Ruthless storytelling

If you know me, you know that it is relatively rare for me to feel of a new work of criticism that I MUST READ IT RIGHT NOW - I am more likely to say that about the new Lee Child novel. But it does occasionally happen, and has happened happily just now in the form of voracious consumption of Joseph North's Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History. I can't say that I share Joe's politics, but I love his account of criticism and its tug-of-war with scholarship over the twentieth century: this is a fascinating, highly readable and often very funny book, essential I think for anyone working in Anglophone literary studies. I'm definitely thinking of adding it at the end of my MA seminar syllabus, if I ever teach that course again, not least for the ruthlessness and delicacy with which he "close reads" the style of other critics. And look at this comment, in a close reading of some sentences by George Levine in which North detects "the more disturbing tones of the underlying sensibility . . . a sensibility to which equality itself has something of the taste of a necessary evil. It is this underlying sensibility that the rhetorics of critical thinking and diversity, properly executed, are usually able to manage and conceal. I note that critiques offered at the level of sensibility are sometimes read as ad hominem attacks, and I certainly do not offer mine in that sense" -- hahaha, must borrow a version of that gesture to use myself, as I am a strong believer in the value of sensibility as an indicator of motives and values, and have often been shot down in meetings on exactly the ad hominem charge!

Things I would ask Joe about if I were a respondent to the book on a panel (but am too lazy to write out properly): (a) What about Barthes? He supports the story, in some sense (think of his criticism veering much more strongly to Michelet and to photographs and drawings rather than to literary work more traditionally conceived), but it seems hard to explain how Sedgwick and Miller stand out so much without at least a nod to the joyful playful contributions of RB; (b) Principled neglect of institutional histories, expansion of higher education and the probable contraction of some of its more luxurious US franchises? (c) What about Maggie Nelson and The Argonauts? Surprising lack of mention of the extent to which arts must supplement both criticism and scholarship in the kind of political project he imagines (this may have something to do with the oddity of T. S. Eliot). Again, instititional contexts, job market, jobs moving to teaching writing and often creative writing - surely there is some hope in that realm along the lines he discerns here.

"The telluric hum"

I really liked David Kurnick's Public Books essay on Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels. Worth reading in its entiretly, but here's what especially captured my attention (I've only read the first installment, will probably get to the others in coming weeks, but this resonates very strongly with my sense of what's most interesting in the series):

What gives unity to the rush of events is Lenù’s sense that Lila’s is the more genuine intellect, hers the more authentic relation to body, mind, action. Lenù’s most persistent fear is that her achievements are pallid reflections of the acumen that vibrates almost painfully from Lila. But this suspicion never settles for long into anything as predictable as competition or envy; Ferrante volatilizes every social and emotional situation. In a thrilling scene toward the end of The Story of a New Name, Lenù, just having published her first book, visits Lila on the floor of the sausage factory. She has convinced herself that she wants to thank Lila for her inspiration, to confess that what’s best in the novel derives from their friendship. Lenù comes, in other words, half in bad faith, and Lila senses it.

Reeking of offal and shrugging off the complaints of her supervisor, Lila launches into a relentless, apparently left-field account of the new world of computer programing in which she’s become immersed in the hours after work. Lenù is crestfallen—but rapt, too—to find her friend’s correspondence course–derived obsession with early digital technology more riveting, even to Lenù herself, than her own authorship. But Lila’s revenge is, as ever, also an invitation: “She was explaining to me that I had won nothing,” Lenù writes, “that in the world there is nothing to win, that her life was full of varied and foolish adventures as much as mine, and that time simply slipped away without any meaning, and it was good just to see each other every so often to hear the mad sound of the brain of one echo in the mad sound of the brain of the other.” The Neapolitan novels offer the truest account I know of the telluric hum of being in the presence of a challenging mind, the shaming, tensed pleasure of trying to keep up.

