The Little Professor

Fishy

In today's NYT, Stanley Fish opined on a subject near and dear to his heart: freshman composition. Before I continue, let's pause for a moment and ponder the real revelation here: Stanley Fish, the world's most famous English professor, teaches freshman composition. So now you know: the next time someone sneers that faculty bigwigs don't teach introductory courses, point him to Stanley Fish. Of course, he'll then complain that we're letting Stanley Fish near impressionable undergraduates, but what can you do?

Onward. Fish complains that our students cannot write English (not a new complaint, as anyone who has spent time around faculty mailboxes quickly realizes) and that the enemy is us: "Students can't write clean English sentences because they are not being taught what sentences are." Freshman composition courses have become a haven for "content," in the form of what Fish calls "big ideas." Fish claims to have solved the problem by eliminating content from his writing courses; not a reader in sight, apparently. Instead, his students spend the semester developing their own language--an exercise that teaches them to understand sentence construction.

The "build your own language" exercise strikes me as an interesting one, and I'm sure it does teach students how to recognize a wild adverb when it races across their path. I spend a lot of time on grammar when I teach freshman comp, so I appreciate Fish's emphasis on mechanics. (I even spend time on grammar in my literature courses; after all, you cannot do formal analysis without being able to recognize the forms!) Still, as Sean McCann notes, Fish cleverly avoids the central question: "does the assignment in fact make students better writers?" But Fish also avoids the pink grammar handbook in the room: do students actually learn to write in freshman composition?

If you're in an English department, you soon discover that freshman composition is supposed to be a one-time vaccination against such dread diseases as Runonsentenceitis and Missingtopicsentencesyndrome. Alas, if we really want students to write well, then we need to administer frequent booster shots. Most students suffer amnesia at the end of each semester. In the fall semester, they learn to distinguish Petrarchan sonnets from the Spenserian variety; in the spring, that knowledge vanishes mysteriously, never to be seen or heard from again. Similarly, your freshman comp course may spend weeks on the inscrutable nature of the independent clause, but that doesn't mean that the students will recognize one the next time they take a course in the humanities. At best, freshman composition introduces students to the basics of mechanics, style, and organization; it cannot "teach students to write." Students can and will learn to write if their instructors constantly remind them of those introductory lessons. And when I say "instructors," I mean all instructors--even the ones who shriek in horror at the sight of the St. Martin's Handbook.

Nobody ever "learns to write," just as nobody is ever truly "well-read" or "cultured"; we are always "learning to write." We need to ask questions about freshman composition, certainly, but we also need to think about how writing fits into the rest of the curriculum.

Two Brief Reviews

1.  The reader who approaches Colum McCann's Dancer: A Novel seeking "information" about Rudolf Nureyev will be sorely disappointed.  In fact, those not already in the know about either Nureyev or his contemporaries may find themselves baffled by the parade of people named (Erik Bruhn, Margot Fonteyn), unnamed (an anonymous "genius," a.k.a. Mikhail Baryshnikov), or Christian-named ("Pablo," "Jacques").  McCann makes no attempt to reconstruct Nureyev's career: there's nothing about his rivalry with Baryshnikov and almost nothing about his work with the Paris Opera Ballet, and even his defection occurs in a narrative gap. 

Instead, McCann wants to capture Nureyev's effect--the artist as high- and fast-burning flame, destroying himself in the name of aesthetic greatness.  But he also wants to imagine Nureyev as inspiration; as pop culture idol; as a means of escaping the gloominess of Communist Russia; as gay icon; as symbol of the West's allure; and so on, and so on, and so on.   Not surprisingly, McCann deliberately fragments his narrative.  There are multiple narrators--including Nureyev himself--all of them writing letters, keeping journals, reminiscing, or flowing along in a stream of consciousness.  McCann heightens the slightly kaleidoscopic effect by rapidly switching narrators, sometimes offering up several different first-person speakers in succession; this is not a novel which allows the reader to coast.  For me, at least, the only really unsuccessful sections belong to "Victor," Nureyev's tour guide to the pre-AIDS sex scene.  The problem with writing about hedonism is that, on the page, it's usually rather boring, and Victor's hyper-kinetic presence ultimately exerts a rather soporific effect.  Overall, the novel probably could have used more focus--for example, on Nureyev's simultaneous desire for and resistance to "star-making"--and it doesn't quite succeed in conveying why Nureyev had such an impact.  Still, as a take on artistic rage, it's quite compelling. 

