The Little Professor

This Week's Acquisitions

• Frances Taylor, The Wise Nun of Eastonmere and Other Tales (H. L. Kilner, n.d.).  Collection of a novella and a couple of short stories by Taylor, a.k.a. Mother Mary Magdalen Taylor.  Catholic didactic fiction, as one might expect.  (eBay)
• Barry Unsworth, The Quality of Mercy: A Novel (Random House, 2011).  A sequel to Unsworth's Sacred Hunger, revolving around the events of a mutiny aboard a slave ship.  Some of the plot elements resemble the notorious Zong case (which happened later than the novel's setting).  (BOMC)
• Patricia Demers, Heaven upon Earth: The Form of Moral and Religious Children's Literature, to 1850 (Tennessee, 1993).  Surveys all the major genres, both fictional and non- (e.g., catechisms, alphabets).  (Amazon [secondhand])
• William S. Peterson, Victorian Heretic: Mrs. Humphry Ward's Robert Elsmere (Leicester, 1976).    Monograph on the religious and cultural significance of one of the great Victorian bestsellers.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Robert Kent Donovan, No Popery and Radicalism (Garland, 1987).  Reprint of a dissertation on objections to liberalizing Catholicism's position in eighteenth-century Scotland.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Jules Stewart, Albert (I. B. Tauris, 2012).  New biography of Prince Albert.  (BOMC)

Me vs. my immune system

1.  Shortly after arriving in California, I begin a regime of non-stop hacking and coughing.  This makes me sad.  Eventually, I hack and cough my way over to the local hospital, which informs me that I have bronchitis.  This continues to make me sad, but in a diagnosed sort of way.

2.  By the time I arrive at MLA, I am down to one or two really bad coughing fits per day, but no longer need to drug myself to sleep at night.  (Granted, I insist on having these coughing fits during interviews--"Er, don't worry, neither dying nor contagious"--but still.)  On the last day of MLA, however, I realize that I am now sick with something else.  Sadness persists.

5.  On the second day of my classes--the second day!--I wake up and feel...strange.  I get to work and continue to feel strange.  And then, certain untoward events occur which suggest to me that perhaps my students might not altogether appreciate my presence in the classroom.  I go home and resign myself to a temporary diet of ginger ale and saltines.  Today, I'm still confined to the house, sniffly and groggy.  Also, sad.  

Dear immune system: what is going on? It's time to get your act together.   

Doc (I)

Postmodern historical novels have a habit of questioning their own existence.  Whether "historiographic metafiction" or "romances of the archive," such novels frequently wind up calling the possibility of historical narrative into question, or emphasizing the narrator's subjectivity, or morphing into stories about the historian's process instead of the (irreclaimable) past.  Strictly speaking, the past's inconvenient habit of being inaccessible to a much later narrator has always been built into the historical novel, right back to Walter Scott (known to meditate on the problem in his prefaces) and realist company.  But postmodern historical fiction tends to be more pessimistic about the possibility of representing ages long ago in any sort of realist mode, and more optimistic about the possibilities of formal experimentation.

Which leads me to Bruce Olds' Bucking the Tiger: A Novel (2002), one of the two novels about Doc Holliday I have sitting on my bookshelves.  This is Olds' second voyage into the lives of iconic nineteenth-century American figures, the first being Raising Holy Hell, about John Brown.  (In Bucking the Tiger, Holliday mentions Brown in passing--not positively.)   Although John Brown and Doc Holliday are not, perhaps, the most obvious pair, they both passed into myth by violently working outside the parameters of law, whether in the service of abolition or the self-service of gambling.  (Rodger Jacobs, who is not an Olds enthusiast, observes in a review of Olds' most recent novel that he's clearly interested in this type of character.)  However, unlike John Brown, Doc Holliday slowly dissolves into mist once historians try to track him down in the archives; there's more legend than man remaining.   Bucking the Tiger thus discards linear narrative--indeed, much of anything resembling a plot--and turns instead to the crafting of Doc's legend, adopting multiple POVs and forms along the way.  The deliberately fragmentary chapters range in nature from dialogue (apparently posthumous) to newspaper reports to cod medical reference works to free verse to scattered quotations; indeed, the prefatory "author's note" consists of definitions of such words as "bricolage" and "catena."  Readers seeking a unified Doc Holliday will find only his shattered body, as it were, spread out across the novel's pages.

