place in the universe, with all his good and bad qualities, including intellectual and spiritual flaws. At the same time, Pope suggests that while the human may be missing things, he is as he ought to be:

Then say not man's imperfect, Heaven in fault;
Say rather, man's as perfect as he ought;
His knowledge measured to his state and place,
His time a moment, and a point his space. (1.69-72)

So, despite man's problems with pride, he is as he ought to be. Questioning humanity's lack would be questioning the maker. Despite this, humans find themselves filled with pride and make assumptions about their proper state:

In pride, in reasoning pride, our error lies;
All quit their sphere and rush into the skies.
Pride still is aiming at the blest abodes,
Men would be angels, angels would be gods.
Aspiring to be gods, if angels fell,
Aspiring to be angels, men rebel;
And who but wishes to invert the laws
Of order, sins against the Eternal Cause. (1.123-130)

The discontent with the lot of humanity is what causes the displeasures of humanity. The order of the world is as it should be -- which is not to say that there are not things to learn, to explore. It is rather to emphasize once again the importance of cataloging things as they are, and not as they should be.

In many ways this all seems rather fatalistic -- or like an over-reliance on the wheel of fortune of the middle ages. But it isn't. There's still something rather positive in this, I think -- and something that's ultimately familiar to us as moderns. Rather than attempt to be that which we are not (which is the cause of suffering and failure in the world), we are to focus on what it means to be human. Pope tells us, at the beginning of Epistle 2,

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man.
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise, and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the skeptic side,
With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride ...
Go, wonderous creature! Mount where science guides;
Go, measure earth, weight air, and state the tides;
Instruct the planets in what orbs to run,
Correct old time, and regular the sun. (2.1-22)

Rather than suggesting that man is causing these things to happen, Pope suggests that man's measurement of these things makes them real. We can only understand the workings of nature through the point of view of the human: and that we should not worry about figuring out the workings of the universe through God's perspective.

Man is central -- even flawed and stuck in the middle state.

Dr. Johnson and Fiction

2011-06-29T20:28:00.035-04:00

In The Rambler No. 4, Samuel Johnson writes about fiction in his time -- and it's important to note that this particular piece was written a decade after the appearance of what are considered the two foundational novels in English: Richardson's Pamela and Fielding's Tom Jones.

Dr. Johnson's House in London. Photo by Dr. Isaacson

I want to highlight a couple of things from Johnson's piece, because I think they encapsulate the conversation about art going on in the 18th century. Johnson begins by explaining that "The works of fiction with which the present generation seems more particularly delighted are such as that exhibit life in its true state, diversified only by accidents that daily happen in the world, and influenced by passions and qualities which are really to be found in conversing with mankind." Thus, Johnson suggests, the novels of the day are realistic (or approximate reality), as opposed to earlier forms of long prose or even long poetry. There's a move away from the fantastic of the romance (for my students, think about The Faerie Queene -- it has elements of the traditional romance in it); and there's a move towards exploring the quotidian, without the farcical elements of early modern and Restoration comedy. Now, we could argue that something like Tom Jones is in fact rather fantastic -- it certain strains credulity at times -- but it is a work about a young man of no particularly fabulous origin, a young man who gets himself into various situations -- but they are plausible situations, and fall into the logic of the novel. At the very least, there's no magic and the backdrop of the novel is true history of early 18th century England.

Samuel Johnson's cat, Hodge. Photo by Dr. Isaacson

Johnson further claims that "The task of our present writers is very different; it requires, together with that learning which is to be gained from books, that experience which can never be attained by solitary diligence, but must arise form general converse and accurate observation of the living world." Again, Johnson focuses on the realistic, the believable. In many ways, I think that this move towards not only internal logic within a long piece (The Faerie Queene has an internal logic. It just relies on a lot of fantastic and supernatural elements to get there), but also a verisimilitude that is familiar to readers of most modern novels (some genre fiction notwithstanding).

In many ways, I suppose, the work of the 18th century will feel more familiar to the students -- it's a bit less alien in many ways, although it is still operates with a different sensibility than our own.

Fantomina and the early novel

2011-06-29T10:25:00.000-04:00

When putting together the syllabus for ENGL 201, I was debating between a number of texts that represent early novelistic forms, and I finally decided on Fantomina. I thought about Oronooko and excerpts from Robinson Crusoe, but Fantomina appealed to me this summer. I felt like it was important for students to see some of the things that built up towards the novel in English (and, hey, you can come read an actually 18th century novel with me next spring).

I think Fantomina is an interesting one to look at for readers new to the 18th century for a few reasons: first of all, it's rather shocking in content. Although Beauplasir clearly takes advantage of Fantomina, she also seeks out opportunities to allow him to take advantage of her. Second, it highlights a different emphasis on the role of clothing in creating an identity. Though Fantomina is always the same woman, she changes costume and Beauplasir does not recognize her: modern readers always find this rather implausible, but I think it sets us up to understand the centrality of the clothing in disguise. Although strict sumptuary laws have fallen by the wayside by the 18th century, clothing was still an incredibly important status marker -- and there really weren't knock off versions of designer outfits available at cheap shops, they way we have them today. Fantomina's ability to disguise herself -- and to be an actress -- speaks to Heywood's background in theater (something of course relatively new in this era) as well as the female autonomy and authority exerted in the piece.

But really, it's the letters that Fantomina writes to Beauplasir. Much of the story's climax is reliant on the epistolary nature of the piece. While this isn't an epistolary novel (like Samuel Richardson's Pamela and Clarissa), it does prefigure that particular type of novel. The nature of the epistolary novel (and Richardson's also include diary entries and wills, among many other things) points to a desire for the realistic, for verisimilitude. While Fantomina is certainly an implausible story in many ways, the letter -- these documents of daily life -- give it the sheen of credibility. This is an important development in the move towards the eighteenth century novel.

If you're interested (particularly my students) in learning more about the development of the novel, I recommend Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel. This is an important (and readable) book about the eighteenth century novel, though it has been supplanted by more nuanced understandings of literary history. It's a good starting point to get some of the basics of what was happening in this area of literary history (and to get to know some of the major players).

Robert Pinsky on William Cowper

2011-06-28T09:49:00.000-04:00

Just a suggestion on an 18th century poet: Why are William Cowper's poems so witty?

Cowper's not a poet that I've assigned the students in ENGL 201, but you might be interested to get some ideas about different types of poetry in the era.

Restoration Literary Feuds

2011-06-27T11:58:00.000-04:00

Or

Beefing isn't just for rappers.

(I'm pretty sure I made that joke last time I taught this poem. Sorry.)

So "MacFlecknoe" is a comic poem -- and it uses the diction of epic poetry to mock another writer. (Students -- you'll see another mock-epic with Pope's "The Rape of the Lock").

One of the things that always causes problems with satire is one of the central characteristics of the genre: the heavily localized references. Dryden references authors important in the late 17th century, but authors that modern readers may not be particularly familiar with (unless they, like me, have spent a lot of time with 17th century drama). The other localized references are to locations in the city -- but there I think modern readers have an easier time. I becomes clear what sorts of locations Dryden selected (even if you don't know the geography of London).

So ... one of the things I suggest that students think about is the very idea of satire. What is it? How does it work? Do you see similarities between the Restoration and 18th century satires (those of Dryden, Pope, Swift, etc.) and modern satires?

And keep in mind that satire is not necessarily the same thing as parody. Parodies can often satirize things (The Colbert Report is an excellent example of this), but parodies are not necessarily commentary about society's failures the way that satires are.

"Let none admire / That riches grow in Hell"

2011-06-23T15:56:00.000-04:00

In Book 1 of Paradise Lost, Milton describes the ornate new building, Pandemonium, and for the modern reader unfamiliar with architecture, some of the importance of this may be lost (and, unfortunately, our book's notes leave out some information that might be evocative here).

The problem with Hell, of course, is that it is quite beautiful -- in its own fashion, anyway. Mammon is able to find great "ribs of gold" from the earth, though he wounds the earth in the process (689-690). This suggestion of earth here, incidentally, makes Hell a palpable place -- a place somewhere in or on the earth itself.

Anyway ... the simple idea that there is beauty within Hell is important -- and it's also important in identifying some of the theology of this particular text. Milton eschews this type of beauty to a certain degree -- and he warns that Mammon, when in heaven, was entirely occupied by "The riches of Heav'n's pavement, trodden gold" (682). The gold in heaven is there, but it isn't to be admired. The adulation of the gold, and adulation of the ornate structure of Pandemonium is the problem.

And an ornate structure it is:

Built like a temple, where pilasters round
Were set, and Doric pillars overlaid
With golden architrave; nor did there want
Cornice or frieze, with bossy sculptures graven;
The roof was fretted with gold. (713-717)

This is the height of baroque architecture. It's ornate and complex -- and in its own way quite beautiful. But it's also got a serious problem, from the English and Protestant point of view. This type of architecture, particularly in terms of religious structures, is heavily associated with the Counter Reformation.

And as many, many critics have pointed out (and our notes fail to mention), the description -- while certainly not exact -- gives Milton the opportunity to assail the central church of the Counter Reformation: St. Peter's basilica in Rome.

This epic, then, is a deeply Protestant epic -- and that's important to think about in terms of Milton's voice.

First thoughts on Milton

2011-06-22T10:10:00.001-04:00

I love, love, love Paradise Lost.

I did not when I was a college student (so, my ENGL 201 students, I understand some resistance to it, if you have any). It was a graduate school professor who convinced me of the beauty of the language and the general greatness of this epic. (It was in an epics class, so that might have helped. We compared it to The Faerie Queene and the way that the two build up specific English and Protestant identities.)

Anyway, I'll post another post about the poem later, but I first want to attend to the very opening of the poem:

Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,
Sing Heav'nly Muse, that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed,
In the Beginning how the Heav'ns and Earth
Rose out of Chaos. Or if Sion Hill
Delight thee more, and Siloa's Brook that flow'd
Fast by the Oracle of God; I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventrous Song ...
...What in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support;
That to the highth of this great Argument
I may assert th' Eternal Providence,
And justifie the wayes of God to men. (1-26)

When we think about this in comparison to other invocations in epic poems, one thing in particular sticks out: Milton's absolute confidence in his ability to express God's will to the people. Milton clearly sees himself as a prophet -- and while he invokes the Heavenly Muse, he is attempting to do something much grander than had ever been attempted before.

Most epics, if we take the standard definition of the term, focus on building national identity. Spenser clearly does this -- and he demonstrates the (admittedly put on) humility that typically appears with the invocation of the muse. Spenser suggests that he will cast off his "Oaten reeds" and "lowly Shepheards weeds" of pastoral poetry and sing instead of the great knights and ladies inhabiting the land. Spenser's opening invocation really is about asking the muse for help in doing these things since he is unworthy of doing them.

Despite his call to the heavenly muse, there's something much bolder in Milton's opening. He is going to talk about one of the foundational moments of all of humanity -- and he opens simply with that, rather than an admission of his own unworthiness of the task. While he calls to mind shepherds, he compares himself to some of the most important shepherds in the Judeo-Christian tradition. You know, like Moses.

And it's that last line -- the task that he has set out for himself -- that announces the importance and power of the book. He will justify God's ways to the people. He's not going to tell God what to do, but he clearly sees himself as one who can explain why things happened and why people should understand it.

Then, of course, we move right into a discussion of Satan's fall from heaven.

Most excellent.

Early Seventeenth Century Poetry

2011-06-20T10:08:00.001-04:00

The students in ENGL 201 are directed to post about "Early Seventeenth Century Poets" today -- and I realize that's a rather wide range of things. The poets in particular that we're taking a look at are John Donne, Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick, George Herbert and Andrew Marvell (and I'm clearly stretching the idea of what's "early seventeenth century" here -- but thematically, I think Marvell in many ways falls in the early modern period more than the Restoration, which is typically how we teach him anyway. At least he writes a lot about Cromwell, which puts him in the middle part of the century. Anyway ...).

It's hard to know quite what to blog about, since I am so fond of all of those poets -- and for different reasons for each. But I think that for now, John Donne is (and always is) where I want to focus this morning. Rereading our selections of his holy sonnets, I'm struck most by sonnet 5 (which is sometimes labeled sonnet 2 in modern editions):

I am a little world made cunningly
Of elements, and an angelic sprite,
But black sin hath betrayed to endless night
My world's both parts, and (oh) both parts must die.
You which beyond that heaven which was most high
Have found new spheres, and of new lands can write,
Pour new seas in mine eyes, that so I might
Drown my world with my weeping earnestly,
Or wash it, if it must be drowned no more:
But oh it must be burnt; alas the fire
Of lust and envy have burnt it heretofore,
And made it fouler; let their flames retire,
And burn me O Lord, with a fiery zeal
Of Thee and Thy house, which doth in eating heal.

The opening image - that he is "a little world" unto himself -- is one that occurs throughout Donne (I'm thinking in particular about "Hymn to God my God in My Sickness" when he describes his physicians as mapping his diseased body, as well as the odd mixing of the two lives in "The Flea"). And it is an important image here, I think. There's something about the creation of the body through the elements - and the angelic spirit -- that makes him both human and divine; that is, the body and the spirit are together in one form. The result of this belief in the inextricability of the flesh and the spirit, though, means that his sin causes failure -- causes blight -- for both. Sin is physically manifested in his body.

The extended metaphor of Christ as explorer (and this is metaphysical poetry at its best, if you ask me) suggests that there are other worlds out there -- and there's an implicit move to connect the human flesh with the world here. Christ is the explorer who can tell of not only new lands, but also new planets.

Donne is left with two options -- or at least he thinks he has two options -- of ridding himself of sin. The first -- the seas -- will either wash or drown him (and that's a clear reference to baptism in terms of the positive use of that element); and the second is the fire that will burn away what it was that sin first burned into him. The entire poem is elemental in nature (and the earth, in the medieval/early modern cosmology was a sublunary sphere) and the elements themselves are neither positive nor negative -- it depends on the usage and the user. Clearly Donne speaks of fire as something that can destroy -- but it is also some that purifies him as well.

On a side note about Donne, since he was the Dean of St. Paul's in London, there's a lovely effigy of him in the Cathedral. Click on the link and then scroll down. He's down towards the bottom on the right hand side of the page. I admit that I spent a lot of time looking at that effigy in St. Paul's. It's fantastic and it survived the Fire of London.

"And fain in verse my love to show"

2011-06-15T10:45:00.000-04:00

Just as I think I ought to post something about Sidney for the ENGL 201 students, Folger Research posts this link of Twitter: a scribal copy of Sidney's Arcadia.

Students are to read the selections of Astrophil and Stella in our textbook (1, 2, 7, 24, 31, 47 and 71). It's a small group of the poems, but it's a good sampling. I'm also encouraging students to take a look at the excerpt from The Defense of Poesy, something I've read and taught many times. I think that students simply want to keep in mind that the text expounds on Horace's dictum for literature: it is to delight and to instruct.

But I want to think a bit about the sonnets -- and particularly about sonnet 1, which I think is probably my favorite. The poem does what many sonnets do, of course (and as I mentioned in my post of Wyatt and Surrey): it presents the state of love as a series of paradoxes. For Astrophil, though, the paradoxes are in the actions that Stella should take, rather than a series of emotions/pains that he is going through. He does not burn and freeze at once in this poem -- instead he feels pain, but wishes her to feel pleasure in her reading of his pain.

But what I'm most interested in with this particular poem is the writing process -- and the way the speaker directs our attention to what writing can do. If he is to get her attention, he needs her to read. She'll then (hopefully) take pleasure. Then

Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,
Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain (3-4)

This ties, in many ways, to Sidney's general dictum for literature: it should teach and delight. This isn't quite the same sort of teaching that he advocates in the defense. Still, it shows the potential power of reading.

