The Little Professor

This Week's Acquisitions

• Karen Hellekson, The Alternate History: Refiguring Historical Time (Kent State, 2001). Links the alternate history novel to more general questions of historical practice; authors covered include Philip K. Dick, Poul Anderson, and Brian Aldiss.

• Richard Jefferies, The Dewy Morn (Wildwood, 1982). Reprint of Jefferies' 1884 pastoral novel. For more on Jefferies, see here.

• Simon Heffer, Moral Desperado: A Life of Thomas Carlyle (Phoenix, 1995). Recent biography of "a magnificent, defiant and often lonely individualist" (blurb). There's a good Carlyle overview at the Victorian Web. His wife, Jane Welsh Carlyle, was an outstanding correspondent; see the Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle (1883).

• Peter Martin, A Life of James Boswell (Yale, 2002). The most recent scholarly biography. There are some useful Boswell links available from Chris Wiley; his will is also online. Jack Lynch has been editing Boswell's Life of Johnson--it's currently up to 1763.

• Paschal B. Kyiiripuo Kyoore, The African and Caribbean Historical Novel in French: A Quest for Identity (Peter Lang, 1996). Postcolonial interpretation. (Yes, this is off my beaten path, but I'm doing a bibliographical review essay on historical fiction.)

• Stephen Harris, The Fiction of Gore Vidal and E. L. Doctorow (Peter Lang, 2002). The two novelists in relation to the American tradition in historical fiction.

• Ian Firla, ed., Robert Graves's Historical Novels (Peter Lang, 2000). The Claudius novels, King Jesus, etc.

• Robert Irvine, Enlightenment and Romance: Gender and Agency in Smollett and Scott (Peter Lang, 2000). Another attempt to theorize the relationship between romance and the historical novel.

• Lisa Jardine, On a Grander Scale: The Outstanding Life of Christopher Wren (HarperCollins, 2003). New life of the great architect. For examples of Wren's work, see here.

• Elizabeth Traice, Mistress Elizabeth Spencer: A Story of the Times of Queen Elizabeth (Nelson, 1895). A short historical romance in which Queen Elizabeth plays matchmaker.

• The Visitor, or Monthly Instructor, for 1838. A full year of this Religious Tract Society journal, featuring various "improving" articles.

Friday Cat Blogging

In this older photograph, Disraeli attempts to chill out on his perch. Thing is, he didn't fit very well.

Relating

If there's one thing that infuriates instructors no end, it's the complaint "I can't relate to this [book, poem, whatever]." Or, alternately, "I like this book because I can relate to it." Both provoke our exasperation, largely because they presume that the student's self is at the center of the universe: reading literature becomes a matter of reconfirming one's own experiences. I think most of us interpret "I can't relate" as "I won't learn." But as this report from a student suggests, "I can't relate" doesn't necessarily mean "I won't learn"; instead, it can also mean "I don't feel." The student comes to understand the poem as an intellectual artifact, but still cannot internalize the poem's meaning. In other words, it's still an alien text which appears to have arrived from a different cultural planet. George Eliot addresses this distinction between intellectual and felt understanding a number of times, especially in Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda: there's a difference between purely "theoretic" knowledge (ideas disconnected from feeling and practice) and true knowledge (bound up inseparably with one's relationship to the world). To what extent are we, as instructors, attempting to move students beyond a "merely" intellectual understanding of a great literary work--the sort of understanding that might generate a perfectly good answer on an exam--to a "felt" understanding? Or are we even equipped to do such a thing? Surely an honest inquiry into our own responses to great literature will reveal that we too often stop at an unfeeling response. For example, I've been reading Lady Murasaki Shikibu's Tale of Genji . As a trained "professional" reader, I'm certainly aware that I'm reading a great work of literature: I can appreciate the author's scope, her skilled manipulation of poetic tradition (about which more in a second), her ability to delineate character, and so forth. But I don't feel much of what I'm reading, for perfectly commonplace reasons: everything in the setting is foreign (from the architecture to the musical instruments to the religious beliefs), the poetic tradition is completely alien, and the characters' motivations don't always make immediate sense. To feel the book, I would need to invest a fair amount of time in reading up on Heian literature, culture, and politics--and I will probably do so at some point. But to many students, Victorian presuppositions about, say, goodness or conscience or what-have-you seem as alien as the culture of Heian Japan. Moreover, there are cases when the student "feels" a novel or poem only by misreading it--and not just students, either.* Marianne Thormahlen's brilliant The Brontës and Religion, for example, makes a pretty airtight case that you cannot secularize Jane's subjectivity, although early feminist readings of the novel (Gilbert/Gubar, for example) often try to split Jane's belief in women's need for work and independence--expressed in Brontë's private writings as well--from her Christian faith.

