The Little Professor

Scattered Musings (occasionally academic)

• This is the second time in a week that I've innocently entered my campus office, only to be faced with a wasp buzzing around.  I object to wasps as a general rule, and object even more strongly to them when I'm trying to use my office.  It isn't clear if I've got wasps because there's a wasp nest located in close proximity to a vent somewhere (my windows are closed), or if I've got wasps because they are the reincarnated spirits of long-gone students, returning to complain further about their grades.
• I've sometimes noticed that my students think of the research-and-writing process as safely linear: you find a topic (hooray!), you read a lot of books (hooray?), and then you write the paper (exhausted hooray, trailing off into muttered discontent).  Of course, it never works that way, and so students sometimes think that any deviation from that path amounts to a grave spiritual crisis.  This summer has certainly offered some useful reminders that one's research can twist-and-turn out from under you in the most devious ways, whether it's in the discovery that topic X resists your proposed argument (the difficulties of writing about  "developments" in Victorian anti-Catholic sermons) or that topic Y suddenly throws up a problem requiring yet more books (the sudden realization that I needed to read a now-obscure, once-popular biograpy of Anne Boleyn in order to substantiate a claim).
• Apparently, there's yet another TV adaptation of Jane Eyre in the works, as if the world needed yet another adaptation of Jane Eyre.  (Incidentally, isn't Francesca Annis a little over-qualified for a two-bit character like Lady Ingram?) Even more so than many Victorian novels told in the first person--or, for that matter, many Victorian novels with strong narrative voices--JE is not at all suited to cinematic realism.  It's not just that the novel's literary effects depend on JE's very distinctive, complex POV, but also that its events themselves often seem bizarre or bathetic when rendered in "objective" form.  The "Red Room," the symbolic lightning bolt (when it's included), Rochester's "telepathic" connection to Jane, and so forth frequently appear uncomfortably comical--especially when, as is usually the case, the filmmaker strips the narrative of its theological underpinnings and turns it into a straightforward twentieth- or twenty-first century romance.  That being said, I think that in JE's case an overtly stylized or even surreal aesthetic might work in an adaptation's favor.
• Yesterday, I finished Brian Hall's I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company, a fine historical novel in the realist tradition.  (By "in the realist tradition," I should add, I don't mean "not difficult": the chapters told from Sacagawea's and Charbonneau's POVs in particular require considerable attention, and the narrative sometimes doubles or triples back upon itself as POVs switch.)  Hall's postscript includes a nice definition of what the historical novelist can do--"The novelist's privilege is to play the fool, rushing in where historians fear from treading" (413)--which came to mind while I was reading Stuart Ferguson's "The Imaginative Construction of Historical Character: What Georg Lukacs and Walter Scott Could Tell Contemporary Novelists" [1].  Oddly enough, Ferguson's article--which, as you can probably gather from the title, argues that both Scott and Lukacs' interpretation thereof got historical characterization "right" the first time around--doesn't engage at all with the recent developments in historical fiction, but instead points fingers at novelists like the late Dorothy Dunnett and the equally late Ellis Peters (44).
• John Quiggin says of Thomas Carlyle that "while I was aware that Carlyle was (correctly) viewed by Fascists as a precursor of their ideas, and that his works were among Hitler’s favorite reading, I hadn’t derived the obvious corollary that his reputation would be revived, and his work celebrated, by postmodernists in the late 20th century."  Have I missed this memo? A very limited amount of Carlyle is amenable to postmodern thought--his interest in signification, for example, or in identity--but I haven't noticed any great enthusiasm for his politics.  As a grad student in the early-to-mid-90s, I was taught to regard Carlyle as basically a thug, albeit a highly influential (and therefore unavoidable) thug; my own students are usually appalled by Carlyle's definition of "liberty" in Past & Present.  Then again, I could just be reading the wrong people, which has certainly been known to happen.  (For previous grumping about non-Victorianists and Carlyle, see this entry from January '06;  one of the first strong attempts to make a case for Carlyle as fascist was J. Salwyn Shapiro, "Thomas Carlyle, Prophet of Fascism," Journal of Modern History 17.2 [June 1945]: 97-115 [available via JSTOR]). 
  

[1] Stuart Ferguson, "The Imaginative Construction of Historical Character: What Georg Lukacs and Walter Scott Could Tell Contemporary Novelists," Scottish Studies Review 6.2 (Autumn 2005): 32-47. 

This Week's Acquisitions

(All but one inherited from an emeritus colleague moving out of state.)