Of course the problem with trying to express one's experience through writing is that, well, writing actually has to happen. And it is that block that's important (particularly given the highly artificial and studies nature of the sonnet form):

I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe,
Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain,
Oft turning others' leaves, to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sun-burned brain.
But words came halting forth, wanting Invention's stay;
Invention, Nature's child, fled step-dame Study's blows,
And others' feet still seemed ut strangers in my way.
Thus, great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,
"Fool," said my Muse to me, "look in thy heart and write." (5-14)

Thus Astrophil fails in his attempts at imitation. This is a move from previous poets, who tended towards imitation and adaptation. The natural expression -- the original expression -- of his feelings is what makes it possible for him to write. The material is already available to the poet -- and it is not even the Muse who provides the material. The Muse simply tells the speaker where to look for that material.

Error's "bookes and papers"

2011-06-13T16:34:00.000-04:00

In the first canto of The Faerie Queene's Book One, Redcrosse Knight comes upon probably my favorite of his enemies. Or at least one of the grossest (my grad school copy of FQ simply has as a marginal note "ew").

In the British Museum. Photo by Dr. Isaacson

Error's appearance sets the tone, I think, for many of the tropes of the epic to come. She is a picture of debased fecundity and dangerous womanhood:

And she lay upon the durtie ground,
He huge long taile her den all overspred,
Yet was in knots and many boughtes upwound,
Pointed with mortall sting. Of her there bred
A thousand yong ones, which she dayly fed,
Sucking upon her poisonous dugs, each one
Of sundry shapes, yet all ill favored:
Soone as that uncouth light upon them shone,
Into her mouth they crept, and suddain all were gone. (stanza 15)

She is a monstrous vision of the mother, and is unlike the positive images of women found in Una and in later women like Britomart and Belephoebe. She is overbred and she actually swallows up her young when confronted by the knight of holiness. Taken allegorically, the notion is that Error, when confronted, folds in on itself: error, when confronted, can only find protection within the original error.

And allegorically, it is important to acknowledge error as partially driven by writing and reading, especially wrong reading. Her regurgitation is not simply black and vile, it is filled with written propaganda:

Therewith she spewd out of her filthy maw
A floud of poyson horrible and blacke,
Full of grat lumpes of flesh and gobbets raw,
Which stunck so vildly, that it forst him slacke
His grasping hold, and from her turne him backe:
Her vomit full of bookes and papers was,
With loathly frogs and toades, which eyes did lacke,
And creeping sought way in the weedy gras:
Her filthy parbreake all the palce deflied has. (stanza 20)

The spewing up of the books highlights a central metaphor for much of the epic. Reading is both good and dangerous. Many of the heros of the book fail (initially) because of wrong reading, because of misinterpretation. Redcrosse Knight misunderstands. Britomart (in Book Three) misreads. As with the two different sides of the allegory (Una and Duessa, for example), reading is complex and cannot be undertaken rashly (as Una warns Redcrosse).

Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey

2011-06-09T10:37:00.053-04:00

Though the poets are not exact contemporaries (Wyatt is about 14 years Surrey's senior), they are typically lumped together for study. It's useful to consider them together for a couple of reasons: they represent some of the best known poets out of the court of Henry VIII and they are the progenitors of the sonnet in English.

Tudor portions of the Tower of London. All photos by Dr. Isaacson

Partly, this sonnet enters into English with Wyatt and Surrey's translations and imitations of Petrarch sonnets. And I would suggest to my students that this is an important thing to be aware of and pay attention to throughout the entire Renaissance period. Sonnets are a central form (as the students who took Renaissance Literature with me this spring), and they proliferate throughout the rest of literature. For my English majors, I want to point out that if there's one form of poetry you should be able to recognize immediately, it's a sonnet (remember: 14 lines).

Because they are working in the tradition of Petrarch, they focus on a beloved object who may or may not return that love (for Petrarch, it was Laura). The tropes of Petrarchan poetry (which you'll want to watch for in future texts) include the pain that the love brings -- but the pleasure that the pain brings. It's a series of contradictions or paradoxes.

For example, Wyatt's sonnet 17, which is an imitation of Petrarch's Rime 134:

I find no peace, and all my war is done.
I fear and hope; I burn and freeze like ice.
I fly above the wind, yet can I not arise.
And naught I have and all the world I seize on.
That looseth nor locketh, holdeth me in prison
And holdeth me not, yet can I 'scape no wise;
Nor letteth me live nor die at my device,
And yet of death it giveth me occasion.
Without eyen I see, and without tongue I plain.
I desire to perish, and yet I ask health.
I love another, and thus I hate myself.
I feed me in sorrow and laugh in all my pain.
Likewise displeaseth me both death and life,
And my delight is causer of this strife.

Central to the poet's emotional state here -- and to his description of love - is this idea of paradox. He freezes and burns all at once; he cannot be at peace, but he is no longer at war either; he wants to die and he wants to live. We can think about the complexity of this love (even if the love object is simply an object and not a woman returning his love -- he seems more interested in the feelings than the woman in question).

Despite the tradition of imitation (which the early moderns felt differently about than we do), there are clear political moments in the poems. Take for example, Wyatt's sonnet 11:

Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,
But as for me, helas, I may no more.
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,
I am of them that farthest cometh behind.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore,
Fainting I follow. I leave off, therefore,
Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I may spend his time in vain.
And graven with diamonds in letters plain
"Noli me tangere, Caesar's I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame."

Despite the fact that this is an adaptation, most scholars agree that the deer with the collar is Anne Boleyn and Caesar is Henry VIII. This poem thus not only identifies a love -- defines that concept love, really -- and hints at the difficulties of the Henrican court.

The Tower Green and Tudor era buildings at the Tower of London

Traitor's Gate at the Tower of London

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey is equally wrapped up in ideas of love (he also translates/adapts some of the same poems from Petrarch's Rimes) and caught up in the combustible politics of Henry's court (keep in mind that a dude who would chop his wives heads off might be a dangerous person to anger). Surrey's poem "So Cruel Prison How Could Betide" explores that very problem, and the apparent contradiction of fearing the King's anger, but also the pain of exile from grace. (The note in our book explains that Surrey recalls an earlier stay in Windsor castle when he was a guest, and not a prisoner.)

So, some questions that my students might think about: how do the poems define the concept LOVE? How do the poems explain the relationship of the poet to the powerful? What's the effect of translation and adaptation, rather than pure originality?

Monument in the place of execution in the Tower Green

And so the class moves into the early modern period

2011-06-09T08:37:00.000-04:00

Summer school survey courses mean one thing: moving incredibly quickly through very large periods of time. This is particularly true of the first portion of the British Literature survey (you know, the one from the beginning to 1800?). We're almost to the three week mark and here we are looking at the poetry of Wyatt and Surrey. It also means that we slow down (slightly) in our span of centuries of literature. The medieval period typically covers a few centuries, the early modern about a century and a half, and about the same for the long eighteenth century. I admit that I always feel like I give short shrift to the medieval period, but then again it is the nature of the survey course to give short shrift to everything.

I think it's simply important to acknowledge that the nature of the survey course means that you're just barely scratching the surface of what's there: the middle ages saw a proliferation of literature that most people aren't particularly aware of. So did the other periods. I think my point, as I go off topic here, is that I hope that my students are aware of the nature of what we're doing. These are only highlights of what's there and we're, by necessity, missing a lot of really great literature, literature that's equally worthy of study as the pieces that I've assigned. But I had to make choices and find things that are significant and would be relatively workable online.

Anyway ... I'll have a post up later about the poems.

For now, I will leave you with a link to a chronological timeline of the sixteenth century. The first part of the century is one of remarkable turmoil. Our first poets of the Renaissance are poets who wrote during Henry VIII's reign.

My friends do great things

2011-06-08T22:54:00.000-04:00

Or, promoting my friends' works.

My friend Catherine Pierce has a wonderful poem up on The Paris Review Daily.

Last weekend Bradley and I went to see a play by our friend David Eshelman over in Asheville (Bradley reviews it on his blog).

I think it's a really good play (though if you're very easily offended, it might not be for you. The humor is rather ribald, but that's actually all part of the commentary the play provides. Anyway ... read Bradley's take on the play to explain it). It's also wonderfully weird (as in, don't expect realism).

Anyway ... the promotional video for the play should give you some idea of what you'd be in for. It runs through the end of the month at the Magnetic Field in Asheville, NC. If you're in the area, it's really a great time (also a great little theater with a nice restaurant where you can eat prior to the show).

THE WITCHES' QUORUM at THE MAGNETIC FIELD in Asheville from The Magnetic Theatre on Vimeo.

"Hail, little tiny mop"

2011-06-07T10:19:00.000-04:00

For relevant images, take a look at these: a diagram of an English pageant wagon and a 19th century depiction of the pageant wagon in action.

I have always found the medieval cycle plays, like The Second Shepherd's Play delightful. I appreciate the need to explain Biblical stories to a popular audience, and the addition of stories beyond the text humanize the experience. (And the sort of absurd story of this play is something that has not gone away.)

But beyond the humor of this play -- and the particularly silly bit of stage business of a discovering the swaddled, stolen sheep -- the play provides important commentary on the lot of the working people. The play opens with the first shepherd complaining of the treatment he receives at the hands of the rich:

We are so hamed
For-taxed and ramed,
We're made hand-tamed
With these gentlery men. (15-18)

The rich tax the shepherds to the point that they cannot get by -- they are dependent on those who tax them to the point that they can nover succeed or improve their lot (the shepherd puts it "ever should we thrive"). The other shepherds complain of problems with their wives and with the very nature of their work. Even the comically villainous Mak has problems with subsisting, because his wife keeps having children.

The nature of their work means that they must sleep in the fields with their sheep -- and the play gives us a bit of pathos with their descriptions of being cold and exhausted from the work.

When the angel sings to the shepherds, he remarks that "God is made your friend now at this morn" (654) and tells them to go see the Christ child lying "In a crib full poorly, / Betwixt two beasts" (657-658). This echoes the close proximity of the shepherds in their sleeping -- they, too, lie close for warmth. The second shepherd describes the prophecy of Isaiah as "Ecce virgo / Concipiet a child that is naked" (695-696) and that addition to the prophecy that the child is naked resonates with the second shepherd's earlier complaint of his own nakedness (see line 254). These shepherds understand the poverty into which the Christ child was born -- the recognize a kinship in this.

The shepherds -- the first ones to hear the news -- bring the child gifts, but they are humble. And this remains part of our understanding of the Christmas story. They have little to give, but they give what they can (think of the Christmas carol "Little Drummer Boy").

The second shepherd greets the child (and this is where I took the title from):

Hail, sovereign saviour, for thou has us sought!
Hail, freely foyde and flower, that all thing has wrought!
Hail, full of favour, that made all of nought!
Hail! I kneel and I cower. A bird have I brought
To my barn.
Hail, little tiny mop,
Of our creed thou art crop!
I would drink in thy cup,
Little day-star! (733-741)

The shepherd recognizes the child as the savior and speaks to him in increasingly respectful terms -- even to the point of acknowledging the need to not only kneel before him, but also cower before him. But then, after the gift, he greets the child in endearing and affectionate terms -- the tiny moppet who is also the day-star. He recognizes in this child the similarities they have.

The play, I think, provides hope for the poor -- and even acknowledges that some of the poverty surrounding the workers is due to unfair conditions. It is a play that is at once comic, touching, and social commentary.

Detail of Westminster Abbey exterior. Picture by Dr. Isaacson

The Miller

2011-06-03T09:49:00.033-04:00

Whan that the Knyght had thus his tale ytoold,
In l the route nas ther yong ne oold
That he ne seyde it was a noble storie
And worthy for to drawen to memorie,
And namely the gentils everichon. (3109-3112)

The Host of the Tabbard wants the Monk to go next -- since he will really be one of the next in the social hierarchy, and will (presumably) provide a noble tale like the one that the Knight has just told (if you're interested, the tale that the Knight tells is about Palemon and Arcite and it gets reconfigured in Shakespeare's Two Noble Kinsmen).

The Miller is having none of this.

The Miller's interruption, brought on in part because, as he admits

But first I make a protestacioun
That I am dronke; I knowe it by my soun.
And therfore if that I mysseke or seye,
Wyte it the ale of Southwerk, I you preye (3137-3140)

upends the social conventions that the Host of attempting to impose on this trip. Not only does the Miller -- "a cherl" -- interrupt the Host's proceedings, he then goes on to tell an extraordinarily bawdy story about a Reeve. (The Reeve will respond in kind with an equally mean and bawdy story about a stupid Miller.)

So, for the students in 201, I want you to think about the effect of the social interruption. I would also like for you to confront the issue of the bawdiness (and misogyny, incidentally -- he's not particularly polite about, ahem, women's bits) of the Miller's Tale. Where does bawdiness fit within literature? One thing to consider is that this tale (and the Reeve's that immediately follows) comes from a tradition in literature called the fabliaux.

(Part of what you might want to consider is the way that literature is also about entertainment.)

I'll leave the tale to the students on Blackboard to deal with.

Southwark Cathedral. Photo by Dr. Isaacson.

General Thoughts on the "General Prologue"

2011-06-02T09:33:00.001-04:00

When I was in graduate school I took a Chaucer course where we were required to memorize the first 18 lines of the General Prologue. And pronounce it properly. It was horrifying and one of the only times where I've had a professor tell me "You're doing this completely wrong. Go practice more and do it again."

Anyway ... that bit of trauma out of the way, I still actually think that The Canterbury Tales are quite wonderful and are justly viewed as one of the most important pieces of literature in English before 1800. And so, dear students (and anyone else who's found their way to this blog post), you are reading some of them.

What I always find worth thinking about in the "General Prologue" is the way that it outlines medieval English society. Society in the modern UK is still rather stratified (in that they still have people with titles), but in the US not quite so. So it's important to think about what it is that Chaucer shows us -- and why he includes the types of details that he does.

By beginning with the Knight (who also is assigned the very first tale), he signifies the importance of that member of society -- and his list of accomplishments for the Knight,

Ful worthy was he in his lordes weere,
And therto hadde he riden, no man ferre,
As wel in cristendom as in hethenesse,
And evere honoured for his worthynesse;
At Alisaundre he was whan it was wonne.
Ful ofte tyme he hadde the bord bigonne
Aboven all nacions in Pruce;
In Lettow hadde he reysed and in Ruce,
No Cristen man so ofte of his degree. ... (47-54)

is particularly impressive. The Knight is respected and is worthy of admiration -- and his tale is equally noble.

But not everyone is so noble -- and Chaucer reserves a variety of criticisms for people at the upper levels of his society. Some members of the clergy are corrupt and the merchant, while dignified, is particularly good at lending money.

Of course, the entire spectrum of medieval society is on this trip: the cook with his carbuncle (look it up. It's gross); the various artisans like the Haberdasher; the wonderfully absurd Wife of Bath; and lesser artisans, like the Miller and the Reeve.

What's remarkable about this is the way that the pilgrimage was ultimately a social leveler: everyone "to Caunterbury they wende, / The hooly blisful martir for the seke, / That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke" (16-18). (That is, they go to Canterbury to seek the spiritual and healing assistance of St. Thomas a Becket, martyred in the twelfth century.)

By the way, Luminarium has some sound files of the first 42 lines of the GP as well as the GP's description of the Miller. For additional outlines, take a look at Harvard's Chaucer page: General Prologue and Miller's Tale.

Also, NPR had a series about following the pilgrimage trail from London to Canterbury. It's worth taking a look at as supplemental information about both the UK and about the importance of Chaucer's work.

Quick Thoughts on Middle English Lyrics

2011-05-31T15:01:00.000-04:00

The book we're using for ENGL 201 has a nice selection of middle English lyrics, including "Sumer is icumen in" which feels rather appropriate given the way that the heat has rolled right in to North Carolina -- summer is definitely here.

Anyway ...

