Snow Days and Voluntary Classes

On Monday, we had the first declared snow day at this institution in eleven years, a combination of good fortune and sheer cussedness in the face of the moderate elements. But a new provost and fourteen-odd inches of snow kept us out yesterday. Today, we were back on, despite some lingering treacherous conditions.

Faculty had been urged to exercise consideration for students who might have a difficult commute, but I hate that particular judgment call. Nothing worse than getting an email from a student that they can't make it to campus, only to see them at the gym right after class. So on such days (when I can afford it on the syllabus) I take a different tack, and send an email to tell students that while I will be having class, I will not be taking attendance. I remind them of the value of the material, but the way I structure my syllabi, rarely is the material of any given day "must-know."

In effect, the day is a free absence, and the students who end up coming to class are the students who actually want to be there. No surprise, then, that the postmodernism class saw about 1/3 attendance, while the amazing survey from heaven saw 2/3 attendance (and many of those who missed were the less-engaged in this highly-engaged group).

But the ones who were there in the postmodern class ended up making it a banner day there. We were talking about Ashbery's "What is Poetry" and "Paradoxes and Oxymorons" both highly playful poems that play around with the way that language functions as pure sign. In fact, one student mentioned the ideas of Derrida (though she could not remember the name), which prompted a quick explanation of differance, in a 200-level class. As importantly, contemporary poetry is not my bag, so while I had a few bon mots to offer, I struggle through his poetry just as much as they do, and so the interpretation they arrived at as a class was ultimately more convincing (or at least more interesting, and maybe both) than the one I'd walked in with.

These were the last texts in a unit on textual play (Borges, Barth, Calvino, Stoppard, Ashbery), and we ended with a casual discussion of simply "what you thought of these texts taken as a group." The discussion ranged far and wide, and touched on nihilism, readerly vs. writerly texts, and the place of pain and anguish within formal play. And I suspect that this was due as in large part to who was not there as to who was not.

This is not so much a dig on those students who might be bringing the class down as it is a reminder of the intellectual joy that arises when you know that the people in the room want to be in the room.

Auspicious?

Just before the semester began, I sent out a proposal to a single high-profile university press for my ongoing book project. I had been in conversation for a little over a year with the Sr. Acquisitions editor, who had made her name in the field by bringing my subfield to prominence. So our most recent contacts had been friendly and relaxed (indeed, at MLA, she hailed me down to show me a new book as I approached the table).

So the packet of materials I sent contained the proposal, a table of contents, a shorter abstract, and two sample chapters: the long introduction, and a later chapter.

She emailed today to confirm receipt, but also to say that she "admired my choice of artists," which in turn made her "realize how long it's been since we've [seen] a good book of this kind," and that she's sending it on to "others," presumably series editors or others in house. On the one hand, I hope that the enthusiasm that I read in this note is more than just professional courtesy. But on the other hand, without a complete manuscript, she probably isn't going to tip her hand too much.

This is the first basically unsolicited proposal I've made to a press. Others with book experience: what kind of early responses did you get, and how should one read this sort of thing?

The Problem of Re-reading

I am not, by nature, a re-reader. Willow is, and many of my friends are. They are the sort of people who, when they have some free time, will pick up an old comfy favorite, and dig right in, sometimes cover-to-cover, sometimes just the good bits.

This is not the way I read. Partially because I read slowly, and partially because reading for pleasure for me can be so engrossing that I kind of shirk my other reading responsibilities, and partially because I'd rather just read something on my already towering to-be-read pile.

Unfortunately, this predilection away from re-reading is not particularly good for teaching, where not re-reading tends to leave you looking like a bit of a fool in front of the classroom, when you don't remember an incidental, but useful detail. For me, now in year five of my TT position, this really is starting to be an issue, because I'm re-teaching enough texts that I am having to go back for fourth and fifth readings--I know them well enough for this to be a little bit of drudgery, but not well enough to go without doing it.

I know, no one really enjoys re-reading for class: it's work, and it has a tendency to turn the thing we love into labor. But I think my particular problem with it also goes back to why I'm not a re-reader (two of those reasons, at least).