Certainly, one of the things that can characterize professionalized reading is that it may work through a purely intellectual understanding of a work to a felt understanding, but such feelings are not necessarily aesthetic or appreciative. Someone complimented me on an article that came out this year by remarking that I seemed "in the mindset" of the writers discussed--although I'm Jewish, the writers were almost entirely CofE evangelicals, and about half of the texts were Jewish conversion literature! And it's true that (some occasional moments of irritation aside...) I was trying to represent a viewpoint entirely "other" to me with not just fairness, but genuine sympathy. That is, I wanted to explain how the ideas worked and what they did. Griping about their rightness, wrongness, or sheer foolishness wouldn't have helped either my argument or the reader's understanding.** But this response derives partly from years of training, in which I learned how to turn difference into a challenge, a problem to be solved. (Which is why I say "Well, I really should go learn something about Heian Japan," instead of "This doesn't speak to me; why should I bother?") Most students have not yet learned how to turn the statement "I don't relate" into the question "Why don't I relate?" Moreover, in many instances we don't have the time to then move students to the next step, which is to find the pleasure involved in answering that question. In some cases, the problem may be that the difference is not felt as enough of a shock, which might energize further investigation.***

In other words, I appear to be arriving at a somewhat pessimistic conclusion, which is that in many cases teaching students great literature will not always be the same thing as teaching students to feel great literature.**** We may get students to do well on an essay question about Robert Browning, but will they want to read Browning ever again? (Obviously, with a good instructor, many students will come to enjoy the works assigned on the syllabus, and a few students in every class will be moved to read more.) Or is just getting students to the questioning phase the measure of success? Such questioning has the merit, at least, of inspiring students to read books they might not otherwise have picked up--the KJV, the Pilgrim's Progress, the Inferno, whatever--and that, in turn, may one day help them feel what we can only get them to comprehend.

*Although isn't it true that a work with "universal appeal" is one that can be appreciated even when most of it in fact remains incomprehensible? I suspect that a lot of people who enjoy Middlemarch do so without understanding its representation of late-1820s-early-1830s politics, its precise critique of evangelicalism, and so forth, even though such things are hardly peripheral to the novel's meaning.

**Kevin L. Morris' excellent survey of anti-Catholic fiction, "John Bull and the Scarlet Woman: Charles Kingsley and Anti-Catholicism in Victorian Literature," Recusant History 23 (1996): 190-218, runs into some trouble near the end because he loses his temper. That he does so is understandable, but it leads him to oversimplify things.

***By "shock," I mean the sort which my father tells me experienced when, as an undergrad in the late 1950s, he first read Boccaccio.

****As I explained when I gave my job talk, my aesthetic tastes are pretty conservative. It's just that I tend to write about books which are only of historical interest. (Or, as I like to quip, there are three kinds of books--the good, the fun, and the interesting. I teach the first two and write about the third.) It seems strange, but I don't experience this as a contradiction--just two different kinds of enjoyment.

(This excerpt from J. Peter Euben's Platonic Noise brings up several problems with what Euben calls the "instrumentalization" of literary study; among other things, Euben discusses "boredom" and "relevance." Here's an old entry from a Tulane message board, apparently by a student, on "relating" to Toni Morrison. An Australian site brings up useful ways to discuss the relevance of King Lear; be sure to click through to the "Objections to studying King Lear in the 1990s" page. While I had quite a few problems with this essay, it correctly points out that many literary classics are not really appropriate for the secondary school classroom.)

This Week's Acquisitions

• Deborah Alcock, Robert Musgrave's Adventure: A Story of Old Geneva (Partridge, n.d.). Historical novel set during the early seventeenth century, with theologian Theodore Beza as one of the main characters. One of Alcock's late novels.

• [Elizabeth Hely Walshe], From Dawn to Dark in Italy: A Tale of the Reformation in the Sixteenth Century (American Tract Society, n.d.). The Inquisition, among other things. First published in England in 1864.

• Scotland's Glory and Her Shame..., new ed. (Smith, 1858). Reprint of a popular anti-Catholic chapbook that first appeared in 1782. Very bad poetry indeed. ("Reader, I hope you'll be so kind,/With oversights that here you find,/To pass them by with little din,/Because I'm an unlearned man.")