There's one poem that I found particularly interesting called "Stond well, moder, under Rode" that involves a conversation between Mary and Christ on the cross. The poem essentially outlines Mary's weeping over the crucifixion, exploring the pain of the suffering mother.

Mary pleads to Christ that he not die:

"Sone, thou art so meke and minde,
Ne wit me naht, it is my kinde
That I for thee this sorewe make."

Quite simply, she recognizes the need for the crucifixion, but she loves him so dearly as a mother that knowing that he will be gone causes her this great sorrow. I found this poem particularly interesting because of the way it humanizes Mary -- and Christ. Christ acknowledges to his mother that "Whet sorewe haveth that children beren, / Whet sorewe it is with childe gon." Christ recognizes the pain of motherhood, the pain that his mother is going through as he himself is about to die.

This humanized relationship between Christ and Mary is part of what will make her the Queen of Heaven, the person to whom those who are lost can cry out.

Hospitality at Heorot

2011-05-27T10:38:00.000-04:00

On this particularly reading of Beowulf, I was most struck by the role that hospitality plays in the narrative, and particularly in the binding of this warrior culture at the center of the text.

Hrothgar, of course, builds himself this "great mead-house / which the sons of men should remember forever, / and there inside he would share everything / with young and old that God had given him" (105-108). This is a monument to the Danish king's fame and hospitality. It is a place to engage in those important forms of the communal warrior culture: the boasts, the gift-giving, the mead-drinking.

And thus, it is a great affront that Grendel, in his unholy quest for causing misery, renders Heorot unusable for the Danes. Hrothgar, for his safety, must move further and further away from his gilded hall and it must sit empty:

So he ruled, and strove against right,
on against all, until empty stood
the best of houses. And so for a great while --
for twelve long winters the lord of the Scyldings
suffered his grief, every sort of woe,
great sorrow, for to the sons of men
it became known, and carried abroad
in sad tales, that Grendel strove
long with Hrothgar, bore his hatred,
sins and feuds, for many seasons,
perpetual conflict. (144-154)

Hrothgar's fame and fortune and tied with this creature for 12 years -- and through the oral traditions of this culture, all know of this indignity of Hrothgar's inability to host people in his hall. Hrothgar, furthermore, cannot appease Grendel in any way that fits within the culture that Hrothgar understands: Grendel is a creature alone, a creature outside of the warrior culture, who does not care for money or other compensation (and this resistance to the traditional warrior culture -- which allows blood money to be paid to end retribution for death -- is of course what leads Grendel's mother into Heorot after Grendel's death).

When Beowulf arrives on the scene, he is welcomed (based primarily on the credibility of his family). Even before the battle with Grendel, which Beowulf fights to gain more glory, he is for the most part brought into this community of Danish warriors (Unferth's skepticism of Beowulf would be the exception to that -- and perhaps Unferth's least appealing quality is that very lack of hospitality). Hrothgar promises Beowulf great gifts and Wealhteow his queen was "mindful of customs" (613) in her duties as the hostess -- she provides men with he cup, and does so in a particular order that designates people's importance within the hierarchy.

Hrothgar rewards Beowulf with further hospitality -- and inclusion within the group -- once he has defeated Grendel (though Beowulf isn't totally satisfied with his own victory -- he wanted to actually kill Grendel on the spot, rather than mortally would him ... but that's just how much of a hero he is).

Even more than the gifts and the mead -- and the new and old tales told by the scop (bard) -- Hrothgar announces his kinship as reward:

Now I will cherish you,
Beowulf, best of men, like a son
in my heart; hold well henceforth
your new kinship. You shall have no lack
of the worldly goods which I can bestow.
Often have I offered rewards for less,
honored with gifts a humbler man,
weaker in battle. Now by yourself
you have done such deeds that you fame will endure
always and forever -- may the Almighty
reward you with good, as He has already done! (946-956)

Hrothgar's claim of kinship for Beowulf is one that doesn't quite resonate with the modern reader -- we don't offer these sorts of claims as rewards (besides, who really wants to be related to me?). But this coming together through kinship is an important part of the hospitality -- and more importantly a part of the warrior culture that Beowulf and Hrothgar inhabit.

That last passage also has some other small things that I want to point out before finishing up this post: while this is clearly a story of the pagan culture, the references to God (as in the Christian one) and Cain are important. The story is filtered through a Christian belief in God, even while it upholds a number of virtues that seem to go against Christian morality (humble is bad, proud is good, for example).

So ... as I finish up this meandering on the early parts of Beowulf, I want to ask my students some questions: What's the effect of an oral culture in this text? How does that filtering of a pagan system of community through a Christian writer affect the text (and your understanding of it)? What does community mean in this text? and what does family mean in this text (remember, Grendel and his mother are also a family)?

Old English and Middle English

2011-05-25T13:36:00.042-04:00

The first thing that students in my course should realize is that the English language is divided up into three major phases (we can get more complicated, but the essential division is three). Our first text, Beowulf was originally written in Old English, our next texts were written in Middle English, and most of our text were written in modern English.

When I teach Shakespeare, students often complain that it's difficult to read because it's in Old English. It isn't. I promise. Shakespeare wrote in modern English (we might hedge a little bit and acknowledge that it's early modern English -- see there are more periods than the main three I mentioned).

Anyway.

For my purposes here I simply want to point students to some examples of actual Old English and Middle English. Old English is the language in its most Germanic form: and we cannot read it without special training. You can find the original spelling of Beowulf at Georgetown University's website (it's part of The Labyrinth, a particularly useful resource). Western Michigan University hosts an electronic version of an introduction to Old English.

In the British Museum. Picture by Dr. Isaacson

Middle English is a form of the language that emerges out from under the French Influence of the Norman Invasion (and English majors, you should forever know the date 1066). Harvard's Geoffrey Chaucer page gives you a bit of an introduction to the Middle English that Chaucer spoke; the University of Michigan has a Middle English Compendium. This form of the language shifts over time (as all language does, and has earlier and later periods).

By Chaucer's period, the Middle English is relatively readable for modern readers. Relatively. It will take you some time and I do want you to attempt it in the original. One of the things that will help is reading it aloud -- sound things out and they'll make more sense to you than if you try to discern the words simply by looking at them. I'm also linking you to The Electronic Canterbury Tales for when you get desperate.

Summer School Beginnings

2011-05-25T08:28:00.003-04:00

I am, once again, teaching a survey course online this summer. Last summer I taught world literature, and this summer I'm teaching British Literature up to 1800. As I did last summer, I'm going to use this space to talk about a lot of the literature that I've assigned the students, as well as post a variety of (hopefully) thought-provoking questions for the students. We're using The Broadview Anthology of British Literature, concise edition, volume A for our readings (I've come to prefer Broadview's approach to the literature to Norton's).

So follow along if you wish. Students have a variety of things to do on Blackboard, but they are more than welcome to post comments here; this space will be sort of a lecture space from my end. Also, I'm going to try to post short comments on Twitter as well -- and I would encourage the students who use Twitter to do so as well. Let's use the hashtag #cuengl201.

Tower of London. Picture by Dr. Isaacson

A semester's end

2011-05-01T10:55:00.002-04:00

This semester has taken me more by surprise in terms of busy-ness than some others, even though I'm teaching a regular load for the first time in over a year. Part of it was some serious traveling - since mid-March, I've been to London, Bellevue, WA (a suburb of Seattle), and Albuquerque.

I am, needless to say, tired of airplanes.

It has been a good semester, on the whole, if one where I felt like I didn't know whether I was coming or going. I had an excellent group of students in my Renaissance Literature course (oh, I got to teach Renaissance Literature at all); I had a good group of 102 students -- and I saw improvement in their writing by the final papers, so I think I might be teaching them something (or they were faking me out at the beginning of the semester).

I've also found some surprising successes in classroom teaching. In Renaissance Lit, feeling at a loss, I pulled out an exercise I learned last summer at the critical thinking conference. I had the students reading portions of Leviathan -- and so I put them in pairs and had them do what's called a critical reading. Basically, a pair of students takes a given passage in a text; one student reads aloud the first sentence and then paraphrases it; the second student evaluates the paraphrase; then the students switch roles, going back and forth through the rest of the passage. I gave each pair a set of broad questions to answer about their paragraph (like "What are Hobbes' assumptions here?") and set them to work.

And they nailed it.

When they slowed down to really read the passage, they made sense of it. It was a beautiful moment in class.

The end of the semester always brings about some soul-searching for me -- and I think it's because in the lull between finishing classes and having students turn in final portfolios/take final exams, I suddenly have some time to myself. I'm also prone to being maudlin in such moments -- that freedom of my time is sometimes overwhelming, and I'd prefer not to go out and weed the flowerbeds -- but I'm trying to reflect more this time around on what worked and what I'm good at. We'll see if that actually works.

Anyway all that travel, led to some good photo-ops, at least:

San Felipe de Neri Church in Albuquerque

The view from my hotel room in Bellevue

The Tower of London, of course

The Roman Baths and Bath Abbey

Stonehenge

Just some links

2011-03-25T07:17:00.000-04:00

Today is the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Factory Fire.

So, some links:

"Shirt", a poem by Robert Pinsky

"Preserving the Triangle Factory Fire's Lessons, 100 Years Later" over at American Prospect, which talks about the importance of women in the labor movement.

And Cornell University's site about the fire (redesigned for the anniversary)

I went to England and saw things

2011-03-20T17:54:00.003-04:00

International Women's Day --100 years

2011-03-08T07:32:00.001-05:00

I take this break from our regularly scheduled mid-semester silence to point out a couple of great resources from the Library of Congress:

Rosie Pictures -- including lots of them in color!

Women's Suffrage collection -- pictures, sound files and more.

I'm particularly excited this year about Women's History Month, because we've got so much happening on campus this year. And importantly, to me anyway, we've got a wide range of faculty, staff and students running programs and events.

In the near future, I will attempt to get back to our regularly scheduled blogging. However, it's midsemester and, well, see above.

Also:

This is from Annie Lennox's foundation for women's equality, in the UK and internationally:

Reading

2011-02-16T19:33:00.002-05:00

Astrophil and Stella, as taught by students

2011-02-08T17:35:00.000-05:00

I'm having my Renaissance Literature students teach sonnets from Astrophil and Stella this week. It's an effort, on my part, to get the students really invested in at least one poem. They're paired off, and they've got to teach for at least 10 minutes -- and they have up to 20.

It's always a difficult experiment for me -- it's hard to let go and let the students explain what they've discovered.

But so far, I must say, I've been pleased. We've had some of the best discussion of what's ultimately difficult material for modern students. The students have patiently looked up words that they cannot define, and they've come to some conclusions about the metaphors in the poems. (We had a particularly interesting discussion of sonnet 9).

My hope is that by having the students attend carefully to a single sonnet now, we'll be able to continue to move forward through the literature the rest of the semester. It takes time, I always tell them, but understanding the language does eventually come -- or at least getting used to this method of reading.

The act of reading

2011-01-27T07:19:00.000-05:00

Thematically, much of The Faerie Queene is about reading -- the ability to read, reading things and people correctly -- and that's something we talked about in class yesterday.

I realized in preparing for the class that when we read Book III, canto 11 -- particularly with students who are first encountering the epic -- we are in the same act of reading, the same bewildered reading, as Britomart, as we enter into Busirane's castle and see the tapestries.

So we worked in class yesterday to read the tapestries.

After briefly covering what happens in the beginning of the canto (Britomart chases Ollyphant, stumbles upon the forlorn Scudamore), I broke the students into pairs and assigned them two stanzas that describe the various scenes in the tapestries.

I had them answer two main questions about the scenes: what is the god doing in the scene? What seems to be the god's attitude about LOVE (our major concept for the day)?

I talked to different student groups as they worked and everyone worked through their stanza pairs -- and then we were able to, as a group, come to the conclusion that this is, indeed, not love, which in turns highlights the statement toward the end of the canto that the Idol to Cupid represents "false love" make all that much more sense.

I've always felt like I've been pretty good at having students work through things, think through things on their own, but I know that there are moments when teaching early modern texts where I'm not quite willing to do that -- it would have been a lot quicker to just tell the students "Britomart walks through a series of tapestries that depict the gods raping women." But that's not really the goal of the course. We're working on building confidence in the ability to interpret, the ability to make sense of what's on the page. Confidence in the act of reading.

Preparing students to read from The Faerie Queene

2011-01-21T07:33:00.001-05:00

Today in class we're reading a few poems by Sir Walter Raleigh (and the obviously one, pairing with Marlowe). We're ending the class with Raleigh's first commendatory verse for The Faerie Queene and I'm going to use it as a way to introduce, more generally, the concept of Spenser's epic.

Because we're reading excerpts from Book III next week.

I always feel a little foolhardy when teaching the text -- even if we're only reading 3 cantos. I think that this will start with my usual admonition to students when reading 16th & 17th century works: don't freak out on me. Read slowly and don't freak out.

In reality, though, I know that as long as they read carefully the students will do well. I trust them with Shakespeare and I really do trust them with Spenser. It's most important to me, from the perspective of the professor, to do justice to the beauty poem -- and to encourage the students in realizing that they can, indeed, read these old things and make sense of them.

It's going to be an adventure -- and we're moving into the really heavy hitters, now.

Another article on the "new" Huck Finn

2011-01-18T10:52:00.002-05:00

I think that this piece by Lorrie Moore in the NY Times a few days ago has been the best op-ed on the excised version of Huck Finn that I've seen so far. Her basic argument? If you want students to learn to love literature, don't start them in high school with something that's going to upset many of them. Put Huck Finn in college and teach literature that the high school students of today will actually relate to.

Moore's point in this piece dovetails with important conversations we have to have about the humanities and about what we teach in literature (and this is something I'm constantly thinking about). What is the purpose of what we're teaching? Are we trying to teach students a specific set of information? Or are we teaching students skills like analysis and synthesis that will lead them to be better able to read complex works of literature, to think about the world and their lives?

I'm inclined towards the latter, but at the same time I wouldn't advocate for NOT teaching classic works of literature. I think, though, that we need to think about why we value the literature that we do -- and we should be open with our students about it (I say as I'm getting ready to scare the students in Renaissance Lit with some Spenser in a couple of weeks).

I would also suggest that we need to rethink which Mark Twain we teach in high school -- and I think that high school is a good time to introduce students to Twain, but perhaps HF isn't the best choice. We don't teach many authors' masterpieces in high school, and that's in part because of content and complexity of the works (I read "Araby" and "The Dead" in high school, but no one would have suggested that we read Ulysses in high school).

Anyway, Moore's piece is good -- go read it if you haven't.

Some pictures for MLK Jr. Day

2011-01-17T11:16:00.000-05:00

I really like this gallery of pictures at Slate.

For me, images of the Civil Rights era are some of the most powerful ways to show what was happening (though "Letter from Birmingham Jail" is one of the most powerful examples of rhetorical strategy in American letters). Something in the photographic image makes the existence of the struggle all that more real -- even though King has now been dead longer than he lived, we can still see his face, the joy, the pain, the belief in equality.

I think it's important to remember -- and to remember everyday -- that King not only advocated civil rights for African Americans, but advocated for equality and dignity of all human beings.

Mike Kardos' book trailer, the blooper reel

2011-01-16T08:23:00.004-05:00

Learning to Ask Questions

2011-01-14T08:12:00.000-05:00

One of the basic assignments that I have in my upper division courses is that students must bring two discussion questions to class every day. I've found that I prefer this to daily quizzes -- and even reading journals, which I use in the Comp/Intro to Lit class.

I mention this because today is the day that we work on asking questions in the Renaissance Literature class. I've assigned students a few Wyatt poems and I'm going to talk about the types of questions we need to foster good discussion.

And then they work together to write some.

Last semester I did this in Shakespeare, and I think it worked really well (and at least a couple of students told me that they much preferred it to reading journals). So today we work. Next week they ask.

