The Little Professor

Is there an e-text in this class?

One of my two freshman composition courses draws heavily on Victorian fiction, short and otherwise.  Because several of the relevant texts are scattered widely (and wildly) across multiple anthologies or are simply unavailable in anything resembling print, I'm using more e-texts than usual--an approach  frequently recommended as a way to cut costs.

Positives:

1.  Obviously, less expense for the students.
2.  Many rare texts that would be otherwise inaccessible can now be taught.  Moreover, the online format partly solves the never-ending problem of keeping non-canonical texts in print. 
3.  In some ways, e-texts are more convenient.  Students can print out single stories, store them on their own computers, or simply access them at the site; moreover, new utilities like Zotero allow electronic markup. 
4.  The search function makes it easier for students to track a word (e.g., "light" in Frankenstein) through a given text, or do comparisons across multiple texts. 

Negatives:

1.  While print anthologies frequently fall prey to that dreaded monster, Hypertypoitis, e-texts seem even more prone to this dread disease (with additional formatting glitches into the bargain). 
2.  Even when the e-texts are free of typos, for which we give due thanks, they are also frequently free of annotation.  For scholars or well-grounded readers, this is not necessarily a problem.  Freshmen, however, are another matter. 
3. Some sites (e.g., HorrorMasters) do not allow PDF files of public domain texts to be printed or copied, which makes them difficult to use in a classroom context.  (I understand making recent work off-limits, but Horace Walpole?)  Presumably, to get around this, the instructor either gets out the electronic projector or asks the students to lug their laptops to class (which requires students with laptops).  Or, of course, assumes that the siteowner doesn't want their texts used that way in the first place, and looks somewhere else.
4. What on earth am I looking at?  More sites (e.g., Romantic Circles) are now identifying and justifying their choice of copytext, but in some cases, the copytext appears to be whatever came to hand.   (This is a problem with GoogleBooks, where nothing is "edited" in the first place.)   
5. Given that public domain materials are the order of the day, e-texts of translated works frequently rely on out-of-date translations, some of which may be bowdlerized or just no longer readable. 

I resemble that remark

Jeffrey J. Williams' post on editing appeared just as I was hunkering down to a) start checking over the Anne Boleyn proofs and b) finish the requested revisions to the anti-Catholic sermons.  I winced a trifle--just a wee trifle, mind you--when Williams denounced "'Glossomania,' or excessive citation."  Thanks to fair use regulations and all, glossomania did not rear its ugly head with the Anne Boleyn article, but I fear that there are many, many quotations in the sermons chapter, some of which really need to go the way of all footnotes.  (All ninety-one of the footnotes.)   But part of the problem lies with the kind of material I work on, which, as a general rule, is completely unfamiliar to nine-tenths of the academic reading population.  Making a general observation about mid-Victorian objections to post-Tridentine Catholic theology is not quite like making a general observation about Dickens' metaphors. 

This Week's Acquisitions

• James Ellroy, The Black Dahlia (Mysterious Press, 2006).  Reprint of Ellroy's bestselling noir about the famous unsolved murder.
• Rohan Kriwaczek, An Incomplete History of the Art of the Funerary Violins (Overlook, 2006).  "Study" of the (non-existent) Protestant practice of using violins to accompany funeral services, and the disappearance of same. 
• D. C. Douglas, English Scholars, 1660-1730 (Eyre & Spottiswode, 1951).  Reprint of Douglas' 1939 study of early modern antiquarians.
• V. Norskov Olsen, John Foxe and the Elizabethan Church (U of California P, 1973).  Important study of Foxe's ecclesiology, etc.
• Alain Cabantous, Blasphemy: Impious Speech in the West from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century (Columbia, 2002).  Blasphemy laws, blasphemous acts, and punishments for blaspheming.
• John Hedley Brooke and Geoffrey Cantor, Reconstructing Nature: The Engagement of Science and Religion (Oxford, 2000).  Critical overview of history vs. science debates.
• Elizabeth A. Fay, Becoming Wordsworthian: A Performative Aesthetics (Massachusetts, 1995).  The collaboration between William and Dorothy Wordsworth. 

