The Little Professor

Is this a generalization I see before me?

In her study of the British and Foreign Bible Society, Leslie Howsam notes that the Society had difficulty maintaining its originally ecumenical character once it started opening business meetings with prayers [1]; one might surmise that even the blandest of prayers was likely to contain some theological point deeply offensive to someone.  I was reminded of Howsam's observation after reading this proposal (PDF) from the Society for Values in Higher Education, which goes on at great length about "religion" and "religious values."  Now, I'm happy to admit that there's nothing more frustrating than hearing non-theists generalizing from the practice of one religion to "religion" in general; projections from, say, Catholicism onto Reform Judaism [2] are always good for a chuckle.  But newsflash: religious organizations generalizing about "religion" are no intellectual improvement. 

Take, for example, this paragraph:

The principle of academic freedom should be employed in ways that welcome religious views and tradition in the search for truth and that preserve the freedom to subject religious beliefs and traditions to critique, challenge, and appropriate standards of proof and evidence.

What does this mean, exactly?   Why is this written as though all religions--or even denominations within religions--will play nicely together?  Surely the authors of this document remember that it's impossible to reconcile opposing claims for absolute truth?  And that there's no agreement on "appropriate standards of proof and evidence"? (Just recently, for example, see here and, on the role of group-membership in religious studies, here.)  At times, I wondered if the writers of this document weren't presuming the existence of the students they hope universities will produce. 

ETA: updated to add a qualifier and move the footnote in the opening sentence. 

[1] Leslie Howsam, Cheap Bibles: Nineteenth-Century Publishing and the British and Foreign Bible Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991),  e.g., 16-17, 196-97.
[2] Although, as it happens, the equation of "Catholicism" and "Judaism" is a longstanding tradition in Protestant apologetics, going all the way back to the Reformation. 

Bleak House 1-29

We do seem to be zipping along, don't we? The third hour brought us to the end of the novel's ch. 24 (of 67). 

The acting remains mostly top-notch, especially Charles Dance as the ultra-malevolent Tulkinghorn.   As Boythorn, however, Warren Clarke appears to be disappearing into his whiskers.   Again, some of the casting doesn't seem quite right, physically speaking: Smallweed needs to be skinnier and Judy sharper.  The production sometimes veers oddly between visualizing Dickens' grotesques and stripping the grotesquerie away.   As Mom the Retired School Administrator noted, however, Lady Jane the evil cat is spot-on; perhaps she's the ancestor of the even nastier cat in Empire Falls. 

Davies continues to wield a bloody hatchet when it comes to the social satire.  There was virtually nothing left of Chadband, the hypocritical evangelical (one of Dickens' least favorite species), although perhaps he'll come back in more force later on.  At the same time, Davies plays up Esther's personal and class anxieties; the exchange between Esther and Jarndyce over Charley, for example, doesn't exist in the novel.  I do wish that Davies had used a more delicate hand when telegraphing Jarndyce's interest in Esther, although Jarndyce's response when Esther admits that she regards him as a father was well-done. 

I like Alun Armstrong a great deal, but he's really not quite right for the shapeshifting, sometimes virtually omniscient Inspector Bucket.   (Armstrong is a Dickens regular: he's done two Oliver Twists, a David Copperfield, and the RSC Nicholas Nickleby.)  Part of the problem is That Face, which is certainly a great face, but a little too...memorable.  Part of the problem is Davies' script, which has already undercut Bucket's ominous abilities.  In the script, when Bucket appears at Mr. George's shooting gallery, George identifies him immediately.  The novel does something very different.  According to Esther, "[w]hen we had all arrived here, the physician stopped, and taking off his hat, appeared to vanish by magic, and to leave another and quite a different man in his place"; moreover, as Bucket explains, "George, I know where my man is, because I was on the roof last night and saw him through the skylight, and you along with him" (ch. 24).  The novel's Bucket is simultaneously reassuring and frightening (he is, after all, initially associated with Tulkinghorn); he is, moreover, apparently inescapable--as unavoidable as the ever-present mud and fog. 

