The Little Professor

No $

In his recent post at IHE, Tim Burke first suggests that "[c]olleges and universities that have chosen to underwrite growth in some areas by steadily degrading the working conditions of adjunct and non-tenured instructional staff and simultaneously relying on that staff to generate more and more of the teaching are going to have to flatly stop doing things that way," on the grounds that students will eventually rebel against the "degradation of educational quality"; then, after some queries from commenters, Tim wonders if, instead, "the ability of adjuncts to juggle multiple positions and stay barely above water economically will come to an end as whatever remaining safety nets they have will snap."  I'm not at all optimistic about his belief that students will rally for more tenured faculty, but Tim's second position bears more investigation.   How many adjuncts have shifted to online teaching, dropped certain campuses from their orbits, or given up altogether in the wake of higher gas prices?  More to the point, will administrations feel the need to make any sort of adjustments in their hiring practices, salary offers, benefits packages (like granting some...), and so forth? Or will they just discover the glories ("glories") of online instruction? (Perhaps, in the future, we'll all be delivering lectures via podcast.) I suspect that the colleges everyone ignores will be the ones who notice the effects first--that is, comprehensive colleges like mine.  We're about twenty minutes away from the next local college and only have one Ph.D.-granting U, the U of Rochester, within reasonable driving distance; to commute here for a part-time job from either SUNY Buffalo or, good heavens, Cornell would be a losing financial proposition of the first order.

Odd omission

While reading a late-Victorian hack biography of William Tyndale, it suddenly occurred to me that there was an odd hole in Victorian fictions of the Reformation.  The novels, plays, and short stories in question all depend on John Foxe's Acts and Monuments--in fact, they're positively parasitic on it (and many of them downright plagiarize it).  But I cannot recall John Foxe ever apppearing as a character in any of the fictions I've read, and I've read...quite a few of them.  There are novels about or prominently featuring Luther, Knox, Calvin, Zwingli, and Tyndale, but no Foxe anywhere, not even as a teensy-weensy supporting character.  Given that everybody else pops in from time to time (I recently tripped over Peter Martyr), surely somebody must have shoehorned him in somewhere.  Although I suppose, in a very loose sense, Foxe is "in" these texts...

This Week's Acquisitions

• C. L. Brightwell, Palissy the Huguenot Potter (RTS).  One of two Victorian historical novels about Bernard Palissy; the other is Anne Manning's The Provocations of Madame Palissy.  (eBay)
• Annie Proulx, Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3 (Scribner, 2008).  New collection.  (BOMC)
• Sabina Murray, Forgery (Grove, 2008).  Faked Greek antiquities + murder = identity crisis.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Isabel Colegate, The Summer of the Royal Visit (Penguin, 1992).  Queen Victoria's arrival in a well-known resort area is anticipated by a motley collection of residents, frauds, etc.  Colegate's best-known novel is The Shooting Party.  (eBay)
• Michele Roberts, The Mistressclass (Holt, 2003).  Brontes + academia + erotica + angst.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Julia Kavanagh, English Women of Letters: Biographical Sketches (Tauchnitz, 1862).  Actually, biographical-critical sketches of women novelists, by another novelist.  An important example of nineteenth-century writing on women's literature.  (eBay)
• Anna Maria Jones, Problem Novels: Victorian Fiction Theorizes the Sensational Self (Ohio, 2007).  Reading and the construction of nineteenth-century subjectivity.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• The Christian Wreath of Prose, Poetry, and Art (RTS, probably 1855 or 1856).  A Christian literary annual.  (eBay)
• The Churchman's Companion 32 (1862).  Church of England journal; I own a couple of later volumes as well.    (eBay)

Friday (Guest) Cat Blogging

A new resident chez Mom the Retired School Administrator and Dad the Emeritus Historian of Graeco-Roman Egypt.  This is Suzy Q, a feral cat previously resident at CSU Long Beach, who will now be living in her very own deluxe cat enclosure in my parents' back yard.  (Suzy Q is a self-domesticated cat: she likes human beings and insists on being petted.)  Right now, she's camped out in a back bedroom.  Here she is in her original habitat:

In case you're wondering, this isn't a Manx; her tail was amputated for medical reasons several years ago.