Death, gloom, etc.

Speaking with my Victorianist's cap on, I was more amused than anything else by these complaints (via Scott).   While Victorian parents certainly provided an appreciative market for children's nonsense fiction that extended well beyond the Alice books--e.g., Catherine Sinclair's enormously popular Holiday House--as well as rollicking adventure tales and so forth, they also snapped up novels that would now strike us as rather...glum.*  If characters aren't being imprisoned by the Inquisition, they're being abused at Catholic schools, neglected by worldly family and friends, abducted by gypsies, subjected to loving punishments by God (my friend Emily Sarah Holt's characters tend to lose their children because of divine love), orphaned, impoverished, riddled with disease, and goodness knows what else. Now, if judged by the relevant Christian standards, these novels all have happy endings, either because Providence intervenes and everybody gets what they deserve, or because the children and other protagonists all wind up in Heaven.  Of course, for the children and others to wind up in Heaven, they have to die first.  Sometimes pretty horribly, as a matter of fact--I recently discussed one example (although Fabiola is right up there for concentrated gore).  Victorian fiction for young people practically staggers under the weight of corpses, whether of children,** innocent maidens and youths, or various and sundry parents.  Even when nobody gets tortured to death (something generally confined to religious historical novels, which are rarely complete without somebody dying, usually unpleasantly), many Victorian novels for youngsters insist that this is a world of suffering and persecution, to be patiently endured until death brings Heaven's reward. 

*--I wonder how modern children and parents would react to the parenting techniques in The History of the Fairchild Family, although I suppose that some would think that a trip to see a decaying, gibbeted corpse would be, well, totally awesome.

**--There's an excellent article on this topic by Elisabeth Jay: "'Ye careless, thoughtless, worldly parents: tremble while you read this history!': the Use and Abuse of the Dying Child in the Evangelical Tradition," in Representations of Childhood Death, ed. Gillian Avery and Kimberley Reynolds (Houndmills: Macmillan, 2000), 111-32.   

In person

I've been asked to talk about the keyword "public" in the "Professionalization in a Digital Age" forum at this little annual shindig (where I'll be sharing the podium with Kathleen Fitzpatrick and Lisa Nakamura), and so my thoughts have naturally turned to anxieties about blogging--anxieties expressed by graduate students, by assistant professors, by hiring committees.  Readers who remember Ivan the Terrible Tribble know of what I speak.  Some of the ideas below are very pragmatic; others, more speculative. 

1.  Potential publicity.  At the most practical level, one of the difficulties involved in offering anyone advice about blogging is that there is no way to predict how a search (or tenure) committee will act.  My own experience with hiring has been that a committee member faced with three hundred job applications will not, in all likelihood, Google anybody unless one of the following is true: 1) the applicant explicitly calls the committee's attention to a significant online/blog presence; 2) the applicant says something which sets off alarm bells (e.g., makes claims about work with Professor X which are not backed up by Professor X's letter of rec, or provides what looks like an inaccurate job title).   But there are clearly committees which conduct themselves in an entirely different way.  I'm not sure it's even possible to offer any profitable generalizations about what to do or not to do, given that, in some cases, the fact of breathing may be enough to condemn an applicant in a committee's eyes. 

In the words of A. E. Housman:

          In speculation
          I would not willingly acquire a name
                For ill-digested thought;
                But after pondering much
          To this conclusion I at last have come:
                LIFE IS UNCERTAIN.

And yet, it is possible to have a web presence and be virtually invisible, depending on whether or not a Googler knows the relevant search terms.  It is a truth universally acknowledged that looking for information about X frequently requires you to already have information about X. 