• Stephen Sykes, John Booty, and Jonathan Knight, eds.,The Study of Anglicanism (Fortress, 1998). Essay collection explaining doctrine, history, liturgy, etc.

• Michael Dobson and Nicola J. Watson, England's Elizabeth: An Afterlife in Fame and Fantasy (Oxford, 2002). Surveys representations of Elizabeth I in literature and popular culture from her death to the present day.

• Dennis Denisoff, Aestheticism and Sexual Parody, 1840-1940 (Cambridge, 2001). Parody as a strategy for sexual subversion.

• Lynda Adamson, Recreating the Past (Greenwood, 1994). An annotated bibliography of 970 children's/YA novels.

• Rebecca Barnhouse, Recasting the Past: The Middle Ages in Young Adult Literature (Boynton/Cook, 2000). Discussion of major topics, representational strateges, etc.

• Harry E. Shaw, Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot (Cornell, 1999). Realism as a mode of representing being-in-history.

• Ann Rigney, Imperfect Histories: The Elusive Past and the Legacy of Romantic Historicism (Cornell, 2001). Problems of representing the past in Scott, among others.

Friday Cat Blogging

In today's installment, Disraeli gets himself into one of those "I feel a sympathetic backache coming on" positions, while Victoria supervises my work from atop the computer armoire.

Middlemarch

I'm rereading one of my favorite novels, George Eliot's Middlemarch, for my graduate seminar. Unlike the Rev. Mr. Casaubon's mind, this novel truly is an "ungauged reservoir," not an "enclosed basin." This time around, I find myself particularly admiring Eliot's masterful use of free indirect discourse: her narrator slips almost imperceptibly in and out of his/her own voice into those of Dorothea, or Lydgate, or Rosamond. These shifts are usually a matter of subtle nuance, and it's particularly fascinating when a thought you've remembered as "the narrator's" turns out to be associated with one of the characters. Eliot's narrators can sometimes cause problems for students, especially when they resort to direct address. Some students regard direct address as something of an insult ("s/he's telling me what to think") rather than as a challenge, or an invitation to reflect on the problems of narrative construction. In Middlemarch, we do have to be reminded that Casaubon isn't an evil man: badly flawed yes, misguided yes, disappointed yes, egocentric yes (although he's hardly the only one in the novel with that problem!), probably impotent yes, but he does have currents of feeling which require our sympathy. (As several critics have noted, Eliot creates only one truly evil character, the sadistic Mr. Grandcourt of Daniel Deronda.) It is, after all, precisely Eliot's point that most of us are in the dark about the nature of those with whom we have daily converse.

The missing narrator was one of the reasons I found the 1994 BBC adaptation ultimately unsatisfying. Not that I thought it was bad or "about as good as you could expect it to be" (as someone aptly said of the more recent Daniel Deronda), but without the narrator, the viewer lost "the web." The novel relies so heavily on the incremental growth of images and allusions (kinds of light, labyrinthine spaces, clearness vs. haze, the famous web) that any attempt to translate it into a visual, dramatic medium loses much of its force. This is, after all, a novel about minutiae, and minutiae tend not to work very well on film. Moreover, there was a certain tone-deafness or, more properly, blindness, in the casting. One certainly "trivial" decision which nonetheless unbalanced the picture was the casting of Julian Wadham as Sir James Chettam. Now, while most people would agree that there's nothing objectionable about looking at Mr. Wadham, there is something objectionable about looking at him as Sir James. In the novel, Sir James is ruddy and "blooming," a big, full-blown, emphatically virile man who stands in direct symbolic opposition to the washed-out and "wintry" Casaubon. There's a lovely little moment when Dorothea finds that "his dimpled hands were quite disagreeable": she consciously registers Casaubon as "mind," but somewhat less consciously reacts against Sir James as "the flesh." In fact, neither man is appropriate for Dorothea. (Will Ladislaw isn't either.) But in the miniseries, we get a Sir James who resembles Dorothea (Juliet Aubrey) and who comes across as rather sensitive and even a bit introspective. So, asks the viewer, why don't they end up together?

(For further information, see Middlemarch at the University of Virginia, which includes a reception history and an annotated bibliography. This guide from a syllabus will help the lost keep all the characters straight. Another course website provides some capsules on St. Theresa and the Reform Bill. Niall McKay posts the great scientist James Clerk Maxwell's interpretation of the novel as "solar myth." The Atlantic has dug up a review dating from 1873.)