The novel's structural fragmentation turns out to be mimetic, simultaneously figuring both Doc's rather frustrating resistance to historical reconstruction (as Olds points out, we don't even know how many men he actually killed) and, within the novel, his bodily dissolution--"this life of decomposition" (14).  "[H]e is coughing himself fraught to fractions" (5), Doc reflects in the first chapter, and the unavoidable reality of tuberculosis (a.k.a. consumption) lurks behind every action even when it isn't explicitly on the table.  Bucking the Tiger theorizes that "Doc Holliday," the legend, the dentist-turned-gambler and sharpshooter, is born out of this ever-present consciousness of death.  Not so much the fear of death, but what Doc describes as a sense of "powerlessness" before it, and then, "the sense that now, I must do everything possible to render myself less so" (38).  Doc goes West to stave off death, but slowly accrues a new identity as a death-dealer instead, a reputation he likens to "walking around inside a suit of stone--in the main, kept the bugs off, but there was absolutely nowhere to run" (205).  The new self paradoxically warps into its own form of entombment, in large part because that very American fantasy of total self-renewal winds up smacking right into other people: Doc doesn't just remake himself, he gets remade.  But then again, without that suit of stone, what is there of Doc Holliday? The "suit of stone" stands in bleak contrast to the nature of Doc's literal body, which spends the novel evanescing, degrading, and otherwise self-destructing; in the mock-epitaph that concludes the novel, we're told that Doc "[d]ied chewed up, chawed on, drubbed and sore dragooned, both lungs run to whey" (365).  Doc's body is a roving self-torture unit, regularly exploding into agonizing, bloody bouts of coughing.  After all, the suit of stone, Doc's Western self, is hardly sufficient to keep the real Doc together, even as it slowly takes his place.  This is not a novel that holds out any hope of an afterlife other than that legend, the mobile prison.  "Doc" is born out of death, and once dead, what remains is..."Doc." 

Doc thus turns out to be both set on self-destruction (he cheerfully ignores doctor's orders for the fifteen-odd years after his diagnosis) and, as it were, self-deconstruction.  Olds enacts Doc's unraveling, in both physical and figurative terms, in the novel's language games.   To begin with, the novel refuses to play by the realist rules of anachronism: as Olds quite cheerfully catalogs in his afterword, many of the fragments illuminating Doc's plight have been garnered from twentieth-century sources, and characters do things like quote N. Scott Momaday while in their cups (368).  Doc becomes Intertextual Man, his "context" no longer the culture of the late-nineteenth century West, but instead all of modern literature; as Olds remakes the myth yet again, Doc seeps out from history into pure story.  And certainly, some of Olds' decisions--making Doc's longtime girlfriend Kate sit at his deathbed, for example--turn out to be imaginative choices, satisfactory from a literary perspective (lovers together again as death looms!) but not necessarily "accurate."  Then again, that would seem to be part of the point: the novel takes the myth apart, but then plays with it, up-ends it, even re-romanticizes it.  Hence the patchwork imagery, with the novel as one more patch. By the same token, Olds refuses to differentiate character according to dialogue, let alone differentiate them from the narrator, as one would expect of realist fiction; we are always reminded that there is a twenty-first century author right there.   In fact, it's rather hard to fathom anybody talking the way these characters talk, which is where the novel itself begins unraveling.

