Literary classrooms

My brief description:

As students and teachers, we spend a lot of time in the classroom. It witnesses moments of exhilaration, boredom, discovery and hilarity, and the dynamics of conversation in the classroom occupy a good deal of our attention. But most of the great canonical novels we read are more interested in domestic scenes - husbands and wives, parents and children, siblings and friends - than in school ones. An exploration of literary classrooms - the humiliations and torment, for students and teachers, depicted by Dickens in Nicholas Nickeby and David Copperfield and by Charlotte Bronte in Villette; the small-group dynamics of Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie; the classrooms of contemporary children's literature from Harriet the Spy to J. K. Rowling. What are the risks and rewards of setting fictional scenes in classrooms? And what is the relationship between the dreams of reading and writing and dreams of teaching and learning?

More information here.

My host Dorian Stuber has lined up a couple other really wonderful things for me to do while I'm on campus (and I am promised swimming-pool access too): namely, visiting a class that's reading Clarissa and running a student discussion on the topic of light reading by way of Ben Aaronovitch's Midnight Riot, which I now have a good excuse to reread on my flights tomorrow morning!

(6:20am departure from JFK: just trying to figure out how early I really should leave for that....)

(Just the thought of it makes me think that I might have to lie down right now for a short nap - napped so long yesterday afternoon that I slept very badly last night and am now feeling on the verge of collapse!)

The human zoo

Giving a talk at lunchtime (style!) to some smaller subset of this distinguished bunch. Two morning meetings before that, slightly overly complex day!

(I need a soothing session of something like this. Via GeekPress/Marginal Revolution.)

Existentially sad?

"The book is just the loss leader for the speech."  (Via varied internet schadenfreude re: Jonah Lehrer, trail no longer retraceable.) 

I have occasionally contemplated the notion that in my ideal universe, I would write fewer reviews and branch out into a mega-speaking-empire, but I think that the exacerbation of habitual insomnia by travel would probably render it inadvisable, even aside from the question of whether literary topics would be likely to attract dollars on that sort of scale....

Self-promotional

The full text of my review of Sarah Manguso's new book is now up at Bookforum.

If you're based in New Haven, think about coming to my talk on April 12....

Tokens

Not open to the public, but in the slightly unlikely event that you happen to be reading this and are also in the class, come up and introduce yourself after the lecture: I'm speaking tomorrow to Siddhartha Deb's fiction students at the New School on Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year.  It really is the most extraordinary book (I started rereading it an hour or two ago - I have an old lecture that can probably be 50% recycled but I thought I had better read as much as I could and think about what the appropriate frame will be for this context).

End-of-week update

These Seven Sicknesses, a.k.a. the Sophocles marathon at the Flea, was highly worthwhile: the treatment of the Oedipus plays seems a bit unstable on the farce-tragedy axis (and I thought the actor playing Oedipus was perhaps the weakest in the show, or at any rate his performance was too campy to be at all moving), but the middle segment of Philoctetes-Ajax is excellent (the Ajax staging is just superb, particularly the handling of the sheep scene) and the concluding pair of Electra-Antigone works very well also.

I finished reading A Dance with Dragons and all I can say is that I really do not see that George R. R. Martin will be able to wrap up the rest of the story in only one more volume, however long!  He is temperamentally averse to leaving anything out, and it leads to some frustrating choices in volumes four and five; my heart sank when I realized that the last volume was literally going to go back to the temporal starting point of the previous one and cover exactly the same time period, not to show a markedly divergent view but just to fill out some things that didn't fit in.  You then see a character you care about, who grew and changed over the previous installment, back in his pre-change version, and for no good reason; this strikes me as a fundamental breach of the compact with the reader, just as I dislike the playing-fast-and-loose-with-alternate-timestream thing that a certain television series I love has been indulging in: the sense of reality you have in television drama is thin enough that you cannot afford to erode it too far by, say, bringing back to life a character you have killed off in the alternate timestream by letting the space-time continuum shift and reconfigure everything. . . .

(You can get the first four installments of George R. R. Martin in a box or a bundle, but really what I recommend instead is Wolf Hall on the one end or Garth Nix's brilliant Abhorsen trilogy on the other.)

The due date is rapidly approaching for my ratings on second-round reading for the New York Public Library Young Lions Prize, so I won't be writing much here about what I'm reading over next few weeks (confidentiality!), and I'm also teaching Clarissa again this semester, which eats up quite a bit of reading time.  However there is always room for a little light reading round the edges...

Miscellaneous links:

Neil Gaiman on growing up reading C. S. Lewis, Tolkien and Chesterton.

And I'm giving a talk today at 4pm at the CUNY Graduate Center; I am just hoping it will stop raining to the extent that people will actually be willing to leave their dwellings and venture out into the world to come to it!

Hugger-mugger

Contrary to the impression that may be created here, I usually enjoy an extremely quiet and solitary life!  Am slightly cracking under the pressure of so much human contact over the last week: each individual piece of Thanksgiving was nice, but cumulatively overwhelming, and having only got home Sunday night from Virginia via Amtrak, I was horrified and appalled to have to leave for the airport again less than 24 hours later!

Yesterday's BU lecture was very enjoyable (special thanks to the Light Reading fan, a BU Core alum, who came up afterwards to say hello!), and I've had the chance to catch up with various friends, but I am now completely behind on my normal end-of-semester school responsibilities and will collapse into my desk chair at home with a sigh of relief late this evening...