• Joseph Skibell, A Blessing on the Moon (Berkeley, 1999).  An executed Polish Jew, who may or may not be dead, wanders through the countryside...
• Gordon S. Haight, ed., A Century of George Eliot Criticism (Methuen, 1966). Anthology of critical essays from the Victorian period to the present.
• Montagu Frank Modder, The Jew in the Literature of England: To the End of the 19th Century (Jewish Publication Society of America, 1944).  A well-known general survey.
• Bart D. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (HarperSanFrancisco, 2005).  Textual criticism, popularized. 

Wikid

Via the comments at AKMA's, this most interesting Wikipedia page.  The discussion of the entry's Wikiworthiness isn't interesting; the refusal to accept the subject's own corrections regarding the right way to spell her name (all lower-cased) is.  (Scroll about 2/3 of the way down.)   It might be worthwhile pondering the editor's explanation, as well as the Wikipedia policy on original research (hint: don't), when thinking about Wikipedia and pedagogical applications thereof.

Signal & Noise

In 1854, the novelist and lawyer Samuel Warren exclaimed

Let us look for a moment to the past, and then to the future.  To the past, when mankind could communicate together orally only, and no further than voices could carry; then, as far and as fast as writing and mechanical means of transit could convey; but now, how is it? Our converse with each other is literally with lightning swiftness; under ocean[,] through the air; from one person unseen to another unseen; in different latitudes and longitudes; and ere long, in different hemispheres! The land is rapidly being covered with a network of electric apparatus for the transmission of thought.  [1]

Warren's excited observations were already commonplace by the mid-1850s.  For many Victorians, the telegraph promised a new way of experiencing both time and space: distance magically collapsed in the wake of scientific advances, granting all communication a fascinating aura of presence.  Your speech "arrived" as soon as it was uttered, as it were, and yet a physical chasm persisted between you and your addressee.  What would it mean to converse without a time delay, yet not be "there"? More to the point, how would these advances reshape not just national identity in the UK and Ireland (by erasing local identities? by extending the metropolis into the provinces?) and the world (by facilitating empire? by enabling intellectual, as well as financial, exchange?)?

One of the notable things about John Griesemer's Signal & Noise (2003) is that it hones in on precisely this strand of Victorian technological optimism.  The novel itself follows the frequently unsuccessful adventures of the transoceanic telegraph cable--the financial huckstering involved, the random acts of scientific egomania, and so on.  Unusually for this type of historical novel, the principal figures and their associates--the American Chester Ludlow and his wife, the British sketch artist Jack Trace, the Lindts, and so on--are all fictional; there are brief appearances by Karl Marx, the Lincolns, Charles Dickens (writing pornography!), and the great engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, with William Thomson, Lord Kelvin playing a more substantial role. All of them are obsessed, to a greater or lesser degree, with the possibility of collapsing spatial and temporal distances--distances frequently associated with death or emotional separation, but also distances inherent in the act of communication itself.  Is it possible, in other words, to be entirely present when with another human being?

The novel's structure itself forms part of Griesemer's overall theme.  There are two timelines: the main narrative, which moves sequentially down the years, and Otis Ludlow's diary, which is set in 1866 and appears sporadically throughout the novel.  The main narrative thus moves "towards" and finally "through" Otis' journal--which Chester himself reads only after Otis' death.   Once drowned (a suicide), Otis somehow becomes his journal, "a bundle of personal effects and written obligations" (583), and it is absence in death that forms the basis for Chester's reunion with his estranged wife, Franny.  The novel's two timelines merge, then inevitably separate again.  Instead of total presence, the novel moves towards wisely accepting absence; communicating with another, even a beloved other, always presupposes a distance.

The most unstable characters fail because they cannot accept death, the ultimate distance of all.  Franny Ludlow spends years as a successful and sincere medium, but always fails to reach her lost daughter, Betty; she gives increasingly fraudulent hope to others, but is herself trapped (especially by the nefarious Zephaniah Hermes, a spiritualist showman).   In Mary Todd Lincoln's brief appearance on the stage, obsessed with the death of her son, we see a woman whose yearning to reach her lost child blinds her to the devotion of her husband, who uncomplainingly shepherds her to Franny's rooms in a violent rainstorm.  Otis Ludlow, a more complex figure, turns to the mysticism of "transetheric" travel--teleportation, in effect--in part to atone for his inability to be there for Betty (like Otis, an epileptic, Betty dies by falling off a cliff during a seizure), in part for his refusal to be there for his artist father (whose death is finally explained only at the end of the novel).  Otis' suicide is, in a sense, an attempt to be nowhere and everywhere at once, forever joined with the sea which he believes is speaking through the broken cable.  And, less outlandishly, the beautiful Katerina Lindt's affairs with men (not to mention her husband) constantly falter on her desire to possess her beloved's total attention.