This Week's Acquisitions

• A. D. Nuttall, Dead from the Waist Down: Scholars and Scholarship in Literature and the Popular Imagination (Yale, 2003). Uses the Isaac Casaubon/Mark Pattison/the Rev. Casaubon link to investigate the literary history of the asexual scholar. (For more on Mark Pattison and George Eliot's Casaubon, see Kali Israel's Names and Stories: Emilia Dilke and Victorian Culture.)

• Giles Foden, Ladysmith (Knopf, 2001). Historical novel about a South African town during the Boer War, told from multiple points of view.

• Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan, Florence Macarthy (Henry Colburn, 1845). A reprint in Colburn's "Standard Novels" series of Lady Morgan's national tale, discussed in two posts below.

• Jerome Christensen, Romanticism at the End of History (Johns Hopkins, 2000). Multiple readings in Romantic historicisms.

• Paula Backscheider, ed., Revising Women: Eighteenth-Century "Women's Fiction" and Social Engagement (Johns Hopkins, 2002). Essays (which are rather lengthier than the norm for this kind of collection) on the role of women in shaping a number of novelistic genres, such as the Gothic.

• James M. Cahalan, The Irish Novel: A Critical History (Twayne, 1988). Argues that the Irish novel has its own literary tradition, one separate from a larger entity dubbed "the English novel" or "the British novel."

• John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, 2 vols. (Everyman, 1969). Reprint of the nineteenth-century biography by one of Dickens' close friends, first published between 1872 and 1874. There is an e-text available.

• Stanley Ayling, George the Third (Knopf, 1972). A generally affectionate biography.

• Mrs. [Dinah Mulock] Craik, A Life for a Life (Collins' Clear-Type Press, n.d.). A novel told from two different first-person perspectives, "Her Story" and "His Story." On Mrs. Craik, see the ever-reliable Victorian Web.

• Henry Mackenzie, Mackenzie's Works (Harper, 1837). Reprints all of Mackenzie's writings, including his three novels. Mackenzie's most famous novel, The Man of Feeling, is available online; for Mackenzie himself, see Slainte and Electric Scotland (which reprints what looks like a nineteenth-century assessment). Incidentally, you can take a look at his will.

• Michael Thorpe, Clough: The Critical Heritage (RKP, 1972). Reprints nineteenth- and twentieth-century critical assessments (reviews, etc.) of this slightly offbeat Victorian poet. Clough's poetry can be found here; there's a biography at (where else?) the Victorian Web.

• R. M. Seiler, ed., Walter Pater: The Critical Heritage (RKP, 1980). Another volume in the series. Oddly enough, Pater doesn't have his own website, but he does have the usual entry at the Victorian Web. An entire collection of critical essays on Pater, Pater in the 1990s, is online, and Pater's own books can be found at Project Gutenberg.

Friday Cat Blogging

In honor of Calpundit's great Internet institution, Friday Cat Blogging, the Little Professor offers this photo of her resident felines. Disraeli is the gentleman in the tux; Victoria, the brown tiger. Despite the noncoordinating color schemes, these two are in fact littermates. And, although you can't tell from the photo angle, they're both quite large: Disraeli is 13.5 pounds and his sister about 12, but neither is overweight. In case you're wondering, Victoria's name has turned out to be very appropriate. Disraeli, alas, is completely lacking in statesmanlike characteristics.

Bookplate redux

I've scanned the previous post's interesting bookplate. I told one of my department's major book collectors about the find; he tells me that since Disraeli's library appears to have been auctioned off by Sotheby's in 1882, looking up the catalog is my logical next step.

Bookplate

I'm intrigued by the bookplate attached to a novel which arrived today, an 1845 reprint of Lady Morgan's Florence Macarthy (1818). It reads as follows:

Sir Samuel Wilson
Hughenden Manor
From the Earl of Beaconsfield's Library

(I'd post an image, but for some reason my camera is not cooperating.)

OK. Wilson (1832-95) rented Hughenden after Disraeli's death. How does one parse the bookplate? Did Wilson purchase the book from Disraeli's estate? Or does the bookplate simply mean that Wilson stored the book in D.'s library (literally)? D.'s title did not pass to his heir, Coningsby Disraeli, so the only Earl of Beaconsfield at issue here is D. himself.