The Little Professor

Never judge a book by its cover, antiquarian bookstore edition

Well, this certainly looks unprepossessing.  It's a battered library discard.

This can't possibly be of any interest.

Still, it can't hurt to look inside...

Huh.  A handwritten TOC! Is this someone's personal bound anthology of...something? Let's see...

It's Shakespeare! Er, sort of.  What else?

The book turned out to be a collection of thirty-six plays, mostly melodramas (Gothic, historical, etc.), from the first third of the nineteenth century, with the earliest dating from 1813.  There are some recognizable names in here, including Thomas Dibdin and Thomas Holcroft. 

This Week's Acquisitions

(Back on usual form this week [oops?].  Blame some coupons.)

• Richard Marsh, Between the Dark and the Daylight (Valancourt, 2011).  Reprint of a collection of Marsh's short fiction in various genres, first published in 1902.  (Amazon)
• Francine Du Plessix Gray, The Queen's Lover (Penguin, 2012).  Historical novel about Marie Antoinette and her (maybe) affair with Count Axel von Fersen, standing in for the cultural and political upheavals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.  (Lift Bridge)
• Michael Ondaatje, The Cat's Table (Vintage, 2012).  A coming-of-age tale set on an ocean liner.  (Lift Bridge)
• Peter Carey, The Chemistry of Tears (Knopf, 2012).  A museum worker becomes fascinated with the history of an automaton.  (Amazon)
• Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant, eds., Steampunk! An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories (Candlewick, 2011).  What the title says.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Andrew Piper, Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age (Chicago, 2009).  Study of how books came to be used and conceptualized in Romantic-era Europe.  (Amazon [secondhand])

We've all had classes like this...

One of the videos that cropped up while I was hunting links for my previous post on the Mad Tea Party features this poor Mad Hatter from Disneyland, trying to deal with an awfully apathetic crowd.  By the end, I was having flashbacks to those days when the students just.  won't.  respond.  to anything you do.  (Although I've never tried singing.  Or toy teacups.  And I've never hugged anyone in relief, either.)   My professorial readers will know what I mean:

PROFESSOR: Hey out there! I'm standing here projecting energy in your direction! *project* *project* *project*

STUDENTS: Zzzzzz.

PROFESSOR: Would it help if I juggled these dry-erase markers?

STUDENTS: Zzzzzz.

PROFESSOR: What if I do my best imitation of Johnny Cash? I'm dressed entirely in black anyway...

STUDENTS: Zzzzzz.

PROFESSOR: *experiences existential crisis, opts to become a plumber instead*

On two occasions, I've broken down in despair and climbed on top of the desk.  The first time was in an 8:15 AM freshman comp course (this is what happens when you're new and not around to request your schedule...) during a truly thrilling discussion of prepositions.  (Ahem.)  This is what happened:

ME: *ongoing demonstration of what prepositions do*

STUDENTS: *general somnolence*

ME: *desperate, standing on the desk* Dr. Burstein is on the desk...

STUDENTS: *mild bemusement* Huh.  Dr. Burstein is on the desk. 

A colleague later reported that someone else had spotted me through the classroom door's window, returned to the department office, and announced, "That class is either going really well or really badly, because Burstein is standing on the desk!"  Which was more of a reaction than I got from the students.

The second time involved students who were usually quite responsive, but had unanimously voted that day to doze off during whatever it was we were discussing (it was intro to lit analysis, so probably a poem).  I "lecture" by asking lots of questions, so if nobody responds, I have to start tap dancing.  Or, in this case, sleeping:

ME: This X here is really odd, because Y.  What do you think is going on here?

STUDENTS: Zzzzzz.

ME: Have we seen X happening before? Is it doing something different this time?

STUDENTS: Zzzzzz.

*rinse, repeat ad nauseam*

ME: *crawls on top of desk, lies down, and starts Zzzzzz-ing*

STUDENTS: *laugh*

Pretending to doze off actually worked that time, but I suspect it's what you'd call a nuclear option.  In any event, the video clip reminded me that even if you don't think about yourself as an "entertainer," there remains considerable overlap between classroom instruction and performance. 