Another one of the friendly feral cats, Gray Brother, has found a home somewhere else.  Mom snapped this photograph of him in his CSULB territory, a parking lot:

Slightly irritated observation, spouted off during a break from writing this book chapter

I vote for banning any question that begins "Am I the only one that..."  (And yes, I've started off questions that way myself, so my ire is self- as well as other-directed.)  Because the person asking the question always wants to be told "no."  In more exasperated moods, I have visions of myself responding "Yes! You are absolutely alone! Completely isolated! Exiled to a desert island! This thought is so taboo that my computer screen is practically cracking apart under the strain! How dare you believe that vanilla is better than chocolate?!"

Or...am I the only one who responds this way?

(Back to Victorian religious historical fiction.) 

 

Myths of reading

James Simpson tells us more than once in Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents (Harvard, 2007) that the purpose of his study, beyond being an account of Reformation hermeneutics, is to argue that "[t]he liberal tradition would understand the punishing demands of literalism better if it stopped tracing its own ancestry to the moment that produced its most vigorous opponent" (282).  According to Simpson, the liberal tradition makes the mistake of grounding itself in the "sixteenth-century Lutheran moment" (3), identifying sola scriptura and the purported attendant "freedom" of the reader as the self-evidently right-minded riposte to Catholic hermeneutics--especially as articulated by St. Thomas More.  Simpson's account pits William Tyndale against More, the latter of whom Simpson turns into the forefather of contemporary "'pragmatism'" (223).  Nevertheless, Simpson also tries to argue that More's treatment of heretics was a kind of interpretive illness, "a textual virus of distrustful literalism," that More "contracted" in the course of arguing against his opponents (261).*  Ergo: More vs. Tyndale also becomes More vs. More vs. Tyndale.  In other words, Simpson claims that sola scriptura is not necessarily the liberating force that some assume it to be, a point which has cropped up elsewhere (e.g., in Diarmaid MacCulloch).  Underlying this critique of the liberal tradition is a critique of what I suppose you could call the "myth of sola scriptura" in Reformation historiography; in practice, this turns out to be an attempted take-down of Tyndale specialist David Daniell, whom Simpson chivvys up one page (or endnote) and down the other.  (My own bemused response to Daniell's Tyndale biography is here.)  While Daniell is not Simpson's only target, Simpson's frequent Daniell-whacking does make it difficult to tell how far the scholarly trend in question extends beyond him. 

As a non-specialist, I've certainly got some questions about the book--for example, there are far better theological explanations for More's behavior than hermeneutics per se, and Simpson's arguments about the "modern" (3) nature of fundamentalism have been seen elsewhere--but Simpson does provide some interesting frameworks for thinking about my Victorian novelists and their own understanding of Biblical hermeneutics.  It goes without saying that the evangelicals are all very invested in sola scriptura, while the Catholics and the High Church Anglicans are very not so invested (in fact, Catholic historical novelists quite pointedly substitute scenes of communal worship for scenes of Biblical reading, often enough).  However, the evangelicals have a range of attitudes to how sola scriptura works in practice, ranging, at one extreme, from the Presto! theory  (Jew or Catholic reads the N.T. without any other instruction and instantly becomes the author's desired variety of Protestant) to, at the other, the Wow, This Takes Work theory (reading takes place over months or years within a larger Christian community that delimits interpretive possibilities).  One of the things that interests me about all of this is that historical novels about the Reformation are, in effect, explaining to the reader how it is possible for them to read...a historical novel about the Reformation.  Because these novels don't just represent people reading, translating, explicating, reproducing, and transporting Bibles; they also rely heavily on the reader's prior acquaintance with the Bible (e.g., the ability to catch allusions, recognize unsourced direct quotations, note parallels between novelistic narratives and various Biblical stories, etc.). 

*--I think this disease metaphor overplays the point one might make about any argument--namely, that it's often impossible to avoid adopting your opponent's own categories, tactics, turf, etc.  That's the price of engaging with another position, really. 

The Hellborn Spawn of the MLA Swamp Monster: A Horror Film in Five Acts

TEASER

[We see a montage of several young, conventionally attractive, and tastefully semi-clothed men and women, all seated at trendy desks in front of expensive laptops—Mac Airs, perhaps. They are nibbling biscotti, sipping Starbucks lattes, and otherwise snacking on pricey but trendy goodies. There are no papers, books, or other signs of intellectual life to be seen.