I had to start the first installment a few times before I really got into it (insofar as one is now a Knausgaardian or a Ferrantista, I am the former!), but I gradually realized as I made myself read on that the novel actually has something that reminds me of one of my lifetime favorites, Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows. That is probably the best book about sisters, love and rivalry that I know (I thought also a bit of Sybille Bedford's great novel A Compass Error).

Here are the passages of My Brilliant Friend that compelled me to flag them. First, the description of the shoes Lila designs (and yes, it's surely an echo of those shoes in Madame Bovary!):

Once she showed me the designs for shoes that she wanted to make with her brother, both men's and women's. They were beautiful designs, drawn on graph paper, rich in precisely colored details, as if she had had a chance to examine shoes like that close up in some world parallel to ours and then had fixed them on paper. In reality she had invented them in their entirety and in every part, as she had done in elementary school when she drew princesses, so that, although they were normal shoes, they didn't resemble any that were seen in the neighbhoood, or even those of the actresses in the photo novels.

The letter Lila writes to Lenu who is away in Ischia:

It was from Lila. I tore open the envelope. There were five closely written pages, and I devoured them, but I understood almost nothing of what I read. It may seem strange today, and yet it really was so: even before I was overwhelmed by the contents, what struck me was that the writing contained Lila's voice. Not only that. From the first lines I thought of The Blue Fairy, the only text of hers that I had read, apart from our elementary-school homework, and I understood what, at the time, I had liked so much. There was, in The Blue Fairy, the same quality that struck me now: Lila was able to speak through writing; unlike me when I wrote, unlike Sarratore in his articles and poems, unlike even many writers I had read and was reading, she expressed herself in sentences that were well constructed, and without error, even though she had stopped going to school, but--further--she left no trace of effort, you weren't aware of the artifice of the written word. I read and I saw her, I heard her. The voice set in the writing overwhelmed me, enthralled me even more than when we talked face to face: it was completely cleansed of the dross of speech, of the confusion of the oral; it had the vivid orderliness that I imagined would belong to conversation if one were so fortunate as to be born from the head of Zeus and not from the Grecos, the Cerullos.

And the sequel rumination:

The next day I went unwillingly to take the exams. But something happened that made me feel better. Professor Gerace and Professor Galiani, who were part of the committee, praised my Italian paper to the skies. Gerace in particular said that my exposition was further improved. He wanted to read a pasasge to the rest of the committee. And only as I listened did I realize what I had tried to do in those months whenever I ahd to write: to free myself from my artificial tones, from sentences that were too rigid; to try for a fluid and engaging style like Lila's in the Ischia letter. When I heard my words in the teacher's voice, with Professor Faliani listening and silently nodding agreement, I realized that I had succeeded. Naturally it wasn't Lila's waay of writing, it was mine. And it seemed to my teachers something truly out of the ordinary.

Two other bits that stayed with me: Lila telling Lenu how to translate Latin sentences; reflections on the times characters move into dialect.

"Literary criticism, but in real time"

Andy Martin shadows Lee Child. I have to say that this is an incredibly funny idea I wish I had thought of myself, though I am not sure I would have had the patience to follow up on it, regardless of questions of access!

Reading my grandmother's books

I come from a family of teachers. Both of my father's parents were English teachers and great readers; they met at teacher training college in Glasgow in the early 1930s, and though I have in my possession only a very small fraction of the books they collected over the years, they occupy a place of high honor in my office.

I sometimes tell a story to my students - it so perfectly seems to recapitulate crucial elements of the history of women's writing - in which my grandmother, during WWII, used the parchment pages of the sole copy of her undergraduate senior thesis to boil a Christmas pudding....

My grandfather was an omnivorous reader, possessing a serious interest in Scottish history, a wide range of literary tastes and an addiction to detective novels and "teach-yourself-X" language books, of which he owned dozens (he also religiously watched the Gaelic-language-instruction programs on public television, though really he and my grandmother grew up speaking Scots, not Gaelic, and lapsed into the familiar tongue of childhood more and more often in their old age as they retreated from the public world). I was tickled recently, while reading Pierre LeMaitre, to see that one of the literary crime scenes staged in his first book is from William McIlvanny's Laidlaw, a particular favorite of my grandfather's; the book he gave me to read the last time I saw him was this.