2.  Excess.    In his first essay (see the "Ivan" link), Tribble represented blog reading as a trip into the Twilight Zone: "Several members of our search committee found the sheer volume of blog entries daunting enough to quit after reading a few.  Others persisted into what turned out, in some cases, to be the dank, dark depths of the blogger's tormented soul; in other cases, the far limits of techno-geekdom; and in one case, a cat better off left in the bag." Bloggers, like the scribbling women and dunces of yore, generate overwhelming quantities of text that leave refined souls whimpering for relief.  The more intrepid explorer finds him- or herself hacking through the spiritual undergrowth, trekking to the outermost reaches of acceptable electronic savvy, or discovering unsavory revelations.  Tribble's blog-induced miseries are all about excessiveness.  Academic bloggers don't just enter the public sphere, they practically flood it--and to such an extent that they render themselves virtually unreadable.  (Excessive publicity paradoxically makes the blogger anonymous.)  Apparently, there's always Too Much Information.

This rhetoric of excess, and variants thereof, characterizes discussions of blogging more generally (e.g., here, here, and here; first two links via Dan.).  Bloggers write too much, too quickly, whether about themselves or others.  When it comes to academic blogging, such excess becomes a sign of an inappropriately managed academic self--insufficiently rational, objective, tasteful, or, for that matter, single-minded.  (I should point out that I do, in fact, think academic bloggers should ponder long and hard about self-presentation, as well as about the ethics of discussing students, colleagues, and so forth.  That's not my primary focus here, however.)  And, some bloggers find that there's a real use-value to less "professional" modes of blogging, even as they are also anxious about it (e.g., here).

3.  Exposure.  We think of blogging as self-exposure.  But what about publicizing other scholars' work, in ways that they might find problematic or even downright rude? This discussion, for example, asks if blogging a seminar presentation without permission constitutes a violation of academic norms (or etiquette).  Blogging about students, colleagues, and administrators raises further questions; I suspect,  for example, that we are all familiar with non-anonymous bloggers who purportedly "anonymize" their colleagues, even though their actual blog posts make it painfully easy to identify who is who.  And what about asking students to blog? For non-bloggers, blogging can look suspiciously like an invasion of privacy, a violation of "safe space," or even an act of intellectual poaching.

4.  Ideas in space.   In order to conceal their identities, pseudonymous bloggers usually have to conceal their specializations and current research projects (e.g., complexification studies).  But non-pseudonymous bloggers also worry about the ramifications of describing work-in-progress: will it be "scooped" by a reader? What happens if someone googles the project during a supposedly double-blind peer review? When ideas sketched out on a blog return to life in a book or article, what do you do with them? (I.e., a blog post is public--but is it published?  Cf. Daniel J. Solove.) But by the same token, discussing research on a blog can make it easier to network with other scholars or gain useful feedback.  If we are to think of blogging as a new twist on the early modern "republic of letters," let alone the Habermasian public sphere, then the ability to exchange information about one's scholarship would seem to be key--and yet, the very publicity of blogging (a blog is not, after all, specifically directed to intended recipients; it's hard to control readership without "locking" the blog altogether) may undermine older modes of scholarly networking and collaboration. 

5.  Gender.  There's a long-running debate about gender and academic blogging, especially anonymous blogging.  To what extent does gender affect how bloggers construct their online personae? Or even their choice of blogging platform? (E.g., LiveJournal vs. Blogger or Typepad.)  If non-blogging academics associate blogging with either the scandalously confessional (sexual, political, departmental) or the merely trivial (shoe-shopping, cat photos), then to what extent do these associations pose different risks for male and female bloggers? What types of gendered risks does publicity pose?

Meets

I'm taking a break from grading, compiling a selected bibliography for the sermons article, reviewing an MA thesis, prepping for Monday's classes, and writing a Serious Blog Post (I'm sure I can think of something else I'm avoiding...) in order to gripe.  Gripe about what, you ask? (So good of you to ask.)  I cannot possibly be alone in being turned off by books described as "X meets Y."  In fact, I know I'm not alone, because Thomas Sutcliffe penned a mildly exasperated article on this very subject--eleven years ago.  As marketing strategies go, "meets" makes perfect sense, but it has the unappetizing side effect of turning the author into the intellectual equivalent of an eggbeater.