Plagiary

1.  After reading Scott McLemee's article at Inside Higher Ed, I scooted off to Famous Plagiarists--and felt vaguely dissatisfied.  The vague dissatisfaction arose from the "Literature" section, which features such luminaries as S. T. Coleridge, T. S. Eliot, and William Shakespeare.  Oscar Wilde is nowhere to be seen, although the book version of The Picture of Dorian Gray includes a chapter distilled from J.-K. Huysmans' A Rebours (and, as Jerusha McCormack has pointed out more generally, "[i]t is hard to say anything original about The Picture of Dorian Gray, largely because there is so little that is original in it" [1]).  And Shakespeare's "threat level" seems a bit low, given that King Lear appears to owe rather a lot to an earlier play. 

But such quibbles aren't the source of the dissatisfaction in question.  In his "War on Plagiarism," Prof. Lesko neglects to get at the literary-historical problem: what, exactly, are we to do with a long-dead major author after we find him or her guilty on all counts? Should we respond to such authors in the same way that we respond to a novelist caught in the act now?  (Or, as Scott asks of Coleridge, "And the more you love his poetry, the harder it is to know what to think of his kleptomania. Should you be indignant? Or just perplexed?") When I teach Dorian Gray, for example, I always point out that Ch. XI is plagiarized.  Now, strictly speaking, an au courant contemporary probably would have recognized the "poisoned book" and, by extension, Ch. XI's debt to it; after all, Huysmans was a key Decadent.  Moreover, as other critics of the novel have noted, there's something oddly appropriate about the chapter's derivative nature, given how derivative Dorian is himself.  Still, we're stuck with the original question.  Should I derail the classroom discussion for a lecture on the evils of plagiarism? Issue a blanket amnesty? Toss the novel into Reading Gaol? What?

Given that literary history consists of authors reading, rewriting, alluding to, parodying, and saluting each other, it's impossible to  yank a brick out of the wall without reducing the whole edifice to a shambles.  One cannot ignore Shakespeare because he borrowed extensively from someone else's King Leir, any more than we can eject Coleridge from the Romantic canon because he had a cribbing habit to accompany his opium habit.  It's much easier to dimiss a pleasant third-rater like Rhoda Broughton, who in one novel absconds with a passage from The Mill on the Floss without so much as a "please, George."  After all, Broughton has had no real influence on subsequent novelists.  And there's the problem, isn't it? Once a work turns out to be powerful enough to generate imitation, response, parody, critique, and so forth, its own borrowings frequently become, in practice, a purely academic question.  If the writer isn't caught and halted at the time (like Brad Vice), then his or her work may either go the way of all published literature or become so culturally significant that plagiarism becomes, to all intents and purposes, irrelevant.  Once the work has successfully gone forth and multiplied after escaping into the wild, as it were, it's perhaps a little late (not to mention futile) to denounce the author at every turn;  what are we to supposed to do, dig up Coleridge's bones and burn them? (Even Norman Fruman, famed chronicler of Coleridge's plagiaristic misdeeds, enthusiastically dubs Coleridge a "great artist" [2].) Like it or not, the plagiarism issue is just not very helpful when it comes to assessing Coleridge's, Shakespeare's, or Wilde's historical significance.  It's similarly useless when talking about low-end novelists:  I can point out that both Anna Eliza Bray and Emily Sarah Holt steal from John Foxe, but once I've branded "plagiarist" on their respective foreheads, I'll still be left with the problem of what they've chosen to steal and how it affects the texts in question.  That's not Lesko's evil goblin, French poststructuralism, speaking--that's old-fashioned, standard-issue literary history and interpretation.  (The LP, after all, is neither Foucauldian nor Barthesian, let alone--despite her B.A.--Derridean.)   Lesko urges us to be "frank in our critical assessment," but this call to frankness seems to evade the historical and critical issues at issue here, not confront them. 