My grandmother suffered badly from dementia in her last years, but she remained a passionate reader: she had always been partial to the North American female short-story writers (Eudora Welty in particular), and Alice Munro was a favorite, not least because she wrote about rural Ontario scenes that resonated strongly with my grandmother's memories of an Ontario childhood (her mother was also a schoolteacher, though they moved back to Scotland after my grandmother's elementary-school years). The last book I remember her giving to me, not long before she died, was William Dalrymple's City of Djinns. I've never met Dalrymple, but he had grown up in North Berwick, the small seaside town outside Edinburgh where my grandparents lived for many years (my grandfather was headmaster of the North Berwick High School before he retired), and they had a proprietary interest in his budding success.

After my grandparents were dead, it was impossible to transfer more than a small selection of books from their house ("Old School House, 4 School Lane" - a quaint address I enjoyed writing on envelopes as a child!) to my graduate student quarters on the other side of the Atlantic. The ones I especially cherished - many of them my grandfather had already shipped to me in brown-paper-wrapped boxes from the local post office by the "book rate" - were the books they had as undergraduates, Everyman editions and a host of other small student-oriented hardcovers that dated mostly from their undergraduate years at Jordanhill. I used some of them while I was studying for my grad school orals: I remember that on my last visit to my grandmother, we had a rather wonderful circular conversation about my upcoming exams - a topic of interest and concern to both of us - she couldn't remember we'd already just talked it all through, so she'd pick up again as we left off by asking me to tell her about them - possibly in that sense she was the ideal auditor for an anxious third-year PhD student with an obsessive fondness for British literature and the ins and outs of academic study!

When I cleaned up my office in December, I came across this volume, which I remembered being there somewhere but which seemed especially lovely to lay hands on now given that it is something I'm currently writing about. I'm especially interested in the ways the page format of the scholarly edition is used by Johnson, so this little book isn't of exclusive utility, or indeed of notable monetary value, but what a precious memento....

From the outside.

Bookseller's stamp.

"Elizabeth C. W. H. Sillars. 1930." (She was born in 1911.)

You see from the list of cities on the title page that this is still the high imperial era of colonial education....

Diligent markup to the "Preface": a strong suspicion of an attentive student marking as the lecturer suggests!

The sheets of notes folded and tucked between the pages:

Up today

in LTCM: Milton!

Milton, books 1-4 of Paradise Lost

Critical readings:

#Stanley Fish, from Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost, 2nd ed. (1967; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 22-37
#Christopher Ricks, from Milton’s Grand Style (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963), 118-138
#Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, from “Milton’s Bogey: Patriarchal Poetry and Women Readers,” The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979), 187-207

Stripped naked

I usually spend July writing something that's intellectually pressing to me, but this year it has been an anomalous month of syllabus design.

Most of the classes I teach fall together pretty easily (making a syllabus for a course on Pope and Swift, or on the eighteenth-century novel, is really very straightforward). This class caused me to examine all of my underlying presuppositions about literary criticism, what an English major should know, literary canons, etc. etc.! I would have perhaps felt the crisis more intensely if I hadn't already experienced it once before.

Often I think of syllabus-making as a form of enjoyable precrastination (I am not a precrastinator, my inbox has tens of thousands of emails that I never clean out and I leave lots of things to the last minute so that I can focus on the things that are really important to me, a syllabus is one of those things that can often properly be done shortly before classes start rather than taking up valuable summer mental real estate).

In this case, though, it was some of the most substantive and demanding intellectual work I've done for a while, and it was important to get it drafted now so that the seminar leaders I'll be working with have some idea of how they will supplement and shape the course with their own contributions.

It is really an impossible task: I have left a huge amount out, and there are all sorts of things I'm not doing at all (most notably, I think, I'm pretty much excluding almost all of cultural studies and all of the more political end of literary studies). That said, I am extremely excited about teaching it.