Mad Tea Party-ing, Brit Lit II edition

Operating on the assumption that it's never too early to think about syllabi, I'm contemplating what to do with the return of Brit Lit II in the fall.  My syllabus for this course has always been unapologetically old-fashioned, in the sense that I treat it as an introduction to major authors only; I've never seen the intellectual point of "canon-busting" for students who have never encountered the canon, and therefore don't understand the stakes of the busting, let alone what's being busted.  (My students soon grow familiar with my eternal "And look, here again is why you need to read Paradise Lost" refrain, which goes along with the "please read The Pilgrim's Progress in your copious spare time," "yes, Shakespeare is necessary," and "if you're an English major, you need a Bible" refrains.)   However, I also ask students to write papers about works that are not on the syllabus--or, sometimes, works that are on the syllabus, but were deliberately not discussed in class--and here's where the less-familiar authors creep in, even at the introductory level.  There are two primary pedagogical reasons for this approach: a) it frees students from the constraints of pre-existing classroom discussion; b) it opens up opportunities for them to show that they can translate reading skills from text to text. 

One of my favorite ways of sneaking other authors into a course is to work with texts that revise, appropriate, respond to, and otherwise rework those on the syllabus.  Thus, we get Felicia Hemans on Lord Byron, Mary Robinson on S. T. Coleridge, half of the known galaxy on Shakespeare, and so forth.  A variant is to have students read/watch adaptations--which, of course, pose their own set of problems, the most serious of which is the dreaded "fidelity" issue.  As anyone who has ever taught adaptations knows all too well, students with no experience in this area sometimes default to conjuring up long lists of similarities and differences (cue instructor: ARRRGH) without an argument.  Yes, yes, differences, but what are they doing there?   Ergo, the poor beleaguered instructor needs to somehow head the default off at the pass.  And that means...demonstration day!

Paragraph three, and I've yet to address the title of this blog post.  (Hmmm.  My grade appears to be dropping.)  I've never taught any Lewis Carroll in Brit Lit II--in fact, I've never taught Carroll at all--and I thought it might be fun to a) get a little Alice in Wonderland into the mix and b) do some work with adaptation/appropriation.  What I think I'll do is pull the "Mad Tea Party" chapter along with a brief extract from a Victorian etiquette manual, and then have the students look at some clips before they come to class.  But which ones? Many of them will have seen Disney's Alice in Wonderland (1951) as children, but it can't hurt to have them look at it again (although I suppose I'll have to explain that the Hatter has somehow been amalgamated with Humpty-Dumpty).  There are some extremely surreal versions out there: e.g., Gavin Millar's Dreamchild (1985), with scary muppets (Dark Crystal mode, not Sesame Street) as Hatter and Co., and Jan Svankmajer's Neco z Alenky (1988), with battered, primitive-looking toys.  Equally surreal is Jonathan Miller's dreamy Alice in Wonderland (1966), although it risks sending viewers off into a different kind of dreaminess.    I'd like to sneak in a couple of ballet adaptations, Christopher Wheeldon's (2011) and Glen Tetley's (1988) (not YouTubed), both of which pose more extreme difficulties for talking about adaptations of Carroll; as reviewers of Wheeldon's ballet kept pointing out, it's awfully hard to confine an Alice to dance and mime. And there's the 1999 TV adaptation, I suppose, but I really dislike it--possibly because I find Martin Short grating, possibly because it just seems to drag on forever.  Whatever their approach, both the straight-up adaptations and the more revisionist appropriations tend to bring out what U. C. Knoepflmacher calls the "unremittingly hostile" (173) quality of the Mad Hatter and the March Hare; the chapter's humor has a habit of deflating when visualized.  In any event, I have the summer to make up my mind...

 

 

This Week's Acquisitions

(Isn't this two weeks in a row now?  At least I'm done with meetings, so my brain is un-frying.)

• Christina Lupton, Knowing Books: The Consciousness of Mediation in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Pennsylvania, 2012).  A study of it-narratives focused on "aware" books.  (Amazon [secondhand])

Robert Elsmere is, in fact, a thing

As you may observe from this ad. 

Brain temporarily on hiatus

This being summer, I'm sitting on a committee.  Which is meeting for one week.  For 4-5 1/2 hours per day.  As a result, my brain currently has the consistency of gelato.  With luck, I'll be back soon with a post on a nice Victorian religious novel. 

Strictly Kosher Reading

Yoel Finkelman's Strictly Kosher Reading: Popular Literature and the Condition of Contemporary Orthodoxy (Academic Studies Press, 2011) is, to say the least, well off my usual beaten path: contemporary Haredi literature (which here comprises self-help and other manuals, pop theology, fiction, biography, and the like) in both Israel and the USA is not exactly my primary area of expertise.   Strictly speaking, this study veers more toward the sociological than the literary, with little in the way of close reading.  For those of us who primarily study Christian fiction, Finkelman's approach most closely resembles Callum Brown's in The Death of Christian Britain: both emphasize the importance of narrative in everyday life, and analyze popular texts (fictional and non- ) in order to discover how groups shape communal identities through storytelling. Although Finkelman's particular topic is probably foreign to many readers of his blog, his points are still worth looking at for those of us who study religion & literature. I'll highlight a few.

