The Little Professor

Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle

The selling point of Mowgli has been its "dark" quality, in comparison to the song-and-dance animated Jungle Book feature and, for that matter, the more recent live adaptation (the film which came, saw, and conquered this one, cinematic-release speaking).  In practice, this results in a kind of tonal dissonance: Mowgli's frequently light-hearted coming-of-age narrative runs smack into a much bloodier story about the ethics of hunting.  (TL;DR: hunting for food, good; hunting for sport, bad.)  As a result, it's not always clear whom the film is for, a problem accentuated by the sometimes odd CGI (Shere Khan and Father Wolf are especially...off) and the sometimes cartoonish, sometimes very brutal violence. Interestingly enough, Mowgli turns out to have its competitor's problem with the in-universe politics of Mowgli's identity as a human being, and yet solves them it in a way that arguably out-Kiplings Kipling.

Mowgli's narrative combines the Mowgli tales from the first Jungle Book, including Shere Khan's manipulation of wolfpack politics, Mowgli's kidnapping by the Bandar-Log (here just known as the Monkey People), and Mowgli's time in the village, although it concludes by foreshadowing his afterlife as Master of the Jungle in the Second Jungle Book (without mentioning that, in his late teens, he returns to his adoptive family).  Moreover, there is a new addition who serves as a pivot point, a deconstructed Great White Hunter (seriously) with a drinking problem and the perhaps somewhat odd habit of lugging all of his hunting trophies around with him.  (Lockwood's obsession with Shere Khan turns out to be a sort of discount Moby Dick plot.) . Much of the tension in the film's first half derives from a rite of passage nowhere in Kipling, the "running," which qualifies the cubs for full membership in the pack; Mowgli's physical inability to keep up with the other cubs, which marks him out as a "freak" alongside his runty albino friend Bhoot, would disqualify him, were it not that he learns to master tree-climbing instead.  It is only Bagheera's deliberate intervention that cheats Mowgli out of winning the contest and inadvertently leads him to being captured by the Bandar-Log.  Mowgli's desire to be accepted, just like everyone else--one of the most popular plots in all of children's and YA film--supplants the original story's explanation for the loathing with which the other wolves regard him: "The others they hate thee because their eyes cannot meet thine; because thou art wise; because thou hast pulled out thorns from their feet—because thou art a man" ("Mowgli's Brothers").  Instead of the film's more generic "we're special!" with which Mowgli's buddy Bhoot tries to console him, the short story very clearly insists on the animals' instinctive recognition of human superiority.  By the same token, the film displaces just about all of the nastiness of human nature (aside from some children being jerks) onto Lockwood, the aforementioned hunter; the villagers, it is made clear, have every right to want to eliminate Shere Khan (who is eating their cattle and, of course, has a history of eating them as well).  Notably, Mowgli never speaks with another human being, although the stories emphasize that he picks up the language very quickly--a kind of distancing that makes it easier for him to abandon the village at the end in order to return to the jungle.

Structurally, as the film makes explicit in Kaa's concluding voiceover, Lockwood and Shere Khan are two aspects of the same violation of jungle law.  Early on, Bagheera explains to Mowgli that hunting for food is both "sacred" and a "right," but one must never hunt for pleasure.  Shere Khan, who kills cows for the fun of it (an especial violation of the law, as it brings humans into the jungle seeking vengeance), is the animal equivalent of Lockwood, a sportsman who displays rather than eats his kills.  (It doesn't help that Lockwood's trophies include half of one of Hathi's tusks and, alas, the taxidermied Bhoot.) Lockwood's implied alcoholism functions similarly to Shere Khan's limp, inasmuch as both have problems with mobility (and, unfortunately for Lockwood, aiming).  Moreover, it is clearly the manner of killing that is also at issue.  First, in a reworking of the original, Akela evicts Mowgli from the pack for saving him with fire, a human weapon; later, Lockwood gifts Mowgli a knife with which to hunt.  Mowgli's success at killing Shere Khan (here, with the help of elephants instead of buffalo) is the moment when he truly establishes himself as a successful man-wolf hybrid: Mowgli can kill Shere Khan because he isn't a wolf, and uses the knife to finally finish him off, but he also kills using the same intimacy prescribed by jungle law.  Lockwood, by contrast, uses a gun, and the gunsight paradoxically makes him unable to see his own oncoming death.  Having erased both the law-breakers and the overly-hidebound from the narrative--Akela dies fighting with Shere Khan, another deviation from Kipling--the film leaves the field open for Mowgli's creativity to rejuvenate jungle law.  Being different, rather than being human, turns out to save the day--and yet, in the end, Mowgli's difference remains predicated on his being human.