I am now just hoping that there will be a work-study student in the English department who will help me xerox and scan these book chapters!

Anyway, here it is, provisionally:

Books (available at Book Culture):

Austen, Emma (Oxford World’s Classics)
Beckett, Endgame (Grove)
Brown, Clotel (Bedford/St. Martin’s)
Dickinson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Belknap)
Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton)
Milton, Paradise Lost (Hackett)
Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays (Oxford World’s Classics)
Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads: 1798 and 1802 (Oxford World’s Classics)

Readings marked # are available on the Courseworks site.

9/2 Introduction

Criticism as taxonomy: ways of looking and describing; intensive vs. extensive reading
Literature and criticism pairings: Georges Perec/David Bellos, Christopher Smart/Geoffrey Hartman
Non-academic literary criticism: Geoff Dyer, Elif Batuman, Alan Hollinghurst, Andre Aciman

Readings for first seminar meeting:

#Donne, “The Canonization,” “The Ecstasy”
#Cleanth Brooks, from The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (1947; San Diego, New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 3-21

9/9 Milton, books 1-4 of Paradise Lost

#Stanley Fish, from Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost, 2nd ed. (1967; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 22-37
#Christopher Ricks, from Milton’s Grand Style (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963), 118-138
#Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, from “Milton’s Bogey: Patriarchal Poetry and Women Readers,” The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979), 187-207

9/16 Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (selections TBA)

#Geoffrey H. Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787-1814 (1964; Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1987), 141-162
#Paul De Man, “Time and History in Wordsworth,” Diacritics 17:4 (1987): 4-17

Short assignment #1 due in seminar

9/23 Dickinson, poems and Virginia Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery (selections for both TBA)

9/30 #Herbert, “Easter-wings” (2 versions)

# Random Cloud, “FIAT fLUX,” in Crisis in Editing: Texts of the English Renaissance, ed. Randall McLeod (New York: AMS Press, 1994), 61-172
#W. K. Wimsatt, Jr. and Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy,” in The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (1954; New York: The Noonday Press, 1958), 3-18
#Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux/The Noonday Press, 1977), 152-154

Short assignment #2 due in seminar

10/7 #William Sherman, “Dirty Books? Attitudes Toward Readers’ Marks,” from Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 153-178
#H. J. Jackson, “‘Marginal Frivolities’: readers’ notes as evidence for the history of reading,” in Owners, Annotators and the Signs of Reading, ed. Robin Myers, Michael Harris and Giles Mandelbrote (New Castle, DE and London: Oak Knoll Press and the British Library, 2005) 137-151
#Andrew Stauffer, “Hemans by the Book,” European Romantic Review 22:3 (2001): 373-380
#Nicholson Baker, “Discards,” The New Yorker (April 4, 1994): 64-86

Oct. 8 – Book Traces event, Butler Library

Seminars meet this week or next week, pending scheduling, at Butler Rare Books and Manuscripts

10/14 Sterne, Tristram Shandy, books I-II (5-137), V.xvi-xix (336-41), VI.xxxvi-xl (420-27)

#Victor Shklovsky, “The Novel as Parody,” in Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (1990; Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998), 147-170
#Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), 2nd ed. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,1983), 221-240
#Peter Brooks, from Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (1984; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), TK
#Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Musgrove Ritual”

10/21 Austen, Emma (vol. 1 at a minimum)

#James Wood, “Narrating,” from How Fiction Works (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 3-38
#Frances Ferguson, “Jane Austen, Emma and the Impact of Form,” MLQ 61:1 (2000): 157-80

Short assignment #3 due in seminar

10/28 William Wells Brown, Clotel

#Ann duCille, “Where in the World is William Wells Brown? Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and the DNA of African-American Literary History,” American Literary History 12:3 (2000): 443-462
#Jonathan Senchyne, “Bottles of Ink and Reams of Paper: Clotel, Racialization, and the Material Culture of Print,” in Early African American Print Culture, ed. Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 140-158
#Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 26 (2008): 1-14

