The Little Professor

Reminder: Great Expectations

The most recent adaptation of Great Expectations begins airing in the USA tomorrow.  Whether or not one has great expectations for three-hour adaptations of Dickens is, of course, an open question.  I can't see it until Monday, due to my ongoing lack of a television set (I suspect I'm going to finally give in sometime in the next few weeks and buy a new one), but I'll have a post about it Monday or Tuesday.

 

This Week's Acquisitions

• The Village in the Mountains, The Conversion of Peter Bayssiere, and History of a Bible (American Tract Society, n.d.).  Three repurposed tracts of various sorts, including a Bible it-narrative.  (eBay)
• Joyce Carol Oates, Mudwoman: A Novel (Ecco, 2012).  A woman left to die as an  infant grows up to head a major university, but still needs to come to grips with her past.   (BOMC)
• Guy Vanderhaeghe, A Good Man (Atlantic Monthly, 2012).  Is hard to find, one presumes.   Third novel of Vanderhaeghe's revisionist Western trilogy (The Englishman's Boy and The Last Crossing), featuring a postbellum Canadian expat who finds himself in the midst of war with Native Americans.  (Amazon)
• Kate Williams, The Pleasures of Men (Penguin, 2012).  Neo-Victorian novel about a young woman increasingly fascinated by a serial killer.  (I seem to have gone in for incredibly cheerful and upbeat novels this week.)  (Amazon)
• John Kucich, ed., The Oxford History of the Novel: Vol. 3, The Nineteenth-Century Novel 1820-1880 (Oxford, 2012).  What the title says: major genres, authors, themes, etc.  I'm reviewing this for Choice. (Review copy)
• Fiona MacCarthy, Edward Burne-Jones: The Last Pre-Raphaelite and the Victorian Imagination (Harvard, 2012).  New biography of one of the Pre-Raphaelite movement's most popular painters; for examples of his work, see here.  (Amazon)
• Chris Brooks, ed., The Albert Memorial (Yale, 2000).  A rather unusually-shaped book about one of the nineteenth century's biggest memorial projects; includes discussions of architecture, ornamentation, sculptures, and so forth.  For some reason, knocked down to about $6 on Amazon when I bought it.  (Amazon)

My fifteen minutes of fame class

Between increasingly frantic bouts of concluding, proofing, and footnoting, I'm grumbling about the loss of fifteen minutes from what used to be a ninety-minute class.  My lecturing has finally settled down into its new fifty-minute groove, but my ninety-minute class is...gasp...freshman comp, and that's a skills/activity-based course.  And I clearly have yet to gauge how to fit the scheduled assignments into the seventy-five minute period.  Part of the problem is that any in-class activity will require different amounts of time from course to course, depending on the number of students, their skills, the amount of caffeine in their systems, their enthusiasm for the course, their enthusiasm for each other, and so forth.  I've had exercises take one group thirty minutes and another group ten (!).   But this semester, we're not finishing things precisely because there's fifteen minutes missing.  V. frustrating. 

Gothic repetition (so to speak)

My Gothic course is nearing the end of The Monk (sex! blasphemy! murder! in-- wait, we haven't quite figured that last out yet).  However, given that Book Two remains on my mind (and, with any luck, will soon get off it), I was struck by Lewis' references to the Bible in II.4.  The narrator begins by warning parents that the Bible, far from teaching virtue, "can only tend to excite ideas the worst calculated for a female breast"; in fact, it "but too frequently inculcates the first rudiments of vice," thanks to its erotic explicitness.  (Although the narrator is not explicit about the explicitness in question, it's possible that he has the Song of Songs in mind.)  Although Lewis appears to be going for gratuitous shock value here, there are some ironic conjunctions here--ironic, given the novel's roisterous anti-Catholicism--with anti-Protestant polemic, which sometimes represented women's Bible-reading in a similarly dangerous light.  (The Catholic novel Florence; Or, the Aspirant (1829), aka one of the nineteenth century's very worst novels, takes exactly this line.) 