Olds loves alliteration, loves consonance, loves pleonasm, loves all forms of repetition in general.   Both the narrator and the characters rack up endless lists of things, events, verbs, seeking precision yet never quite settling for a single word. Here's a speech from Doc himself, picked totally at random:

 

For a place so enamored of its drink, the West is singularly sloppy with those possessed of no right aptitude for its right handling.  It remains, alas, a land of scant couth, coarse and common and low, a land, at last, of low-down, loutish, copper-common drunks.  In the meanwhile, as there be nothing in this world so detestable in my eyes as the sight of an empty bottle--lest it be an underfilled glass--I intend henceforth to preside over my own dissolution and disintegrate as it may please me, if always with such discrimination and discretion as my debauchery may deliberately allow.  (127)

 

On the one hand, the sonic effects do work well enough with the paragraph's movement: the sibilants and soft "l" sounds contrast sharply with the hard "c"s, then crash abruptly into the blunt "drunks."  The "d" of drunks then echoes through the next sentence, with "debauchery" and "deliberately" ironically calling back to "detestable" (non-detestable debauchery? deliberate debauchery?) and both bookending the play on the "dis" verbs and nouns (themselves playing on each other--who disintegrates with discrimination?).   At the same time, the pleonasms suggest their own kind of linguistic debauchery, a world of rhetorical excess in which language piles up, turns back on itself, keeps reduplicating.  (Good lord, it's catching.)  Given that pleonasm is too much of a muchness, this accumulation of language suggests its opposite: what would happen if the excess was stripped away? What, then, would become of "Doc"? On the other hand, Olds writes the entire novel this way, which, to put it mildly, frequently produces the wrong sort of hypnotic effect. (In fact, despite frequently reminding myself, like the pianist Charles Rosen, that boredom may be a personal failure, I was rather bored.)  The sad and sobbing reader soon seeks an editor's soothing interventions...or, at least, some stoppage of the sesquipedalianism.   

I would suggest, though, that there's a more serious problem: the novel's drive towards fragmentation is, by this point in the postmodern historical novel's development, too predictable.   Legend falls apart under close consideration; news at 11? Trawls through the archives reveal only more linguistic constructs? Subjectivity may intrude on the historian's point of view? Haven't we been told this already--and often? I often find that metafiction tends not to be very interesting or thought-provoking when it's a novel's primary focus, and Bucking the Tiger didn't change my mind. 

Feelings of rejection

Yes, well, this certainly brings back memories, some of them more recent than others:

Excuse me, I need to pull some teeth:  In the 90s, I had to call the chair of a Catholic college and ask what the blazes was going on (as I had received a non t-t offer elsewhere).  Much hemming and hawing ensued before the "no" finally emerged.  As this was one of the most mind-blowingly unprofessional institutions I have ever had the displeasure of dealing with, before or since, I should not have been surprised.

The students would run screaming: This was the gist of the only feedback I received during my first assault on the market.  Given that the sum total of my teaching experience at the time amounted to two once-a-week discussion sections, the feedback was accurate, in all likelihood.

We'll get back to you (LOL): When I was up for tenure, I did poke around on the market a bit.  Alas, I was promptly poleaxed by the flu (this was the last year I neglected to get a flu shot...), and had to reschedule an interview at the MLA.  "Oh, we'll get back to you to arrange a phone interview," I was assured.  Er, no. 

 

What an amazing coincidence!

I once had a student in freshman comp make exactly this excuse about why he had turned in a plagiarized paper. 

The Horrid Dungeon of the Syllabi!!! A Fragment of a Gothick Romance

Editor's note: The following fragment came into my hands after an archeological expedition to Brock-Port discovered a miraculously still-functional electronic device, known to the ancients as a "laptop computer," which contained several documents of a most curious description.  Although the bytes were considerably degraded, we were able to decode the narrative below, which throws a most shocking light upon the manners and customs of academic life in the twenty-first century.

...Icy winds, as cutting and uncaring as an anonymous peer review, blasted around the crumbling brick towers.  They piled the dank, dirty snow into treacherous heaps,  concealing deadly ice patches that threatened the lives of any innocents who dared venture beyond the doors.   But those trapped inside were held fast by cruel orders, and heavy chains, and evil spells beyond description.  For this was the Dungeon of the Syllabi, to which all faculty who left writing their syllabi to the day before classes were consigned.  Woe!...