I've been thinking a lot about when I learned to ask discussion questions. No doubt a great deal of that came in my work in the Education program at Augustana -- and my ability to ask more precise and field-specific questions developed in graduate school. Of course, it's an ongoing thing as well -- though now it's frequently about asking appropriate questions for classroom discussion, rather than questions for my own research pursuits.

At the same time, I also have to give some credit to my high school English teachers (or a lot of credit, to be truthful). I remember that, starting sophomore year, we were frequently paired up with a classmate to lead discussion, or monitor discussion, or ask the discussion questions themselves. It was a well-coordinated effort by several of the teachers -- and it meant that by the spring of senior year we would be entirely in charge of discussion and our teacher would sit in the circle, listening, taking notes on what was said, and only intervene if we hit a dead-end. I think that this experience, this practicing at starting a discussion (rather than simply responding to someone else's questions), helped me in college and in grad school -- I was ready to move beyond the literal interpretation of the text right away, I wanted to discussion implications and ideas.

I hope that this is what I'm providing for my students -- I really hope that I can provide for them the high quality of instruction that I've received. And I hope that I can convey to them not only my love for this particular literature, but also the sheer joy of kicking around ideas and talking about language.

Some recommended reading: On the "new" Huck Finn

2011-01-13T08:03:00.002-05:00

My old high school classmate Nicole Peeler (now an author and American literature scholar) has a nice reflection on teaching Huckleberry Finn and the recent version of the book that sanitizes the language. You should check it out -- it's thoughtful and thought-provoking. Peeler is concerned that all the discussion about the changes have been focusing on the historical nature of the language -- and have tended to relegate the novel itself into the dustbin of history, ignoring the powerful presence of the book in the here and now. When you boil it down, Peeler argues, the situation doesn't just speak to race relations of our past, but also race relations right now -- and our inability to admit to the racial inequality that persists in the country today.

Ice droplets in the rising sun

2011-01-12T08:03:00.000-05:00

Mike Kardos' book trailer

2011-01-11T17:35:00.002-05:00

On the virtues of fluff

2010-12-28T10:38:00.000-05:00

I admit that my reading tastes tend to be a bit, let's say, snobbish. This really has something to do with the fact that I feel like I must be reading "serious things" to make myself a "real" professor than any real disdain for genre fiction -- I have to make the most of my leisure time, so I might as well read things that contribute to some level of erudition, or something. It also has something to do with the fact that I genuinely like authors like Faulkner and Nabokov, so I spend a lot of time reading their work (I mean, I didn't get into literary studies because I thought they were boring).

Still, there's always some room for fluff.

I do want to define what I'm looking for when I'm looking for fluff. I can probably explain this in terms of my television viewing choices, even more than the reading choices. There really seem to be two ways people appreciate television, movies and literature: either they want something that's plot-driven and holds character development secondary or they want something that's heavily invested in character development and holds plot secondary. That's not to say that the latter type of narratives don't have complex and exciting plots. Instead, it's that the plot arch serves to develop the characters in interesting and complex ways, and that the pacing tends to be more deliberate and lacks plot twists that are included merely for their own sake. Plot twists happen, but only for a reason.

In my television viewing (which is admittedly a great deal of fluff), I tend to prefer shows that are of the latter type: they move the plot forward, but do so in order to develop a larger narrative or more fully develop the characters. (This is an issue of flat characters vs. round characters as well.) Currently, for example, we're watching the first season of Fringe on DVD, which Bradley gave me for Christmas. I like the show because the characters are developed over the series -- rather than simply in the initial episodes. So, I like things that might normally be considered "fluff" (Fringe, 30 Rock), but are things that are well written and lean towards the character-driven side of narrative development.

Anyway, to get to the point I was originally going to make in this post, I just finished Nicole Peeler's first novel Tempest Rising. As I said in a previous post, this book is outside my usual range of reading, but I went to high school with Nikki and I thought I'd give the book a try (you know, support a fellow West Aurora High School grad sort of thing). The book is the first of a six-book series (she's currently finishing up book four, so it's a series in progress) -- and it's an example of Urban Fantasy, a genre that I was unfamiliar with until I discovered that Nikki was writing these books. Basically, the concept of Urban Fantasy is, as I understand it, that the books deal with the supernatural beings of fantasy novels in contemporary, realistic settings. This book introduces Jane True, a half woman/half selkie, who begins her life in a coastal town in Maine, only to discover her identity as something not-quite-human and to discover a supernatural world just beyond the realm of human perception. It's a murder mystery and there's a bit of romance.

Like I said, it's out of the normal range of reading for me. And I thoroughly enjoyed it.

What helps the novel is that it's clear that this is just the beginning of the character development for Jane True -- the novel is about origins (of a sort) and she's a character who is deeply flawed as an individual. And it certainly doesn't hurt that Jane was an English major (which Nikki admits is a bit of self-indulgence on her part as an English professor) and makes the occasional reference to literature.

And I also admit that I think I'll read the whole series. I think I deserve the fun.

December snow

2010-12-27T18:45:00.001-05:00

Year in review

2010-12-21T11:36:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking a lot about what I've read this year. While I had no particular "program" of reading (which I feel compelled to have, for some reason - likely grad school), I did actually read quite a bit, and patterns emerge in the types of readings this year. (I will grant that I did not read quite as much as I would have liked to, but well, it is what it is).

But on to some categories and (perhaps) some reflection:

Travel narratives
This year I discovered (via my friend Michael) Tony Horwitz's Confederates in the Attic, which I enjoyed immensely and which lead me to reading two of Horwitz's other books, A Voyage Long and Strange about the first Europeans in North America and Blue Latitudes, which follows Captain Cook's 18th century journeys around the globe, particularly in Polynesia. I was also pleased because Ian Frazier's Travels in Siberia came out this year and I actually was able to read the book at about the same time he was on The Colbert Report. I'd read Frazier's 2009 essays in The New Yorker, which constitute part of this book, and I spent a lot of time impatiently waiting for the book. It was nice to feel like I was actually aware of current publications (do not, however, ask me anything about current fiction. I have no idea).

Anyway, Frazier's book reminds me of a second category.

Russian stuff
Frazier's book is just one of the Russian-ish books that I read this year. On the recommendation of one of my colleagues I read Tolstoy's Resurrection and followed that Siberian prison narrative with Solzhentisyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Lots of Siberia this year.

I also read a collection of Chekhov's short stories and two novels by Nabokov (Invitation to a Beheading and Pale Fire).

I also read Steven Church's excellent The Day After The Day After, which is less about Russia than about growing up with middle American fear of the oncoming Soviet invasion and/or nuclear war -- and this leads me to my next category:

Creative Nonfiction (Bradley recommendations edition)
I read a number of things that WB recommended -- Chuch's book; Quotidiana by Patrick Madden; and Notes from No-man's Land by Eula Biss. All were excellent.

Authors who've been to Chowan
I read several books this year that have expanded my knowledge of living North Carolina writers, based on the fact that they've all been on our campus at some point (two this calendar year -- both of whom I met; one in previous years). So, I read Lee Smith's Cakewalk and On Agate Hill, Lynn Hinton's Friendship Cake and Allan Gurganus' The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. I met Smith and Hinton this year -- and Gurganus' book was a part of my quest (along with Tony Horwitz's Confederates in the Attic) to make some sense of living in the south and living among people who feel very differently about the Civil War than I do.

Books I'm embarrassed I hadn't read before
The Mayor of Casterbridge and Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy; The Complete Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle; and The Great Gatsby.

The less said about that the better. But now I've read them and I feel a bit more like I've caught up on, well, something.

And finally, I really did read some Renaissance-ish books. I reviewed two books for a journal and I read gazoodles of articles about Shakespeare (that's an accurate number, I swear). I also read (um ... skimmed) The Case for Shakespeare by Scott McCrea when I taught a couple of classes of our honors seminar -- we talked about conspiracies, and that's the biggest one I have any sort of expertise on.

I also read Martha Nussbaum's Not For Profit which qualifies as related to me work, I think.

There was other stuff, too, but those are the big ones.

Right now, I've switched to something a bit more in the "fluff" category -- I'm reading Nicole Peeler's Tempest Rising, which is an urban fantasy novel. This is something way outside my normal realm of reading, but I graduated from high school with Nikki and we were in a lot of English classes together (plus, her father was my world history teacher my frosh year of high school). We weren't quite friends, but we crossed paths a lot and we've become more acquainted (reacquainted) via the wonderful world of Twitter. So I thought I'd give her work some love and support one of my fellow WAHS grads who's also gone into the insane world of the academy. And that will lead me right up to Christmas, where I'll be once again stuck for figuring out what exactly I should read.

More November foliage

2010-11-25T18:59:00.000-05:00

November in Murfreesboro

2010-11-22T10:35:00.000-05:00

I enjoy autumn. It just starts a little later in North Carolina.

Shakespeare Movie Night

2010-11-19T07:56:00.000-05:00

This week I showed the final movie in a series of six to our students. I decided that this year, it would be best to offer my Shakespeare students the opportunity to watch an entire production (or adaptation) of Shakespeare from start to finish. Because I wanted to give the students options, and because we've got a program for such things already in place, I decided to open it up to the whole student body.* And I'm pleased with how it went, in general.

We watched six Shakespeare movies: Titus, Twelfth Night, Throne of Blood, Scotland, PA, Hamlet with Mel Gibson, and King Lear with Orson Welles.

I think overall, the students from my Shakespeare class -- and probably all of the students who attended -- preferred Titus and Scotland, PA. And that's okay.

I always wish that students liked the ones that I like (I like both of those movies -- and realized, upon another viewing, that Scotland, PA is a great adaptation. I'd just added it in as a goofy adaptation of Macbeth, thinking that the students would like it because it's a dark comedy.), but they don't always agree with me on matters of taste.

Then again, the first completely overwhelming experience I had of live performance was a production of The Magic Flute, so you can guess where my tastes lie.

Still, I got good response from students on the other movies -- and I was most pleased by one of my Shakespeare students who suggested that she almost backed out of watching Throne of Blood because it was in black-and-white AND Japanese, and then she enjoyed the film.

That was really the point of the whole thing. I am satisfied that it worked -- and it will be worth another go next time I teach the course (2012 here we come!).

*We have a program that requires first and second year students to attend a certain number of cultural/academic/campus events each semester. We have regular events at 11:00 on Wednesdays and then add a series of other things, like Music Department concerts, art show openings, the play, the Homecoming Football game, etc. One of the goals is to expose students to cultural/artistic/academic experiences that they've never encountered before.

The Oatmeal has fun quizzes

2010-11-18T20:38:00.001-05:00

Created by Oatmeal

Traveling with other writers

2010-11-15T07:53:00.000-05:00

I love to travel and I wish I could do more of it. Okay, there's one exception that that statement -- or a clarification about it: I hate airports, especially when I'm traveling with a group. I'm high strung and antsy, crabby and snappish.

But once we're at the destination I'm happy.

So it comes as no real surprise that I like travel writing, I suppose. I've just finished Tony Horwitz's book Blues Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook has Gone Before -- and it's the third of Horwitz's books that I've read in the past year (when I find something I like, I find something I like). Now, I'm starting Ian Frazier's Travels in Siberia, from which I'd read excerpts last fall in The New Yorker.

Part of the appeal of these books is that these are people traveling to places I'll never have (or necessarily want, in some cases) the opportunity to travel to. Part of the appeal of Horwitz's books for me is that he brings a dispassionate journalist's eye to complex historical situations, mediating a number of raw emotions on all sides into a sensitive understanding of our relationship with history (it's happened and we can't change it) and the present (we can be sensitive that all involved in first contact were human -- both Europeans and non-Europeans).

What I realized on reading Blue Latitudes is that my interest in the history, the geography, and the anthropology of the books sends me into a relentless cycle of reading, then looking things up, reading more, then looking more things up. For example, I didn't even know that the country of Niue existed -- but I do now, and I've browsed the Wikipedia entry for it (a small bit of research, but research nonetheless). My tendency to look things up probably stems originally from the fact that my family had the world almanac and other reference books in the kitchen, so we could look things up during dinner conversations.

But what this really got me thinking about is how to teach this sort of curiosity. Some college students are incredibly curious about the world -- but so many more are not particularly curious. It strikes me that curiosity is one of the most important qualities that people who are successful in college -- in life -- actually have. It's that questioning mind that seems central to the entire enterprise.

Then again, I run up against this conundrum about once a semester: why are some students simply not curious about the world? And how can I teach them to be? Can it be taught once a person is over 18?

Anyway. This all reminds me of my first trip to Hawaii, before Bradley and I were married. We were having breakfast in Honolulu with his parents (who live on Maui) and I looked out the window, pointed to one of the palm trees and asked his mother if she knew what kind it was. Her response? "I knew you were going to ask that. I meant to look it up."

Rallying

2010-10-31T11:25:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, we had an adventure in Washington, DC: we braved the crowds to go to the Rally to Restore Sanity/Keep Fear Alive. Yesterday's weather in DC was beautiful -- and the temperature just right.

And the people -- the people! -- I don't think I ever seen quite this many people at a single event before. Everyone was so polite (with a couple exceptions -- and even those exceptions weren't all that rude) and people seemed to be having such a good time just being out with other people.

Translating Shakespeare

2010-10-29T07:59:00.000-04:00

I don't entirely know how I feel about the fact that I've started doing this, but I realized this week that I have a tendency (probably picked up from my dissertation director) to succinctly modernize certain passages of Shakespeare, just to make sure students really get what's going on. Since my director did it, it must be okay, right?

Anyway, this week's pronouncement:

In Hamlet's "Get thee to a nunnery" conversation with Ophelia, he's really just breaking up with her by saying "I never loved you, you whore."

And that about does it.

I'm trying to be a good professor, I promise.

October Rushing By

2010-10-26T20:17:00.000-04:00

So, it's been a while since I've blogged at all. This October for some reason has gotten completely by me -- to the point that I'm looking at a draft of a grant proposal that's due (via USPS) on Monday.

I'm starting to think that it's not going to get done. And I think I've decided that it's okay. I was planning on using the grant to travel to D.C. to the Folger Shakespeare Library. I'm already planning on going to D.C. for a few days in the spring, so I'm going to make use of my time then.

I don't need no stinkin' grant.

Actually, I could use the grant, but I think I'll have a better proposal a year from now, when I've actually really started work on that mythical beast, the book. For now, I'm going to concentrate on finishing a new article and writing for the 2011 Shakespeare Association of America meeting. It occurs to me that, rather than write a sub-par grant application, I should use my time to do some of the eighty-gazillion-billion other things that I need to do right now (I might be exaggerating a little bit right now, but I have a very long to-do list and I've had a lot of very long days lately).

Part of the other reason I haven't blogged in a while is that I feel a bit like I've run out of things to say. It's not that I'm short on things to talk about in class (we covered Act 1 of Hamlet today and I only just got to the things I wanted to talk about), but it's that I'm not thinking far enough ahead to be able to blog them.

I've also spent the last month reading, bit by little bit, Allan Gurganus' The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. I've enjoyed it for the most part, but there are a few things that irk me about the historicity of the book. For example, there's a nice section on the travel from Africa of one of the slave characters. Thematically, it's quite nice. But the character herself is about 15 or so at the end of the civil war. She was (she claims) 3 at the crossing, which would put transportation of slaves in about 1853 or so, which in turn doesn't quite work historically, since the Atlantic slave trade had essentially been deemed illegal at that point.

The novel isn't historical fiction per se, but it does rely on narrative out of the past -- and there are numerous points where something about the past narratives doesn't quite sit right with me. Still, it's an interesting book, and an interesting perspective on the Civil War and life in the South, so it's been a worthwhile read.

As October draws to a close, I want to try to rededicate myself to writing -- both on this blog and on scholarly topics. I've been a bit remiss all over the place, but the semester has taken up much more of my time that I'd ultimately anticipated (I emailed the Dean of Arts and Sciences first thing in the morning last Friday, explaining that I hadn't emailed him at the end of a 12-hour day, as I anticipated he might appreciate some level of sense to my email ... it's just been like that).