Short assignment #4 due in seminar

11/4 Election holiday – no class

11/11 #Melville, Billy Budd

#Barbara Johnson, “Melville’s Fist: The Execution of Billy Budd,” Studies in Romanticism 18:4 (1979): 567-599

11/18 Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

#Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Tales of the Avunculate: Queer Tutelage in The Importance of Being Earnest,” in Tendencies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 52-72

Final paper proposal (topic, projected argument, selected evidence, annotated bibliography) due to seminar leader Friday, Nov. 21

11/25 Beckett, Endgame

#Theodor W. Adorno and Michael T. Jones, “Understanding Endgame,” New German Critique 26 (1982), 119-150

12/2 #Franco Moretti, “Trees,” in Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (London and New York: Verso, 2005), 67-92
#Matthew Kirschenbaum, “The Remaking of Reading”
#Natalia Cecire, “Ways of Not Reading Gertrude Stein,” ELH (forthcoming)

Draft of final paper (8-10pp.) due to seminar leader Friday, Dec. 5; final paper due to seminar leader at a date of his or her specification.

TK

Alas, I am increasingly resigned to the fact that if I work incredibly hard from September to May, June is always going to be a bit of a wash work-wise! It is regrettable but I don't think there is a great deal to be done about it, especially when I also always want June to involve large amounts of exercise.

That said, I am ready to kick off what I hope will be an extremely productive July....

Having cleared from the desk what is for once not an overdue reader report on a journal article, I am facing a happy week with only two major responsibilities.

First, I need to revise the article I got back with reader comments in AUGUST, should have dealt with then but have instead had stressfully on my to-do list for, oh, let's say about TEN MONTHS (relatively minor revisions, but it was a complex set of reports - two from primary readers and two additional ones from editorial board members, one of whom clearly felt that the article was pernicious in every aspect and offensive by dint of its very nature!). It also needs some library work in the matter of correcting to appropriate scholarly editions, which meant it couldn't be done in Cayman, the place where I am usually better off in the matter of uninterrupted work time. Anyway, I am saying it here for accountability (I am not I suppose, on the continuum from procrastination to not-procrastination, especially an offender, but when putting-off does coalesce around a particularly undesirable task, it coalescesces mightily!) - it will be done by the end of the week, sooner if I have any control over the matter.

Second, I need to plunge into the complex but exhilarating task of drafting my syllabus for Literary Texts, Critical Methods, the one required course for undergraduate English majors, which I am teaching this fall for the first time. Here is the description - it is very open-ended, my colleague E. has been teaching a wonderful version of it but contemplation of his syllabus has told me I want to do it entirely differently - I will probably be canvasing for suggestions here over the week:

This course is intended to introduce students to the advanced study of literature. Students will read works from different genres (poetry, drama, and prose fiction), drawn from the medieval period to the present day, learning the different interpretative techniques required by each. The course also introduces students to a variety of critical schools and approaches, with the aim both of familiarizing them with these methodologies in the work of other critics and of encouraging them to make use of different methods in their own critical writing.

I often leave syllabus-making until the last minute, but in this case I teach in tandem with five graduate student seminar leaders who will customize and modify the base syllabus with their own additions, so it is only reasonable that I should have it to them by mid-July at the latest. It is going to be really fun, I have all sorts of ideas percolating about what I want to do!

(After that, The Ten-Week Clarissa and some reading and thinking for my exciting next project on the battle of ancients and moderns and why it mattered!)