 

Brief note: In the House in the Dark of the Woods

Where there are fairy tales, there are often forests; where there is American Gothic, there are also forests.  Laird Hunt's recent In the House in the Dark of the Woods fuses these traditions, yoking "Hansel and Gretel" and "Little Red Ridinghood," in particular, to Gothic narratives of witchcraft and Puritanism--especially Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown."  (One of the characters turns out to be named Faith...)   Most of the plot, which as we discover near the end actually begins in medias res, is told in the first person by a young wife known only by her wifely identity, Goody.  Goody lives with her clearly abusive husband and possibly autistic son in an isolated cabin, although close to some of the "first folk" who still occupy the nearby lands.  Her wanderings through the woods lead her to three women: Captain Jane, a mysterious woman in a magical cloak and affinities with the wolves; Eliza, a beautiful young woman (or so, at least, she seems), who is for seem reason trapped in an Edenic house and lands (or so, at least, they seem); and Granny Someone, a stereotypical witch who sends Goody on a classic fetch quest.  All three of these women are under the power of a mysterious being known only as Red Boy, who controls not only the woods, but the very identities of all three women: "We are all what Red Boy has told us we are," Captain Jane tells Goody (loc. 1220).  The reader up on their colonial America will expect that Red Boy, a competitor to God, must be Satan, although the novel never quite affirms that interpretation.  

I'm going to talk about some key aspects of the plot, so let's go below the fold. 

Yawn

A colleague recently remarked that boredom is part of the educational process: not all learning can be made "entertaining," and there are times when mastering a subject means doing a lot of dull work (repetition, dealing with "dry" texts, reviewing previous lessons, etc.).  The "discipline" in discipline, in other words.  I was thinking the other day, though, of the kinds of boredom inherent in teaching that the instructor, too, has to overcome.  At the most basic level, most of us eventually develop a stable repertoire of courses that we are expected to offer on a regular basis--the lower-division survey course, for example--that, because of our other professional obligations, cannot be revised extensively on any regular basis.  (For those of us with heavier teaching loads, having courses that eventually don't need extensive prep time is essential, especially when you hit that phase of your career when you are also expected to do a lot of service work.)  That's particularly the case if the works on the syllabus were designed to "talk" to each other, in which case removing one can cause aggravating domino effects down the line.  Similarly, it often becomes clear that some works consistently resonate with the local student population and others consistently don't, which means that the former tend to appear more often on one's syllabus and the latter less (or not at all); this leads to situations like teaching Jane Eyre in four classes out of six, as I once did many years ago.  (I'm a big fan of Jane Eyre! Great novel! But there are limits!)   And some of the repetitive drills that bore students also bore the instructors.  