1) Strategies for negotiating boundaries, and the permeability of same.  Finkelman repeatedly points out that Haredi literature, despite its apparent rejection of all non-Haredi culture, is actually permeated with a number of very modern concepts--"coalescence," a term he borrows from Sylvia Barack Fishman--which it often authorizes with more traditional rhetoric and authors.  For example, contemporary beliefs about nutrition can be undergirded with references to Maimonides and kabbala (45-48), and equally contemporary arguments about child-rearing (especially the dangers of physical punishment and the need for affection between parents and children) can be justified by careful interpretations of apparently contradictory verses from the Torah (74-77).   Innovation can thus be folded back into tradition.  At the same time, as Finkelman reminds us, "[a]t the end of the day, market forces may be more important in the Haredi book market than ideology, whether to publishers, authors, or readers" (97).  (As we have seen very recently, attempts to quash heterodox or heretical texts may have the opposite of the desired effect, especially thanks to the internet.)   Most of the book is devoted to how Haredi authors import and transform apparently secular genres or theories, whether fictional or scientific, and then justify the practice (sometimes by refusing to acknowledge what's going on, sometimes through careful framing). 

2) Gender and appropriation.  The book advances an interesting argument: Haredi women are not only more likely to advance internal self-critique, but also to utilize arguments drawn from secular sources, given that they "for the most part do not receive the same degree of education as men in the most sacred and authoritative texts of tradition" and are much more likely to "have received a less restricted secular education" than their male counterparts (79).  Thus, a woman writing about problems with the Haredi education system unapologetically deploys her "expertise in special education" (84) in a way that a male author rarely does.  Although at one level this is a very culturally-specific difference, it also raises interesting questions about secular dynamics in women's religious writing from other traditions, whether non-Haredi Judaism or Roman Catholicism. 

3) In-group vs. out-group texts, or not.  As one might expect, texts produced for outreach rather than for the home community's consumption often have different trajectories, contents, and so forth.  But as Finkelman observes, "much of the outreach-oriented literature is in fact read, and meant to be read, by insiders as well" (39).  Trying to identify how an audience might respond to a given text is tricky for precisely this reason: it's not at all clear, for example, that Jewish conversion novels have a Jewish audience in mind, while Jewish and Catholic novelists like Grace Aguilar, Lady Georgiana Fullerton, and Julia Kavanagh had a wide-ranging ecumenical readership.  (What would it mean to "get" one's understanding of Catholicism from Lady Georgiana?) Here, though, is where the question of media distribution networks arises--a nineteenth-century Catholic novel aimed primarily at a Catholic audience and sold almost entirely at Catholic bookstores would not have the internet to enhance its mobility, whereas the combination of online bookstores and search engines now makes it difficult to keep in-group literature "in" (sometimes to everyone's chagrin). 

4) The practice of in-group criticism.  Finkelman highlights two different trends in Haredi self-criticism: "one that reinforces the beliefs of the community" and "a more subversive, dangerous comparison, one in which a Haredi spokesman cautiously and implicitly accepts various aspects of the secular critique of Haredi Judaism" (163).  The former insists that all failures indict not the community's values, but rather its refusal to practice same; the latter suggests that the community's self-construction obscures important flaws visible only to those outside of it.  Thus, one critic of internet use warns that many blogs are dangerous because "they lack the filters and limits on criticism that Torah considers central" (166), whereas the prominent commentator Yonoson (Jonathan) Rosenblum extensively quotes from a secular author's perspective in order to authorize his own agenda, and thus "translates the outsider critique into the language of insiders" (172).  Although Finkelman doesn't discuss the issue at any length, the problems posed by #3 above have considerable resonance for in-group critique: what happens if the out-group reads it?   This is much less of a problem if one is writing in Yiddish or Hebrew, obviously, but it remains an issue; one thinks, for example, of the minefields involved when moving from Catholic anti-clericalism to anti-Catholic anti-clericalism, or from Jewish critiques of materialistic Jews to the anti-Semitic version of same.  (The reception history of Amy Levy is one of the most [in]famous cases in point--how are we supposed to read her contempt for Jewish bourgeois self-satisfaction?)

This Week's Acquisitions

(I know, I know, falling down on things.)