The montage has been taped with a single handheld camera.

As the montage proceeds, ominous music swells in the background.]

TIMOTHY: OooOOOOOhh, deepest and darkest spirit, hark unto my plea! I bring thee the dripping heart of the fifth student of the fifth hour of the fifth day of the fifth class. [Holds aforementioned dripping heart above the keyboard]

CHRISTINA: If thou fulfillest my request, I pledge you the blood of my firstborn son! [Crosses fingers behind her back.]

SUSANNAH: Take this token of my earnest vow, to do thy bidding throughout all eternity! [Slashes hand with a knife and lets the blood drip over the keyboard.]

JONATHAN: I give you this surety of my eternal debt. [Tosses DVD of There Will Be Blood into what looks like a ritual lamp.]

DORIAN: I, like, will give you, like, anything. Like, my soul, and stuff.

[The music amplifies to a shriek, as we see…]

  CREDITS

THE HELLBORN SPAWN OF THE MLA SWAMP MONSTER

[As the credits roll, we see a closeup of the laptop screen. On the screen is the MLA Job Information  List, but it’s a JIL like we’ve never seen before: not only is it red characters on a black background, but also it is ornamented with pentagrams and other vaguely demonic-looking symbols. A weird chanting sound emerges from the laptop speakers. The screen slowly degrades into what looks like a smear of unknown bodily fluids, while blood slowly drips out of the laptop. Fade to black.]

  ACT I

[SUBTITLE: Three months later…]

[We see our five protagonists gathered in a swanky bar in an upscale hotel. All of them are wearing expensive (if somewhat tight-fitting) suits, carrying leather briefcases, and sipping expensive wines. To their left and facing away from them is what looks like a LITTLE PROFESSOR, reading a book.]

JONATHAN: I’ve got eighteen interviews, including a senior position at Harvard. They’re ready to offer me tenure when I haven’t published a single article! I killed.

SUSANNAH: And I’ve got twelve interviews, even though I haven’t actually finished my Ph.D. I’m guessing that the committees are going to slaughter each other to get their hands on me and my wicked brain.

CHRISTINA: Both Yale and Stanford are dying to hire me for Comparative Literature.

TIMOTHY: Kids, I’ve got half-a-dozen department chairs with their blood up, ready to duel to the death for the privilege—the privilege, I tell you—of offering me the richest startup packages in the business.

DORIAN: Wow, dudes. I’m, uh, like, still waiting to hear from, like, that college near the desert.  You know? The one fifty miles from the closest village.

[Everyone, except DORIAN, clinks their glasses in celebration.]

WOODEN  VOICE FROM THEIR LEFT: Those who live by the JIL of the deepest and darkest circles of Hell, die by the JIL of the deepest and darkest circles of Hell.

[They turn, and see that what at first appeared to be a LITTLE PROFESSOR is actually…a VENTRILOQUIST’S DUMMY in the shape of a LITTLE PROFESSOR.]

LP VENTRILOQUIST’S DUMMY:  The demon Blweizkswqxz is waiting to eat the hearts of those who fail to obtain jobs at this year’s MLA convention.  Your pledges of blood were insufficient for his cavernous maw. Now your doom hastens upon you! Bewaaare! Bewaaaare!

[The LP VENTRILOQUIST’S DUMMY shatters into tiny pieces. Nobody else at the bar appears to notice.]

DORIAN: Uh…guys? Isn’t that, like, a bad sign? Like, maybe, a prophecy from Hell, or something?

[The others share a glance, then shrug.]

TIMOTHY: Nah, just some Charlie McCarthy wannabe. 

[A janitor comes along and sweeps up the pieces. An eye winks at DORIAN from the dustpan.]

ACT II

[Cut to an equally upscale hotel room. Several mini liquor bottles are littered around the room. TIMOTHY and CHRISTINA are disporting themselves on the bed.]

CHRISTINA: Oooh. Oooh. Oooh.

TIMOTHY: Ahh. Ahh. Ahh.

[Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.]