In any event, good mama Elvira determines that "Antonia should not read it, till She was of an age to feel its beauties, and profit by its morality: The second, that it should be copied out with her own hand, and all improper passages either altered or omitted."  What strikes me here is not the Bible bowdlerization, although that's certainly of interest, but the way in which this moment dovetails with Walter Scott's The Monastery (1820): Lady Avenel originally intended that her daughter Mary Avenel would be "so far advanced in age" that she could understand the Bible before Lady Avenel would begin teaching her about it (as it happens, Lady Avenel dies before that can happen), and the Bible that Mary inherits from her mother is heavily annotated and interleaved with her comments.  Indeed, what really grabs Mary's attention is a Biblical commonplace book in her mother's writing, containing "those affecting texts to which the heart has recourse in affliction, and which assure us at once of the sympathy and protection afforded to the children of the promise" (III.5).  In Lewis, the Bible is a dangerous text, a trigger for the worst forms of sexual desire; innocent (virginal) youth must encounter it through the protective haze of the mother's virtue.  (Much as the married Dorothea Brooke can read Smollett, it appears that the married, and hence sexually enlightened, woman can read the Bible.)  Reading the Bible becomes, in a way, the act of reading the mother's mind. 

For Scott, however, what is at stake is not sexuality, but theology, and the mother excerpts instead of censors.  Scott's Bible troubles the intellect rather than inconvenient body parts.  By the same token, part of the charm of the commonplace book is that it "com[es] from a hand so dear," just as Elvira uses "her own hand."    But Scott dwells far more intensely on the materiality of that hand's work--the book overstuffed with notes, extra pages, and MSS--than Lewis does.  In both cases, the mother's authority trumps that of any other, but in Scott, Lady Avenel's interventions are intended to draw her daughter into a sense of Scriptural and theological tradition (after all, Mary still inherits a complete and unexpurgated Bible).  Lewis' mother, by contrast, actively "feminizes" the Bible.  Not, as it happens, that it will save her daughter from the Monk's machinations...

 

Badness

I was fascinated by the disconnect between Daniel Melia's essay on "bad books" (by which he means claptrap masquerading as serious scholarship) and the comments that THE solicited in response to it.  Because Melia is talking, quite reasonably, about the tricks of the pseudointellectual trade: the bibliography with all the wrong items on it, the pretense of Discoveries Never Before Seen By Humankind, and so forth.  But the comments are all about a different kind of badness, and several of them are bad in their own way.  (At least in part, this seems to be the fault of THE's question.)  For example, one respondent doesn't like Wolf Hall.  This is hardly grounds for summary execution, but nothing Melia says has to do with aesthetics--or, indeed, literature, unless it's the kind of polemical literature that promises Discoveries Etc., but nicely sugared with a healthy dose of inept narrative (or the like).  Melia is quite expressly interested only in books that strike an academic pose in order to authorize nonsensical conclusions; presumably, one might object to Wolf Hall's representation of Thomas Cromwell, in much the same way that one might object to A Man for All Seasons' representation of Thomas More, but we would not be doing so on any of the grounds that Melia introduces.   Similarly, poststructuralist jargon, the target of some ire amongst more than one respondent, may well clog up the literary-critical works, but it isn't bad in Melia's sense unless it's being used to conceal the presence of an intellectual absence.   And "I don't agree with these people" is equally irrelevant to the topic at hand.  There are certainly books that qualify as bad in what you might call a functional sense--e.g., argument doesn't pan out or has missteps--that aren't bad in Melia's. 