Most of the novel's characters believe implicitly in the power of intention: they will do what they set out to do, and what they accomplish will be what they desired.  Griesemer pulls that rug out from under their feet by emphasizing the sheer force of accident, coincidence, and pure bad luck.  (As  Joseph O'Connor shrewdly observes, "At heart, this clever novel is a meditation on that most unAmerican of topics, failure, and Griesemer has the courage to let it be exactly that.")  The cable venture fails over and over again; Brunel's "babe," the Great Eastern, suffers through a series of spectacular crises; Ludlow invents a cannon, only to have it shoved aside by the government; Katerina dies in a horrible train crash.  Even Jack Trace, who is (in his own way) the most upwardly mobile character in the novel, dies before he can experience his magnum opus' popularity.  This theme plays out as well in the Betty subplot, for (after an initial success) Franny only "sees" Betty when she isn't looking for her, as does Chester.  Griesemer further underlines this point by frequently having various characters accidentally run into either each other or famous people (as in the initially comical appearance by Karl Marx).  One reviewer in the list of pull quotes trots out the infamous adjective "Dickensian" to describe the characters, but there is something deliberately cod-Dickensian about the coincidences, which reveal neither a providential pattern nor the interlocking of social strata--just the "noise" of the universe, as it were.

Strikingly, unlike many neo-Victorian novels, Signal & Noise is, at base, an optimistic novel.  Which is not to say that the optimism doesn't take its own gentle ribbing, in the form of the hyper-opportunism of J. Beaumol Spude and the final transformation of the Great Eastern into a theme park.  But Jack Trace's final work of art, Progress, which fantasizes the possibilities of post-industrial England, spurs Chester to think about the future already in process: "Chester began wondering if such manners of flight and propulsion and communication could ever be built.  He wondered if he could ever build any of them.  Already, over in America, a Scotsman named Bell was sending not just flickers of light or clicks of a key but his own voice and music down a wire.  Progress was everywhere.  How could a man keep up?" (591-92)  The subdued panic here--is progress passing me by? Is the world moving too fast?--exists alongside a sense of the future's just-barely imaginable possibilities.  The moment's dramatic irony pushes us "away," reminding us that we who are distant from the novel's past are also moving into an unknown future.   

 

[1]  Samuel Warren, The Intellectual and Moral Development of the Present Age (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1854), 24. 

Dominant books

Kate's Book Blog asks: which authors dominate your shelves? Kate defines "dominates" as five books or more, but since that would make my list a little too long, I'm going to bump it up to a minimum of ten and stick to the novelists (including autobiographies, collections of letters, etc.):

Peter Ackroyd, Deborah Alcock, Honore de Balzac, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Elizabeth Rundle Charles, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, George Eliot, William Faulkner, George MacDonald Fraser, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Gissing, Thomas Hardy, Reginald Hill, Emily Sarah Holt, Henry James, Charles Kingsley, Rudyard Kipling, Emma Leslie, Capt. Marryat, Emma Marshall, George Meredith, Margaret Oliphant, Charles Reade, Sir Walter Scott, Charlotte Smith, W. M. Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, Charlotte Yonge, Emile Zola. 

(Via Terry Teachout.)

Young folks these days

"We 'other Victorians,' to borrow a phrase of Michel Foucault--discussing attitudes to sex rather than empire--have been constructing our identities against those world-encompassing Victorians for the past century, and some still feel it necessary."

--Mark F. Proudman, "The Most Important History: The American Historical Review and Our English Past," Journal of the Historical Society 6.2 (2006): 197. 

It's rather distracting to find a misattribution that drastic in an essay complaining about someone else's ignorance of Victorian historiography...

