Summer Projects
I think I’ve finally convinced myself that the term is over! Now, I can begin considering my summer projects, since I’ve had a nice couple of weeks to myself. A colleague has started “Academics Anonymous,” an interdisciplinary workshop the goal of which is to keep us on track and give us all a few more pairs of eyes on our work. We had our first meeting last week, and this week, we’re going over a draft of mine–”‘All deformed Shapes’: Figuring the Posture Master as Popular Performer in Early Eighteenth-Century England.” I’d presented it some weeks ago at the Popular Culture Association conference in San Antonio, and my goal is to get it finished, polished, and sent to the Journal of Popular Culture.
Other projects on the horizon include rereading Clarissa with a couple of facebook friends and colleagues–I haven’t read it in about four years, and I think I need to see it as more than a threat for students who find our coursework too substantial. It works well as a threat, of course, looming there as it does over my left shoulder, but I miss sinking into a good c18 novel–and having someone to talk about it with, however informally, is a real pleasure.
It’s also the end of my fifth year at Marymount, and needless to say, I’ve got to prepare the tenure portfolio. I have no idea how long it will take, but putting the narrative together just so seems like it will be close to the death of me. Hoping to request references from some new friends; I’m always petrified about that, worried that either someone will say “No,” or “Don’t you think there’s someone more suited as a reference?” But, for now, I will put off the anxiety by tidying my essay, reading over some initial comments, and thinking about next steps. Onward!
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UMW Faculty Academy 2011
It was great to be back in Fredericksburg for the 2011 Faculty Academy! I was only able to attend one day of the two-day conference, and though I missed Michael Wesch’s keynote, I did hear Amanda French’s plenary on the The Ivy and the Kudzu, or, the Lush Perils of Openness in Academe–a wonderful model of a talk, merging theoretical reflections with a very clear practical apprehension of both the tools used during the presentation and the on-the-ground ramifications of academic openness. Her comments on the DIY university movement were interesting, and I keep returning to the idea of the university as a gymnasium–a place you pay to go to because you know it’s good for you, and if such a formal structure didn’t exist, no one would exercise. And we’d all be lazy consumers thinking we were otherwise. Okay, so I added that last part, but you get my meaning. The talk also make me think seriously about putting my own work–conference presentations, papers, slides, &c–out there under CC license; the fear, on my part, is not so much that folks will figure out I’m a fraud, but rather that folks will deem me such a fraud I can’t be helped. Sounds melodramatic, I know, but grad school really wasn’t that far away. Maybe this summer I’ll figure out a new way to organize this site, perhaps install it on my own server so I can use it as a platform for openness. For my test of openness.
A couple other interesting things I came across at the Faculty Academy–YouTubing the Literature Classroom, a presentation I’m going to crib shamelessly from by Maya Marthur, and a presentation by Andrea Smith on low- or no-cost solutions to university problems, A Job Bank or: How to Engage Students and Alumni Without Spending a Dime. Andrea’s model encouraged me to create this mockup for an English Department internship site, using a Google spreadsheet and form plus MIT’s SIMILE project, Exhibit 2.0. Still working on the details, but I’m excited to see what we can do with it!
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Gender Studies, Bishop
In 290 tomorrow, I’m going to try something a bit new–students will have read the Ryan introduction to gender studies, which has three distinct portions (not divided as such, but useful): an overview, a closer look at the patriarchal construction/rejection/suppression of the feminine, and a section on homosexual panic and compulsory heterosexuality, all the while focusing on the fluidity of gender rather than its stability. We’re also reading Bishop’s poem, “The Roosters,” about which Ryan has generated some interesting prompts. My plan is to divide the students into three groups, and have each group teach a section of the introduction to their peers in a 5-minute presentation. They’ll need a bit of time to gather thoughts and figure out what is most important, plan an approach, and organize themselves, but I think 15 minutes should do it. Then, we’ll use most of the rest of the class to go over “The Roosters” in general, after reading it aloud, spending the very last portion on a prompted freewrite to prepare for later assignments.