I suppose some might argue that you should be upfront with the students about this, in the interests of authenticity, or the production of empathy, or the demonstrated of a shared (lack of) affect, etc.  A professor from my undergraduate days was, in fact, rather notorious for "being himself" in that manner, and had a habit of telling students things like "wow, I just don't feel like teaching today"; while I gather the students may have made sympathetic noises in class, the noises they made outside of class sure as heck weren't.  ("Great," one of his students said to me one day, "I guess we can leave now?") Putting aside the useful reminder that the student responses to personal revelations that you see may not be the student responses that you don't, the "discipline" in discipline pertains here too.  While the reasons for boredom may be different ("I've taught this poem so many times I can recite it backwards while balancing on one foot on top of a hardboiled egg"), the necessity of modeling how to do the work remains.  There is always something that can reanimate an overfamiliar text--a discussion session, a question, a serendipitous article or monograph (on a totally different subject, even), a new pedagogical technique...

 

Brief note: Melmoth

One of the worst things you can do in a Gothic narrative is travel, and Sarah Perry's Melmoth features one inset narrative after another of migrants, whether from another town or (more usually) another country.  As the title suggests, the novel is loosely inspired by Charles Robert Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) and borrows its structure, with overtones of the legends of the Wandering Jew and Faust, the Pilgrim's Progress, John Foxe's Acts and Monuments (Alice Benet's story is lifted from that of Rose Allin), and (perhaps) William Godwin's St. Leon (1799).  Perry's Melmoth, however, is not the man who scoffed at Christ en route to Calvary, but rather a woman who saw Christ's empty tomb and "denied what she'd seen" (69).  This subtle shift in the legend, which turns Melmoth into not the Wanderer but rather the "Witness,"  transforms its implications: in refusing to testify to the Resurrection, Melmoth equally refuses to testify to the possibilities of faith and hope; she negates her own witnessing and attempts to undermine that of her companions.  Her sentence, then, is to wander eternally, witnessing all the horrors of the world but offering no "hope of comfort" (244), no action, and no alternatives.  Speaking to Melmoth means confronting the result of one's sins, but without the possibility of redemption--the cross, as it were, is empty.  In the terms of the Pilgrim's Progress, she is the Giant Despair, who unlike Maturin's Melmoth has no end to her journey.  

Melmoth's characters are all fundamentally mediocre, to varying degrees (with perhaps the exception of the ex-barrister, Thea).  Yet their sins have enormous consequences: genocide, wrongful imprisonment, torture.  Moreover, these sins occur across religious, racial, and political boundaries, often against those who are in proximity yet assumed to be "other."  Josef Hoffman, for example, is a German child who emigrates to Czechoslovakia with his parents, whom he resents; during the German occupation, he turns in a Jewish family to the authorities out of jealous rage, and they die in Theresienstadt.  And then his own family is eventually targeted when the Germans lose.  Josef, a German, is at home in Czechoslovakia, yet not at home, while the Jews attempt to rewrite their identity with "forged papers" (129) but accidentally give themselves away on the Sabbath precisely because they have begun to feel too at home.  Their quest for home constantly destabilizes, with fatal results, as each tries to manipulate boundaries that have a bad habit of snapping back.  When Melmoth confronts Josef on the street as he is being marched away, it is at the moment when he is faced with another moral choice: does he betray the local policeman as a fellow German, or does he allow him to continue passing as a Czech? The temptation Melmoth offers Josef is that of embracing his sinfulness and therefore refusing to act.  "What is left for you but suffering?" she asks.  "What is left but the just outcome of all your iniquity?" (142) His decision to refuse her, which he describes as "the sole act of courage of my life" (143), is done without hope of salvation, let alone any recognition; after all, he cannot tell if the policeman understands that Josef's brief assault on him is actually the ploy that saves his life.  Melmoth's enraged question "Do you think there's enough blood in you to settle the debt?" (143) offers an economy of redemption refuted by her own existence; yet as we see near the end, in the case of the nameless man who decides that "he'd seek neither light nor grace" (242), embracing Melmoth's despair means, in effect, the nightmare life-in-death.  Rejecting Melmoth, though, does not mean choosing happiness, but choosing righteous action, even though that does nothing to erase all the sins that came before.  Helen Franklin's life of ascetic penance is one long failed atonement; the true breakthrough is when she finally realizes "the prospect of redemption by meeting hope with hope" (266), no matter how dim the hope might be.  