2.  On a slightly different note, I was discussing plagiarism with the head of our committee on academic integrity.  In our conversation, I pointed out that we often expect students to regurgitate information on exams (most frequently, in short identifications), whereas we just as often expect them to think original thoughts in their papers.  This, it seems to me, is an unspoken contradiction in our pedagogical practice: do we make it clear why we reward students who plagiarize our lectures in an exam (that is, after all, what they're doing), but punish them for doing the same thing in a term paper?  We punish several types of cheating on exams--stealing a test, copying another student's work, bringing cheat sheets--but repeating points made in lecture rarely makes it onto the radar.  (This page, for example, includes several hints on deterring students from cheating during an exam, but doesn't include "appropriating the instructor's ideas" on its list of potential sins.  After all, we often want the students to appropriate our ideas.)  I usually make a point of warning students that I know what I think, thank-you-very-much, but even so, regurgitation isn't grounds for failure.   There are ways of getting around this problem--for example, I assign a few more poems than I will actually discuss in class, precisely because I want students to approach them "unspoiled" during an exam--but it's still there, nevertheless.  Have other people discussed or dealt with this issue?  Or am I just inventing a problem? (After all, I'm an academic; we do that sort of thing.) 

[1]  Jerusha McCormack, "Wilde's Fiction(s)," The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde, ed. Peter Raby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 110. 
[2]  Norman Fruman, Coleridge: The Damaged Archangel (New York: George Braziller, 1971), 263.
                   
   

This Week's Acquisitions

• J. W. Cunningham, The Velvet Cushion, 2nd ed. (Cadell and Davies, 1814).  An extremely popular evangelical "object narrative."  (This acquisition was prompted by an e-mail I received a few weeks ago about the book,  which reminded me that I had always wanted my own copy...)
• Julian Barnes, Arthur and George (Knopf, 2006).  Historical novel about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's work on the real-life case of George Edalji.
• Margaret Drabble, The Red Queen (Harvest Books, 2005).  An academic receives an 18th-c. Korean princess' memoir, with unexpected results.

Booking, overbooking

In my infinite wisdom, I am attempting to somehow reconcile New Research Projects with Multiple Committee Assignments.  I fear that a nervous breakdown may result--or, at least, an overdose on giant chocolate chip cookies from Bruegger's Bagels.  And that, while tasty, would be hard on the waistline. 

On the plate for this semester:

• The usual three courses
• One independent study
• Three MA theses
• Reader on an additional thesis
• Running the department's MA program
• Library Coordinator (although I regard this as more play than work, really...)
• Graduate Council
• The department's Executive Committee
• The Appointments & Tenure Committee (which is overseeing four job searches)
• The search committee for the Director of the Library
• The Joint Committee on Academic Integrity

Strictly speaking, all of the job searches should be finished by the first week in March, so life will improve somewhat thereafter.   That is to say, I should be in a state of only moderate hysteria, as opposed to stark raving lunacy.  And, yes, I'm largely responsible for my own demise here; it's called "saying 'yes' once too often."  I do that sort of thing. 

At the same time, I've decided that it's time to start being serious about Book Two.  With any luck, multiple commitee assignments will concentrate the mind wonderfully.  Right now, I'm trying to juggle Anne Boleyn, twentieth-century versions of, with Mary I, Victorian versions of; the former is a stand-alone article (you know, the one I've been talking about for several months now...), the latter a conference paper now and a book chapter later.  I've started working on the notes for Anne Boleyn, but she doesn't have an external deadline--and I tend to work better with deadlines looming ominously on the horizon.  Still, I'm aiming to have her finished (decapitated?) by May.  Mary I, however, has a real deadline in March for her short incarnation and a potential deadline in October for her full lifespan; the idea here is to have a book chapter that can also go out into the world on its own, acting as a calling card of sorts.   It just occurred to me this afternoon that I don't have any Victorian Catholic novels about the Marian persecutions to counterbalance the evangelical and High Church novels--there must be one or two out there somewhere. 

In which I explain that my mind is closed

Regarding any comments related to Dr. Pluss: folks, kindly refrain from posting links to neo-Nazi websites.  Strangely enough, this Jew has no interest in sending neo-Nazis any traffic.   I'm sure that we're all quite capable of directing someone to Google. 

Trivial

Ten Top Trivia Tips about The Little Professor!