This Week's Acquisitions

• Tim Powers, Hide Me Among the Graves (William Morrow, 2012).  Neo-Victorian historical novel involving John Polidori, vampires, Pre-Raphaelites, and, er, Pre-Raphaelite vampires.  (Hey, it's Tim Powers.)  (Amazon)
• Mark Dunn, Under the Harrow (MacAdam/Cage, 2010).  Bizarre neo-Victorian utopian community discovers that things are not entirely as they seem.  (Amazon)
• Euan Cameron, Enchanted Europe: Superstition, Reason, & Religion, 1250-1750 (Oxford, 2010).  Studies the shifting meanings of "superstition" in the context of the so-called "disenchantment of the world."  (Amazon)
• Andrew A. Bonar and Robert Murray M'Cheyne, Narrative of a Mission of Enquiry to the Jews in 1839 (Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1845).  Evangelical travel narrative examining the condition of the Jews across the globe, with the intent of assessing the prospects of converting them (amongst other things).  (eBay)

Adventures in shelving

I have not shelved any religious studies books in over a year.  This cannot stand. 

Or, at least, I cannot stand the blasted piles of religion books going every which way.

Seriously, they're starting to stalk me across the floor.

Besides, I couldn't possibly do any work: there's a cat in my office chair.

Vicki has gained a full pound since being nuked for her thyroid disease, and is no longer radiating (thank goodness).

Luckily, I have a lot of empty space for books.

Making progress...

It's a good thing I had all that empty space in the bookshelf across the room.  Right?

*grits teeth*

I suppose I should relocate at least the books on American religion to my campus office, but as we're moving to a new building with smaller offices in 2014 (or so we've been told), there's not much point right now.   

A GoogleBooks search should not resemble a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup ad

There I was, searching for the keyword "England" in a very out-of-copyright Victorian novel, and...strange results kept cropping up in the midst of my results list.  How did "no preview...buy this book" keep getting into my free eBook?

And how did my author cite an article published several decades after the book was printed? Curiouser and curiouser.  It would appear that the keyword search is randomly pulling up results from entirely different books, even though my search was specifically limited to one text. 

Things I have learned about college lecturing from watching CSI

• To achieve the best dramatic effects, lecture with only minimal lighting, leaving the students with no way to see their notes.  If at all possible, arrange for your own personal spotlight.  
• Dust motes are necessary for atmosphere; request that the custodians refrain from vacuuming, mopping, or otherwise cleaning the room.
• Be sure to have a REALLY BIG SCREEN on which to display your exciting multimedia illustrations.
• Your students will, of course, have the kind of comfortable seats one expects in movie theaters. 
• Notes on the chalkboard should be arranged with a Michelangelo-esque attention to aesthetics. 
• Deliver your lectures with the same degree of seriousness that you would use to declare the onset of World War III.
• Rest assured that students will be absolutely spellbound by your performance.  They will not text, doodle, giggle, gossip, or snooze.  In fact, many of them will nod and sigh in awe of your incredible profundity, whether or not you have actually said anything worth remembering. 
• All of your students will be tastefully dressed in the latest preppy fashions.  For some reason, they will also appear to be in their late twenties or early thirties, even though they are really only eighteen.

This Week's Acquisitions

(It's been a while since I've picked up any religious magazines.)

• David Kowalski, The Company of the Dead (Titan, 2012).  Alternate history novel featuring the Titanic and a world in which the US stayed out of WWI; gives off a bit of a Man in the High Castle vibe (albeit clocking in at 752 pages).  (Lift Bridge)
• Mary B. Tuckey, Old James, the Irish Pedlar (American Sunday-School Union, 1851).  Narrative poem in rhyming couplets about a nice Protestant Irishman who wanders about speechifying (you get the idea). Also published in Dublin.  Tuckey's other efforts include abolitionist texts.  (eBay)
• The Life and Death of Lady Jane Grey/Story of Samson, the Strongest Man (American Sunday-School Union, n.d./1839).  Two tracts bound together.  (eBay)
• [Timothy East], The Evangelical Spectator I (1839).  US reprint of East's answer to Addison and Steele, originally published in 1828.  East published multiple volumes of the Spectator, as well as an Evangelical Rambler; for a brief reminiscence of East, see here.  (eBay)
• The Primitive Methodist Juvenile Magazine II (1853).  One year of this reasonably long-lived British magazine, featuring poetry, short stories, missionary reports, etc.  (eBay)
• The Christian Miscellany, and Family Visitor (1870, 1879).    Two volumes of a successful Methodist magazine.  (eBay)