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The Rover, Day One
It’s time for Behn! I love this play, and I really enjoy teaching it–I just hope that the limited time we have is enough, and that the disruptions of midterm can be overcome. Tomorrow, students will have read acts 1 and 2 of the play, so I’d like to give them a little bio and background/critical information about Behn as a context, saving the thematic issues until next class. Then, I plan to have students get into groups and select the scene–or some portion thereof–they feel is most important thus far. That should give us an interesting place from which to think about key ideas, images, characters, and events, plus set us up for some thematic discussion next class. Using their ideas, we’ll watch select scenes from the BBC/WPT production, which should raise more questions for them. I’m going to ask that, for next class, students jot down one key question they’d really like answered about the play–and I can’t forget to go over updates to the summary assignment!
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The Country Wife?
Our last discussion in Theater History was taking up the role of the thematics of theatricality in The Country Wife; I wanted to organize our thinking on the theatricality of court culture, the generic features and cultural significance of comedy during the period, and the purpose served by “the playhouse” in Wycherley’s drama. I started with a clip from The Last King, a tool to get a discussion going about court theatricals and innovations in the stage that derived from masque culture, and then I wanted to show another clip from the same film–a contrasting clip that shows Nell Gwyn on the public stage, in a comic performance. I had planned to spend most of the time after that highlighting and discussing the metatheatricality of The Country Wife, reading the play as a partial document of theatrical culture in the Restoration. Sadly, the computer kept hanging! So, I wasn’t able to show the clip that connected the three parts of the lesson plan, and that made me feel very discombobulated. Added to which, folks seemed a little less than invested in commenting on the features of the court masque and what that suggested about Restoration culture. Well, live and learn–I’m working on a collection of video clips that can be streamed over the web or drawn from a data disc, which should help avoid these problems in the future. And yet…
I am also not quite satisfied with the daily summary assignments; I feel they’re incredibly useful, especially in a world where summary skills and accurate observation are being waylaid by opinion and gut response. However, I am beginning to suspect that the class doesn’t quite approach the summary assignments in a fully effective way–making them not useful as study guides, for one. The level of completeness and accuracy I would like to see just isn’t consistently there, and so students don’t seem to be getting much out of the exercise. I’m considering having summaries of each play for the remainder of the term, rather than summaries of each reading assignment as it comes. Perhaps the holistic summary will be more useful for students.
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Achebe and the Center
In my tutorial today on the postcolonial novel and theory, we’ll discuss The Empire Writes Back and the chapter on “Re-Placing the Text,” in conjunction with the first part of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and, if we have time, Yeats’ “The Second Coming”:
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
THE SECOND COMING
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
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Today in EN290, we discussed Bishop’s poem “Insomnia” from a psychoanalytic perspective. I started the class by turning to some important themes in Bishop’s biography, themes which find expression quite often in her work–loss, alienation, dislocation, and so on. This allowed us to differentiate formalist from psychoanalytic methodology, while also giving us a starting place for our return to the basic principles of psychoanalytic theory. For the next 20 minutes or so, I tried to establish a sense of continuity and difference between this and earlier theoretical approaches we’ve studied–there can never be too much repetition! What ideas/images/practices would most interest a psychoanalytic critic? A deconstructionist? A structuralist? A New Critic? A Russian Formalist? I think that working backward, continually, from the approach-of-the-day may be useful in encouraging students to continue asking the same question of different theories.
For homework, I’d asked each student to annotate a poem of their choice using the tools of psychoanalytic analysis, and some poems were particularly well-suited; the one we worked on as a class, “Insomnia,” had been given short shrift in the annotation. I used an example of close reading for theme to model how to start or set-up an analysis, and we briefly discussed the poem as a whole–I am constantly amazed that students don’t immediately gravitate toward the title as a site for analysis! Then the students got into smaller groups to discuss the poem, jot down notes, and so on. Then, students individually worked on a paragraph of their own analysis–starting with a completion of the sentence, “Elizabeth Bishop’s poem ‘Insomnia’ addresses….” We weren’t able to finish the paragraphs, so I’ve asked students to finish and revise at home. If I were to have done this class again, I’d truncate the discussion time, which did run a little over, and devote more to the writing and full-class discussion of their analyses. Nonetheless, I do like the continuity established through revision; there’s just never enough time in the period!