Miscellaneous light reading, some of it more brain-rotting than others: Robert Galbraith, The Silkworm (very good, better than the first one I think - JKR is just a real pro, great storyteller - also it reminded me of childhood favorite Thou Shell of Death); Megan Abbott, The Fever (superb - I have loved all her books, but this one has the potential to reach a huge audience, and I'm delighted to see how much attention it's getting); Stephen King, Mr. Mercedes (contemplating a short essay on King, so won't say more here, but I thoroughly enjoyed it); Charles Stross, The Apocalypse Codex (I love this series - new one out shortly, had to catch up on the previous); and finally, much worse than any of these others, Tom Rob Smith's The Farm, which I should have put aside but instead speed-read in increasing irritation - people's lives and pathologies just don't sort themselves into neat boxes like this, it is a fraud, and I hated the way the Kindle edition used huge type to narrate the mother's account!

Blindness, insight

At the LARB, a very good essay by Jonathan Freedman on the topic of Paul De Man:

De Man was a mediocre student (largely because he took engineering and chemistry courses), but he was steeped in different traditions than his US peers: existentialism, modernism, the avant-garde both before and after the second World War — indeed in America, he served as an important conduit to European thought, writing on Walter Benjamin before it was de rigueur, engaging in dialogue with Derrida when Derrida was largely unknown, turning in his later works to an encounter with Adorno. And there remain important continuities between de Man and his European elders. It’s important to remember, for example, that one of de Man’s major late essays is called The Return to Philology, by which he meant a return to a rigorous attention to the linguistic specifics of a text in and of itself without recourse to any humanistic pap or moral, ethical, or hermeneutical hijinks. Whether this is an adequate “return,” I leave to the philologists to debate; what seems important is that late in his life, de Man affiliated himself with a tradition of European thought that began, as Jeffrey Harpham has reminded us, in the 18th century’s demystification of Biblical texts and thence to Nietzsche’s madcap philologism before it rolled across the seas in the 20th century. More generally, explication de texte as a method was rooted, in its Comparative Literature aspects, in philology, and competed with — even as it ultimately merged into — the superior pedagogically (because more accessible) but inferior intellectually (because un-self-critical) Anglo-American “New Criticism,” with its emphasis on close reading as a method. Deconstruction in its de Manian guise needs to be understood under the sign of this genealogy, as an attempt to bring the demystifying essence of the philological perspective and close attention to literary detail inherent in the explication tradition together as a critical method.

Had a meeting today about the course I am teaching in the fall: it is called "Literary Texts, Critical Methods," and it is the required introduction to critical approaches that all our undergraduate majors take, preferably in their second year. An interesting challenge, but also a daunting one!

"I must now insert myself into the story"

A fascinating essay by Peter Brooks at the NYRB on the life of Paul de Man (it is among other things a devastating takedown of the new biography, but that's by no means all).

Hmmm...

Either tonal instabilities in the transition from conversation to page, or else just the most unsympathetic author interview I've seen in a long time!

Souvenirs

Paul Fussell has died.  I can't remember exactly when I first read his books, only that a copy of the subfustian-jacketed Poetic Meter and Poetic Form (it does not at all look as though it would be an exciting book, only to me at the time it was thrilling!) probably came my way when I was fourteen or fifteen via my inspired teacher Deborah Dempsey.  I acquired and read The Great War and Modern Memory not long after that, and it was an eye-opener; I had read a good deal of the WWI poetry Fussell writes about already, and some of the memoirs (Robert Graves, Vera Brittain), but the kind of analysis the book does made me think I want to write a book like this! 

Two bits that have stayed with me, possibly inaccurately: his observation in passing that before the aftermath of WWI, with British soldiers returning from having spent years in France, the thing you might buy on holiday to remember your trip by was called a keepsake rather than a souvenir; and his reproduction of the text of the amazingly Orwellian form postcard given to soldiers on the front to send home.

The weekend edition

Have finished all reading for tomorrow (a good chunk of Jonathan Arac's Critical Genealogies: Historical Situations for Postmodern Literary Studies, Gulliver's Travels and Terry Castle's essay "Why the Houyhnhnms Don't Write"); must write comments on at least a few assignments before I stop work for the evening, but really I am weary and will have to do the rest of them and prepare actual classes in the early morning tomorrow.