This week, I got a desk copy of Pale Fire in my box. I'm teaching it in a summer narrative theory course. I haven't read it yet, though I knew enough about it to know that it was going to be a good fit. And I've learned that if I want to keep up anything like a diet of new texts, I have to add them to my syllabi. Rarely do I teach a class in which I'm not reading something along with my students. So I've got Pale Fire on my pile.

That, and I took the kids to the bookstore today, to kill a little time on a frigid day where snowplay was impossible. They browsed the kids section, while I went off to look for something particular. I didn't find that text, but while poking around the fiction section, I ran across Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red, something I've been salivating over for some time. Since I read Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence this past winter break, I thought that since the Pamuk book covered some of the same historical and geographical territory, that now was a good time to grab it. (also...It was a lovely book that I already wanted and my will power was eroded by begging for Littlest Pet Shop sticker books). So I picked it up, and brought it home.

I walked in, and laid it on the table by the door, on top of Pale Fire and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which I'm teaching this week (Also, Spanish Tragedy and Hamlet--in a different class--and Shelley and Keats). In terms of urgency, then, My Name is Read automatically goes to the bottom of the pile. This makes me actually resent R&G, which would seem preposterous, except that I've already read it twice and seen it once in the last 15 months, and should look over it again tonight, instead of tucking into bed with a new marvelous beautiful novel that I really just want to read. For the first time.

On Calvino

I mentioned in an earlier post that I'm teaching Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler to my undergraduate class on postmodern literature. I'm teaching it following a week of Borges stories, so it is at once a natural follow-up, and at the same time, overkill, especially for young (mostly female, in this section) readers raised on the funnel-cake-and-cotton-candy diet of Rowling, Meyers, and Sparks.

I didn't read it until I was an MA student, right after taking a narrative theory course that I loved. So the pump was primed, so to speak. And for someone who loves formal play, Calvino's novel is pure joy. The second person narration begins with a near-perfect mapping of narrated Reader and the flesh-and-blood reader, and slowly but inexorably spins into pure fictional world, ending up in the literary police state of Ataguitania. And then there is the series of ten novel beginnings the reader encounters, each one a pastiche of a literary style or even a particular author (I can pick out at least Kawabata and Marquez). Add to this winking references to perversions of the 1001 nights, ingeniously contructed mise-en-abymes (an author in the book imagines writing a book that looks exactly like the book we're reading), and some striking metaphors for reading-for-pleasure.

In fact, this last idea is the central argument for the novel: that pleasure is the one pure-and-true motive for picking up a novel. In fact, he ties reading to not only physical pleasure, but sexual pleasure throughout: sex becomes an ongoing metaphor for reading, and when it happens, reading becomes a metaphor for sex (a trope Jeannette Winterson improves upon in Written on the Body). This, of course, was the way in to the most successful lesson with this class so far. Since the Other Reader of the novel is also an ideal (and idealized reader) the frame story of the novel is something of a love plot between the Reader (you) and the Other Reader (Ludmilla), even as it is a quest narrative to find the end of one of the frame stories.

So the idea of reading for pleasure and sex for pleasure are conflated into the same plot, and of course, the novel ends (a full narrative after all) with "you" and Ludmilla married. yay, and all.

The thing is, this idealized plot is peppered all the way along with bad readers: Irnerio, the sexually ambiguous non-reader who only sees books for their value as beautiful objects; Professor Uzzi-Tuzii, the shriveled, dusty professor of a dead language who is caught up in grammar, syntax, and punctuation; the general of Ataguitania, who uses his control of access to books as a means to power; Cavedagna, the hurried little publisher who has lost the pleasure of books to the bustle of putting books together; and most disturbingly, Lotaria (a purposeful re-gendering of the Lothario, who is in it not for the love of it, but for the chase). Lotaria is Ludmilla's sister, and is as passionate about books as her sibling. But Lotaria is a ball-breaking, militant feminist, who reduces characters, settings and situations to "general concepts" (and a litany of academic jargon is inserted here). Later in the novel, she reduces writing down further, processing it electronically to garner word frequency, thereby deducing the major themes.

