The Little Professor

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The first day of class is always administrivia day, so the real fireworks begin tomorrow. In the Victorian survey, we follow the sacred--um, in my world--tradition of starting with Tennyson's "Mariana" and "The Lady of Shalott," which, besides being great poems, have my favorite "gotcha!" moments for teaching students how to pay close attention to the text. In "Mariana," the students have to watch the quatrain at the end of each stanza. What is "dreary"?

Life
Night
Day
Life
Night
Life
I

The poem "corkscrews" as it goes along, tightening to that moment of anguished realization when Mariana finally says "I" (it's my subjectivity, my perception at issue).

"The Lady of Shalott," meanwhile, has that brilliant crack in its endless "Camelot/Shalott" refrain, as Sir Lancelot, riding in and out of the mirror, shatters the poem's structure--among other things. And then there's the little matter of what the Lady actually sees when she looks out the window. (We always spend some time talking about Plato's allegory of the cave. I'm happy to say that my students generally have at least a vague notion of what the allegory is all about.)

Things are still Victorian in the honors comp course, where we'll have a go at Act I of The Importance of Being Earnest. This play is really our warm-up for the ominously onrushing freight train that is George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman (which, thank goodness, we'll be seeing without Act III; it might be interesting to see it with Act III, sure, but then we'd be in Canada until sometime next year). Then it's back to administrivia with the graduate students, although I'm going to have them do a bit of in-class writing before I allow them to escape.

Three more pet peeves

Inspired by the ongoing process of reading 100+ books on historical fiction for a bibliographical essay.

• Where's the context? Those of us studying historical fiction frequently encounter that dreaded mental block known as Goodness Gracious, I Don't Know a Darn Thing About This Novel's Subject Matter. And since a key part of the historical novelist's craft is the ability to transform recalcitrant facts into aesthetically pleasing shapes, GGIDKaDTATNSM usually sends us shooting off in directions well outside our regular line of work. Since we cannot and should not reinvent someone else's wheel, that means hitting the scholarly books. I find myself getting unhappy, however, when literary critics simply appropriate another critic's (or historian's) interpretation of a wide range of materials and turn that interpretation into the "context." Granted that my own work is intended to save people from slogging through endless reams of H. E. Burch and Emma Leslie, but at a certain point you just have to stop and do some spot-checking. This remains true whether the texts at issue are sermons, conduct manuals, or medieval chronicles. Moreover, it should be the right source material.

• Where's the voice? Ack! Endless unqualified citations and quotations of other critics in the main text! Build on the point or argue with it--don't just leave it hanging there.

• Where's the original? While it's one thing to go the "quoted in" route when you haven't the proverbial snowball's chance to see the original, I don't quite understand the point of quoting well-known work X from secondary text Y. Um...hello? The library? Interlibrary loan? What gives?

Murphy's Law

1) Discover that I haven't been given enough booklets for my intro to college course.
2) Discover that either a student misheard some pertinent information, or I spoke in a less than pellucid manner. Send clarifying e-mail to entire class, just to make sure.
3) Apologize for error made by someone else.
4) Realize that I belong to the Executive Committee. Also realize that I have to attend the Executive Committee meeting on Wednesday. Further realize that I have scheduled a Graduate Committee meeting for the same time. Unschedule it.
5) See independent bookstore's list of books for my course, which, unfortunately, also contains a number of books assigned by the faculty member previously assigned to my section. Point this out.

Why we don't read the New York Times for scholarly commentary on the Victorians

"But Thackeray illustrated himself, something that is often forgotten." By whom?

Oh, and I'm so not looking forward to Reese Witherspoon as Becky.

Scattered Last-Minute-Before-the-Semester-Begins Links and Musings

I spent a good chunk of the day making last-minute adjustments to various syllabi and writing up my first set of discussion questions. (This sounds awfully familiar, somehow.) It did occur to me at some point that, really, the students needed at least one more day to get through Villette. The Victorian survey is one of those courses that steadily leaks reading assignments; the last time I taught it, the students felt a bit overwhelmed by all the poetry, so I kept most of the authors but slightly reduced the number of texts. As a result, there are just two real marathon moments: Villette during the first half of the semester, Bleak House during the second. (While joking around with one of our office aides, a former student of mine, I suggested that she could solve her reading load problem by taking my class--after all, "it only has two novels!" Alas, she informed me, she had yet to recover from the sheer weight of Daniel Deronda.)