Still, I can think of a number of meet-ups with great commercial potential:

• As I Lay Waiting for My Dearie: William Faulkner meets Brigadoon.  In the early twenty-first century, two American bloggers in search of "the real Scotland" stumble over a decaying village, seething with sexual shenanigans and domestic hatreds.  Told by multiple first-person narrators, the dominant voice belongs to the dead Harry Beaton, still enraged that he was killed off with the worst lyric in the history of musical theater* ("Lads, say a prayer; I'm afraid Harry Beaton is dead./Looks like he fell on a rock and it crushed in his head").       
• Wives and Daughters and Sons and Lovers: Elizabeth Gaskell meets D. H. Lawrence.  Set in an American "living museum" devoted to the nineteenth century, the novel charts the doomed passion of Molly, a naive female docent (and daughter of a college professor) for Roger, the aspiring actor (and trust fund baby).  Sure to be controversial for its scenes of wild passion in a reconstructed schoolhouse.   
• A Tale of Two Fight Clubs: Charles Dickens meets Chuck Palahniuk.  A young lawyer sacrifices his life for his look-a-like after first beating him to a pulp. 
• Tom Brown's Blood and Guts at Oxford: Thomas Hughes meets Kathy Acker.  Provocative pomo rewriting of Tom Brown at Oxford, in which our hero goes on a rampage at High Table with a transvestite Thomas Arnold.  Incorporates long passages from the original text--which nobody has read, anyway. 
• Are You There, God? It's Me, Vlad: Bram Stoker meets Judy Blume.  Tender YA novel about a young vampire, hovering on the brink of eternal adolescence.  Includes lengthy meditations on universal teenage difficulties, such as maintaining basic hygiene without use of a mirror, attracting the opposite sex while draining their bodies of blood, and keeping garlic away from one's coffin. 
• All My Railway Children of the Corn: Edith Nesbit meets Stephen King meets Agnes Nixon.  In Pine Valley, three youngsters (relocated from New York after someone falsely accuses their father of substituting Linux for Windows on the company PCs) amuse themselves by watching the locals use the trains to commit the seven deadly sins...until they realize that the cute little kids down the road are taking the town's oldest inhabitants on long walks, from which they never return.
• Emma, My Gun is Quick: Jane Austen meets Mickey Spillane. A hardboiled detective goes on the rampage after a young woman with matchmaking tendencies is brutally murdered, setting the stage for shoot-em-ups at tea parties, a furniture-busting fistfight on a piano, and, finally, a brutal death during a picnic.      

*--Others agree with me.

This Week's Acquisitions

(Mostly freebies this week.)

• Kathy Acker, Great Expectations: A Novel (Grove, 1994).  Acker's postmodern rewrite of Dickens' original.
• Jane Smiley, Ten Days in the Hills (Knopf, 2007).  Smiley does the Decameron, Hollywood-style.
• Ben Forkner, ed., Modern Irish Short Stories (Penguin, 1995).  Anthology of twentieth-century short fiction.
• W. Somerset Maugham, The Collected Short Stories of W. Somerset Maugham, vol. 2 (Penguin, 1991).  More of Penguin's four-volume edition.
• David Norbrook, ed., The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse: 1509-1659 (Penguin, 1993).  A quite hefty anthology.
• Linda Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History (Pantheon, 2007).  Biography of this eighteenth-century world traveler.
• Sheila Delany, Impolitic Bodies: Poetry, Saints, and Society in Fifteenth-Century England: The Work of Osbern Bokenham (Oxford, 1998).  Uses Bokenham's Legend of Holy Women to discuss issues of gender and hagiography more generally.
• Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Harvard, 1997).  History of that now-ubiquitous (yet still-contested) element of scholarly apparatus.