"Unearthing the Past" - a local history experience

2010-10-01T08:30:00.001-04:00

Our town has a huge number of beautiful old homes, in various states of repair and disrepair. One of the most impressive of the homes -- impressive in part because it's on a very large lot -- is the D. A. Barnes house. The house was in serious disrepair in 2000 when someone bought it to renovate. She recently sold the house to another couple, Leeta and Kenny, who have been finishing the restoration work.

In the process of the restoration work, they've been dealing with an enormous number of garbage bags that were filled with what looked like, well, garbage. Instead, what they discovered were thousands of artifacts from the Barnes family, including letters dating to at least the 1860s, periodicals like Harper's Bazaar from the 1890s (which is a magazine that Leeta actually worked for while in NYC), toys, clothes, books and photographs. It's amazing the sheer amount of stuff that they've been going through.

So last night, Leeta presented the work they've been doing to members of the town's Historical Association (and we are, indeed, members). Pictures of the renovations and the artifacts were simply incredibly -- and I think Leeta's a little overwhelmed with figuring out what to do with all of these things. In fact, I'm a little overwhelmed with the possibilities, too.

And that's what's exciting: the possibilities. There's a great deal of work to be done to make sense of what they've found. My first thought is, of course, that there are all sorts of senior projects - for both history majors and English majors - in all of these things. (And maybe art majors, too).

My second thought is that I wish I had gone into American Victorianism, because this is quite a treasure trove. The cultural materialist in me was just dying to shout out that I want to help Leeta with things -- I don't know quite what, but you know, things.

My final thought -- and this actually is much more productive -- is that Leeta's interests in all of this coincide with mine, even if they're in a different century: she's explains that she's most interested in those things that relate to family, children and domestic life (she even tried to make a cake from one of the 19th century receipt books that she found). And that's right up my alley.

The whole thing was a lovely evening -- and it was nice to do something that wasn't work-sponsored (though I enjoy all those things, too). I hope that this is a sign of things to come in our town.

Incidentally, here's Leeta's website. From what I can tell, it's still in process, but she's eventually have prints available for sale (and I've been really enjoying her work, via Facebook -- and you can see that the image on the above postcard is beautiful). So do check it out.

The image on the postcard above is copyright of Leeta Harding, 2010.

Yard, early in the deluge

2010-09-30T06:24:00.001-04:00

[insert appropriate Noah or The Tempest joke here]

This is the backyard after a mere 24 hours of moderate rainfall. The rain has continued, and the last 6 hours have been heavy rain. We're expecting even more as some convergence of an extra tropical system and the remnants of Tropical Storm Nicole stall out over us.

I have rarely thought that it would be a good idea to cancel things because of the rain, but today is one of those days. I mean, I lived in the upper midwest starting in the 5th grade, and we had almost no snow days.

But the flash flooding everywhere is pretty exciting - and we're on high ground here in town.

The Poages of Bolivar, Missouri

2010-09-27T21:32:00.000-04:00

I posted this over on the family photo blog, too, but this is just too good not to share here. This is an advertisement from the 1880s for all sorts of stationery supplies. The Poages are my maternal grandmother's mother's family (got that?).

Historical dramas of yore

2010-09-26T09:12:00.000-04:00

One of my favorite genres of film is period film -- but more specifically period film from the 60s and 70s (although, I'll definitely go even older than that). In fact, I'm not all that fond of a great deal of period film from the last 10-15 years, though I'll watch them. (Okay that last sentence is sort of a lie. I do really enjoy more recent films, but not with the same sort of gusto I do earlier ones. Catherine Hepburn and Peter O'Toole in Lion in Winter is where it's at. Or something like that.)

And this week, with Bradley in New York for a series of promotional events for the anthology, as well as my own exhaustion after 15 or more student meetings a day, I've been indulging that fondness.* I'm, of course, generally most fond of period films about the medieval and Renaissance periods for probably obvious reasons.

This week, I've blazed through the excellent BBC miniseries The Six Wives of Henry VIII and I've gotten a bit more than halfway through the follow up, Elizabeth R. (And I do have to say that I'm very glad that I had not seen Glenda Jackson as Elizabeth prior to the movie that came out in the 1990s. I probably would not have enjoyed that version quite so much -- though I do love Geoffrey Rush as Walsingham.) I also watched A Man for All Seasons the other night.

Part of why I watch these is certainly that it's television, but it generally assuages my guilt about not doing other work. This week should have been a great time to write, with Bradley gone and no grading to do, but I've been so worn out from teaching and talking to every single composition student, that I've arrived home to the sofa. And only the sofa. I've been able to do some minor work on the laptop, but it's mostly administrative-ish things in relation to course management and the Women's Resource Center (and this, that, and the other things, too). Like I said, it's television, but it's not watching Vh1's 100 top one-hit wonders from the 80s (which I watched an hour of this week and felt very, very guilty about).

But the films -- and miniseries -- themselves. Part of why I love them so much is that while they frequently attempt some sort of sartorial accuracy, they're still often somehow dated. For example, even though I know that the hairstyles of many of the men in the Henry VIII series are based on early modern portraits, they somehow look too floofy to be anything other than the late 60s/early 70s.

Seriously, though the clothing of background characters in some of the films -- A Man for All Seasons for example -- doesn't quite fit. It looks somehow like it was made of a modern fabric (rayon? polyester?) or in a surprising color (bright orange? and I'm pretty sure I saw some very bright green on one guy).

Like I said, it's a less-guilty pleasure than watching other junk on cable. I'm thinking about starting to watch The Tudors, and I'm not quite sure how that's going to register.

*You cannot yet buy the anthology on Amazon, but it should be available soon there. If you're in the Hamilton, NY area, you can definitely buy it from the Colgate University bookstore.

Pine cone, alone in the late afternoon

2010-09-24T07:46:00.000-04:00

Shakespeare and the movies

2010-09-17T07:53:00.000-04:00

One of the assignments for my Shakespeare class is a movie review. I've decided (and it's heavily influenced by past experience as a TA with my awesome dissertation director) that students really need to experience at least one Shakespeare play in its entirety. Thus, I've instituted a Shakespeare film series for the fall -- and the series is open to the whole campus, not just the students in my class.

This makes for a few very long Wednesdays -- and Wednesdays where I arrive home and immediately go to bed, since I get up no later than 6 a.m. on Thursdays. But I think overall, the practice is going to be rewarding in multiple ways.

This week I showed Julie Taymor's Titus, and I think it was a good one to start with -- though of course, none of the other films will be quite so violent or sexy (is it sexy? or just sexed-up?). I had a good conversation with the students in the Shakespeare class the next day -- and they had some good insight about the difference between actually seeing the play and reading the play, though I want to work very hard to remind them that these films are always adaptations that may or may not be the only way to interpret the text.

But what I enjoyed most of the experience was the response of the students -- particularly those who had not read the play in advance -- to the violence of the movie. In that last scene, where everything happens so quickly, the students were shocked. Audibly shocked.

It's a great deal of fun for me when I can remind students that what we do in literary studies isn't actually all that stodgy.

Currently Reading

2010-09-09T07:40:00.025-04:00

We're at the beginning of the semester and I've still got some time to read for pleasure -- and I'm still awake enough before bed to do some actual reading.

Right now I'm bouncing between two books: David Shield's Reality Hunger (which I think I'll have some things to say about later) and Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (I find a strange pleasure in reading about the Soviet prison system. It's weird, I know. But there it is).

Down the road, I plan on reading Allan Gurganus' The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, based both on recommendation from my mother and on the fact that our University gave him a small literary award years ago. We also picked up a copy of Gurganus' White People in a used bookstore over the summer, so I might read that.

Perhaps this will all tide me over for a very long time, but I'm not totally sure. I'm starting to look about for other things to read. I'm not sure if I can bring myself to read Jonathan Franzen's new book, despite the fact that I know it's going to be what everyone at MLA will be discussing (which I may or -- more likely -- may not attend).

I'm not even sure if I'm in a mood to read older literature (the continued effort to fill in the gaps. Which reminds me that I could read Jude the Obscure to complement the other Hardy that I read this past spring) or if I should read contemporary works. I read a lot of nonfiction over the summer (and completely failed in my plan to read Ben Jonson).

So ... suggestions? What are you reading lately that's worth recommending?

One of those nice moments in teaching

2010-09-08T07:39:00.000-04:00

But I can't really take credit for it. However, one of our English majors has started a blog over the summer. She's sorting out her interests in art and English, thinking about what she might want to do in graduate school.

She's posted a really nice overview of our discussion of Titus Andronicus and some of the things that she's mulling over in relation to what we didn't discuss quite as much. Anyway, she's a thoughtful student who is always great to have in class discussions. So I thought I'd send her some audience for her thoughts.

It's always nice to see that students continue to think about class after we've left class.

Titus Andronicus and fatherhood

2010-09-03T07:54:00.001-04:00

In Shakespeare, we're up through Act 4 of Titus. While the students' submitted discussion questions ranged from Saturninus' ability as emperor in scene 4 to Lavinia's literacy in scene 1, the bulk of our discussion centered on Aaron in scene 2.

(I have to give credit to the students who made the observation that once Lavinia has revealed who raped and mutilated her, she's run out of purpose in the play ... but we only talked about that a little.)

I've been pushing the class towards coming up with a definition of the stage Machiavel or the Vice character, based on the example of Aaron. Through act 3, we were doing pretty well -- or at least students were recognizing that much of Aaron's criminality is motivated by his pleasure of doing evil. (I do have to say that while the students are looking for some psychologically real motivations for him, for the most part we've come to an agreement that Aaron manipulates people because he can -- because he loves "an excellent piece of villainy.")

But students' responses to Aaron changed when we got to Act 4, scene 2, when it's revealed that Tamora has just given birth to their child. When on Tuesday I revealed to the students that Aaron, as a Moor, is black, they were a bit alarmed, since the play equates black with evil. But I told them to hold on -- it's important. And this child is part of why it's important, in terms of the logistics of the plot. The child of a Goth and a Moor will not be white -- and so even the very dense Saturninus will figure out that something's going on.

The students saw Aaron as a suddenly more complex character who now has something to hold on to: he had no stake in the proceedings of the first acts, but now he has a child to protect from its mother, from its half-brothers, and from all the Romans, really.

This is leading us, I hope to some useful discussions of parenthood -- fatherhood in particular -- in the play. Aaron's recognition of the child, a child whose life he takes full control of in the line "Then let no man but I / Do execution on my flesh and blood" (4.2.82-83), parallels in odd ways Titus' claim on the mutilated Lavinia. Where Marcus brings Lavinia to her father, he tells Titus that "This was thy daughter," Titus responds in a different tense: "Why, Marcus, so she is" (3.1.62-63). And of course, Titus takes control of decisions of life or death for Lavinia in the final scene of the play.

I'm not quite sure what to do with this parallel yet beyond acknowledge that it's there -- in part because from the very beginning of the play, the class has been noting a great number of parallels or contrasts (brother vs. brother; parental sacrifice of children; Rome vs. the barbarians, etc).

We discussed whether or not Aaron's ownership of his child (which is at some moments narcissistic) mitigates his previous crimes. While students generally agreed that it does not, they also suggested that the birth of the child makes him a more complex character. I'm interested in seeing what happens when they get to Aaron's final speech about regrets, where he regrets not the crimes he's committed, but "that I had not done a thousand more" (5.1.124).

Starting in on Shakespeare

2010-08-27T08:21:00.001-04:00

So, it's the first week back to classes and I've really not had a whole lot of time to reflect on, well, anything. The first week of the academic year is frequently exhausting after setting my own pace all summer. I've got one final pass with edits on my article -- then I'm sending it off. I must stop tinkering with it before I destroy the whole thing altogether, or get sucked into my usual cycle of perfectionism. I sent off my list of "professional development" accomplishments to my provost (books reviews plus critical thinking conference) and I feel like I can say that summer was not, as I had feared, completely wasted.

But now we're in session and I'm completely exhausted. It doesn't particularly help that our cat Leroy has decided that biting is an affectionate way to get my attention. At 1:30 in the morning. And again at 4:30.

So, in sum, we're back. My feet hurt and my cat keeps me from sleeping. And this was only a four day week.

But I'm glad to be teaching again. I'm hopeful about the semester (as I always seem to be in the first week or so, before students in English 101 start hating me because I give them grades). I'm particularly happy to be back to teaching Shakespeare. I've enjoyed the other things that I've taught in the last two years, but it's always nice to be back to the early moderns (you know, the stuff I spent time in grad school preparing for).

We've had one day of actual reading for the class, and we're beginning with Titus Andronicus. Part of yesterday's class was dedicated to practicing asking questions (discussion questions by students are one of the assignments for the semesters -- I'm foregoing quizzes and reading journals) and so students worked in groups of 3 to come up with questions about the first act of Titus. I was pleased with what the students came up with -- and I'm looking forward to seeing what comes up in future classes.

But I noticed one thing. (And it's important to remember that we've only read act 1, where Titus takes Alarbus offstage to "hew his limbs" and where Titus kills his son Mutius for dishonoring the family.) Students found the violence in the first act shocking ("extreme" said one group).

As I said to a colleague in the history department yesterday, the play starts with a ritual sacrifice and then it gets gross.

I admit that I picked this as our first play for precisely these reasons -- and I suspect that many others do to. It's wild and over the top in its depictions of violence, but it's those things because that was part of what was popular in the 1590s (and a couple of students who have taken my classes before made suggestions along those lines -- and I will not-quite-sheepishly acknowledge there is something nice about recognizing my influence on my students). I don't know if it's a cheap trick to get students into the plays or a good way to suggest that Shakespeare isn't just this stuffy thing that you were forced to read in high school. But I did it and I think it's going to work.

More importantly, I hope that the course itself is going to work -- and I hope that my students will continue the excellent discussion we started yesterday. While coming out of such a classroom can be exhausting, it's that good sort of exhaustion -- the one that comes with a sense of exhilaration, rather than frustration. (So if you're a student in this class and reading this, no pressure.)

Here's to a good semester.

Preparing for the semester: or, summer's over

2010-08-15T09:40:00.000-04:00

The last gasp of summer always stirs up a mix of emotions. On the one hand, I really enjoy teaching and I enjoy working with students at our University. On the other hand, well, it means going back to keeping regular hours and actually looking like an adult while I work. (They tend to frown on professors going barefoot.)

We start back this week with a whole slew of meetings, so I've spent the last couple of days developing courses -- and, of course, working to revise that Middleton article (it's coming, it's coming). It's odd to be developing the comp course again -- or rather to be simply tweaking the syllabus from last fall. I'm a bit fearful, to be perfectly honest, of simply becoming that stereotyped professor who pulls out the yellowed notes from a folder and teaches the same thing over and over again, year in, year out. While I don't think this is actually the case -- and since the basics of the syllabus are necessary to any course, I am always cognizant of this. I haven't written the schedule for the comp class yet, but I think I'll be doing a couple of new essays out of our reader to keep things fresh for me. And then there will be the assignment sheets. Oh, the assignment sheets. Those will be new(ish) (maybe).

I did spend a great deal of time developing the Shakespeare course, and I've been working to incorporate a new paradigm that we're using at our University. We've been developing a critical thinking program, using the model developed by the fellows at the Foundation for Critical Thinking. We went to the conference this summer, and I had fairly mixed feelings about it. There's a real danger that the basic terminology can become the content -- and that's something that I think happens with the true believers. But the paradigm itself is pretty useful, and I've been working to redevelop my course objectives to fall more in line with it.

This was not easy.