Hic! It's the Annual Horde of Halloween Horrors!

As Halloween is almost upon us, it is time for another round of horrible happenings.  Our theme this year: thirteen tales of horrific romance! 

Mary Elizabeth Braddon, "The Cold Embrace": Guy jilts girl, girl has other ideas.   

Gottfried Bürger, "Lenore":  The dead ride fast.

Eugene Field, "The Werewolf": One leg of a medieval love triangle turns out to have an awkward problem (you may need to search).  

Elizabeth Gaskell, "The Old Nurse's Story": Two sisters feud over a handsome music teacher, with unfortunate results.  

Julian Hawthorne, "Ken's Mystery": Flirting with women who sit on graves is not always the best plan.  

Rudyard Kipling, "The Phantom Rickshaw": A man's cruelty in the aftermath of an affair comes back to bite him.    

J. S. Le Fanu, "Schalken the Painter": When arranging a marriage, it is generally a good idea to ask why the intended husband is not breathing.  

M. G. Lewis, "The Cloud-King": Young woman chooses the wrong elemental, discovers that the next day's menu is not at all to her liking.  

Florence Marryat, "The Ghost of Charlotte Cray": An older woman who has been badly treated is not letting the man off so easily...

Edith Nesbit, "John Charrington's Wedding": Some ghosts are determined not to let death stand in the way of marriage.

John William Polidori, "The Vampyre": Where the fad for sexy vampires began.  

Frank Stockton, "The Spectral Mortgage": A new ghost in town finds romance (you may need to scroll down).  

Edith Wharton, "The House of the Dead Hand": A young woman is unable to escape her father's obsession with a painting by Leonardo.  

 

 

When fiction slides into your footnotes as fact

This afternoon, I was doing what passes for academic multi-tasking--i.e., reading a scholarly essay collection while eating dinner--and found myself yelping in pain every time a well-known historian of religion cited "Osborn W. Trenery Heighway's" Jewish conversion narrative Leila Ada as a straight-up biographical source.  Because I'm afraid it isn't.   I've previously registered my suspicion that Francis Edward Paget's A Student Penitent of 1695 should not be touched with the proverbial ten-foot pole, or even a twenty-foot pole, until somebody verifies that the letters it claims to reprint actually exist.  (For some reason, neither Google nor Typepad will let me call up the post right now, but while the people in the book are real, the letters are so straight-up Victorian in prose style that surely they ought to ring alarm bells.)  At least one doctoral dissertation mistakes Emily Lawless' With Essex in Ireland for an actual diary. This doesn't constitute an epidemic--quite the contrary, there are just a handful of examples--but it's worth noting that the books causing all the trouble are precisely the ones that claim to be some combination of memoir, journal, or epistolary collection.  I have similar questions about an "autobiography" I briefly mention in an article I have forthcoming next year (my verdict: the book sure acts like it's a novel--but while its relevance doesn't have anything to do with its reality in this instance, I'm still not sure if I should drop it anyway).  Some nineteenth-century things are not what they claim to be, and we don't always know what they are until it's too late...

Curses, hoaxed again

I probably would have been more exercised by Sokal Part Deux about a dozen years ago or so, but perhaps because it's Sokal Part Deux I'm not sure what, if anything, will be accomplished by this exercise.  Did Sokal's experiment produce any demonstrable effect on its targets, and if so, where?  Ironically, I became relatively disinterested in theory per se as part of going to a "theory school" as an undergraduate, as it seemed to me that while theory was certainly helpful in formulating questions, "doing" a certain type of reading was a mechanical exercise at best (pedagogically useful--the best way of learning a new approach is to do it, after all--but not as a scholarly life goal).  And some theoretical approaches don't actually seem to be applicable: there's a certain kind of essay that starts off with a complex theoretical framework and then promptly collapses into a close reading or very traditional historical analysis.  Eboo Patel's essay, I think, sums up my response: at some point, your theory will fail, and it's your job to figure out what to do about that.  (That is, at base, what Book One is about; Book Two, for that matter, involved a process of realizing that a historical theory about anti-Catholic rhetoric did not, in fact, account for the evidence.) But that requires a certain detachment from one's theory.    