How to Write a CoHE "First Person" Essay: A Handy Multiple-Choice Guide

While the CoHE has printed its share of worthy essays in the "First Person" section, there is nevertheless a certain type of essay--melancholy, sulky, or otherwise gloomy--that frequently elicits strong reactions of a not altogether positive nature.  This evening, while on a break from executing Anne Boleyn, it occurred to me that we could save future writers for the CoHE considerable time and effort by supplying an easy-to-follow guide.  For example:

1.  I am
___ writing under a clever pseudonym
___ writing under an uninspired pseudonym
___ using my own name

2.  At present, I am
___ tenured, unfortunately, at a wonderful college
___ tenured, unfortunately, at the campus from hell
___ tenured, unfortunately, at an institution that fails to appreciate my scintillating qualities
___ untenured, unfortunately, at a wonderful college
___ untenured, unfortunately, at the campus from hell
___ untenured, unfortunately, at an institution that fails to appreciate my scintillating qualities
___ a much put-upon administrator
___ a recently-fired (without cause!) administrator

3.  I'm terribly, terribly unhappy, because
___ I thought life after tenure would be bliss, and it's just the same-old, same-old
___ my colleagues fail to appreciate my scintillating qualities
___ there's a poststructuralist/Marxist/cultural materialist/New Historicist/Lacanian/ deconstructionist/other in my department
___ there isn't a poststructuralist/Marxist/cultural materialist/New Historicist/Lacanian/ deconstructionist/other in my department
___ there are politics! in academia!
___ if I had been born fifty years ago, there would have been no politics! in academia!
___ if I had been born fifty years ago, there would have been my kind of politics! in academia!
___ academic work isn't all about Twoo Wuv for your subject
___ people are so mean to me
___ students don't appreciate all the effort I put into teaching them

4.  I can prove that what I say is true, because
___ I have personal anecdotes
___ I'm going to reveal confidential data from job searches and personnel decisions
___ the CoHE published this essay, and therefore it must be true

5.  Blogging is
___ a sign of the imminent Apocalypse
___ not done by trustworthy people
___ not done by employable people
___ ...what is a blog?

6.  Everything would be so much better if
___ someone granted me an endowed chair at a research university with a 2-2 load
___ I gave up tenure to farm sheep in New Zealand
___ everybody published scholarship of interest to me
___ being in graduate school was all about Twoo Wuv
___ students were really interested in the Meaning of Life

7.  But none of this will happen, because
___ I'm not politically correct
___ sheep give me hives
___ nobody cares about academics like me
___ graduate school is all about politics!
___ students these days just can't appreciate the Sheer Joy of Learning

8.  Still, at least I can tell you that the Little Professor will be invited to write an essay for the CoHE when
___ pigs fly
___ cats obey orders
___ professors in the English department make more money than professors in the Business department

Friday Cat Blogging

Today's installment just goes to show that cats can sleep anywhere, including places that they don't really fit.

This Week's Acquisitions

Picts and Pitts come in Waves; Sermons, however, come in Lots. 