1. The Little Professor can last longer without water than a camel can!
2. A female ferret will die if it goes into heat and cannot find The Little Professor.
3. If the annual Australian The Little Professor crop was laid end to end, it would stretch around the world seven times!
4. In the Great Seal of the United States the eagle grasps 13 arrows and The Little Professor!
5. The Little Professor will become gaseous if her temperature rises above -42°C.
6. Over half of Americans are officially The Little Professor.
7. The risk of being struck by The Little Professor is one occurence every 9,300 years.
8. It takes forty minutes to hard-boil The Little Professor!
9. The Little Professor can clean her ears with her tongue, which is over thirty-nine inches long.
10. There are 336 dimples on The Little Professor!

I am interested in - do tell me aboutherhimitthem

 

 

Scattered Musings

• As far as I know, my office building is perhaps the only structure in the world in which heat does not rise.  In the basement, we peel off layers of winter clothes; on the second floor (which, unfortunately, happens to be where my office is located), we shiver under our heavy coats. 
• Somehow, I always forget that in the winter, lecturing + heat = *cough* *rasp* a sore throat.
• There is PC.  There is anti-PC.  And then there is anti-PC that forgets what PC is.  Exhibit A:  David Levy and Sandra Peart, who, in 2001, penned the following rather baffling  lines: "We'll also ask how it is that those who defended the wire whips and the judicial lynch—Carlyle, Ruskin, Dickens, Charles Kingsley—are celebrated by scholars in achingly correct modern English departments as "progressive thinkers" against those who protested in the name of the rule of law for people of all color."  Let us all think very carefully about this.  Since the 1990s, English professors have been accused of being obsessed with race, sex, and class. Levy and Peart, however, are claiming that English professors do not discuss race and class (we'll eliminate sex) when Carlyle, Ruskin, Dickens, and Kingsley come on the floor.  In other words, the problem is not that English professors aren't obsessed with race and class; it's that we aren't obsessed enough with race and class.  Because we think that Dickens (?), Ruskin (??), Kingsley (???) and Carlyle (!!!!!) are progressives.  Oh.  Well, Jacques Pluss exists, so anything's possible, I guess.  Never mind that Levy and Peart have clearly not read any literary scholarship on the Governor Eyre case (hint: it exists), on Carlyle's, Dickens', and Kingsley's attitudes to race (hint: that exists too) and slavery (hint: been there, done that), or on any of their political positions (hint: that's not hard to find either).  Given the existence of the scholarship--not to mention the political climate--doesn't it follow that some people, somewhere, might find it in themselves to mention such issues in class? Didn't English professor Chris Vanden Bossche already make their point--a decade earlier?  And in achingly correct economics departments, are scholars taught to carry coals to Newcastle? (Hat tip, I guess, to Liberty & Power.) 
• The Dean has an interesting modest proposal.  As someone serving on multiple search committees, I feel a certain sympathy.
• I quite liked this short story. 
• Apparently, Michael Berube and I share a house and car.  And this is odd, since he's in Pennsylvania and I'm in upstate New York.

          

Bleak House (1-22)

PBS is airing the new BBC Bleak House in two-hour installments, instead of the original thirty minutes.  I was a little worried that the breaks between episodes would be too apparent, but the transitions felt reasonably seamless.   As one might expect, given how characters practically spill out from the novel's pages--I usually warn students that they might need to draw themselves a chart--the first two hours take a whiz! bang! zap! approach to the text, introducing us to most of the major players in what sometimes feels like haphazard fashion.    Of course, screenwriter Andrew Davies has already had to cut much of the original narrative and many of the characters: Esther's childhood is reduced to a couple of brief flashbacks; understandably, much of Dickens' satire on philanthropy has gone, leaving us with a truncated (albeit suitably sloppy) Mrs. Jellyby and a disappointingly muted (even worse, childless) Mrs. Pardiggle; the various and sundry Dedlock hangers-on are nowhere to be seen.  Viewers on the lookout for both fog--there's ample rain, perhaps to compensate--and Mr. Tulkinghorn's ceiling will be disappointed.  And, as always, some actors don't seem to fit their characters' physical bill: Krook and Miss Flite, in particular, are both too substantial, and Jo seems a tad too healthy underneath his makeup. 