(Thursday and Friday this week are very busy, as are the next two weeks more generally, but I should be able to hole up this weekend and read the first of the two dissertations I need to get through this month.  I am desperate for (a) some down time and (b) clear mental space to revise my novel!)

Have had virtually no time to read, but I did enjoy Jacqueline Carey's Santa Olivia sequel Saints Astray and Marcus Sakey's At the City's Edge.  Halfway through Michael Lewis's Moneyball and enjoying it a good deal (it's free through the Kindle Lending Library if you have Amazon Prime): I saw the movie with B. last week, and it struck me then as ideal Hollywood fare, but the book is inevitably considerably better due to its having much greater quantities of information and analysis!

The ABCs of the novel

I'm not sure whether this link will work for non-Columbia affiliates (it's an alumni event, but really it's open to the public), so I'll paste in the information just in case. They have a funny constraint: you are allowed to use a sheet of notes or an aide-memoire of some sort, but you're not supposed to lecture, they will prefer speakers to carry on off the tops of their heads! This is good, under the circumstances, as Monday is yet again my long teaching day: I've got a set of undergraduate assignments to comment on, Plato's "Phaedrus" and Derrida's essay "Plato's pharmacy" to read and prepare for the graduate class and a slew of poems about women by Swift and Pope (plus Johnson's "Life of Pope") for the afternoon class...

It would be nice to see a few familiar faces at the event, and if you are a regular reader here but don't know me in person and decide to attend, please make sure to introduce yourself!

Cafe Humanities: The ABCs of the Novel with Jenny Davidson
Date: Oct 17, 2011
Time: 6:00PM - 7:00PM ET
Location: PicNic Cafe
2665 Broadway (between 101st and 102nd), NYC
212-222-8222

Description:

Cafe Humanities is a series of informal discussions about the questions surrounding the humanities field today, led by Columbia University's foremost professors. The discussions are held at the Picnic Market Cafe at 2665 Broadway (between 101st and 102nd Street).

Professor of English and Comparative Literature Jenny Davidson will discuss The ABCs of the Novel

We often talk about the novel emerging in 17th-century Europe in response to all sorts of social, political and economic factors, in short as a historical phenomenon rooted in a particular time, place and set of intellectual conditions. A historical understanding is so integral to the discipline of English literary studies that we frequently don’t even question the premise that literature is best considered in groupings determined primarily by historical and geographical constraints. Davidson asks what happens when we banish historicism from the explanatory scheme and return to considering novels primarily in terms of their formal properties. Come listen to her share some thoughts about the risks and rewards of this sort of approach, as well as considering how it might let us revisit classics such as Don Quixote, Tom Jones and War and Peace with fresh eyes.

For more information, see www.columbia.edu/cu/english/fac_profiles.htm#jmd204.

Space is limited; $10 cover (cash only) includes one drink

Exciting times for librarians

A great commencement speech by librarian and internet folk hero Jessamyn West.

"The tautology hut"

My flight from LaGuardia to Rochester last night was delayed, and I didn't arrive at the Inn on Broadway until after midnight. Now I am ensconced in my hotel room mentally readying myself for the graduate seminar I'll conduct at noon and the lecture later in the day.

A passage I love, from Jakobson's essay "Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances" (in addition to the informal seminar for the grad students, I was also asked to recommend to them a couple short pieces of critical reading - I chose this piece and Roland Barthes' "The Reality Effect," another favorite of mine, not because I will speak about them directly but because they seem to me two such compelling instances of the delights of non-historicist work in literary studies):

In manipulating these two kinds of connection (similarity and contiguity) in both their aspects (positional and semantic) -- selecting, combining, and ranking them -- an individual exhibits his personal style, his verbal predilections and preferences.

In verbal art the intersection of these two elements is especially pronounced. Rich material for the study of this relationship is to be found in verse patterns which require a compulsory PARALLELISM between adjacent lines, for example in Biblical poetry or in the Finnic and, to some extent, the Russian oral traditions. This provides an objective criterion of what in the given speech community acts as a correspondence. Since on any verbal level -- morphemic, lexical, syntactic, and phraseological -- either of these two relations (similarity and contiguity) can appear -- and each in either of two aspects, an impressive range of possible configurations is created. Either of the two gravitational poles may preval. In Russian lyrical songs, for example, metaphoric constructions predominate, while in the heroic epics the metonymic way is preponderant.

In poetry there are various motives which determine the choice between these alternants. The primacy of the metaphoric process in the literary schools of romanticism and symbolism has been repeatedly acknowledged, but it is still insufficiently realized that it is the predominance of metonymy which underlies and actually predetermines the so-called 'realistic' trend, which belongs to an intermediary stage between the decline of romanticism and the rise of symbolism and is opposed to both. Following the path of contiguous relationships, the realist author metonymically digresses from the plot to the atmosphere and from the characters to the setting in space and time. He is fond of synecdochic details. In the scene of Anna Karenina's suicide Tolstoy's artistic attention is focused on the heroine's handbag; and in War and Peace the synecdoches "hair on the upper lip" and "bare shoulders" are used by the same writer to stand for the female charactesr to whom these features belong.