The Water's Lovely

I picked up Ruth Rendell's latest in order to take a break from the life-threatening combination of reading academic prose and grading, but was quickly struck by how Victorian the novel was.  To begin with, Tess of the d'Urbervilles haunts The Water's Lovely, beginning with one character's explicit references to Tess and moving on through The Water's Lovely's intertwined stories of rape, women's conflicted attitudes to marriage and sexuality, and class conflict.  Moreover, Rendell borrows noticeably from Victorian narrative conventions, including coincidence and at least one instance of extreme poetic justice.    Over all of this, Rendell throws a heavy pall of the Gothic: insanity, a deep claustrophobia (in part because of the coincidences), a Dark Family Secret, and frequent instances of sexual perversion or violence. 

What interested me about both the coincidences and the supposed example of poetic justice, though, is that both fail to do their job "properly": that is, they neither signify a hidden, providential order in an otherwise morally chaotic universe, nor (as they would in Dickens) do they reveal that a supposedly divided society is, in reality, an interlocking whole.  Each coincidence merely ratchets up the mutual antagonism, driving characters further apart while cementing their hostilities.  And the "poetic justice" of the conclusion, far from restoring or even revealing order, in fact calls justice itself into question.  Heather, the character closest to Tess, is also the one character who actively insists on justice for herself and others--yet her willingness to fight back apparently dooms her, in the cosmological scheme of things.  (Or does it? Given the Tess connection, one wonders about the ending.)  All of the novel's other primary female characters are desperate for male companionship, weak, and/or conniving (one is a parody of the Victorian spinster-companion, another the quintessential Victorian female hypochondriac); victimized by men who are brutal rapists, emotional sadists, or simply inattentive, the women frequently "achieve" their hearts' desires by, in effect, collaborating in their own destruction.  Drinking wine, Heather's sister Ismay thinks to herself, "I shouldn't live like this, but I do and whem I'm married to Andrew I always shall.  To brace myself for the lies I shall have to tell him.  To fortify myself against the lies he will tell me.  For his infidelities and for my daily stress" (325-26).  Marriage and romance almost always prove to be bleak prisons built out of deceit and submerged violence, just as the families themselves are riven by lies and, sometimes, mutual contempt.  Tess of the d'Urbervilles ends on a note of some small hope for the future of male-female relationships; this novel offers none at all.

Linking about: Full-text correspondence databases, online

(Note: this list only includes free sites that offer full-text access.  Most feature both images and transcriptions.)

• Fred B. Brian: WWII-related correspondence of an Illinois Weslyan University professor.
• The Carlyles: correspondence of both Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle.
• Carolus Clusius: correspondence of a well-known sixteenth-century botanist and physician.
• Darwin Correspondence Project: the letters of Charles Darwin.
• Thomas Eakins Letters: correspondence of the American painter.
• Fenian Brotherhood Collection: includes correspondence from members in Ireland, the USA, and elsewhere.
• Hiro Higuchi Papers: letters of a Hawaiian WWI army chaplain to his wife.
• Abraham Lincoln Papers: massive collection of Lincoln's letters and other writings.
• The Linnaean Correspondence Project: includes letters to and from Carl Linnaeus.
• William Penn Brooks: correspondence relating to Brooks' activities in nineteenth-century Japan, where he helped establish an agricultural college.
• A. & L. Tirocchi: clients and friends of an early twentieth-century dressmaker.
• Timothy Vedder Letters: a Union soldier describes various wartime experiences to his family.
• Victorian Women Writers' Letters Project: Anna Jameson and Harriet Martineau.
• The Correspondence of James McNeill Whistler: letters to and from the late-Victorian painter.
• Wisconsin Pioneer Experience: letters, diaries, and other papers of nineteenth-century Wisconsin settlers.

In 1950, what was published in PMLA?

Results derived from a search in the MLA International Bibliography, with the chronological limiters of January 1950 to January 1951; the search yielded a total of eighty-eight articles.  Some observations at the end.