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Critical theory meets on Tuesday to finish discussing Derrida and to begin thinking about psychoanalysis–largely, Freud and Lacan, but including our crazy friends Deleuze and Guattari. I’m hoping to be able to move fairly quickly through the excerpts we’ve got, but I anticipate having to spend more time than less with poststructuralism. I’ve got a couple of handouts, particularly some general examples of deconstructive analysis, which should come in handy, but I think we’ll also need to go over Derrida’s own style as a performance of his methodology. I definitely want to discuss his constant redefinition of différance, as well as his neographisms, but it would be useful to try to sketch out some definitions, too. Even though Derrida would not really want us to. Well, let’s see… we will put our definitions under erasure, and consider definitions!
From Freud, our reading is pretty straightforward, but I’m a bit worried about the Lacan–”Instance of the Letter” and “Mirror Stage.” I’m hoping that the relationship between Lacanian psychoanalysis and some of the previous post-structuralists we’ve been reading will make his work clearer.
I’m also beginning to consider midterm exam materials… my initial thinking involves a two-part take home exam. The first part presents quotations from our theorists and asks students to identify them and summarize the idea being explored, and the second presents students with a popular but still academic essay (perhaps from the Times Book Review or the LRB), and asks them to identify the different critical approaches that are being employed. I’d like to do just one or the other, but I think I really need to ensure both comprehension and analytic comprehension. Regardless, it will definitely be closed-book; otherwise, there would be no end to the exam!
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Spring 2011… At long last!
So, as you can clearly tell, I “took a break” from this teaching blog. Deliberately, you ask? Well, not quite… Though I’d like to think it was a conscious decision. I’m going to restart it, though, because I’m teaching several new courses this term and I want to have a place where I can keep track of my thoughts, experiments, failures, and more. This term, I’ve got a lot on my plate, which really makes my attempt to keep anything like a blog rather counterintuitive, as far as I can tell, but we’ll see what happens.
The term has almost (but not quite) reached midterm, so I thought a bit of reflection was in order. (Three classes + three new preps) + (three tutorials + three new preps) = chaos, of course. EN290, Introduction to Literary Theory and Practice is a gateway course for majors and minors, and I’m using the Michael Ryan Practical Introduction along with Elizabeth Bishop’s Complete Poems. The small class size (six!) really makes for an intimate discussion, but the material, despite Ryan’s highly lucid overviews, is still challenging. I spend a lot of time going over what we’ve already gone over, under the theory that repetition is the better part of valor, but I think it does help the students. The more abstract approaches–deconstruction and poststructuralism, but also structuralism–have proven problematic, in part because I don’t want to water the theory down. However, I’m learning that the most important thing to keep in mind is the example, and the so what; the how, and the why. Bishop’s poems, of course, are challenging on their own, and even with Ryan’s analyses, they are difficult to get at. My worry with this class is that students may get tired of reading so much Bishop–this is a bit like what I experienced with early EN200 courses that took up the story of Robinson Crusoe and its adaptations.