The Philadelphia trip today was tiring but worthwhile (fortunately my trains weren't seriously delayed - all sorts of other Amtrak and New Jersey transit trains were canceled or delayed by hours due to yesterday's storm).  Bonus: the birthday party featured two different kinds of cake, both very delicious! One was daffodil cake, courtesy of E. and the Spring Mill Cafe (it is a very good light angel's food cake with whipped cream and lemon curd); the other (I think I have its provenance right) was the amazingly good red velvet cake from Golosa.  My preferred cake of that ilk is carrot or pumpkin bread, not red velvet, as I am suspicious of the notion of ingesting large amounts of red food coloring (or on the other hand why not just have chocolate cake if you are moving in that direction?); but it is very good, the icing was perfect....

I have a lot to do this week, but on Friday morning I am leaving the country for a week at B.'s place!  Will have to take a heap of work with me, it is true, but it will be good nonetheless: I am taking advantage of Columbia's oddly timed election holiday and a week with no actual teaching or office-hour obligations.  It is fortuitous that I will be able to participate in the Cayman Islands Triathlon a week from today; also, there is an 800m swim race next Saturday, rescheduled from October due to weather, so there's no reason I shouldn't do that also.  Due to a combination of insufficient training on my part and the fact that exclusively quite fast people do triathlons in Cayman, I will certainly be one of the last couple finishers, but it should be enjoyable nonetheless, though I will be cursing my lack of heat acclimation on the run...

"Critical Style"

I haven't ever taught the seminar we require of our MA students before (there are 3 sections each year, with about ten students each, and it is left to the instructor's discretion to set the terms of engagement), and making up this syllabus sent me into a minor intellectual crisis when I tackled it in June! What is the discipline? What am I comfortable endorsing in its excellence but also in its representativeness?!? I put out an appeal to Facebook friends and in a couple of other online venues, and the final result owes something to those suggestions; thanks to everyone who weighed in. I felt a lot better once I gave up any thought of the representative or of telling a full intellectual-historical story: it is a class on reading tactics, not a class that provides an exhaustive account of things...

(This is just the course description and reading list, not the full syllabus with assignments etc.)

The reading list for this course includes some of the most interesting and influential texts in twentieth-century Anglo-American literary criticism, interlarded with some bits of the French literary theory that influenced many American literary scholars in the closing decades of the last millennium. We will read the assigned texts closely and critically, both in order to understand what each one says and to isolate and identify interpretive and argumentative tactics that might be useful in our own critical work. Although we will touch regularly on intellectual history and the history of criticism, we will be especially attentive to questions of voice and argument; a significant portion of each class will be devoted to considering the choices each writer has made as they manifest themselves in style at the level of sentence, paragraph, chapter and book.

9/12 Introduction

9/19 William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity

9/26 Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden

10/3 Raymond Williams, Keywords

10/10 Roland Barthes, The Neutral

10/17 *Plato, Phaedrus; Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Dissemination

10/24 *Eve Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” in Touching Feeling

10/31 Jonathan Arac, Critical Genealogies: Historical Situations for Postmodern Literary Studies

11/7 Election holiday – no class

11/14 *Peter Stallybrass and Margreta de Grazia, “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text”; *Frances Ferguson, “On the Numbers of Romanticisms”

11/21 *Gayatri Chakravorky Spivak, “Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and Certain Scenes of Teaching”

11/28 D. A. Miller, Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style; *Jane Austen, “Sanditon” (fragment)

12/5 Jonathan Coe, Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson

12/12 David Markson, Reader’s Block

The third ear

From James Wood, How Fiction Works:

Nietzsche laments, in Beyond Good and Evil: "What a torment books written in German are for him who has a third ear." If prose is to be as well written as poetry--the old modernist hope--novelists and readers must develop their own third ears. We have to read musically, testing the precision and rhythm of a sentence, listening for the almost inaudible rustle of historical association clinging to the hems of modern words, attending to patterns, repetitions, echoes, deciding why one metaphor is successful and another is not, judging how the perfect placement of the right verb or adjective seals a sentence with mathematical finality.