But it was an excellent way to approach the course design. I had to think more about what it actually is that I want students to be able to do by the end of the course, and what it is that we actually do in literary studies. (And I blogged about that last summer, too. I'm a lot more comfortable with it now.) One of the most important things I learned at the conference this summer was to design courses around a central question. I've frequently had a theme in mind, but I've not always really thought about it as anything much more than a way to select particular texts. For example, last time I taught Shakespeare's, my theme was Shakespeare's Britain, but we didn't really answer that question fully -- mostly because I didn't actually ask the question.

This time, I'm trying to focus more on that idea of the question. We've got the theme (Shakespeare's Women) and we've got the catchy title (Villain, Victims, and Girls Dressed Like Boys), and now, we've got a question. What I like about this idea is that the question can be fairly broad, so I'm structuring the course around this central question: how do Shakespearean texts represent women? That's it. It gives the students a lot of latitude in their final papers, but it gives us a way to approach everything we read (and I'm finally really learning -- after teaching a Shakespeare play almost every semester for the last 8 years -- that students need something to hang on to while reading the text).

We'll see how it goes.

Growing up at the end of the Cold War

2010-08-07T12:09:00.000-04:00

Earlier this week, after both having read Steven Church's The Day After The Day After: My Atomic Angst, Bradley and I had a Cold War movie night. More precisely, we had an end-of-Cold-War movie night. We watched the made-for-television movie The Day After that fueled so much of Church's angst, and as a palate cleanser, we watched Rocky IV (and it's a movie that was still so much a part of the Cold War era that many of the actors playing Soviets are actually Scandinavian).

The Day After is dreary. I was hoping that, based on my understanding of mediocre special effects and melodramatic acting, that there would be a slight amount of campiness to it. But no, it is simply horrifying -- and I understand better some of the angst created by the movie when it aired in 1983. It's a movie that I didn't see -- I was only 5 and my parents were obviously not interested in scaring the bejeezus out of me -- but it's a movie that clearly had an impact on Americans in the early 1980s.

But the early 1980s is a time I don't remember particularly well -- in fact, I had to look up a number of things that Church talks about in the book (at least when he's discussing international events of the 80s -- I remember the tornado that hit Greensburg, Kansas a few years ago). That's a clear sign of a difference in our ages. Church is a few years older than Bradley, and Bradley is a couple years older than me -- and we all have distinctly different recollections of the political events of the 1980s. My memories of the late years of the Cold War are dominated by things like a vague awareness of peristroika and the gradual opening of the culture of the Soviet Union to American audiences (we went to an exhibit, maybe in Minneapolis or St. Paul, about life in the Soviet Union; this was maybe in conjunction to Gorbachev's visit to the Twin Cities. It's all a little muddy for me). Church's childhood is dominated by awareness of Mutually Assured Destruction and the passenger planes that Soviet fighter pilots shot out of the sky.

At the same time, we are both children of the end of the Cold War, children of boomers (we were both around the same age when our parents divorced), and children of the Midwest (despite my early childhood in the South, I have no choice but to call myself a Midwesterner. I have made my peace with that). Neither of us went through the drills that our parents went through in school -- and though our schools had fallout shelter signs, I suspect no one had really even been in the fallout shelters in the years we went to school.

(I am, of course, terrified of nuclear weapons, but my terror comes not from those memories of childhood. Those terrors come from knowing what I know about Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- and I want to acknowledge that this weekend marks 65 years since our country dropped those bombs on the people of Japan.)

But my memory of the Soviet Union is really about the dissolution of it: the Iron Curtain came down; the Berlin Wall crumbled. When the Berlin Wall came down, my Aunt Mila (a great aunt by marriage who had grown up near Bratislava) was awestruck and told me that she never expected that it would happen -- that when the wall went up, they all assumed it would last forever.

And in hindsight, knowing what we know now about what was happening within the USSR, we shouldn't have been quite so surprised about the failure of that particular experiment in government. Reagan didn't end the Soviet Union -- nor did Rocky, or even David Hasselhoff. But that's hindsight -- and perhaps in part my own memories of the end of the Cold War, those positive memories of seeing Gorbachev in St. Paul and learning about children in communist countries, color my understanding of the past and make me less fearful of what could have been.

Hmm. I was going to write more about the book. It's really good, and I recommend it, but as with reading so many of these memoirs by people who grew up at about the same time I did (or in the decade before me), I find myself waxing a bit nostalgic, or at least remembering things from my own childhood long dormant in my mind.

Tolstoy and Russia

2010-08-01T12:21:00.000-04:00

I have long been fascinated by Russia -- and have always had a difficult time conceptualizing it. There's something about knowing that an entire part of Europe exists east of Germany and Austria that has always caused me some sort of cognitive disconnect, and I'm really not sure what it is. I have no problem thinking about the existence of Asian countries like China and Japan; and I've never really had the same sort of difficulty thinking about Australia.

But something about Russia has remained elusive -- and sort of awe-inspiring -- for me. It may have something to do with the specter of the Cold War, which ended in my childhood (incidentally, I'm now reading Steven Church's The Day After the Day After which deals with his own memories of the end of the Cold War -- he's a few years older than I am, and thus has a different memory of it; mine is primarily about Gorbachev and the thawing of relations between the US and the USSR, and doesn't involve the tension of the early 1980s); it may also have to do with a tendency among Americans (likely related to the Cold War thing) to think only of a Europe that contains western Europe -- with the notable exception of Greece, or at least ancient Greece.

I'm not sure when my fascination began -- although I was a moody English major in college, I didn't begin my "Russian literature phase" until more recently. It may have been traveling to Europe in college and going to Poland and Hungary, realizing that there was an awful lot of Europe beyond what I was thinking of. It may have been reading magazines in my grandparents' house, where they subscribed to one entirely about Russian culture and history. It may have happened while reading Virginia Woolf's Orlando. Like I said, I'm just not really sure. But nevertheless, I like to return to Russian literature and history -- and I'm particularly interested in the reforms made in Russia in the 19th century.

Thus, I just finished Tolstoy's novel Resurrection which is critical of some of those reforms. The nature of the book is not to criticize the concepts of the reforms (a jury system is better than an authoritarian justice system that simply sends you to Siberia without trial); it instead criticizes the enacting of that system by flawed -- and frequently deeply corrupt -- individuals.

As I read, I was delighted to realize how much Tolstoy was indebted to Thoreau's ideas about our relationship to a just society: his protagonist in the novel realizes, for much of the novel, that he cannot be a part of the current corrupt society, the one that has privileged him, because it is at the expense of his social inferiors. The protagonist cannot solve the problems of the system, so he attempts to remove himself from it.

I also enjoyed the novel (and this goes back to my fascination with Russian history) because it's so much about the Russian penal system -- and about Siberia. That's one of those things I've always had a hard time picturing in my head. Even looking at photographs and paintings of it have never really satisfactorily resolved that problem.

But perhaps, it occurs to me as I write this, Siberia and transportation are exactly what overwhelms me about Russia: the sheer vastness of it all. The vast landscape, covering two continents; the vast number of peoples under the Tsar's control; and the vast history and culture, both of which are rich and both of which we learned little about as children.

Cotton Candy

2010-07-31T16:13:00.000-04:00

from the Carnival at the Watermelon Festival

Finding differences in the strangest places

2010-07-27T11:51:00.000-04:00

The sewer covers in North Carolina say very different things ...

A post in which I try not to be maudlin

2010-07-26T11:49:00.000-04:00

I've been working, slowly but surely, on several writing projects this summer. I've got a Middleton article that is now in the "revise and resubmit" phase (an admittedly painful stage, but one that will lead to a much better article, and hopefully an actual publication); I've got a preliminary draft on a paper about Shakespeare and Faulkner; and I've got major notes towards an article on gender and childhood. I've written and sent off one book review; and I'm halfway through the second book I'm reviewing this summer. I taught summer school. I went to a pedagogy conference in California. I've also been reading and blogging like crazy (though not reading things in my actual field). So I should feel good about my summer productivity.

And yet.

There's always that moment of "and yet" for me.

I read Kerry Ann Rockquemore's "Tame Your Inner Critic" this morning, and I find it to be absolutely what I'm dealing with at the moment. Part of my problem with my inner critic is not so much the problem of "the writing isn't good enough," but rather "your thinking isn't good enough" -- and that's something that Rockquemore acknowledges in this piece. I've been wrestling with the inner critic lately, who has really been trying to remind me that I'm a fraud and I have nothing but simplistic ideas. This comes in part because of the commentary on my article (the "revise and resubmit" one) -- the comments are actually extremely helpful, and I have to remember that I am actually a scholar relatively close to the beginning of my career. Still, the suggestions -- helpful as they are -- exhaust me. And depress me. It's that moment of having to reframe things once again in an article -- to reframe to point out what's at stake, when I'm no longer entirely sure about what's at stake in the article. This leads to a lack of surety about what's at stake in the book-that-doesn't-quite-yet-exist that should be emerging from my dissertation project.

And, and, and.

It all sends me into this weird spiral of non-productivity. And being maudlin enough about it to blog about it.

In the end, though, it's always good to see what others have to say about the problems of the inner critic (and how to respond constructively to those outer critics). I know that these emotions are simply part of being a scholar -- and I got a very nice message from a friend who has books and many articles, suggesting that revise and resubmit is what she hears on just about everything. We're all doing this together, as frustrating as it can be sometimes -- and what emerges at the other end of the process is something significantly better than what we began with.

In the used bookstore

2010-07-16T10:54:00.000-04:00

I know I've mentioned that Bradley and I enjoy used bookstores (and seriously, what English professor doesn't?). We've found some amazing things in the used bookstores we've visited across the country -- some of those things are silly (the novelization of the movie Gus that Bradley found in our current favorite used bookstore in Franklin, Virginia), some more impressive (a 1948 Bantam Books edition of John Hersey's Hiroshima that we found in a bookstore on Maui), but always interesting. That bookstore in Franklin is our current favorite because it's close by and, to be very honest, inexpensive. I like the store particularly because it's easy to find fifty-cent copies of paperbacks of classic novels that I ought to have read at some point.

Anyway, this is all to say that we went to the used bookstore yesterday and I found one particular book gem -- not the book itself (and I decided that four dollars was more than I wanted to spend on a children's book called Kak: The Copper Eskimo -- though if it's still there next time we go, I may buy it). Rather, it was the publication information page that I found most exciting.

So, as I said -- the publication information. The book was published in 1925, and so Macmillan & Co. Limited is in London, Bombay, Calcutta and Melbourne. Given the summer class that I just taught online (and that you've read about in my previous posts), I couldn't help but find this fascinating to think about: this is a book published prior to India gaining independence from Great Britain -- and so Bombay and Calcutta are still technically "British."

That's the sort of book nerd I am, apparently.

From William Gouge's Of Domesticall Duties

2010-07-14T08:28:00.000-04:00

As I've been re-reading sections of William Gouge's 1632 treatise on how to maintain a proper Christian family, I ran across this gem:

Contrary is the vaine-glorious humour of many children, who to the grief and discredit of their parents, apparell themselues both against the minde, and also aboue the ability, and vnbeseeming the place and calling of the parents. Among others, many ministers children bring much discredit on their parents hereby. Let all such proud Youths note how the Lord hath threatned to visit even Kings children that are clothed with strange apparrell.

So, two things: ministers' kids are always getting into trouble and even the royal kids shouldn't wear weird clothing.

Thought you should know.

The texture of reading

2010-07-13T09:39:00.000-04:00

When I was in college, back in the days of being an education major, I took a course called "Computers in Education" where were learned a computer program which helped up create hyperlinked games. I also had a professor in the English department who thought that hyperlinked computer portfolios would be a really interesting -- and cutting edge -- way to present ourselves to potential employers (and in hindsight, that is a really cool idea. I was averse to the idea, but then again the internet and computers were a lot clunkier then and required more advanced knowledge to do some of the really cool things).

I've been reminded of this based on a number of things that I've read lately -- and it's got me thinking about the very nature of the act of reading, and even (as I said in the title) the texture of that act. Certainly, the recent release of the iPad and the plethora of e-readers now available are changing, to some degree, the act of reading. At least, the ap-store features of certain books seem to be a different approach to reading. Many people (including myself) now know some very basic html, and sites like blogger and livejournal have added editing features that have made it possible to do all sorts of things without having to know the html codes for it. This enables a wide range of people to build in a new texture to what they write (for an example of a literary experiment with this, see Dave Griffith's post on his essay "Underworld").

But this sort of push against linearity in reading isn't new -- it's simply the technology that's new. Certainly, the ability to simply click on a link facilitates the break from the linear reading of the book more easily, but there are any number of books that were already doing this decades -- even centuries -- ago. In fact, this post is almost entirely inspired by the realization that I had when I began re-reading William Gouge's Of Domesticall Duties: Eight Treatises, a seventeenth century book detailing how a proper Christian family ought to be ordered. Throughout the (extremely long) book, Gouge provides some pretty standard glosses, but he also makes a series of cross-references, including references to the Bible passages he's citing (which he encourages readers to seek at "if ... leisure will serve" them), and -- to my point -- cross references to other similar sections of the book. The lack of specific narrative in the book frees Gouge from the constraints of linear reading -- and her references items in other chapters (and books) quite freely throughout the margins. (He also mentions at the very end of the introduction that there are a few printing errors -- noted on the final page of the book -- that he'd like his readers to correct by hand).

All of this gets me to Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, his 1962 novel about the delusional Charles Kinbote who has given himself the task of editing and annotating the final work of the poet John Shade. As with all of Nabokov, the language is beautiful -- sometimes downright funny -- and the ideas are complex.* But what's more interesting to me in this context is the design of the book itself. If you're not familiar with it, it includes an introduction by Kinbote, John Slade's 999 line poem (in four cantos) and then Kinbote's lengthy annotations on the poem. Kinbote's annotations include both stories about John Slade's life and the stories that Kinbote had been telling Slade about his home country of Zembia (I won't be a spoil-sport about the plot, but suffice it to say that as the two narrative lines -- Slade's and the exiled King of Zembia's -- move together, the Kinbote's narrative unravels).

It's the way that we can read the book that matters to me at the moment (hence, minimal discussion of the plot). The book is referential to Nabokov's other works, for one thing (Hurricane Lolita strikes at one point in the poem; Professor Pnin works at the college that employs Slade and Kinbote). But more to the point, the book is set up to be read either entirely linearly (a completely possible feat of reading the introduction, the poem, and then the annotations), to be read as one would study annotations of a difficult work (flipping between the lines of the poem to every annotation), or some combination in between (reading more chaotically, by looking at parts of the poem, then some of the annotations, then re-reading some parts of the poem and moving forward, etc., which is what I did). The book defies linearity, even as it reveals a narrative to its reader. It's a complex approach to the experience of reading.

Thus, I return to my earlier thought: technology has merely more easily facilitated habits of reading that have been tried before. While most novels are clearly meant to be read in a linear fashion, the idea of moving freely through a text isn't new to the iPad, or to computer programming. I still want my books in book format, I admit, but I'm not averse to the idea of connecting across the text -- it's part of what I love about the study of literature.

*Also, butterflies

Martha C. Nussbaum's Not for Profit

2010-07-12T09:11:00.000-04:00

Nussbaum's most recent book, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities is above all, as she acknowledges, a manifesto for education -- and education at all levels. And as a manifesto, it works for me: I'm ready to go out and punch someone to make them learn about the beauty of Shakespeare.

Okay, not really. But I do feel a renewed sense of enthusiasm and idealism for what I do as humanist and as an educator. Nussbaum provides a brief overview of the history of progressive education in Europe, the United States and India -- and she explores the way in which school systems have moved away from liberal arts and the ideals of the progressive (and generally socratic) educational models.

At the heart of Nussbaum's discussion is a definition of democracy that I think it's important to acknowledge -- and it's a definition that I think isn't currently in vogue. That is to say, it's a more traditional, egalitarian definition -- the idea that democracies are at the heart participatory governments that look out for the best interests and the human dignity of all members, in the fairest way possible -- than the definition of many people in congress (it's about protecting our own interests). But that latter definition is one that I think doesn't sound appealing to most people, even though it's central to the practices of many in the voting booth and on the congressional floor. But Nussbaum would suggest that the lack of reflection about such things is related to our abandonment of the humanities -- fields that encourage critical reflection and creative thinking, fields that teach us the value of human dignity.