EN207, Theater History, is a great enjoyment to me, though I’m still parsing out the best way to do it. I’d love to be able to focus on the cultural and material history, supplemented with excerpts from a host of plays; however, this means an entire summer of course prep. It’s one of the things I’m planning on devoting time to over the summer months. This term, though, I’ve been able to narrow the focus to British drama from the Renaissance, the Restoration, and the eighteenth century, or the “early modern” period broadly–well, excluding most of the medieval period, except as a context for Renaissance dram, and including the late-early modern eighteenth century. We’re reading a fabulous selection of plays: Doctor Faustus, The Revenger’s Tragedy, The Country Wife, The Rover, The Beggar’s Opera, and She Stoops to Conquer. Instead of assigning a great deal of contextual reading, students are using only a couple of essays from the Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre; the Thomson essay is very dense, but do-able with work, something I try to emphasize every day. These materials are supplemented with handouts of primary source materials and lectures, and thus far, it feels just right in terms of reading material. In addition to streamlining the secondary materials, I’m asking students to summarize every reading we do, as we do it; it’s a lot of work for me, but I’m hoping that the practice will help improve writing skills–and, that the summaries of the Oxford Illlustrated essays will be useful as study materials.
The third class on my docket is EN502, a graduate theory course–this is the first time I’ve taught it, and I’m so happy that I’ve got the undergrad EN290 to complement it. I can arrange quite a bit of cross-fertilization between these two courses, which makes the prep much easier. However, the students here are energetic and thoughtful, which makes our conversations quite enjoyable–though it is a great deal of work, I look forward to the class every night. Again, I’m having students summarize every week, in addition to providing an illustration/application of the theory. The illustration has thus far proven the most problematic portion, as I’ve not assigned any literary texts for us to work with as a class; instead, I’m bringing in pieces discussed in the theory. The class seems to be working well with this set-up–at least, as far as I can discern right now.
More details on tutorials later; for now, ta ta.
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This course was set up as an introduction to graduate study at Marymount, and given the diversity of our student body, it seemed useful to incorporate a web component as well. I teach in both the Humanities and the Literature graduate programs, and my students were about equally divided between the two–a few more in the Literature program. Some students came into the graduate program directly from undergraduate study, some students were international and found themselves struggling with a non-native language, and some students had already built substantial educational or corporate careers. My logic for incorporating the technologies I did was fourfold. First, several students were either returning to graduate study after a hiatus or drawing on the graduate program for career enhancement, and so needed an orientation to doing research in an electronic environment. Second, the diversity of skill sets brought to the forefront the need for a framework in which to conceptualize the systematic nature of writing, literary and cultural analysis, and research–hence the title of the course, “Building Textual Interpretation.” Third, because several students were interested in pursuing careers in education, it seemed incumbent upon me to sketch out a little of the terrain that their students would be increasingly familiar with. Finally, fourth–and perhaps most importantly–I believe that the kinds of skills needed to interact successfully and creatively with the many and varied platforms and technologies available to students, from library catalogs and primary source databases to blogs and web-based research tools, enhances the individual ability to put an idea together from its parts.
While this course was not set up as a radically non-traditional or web-based course (in fact, it was fairly traditional in its writing requirements), a few of the techniques for researching and writing in an electronic environment were in some cases perceived as radically non-traditional for my students. One, who describes herself as “a bit ‘shell schocked’ with my re-entry into school after almost twenty-five years, when we actually typed papers on a typewriter,” purchased her first laptop computer during the process of our class. Similarly, many of my students’ initial approach to research was built on the “research report” model–finding sources that discuss your topic and weaving them together into a new essay. This “research report” model ultimately stunts the critical and creative thinking essential to graduate students’ success in the program, because it neither fully addresses the question of originality nor models the fundamental skills of lateral thinking.
The course was divided into two broad sections: the first half of class was devoted to cultivating the skills of close reading and creative analysis required in graduate study, and we used Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as our primary text. This first half of class culminated in a 6-8 page thesis-driven essay in which students were restricted to using only Conrad’s novella. The goal here was to encourage sophisticated textual analysis, which requires attention to the details of the text and its language. The second half of class was devoted to cultivating the skills of creative research, and we used Pope’s The Rape of the Lock as our primary text. This second half of class culminated in a 15-page seminar essay that situated the poem in its material cultural context; the essays sought to answer the question, “How can a fuller knowledge of the material cultural context of the early 18th century help me understand some aspect of Pope’s poem more clearly?”
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