The other part of the afternoon was spent in academic regalia. Like all University of Chicago Ph.D.s, I'm fond of my robes, which make quite the fashion statement--maroon with black velvet facings, black velvet tam instead of a mortarboard*--but there's no air conditioning in our gymnasium. Um. Heavy wool in mid-80s temperatures (at least) in a humid gym. Aieee. One of the freshmen sitting near the assembled sweaty faculty looked at us with grave concern and said, sympathetically, "You guys must feel a lot more uncomfortable than we do!"

Meanwhile, I agree with Dan Green, although I sometimes feel as though a literary classic is "a book that can be enjoyed for generations after its original publication, even though later readers only think they understand what's on the page in front of them." Well, perhaps that's too extreme (not to mention too cynical), although in some cases--Jane Eyre comes to mind, along with a fair amount of Shakespeare--it seems to describe what's going on.

In other news, a fellow Cliopatriarch starts the semester off with a bang by pointing us to this example of teaching gone inadvertently haywire. I took one film off my freshman syllabus this semester because I decided that it would only shock the kids, which isn't useful when you're trying to stimulate serious discussion. If it had been an upper-division course, the film would have stayed, but I thought it best to err on the side of caution. Speaking of pedagogy, This Academic Life offers some thoughtful reflections on academia as a "vocation" instead of a "job."

On a totally non-academic note, I empathize with the New Kid on the Hallway. I've twice devolved into Helpless Small Female by calling on Strong Men to deal with Icky Bugs--although the second time, at least, I was trying to deal with the Icky Bug myself. I was in Wales at the time, staying in a dorm room. Icky Bug was on the ceiling, and--the Small Female thing making it impossible for me to reach anything ten feet up, even while standing on a chair--I went down to the security desk to see if anyone had a flyswatter. Instead, a security guard came up to my room and personally removed the bug for me. He seemed to think it was all rather cute.

*--Which, as the University of Idaho points out, is "notorious for its intractability in any kind of breeze." Tams, at least, tend to stay put. There's also the entertainment value provided by hoods, which unwind from their hooks and strangle unsuspecting faculty at inconvenient moments.

Box Office Figures Nonsense Blogging

I'm in pre-semester meltdown--the result of overdosing on syllabi, discussion questions, and new homework assignments. This is my only excuse for the following mangled film titles, which I've generated by joining two adjacent films on the current box office chart.

• Exorcist: The Beginning Without a Paddle. A wayward priest goes on a wild-n'-crazy boat trip in search of lost treasure, only to find a demon-possessed Burt Reynolds. Lots of nutty hijinks follow, most notably Reynolds doing a spider walk down a flight of stairs.

  
  

• Princess Diaries 2: The Royal Engagement of Alien vs. Predator. Two seriously ugly critters discover the secret of their royal birth. After some understandable identity crises (and a special guest appearance on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy), they overcome a number of unforeseen obstacles (including the Hollywood producer who wants to use them in a major gorefest), fall in love, and live happily ever after.

  
  

• Open Water Collateral. Two yuppies deeply awash in debt discover the true meaning of the term "loan shark."
  

Links, mainly Victorian

• Lauren's Alice in Wonderland Page. More illustrations than you can shake the proverbial stick at, plus lots of other good stuff. (Via Maud Newton).

• George and Weedon Grossmith's Diary of a Nobody in--you guessed it--blog form.

• A real Australian diary, written by Alexander Goodall in the 1890s. (For a lot more examples of nineteenth-century Australian diaries, narratives, letters, etc., see this genealogy page.)

• Designing Domesticity: Decorating the American Home Since 1876. Brief history of interior design.

• Thoemmes Press has an online encyclopedia (albeit a small one) of the history of ideas.

This Week's Acquisitions

• A. D. Crake, Aemilius: A Tale of the Decian and Valerian Persecutions (Mowbray, 1902). Part of Crake's long cycle of novels devoted to the history of Christianity. This is a reprint of his first novel.