...Shivering in her chilly cell, Elle P. hunched over her laptop, staring bleary-eyed at a syllabus for the Gothic Novel.  Her chains of USB cords clacked softly as she sought to relieve her aching back. Beyond the steel door, she heard the wails of fellow inmates, bemoaning their fates as they pounded unceasingly at their uncaring keyboards.  Some of them, it was rumored, had been sent to the dread Dungeon every semester for years and years upon end.  Elle shuddered at the thought of the bitter torments that awaited those who failed to complete their miserable task: incomplete assignments! Late papers! Sneering student evaluations! The disdain of her colleagues! Whimpering softly as she bemoaned her fate, all the more horrid for being self-induced, Elle burst into a song of despair--but her voice soon died away, for she had never been very good at rhyming on the fly...

...Finally, the gnawing pains in her belly drove Elle to abandon her office in search of what sustenance the Dungeon had to offer.  Timidly, she crept out into the halls, trembling as the howls and shrieks of the other lost souls escalated in volume.  She inched past the mysterious, fading posters attached to the walls, which blazoned forth the agonies suffered by prisoners past, and, fearing to take the clanking elevator--for who knows if it might suffer some mysterious breakdown, trapping her there to die of starvation!--she crept down the steps.  There, standing before her, were vending machines, filled with unhealthy food intended to inflict cavities, sugar rushes, and halitosis on all who dared consume it.  But the demands of the syllabi forced Elle to indulge...

...Behind her, a SOUND! Elle whirled about and found herself faced with some unearthly creature, tall and indistinct of form, its features obscured with a scarf, its body wrapped in a heavy coat, its feet encased in fuzzy boots.  Her thoughts spun and crashed uselessly into each other in what remained of her brain.  Was this the ghost rumored to haunt the building's halls? Was it some vampire, out to suck her life's blood? Or, even worse, was it the embodiment of the feared SERVER OUTAGE, which had been known to destroy faculty lives with one zap of its electronic paw? Elle's senses swam, and she felt herself swooning to the floor, at the mercy of this strange beast, when it spoke:

"I'm, like, looking for the computer lab.  Is it, um, on this floor?"

Not trusting herself to speak, Elle pointed one trembling finger in the direction of the computer lab.

"Cool, dude! Thanks."

...

...She had completed her task! The curse would soon be lifted! Elle once again attempted to lift her voice in song, but ceased when the next cell's occupant complained that she was off-key.  Nevertheless, she joyously printed out her syllabi and skipped to the door, contemplating her future after her release from the Dungeon.   Never again would she fall prey to that dire demon, Procrastination.  Her life would be one of virtue, cheerfulness, and, above all, punctuality.  As she neared the office ahead, she saw other inmates, all congratulating each other with great excitement over their impending depatures from this fearsome pile. 

Yet, all of a sudden, a terrific SHRIEK arose from amidst the crowd.  The congratulations turned to screams, moans, and gasps of agony beyond mortal description.  Elle rushed to the office as she saw one sufferer after another faint to the floor, clutching their syllabi in their cold hands.  What could it be? What new evil? Why were faculty being brought low at the very moment of their triumph?

And then--she SAW.  Shaken to her core, she sobbed witlessly for a moment, then swooned (again) to the floor.  For the punishment dreaded beyond all others had been inflicted upon them.  Upon the photocopier, there was a sign, inked in a red more bloody than any human blood:

"Photocopier broken.  We've called the repairman.  Sorry!"

This Week's Month's Acquisitions

(Look what was waiting for me when I got back...)