CHRISTINA: Timmy—Timmy darling--I don’t know why, but tonight, I just had to engage in the pleasures of the flesh.

TIMOTHY: Chrissie, I felt exactly the same way. It’s like…somehow…there was a plot, or something, forcing us together at this very moment in time and space.  Because it can't be this dialogue, which is just awful.

CHRISTINA: Oooh. Oooh. Oooh.

TIMOTHY: Ahh. Ahh. Ahh.

[Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.]

A WEIRD VOICE FROM THE CLOSET: Of course you had to have sex, you idiots. Didn’t you do the reading in “Introduction to Genre Theory”?

[As TIMOTHY and CHRISTINA jump out of bed, shrieking, a MAN IN A HOCKEY MASK emerges from the closet.]

MAN IN A HOCKEY MASK: Look, scumbags, it’s a horror movie. You have sex, you die.

[The MAN IN A HOCKEY MASK brandishes a reasonably realistic axe. The handheld camera shakes uncontrollably.]

TIMOTHY: No! Wait! We’re subverting the horror genre! We’re a sex-positive horror film! Let me talk to your agent—

CHRISTINA [talking over him]: Seriously, that master narrative? No longer in play. This was supposed to be a deconstructive moment. A play on embodiment and disembodiment—

MAN IN A HOCKEY MASK: Hon, let’s talk about disembodiment, shall we?

[Fake blood spills in a number of inventive ways.]

ACT III

[We’re in the lobby of our upscale hotel. DORIAN, SUSANNAH, and JONATHAN are relaxing in leather armchairs, sipping their morning cappuccinos. They are wearing expensive suits, but not last night’s expensive suits.]

JONATHAN: Have any of you seen Tim and Chrissie? What could have happened to them?

[Fake blood drips from the ceiling behind them. Nobody notices.]

SUSANNAH [getting up]: I’m off to my first interview. With the University of Chicago. I tell you, they’re going to eat me up.

[She exits, wearing a pair of extremely impractical stiletto heels.]

DORIAN: Man, my only interview is, like, on the last day of the conference. Totally uncool.

[Suddenly, JONATHAN and DORIAN catch sight of two unusually ratty-looking men—for this film, anyway--one elderly, one bearded. The two men approach.]

PROPHET #1 [speaking unintelligibly] Blah blah BLAH blah BLAAAH blah blah.   

PROPHET #2 [rather more intelligibly]: "Therrrre is a warrrr going on between angels of light and darrrrk, overrr yourrr soul…"

JONATHAN: At the MLA? Dudes, you have got to be kidding me.   Binary oppositions are so passé now; we’re all about the indeterminacy.

[DORIAN, baffled, heads to the nearest coffee shop for another cappuccino. Meanwhile, from the other side of the lobby approaches a white-faced demon with pins stuck all over his head, carrying a script.]

PINHEAD: Yo, Prophets! Check the script! This is a horror film, not a send-up of the Christian apocalyptic genre. Get with the program.

PROPHET #1: Blah blah blah blah?

PROPHET #2: Rrrreally? Huh. [They huddle around the script.] You’rrre rrright. We must have taken a wrrrrong turrrn at the last exit from limbo. [Shrugs.] Come to think of it, I’m supposed to change costumes and appearrr in some English professorrr’s Starrr Trrrek parrrody, anyway. 

[They disappear in a puff of rather dirty smoke.]

PINHEAD: Now, as for you…aren’t you the guy working on the Marquis de Sade?

JONATHAN [flattered]: Why, yes; I’ve got an article in circulation on the relationship between the logics of Foucauldian power-knowledge and the practice of body modification in Justine…

PINHEAD:  The Hell’s Journal of  Agonizing Eternal Torment has accepted your article, and awarded you this really nifty puzzle box in token of their appreciation of your scholarship. [Hands JONATHAN the box.]

JONATHAN: Wow, this is…huh, let me see if I can solve it…I think I’ve got it…There! Cool!

[A moment later, JONATHAN realizes that solving the puzzle was perhaps not as cool as he first thought.  As the handheld camera shakes, more fake blood flows.]

ACT IV

[We are in CHRISTINA’S and TIMOTHY’S hotel room, still dripping with fake blood. SUSANNAH is seated on an uncomfortable chair, facing a very strange-looking SEARCH COMMITTEE.]

