The Little Professor

(Im)mobile

One of the points that came up in responses to Tim Burke's excellent "Angry at Academe" post involved academic immobility; as Jason Mitchell observed, "we have very little macro-flexibility - most of us are lucky if we can find any decent job, and we certainly can almost never choose where we get to live."  I've found that, more than anything else, this is the issue that non-academics understandably don't "get."  ("If you're originally from Los Angeles, why are you teaching at a college in a small village in upstate New York?" "Um...because they offered me a job?")  Moreover, and perhaps even more seriously, it's also the issue that many would-be academics don't get.    It can be difficult to explain to someone that an academic career usually means uprooting your ties from family, community, or region--let alone that, for single academics, going "home" may never be a viable project.  (While visiting my parents earlier in the month, I daily contemplated the $375K price on a one-bed, one-bath house of under nine hundred square feet.  Let's just say that this failed the all-important "will both the books and I fit into the house?" test.  The house sold, in case you were wondering.)

This Week's Acquisitions

• Anna Maria Porter, The Recluse of Norway (Routledge, 1852).  One-volume reprint of the four-volume 1814 original.  (In very small and cramped type.)  Anti-Catholic novel set in seventeenth-century (wait for it) Norway.  Porter's sister is the better-known Jane Porter.  GoogleBooks has a copy of an 1834 edition of The Recluse.
• [Selina Bunbury], The Abbey of Innismoyle: A Story of Another Century (Campbell, 1845).  US reprint of a novel initially published in Dublin in 1828.  Another novel with noticeable anti-Catholic overtones.  (Also: Damn! Bunbury wrote a novel about Anne Boleyn! [It will come in handy for Book II, at least.])

Thoughts consequent on scrolling through a list of 900 library catalog results

1.  "Oliver Optic" may be one of the best pseudonyms ever.  (It would work great for a blog, too.)

2. You know that you're looking at a Henty title if it starts with a preposition.  In this, Out that...

3.  There's a novel about Armageddon in the children's literature collection?!

4.  I  was unaware that John Galt had written a novel about the Wandering Jew.  No, not that John Galt.

5.  It's amazing how novels about violent criminals always wind up with subtitles like "A Tale of the Good Old Times" or "A Tale of Merrie Olde England" or something of the sort.

6.  I really should get around to reading Gwendolen: A Sequel to George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1878). 

Notes on Dealing with Professors

1.  We are not telepathic.  If you're having a problem with the course material, please tell us about it.

2.  Office hours, while convenient for monitoring eBay auctions, really are intended for professor-student interaction.  Don't hesitate to drop in.

3.  If you want to know the assignment for the next day's reading, please look at the syllabus.  That's why it's there.

4.  If you have been assigned a style guide (MLA, APA, whatever), this is probably a delicate hint that you ought to avail yourself of it.  (Incidentally, there are now online citation generators.)

5.  When corresponding with your professor, please use an email address that sounds reasonably mature.  SUPERHOTCHICK111 may produce an undesirable impression.

6.  Professors may not respond immediately to your emails.  This should not send you into a panic.  Or into a snit, for that matter.

7.  If your professor suggests that you might want to see a writing tutor, this is generally a not-so-subtle indication that, really, you might want to see a writing tutor.

8.  Do not ask your professor "Did I miss anything?" or "Will I miss anything?" or "Is there something important we're going to talk about?" Just don't.   

9.  If you feel the need to surf the web during class, it might be advisable to do so from a location where the instructor cannot see the screen.

10.  Remember that most of us--even those suffering from various forms of social maladjustment--are not necessarily evil. 

Themeparkification

Is there such a thing as an innocent theme park these days? Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days, which I read a few weeks ago, is only one of the many dystopian fictions that imagine entire cities or even countries transformed into the equivalent of Disneyland.  (Julian Barnes' England, England, which is on my "to read" list, is probably the best-known recent literary example.)  This satirical/dystopian invocation of theme parks runs parallel to the similarly satirical/dystopian invocation of the Internet, as in Jennifer Egan's Look at Me.*  No doubt Jean Baudrillard has something to do with this.  (And, of course, Disneyland is apparently everywhere.)  But how often do you find fictional examples of theme parks as a source of simple pleasure? Maybe it's symptomatic that I can't remember the title (!) of the only example that comes to mind: a short story in one of the Year's Best Fantasy and Horror collections, in which the predatory protagonist spouts the Baudrillardian line about theme parks and reality, while the cartoonish park itself turns out to be a place of genuine love and safety for the girl he's trying to destroy.

*--Geoff Ryman's Air; Or, Have Have Not, which imagines the next phase of the Internet, is an exception to the trend that represents the 'net as dehumanizing; for Ryman's characters, Air--even in its commodification of peasant culture--offers possibilities for developing entirely new ways of living. 

Still in use: older critical texts in Victorian studies (part 1 of a series)

The following is a partial list of older critical texts (1970 and earlier) that still figure in current bibliographies--as useful works in their own right, not as examples of historical trends.  Obviously, it's partial because it reflects my own scholarly interests, such as Victorian fiction; I'm sure other Victorianists can come up with additional examples (which, if they're so inclined, they can list in the comments!).  The list does not include bibliographies or catalogs, like the Sadleir and Wolff catalogs.

• Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader (1957)
• ---, Lives and Letters (1965)
• Merle Mowbray Bevington, The Saturday Review 1855-1868 (1941)
• J. H. Buckley, The Triumph of Time (1966)
• Vineta Colby, Singular Anomaly (1970)
• Philip Collins, Dickens and Crime (1962)
• George H. Ford, Dickens and His Readers (1955)
• Kenneth Graham, English Criticism of the Novel 1865-1900 (1965)
• Guinevere Griest, Mudie's Circulating Library and the Victorian Novel (1970)
• John Holloway, The Victorian Sage (1953)
• U. C. Knoepflmacher, Religious Humanism and the Victorian Novel (1965)
• Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience (1957)
• Margaret Maison, The Victorian Vision (1962) (a.k.a. Search Your Soul, Eustace)
• Leslie Marchand, The Athenaeum (1941)
• J. Hillis Miller, The Form of Victorian Fiction (1968)
• ---, The Disappearance of God (1963)
• ---, Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels (1958)
• William Peterson, Interrogating the Oracle (1969)
• Kathleen Tillotson, Novels of the Eighteen-Forties (1954)

Never trust an American publisher?

Well, perhaps that's taking it a bit far.  Nevertheless, one of the week's acquisitions is a US reprint (translation: pirated edition) of a novel from across the Atlantic.  The US publisher, James M. Campbell, assigns the novel to the author of Father Clement--in other words,the Scottish novelist Grace Kennedy.  Yet, as it turns out, Campbell and, later, T. B. Peterson are the only publishers who believe that Grace Kennedy wrote (perpetrated?) the book; everybody else (everybody else across the Atlantic) thinks that the author is Irish novelist Selina Bunbury.  It would be interesting to know how this particular mix-up happened. 

Department of Infelicitous Phrasing

From the Democrat & Chronicle:

And a county credit card was used to buy blank DVDs so the former undersheriff could copy pornography for his use.

Because, as we all know, if he was copying pornography for somebody else's use, this would have been OK.

Zoological observation for the day

Having a bat flying around in one's livingroom is really rather distressing.

Antecedents

Three questions:

1.  What do you think literary scholarship used to be--say, prior to 1960?

2.  How have you developed that impression? (E.g., from reading articles published in Modern Philology during the late 1950s)

3.  In your own field, which critical works from this period are still cited (for reasons other than historical overviews, that is)?