• Lewis De Lew, Ben-Onie.  Episodes from the Journal of an Israelite, Converted to Christianity (George Lycett, 1887).  Despite the testimonials at the back, this appears to be yet another Jewish conversion novel (like Leila Ada).  The title character eventually treks from England to the USA and becomes a minister.  (eBay)
• Brian Moore, The Mangan Inheritance (NYRB, 2011).  Reprint of Moore's novel about a young man who becomes convinced that he has some sort of connection to the minor poet James Clarence Mangan.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Jacqueline S. Bratton, The Impact of Victorian Children's Fiction (Barnes & Noble, 1982).  An important study of reception, genres, publishers, etc.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Matthew Kaiser, The World in Play: Portraits of a Victorian Concept (Stanford, 2011).  How people made sense of the rapid shifts in Victorian culture.  I'm reviewing this for Choice.  (Review copy)
• Michael Alexander, Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England (Yale, 2007).   The fad for all things medieval in art, architecture, poetry, fiction, etc.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Emma Major, Madam Britannia: Women, Church, and Nation, 1712-1812 (OUP, 2012).  "Britannia" as a gendered and Protestantized symbol.  (OUP)
• Richard J. Schiefman, Nicholas Wiseman and the Transformation of English Catholicism (Patmos, 1984).  Studies how Wiseman attempted to move English Catholicism in a more "European" direction, among other things.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• John Cornwell, Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (Continuum, 2011).  Brief biography of Newman, who was beatified in 2010.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Eamon Duffy, ed., J. A. Froude's Mary Tudor (Continuum, 2010).  Unannotated (!) excerpts  from Froude's History of England, with intro by Duffy.   (Amazon [secondhand])
• Duncan Forbes, The Liberal Anglican Idea of History (Cambridge, 2006).  Reprint of Forbes' classic study of figures like Thomas Arnold and their approach to Christian historical narrative.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Angus Vine, In Defiance of Time: Antiquarian Writing in Early Modern England (OUP, 2010).  Humanist beginnings of antiquarian scholarship.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Stephen Bann, The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France (CUP, 2011).  Reprint of Bann's important study of 19th-c. historiography, fiction, and art history.  (Amazon [secondhand])

This place looks familiar, somehow

Back in the 'port! Which can mean only one thing: the new semester starts on Monday.   (And I have a committee meeting on the first day of classes.  This may be a record.) Time to finish up those syllabi. 

This semester will be interesting: the campus has rejiggered its scheduling so that our classes have become shorter (losing anywhere from ten to thirty minutes, depending on the original length).  There will be a lot of experimenting this time around to see how much I need to cut out of lectures and/or my usual run of assignments.  The new schedule also means that my classes will now all be clustered in the afternoons, as the department needs to have morning slots open to round us all up for meetings and suchlike.  (Strangely, not everyone seemed overly enthusiastic about department meetings at 8:30 AM.  Perhaps the chair needs to supply coffee, or maybe chocolate-covered espresso beans.) 

Alas, my deep philosophical objections to winter are, once again, in full force.

 

Massive manuscript mayhem!

• The introduction is doing its best to imitate a fungus, I think.  It keeps groooowing, well beyond the length appropriate for any respectable introduction.  Because there needed to be more historical background--yes, yes, OK, many people have never heard of a Ritualist--and where else to put that but in the introduction? (Where one tends to introduce things.)  And I realized that the previous version somehow neglected to mention either the Reformation tercentenary commemorations or the Martyrs' Memorial in Oxford, both of which seem to be awfully relevant to the point in hand.   But they take up space! Ergo, I've been doing my best to prune, lop, and otherwise shorten the thing to some manageable length. 
• For some reason, the new chapters are all 3/4 complete.   It seems to me that perhaps I should finish them.  Like, now?
• As a break from book inflation, I realized that once the first chapter was chopped into two, the first half no longer made sense by itself.  Out it goes!

Two connected, and possibly contradictory, theses

1.  Tweaking the format of doctoral dissertations will not affect time-to-graduation unless departments also tweak the teaching responsibilities they expect graduate students to shoulder. 

2.  Graduate students who do little-to-no teaching are even more hampered in this terrible job market than they would normally be.  A pedagogy-oriented dissertation will be of no help unless there is some actual pedagogy taking place. 