Now it's hardly coincidental that Calvino's book, which doesn't hold up too well to feminist scrutiny, chooses a feminist for his radical academic target. But add to this the fact that each of these bad readers is, in some ways made either sexually undesireable or sexually suspect, and the critique gets a little more vicious. The insinuation (and I might, under such a reading, be compelled to take this personally, as a somewhat sexually ambiguous, feminist, professor of literature) is that folks who read in these bad ways, are both undesireable as readers, and therefore ineligible for the pleasures of reading.

Well, harrumph.

The thing is, those students in my class, the ones who both identify as "pleasure readers"--they were the students who inevitably complained about the novel's frustrated beginnings: a string of coitus interruptus if you will. They complained that they were so frustrated with the stops and starts that had it not been for class, they'd have never finished the novel. Conversely, the students who enjoyed the novel found themselves mocked via the figures of Lotaria and Professor Uzzi-Tuzii.

I wonder whether, in much of today's reading climate, Calvino hasn't created a novel that can only (or mostly only) be loved by those it mocks, while it shuts out those readers it adulates. That is, I first read this novel for pleasure. and every time I've read it since, I derive a kind of pleasure in it. But I've also always seen my own reading practices mocked somehow.

But perhaps I am the audience. Perhaps Calvino is invoking the Lotarias and Uzzi-Tuzii's of the world, and reminding us that there is still pleasure to be had in books, not just politics, or even a livelihood. I'm not ready to renounce my politicized interpretive strategies or even my pickiness about grammar, but I do need to remind myself now and again that not every book needs to be the subject of my teaching and writing. Unfortunately, I've got enough of a backlog on that, that the pleasure reading will wait.

A Class is its Students

At the beginning of every semester, I tweak the syllabus, look at the roster, check the room out beforehand, and think about which lessons will still work and which need to be revisited, or created from scratch.

And despite all of that work, how well a class goes often depends not on that immaculate preparation but the ten or twenty-five, or forty people in the room. Take for example my later British Lit survey. In the past five years, I've taught roughly 11 sections of the class. I've had some really solid ones and one or two stinkers (and even those had bright spots). But I'll admit: even after switching up some themes and texts last fall, I'm still kinda bored with the class. Evals have been very good, but have sort of plateaued off, and the occasional negative or even constructive comments I get are of the damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't variety (seriously, the two lowest aggregate scoring ones said, on one hand, "more open class discussion," and the other said, "more lecture"!). The point is, I feel like I've kind of maxed out my own personal reward from the class.

Until this semester. I expected the same-old-thing, but the 27 people in the room are totally rocking it out. I didn't need to do the whole "Crazy Ol' Blake" routine, and when I started up my riff on Wordsworth's sorta self-serving and kinda arrogant criteria for the poet (Really, you think your soul is more comprehensive than mine?), the students totally stepped up and defended the entire project--using evidence from the preface to the Lyrical Ballads. I mean, that's the ideal scenario, but it's never gotten even close to happen. These folks have ideas about texts, and the backbones to express and defend them. I'm totally in love with them.

Meanwhile, my course of postmodern lit (a gen-ed) is only in its second iteration. The first one started off fairly roughly, but ended up being a lot of fun. So I made some fairly substantial modifications to the beginning of the course, and was really excited to get back into it this semester. But after the very full first day of class, and I discover that most of my students think postmodern lit is written by Stephanie Meyers, Jodi Picoult, and Nicholas Sparks. I've been pulling all of my best tricks out of the bag in the first three weeks, and I'm dying here. I got a moderately good discussion out of the conflation of reading and sex in Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night..., but I had to resort to some pretty cheap tricks to do that.

So I thought I'd have one great class, and one just-ok class this semester, and so far that's turned out to be true. But with the actual classes flipped around.

This reminds me that students themselves have a responsibility for how classes proceed. My sense is that we often enforce this with participation grades and such, and there are a variety of lesson-planning strategies built around hedging against this fact (several usefully noted in a recent post at ProfHacker). But I also want us to think about how we can convey that responsibility to our students.

One way that I do it is that when I do midterm evals, I ask students to make a column for things I can control, but also things that they can control, and then suggest that some of those suggestions will become specific criteria for class participation. But this is still a bit more whip than carrot. If you're reading, and have other ideas, I'd love to hear them. Once we've exhausted our own tactics for livening up a classroom, how do we convey to student their responsibility for doing so?