Because I was a somewhat odd undergraduate, I read things like the National Association of Scholars journal, and I was more puzzled and uninspired by them than anything else.  I could see what they didn't like, but there was no positive program for what they did.  There was nothing, that is, to emulate.  So, after academic-ing for several years, I finally arrived at the position that the only thing to do was my work, and if I had something to complain about, then I needed to complain about it by actively doing something different.  Of course, sometimes nobody listens.  (My polite suggestion that if one is going to talk about John Stuart Mill in respect to universities, then one should talk about John Stuart Mill's writing on university education, and not about John Stuart Mill on free speech more generally--as it is not clear that they are the same thing--seems not to have gone anywhere.)  Still, I became interested in literary history because I take delight in figuring out how books work together, and because I think that that's useful to know, whatever books I happen to be writing about at the time.  And so I read a lot of books that, taken individually, are not always delightful (sometimes resulting in the "distant reading" effect--as in, "why am I not one hundred miles distant from this novel by E. H. Dering?"), along with whatever helps me figure out the best ways to understand them.  But I'd prefer not to talk about it, I suppose.  (Even this post might qualify as too much talking.) 

Transcription

*-Juliet Armstrong, the heroine of Kate Atkinson's Transcription, spends WWII as a secretary for MI5.  As the novel's title suggests, her job primarily consists of transcribing the bugged conversations of the local fifth columnists--otherwise "normal," uninteresting middle- and upper-class types, mostly women--for her bosses, Perry Gibbons (on whom she nurses an unrequited crush) and John Hazeldine/Godfrey Toby (who is, as more than one reviewer points out, an obvious Smiley knockoff).  Although periodically given to fantasizing herself in the middle of romance narratives ("I would be nothing without you, Miss Armstrong" [61]), her life is otherwise dull until she gets caught up in some spy work of her own, infiltrating the local pro-Nazi circle in search of the mysterious Red Book purportedly containing the names of the entire network. Needless to say, this too goes not as expected, as Juliet winds up inadvertently causing the death of a servant and contributing directly to an even ghastlier death later on.  (Both the dullness of intelligence work and its moral ambiguity are inherited from Le Carre, whose spies have occasional bursts of excitement interspersing the bureaucratic backbiting, personal misery, and self-betrayal.)  

As there are by now plenty of reviews covering Transcription's reworking of spy novel tropes, I want to focus on the relationship between the titular act of transcription and the novel's narrative strategy, including the apparently sudden revelation with which it concludes.  Juliet is hired to, in effect, be an extension of M15's bugging system and the typewriter.  But some reviewers, like Jonathan Dee, have pointed out the linguistic uncertainty built into the transcription system, thanks to the machinery on which it depends: "The microphones are muddy, no more or less attuned to human speech than to things like rustling paper, and her transcripts are full of question marks, gaps, misheard words."  Far from being a purely mechanical act, in which the conversations in one room turn into intelligence scripts in another, the act of transcription requires the ability to conjecture, even characterize.  Juliet is "secretly pleased" to find that a temporary replacement "hadn't learned how to fill in the gaps" (60), but she repeatedly complains about the "daily tedium" (94) of her job and, for that matter, the "tedium" of the records themselves (110).  The looming ominousness of the subject matter (after all, these people want Hitler to invade) is in stark contrast to both its own dullness, the frequently trivial and superficial quality of the language, and the equal dullness of taking it down.  This sort of labor is compared not-so-implicitly to that of the servants, as well as Juliet's own mother, a dressmaker, not least because Juliet also winds up fetching the coffee and doing literal cleanup.  Women work the typewriters, whereas men manage the high tech.  Yet Juliet's skill at "fill[ing] in the gaps" is taken to its obvious conclusion when, as part of a cover-up operation, she must invent transcriptions of a character now dead.  She becomes a scriptwriter (ironically prefiguring her later job with the BBCr, which often requires her to rewrite scripts), producing fictional intelligence that will be filed interchangeably with the factual (or is it?) intelligence, with no government official the wiser.  The invisible typist, supposedly part of the machine, makes the text intelligible or leaves it unreadable; she is visible only in the moments when the machinery fails to work as promised.  