This Week's Acquisitions

(I may have wandered by a few book exhibit tables at the MLA.  *whistles innocently*)

• James Hogg, Winter Evening Tales, ed. Ian Duncan (Edinburgh, 2004).  Short fiction in a variety of genres, originally published in 1820.  (Freebie from those nice people at the Scottish Writing table)
• M. O. Grenby, The Child Reader, 1700-1840 (Cambridge, 2011).  Empirical/quantitative study of children's reading, including distribution, ownership, purchasing patterns, and the like. (Cambridge UP)
• Brian Sudlow, Catholic Literature and Secularisation in France and England, 1880-1914 (Manchester, 2011).  How Catholic authors responded to and combated the secularization process in order to assert their own place in late-19th c. culture.  (Palgrave Macmillan)
• Barrett Kalter, Modern Antiques: The Material Past in England 1660-1780 (Bucknell, 2012).  Medievalism, Gothic, collecting, etc.  (UPNE)
• Stephanie Stidham Rogers, Inventing the Holy Land: American Protestant Pilgrimage to Palestine, 1865-1941 (Lexington, 2011).  How they got there, what they saw, how they wrote about it, what it meant to American Protestant culture.  (Rowman & Littlefield)
• Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn, Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century, 1999-2009 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).  A substantial study of neo-Victorian fiction, film, and other media.  (Palgrave Macmillan)
• Clare A. Simmons, Popular Medievalism in Romantic-Era Britain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).  Gothic, legal systems, political satire, theater... (Palgrave Macmillan)
• Sue Zemka, Time and the Moment in Victorian Literature and Society (Cambridge, 2012).  The Victorian redefinition of temporality.  (Cambridge UP)
• Stuart Kelly, Scott-Land: The Man Who Invented a Nation (Polygon, 2010).  New biography of Scott and his role in shaping nineteenth-century Scottish nationalism.  (Another freebie from the Scottish Writing folks)
• Donald Malcolm Reid, Whose Pharoahs? Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I (California, 2002).  Going to Egypt, writing about Egypt, and then bringing stuff back from Egypt.  (Donation from my father)
• Jason Thompson, Sir Gardner Wilkinson and His Circle (Texas, 1992).  Biography of England's first major Egyptologist.  (Another paternal donation)

Death of the author

The Guardian reports that Reginald Hill, author of the Dalziel and Pascoe series, is dead. 

A Judgement in Stone

Ruth Rendell's A Judgement in Stone (1977) came up during interviews, so I decided to load it up on the handy Kindle on my way home.  I was initially startled by the brutality with which the narrator treated our murderer's illiteracy, which is the crux of the plot--"Literacy is one of the cornerstones of civilisation.  To be illiterate is to be deformed.  And the derision that was once directed at the physical freak may, perhaps more justly, descend upon the illiterate" (ch. 1)--but perhaps should not have been.  After all, Rendell's narrative personae are usually distinguished by their utter lack of charity.  But it soon became clear that this harshness derives not from Rendell, but from the novel with which A Judgement in Stone is in dialogue: Charles Dickens' Bleak House.  Eunice Parchman, our protagonist, crosses Jo and Esther Summerson, with deadly results--and yet, what is "killed" over the course of the plot is Dickensian sentimentality as much as several other characters.