SUSANNAH [uncertainly]: Am I in the wrong room? I thought this was the interview for the University of Chicago position in postmodern Gothic literature.

DRACULA (GARY OLDMAN VERSION): Actually, this is the Gothic interview, not the interview for a position in Gothic literature. [Politely] Here, let me get you a drink. [Hands her a glass of something red.]

SUSANNAH:   Please tell me that this is V-8.

DRACULA (BELA LUGOSI VERSION): Not at all. This is a particularly fine vintage of blood—1306 AD, as a matter of fact—decanted from the throat of a virgin by the light of the full moon. Extremely prized by blood connoisseurs, I assure you; a hint of chocolate in the nose…

[SUSANNAH, understandably, looks a little queasy. Nevertheless, she needs the job—but reminds herself to write a letter of complaint to this school’s HRC, wherever it may be.]

COUNT ORLOK (MAX SHRECK): [Gestures silently while eerie music plays.]

DRACULA (GEORGE HAMILTON VERSION): What Orlok means to say is that we’re a very diverse institution. [Hands SUSANNAH a slimy-looking packet.] In addition to a variety of vampires, succubi, and incubi, our student body includes several zombies, a large population of banshees, and numerous poltergeists.

DRACULA (FRANK LANGELLA VERSION):  We also have an excellent benefits package, including velvet-lined coffins and anti-stake armor, plus free garlic repellent after three hundred years of service.

SUSANNAH: Er…I’m not sure you understand. I study contemporary vampire erotics; I’m not a vampire myself. [Looks at the blood on the bed] Didn’t anybody ask to have this room cleaned up before the interview?

DRACULA (BL): Not a vampire? [They check her CV.] That’s odd. I could have sworn…Damn, we’ll have to impale the administrative assistant who made this appointment.

SUSANNAH: [inching towards the door] If you don’t mind, I think…I’ll be going now. Another interview, you know. With live interviewers. [She makes a run for the door, but trips and falls, thanks to the stiletto heels.]

COUNT ORLOK (MS): [Gestures silently while eerie music plays.]

DRACULA (GO): Yes, Orlok, you’re right! I believe that now would be a good time for a light snack.

[Fake blood spills as the handheld camera does loop-the-loops.]

ACT V

[We’re back in the swanky bar. DORIAN sits by himself, drinking beer and reading the latest issue of PMLA. As the handheld camera pans to the right, we see that the LP VENTRILOQUIST’S DUMMY is sitting at the next table. How it got itself together again is not explained.]

LP VENTRILOQUIST’S DUMMY: The demon Blweizkswqxz is waiting to eat the hearts of those who fail to obtain jobs at this year’s MLA convention.  Your pledges of blood were insufficient for his cavernous maw. Now your doom hastens upon you! Bewaaare! Bewaaaare!

DORIAN: Dude, you, like, said that the last time you were on.

LP VENTRILOQUIST’S DUMMY [checking the script]: Damn, you’re right. Let me try that again. [Beat] Blweizkswqxz awaits thee below! Thy time on earth hast ended! Prepare for all the torments of Hell! Bewaare! Bewaa—oh, man, I’m repeating myself again. Who wrote this script, anyway?

DORIAN: Speaking of the script…where’s the hellborn spawn of the swamp monster? I mean, it says right there in the opening credits that there’s going to be spawn. Don’t you guys believe in, like, truth in advertising?

LP VENTRILOQUIST’S DUMMY: Budget cuts. [Sighing] You wouldn’t believe how hard it is these days to fund really good spawn; the NEH used to have grants to support them, but the scrutiny they give monster applications these days is just insane! [More sternly] Now, speaking of grants and budgets, that blood you pledged…

DORIAN: Look, that contract the others signed? I didn’t complete it. [Shrugging] Seriously, I’m afraid of blood.  Makes me faint, like, every time. They used Blweizkswqxz’s JIL from Hell, not me. No way am I under this curse.

LP VENTRILOQUIST’S DUMMY: Well…darn, how unfair can you get? Everybody else got to off somebody. [Sulking] How am I supposed to show my face at the annual Hell’s Halloween Ball if I don’t personally bring you face to face with Blweizkswqxz?