Halcyon days

Nick Curley interviews Lev Grossman for Jewcy (via The Rumpus).

Postscript

The Possessed made me think about an interesting workshop-style class I'd like to teach, which would be an undergraduate seminar for students who wanted to find out non-academic ways of writing seriously about literature. The syllabus would include some essays from this book, Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage, Jonathan Coe's Like a Fiery Elephant - and what else? I have never read Nicholson Baker's U and I, but that might be a candidate - a few of Hazlitt's essays about the Romantic poets - perhaps an Eminent Victorian and some other critical essays (an essay or two by Richard Holmes?), I'd definitely like it to be not just all contemporary...

Students would have their own project - in order to be admitted to the seminar, they would have to offer at least speculatively the name of a writer with whom they have an intense enough relationship that they would be willing to pursue a larger project of this obsessive and personal biography-oriented sort. There would be short writing assignments every two or three weeks, and some workshop time in class, culminating in a 5,000-7,000 word essay at the end of the semester.

(Another book I have been meaning to read is Lawrence's book about Hardy. Not talking literary biography here so much as a personal and essayistic form of criticism that seems to be having a resurgence these days.)

The 2000s

At the Guardian, a celebration of some writers who died in the last decade: lots there of interest, including Geoff Dyer on W. G. Sebald and Ian Rankin on Muriel Spark.

When I find time to look back through the year's archives, I'll probably post a "favorites of 2009" list, though I don't think I read much this past year - 2010 should be a good year for reading, though...

"Motiveless civility"

At 90, Frank Kermode hardly has time to read for pleasure.

On curiosity

I just learned, in an email from my department chair, of the death of a much-valued colleague, Karl Kroeber. Karl has been seriously ill for some time, and I heard at the end of last week that he was in hospice care at his home, but the news still comes as a blow.

If you have a few minutes, go and read this wonderful interview that Adam Katz and Josh Schwartz did with Karl for Columbia's Bwog a few years ago - it really gives the flavor of his interests and character and his wonderful restless roving intelligence...

Karl made a very lovely gesture upon his retirement last spring. It is common in such circumstances for the university to host a lavish but exclusive party, usually for an elect group of senior colleagues. But Karl observed that the people he'd learned the most from at Columbia were in fact his junior colleagues, that reading their work for various reviews (tenure and otherwise) was what kept him abreast of interesting new developments in various fields and that really he would much prefer to take his younger colleagues out for a really lavish lunch at Terrace in the Sky! And that was what happened - it was a true valediction.

"Nothing of the costly showiness of Proust and Virginia Woolf"

At the Guardian, Stefan Collini has a very good piece on the new volume of Eliot letters:

Much of Eliot's editorial correspondence deals with what, to anyone who has any experience of literary journalism, will be bound to appear as the familiar constants, almost the universals, of the trade. Here, over and over again, is the desperate last-minute scramble to meet (or sometimes not quite to meet) the deadline for the current issue, followed by repeated resolutions to have the material ready in good time for the next issue. Here, in dispiriting quantity, are examples of the various ways of sucking up to eminent potential contributors, of well-meant evasiveness with lesser supplicants, and of tactful dealings with imposssibly difficult authors (Wyndham Lewis wins the prize). Here, too, are the familiar grumblings about the inefficiency of printers, the usual unrealistic fantasies about circulation and the vehemently expressed regrets at ever having taken on such a doomed and life-destroying enterprise in the first place.

Apologising to one contributor for the fact that, a year after being accepted, his article had still not been published, Eliot tried to enlist his sympathies: "I can only say that there are others – in fact nearly all of my contributors at one time or another – whom I do not dare to meet in the street. Conducting a review after 8pm in the back room of a flat, I live qua editor, very much from hand to mouth, get myself into all sorts of hot water and predicaments, and offend everybody. At the end, the review is squeezed together somehow, and is never the number that I planned three months before." In this case, he promised the article would be published "early next year"; in the event, it never appeared.