Although Rendell's novel is about 1/5 the length of Dickens', the plots do manage to cross.  Like Jo and, to a lesser extent, Krook, Eunice is illiterate--in her case, by sheer inattention during WWII-era schooling.  Like Esther, she proves to be a fanatical housekeeper, preferring nothing more than to polish dishes and iron the clothes.  And like various people over the course of Bleak House, she's a blackmailer.   Rendell signals her indebtedness to Dickens more explicitly, however.  Lowfield Hall, where Eunice manages to get herself employed (with the coaching of one of her blackmailees), has, we're told, been transformed into a "bleak house," figuratively occupied for Miss Flite's birds (ch. 2), and we find out eventually that the murders precipitate the descendants into a Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce-type lawsuit.  (The names of Miss Flite's birds are also the final words of the novel.)  Similarly, when it comes to the question of class, we're told that, according to George Coverdale, "[b]etween the Coverdales and the Parchmans a great gulf is fixed" (ch. 4), much as Dickens' narrator marvels at "[w]hat connexion can there have been between many people in the innumerable history of the world, who, from opposite sides of great gulfs, have been very curiously brought together!" (I'll return to Rendell's ironic reworking of this quotation in just a moment.) Esther's inner moan of "too late" when Woodcourt proposes comes back in the "too late" of Eunice's refusal to learn to read in prison (ch. 25), while Esther's self-sacrificing nature is darkly parodied in Eunice's apparent "devotion" to her ill parents--which climaxes with the murder of her father when he cracks a bad joke once too often. And when Eunice fails to appropriately appreciate a baby, her disinterest contrasts starkly with Ada's spontaneous response to the bricklayer's wife and her dead child, which prompts a moment of mutual weeping.  Perhaps most importantly, the narrator's cold assessment of Eunice's "deformity" derives from Dickens' account of Jo, who is in "utter darkness" when it comes to the written word (Eunice lives in a "narrow twilight world" [ch. 4]) and is more like the "horses, dogs, and cattle" than the human beings. 

The narrator's clinical contempt for Eunice thus derives directly from Bleak House's anonymous narrator and his far more emotionally-charged representation of Jo, whose degradation is meant to excite the reader's righteous charity (precisely the thing that Rendell's narrator neither offers nor requests).  In fact, the charitable act that brings a badly-ill Jo to Bleak House, only to infect Charley and Esther, repeats itself in A Judgement in Stone.  "The Coverdales," the narrator informs us, "were interferers.  They interfered with the best intentions, of making people happy" (ch. 6).   In that sense, they're actually closer to Dickens' Jarndyce and company than any of his "bad" charity workers (Mrs. Jellyby or Mrs. Pardiggle).   Each charitable or sympathetic act, whether George offering to teach Eunice how to drive or his daughter Melinda, after catching on to Eunice's secret, promising reading lessons (ch. 18), merely turns one more screw in their ultimate fate.  Where Bleak House's narrative logic invites readers to contemplate an intimately interconnected world, one in which "great gulfs" are repeatedly crossed and recrossed through historical accident, A Judgement in Stone splits physical and subjective "crossings."  The Coverdales both assume Eunice's otherness (the fixed gulf) and seek, through charitable or sympathetic acts, to offer her their own pleasures.   Eunice's straitened subjectivity, however, lacks "sympathy," "imagination," and "what psychologists call affect, the ability to care about the feelings of others" (ch. 6); unlike Jo, who on his deathbed acknowledges and rejoices in the kindness of those who have taken pity on him "on accounts of their being ser good and my having been s' unfortnet," Eunice lacks the ability to recognize other people's moral or mental states.   More to the point, Jo's witness to everyone's "goodness" also justifies their charity as the "right" sort, one that recognizes the selfhood and agency of even the lowest sufferer, whereas the Coverdale's liberalism turns out to be a form of higher snobbery.   Melinda, a vague young lefty, keeps engaging in the sort of spontaneous sympathy that Dickens praises, but without being able to grasp that sympathy is the last thing that Eunice is capable of understanding, let alone appreciating   As the narrator remarks, "[t]hey were afraid of being selfish, for they had never understood what Giles [George's stepson] knew instinctively, that selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live" (ch. 6).   Jo's tear-jerking celebration of forgiveness and charity is simply impossible in this novel,  where illiteracy produces someone so truly Other that she cannot be reclaimed by the rhetoric of sentiment.  Not only can Eunice not read, she turns out to be unreadable. 