2.  In stark contrast to Dancer, Madison Smartt Bell's The Stone that the Builder Refused aspires very much to the status of historical novel-as-history.  Stone completes Bell's trilogy about Toussaint Louverture, and there's absolutely no point in picking this one up if you haven't read All Saints' Rising (1995) and Master of the Crossroads (2000); even if you have read the earlier novels, be warned that Bell doesn't spend much time refreshing your memory about who's who in his character-filled canvas.  Bell's main narrative takes us through to Toussaint's capture and, eventually, his death (from cold, it would appear) in a French prison.  The ugly aftermath appears in an afterword narrated twenty years after the fact by the trilogy's only first-person speaker, Riau.  In addition to the main text, we also have a glossary of French and Creole terms, a detailed chronology, and some primary documents in the original French. 

I found this final installment somewhat less impressive than the first two, but it's hard to put my finger on the problem.  Part of it may be the novel's serial quality--military picaresque, perhaps? Both Toussaint and the key white characters, especially Antoine Hebert, spend the entire novel moving from one spot to the next--in Hebert's case, usually in circumstances not altogether under his control.  Obviously, the constant motion is a necessary part of the historical plot, but at times the book feels as though Bell just wants to be done with the enterprise.  Part of it may be that Bell's interest in developing his characters appears to have waned; we don't really learn anything new about Hebert, his wife Nanon, the other female characters, or even Toussaint.  In a sense, this flattening is appropriate, as historical events overwhelm and threaten to erase just about everyone in the novel.  Once again, though, it reduces the novel's effectiveness, and it also undermines what Robert Stone correctly identifies as the trilogy's larger point: "the imprisonment of human nature in a fallen world, forever chasing utopias." 

More successfully, Bell continues to utilize points-of-view rooted in Voudou, especially in Riau's sections.  Not surprisingly, Ghede--the god of death--haunts the novel. (Master of the Crossroads takes its name from another Haitian god, Legba.)  Of necessity, this is a blood-soaked novel, but there's nothing here as graphic as, say, Choufleur's murder of his father in the first novel or Choufleur's own death in the second. 

Here today, gone tomorrow

On C 18-L, Ellen Moody relays a claim from SCOTT-L that Penguin's newest edition of Sir Walter Scott's Redgauntlet--taken from the spiffy Edinburgh scholary edition--has sold exactly twenty-six copies.  If true, that doesn't bode well for additional reprints of Scott's fiction, but the low sales on their own aren't especially shocking.  Both Penguin Classics and Oxford World's Classics rely heavily on academic marketing for their sales, which means that books stay in print as long as instructors want to assign them.  And there's the rub.  While there are more and more scholars interested in British Romantic fiction--long the bankrupt (never mind poor!) cousin of Romantic poetry--courses in the British novel often smash the early nineteenth century between the Scylla and Charybdis of long eighteenth-century novels and equally long Victorian novels.  (This syllabus is a typical example.) Courses devoted specifically to the nineteenth-century British novel often plump for Jane Austen over Sir Walter.  See, for example, these syllabi from Dan Bivona, Patricia Craddock, David Latane, Barry Milligan, Prof. O'Hara, Laura Runge, Julie Shaffer, and Chris Vanden Bossche; Lynn Alexander offers a rare exception to this rule. 

It's not as though there's some secret academic conspiracy devoted to avoiding Scott.  Indeed, from a purely literary-historical standpoint, Scott is arguably the more important novelist: everybody who was anybody (or nobody) in nineteenth-century British, European, and American literary circles read Scott, imitated Scott, rewrote Scott, argued with Scott, and, in general, tried to outdo Scott.  One of the things about course design, though, is that literary history sometimes needs to give way to more pragmatic issues--such as the likelihood that your students will use the assigned reading as kindling for a March Madness bonfire instead of, well, actually reading it.*  Jane Austen's sprightly and ironic prose usually succeeds with undergraduates where Scott's more ponderous style fails (although, of course, some people teach some Scott with considerable success).  In any event, an instructor who wants to teach Scott probably won't head for Redgauntlet, a novel with the unfortunate distinction of being better known for its brilliant inset ghost story, "Wandering Willie's Tale," than for the plot proper.  I imagine that many of us appreciate having the opportunity to own a cheap printing of a text from the Edinburgh edition of Scott, but that's not the same thing as saying that we're all bursting to assign one. 