The Grad Course: Metatheatre and Metadrama

In designing the graduate course I'm teaching this semester, I looked to the common themes of my favorite and most teachable plays, and the common theme is, almost invariably, texts that play formally and thematically with the boundaries between performance and reality. This is a theme that connects in an unexpected way with my research, on staged life-writing, and as a result, it's become a course in which the critical conversation is a fairly new topic of concerted study.

The curious thing is that this central idea is a fairly old one, with foundational books on the topic dating back to the 60s, but it's never been a particularly faddish scholarly line, which is to say that the history of metatheatrical criticism doesn't really feature a spike or a lull. The bad news about that is that the most ambitious students are not likely to find it professionally sexy on the front end, but since it's an MA level course (as opposed to a seminar), there are lots of ways in, in terms of the texts and the critical schools of thought that approach them.

The primary texts in the course could read like a (spotty) survey of (non-realistic drama, with a particular emphasis on the 20th c.:

• Beckett, Krapp's Last Tape
  
• Anonymous, Mankynde
• Medwall, Fulgens and Lucres
• Marlowe, Dr. Faustus
• Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy
  
• Shakespeare, The Tempest, Midsummer, Hamlet
• Beaumont and Fletcher, The Knight of the Burning Pestle
• Sheridan, The Critic
• Villiers, The Rehearsal
• Pirandello, Six Characters and the remainder of the theatre trilogy
• Brecht, The Caucasian Chalk Circle
• Genet, The Balcony
• Weiss, Marat/Sade
• Gambaro, Information for Foreigners
• Handke, Offending the Audience
  
• The Performance Group, Dionysus in 69
• Stoppard, R&G, Travesties
  
• Soyinka, Death and the King's Horseman
• Walcott, Pantomime
• Suzan-Lori Parks, Venus
• Wertenbaker, Our Country's Good, Love of the Nightingale
• Valdez, Zoot Suit
• Churchill, Cloud 9
• Schenkar, The Universal Wolf

Ultimately, my hope is to use the framework of metadrama to introduce these students to a wider range of drama than they've perhaps been exposed to, and to raise a number of other theoretical concerns through this basically formal lens. And finally, this frame is designed to get students to think about these plays as both literature and performance, a double lens with which scholars on both side of the disciplinary aisle struggle.

So far, the class has been pretty game, willing to read and think historically, theoretically, and in one case already, physically. We'll see how the rest of the semester progresses, and whether my five weeks before the 20th century material is a success.

Stretched Thin

It's been a rough week. Junebug's virus has turned out to be RSV which has turned into bronchiolitis, and may have even developed into a mild case of pneumonia. There's an ear infection in there, too. So since Friday, we've been to the doctor's office four times, and again tomorrow, all of which is the alternative to admitting him into the hospital. Through it all, he's been a total champ, and as he begins to feel better (despite the somewhat labored breathing, and hideous cough) he's been super smiley, which is all the sadder with his face slightly puffy from the inflamed sinuses and coated entirely in snot and tears.

So in between the temp-taking and the oral medicine administering (we're on our second anti-biotic now) and the diffuser with albuterol vapor and blah blah blah, Willow and I are both trying to keep our semesters from falling apart. Willow, teaching comp this semester, has been in conferences this week for first papers, while I've been trying to pull together materials for texts as diverse as--seriously--Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler, and finally, the pairing of Marlowe's Dr. Faustus and Shakespeare's The Tempest.

I've been lucky so far with forgiving classes: while the postmodernism class has needed some pulling along (half of that class cites Stephanie Meyer, Jodi Picoult or Nicholas Sparks as a favorite author), the survey class has been totally rocking my world--today students asked questions like whether Wordworth's ideal poet's "more comprehensive soul" was innate or a learned quality, and whether the democratic impulses of his poetry actually translated into a readership that included the "common man" he so valorized. But still, I've got two Renaissance plays to prep for grad students on Thursday, and the insane Jan Svankmajer film version of Faust that I may want to screen some clips of to watch in class, and a set of quizzes to grade and a another set of worksheets on Borges to collate into one usable document and...

I'm on childcare duty tomorrow, with a Doctor's appointment at 11am.