The novel's key joke on the reader, it seems to me, rests in its limited omniscient narrator.  Between Juliet's constant prevarications and (failed) romanticism, in the one hand, and the novel's nonlinear structure, on the other, the reader is primed to think of Juliet as, well, probably not the world's most reliable character.  Yet because she isn't the narrator, we are tempted to relax our guard a bit: it's a given that the narrator won't know anything the focalizing character doesn't, after all, but we may naively expect that the narrator will tell us everything we need to know about the character. Perry Gibbons provides a useful bit of misdirection.  Because we are provided with so many obvious clues that he is gay, clues that Juliet completely fails to notice (and, when pointed out to her, certainly fails to understand), it's easy for the reader to relax their suspicions about any narrative sneakiness elsewhere. We are, the novel invites us to think, Juliet's obvious superior in terms of our abilities to decode such clues, no matter how she prides herself on guessing at words and filling in gaps.  But--and here's where transcription comes in as a figure for the narration as a whole--the reader who focuses on text and subtext may fail to notice the gaps, even when we witness Juliet producing them (as when she destroys a recording of a children's program gone amok).  Without giving away the Big Reveal,* one of the most significant moments in the novel involves Juliet performing a totally mundane act of apparent kindness that isn't--but we don't know that until much later on, because the narrator simply omits the next step and expects that we will fill in the chronological gap incorrectly.  The Big Reveal also reveals the narrator, whose text turns out to be much more opaque than originally anticipated; the novel does not, after all, work quite as it is initially presented.  

*--A number of readers have complained about just how well set up the Big Reveal is, or isn't.  There are clues, in addition to significant gaps, but I think part of the point is that we aren't supposed to be able to predict the outcome, in much the same way that Juliet never finds out the truth about Toby, that the car accident book-ending the novel is never explained, that the cause of Perry's death is never known, etc.  The listening machinery does not provide access to perfect knowledge, as it were.  

Friends, Romanticists, Victorianists, lend me your...book reviews?

As of the Spring 2019 issue, I will be Book Review Editor at the Journal of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies.  (My name will appear on the masthead shortly, but I'm already at work.) My time at Modern Philology all those years ago is now paying unexpected dividends! Fortunately, blue pencils, red pens, and proofs lost in the mail are no longer an issue.  

Peerless

Via Facebook, this essay by Mieke Bal advocating against the current system of peer review.  In the essay's numerical spirit, some thoughts:

1) Are "only the less active and less brilliant scholars" really the ones primarily involved in peer review? This seems an overstatement (and, perhaps, rather inadvertently insulting...).  Ironically, there are reasons that you might not want active and brilliant senior scholar X peer to referee a paper, for the same reasons that, as I discovered when working at Mod Phil, you might not want them to review a book--the activity meant nothing on their CVs and was valued accordingly.  For someone more junior, peer review is proof of both reputation and professional service.  In any event, see my initial caveat.

2) I'm not sure who ought to be having the "quality discussions" (the editors? the editorial boards? acquisition editors? publisher's review board?), although I agree that "duration" is an issue.  