There are a number of things that Nussbaum talks about -- and she includes a great deal of basic review of famous psychological studies about human interaction with authority and peer groups. But I want to mention one idea that I found particularly beautiful and central to the entire argument (and the entire goal of education): Nussbaum writes that in good socratic pedagogy "Each student must be treated as an individual whose powers of mind are unfolding and who is expected to make an active and creative contribution to classroom discussion" (55). She here acknowledges the role of both the educator and the students in this passage -- and the importance of active participation by all.

My hope is to remind myself of this (and remind my students of this) as I teach in the fall -- it gives me a renewed sense of purpose in what I'm doing.

Sherlock Holmes and historical perspective

2010-07-11T11:30:00.000-04:00

As I read for my spring survey course, I decided that I ought to go ahead and read the entirety of The Complete Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (the first 24 stories by Doyle -- for class we read "The Adventure of the Speckled Band"). I had fun reading the stories -- and have lots of ideas about their utility in teaching.

But I also found, at a certain point, something quaint about having historical perspective on the stories. More specifically, I found the hindsight of knowing 20th century history rather poignant while reading "The Five Orange Pips." The story begins with, of course, someone who is fearful about being murdered because his family is being pursued by some mysterious, shadowy group. One of the clues that Holmes examines is a letter that includes the initials "K. K. K." -- and as a 21st century American, I know who that is.

But that's the thing. In late 19th century London, the Klan is viewed as something extinct, and that's part of the puzzle of this particular mystery. Watson asks, for example "Then what are they? Who is this K. K. K., and why does he pursue this unhappy family?" (65).

Holmes explains (eventually) the origin of the initials:

"Have you never -- " said Sherlock Holmes, bending forward and sinking his voice -- "have you never heard of the Ku Klux Klan?

"I never had."

Holmes turned over the leaves of the book upon his knee. "Here it is," said he, presently, "Ku Klux Klan. ... This terrible secret society was formed by some ex-Confederate soldiers in the Souther States after the Civil War, and it rapidly formed local branches in different parts of the country. ... Its power was used for political purposes, principally for the terrorising of the negro voters, and the murdering or driving from the country of those who were opposed to its views ... For some years the organisation flourished, in spite of the efforts of the United States Government, and of the better classes of the community in the South. Eventually, in the year 1869, the movement rather suddenly collapsed, although there have been sporadic outbreaks of the same sort since that date." (67)

And there it is. The Klan prior to their reemergence in the early 20th century is seen as a mysterious, mostly defunct secret society that can be a set piece in a detective story. I'm not quite sure what to do with that, other than observe that it is a perfect example of why we need to be aware of literature within its own time -- and that assumptions made in earlier eras might not reflect the same reality as our own. Mostly, it strikes me as a very teachable story for just that reason.

Alone on the sand

2010-07-09T16:43:00.003-04:00

Seen on a walk on the beach in Delaware

Putting it all together

2010-07-07T14:25:00.000-04:00

So, over the past few weeks I've been blogging my own responses to things that I've had my students read. It's been an interesting experience -- and one that's reinvigorated my desire to "write after everything I read" (the advice my dissertation director gave me). While I likely won't do quite that, I am going to make a concerted effort to blog about more of what I've been reading.

But to get to the title of my post, what I'd really like to think about for a moment is the impact of reading the selections that I've put together for ENGL 206 this summer. I've been considering the questions that I posed to the students at the beginning of the semester, as well as questions about why I made these particular selections. More accurately, I've been thinking about what these particular selections say about what world literature may or may not be, a topic that I know my British literature students know I love to bring up.

I actually don't have an answer. British literature as it currently stands includes a wide variety of people who would not have been considered "British" enough in the past -- and the same is true of American literature. But the study of world literature, at least as I've presented it to the students this semester, brings up a host of questions about what counts as "world literature." Do authors who live in the U.S. as expatriates count as world literature? I've suggested that they might. What is the motivation for doing that? Ultimately, it's an attempt to think beyond traditional expectations of American or British literature. Certainly, many of the authors I put together for this course spent a great deal of time in the U.S. or Britain. But they also have important ties to other countries, and for the purposes of the course -- and for the inquiry that suggested the theme of this course -- I think that those ties are equally important.

Perhaps this all suggests something about global citizenship that I'm not quite sure how to articulate just yet -- but as I said, reading these particular texts together has gotten me thinking about that. And I hope that it has suggested some of the same questions to the students.

After Partition

2010-06-30T09:26:00.000-04:00

In many of the stories of Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies, characters (particularly older characters) talk about life "after Partition" as a way of marking time. This term, Partition, and the characters' relationship with it is an important one in understanding the postcolonial experience: it is both a way to mark time by a major event in world history and it is a marker of the seemingly artificial nature of dividing former lands of the British Empire. And that artificial nature -- those new borders -- have had long term implications in Asia, as they have in the Middle East and Africa.

Partition, quite specifically, refers the the 1947 end of the British Empire in India and surrounding areas. In 1947, as the British granted the Indian state independence, the subcontinent was divided up into India and Pakistan. At Partition, the area now known as Bangladesh could choose between joining Pakistan or India. It chose Pakistan -- and if you look at a map, you'll understand the difficultly of uniting the areas know for the middle of the twentieth century as East Pakistan (Bangladesh) and West Pakistan (Pakistan). In 1971, Bangladesh fought a war with Pakistan and won its own liberation.

(This is a very perfunctory explanation of the term. It is, of course, quite complicated and many actors were involved. If you're interested in anything beyond these very basic, broad strokes, please go investigate. For my purposes here, this will do.)

But Partition is an important point in time -- and one that, as I've said, characters use frequently in Lahiri's stories. Boori Ma ("A Real Durwan") "details her plight and losses suffered since her deportation to Calcutta after Partition," for example (70). Boori Ma is an example of those displaced by Partition -- and her plight highlights the problems created after what was ultimately a good thing. While gaining independence from Britain was important and good, the immediate results were loss of homeland and privation for some people. This brings up that question about the effect of Empire -- and particularly what happens to people once the empire leaves and carves things up in a new way. Giving homelands to some people means expelling others from that space sometimes -- and if those homelands are ancestral for both, how far back does the ancestry have to go? Who has a claim to the land? (This is something that is playing out very clearly in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Israel has an ancestral claim on the lands, but the Palestinians have been on the land for a long time as well.)

This is not necessarily to say that the colonizer is somehow to blame for modern conflicts (though it might be, I'll admit), but to suggest that the removal of the Empire creates new conflicts. One cannot go back to the way things were before: the past is irrevocably behind and there are new concerns to deal with. (This is something we've seen in Achebe and Walcott as well.)

And one of those more modern conflicts -- the Civil War in Pakistan in 1971 -- is a centerpiece in "When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine." This story examines the artificiality of Partition through the eyes of Lilia, the daughter of Indian immigrants. When she refers to Mr. Pirzada as Indian, her father corrects her: "Mr. Pirzada is no longer considered Indian ... Not since Partition. Out country was divided. 1947" (25). Her father further explains that "One moment we were free [from Britain] and then we were sliced up ... like pie. Hindus here, Muslims there. Dacca no longer belongs to us" (25).

Lilia is understandably confused, since Mr. Pirzada and her parents "spoke the same language, laughed at the same jokes, looked more or less the same" (25). Ethnically and linguistically they are all the same (Bengali); but religiously, Mr. Pirzada is Muslim while her family is Hindu; geographically, Mr. Pirzada is from Pakistan, but her family is Indian. To a child, the whole thing seems nonsensical.

And perhaps it should. Or at least it should help us question the role of national borders. Mr. Pirzada and Lilia have many things in common, but because of one particular part of his identity (his religion), Mr. Pirzada comes from a country that is different from her parents. Ultimately, we have to ask what the basis for particular national borders is and why that decision was made.

Ultimately, the characters remember, like Lilia's father that "One moment [they] were free and then [they] were sliced up." Partition marks that moment of permanent change -- and for some characters, permanent displacement.

Historicizing Fiction & Fictionalizing History

2010-06-25T08:58:00.000-04:00

A great deal of fiction takes place against an obvious backdrop of history, and in novels that backdrop is often relatively recent history. I'm thinking, for example, of Fielding's Tom Jones and the backdrop of Bonnie Prince Charles and the Jacobite Rebellion; of Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities and the French Revolution; and of Thackeray's Vanity Fair and the Napoleonic Wars. Then there are other stories and novels that seem clearly of their time -- the Sherlock Holmes stories are visibly set in Victorian England, even though they may not always deal directly with real political/historical events (the way that characters in Vanity Fair go off to fight Napoleon). When I teach, I often push students to think about the historical context for everything that we read -- it's helpful to read Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, while again not sending characters off to major world events, in the context of late 19th century, industrialized England.

In all of these cases, the main character are almost completely fictional, and while they may interact with actual historical figures, those interactions are fairly limited. So what happens when an author takes historical figures and creates a work of fiction around them? And to what purpose?

That's what Alvarez does in In the Time of the Butterflies. Alvarez's work is obviously not the first to create a new narrative around historical figures (a practice which goes back to at least the Middle Ages; Shakespeare quite obviously did this). And her novel isn't the only novel that includes the Mirabal sisters or Trujillo (Junot Diaz's more recent The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao glancingly acknowledges the sisters and deals with characters living under Trujillo). But Alvarez takes the four Mirabal sisters -- the three who were martyred and the one who is still living -- and constructs the narrative of each of their lives, even writing in their voices as she shifts narrators throughout the novel.

So why tell their story this way? Why create fiction out of major historical figures?

And part of the answer clearly comes in that last question. For Alvarez -- and for the Dominican Republic -- the Mirabal sisters are important historical figures, whose martyrdom at the hands of Trujillo's henchmen brought renewed international attention to the island nation. The United Nations has designated November 25th as The International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women (and incidentally, it occurs to me that this year is the 50th anniversary of the three sisters' deaths).

But as Americans, are we really aware of them? Did you know them before you read the book? I admit it: I certainly didn't.

And that's part of Alvarez's clear (and stated) goal in this novel.

When we lived in South Florida for a couple of years, I realized how very little I knew about the Caribbean and Latin America, which was rather embarrassing (I try to think of myself as pretty well educated -- but there's always so much more to learn). I've spent much of my education focusing on European literature and history: the Caribbean is much closer, but I knew so little about it beyond the basic facts of colonization by the Europeans and the region's role in the Transatlantic Slave Trade. That was it. Okay, that and the Bay of Pigs.

But it's an area that the United States has frequently been involved in -- beyond Kennedy's attempted invasion of Castro's Cuba. (Oliver Stone's new documentary is about US intervention in the hemisphere -- I'm linking to an interview he did with filmmaker Robert Greenwald if you're at all interested.) It is part of our history as well (sorry that's a subscription-only page, but it discusses the need to draw Latino literature into English departments for some of this very reason).

And really, it all boils down I've already said: there's so much to learn and it's important to always search for more information, more history, more literature.

So, to go back to my original premise, I want to suggest that there's something in Alvarez's book that is a bit like Shakespeare's history plays -- it's an attempt to establish a national identity, certainly. But I think the most apt comparison would actually be movies made about historical figures. There are some very good ones, and there are some very bad ones, but they all serve a desire that the audience seems to have these days: to understand historical figures as people.

Minerva's Move into Womanhood

2010-06-23T09:13:00.000-04:00

In Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies, the association between the move into puberty (menses) and the move into political consciousness is quite clear. It begins with Minerva's arrival at the boarding school, Immaculada. Minerva -- in the first section she narrates -- even acknowledges the coming together of these things. She says

And that's how I got free. I don't mean just going to sleepaway school on a train with a trunkful of new things. I mean in my head after I got to Immaculada and met Sinita and saw what happened to Lina and realized that I'd just left a small cage to go into a bigger one, the size of our whole country. (13)

For Minerva, the arrival at school means that she is no longer sheltered by her father's controlling hand -- a father who wants her to stay around and help operate the store because she's good at it. She realizes that she was also sheltered from the realities of the Trujillo government. When Sinita first tells Minerva about what the dictator has done to her family, Minerva doesn't believe the stories -- or the "secret" as Sinita describes it. Minerva associates that term secret with the start of womanhood, those things that her older sister Patria has told her about in hushed tones.

The secret of Trujillo, though, is that he has done "bad things," which shocks the innocent Minerva (she remarks that "It was as if I had just heard Jesus had slapped a baby or Our Blessed Mother had not conceive Him in the immaculate conception way" [17]). Gradually, Minerva discovers that Trujillo's power was not lawfully gained and that he was killing his political opponents -- including members of Sinita's family. As this happens, Minerva's "tummy" hurts (which is, of course, cramps); and she describes "Sinita's story spill[ing] out like blood from a cut" (18).

Minerva awakens later to discover that she has begun menstruation -- or as she puts it "Sure enough, my complications had started" (20).

That term complications is certainly a loaded term here. It does refer to the biological function that Minerva has just begun; but it also refers to the newly awakened political consciousness in her. She will become a freedom fighter: and this will obviously make like much more difficult for her and for her family living as she does under a military dictatorship.

This association between the entrance into womanhood and the entrance into political consciousness is important to note, as I said. It suggests an association between the two that aligns women naturally with the move for freedom: that is, it suggests that women concerning themselves with the liberty of their country is a natural outgrowth of being female. I think this is important to consider given the strongly patriarchal culture that the Mirabal sisters lived in. While there are moments in the novel when they do defer to their husbands' judgements (and moments when they use that femininity to their advantage against their captors and oppressors), they are women who live outside of strict gender norms.

And it is this which makes them powerful leaders as the Mariposas (butterflies) and as symbols of the resistance. But it is also that which makes them targets of Trujillo's henchmen.

In the Time of the Butterflies and Imperial Conflict

2010-06-22T10:45:00.000-04:00

After two books that clearly deal with -- and critique -- the idea of Empire, we're moving to two books that acknowledge the results of Empire more obliquely. Thus, I want to begin my series of posts on Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies with a bit of acknowledgement of that.

The aftermath of colonialism left a great number of states in turmoil -- and left fledgeling democracies in a situation where they were not strong enough to avoid coups and military dictatorships, like the one under Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. If we think about Trujillo, particularly the way that he's portrayed in the novel, we can see the influence of Europe on him. Most obvious, perhaps, is the simple fact that the Dominican Republic is a Spanish-speaking country, and a location that claims Christopher Columbus as well as the first university in the New World: all things that reflect back to the heritage of the island as an early colony.

But there are other, perhaps more subtle things that are important in recognizing the results of empire: Trujillo's obsession with his own whiteness is probably the best example of that. He lightens his skin in an effort to demonstrate a racial purity. This is the least dangerous of his attempts at preferring the European to the non-European: his slaughter of Haitians in the border region is clearly more deadly.

The book, however, suggests another aspect of Empire that we as Americans don't often like to acknowledge: our role as potential Imperialists. Throughout the 20th century, the United States had been involved to various degrees in the political workings of the Caribbean and South and Central America. Our government openly -- or sometimes tacitly -- endorsed specific leaders, even leaders who we knew were dictatorial, simply because their opposition seemed even worse (or communist, as was the case in Cuba). And this is something that the people in In the Time of the Butterflies acknowledge. They speak frequently of the intervention of the Yanquis (Yankees, if you didn't catch that), speaking with hope that the government in Washington would support the rebellion against Trujillo.

Of course -- and even the facts of our involvement in the region remain occluded and controversial -- the United States had specific interests during the Cold War. We feared communism more than military dictators. Alvarez acknowledges the intervention of the USA in the affairs in the hemisphere -- and it's a complicated relationship. The US on the one hand, did not support Castro's Cuban Revolution; at the same time, for many refugees from Trujillo's Dominican Republic, it represented a place of hope and safety. Alvarez's family is included in that group.