• Frederick Oakeley, Things Dispensable and Things Indispensable: The Importance of Distinguishing Between Them, with a View to True Conscientiousness and Christian Joy. Two Sermons, Preached in Margaret Chapel, St. Maryblebone, on Sundays the 10th and 17th of November, 1844 (James Toovey, 1844).  Preached about a year before Oakeley's conversion to Roman Catholicism.  Short biography at the Catholic Encyclopedia; a couple of hymns (including "O Come, All Ye Faithful") at the Cyberhymnal. 
• Robert Hussey, The Church from the Beginning Until Now.  A Sermon Preached at St. Mary's in Oxford, October 31, 1847, Before the University (John Henry Parker, 1847).  Hussey was Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History.
• ---, The great contest: A sermon, preached in the cathedral of Christ Church, on Easter day, April 11, 1841 (John Henry Parker, 1841).  The title refers to Christ's Passion.
• R. Montgomery and H. Bedford, Extract from a Third Sermon on the Fifth Petition of the Lord's Prayer and The Safeguards of Faith.  Two sermons extracted from The Churchman's Pulpit no. 3 (Mar. 9, 1850).  Bedford converted to Catholicism in 1851. 
• Charles Smith Bird, Commemoration of the Fifth of November: A sermon, preached at Trinity Church, Reading, November 5, 1839 (Hatchards and Nisbet, 1839).  Anti-Catholic sermon; author's presentation copy.  Smith Bird was later Vicar of Gainsborough.
• Charles A. Heurtley, The Lord's day: the blessings consequent upon its due observance: A sermon, preached before the University of Oxford on Sunday, November 4, 1855 (J. H. and J. Parker, 1856).  Heurtley was Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford.
• A. H. Mackonochie, "Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord": A sermon preached before the University of Oxford, at the Church of St. Mary-the-Virgin on Advent Sunday, December 1st, 1867 (Mowbray, 1867).  Prominent (and frequently prosecuted) Anglo-Catholic.  An 1890 biography is available at Project Canterbury; see also the account at his church.  Don't miss this truly horrifying elegy by the infamous W. T. McGonagall. 
• Henry Hayman, Peace, God's Gift, and How to Use It.  A Sermon Preached in the Temple Church, on the Second Sunday after Easter, 1856 (William Skeffington, 1856).  Hayman went on to become Rector of St. Cuthbert, Aldingham. 
• William Jacobson, Truth and peace: A sermon preached before the University of Oxford at St. Mary's, on Sunday, June 20, 1847, being the day on which Her Majesty began her happy reign (Francis Macpherson, 1847).  Jacobson shortly became Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford and then Bishop of Chester.  Very brief account at the King's College London College Archives; portrait by Lewis Carroll at the NPG.
• William J. E. Bennett, Apostacy: A sermon, in reference to a late event at S. Paul's, Knightsbridge, preached on the twenty-second Sunday after Trinity, 1847, 6th ed. (W. J. Cleaver, 1847).  Another Anglo-Catholic who got in regular trouble.  Biography at Project Canterbury, along with a few sermons.
• J. M. Neale, The Blessing of Isaac.  A Sermon Preached on the Fourth Sunday after Easter, 1864, at S. Thomas the Martyr's, Oxford (Mowbray, 1864).  Probably the best-known author in this group of sermons.  Brief account by James Kiefer; numerous texts at Project Canterbury; hymns at the Cyberhymnal. 
• John Sinclair, On Hearing the Word of God Preached. A Sermon, Preached at the Special Service in the Cathedral Church of St. Paul, London, on Sunday Evening, April 17, 1859 (Gilbert and Rivington, 1859). Sinclair was Archdeacon of Middlesex and the son of Sir John Sinclair. 
• George H. Wilkinson, Thoughts on Calvary.  The Substance of Two Good Friday Addresses (Wells Gardner, 1882).  Wilkinson was Bishop of Truro and later of St. Andrews.  Photograph and brief biographical sketch at Paul Frecker London; Vanity Fair caricature at the NPG. 
• Walter Farquhar Hook, Take Heed What Ye Hear.  A Sermon, with a Preface on Some of the Existing Controversies in the Church (F. & J. Rivington, 1844).  Publisher's presentation copy.  Hook was Vicar of Leeds, then Dean of Chichester.  Biographical sketch at Leodis; interest in choral music at Discovering Leeds; portrait at the NPG. 
• ---, The Catholicism of the Anglican Church and Its Branches: A Sermon, Preached in the Episcopal Chapel at Stirling, on Sunday, March 20th, 1825, at the Consecration of Bishop Luscombe (T. Harrison, 1844).  Reprint of an early sermon, probably for its topicality.
• ---, The sin and danger of lukewarmness: A sermon, preached at the opening of the nave of the parish church of Leamington Priors, on Thursday, the ninth of May, 1844, new ed. (T. Harrison, 1844).  Ah, but at which church? (This one, which was being renovated at about this time?)
• Tract Magazine and Christian Miscellany (1867-68).  Two volumes in one.  Ex-libris of well-known book collectors Anne and F. G. Renier. 
• F. D. Maurice, Theological Essays, 2nd ed. (Macmillan, 1853).  A controversial work by one of the most famous theologians and educators of the Victorian period.  Brief biographies by James Kiefer and the NNDB; portraits at the NPG. 
• ---, Sketches of contemporary authors, 1828 (Archon, 1970).  Reprints articles that Maurice wrote for the Athenaeum on Wordsworth, Scott, etc.
• Juliet Barker, Wordsworth: A Life (Ecco, 2005).  New biography.
• Timothy Lang, The Victorians and the Stuart Heritage: Interpretations of a Discordant Past (Cambridge, 1995).  Victorian historians on seventeenth-century religion, politics, social life, etc.

Off with her (sister's) head

In Anne Boleyn-related news, the Guardian reports that there's to be a film version of Philippa Gregory's The Other Boleyn Girl, with Scarlett Johansson as Mary Boleyn, Natalie Portman (Natalie Portman?!) as Anne, and supposedly Rue McLanahan (Rue McLanahan?!?!) as Lady Jane Rochford.  There is a defensive comment about the little matter of a 2003 miniseries based on the novel, plus this worrisome gem: "He said The Other Boleyn Girl was 'a piece of British history that has never been told in this way before'."  Er, well, given the miniseries, one presumes that this "piece of British history" has, in fact, been told this way before.  Oh, you mean the novel told this "piece of British history" in a new way? But Gregory borrowed the most spectacuscandalicious elements of her novel straight from Retha Warnicke's controversial study of Anne, which suggests that, in fact, the history has been told that way before.  Or something.