American literature:

• George H. Nettleton, "Sheridan's Introduction to the American Stage" (reception; 18th c.)
• Donald A. Ringe, "Hawthorne's Psychology of the Head and Heart" (19th c.)
• John W. Shroeder, "'That Inward Sphere': Notes on Hawthorne's Heart Imagery and Symbolism" (19th c.)
• Carl F. Strauch, "The Date of Emerson's Terminus" (establishes date; 19th c.)
• G. Giovanni, "Melville and Dante" (19th c.; response to earlier article)
• John K. Reeves, "The Way of a Realist: A Study of Howells' Use of the Saratoga Scene" (19th c.)
• C. Hugh Holman, "Simms and the British Dramatists" (source study; William Gilmore Simms; 19th c.)
• R. W. Short, "Some Critical Terms of Henry James" (19th c.)
• W. B. Gates, "Cooper's The Sea Lions and Wilkes' Narrative" (source study; James Fenimore Cooper; 19th c.)

English literature:

• Helaine Newstead, "Kaherdin and the Enchanted Pillow: An Episode in the Tristan Legend" (source study; medieval)
• W. H. Trethewey, "The Seven Deadly Sins and the Devil's Court in the Trinity College Cambridge French Text of the Ancrene Riwle" (manuscript; medieval)
• Anna J. Mill, "The York Plays of the Dying, Assumption, and Coronation of Our Lady" (medieval)
• R. H. Bowers, "A Middle English Treatise on Hermeneutics: Harley Ms. 2276, 32v-35v" (manuscript; medieval)
• William A. Nitze, "Additional Note on Arthurian Names" (medieval)
• Jerome W. Archer, "On Chaucer's Source for 'Arveragus' in the Franklin's Tale" (source study; 14th c.)
• Margaret Schlauch, "Chaucer's Prose Rhythms" (14th c.)
• Charles Muscatine, "Form, Texture, and Meaning in Chaucer's Knight's Tale" (14th c.)
• Margaret H. Statler, "The Analogues of Chaucer's Prioress' Tale: The Relation of Group C to Group A" (source study; 14th c.)
• Mary E. Dichmann, "Characterization in Malory's Tale of Arthur and Lucius" (15th c.)
• Curt F. Buhler, "The Liber de Dictis Philosophorum Antiquorum and Common Proverbs in George Ashby's Poems" (source study; 15th c.)
• Rossell Hope Robbins, "The Poems of Humfrey Newton, Esquire, 1466-1536" (transcription; 15th-16th c.)
• Bertrand Evans, "The Brevity of Friar Laurence" (Shakespeare; 16th c.)
• Ralph M. Sargent, "Sir Thomas Elyot and the Integrity of The Two Gentlemen of Verona" (Shakespeare; source study; 16th c.)
• Michael F. Moloney, "Donne's Metrical Practice" (16th-17th c.)
• Elizabeth Jackson, "Milton's Sonnet XX" (17th c.)
• Arnold Stein, "Satan: The Dramatic Rôle of Evil" (on Milton; 17th c.)
• Audrey Chew, "Joseph Hall and Neo-Stoicism" (17th c.)
• Peter G. Phialas, "The Sources of Massinger's Emperour of the East" (source study; 17th c.)
• A. Owen Aldridge, "Polygamy in Early Fiction: Henry Neville and Denis Veiras" (17th c.)
• Edward A. Bloom, "Addison's 'Enquiry after Truth': The Moral Assumptions of His Proof for Divine Existence" (18th c.)
• Robert Halsband, "Addison's Cato and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu" (18th c.)
• Earl R. Wasserman, "The Inherent Values of Eighteenth-Century Personification" (18th c.)
• D. J. Greene, "The Johnsonian Canon: A Neglected Attribution" (authorship; 18th c.)
• Arthur M. Eastman, "Johnson's Shakespeare and the Laity: A Textual Study" (editing; 18th c.)
• Edward Hart, "Some New Sources