At times, the film felt like the David Copperfield from a few years ago.  Davies crams in most of the significant events, but he doesn't reinvent the novel's narrative structure or give us much time to reflect on what's taking place.  There is, perhaps, a little too much foreshadowing at work--in particular, of Mr. Jarndyce's interest in Esther.  Moreover, the random jostling of the opening hours is a nod in the direction of Dickens' complex network of coincidences, but we have no sense of the back-and-forth between the novel's two very different narrative voices.  It's significant, for example, that Esther Summerson never actually appears in the third-person narrator's half of the text, but the film mostly tramples the divide between Esther's worldview and the other narrator's.  The cinematographer compensates somewhat with the color schemes: while this is very much a period adaptation in All Black, All the Time mode, the washed-out Dedlock home contrasts with London's mud and grime and, in turn, Bleak House's occasional swatches of bright color.  The sun even comes out at Bleak House! 

This is one of those miniseries in which it feels like the entire English acting community (plus one American) puts in an appearance.   There are a number of very strong performances here, most notably Charles Dance's singularly reptilian Tulkinghorn, Gillian Anderson's literally and figuratively emaciated Lady Dedlock, and Burn Gorman's grotesque Guppy.  As Skimpole, Nathaniel Parker is suitably unctious.  And Anna Maxwell Martin lends just enough bite to Esther to prevent her from becoming saccharine. 

Interestingly, while the miniseries aims for an authentic "look," the score makes no attempt at period echoes, and the camera is rather more lively than is common in such adaptations.  Granted, I could have done without some of the zooms, but the production team clearly wanted to eschew the stultifying "good taste" that frequently mars BBC adaptations.   So far, the result has more snap than the shorter (almost by half) miniseries of twenty years ago. 

The agony and the ecstasy; or, revising syllabi for the new semester

• Search around on hard disk for old syllabi. 
• Search around on campus website for the academic calendar.
• Begin working on British Literature II.  While pondering the eighth edition of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume II, observe the miraculous appearance of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point" and Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "Jenny."  Celebrate by dancing around the office (after first closing the door).  Revamp syllabus.
• Note pretty color pictures in the new Norton.  Also note that there is still no pretty color picture of "The Blessed Damozel"--with or without the predella--even though the accompanying poem is in the anthology. 
• Learn how to use the nifty media carts, so as to project pretty color pictures of such things as William Blake's engravings. 
• Worry about scheduling a class on Friday, March 24, due to the possibility of being at UC Irvine on that day.  Anxiously check e-mails for signs that conference paper has been accepted.  See no such signs.  Sigh. 
• Begin revamping Intro to Literary Analysis syllabus.
• Observe that revamping has left me with an odd extra day at the end of the semester.  Meditate, grimly, on my inability to either count or use a calendar correctly. 
• Attempt to come up with an additional activity for Intro to Lit Analysis (which, no doubt, will require me to move everything around on the calendar).
• Continue checking e-mails in re: conference paper.
• Still thinking about Intro to Lit Analysis.
• Begin revamping the upper-division/graduate Victorian survey. 
• After writing in the chapter numbers for Charlotte Bronte's Villette, suddenly remember that I assigned Jane Eyre instead.  Sigh, loudly.  Fix the calendar.
• Hooray! Conference paper accepted. Celebrate by dancing around the home office, much to the cats' bemusement.
• No, still no idea about what to do in Intro to Lit Analysis. 
• Wander into campus bookstore to check my books.  Observe that either I or they neglected to order a book for the Victorian survey.  Rage loudly at the injustice of the universe.
• Remind self that the universe probably could care less about my Victorian survey.
• Intro to Lit Analysis pops into my head.  Hit head against desk in order to banish it.
• Go in search of three e-texts to replace the aforementioned missing textbook. 
• Read yet another novel about Anne Boleyn.  Sigh, mournfully.   Feel desperate urge to read a good novel for a change.  Grab Marguerite Yourcenar's The Abyss off the shelf. 
• Glare at the still-present gap in Intro to Lit Analysis.  Note that the syllabus needs to be finished in short order.  Sigh, wretchedly.