Perhaps we could coin a term for this publishing-and-purchasing syndrome, something along the lines of "nonstudentreadershipitis."  (Presumably, somebody out there--maybe the headless one--will be capable of coming up with a term that might actually strike someone as amusing...)  Pandora's Mothers of the Novel series and Penguin's Virago imprint both died of this fatal disease: scholars happily rushed to acquire copies of difficult-to-find novels like Geraldine Jewsbury's Zoe or Charlotte Smith's Emmeline, but didn't assign them to students.  Similarly, speaking as a scholarly reader, I adore Broadview Press, which brings all sorts of interesting things back into print.  But does anyone anticipate a headlong drive to teach, say, Amy Levy's** Reuben Sachs? Or, at least, to teach it to undergraduates? While it's nice to have a reasonably priced edition that's separate from the Melvyn New collection of Levy's works, the novel itself depends so heavily on contemporary religious and literary context--among other things, it cocks a sarcastic eyebrow in Daniel Deronda's direction--that it's unlikely to work in anything but an advanced undergraduate or graduate seminar.  It's nice having these books around, but it's not always clear for whom they're intended.   

*--Which is why none of us are battering down the door to teach anything by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, although he's one of the most influential novelists of the Victorian era.  Somehow, I suspect that Bulwer-Lytton's magenta prose and his bizarre brand of mysticism would be voted least likely to succeed with the 18-to-22 demographic.  Or, for that matter, any other demographic.  (That being said, "The Haunted and the Haunters" holds up nicely.) 

**--For some reason, Amazon keeps listing forthcoming Broadview reprints under the editor's name--in this case, Susan Bernstein--instead of the author's.

This Week's Acquisitions

• Mary Doria Russell, A Thread of Grace (Random House, 2005).  Russell takes a break from space-going Jesuits to write a novel about Italians saving Jews from the concentration camps near the end of WWII.
• H. Grattan Guinness, Romanism and the Reformation from the Standpoint of Prophecy, 2nd ed. (Nisbet, 1891).  "Cheap" edition of this wildly popular lecture series.  Guinness was a famous Baptist preacher and missionary.
• T[homas] Binney, Sermons Preached in the King's Weigh-House Chapel, London. 1829-1869 (Macmillan, 1869).  Er, sermons.  For more on Binney, a famous Congregationalist, see the Cyberhymnal; the National Portrait Gallery owns a Vanity Fair caricature.
• Paul Goldman, Victorian Illustrated Books 1850-1870: "The Heyday of Wood Engraving."  Selections from the Robin de Beaumount Collection in the British Museum (Godine, 1994).  Prints, artists, production methods, etc.

In which, once again, I fail to predict my teaching evaluations

One of Dad the Emeritus Historian of Graeco-Roman Egypt's pearls of wisdom addresses the discrepancy between the instructor's opinion of how a course is going and the students'.  To paraphrase: "We know that something isn't working, but that doesn't mean that they do." I should probably string this pearl on a necklace and contemplate it on a more regular basis, especially since I received my strongest evaluations from the Silent Seminar--the students I expected to draw and quarter me.  The other two courses polled quite well, too, which was not a surprise for one (Women in the Novel, which is always quite popular) but a little startling for the other (Brit Lit II, which has a high population of lower-division students unaccustomed to getting Cs). 

Friday Cat Blogging

Victoria and Disraeli have their headshots and are heading for Hollywood.  Well, maybe not. 

Got articles?

Apparently so.  The turn-around on the first was remarkably fast, I must say--the proofs came and went just a few weeks ago.

Photographic Fiction #2: The Photograph

Unlike Helen Humphreys' Afterimage, Penelope Lively's The Photograph takes no real interest in the relationship between photography and storytelling.  While a photograph propels the narrative, the novel's key metaphors for memory and history derive from landscapes and gardens; moreover, the novel consistently redefines attentiveness to others as not looking but listening.  Glyn, a landscape historian, finds a photograph of his late wife, Kath, that apparently reveals the existence of an affair with her sister Elaine's husband, Nick.  Not surprisingly, this knocks his world off its axis, and he--being a good historian--promptly sets out to uncover the truth.  In turn, his investigations upset everyone else involved in the story, from Elaine herself to the man who took the photograph in the first place.  By the end, though, Glyn will discover that the affair itself is meaningless; far more important are the darker truths about Kath's existence that reveal themselves over the course of Glyn's "research." 