• Kate Grenville, Sarah Thornhill (Grove, 2012).  Final entry in Grenville's trilogy about the brutality of British colonialism in Australia, featuring the daughter of the principal character in The Secret River.  (Lift Bridge)

Department of things that cannot possibly be a good idea

Here we have an...interesting...patent (originally sighted here).  The likelihood of it ever actually being implemented strikes me as slim, for any number of reasons (it could be prohibitively expensive, for starters).  But it's certainly interesting to contemplate.  The problem? Books cost too much! (Whoops, that's the Crown Books ad.) To be more precise: the argument is that textbooks cost too much not because of the "greed of academic presses," but because of pirates, pirates everywhere.  Even faculty have proven complicit, "turning a blind eye when students appear in class with photocopied pages," or, even worse, "placing texts in the library reserve where they can be photocopied."    This is before we get to more nefarious means of distribution.  Our patent holder has the solution: "A system and method for preventing unauthorized access to copyrighted academic texts is provided. The present invention integrates trademark licenses, discussion boards, and grade content into a web-based system that provides incentives for all interested parties to comply with copyright law while also enhancing the overarching academic mission to create and disseminate knowledge."  How would this work? Licensing. 

Under this plan, professors would have to request a license to use a copyrighted textbook on their syllabus.  Once the license was issued, the publisher would build a mandatory discussion board for the course, which students would have to register for using a Magic Key^TM, obtained only by purchasing a new copy of the textbook. (OK, he doesn't call it the Magic Key, but you get the idea.)  To make the stick heavier, this discussion board should be a "significant portion" of our new-textbook-ifying student's grade in the course.  (Authors even have access to the discussion boards.)  But wait, you say! What about used textbooks? Why, students who have the temerity to purchase used books will still be charged to access the discussion board, "thereby reducing the incentive of the publisher to issue new editions for the sole purpose of frustrating the used book market."  (This is a wonderfully optimistic patent.)  Student buys perfectly legal book from Amazon for .01? Pay a fee! (What's utterly baffling about this is that we're legally required--in my state, anyway--to supply our book orders well ahead of time so that students can find cheap used copies elsewhere.)  Student takes a book out of a perfectly legal local library, as many of mine do? Pay a fee! University bookstores, which one might think would object to this line of attack, would no longer be able to profit on booksales at all, as publishers would exert complete control over book pricing (the books, of course, being priced more reasonably, now that piracy has been eliminated forever; did I mention that this was an optimistic patent?).¹

The author does concede that some faculty might be grumpy, especially those addicted to controlling their own syllabi, assigning texts as they see fit, and the like. (Also, most of us are disinclined to monitor discussion boards on someone else's say-so.)  But faculty get a nice shiny carrot: "In particular, a percentage of the net royalty income such as, for example, 50% generated from textbooks sold by presses using the system, collected in the US and Canada may be dedicated to litigating tenure disputes from both within and outside the university walls."   Save the copyright, save the tenure.  Or something like that.  (I believe that I have mentioned that this is a remarkably optimistic patent.)  In exchange for generous authors giving up a chunk of their frequently insubstantial change--if I'm reading this thing correctly, they're only entitled to 10% of the royalties generated by their book--they get extra armor against unfair tenure practices.  (Seriously, unless you've co-edited a Brick [Norton anthology] or its equivalent, you aren't raking in any dough.)  More precisely, someone else gets the extra armor, as probability would seem to dictate that the author isn't going to benefit directly.  (Oh, and we're assuming that publishers would hand the money over. Yes, let's return to that optimism bit.) 

Putting to one side the increasingly Rube Goldbergesque nature of the patent's solutions for dealing with misbehaving faculty and students, its connection to pedagogical practice in the humanities, at least, seems rather slim.   Most of us aren't assigning "textbooks" per se, aside from the usual run of Norton, Longman, Broadview, etc. anthologies or the big intro to theory collections.  (This is a problem with the discussion I linked in my first paragraph, as "textbook" seems to encompass monographs--which professors have been putting on reserve since the dawn of time.)  Once you get into teaching novels, say, prices drop dramatically, thanks to the combined efforts of Oxford, Penguin, and company.  While it would be exceptionally (OK, murderously) frustrating, it would be possible to put together a full poetry survey using nothing but free online texts, thereby saving students a bundle.  (The absence of footnotes, though, would be a problem, unless you've found an edited text.)   One suspects that the growing efforts to develop OS textbooks, whether for specific universities or the general academic population, might be more dangerous to traditionally textbook-heavy disciplines than piracy--or, you know, buying your books for .01 on Amazon, if that's how you prefer to save cash. 

¹ Although the author fails to mention it, his patent method would also cause considerable grief for independent bookstores in college towns, as many of them subsidize their operations by selling textbooks.