• Mike Jay, The Unfortunate Colonel Despard: Hero and Traitor in Britain's First War on Terror (Bantam, 2004). Biography of "the last man to be sentenced to public hanging, drawing and quartering for high treason" (ow).

In which we pause for a moment of irritation

A note to all literary critics, aspiring and otherwise: when providing "context," it is not necessary to begin from the dawn of time. As a general rule, your reader expects the context to be in some manner relevant to the matter at hand. Besides, this is literary criticism, not James Michener.

Research at a non-research institution, part one

I'd like to follow the lead of George H. Williams and Chuck Tryon, but I'd also like to do something a bit more specific. If you'll permit me to generalize about a generalization, gentle reader, most commentators on the current scholarly climate confuse that which is most visible (the 100-odd Ph.D.-granting institutions) with that which is statistically normal (the 1000+ rest of us). Since institutions exert considerable influence on the kinds of scholarship that an academic can produce--and, by "influence," I don't necessarily mean political influence--it's worth spelling out what separates us from the Research I/II crowd.

My own generalizations derive from a) my own experience at a small comprehensive with a nine-hour teaching load, b) my father's experience at a large comprehensive with a twelve-hour teaching load, and c) my discussions with colleagues at similar institutions, both public and private. These generalizations can be further inflected, however, by talking about the research environments at some small private colleges and church-affiliated schools; for example, a few years ago, I met a respected political scientist at a small, well-known liberal arts college whose colleagues had tried to scupper his tenure bid not because he hadn't published anything, but because he had.

Numbers (1). For tenure, my own department requires a scant handful of articles (about 4 would do it; this includes articles in press) and book reviews, but no book. (We also count conference presentations toward requirements for scholarship, which may be unusual.) As we've discovered during job searches, departments at equivalent institutions often have much lighter requirements--perhaps an article or two, or, in some cases, no publications at all. By contrast, a Research I or II will normally ask for a book plus articles plus reviews.

Numbers (2). I teach a 3-3 load; my father has been teaching 3-3-3, with each course running 4 hours instead of 3; and I know people who teach 4-4 or even 5-5. At the University of Chicago, however, faculty teach some version of 1-2-1, while faculty at the University of Michigan--Ann Arbor, UCLA, UCSB, etc., do 2-2. For obvious reasons, the more you teach, the more creative you have to get about finding time to write. The flip side, of course, is that the less you teach, the more you're expected to write...

Numbers (3). To maintain a credible (and accredited) Ph.D. program, a Research I or II needs a library of around 2,500,000-3,000,000 books. The biggest and wealthiest programs will have at least double that number, plus microfilms, periodicals, and so forth. At a non-research campus, however, those numbers drop off like a cliff. (I interviewed at one campus with a collection the size of an average public library branch site.) Scholars at small schools in out-of-the-way locations suffer real handicaps in terms of access not just to the current scholarship, but also to the primary literature.

Numbers (4). The only ways to compensate for a non-research library are to travel or to build your own collection. But faculty development grants are often either small or hard to come by, and it can be difficult to compete with Research I/II faculty when it comes to applying for outside grants. (Hence the NEH's decision to put 4-yr college faculty into their own grant pool.) The lucky among us are those who live in cities with easily-accessed major collections (e.g., Chicago, New York, Boston, Los Angeles).

Freedom. Lest I make it seem that pursuing scholarly work at a comprehensive or smaller school is all misery, no fun, let me point out that we have one significant advantage: our departments are far less likely to exert pressure on our choice of topics, methods, and the like. When the attitude to scholarship is not "what have you published?" but "wow, you've published," then there's far more room to experiment or even to move into different fields altogether. Moreover, since we're under considerably less pressure to publish than scholars at big research campuses, it's easy to develop a comfortable working rhythm. One doesn't have to churn, chug, or whatever else you want to call it.

Right now, I'm in the middle of finishing two articles, collecting sources for a third, and (over a very long haul) thinking about a chapter for my second book. As I go through the semester, I'll offer some "meta" comments about my own practice.