What Rendell does, then, is charge Dickens with narrative cowardice.  Eunice Parchman is Jo not merely de-sentimentalized, but also taken to an extreme that Bleak House first hints at, then undercuts.  Jo's Carlylean infectiousness explodes here into gunshots, as Eunice and her sole friend (or what passes for such), the mad (and Chadbandish) Joan Smith, murder the entire Coverdale household.  So much for sentimentalism's potential! The cheerful Jarndyces and sunny Summersons, kindly identifying with the downtrodden yet remaining genteel themselves, do not fare quite so well at Rendell's hands...

Lecturing, reviewing, submitting,

• Is it a sign of permanent wishiwashiness on my part that whenever the lecture vs. discussion vs. technology-enabled techniques vs. other approach debates arise, I always wind up saying, "well, it depends"? (You do not, in fact, have to answer that question.) Who's in the class, what are you teaching, does something need to be modeled...Perhaps part of the problem is that I never really encountered the monologic, droning lecturer of legend (I know they exist--I just never had one); instead, the pedagogical models I encountered always talked with us, not at us.  At the very least, the class would be peppered with questions.  My own style would hardly work with the permanently-archived podcast approach, because it involves me stopping every five seconds to ask the students about something going on in the text (along with collaborative work, "find one thing and tell us about it" exercises, and so on). And I don't exactly qualify as an avant-garde instructor...
• For some reason, my young fogeyness keeps emerging when faced with suggestions that peer review needs to undergo summary execution, or at least needs to be zapped with a polymorph wand from NetHack.   Although I like the Kairos model outlined here, there seems to be an odd strand of...utopianism?...involved in many of the suggestions (in particular, the sometimes unstated assumption that people who are actually experts in the field will simply show up and comment on your blog post when required).  I've got a very speculative little article coming out that was going to be a blog post, until I realized that my little speculation about Interesting Thing was actually posing a kind of serious problem--and I darn well wanted an expert peer reviewer to shoot necessary holes in it.   (There are, in fact, times when you want somebody to say, "you know, this could be wrong, and here's why.")   It was not clear to me at all that such peer reviewers would magically appear on my blog--or, for that matter, that anyone who might want to know about Interesting Thing would necessarily think to find it here (it's not the sort of topic I usually write about, for starters). 
• On another note from the article linked above: is it time to revisit the rule that says, "you may submit this article to only one journal at a time"?  (I gather that law reviews don't abide by this.)  The rule in question is looser for book manuscripts (where it's more "you may query multiple publishers, but can only have your book under consideration at one").  Depending on how long an editor hangs on to an article, or how much trouble they have finding a reader or readers, or how long it takes to extract the article from the readers (possibly with dental pliers), the time from submission to acceptance or rejection can become thoroughly unholy.  I understand why you might want to keep the protocol in place--for starters, it keeps the editors from wasting their time with articles they won't have the chance to publish--but are there also arguments in favor of revising the rule of thumb?

I hear tell there's a conference going on

1.  This bronchitis could stand to do a little more ratcheting down.  I twice had to explain to candidates that my reasons for suddenly decamping from the interview session did not include either dying or bizarre infectious disease.

2.  Speaking of asking questions, it probably would have been a good idea to figure out what I was ordering for lunch.  What arrived was, I suppose, suitably monastic in conception for an academic, but not advisable fuel for several more hours of interviewing.

3.  Still, no bankruptcy in sight.

4.  There was also no bankruptcy in sight after visiting the book exhibit on double-quick time during the lunch break.  What's up with all the exhibitors saying, "sorry, no, I can't take money, we're not selling anything"?!  (Come on, Harvard, I wanted that new book on Dickens.)   I gather there's some sort of commerce regulation at issue, but...really? I did break down and buy a book from Cambridge (now, there's a bankruptcy-inducing prospect), and I've reserved a couple of free books from the Scottish Writing folks; maybe I'll pick up some stuff on Sunday.

5.  And continuing the theme of things not in sight: people in the exhibit.  I've never seen it so empty.  Economic downturns, departments Skyping their interviews, or some combination of the above?