DORIAN [earnestly]: Look, dude, I don’t mean to pry, but…have you ever seriously considered trying another genre? Like, maybe, comedy? I’ve been thinking of chucking this whole academia thing and going into ventriloquism. I mean, my dissertation was just, like, repeating what thirty other people had said, anyway.

LP VENTRILOQUIST’S DUMMY:  That is an idea. [Brightening up a bit] You know, there’s this great little club in Hell’s Kitchen…

[Fade to black as the credits roll.]

At times like this, one wishes to see the whole argument...

The feminist legal scholar Nicola Lacey argues in an op-ed that Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders represents a much different, and much more positive, attitude to female criminality than Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles:

...If Defoe's message was that redemption is always available to the penitent, he also conveys very forcefully that wit, courage and enterprise are valuable attributes for a woman.

Moll could not be a greater contrast to the stereotype of female criminality embodied in Tess. For Moll is autonomous, brimming with ambitions and strategies for pursuing them. Unlike Tess, she shapes her own destiny. A strong, active and dominant woman, Moll's world is peopled by women similar to herself. The men in this world are often weak, indecisive and passive.

Lacey's position here is apparently distilled from her most recent book.  My immediate problem with this argument is that the Defoe who came up with Moll Flanders is the same Defoe who came up with Roxana, whose narrative derails quite spectacularly.  And then, while Lacey quite rightly notes that Defoe found "it natural to have a sexually active, socially marginal female thief as his protagonist," which, it is true, did not happen in canonical nineteenth-century British literature, it does not follow that Moll either represents a) what Defoe valued in actual women, or b) what anyone else at the time would have valued in actual women.   If you'll permit me to indulge in an undergraduatism, audiences since the dawn of time (cue James Michener's dinosaurs) have been willing to enthusiastically enjoy characters in fiction/drama/whatnot who engage in all sorts of behaviors that would not be accepted in "the real world."  (Obvious contemporary example from TV: Gregory House.  Or, at a much more extreme remove, Tony Soprano, Dexter, and Vic Mackey.  Heck, probably any character on a daytime or prime time soap.)  It's interesting that certain characters become possible or impossible at particular moments in time, but I'm a little anxious about mapping such possibilities onto lived historical experiences.   Which leads me to my final qualm: the only two authors mentioned by name in either the op-ed or the book's write-up are Defoe and Thomas Hardy, both now canonical figures.  But a canonical novelist is not necessarily a representative novelist (even if Defoe was a very different kind of novelist, market-wise, than Hardy).  I'm not dismissing Lacey's thesis--in fact, the book sounds quite interesting--but its presentation in the op-ed seems to iron out certain literary-historical kinks.  It may look different when the legal apparatus is on display...

This Week's Acquisitions

(Our campus bookstore had its quarterly-or-so shipment of remainders.)

• Christine Schutt, All Souls (Harcourt, 2008).  Angst at elite NY girl's school.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Jenny Davidson, Heredity (Soft Skull, 2003).  Twenty-first century American researcher concocts scheme to become impregnated by Jonathan Wild, which you'd think would be somewhat difficult.  (B&N)
• Annabel Davis-Goff, This Cold Country (Harvest, 2003).  Woman travels to decrepit Irish estate at dawn of WWII.  (B&N)
• Arnold Bennett, Whom God Hath Joined (Sutton, 1985).  Reprint of Bennett's novel about marital shenanigans in the early twentieth century.  (B&N)
• Peter Rushforth, Pinkerton's Sister (Harvest, 2006).  In NY, circa 1903, an unhappy young woman does a lot of reading.  (B&N)
• P. D. James, The Children of Men (Vintage, 2006).  Dystopian novel about a twenty-first century Earth that has no more children...  (eBay)
• Sally Mitchell, The Fallen Angel: Chastity, Class, and Women's Reading, 1835-1880 (Bowling Green, 1981).  Important study of attitudes to gender, social status, and literary consumption.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• John Corrigan, Business of the Heart: Religion and Emotion in the Nineteenth Century (U of California, 2001).  Study of mid-19th c. American revivalism.  (B&N)

Tick tock

I don't think that I could teach in a room with this clock, but it would certainly have an interesting effect on students taking final exams.  (Via.)