The novel's plot bears some resemblance to Virginia Woolf's short story "The Legacy," albeit without Woolf's feminist point.  In "The Legacy," a self-satisfied politician reads his late wife's diaries, looking almost entirely for reflections of himself; as he reads, however, he discovers that he actually knew his wife not at all.  Like "The Legacy," The Photograph features an eminently self-satisfied male who discovers that his wife was not what she seemed; an affair; childlessness; and suicide.  Unlike "The Legacy," The Photograph holds out the promise that Glyn will, after all, change.  (While Woolf's politician certainly experiences an epiphany at the end, it's still a very self-centered epiphany, as my students regularly notice.) 

In any event, whether or not Lively is consciously indebted to Woolf, the novel itself exemplifies what Suzanne Keen dubs a "romance of the archives": that is, unlike postmodern historical fictions, which tend to emphasize the possibility of multiple and subjective historical narratives, romances of the archive reinvigorate the search for truth through the quest-romance.  There are, indeed, truths to learn about Kath, and these truths will realign the lives of everyone who thought they knew her.  As it happens, both Glyn and Elaine are desperately in need of some realigning.  While Glyn is a historian and Elaine is a garden designer, both of them err in trying to control their pasts and their surroundings; we are meant to frown, for example, on Glyn's careful application of scholarly method to his newest research "project."  For this reader, at least, the novel's primary weakness lay exactly in the predictability of its outcome.  Granted, nobody lives happily (or, for that matter, unhappily) ever after, but it's far too easy to figure out what happened to Kath, how each character will react to the final revelations, and so on.  That being said, Lively constructs her novel carefully, and her prose is thoughtful and graceful throughout. 

I'm not an Americanist, but I feel a certain...concern

Apparently, Sylvester Stallone is going to direct a film about Edgar Allan Poe. The article also mentions that

In the magazine Interview 10 years ago, Stallone said he would never play Poe, because "there's no way the baggage that I would bring to the role could ever be assimilated by the public".

Never mind the baggage. What about the biceps?

Cited by

Dad the Emeritus Historian of Graeco-Roman Egypt sent me to Donald Kagan's Jefferson Lecture. Despite Kagan's warnings against the dangers of over-generalization, his critique of contemporary historiography was so non-specific--apparently, we're still stuck in 80s crusades against DWM--that I had a hard time finding the "there" there.  I've already had an earful about this lecture from a classicist's perspective, and I'll leave his call for history as a "sound base for moral judgments" to other historians.  Being an English professor, albeit of the old-fashioned literary-historical variety, I naturally pricked up my ears (eyes?) when I stumbled across some references to Stanley Fish and Paul de Man.  I was a tad puzzled to discover that Kagan didn't cite Stanley Fish and Paul de Man directly, but only from excerpts: Fish from Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals and de Man from David Lehman's Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man. When I teach my graduate students how to evaluate secondary sources, I always ask them to consider how many times the author chooses to cite primary sources that have been quoted in other works, as opposed to citing directly from the original texts. While it's legitimate to cite a primary source "quoted in" another work when you cannot access the original text (e.g., it's a manuscript on the other side of the planet), there's no excuse for citing easily available sources in such a fashion.  How can you tell if the quotation has been taken out of context or misquoted? What if your secondary source hasn't understood the original text? There's something rather depressing about reading a paean to traditional historical inquiry, only to discover that the author is generalizing about something that he apparently knows only in snippets and at secondhand. (Do historians really read a lot of Paul de Man? I wouldn't have thought he would be even remotely useful. Conceivably, the early Stanley Fish's reception theory might be more helpful.) Now, Richard J. Evans does a fine job of critiquing postmodern theories of history, precisely because he's done the reading, has clearly thought about it at some length, and can separate the wheat from the chaff.  No vague handwaving there. (Incidentally, Evans' response to his critics is quite delightful.)