And so, to return to the theme of our summer course, I want to simply highlight the shift that we're seeing in the novels. Rhys and Achebe deal directly with early colonization in the Caribbean and in Africa. Alvarez -- and Lahiri in our next book -- don't deal directly with the concept of colonization, or even directly with the aftermath of the colonizers leaving. Instead, their books explore the space left behind as a new type of identity -- and particularly a new national identity -- emerges.

iPads and the future of reading

2010-06-21T09:39:00.000-04:00

So far, I've been hesitant about the idea of e-readers. I like my books -- and I like having them line my shelves.

But the commercial for the Alice in Wonderland application for the iPad is pretty awesome. I realize that very few books will get this sort of treatment, and that I still have a great fondness for the words on the page, but this is a version of the book that looks like an awful lot of fun.

At the same time, the spoilsport in me wants to point out that this idea is simply a digital version of a pop-up book -- so while it's beautiful to look at (though that commercial is a bit frantic), it's not exactly a new concept.

Still, if someone wants to buy me an iPad, I would totally not object to that.

Fun with John Donne

2010-06-20T14:11:00.000-04:00

I'm a little late to get on board with wordle, but when I've only recently acquired a computer that can actually use it. Anyway, this wordle is of John Donne's "Hymn to God, My God in My Sickness."

The Destruction Wrought by the Empire

2010-06-18T10:09:00.000-04:00

In my last post, I discussed some of the positive things that the missionaries brought to the villagers -- or at least brought to villagers willing to listen and allow them land.

And it's that last point that makes me want to emphasize that the conversion to Christianity and the movement into the Empire was not one that was always peaceful (as the destruction of the resistant village of Abame demonstrates), and it was something that also destroyed a specific sense of the tribe, and disrupted the entire value system of the culture. Despite some of those good things -- discouraging the abandonment of twins, for example -- the entrance of the British Empire left the tribes at the end of an epoch and the question becomes whether or not the members of the tribe can cope with that change.

With the Mr. Smith as the new missionary -- the one after the gentle, thoughtful Mr. Brown -- the fanatical converts can exert their will against the tribe. Some of those who have converted to Christianity react with such zealotry that it brings the conflict between the church and the tribe to a fore. When Enoch, one of the most enthusiastic converts, removes a mask from one of the egwugwus, he not only reveals which tribe member has been behind the mask for the ceremony, but he also kills "an ancestral spirit, and Umuofia was thrown into confusion" (186).

It is at this point the villagers realize the inevitable.

But this inevitable is not simply a shift in their lifestyle, such as having to use the British justice system rather than their own, time-honored system; it is not simply an introduction of Christianity alongside their own religious traditions; nor is it merely an introduction of a different way of telling time. It is an absolute destruction of life as they know it. As all Umuofia mourns the loss of the egwugwu, they realize this: "It seemed as if the very soul of the tribe wept for the great evil that was coming -- its own death" (187).

Christianity does not allow for the type of ancestor worship the people of the Nine Villages practiced. While it maintains some reverence for those who have gone before, it does not encourage the types the tribe has been accustomed to. It has to do with a belief in different types of afterlife: in Christianity, particularly the Anglicanism practiced by the British, the afterlife is a place where only Christ will meet the soul's needs; in the tribal ancestor worship, the ancestors await the tending of their descendants. They remain in an ethereal plane of sorts, still among the village, but beyond it. With the conversion to Christianity, the young will no longer reverence -- or tend to -- their ancestors' souls.

This is part of the loss that is so very devastating for Okonkwo, but even beyond that concern, the basic governmental structure of his village has been changed, so that he will no longer be able to aspire to the titles he and other value so much. Despite returning from exile, he remains exiled from his past. Obierika recognizes that this has come through force, even if it has been at times the subtle force of the kind missionary: he says to Okonkwo that the white man "has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart" (176).

Things have fallen apart -- and it is a terrible creature that slouches towards Bethlehem, at least for the villagers.

But this all highlights the very complex nature of the relationship between the colonized and the colonizers. Achebe wrote this book in the late 1950s, a time when Nigeria had long been under British rule -- and he, like many in Africa, speaks English. Moreover the use of W. B. Yeats' poem for the title -- and even thematically -- suggests a recognition of a shared culture in Western literature. In the end, it boils down to the inevitability of the change, one that Okonkwo cannot handle, and the need to look forward from there. The book ends tragically for its protagonist, which certainly suggests the destruction wrought by the Empire. But the tragedy also allows Okonkwo to remain in the past: he no longer faces the world that his children are embracing. The new epoch goes on without Okonkwo.

The Relief the Missionaries Bring

2010-06-17T10:44:00.000-04:00

In Things Fall Apart, Achebe acknowledges that the incursion of the Europeans into Nigeria creates a complex situation, one that is neither completely good nor completely bad. I want to focus a bit on the good that the missionaries bring, at least to Nwoye, Okonkwo's eldest son.

Nwoye is, much to his father's chagrin, sensitive and more equipped for reflection than action, which is not particularly something that brings pride to the man known best for bringing "honor to his village by throwing Amalinze the Cat ... the greatest wrestler who for seven years was unbeaten" (3). Nwoye prefers listening to stories, and he takes the death of Ikemefuna particularly hard.

Thus, when the missionaries arrive, bringing a different message of how people might interact with one another, Nwoye is drawn in by their compassion. The possibilities for other ways of life is something that has already been suggested -- Uchendu, one of Okonkwo relatives who take him in during the exile -- has suggested that "The world has no end, and what is good among one people is an abomination with others" (147). But the message of the missionaries is radically different. Despite some of the fears (and the clear moments of brutality in taking over Nigeria, like wiping out Abame on a market day), the Europeans --specifically the British -- bring a new sense of order and a different view of spirituality that allows the outcasts to become part of a community.

While most others dismiss the missionaries and their claims about the Trinity, Nwoye finds himself captivated and relieved:

It was not the mad logic of the Trinity that captivated him. He did not understand it. It was the poetry of the new religion, something felt in the marrow. They hymn about brothers who say in darkness and in fear seemed to answer a vague and persistent question that haunted his young soul -- the question of the twins crying in the bush and the question of Ikemefuna who was killed. He felt a relief within as the hymn poured into his parched soul. The words of the hymn were like the drops of frozen rain melting on the dry palate of the panting earth. Nwoye's callow mind was greatly puzzled. (147)

The ability to reconcile emotion, the ability to reflect is important to him. But most important is the possibility of a new way of thinking, one that turns away from the traditional beliefs that result in so much death of the apparently innocent.

While the British do come in showing great force in many respects, the positive they bring in complicates the colonial experience.

So, some things to think about:

What is the relationship of the new religion with the old? How does Achebe characterize each? Does he show any judgment towards one or the other?

How is Nwoye's relationship with his father characterized? How does it change with the arrival of the missionaries -- and most importantly with his conversion to Christianity?

Tradition, the Individual, and the Recognition of Time

2010-06-16T19:07:00.007-04:00

The first half of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart has, in some ways, an apparent sense of timelessness. I admit that the first time I read the novel, I thought the action was happening much earlier than it actually was (i.e. I assumed that it was happening in something like the 14th or 15th century, rather than the late 19th century). In many ways the first section -- which the blurb on the back of the edition I'm reading calls "a powerful fable of immemorial conflict" -- does seem timeless or outside of time. However, on this most recent reading, I noted the presence of items that suggest that Okonkwo's world of the Nine Villages is already changing, most especially the references to the gun (though Okonkwo cannot shoot the gun properly).

These cracks in the apparent timelessness of the first part of the story are parallel to the cracks in the village traditions, the cracks in the willingness to adhere to tradition. Okonkwo and his people seem at first fully wedded to their traditions: communal living and justice, recognition of specific village titles, strength and masculinity as signs of power, a reverence for the ancestors, a willingness to follow the oracles, and a calculation of time based on the harvest. This is very much a warrior culture that adheres to a code that we as Westerners find somewhat bewildering. But the cracks show (or, as I said in a previous post, things begin to fall apart): the narrator recognizes Okonkwo's inability to show emotion with his children, for example.

More importantly, despite the fact that death of children is a regular part of life for the people of the Nine Villages, cracks in the traditional system arise as a result of the death of Ikemefuna. Obierika, Okonkwo's closest friend in the village, questions the Oracle's judgment that Ikemefuna was finally, after three years, to be killed. Obierka does not directly question the Oracle's judgment: rather he answers Okonkwo's question about the Oracle's wisdom saying that "I do not [question her decision]. Why should I? But the Oracle did not ask me to carry out its decision" (66). Though this is not a direct questioning of the demand for the sacrifice, it suggests an individual's ability to choose not to participate directly in the traditions of the culture. Obierka did not stop the execution of the young man, but neither did he directly participate in it.

In a discussion about tapping the palm trees -- and Obierka's inability to do it, based on the village's laws -- Obierka again hints at the arbitrary nature of the customs of the village. Because Obierka took a particular title, he cannot tap his own palm trees and must rely on young men who have a tendency to wound the trees and kill them. Okonkwo still insists that "the law of the land must be obeyed" -- clearly a sign that he still cannot bring himself to accept the potential for change or question tradition -- but Obierka explains that "I don't know how we got that law" (69). Just that little question brings up the possibility that other laws are equally questionable, particularly since this law about tapping the palm trees is not common to all of the Nine Villages. Obierka here seems to suggest that there might be better ways of doing things -- or at least other ways of doing things. The traditions of the village are not on as solid a foundation as they seem initially to be. The question remains for the rest of the novel whether or not Okonkwo will be able to accept changes.

So, some things to think about:

What sorts of traditions are important to the villages? Why adhere to these? Are they good or bad, according to this novel? How do we know that?

Does the imposition of change on the villages by the white missionaries (in the second half of the novel) produce good or ill effects? Or something in between?

Happy Bloomsday

2010-06-16T10:16:00.003-04:00

Joyce portrait at our favorite Irish Pub, Bogart's in Key West.

Some changes

2010-06-15T10:19:00.004-04:00

I've been using the same template for this blog since I began a few years ago. Blogger just added new backgrounds and the temptation was too much. So I've changed.

I'm planning on reorganizing links down the side over the next few days -- it's a little unwieldy right now. I think I'll have several sections: Family & Friends, Early Modern Scholars, Other Academic Bloggers, and Fun With Language.

If you've got a link to recommend, please leave it in the comments.

update 11:00:
I spent the evening reorganizing links, though I haven't checked them all to make sure that they work. Still, if you have suggestions or you link to me and I haven't linked to you, put it in the comments so that the other 6 readers can see it. I'll get it listed appropriately.

Yeats' "The Second Coming"

2010-06-15T09:09:00.002-04:00

I want to briefly discuss W. B. Yeats' poem "The Second Coming" as preparation for discussing Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. It's important to note a few things about Yeats' poem because it gives more to Achebe's book than the title: it influences our reading of the theme as well.

Yeats' poem suggests that the end of history as we know it is here (i.e. the second coming, as spelled out in the Bible.) But Yeats' apocalyptic vision is not one of the absolute end times; that is, it's not an eschatalogical change, but simply a significant change in epochs. The mythology set out in this particular poem is that history is set on a spiral, going ever outward until it can no longer sustain itself -- hence the opening image of the falcon, who flies in a spiral (gyre) above the falconer. That falcon moves further and further away, both upward and outward from his master, from his center. Yeats then moves to the image of the spiral itself in the following line: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."

History will turn in on itself and renew itself -- or at least that's the hope of the first stanza. But for Yeats, that new historical epoch is not one of Christian hope; instead, the second coming is monstrous, some "rough beast ... slouch[ing] towards Bethlehem to be born."

Yeats lived in an era of war and significant change for both his homeland (Ireland) and the world (World War I). The Irish were fighting for independence from the British, and Yeats was something of a reluctant supporter of the leaders of the movement for independence (see his poem "Easter 1916" for the ambivalent feelings that he has about their martyrdom).

And so, like Yeats, Achebe records the end of one era and the beginning of a new one in 19th century Nigeria. His book is marked with ambivalence towards this: the traditions of Okonkwo's village are certainly sometimes questionable, and the first missionary at times seems sympathetic (though the second missionary seems much less so). Still, despite evidence of some prior interaction with Europeans (the gun hints at some trading with the outsiders), the shift that the European colonizers bring is too much for Okonwko, since it denies him expected traditions and traditional forms of identity.

Things fall apart for him indeed.

The Power of Naming

2010-06-14T18:42:00.003-04:00

I'm not sure that we always think about the power of a name. I first started thinking about the power of names when I was a teenager and decided that I would keep my own last name when I married. I didn't really have right background to articulate that decision when I was 15, but I knew that I liked my last name and I knew that I wasn't happy with the traditions of marriage in our culture (please don't take that to mean I disapprove of women changing their names -- I think it's important to acknowledge reason for doing such).

I was really challenged to think about the power of the name in a class my first year of college. Certainly, having someone -- a relative stranger -- know your name means that they can get your attention fairly easily, when you might otherwise be anonymous. I know that when we moved to NC, and we would take our evening walk, other faculty from the institution would call out to us and we'd be a bit confused: they knew our names, but we didn't know theirs. They had the power to get us to turn around and wave. That doesn't sound like much, but it is more power than the anonymous person hollering from a car or ignoring me altogether has. Someone knowing my name cannot be ignored in the same way.

But the power of names is even greater than that in certain cultures -- and that brings me to Wide Sargasso Sea. One of the changes that Rhys makes to the Jane Eyre story, and the one that's probably most obvious to readers, is that she calls the woman Antoinette throughout the book. This name didn't appear out of nowhere, since according to Bronte, the woman's name is Bertha Antoinette Mason, but the emphasis -- with no explanation until well into the book -- separates out her identity from the monstrous one that we know in Jane Eyre.

Rochester (or not Rochester, since Rhys doesn't actually ever name him) exerts power over his wife through naming. He refuses to call her Antoinette once he realizes that she shares the name with her insane mother (68). When Antoinette confronts him about this, asking him why he insists on calling her something other than the name she's used her whole life, he explains that "it is a name [he's] particularly fond of. [He] think[s] of [her] as Bertha" (81). At the very least this seems simply rude; at the most it seems like he's asserting some sort of husbandly power over her, wiping away part of her past identity to mold her into something that he likes. (And I think, either way, it makes her more sympathetic as a character, which is part of Rhys' stated goal of this novel.)

To Antoinette/Bertha, however, it is something much more. It's not simply an assertion of masculine dominance or an attempt to encourage her to be more "English" (as Bertha is a distinctly English/German sounding name and Antoinette is distinctly French). Instead, she sees it as supernatural and dangerous. She says:

Bertha is not my name. You are trying to make me into someone else, calling me by another name. I know, that's obeah too.

It's obeah -- and a ritual in obeah that is connected with the creation of the zombie, the living dead. (Remember obeah is a religious practice similar to what we call voodoo. These are practices that take older African forms of spirituality and merge them with some Catholic notions. Obeah is not witchcraft or black magic, but a major system of belief and interacting with the world.) Certainly, the description of Bertha in Jane Eyre -- and even her behavior at the end of Wide Sargasso Sea -- marks a break from the original self, a break in her psyche. Bertha/Antoinette has clearly gone insane, but why? And to what extent?

Rhys answers that with a fair amount of blame on Rochester (and even Antoinette's mother is treated a manner so appalling as to suggest a certain amount of external influence on her sanity). In England -- and in a place where even the unpleasant Grace Poole questions the treatment -- Bertha/Antoinette does not know herself. She does not recognize herself in the mirror (and doesn't even believe that she's in England); she does not recognize herself as the ghost that Jane fears.

She has been separated from her first self and (not) Rochester's influence is part of that shift.