The Little Professor

The Curious Case of the Adapted Detective: Syllabus

Some people were asking about what "The Curious Case of the Adapted Detective" looks like, so here it is.  Bear in mind that this is my department's upper-division theory seminar, so that the post-Doyle Holmes universe becomes a case study for talking about adaptation, appropriation, and the sometimes exceptionally fuzzy line between the two.  Because of in-class tech constraints, we're dealing with fairly conventional media--novels, film, TV--but the students have leeway to research Whatever They Want, which, when it comes to Sherlock Holmes, is a stunningly wide range of material...

Given the immense quantities of Holmes out there, and the necessity of giving the students ample time to prep and discuss the secondary texts, I had to make some v. sad decisions--chief among them being that I wound up eliminating the RDJ/Law Holmes  (OK, I don't actually like the films as Holmes films, but they're significant in terms of certain trends).  Ultimately, for pedagogical purposes, I opted for a straight run of variants on the Hound, giving us a baseline for comparison.  

The class assumes no prior knowledge of the original stories.    The literary pastiches come in groups: two very different (and either bleak or sardonic) accounts of how the Holmes/Watson partnership "ended"; two attempts to rethink Holmes and his methods in the context of WWII and the Holocaust; and two more...unusual...takes on the canon. 

WEEK 1 (1/28)	Introduction and tour A Study in Scarlet
WEEK 2 (2/4)	“A Scandal in Bohemia,” “The Five Orange Pips," “The Speckled Band,” “The Engineer’s Thumb” (Adventures) Leslie Haynsworth, “Sensational Adventures: Sherlock Holmes and His Generic Past” (Project Muse) Hound of the Baskervilles
WEEK 3 (2/11)	Hound of the Baskervilles Watch “A Scandal in Bohemia” ($1.99 on Amazon Instant Video, or you may borrow DVD from me); Hutcheon, Theory of Adaptation, ch. 1 1st group presents: Hutcheon, ch. 2
WEEK 4 (2/18)	Hound of the Baskervilles (1939) Short paper due 2/22
WEEK 5 (2/25)	2nd group presents: McFarlane, Novel to Film, Pt. I Dibdin, Last Sherlock Holmes Story 3rd group presents: Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation, chs. 2, 7
WEEK 6 (3/4)	Dibdin, Last Sherlock Holmes Story Marowitz, Sherlock’s Last Case
WEEK 7 (3/11)	Individual meetings with instructor; prospectus due 3/15
WEEK 8 (3/18)—Spring break
WEEK 9 (3/25)	Chabon, The Final Solution 4th group presents:  Stef Craps and Gert Buelens, “Traumatic Mirrorings: Holocaust and Colonial Trauma in Michael Chabon’s The Final Solution” (Project Muse) Research discussion day—post queries and finds to the Wiki Annotated bibliography due 3/29
WEEK 10 (4/1)	Cullin, A Slight Trick of the Mind
WEEK 11 (4/8)	Vote by 4/1: watch EITHER the Livanov Hound of the Baskervilles OR the Brett Hound of the Baskervilles, both available on Amazon 5th group presents: Neil Caw, Adapting Detective Fiction: Crime, Englishness and the TV Detectives, ch. 2 (eBrary)
WEEK 12 (4/15)	Watch The Hounds of Baskerville from Sherlock, season 2, available on Amazon 6th group presents: Balaka Basu, “Sherlock and the (Re)Invention of Modernity,” Sherlock and Transmedia Fandom (eBooks Library) Read through the fictional “blogs” and “tweets” by the Sherlock characters: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b018ttws/features/disclaimer Newman, The Hound of the D’Urbervilles, “Preface,” “A Volume in Vermilion”
WEEK 13 (4/22)	Newman, The Hound of the D’Urbervilles, title story Gaiman, “A Study in Emerald” (http://www.neilgaiman.com/p/Cool_Stuff/Short_Stories) Research presentations
WEEK 14 (4/29)	Research presentations
WEEK 15 (5/6)	Research presentations Final reflections and individual conferencing Research projects due Monday of finals week

 

Vows

I have promised myself that there will be no books in the living room for the foreseeable future.

OK, at least for another couple of years.

I think.

However, I never made any promises about putting more books in the family room.  So the advent of two barrister bookcases there doesn't betray my solemn vows.  See how that reasoning works?

(I at least have a semi-good reason for the barristers: Disraeli keeps eating the Christian periodicals.  That's Disraeli the cat.  Not Disraeli the PM.  Who, if he were around, would probably be a zombie. And eating brains, not periodicals. Luckily, it's just the cat.)

 

Accident

I've been trying to explain Book Three (a.k.a. Inexpensive-to-Write Book, a.k.a. Book on Neo-Victorian Fiction) to people for a few months now, and have usually met with polite incomprehension.  Obviously, that's not the response Yr Humble Servant has in mind.  So I've done all my usual routines--chewing over this and that while walking to and from campus, doing more reading (I can always do that), working on conference paper proposals, and the like.  Then, one day, I read a book on what appeared to be a totally non-related topic, and said, Aha! That's what was missing! And voila: now I have a research program to follow, a narrative to construct, and a more precise set of novels to target.