3) On the one hand, I'm sympathetic to the argument that requests to cite X can be burdensome, irrelevant, or even reactionary.  (On more than one occasion, I have had to write a footnote that, in effect, serves to announce "Here is X.  X has no relation to the argument.  Nevertheless, X is here.")  On the other hand, I have seen so many articles that would not exist if the author had shown signs of reading X--because X had already written that article (or book)--that my sympathy boomerangs in the opposite direction.  In fact, there have been times when I wanted to be told to do more reading, because I knew there had to be something out there I was missing but couldn't find.  Over the years, I've developed a rule for myself that if I suggest more reading, it's incumbent on me to explain how the reading will help develop the argument.

4) There appear to be multiple levels of "know" here.  There is "know" as in "I will send this to my buddy to referee," and then there is "know" as in "help, it's an article about religious fiction, I haven't the slightest clue who Frederick Robinson is, let's send it to MB because we know she writes about this stuff."  Further, there's "we've sent articles to MB to referee before, let's keep her in mind for later work."  Most of the time, I've been approached to referee solely on the grounds that I've written something that was vaguely in the immediate near ballpark of the topic, not because the editor had ever spent time in my company.  One edited collection in which I appear did, we were told, run into the "turf policing" issue, so I'm aware of the problem--but I'm not sure there's a good solution (even just reducing things to an editor and editorial board won't eliminate the risk of an author inadvertently stepping on somebody's sprained toe, figuratively speaking).

5) I suppose you could up-end the "hierarchy" somewhat by leaving the authors anonymous and forcing the referees to sign their names, but there again you would have a different set of problems (not least because like doesn't necessarily referee like--what if a more junior referee fears retribution if they write a negative report about a senior scholar's work?).  However, here I began to wonder if our academic contexts are different enough that there are unwitting conflicts at stake in how we respectively understand the peer review process...

6) How do we define "adequate"? I have sudden visions of all the scholars working on religious fiction (all...ten of us or so?) being stuck refereeing each other, in a vicious circle.  The JBS article I published last year had extremely helpful referees, but it was clear that the editor had had to assemble multiple people from different walks of life to deal with the manuscript, and some people had never heard of the periodical at the center of my argument.  Even a reviewer who isn't up on the finer points of mid-Victorian Scottish anti-Catholic periodicals, though, can still assess whether or not the article makes logical sense, identify where the author appears to be confused, or catch holes where something has clearly been under-researched.

7)  No argument that peer review is slow.  The only way to fix that, quite frankly, is for editors to keep a close eye on their timelines, pull back articles from referees who don't get the job done, and then expedite another review--keeping the author in the loop along the way.* 

8) This problem--graduate students needing to publish for in-house reasons during the three or four years allotted for doctoral work--does not seem applicable to the United States (not least because the timeline is considerably different).  Most graduate students publish one or two articles prior to finishing the dissertation and going on the market, but that's a different can of worms; slow peer review is much more anxiety-provoking when it comes to tenure, especially when some prestigious university presses have been known to take up to a year to offer a contract (or remember the manuscript's existence, even).

9) And this makes even less sense in the United States, where humanities refereeing is double-blind.  It's difficult to wage scholarly vendettas against other scholars (let alone their students) if you haven't the slightest idea whom you're reviewing.  I suppose it's more possible with books, which may be refereed single-blind, and of course it's always possible to figure out by internal clues, as Bal points out, who the reviewer or reviewee is; I (correctly) identified the Ashgate referee for my first book, for example.  But this isn't a universal problem with peer review.

10) Bal appears to mean by "authoritative mentality" something akin to a herd mentality, which goes back to her critique of peer review's "conservative" pressures in #3.  But surely eliminating the peer reviewers and, say, keeping everything in-house (all decisions made by an editor and editorial board) doesn't eliminate this problem along with it? Publishing still implies that somebody is going to make a judgment call somewhere, and the editorial board is no less suspect to the temptations of ego &c. than random referees, even if more easily discoverable.  

*--Which reminds me that I need to write the final paragraph of a book review that was due on the 1st.  Whoops!