The Little Professor

Have I missed it?

While compiling this bibliographical essay on studies in historical fiction, I've been nagged by the absence of an expected presence: book-length work on gay & lesbian historical fiction. I thought it must be out there somewhere, especially given the incredible explosion of scholarship on African-American historical fiction--much of it in just the past five years alone--and the mainstream readership for novelists like Christopher Bram, Emma Donoghue, and Sarah Waters. (In Britain, Gay Men's Press publishes a lot of more niche-oriented historical fiction by writers like Chris Hunt.) But I can't find anything at all, which genuinely puzzles me. The most promising-sounding book, Scott Bravmann's Queer Fictions of the Past: History, Culture, and Difference (Cambridge, 1997), talks about some fiction but emphasizes historiography more generally. There are articles out there, to be sure, but they're not what's called for.

Wishful

One of my tried and true recipes for procrastination involves playing with my Amazon wishlist--which, I noted yesterday with a combination of bafflement, bemusement, and resignation, now numbers over 400 items. (I decided it would be more fun to hunt down new Oxford and Cambridge books on the nineteenth century instead of reading Historiographic Metafiction in Modern American and Canadian Literature.) As it so happens, I don't expect anyone to actually buy something for me from the list; instead, I use it as a repository for identifying books I ought to read, books I don't really want to read but should know about, and books I desperately want to read but can't afford to own. In addition, I use it--along with AddAll--to double-check prices before bidding on academic books at EBay.* I'm still irritated by Amazon's decision to eliminate the list-view option for used books, but at least they went back to identifying the used prices in the full wishlist itself.

The wishlist approach replaced my earlier habit of maintaining "interesting books" lists in Word documents, a practice which saved space (because I could then throw out the catalogs) but became too time-consuming. I started keeping lists of books while I was a graduate student--I'm a pretty inveterate lister of all sorts of things, I've got to say--and still riffle through my older lists whenever I start working on a new project.

*--Which is worth doing, because there's no point in getting caught up in a bidding war if the book can be found more cheaply elsewhere. When I bid on antiquarian books, I first look up the going rate on AddAll and then keep my maximum bid well below that price.

Lewis Carroll in the TLS

While most people know about the ongoing controversy over Lewis Carroll's (Charles Dodgson's) interest in young girls, the clash between Morton N. Cohen--the dean of Lewis Carroll studies--and those he dubs the "revisionists" has had far less play outside of literary circles. In the Times Literary Supplement for 9-10-04, Cohen takes a whack at the most famous of the revisionists, Karoline Leach. Strong language abounds. There's more on the article at A Blog of Bosh (no permalink, scroll down) and an excerpt from Leach's In the Shadow of the Dreamchild here.

Not the sort of article you want to read while preparing your tenure portfolio

The University of North Texas rejected twelve tenure applications this year. The president claims that departments and divisions were not properly adhering to standards; the faculty claim that the president unfairly altered requirements without telling anyone. Did the assistant professors in question have consistently positive evaluations during their stay at the University of North Texas? Were there negative paper trails in their files? Both points, I imagine, could well come into play if anyone decides to sue--never mind the possibility that the president simply changed the rules. While the courts have generally frowned on interfering in tenure cases at private institutions or tenure cases where quality assessment is at issue, they've been much more willing to jump in when there are clear-cut procedural violations.

Well?

So what's the answer? Don't leave us all hanging. I'm presuming that it's Leiter, unless summarily informed to the contrary.

Since I don't discuss politics at all on this blog (although I nearly gave in to temptation this morning after glimpsing a few minutes of the absolutely appalling Necronomicon on the Sci-Fi Channel), I'm much less fun, but I suppose you could sum me up like so:

1. Books or food? Books or food? Of course books, you ninny.
2. Insert random meditation on student behavior here.
3. The Victorians are, like, totally cool, dude.
4. More books. Wait--is that the sound of another bookcase collapsing?
5. Why don't my students appreciate Gerard Manley Hopkins?
6. Still more books.
7. Did I mention that my cats are adorable?
8. Is it just me, or are the books getting up to something unmentionable while my back is turned? I mean, they keep multiplying.
9. Amazing! I saw a movie.
10. Those books just don't stop, do they?

Iron Council

Some spoilers, so head below the fold.

Conference angst

Kathleen Fitzpatrick details some exasperating conference behaviors. My own nominee for all-time annoying panelist would have to be the woman who began by cheerfully announcing that she hadn't actually prepared her talk--after all, she preferred spontaneity. Personally, I'd have preferred a rehearsed paper with an intelligible argument, but that was no doubt a sign, once again, of my premature young-fogeyness.

Meanwhile, it appears that my own paper for the MLA will need to clock in at 15 minutes, which makes the process of writing it more difficult (if I don't supply some historical context, the novels themselves won't make much sense...) instead of less. Ah well.

This Week's Acquisitions

• Colum McCann, Dancer: A Novel (Picador, 2004). Fictionalized biography of Rudolf Nureyev, as told through multiple voices.

• China Mieville, Iron Council (Del Rey, 2004). Third in Mieville's series of novels about Bas-Lag and the city of New Crobuzon.

• Christopher Bram, The Notorious Doctor August: His Real Life and Crimes (Perennial, 2001). Civil War-era historical novel involving spiritualism, music, and magic, among numerous other things.

• Samuel Wainwright, Ritualism: Romanism: and the Reformation: A Question of Fact (Partridge, 1879). Attack on the Anglo-Catholic movement.

• Nicholas Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism c. 1530-1700 (Manchester, 2001). Essays mainly on Puritanism and Arminianism.

• Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (Yale, 2004). Argues that a new concept of selfhood emerged in the late eighteenth century.

In Hell

Yesterday was spent ushering freshmen through a second day of the Don Juan in Hell section from Man and Superman and upper-division students through Thomas Carlyle's Past and Present (which, besides striking the students as a hellish experience, includes a famous snark about the modern English version of "hell"). The freshmen, while much relieved by the prospect of escaping hell, had a rather better grasp of Shaw than the older students had of Carlyle--which, given Carlyle's grand Old Testament prophet mode, is understandable. Still, it was difficult to get the second group away from thinking about Carlyle's style as "too wordy." As a practical matter, I think it's important to teach students how to turn stumbling blocks into productive questions: not "too many words!" but "what are the words doing?" It's very easy for students to fall into the trap of thinking that a difficult literary work doesn't want them to read it, as it were, and I don't want them to feel that studying Victorian literature is some sort of adversarial activity; Carlyle, after all, isn't out to torture us, and we aren't here to "interrogate" him.

Next week, the older students start reading Villette, which I've never taught before. (Unfortunately, I can't rely on anyone having read Jane Eyre, one student aside.) Rereading it myself, I'm struck again by the odd opening chapters, in which Lucy Snowe not only doesn't do anything, but also seems shunted off to the margins of what is purportedly her own narrative. And yet, her observations of the figures around her establish the shape of her character very quickly indeed. It's no wonder that she's amused by Madame Beck; the two of them have more in common than Lucy acknowledges! On a different note, I'm not sure how the students will respond to the novel's blatant anti-Catholicism. When I teach Jane Eyre, the students (including the Catholic students) usually don't notice the novel's mostly figurative anti-Catholic language until I point it out to them; here, though, it's right out in the open.

Why we need editors, reason #1294

Anne Rice demonstrates. (Note: link to MeFi because the Amazon link may be kaput; cache in thread.)