On the one hand, such accidents are part of the romance of research, as it were.  There I was, stumbling along, minding my own business, and...inadvertently solved my problem.  All very convenient, if not fated.  Hence academic angst about libraries relegating books to weird underground (or offsite) repositories: we all have stories about the Brilliant Insights we obtained just by wandering through the stacks.  On the other hand, these accidents are, in many ways, much less accidental than they first appear.  I wasn't "just" reading Totally Non-Related Book (at least, that's what I thought it was)--it was on my radar in the first place because it speaks to one cluster of my usual run of scholarly interests.  In this case, I simply hadn't yet made the right connections.   Even when I'm reading randomly, I still have a set of parameters lurking at the back of my mind, clicking and gurgling away.  By the same token, when I'm meandering amongst the library bookshelves, I'm still likely to be meandering in a specific set of locations.  The discoveries are "accidental," but not in any sort of chaotically free sense.

I was thinking about this question of accidents because of the Sherlock Holmes course in particular (yes, I'll post the syllabus shortly...).  The undergraduate and graduate seminar experience teaches "research strategies," yes, but in ways that don't really mimic the experience of research and writing as a professional scholar.  The time constraints, for example: we have deadlines, but our deadlines generally don't fall into neat fifteen- or ten-week increments.  More to the point, it's hard to encourage undergraduates to have productive accidents when they don't yet have those silent (or relatively quiet) parameters yet in place--for the accident to "help," the ideas already need to be churning about.  But in a seminar, one's frame of reference, often enough, is just what's on the syllabus: the student enrolled in a course on Chaucer is highly unlikely to have read John Gower.  This is true even at the graduate level, where fulfilling your single-course requirement in early modern literature doesn't necessarily entail having much in the way of previous experience with it. 

This Week's Month's Acquisitions

• Rachel McCrindell, The English Governess: A Tale of Real Life (Herman Hooker, 1844).  Important early "governess novel" about the trials and tribulations of this job.  First American ed.  (eBay)
• Edward Everett Hale, Margaret Percival in America: A Tale (Phillips, Sampson, & Co., 1850).  Unitarian response to Elizabeth Missing Sewell's Tractarian novel, Margaret Percival.  (eBay)
• The Two Sufferers Contrasted; Or, Fear and Anguish and Joy and Peace.  A Record of Facts from the Chamber of Sickness and Death (American Sunday-School Union, 1849).  Religious tract about--you guessed it--how religion affects the ways in which the ill and dying respond to their imminent demise.  (eBay)
• Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers (Europa, 2012).  Reprint of Burgess' 1980 novel about the yoked fortunes of a commercially-successful gay novelist and...a Pope...during the twentieth century.  (Barnes & Noble)
• Hannah Adams, A Dictionary of All Religions and Religious Denominations (James Eastburn, 1817).  Fourth edition of Adams' significant reference work, first published in 1784 as A View of Religious Opinions.  (eBay)
• Child's Companion and Juvenile Instructor (1862).  One volume of this Religious Tract Society periodical.  (eBay)
• Peter van der Veer, Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain (Princeton, 2001).  Analyzes how British and Indian religious and intellectual traditions mutually influenced each other during the Victorian period.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Paul S. Ell and K. D. M. Snell, Rival Jerusalems: The Geography of Victorian Religion (Cambridge, 2009).  Who was worshipping how where and when.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Nigel Yates, Liturgical Space: Christian Wordship and Church Buildings in Europe 1500-2000 (Ashgate, 2008).  Examines relationship between liturgical and architectural traditions (and innovations).  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Emmet Larkin, The Making of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, 1850-1860 (North Carolina, 1980).  One volume in Larkin's standard history of developments in nineteenth-century Irish Catholicism.  (Amazon [secondhand])

The Pre-Semester Book Blues

1.  Reasons to distrust your campus bookstore's auto-fill, #222111: I went in to check on my books today, and discovered that The Hound of the Baskervilles was indeed there.  The "retold" Hound of the Baskervilles.  The one intended for YA readers.  The one I certainly didn't want my seminar to read.  I expressed much sadness in the appropriate direction.

2.  My inability to get a desk copy of the fifth edition of the Longman British Lit anthology is apparently matched by Pearson's inability to ship same to my undergraduates. Or its limited ability, as I saw one fifth edition, sitting sad and miserable in the midst of a sea of fourth editions. 

3.  I continue not to have a desk copy of Charles Marowitz's Sherlock's Last Case.  There may be a nefarious plot at work, although I hope it isn't the one that Watson cooks up in this play.

In which I remain restricted to short observations, thanks to jet lag

It is a truth universally acknowledged that instructors who wish to write syllabi are IN NEED OF THEIR DESK COPIES. 

Longman, I am staring really, really hard in your direction. 

For the (further) record

At the risk of sounding like an exceptionally elitist English professor, I am disinclined to purchase any novel that aspires to be "the new Fifty Shades of Grey."  Because the old one was more than sufficient.

Excessive, even.

I'm just saying.

Rest assured that this book is not on the Sherlock Holmes syllabus

"Santoro's body lay stiff on the floor, and I covered it with my coat.  He had been dead for several hours and the sound that had alerted us to his presence was, perhaps, an involuntary gasp." 

Because, as a general rule, corpses gasp voluntarily?

(Also, Holmes and Watson keep referring to each other as "old boy," which...no.)

For the record

We will not be burning anyone at the stake on the cover of Book Two, a.k.a. Victorian Reformations.

A genuinely baffled question

Does anyone know what happened to the "search my library" function on GoogleBooks? Because it doesn't search my GoogleBooks library.  Which makes it impossible to do a keyword search.

ETA: It sounds like GoogleBooks just doesn't love me anymore, but loves everyone else.  *sniff*