Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Effeminate women

bradamante.jpg[Xposted to my blog]

Yesterday in my graduate seminar we discussed Margaret Cavendish's Bell in Campo and The Sociable Companions. It was a lively discussion — they are an interested group — and at one point someone brought up the ways in which the two armies in Bell in Campo are described. "Masculine" is used to describe the army of men, while "feminine" and "effeminate" would seem to be used interchangeably to describe Lady Victoria's army of women. It is also used to insultingly refer to men who prefer to stay home rather than fight. This led to a sweeping pronouncement from me about the ways in which the definitions of words often narrow and focus over time; it would seem that at one time "effeminate" could have been used to mean more or less "feminine" without any shading — though it was also used in our contemporary sense — but now it is used pretty exclusively as a pejorative applied to gay men who are perceived as lacking in "masculine" traits. We discussed various female equivalents and unpacked the some of the meanings "Amazon" held in the period.

This is one reason, among many, that I like the 18thc: English, always in flux, is just at enough of a remove after three centuries, give or take, that it is deceptively familiar. But upon closer examination there are significant little moments of vertigo, moments which can be useful as an entrée into a discussion of, say, gender roles.

[Speaking of language, awhile back on C18-L Jim Chevalier linked to a useful glossary of 18thc terms. I downloaded the list myself but have mislaid the link and invite you to post it again, Jim, if you are reading this.]

ESTC online

[Xposted to my blog]

Just found out that the British Library is offering free online access to the English Short Title Catalogue. Most, most excellent. Heads up from Stephen Karian on C18-L.

Monday, September 25, 2006

"Clarissa" and every fourth female reader

It is estimated that one in every four women will experience rape or attempted rape at some point during their four years in college. According to the latest numbers from the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network, one in six women overall will experience some variety of attempted or completed rape, and 80% of these are women under the age 30. Almost two-thirds of all rapes were committed by non-strangers, and 17% are committed by someone the victim knows intimately.

And the situation for young women attending college parties and dance raves has gotten much, much worse. The most alarming development since the 1990s is the easy availability of what the Drug Enforcement Agency calls “predatory drugs.” These include Rohypnol (commonly known as “roofies” or the “date rape drug”), GHB (“liquid ecstasy” or “grievous bodily harm”), and Ketamine (“special K” or “cat tranquilizers). The most common of these, Rohypnol, is a sedative ten times stronger than valium, and in the year 2000, four million doses were intercepted coming from Mexico alone. Since the effects can last up to eight hours, women at parties who have perhaps accepted drinks containing the tasteless and odorless drug can wake up in a basement or fraternity house with no recollection whatsoever of what has been done to her, by whom, and how many times.

If you typically have twelve women in the classroom when you teach Clarissa, the odds are that three of them has, or will have, an experience with rape or attempted rape. It’s also a safe estimate that at least one of those three will have had that experience connected with a predatory drug. That bears repeating: every time we teach Clarissa, we need to assume that at least one of the women in the room has experienced something similar to, or even worse than, what Clarissa experienced in her rape.

Do we have a responsibility, therefore, to adjust our approach to class discussions of this still-controversial novel? If so, we are forced to juxtapose two dangerously contradictory messages in our common pedagogy of the eighteenth-century novel. On the one hand there are the familiar feminist and Marxist readings that Clarissa’s death, while certainly objectionable, is nevertheless the victory of the spirit over the polluted body, the dominance of an independent will over the oppression of the patriarchy, and the rise of the empowered feminine bourgeoisie against the fall of the corrupt masculine aristocracy. Clarissa is admired, and rightly so, for seizing her right to self-determination in the way that she sees fit. On the other hand, these same feminist readers would surely endorse the counselors, crisis centers, and ministers that give these same students a radically different message about healthy reactions to rape: anorexia and thoughts of suicide are the wrong path; the victim is not to blame; the body has been violated, but not ruined; virginity is a state of mind, not a state of being; and sins need not be atoned for because the victim has done nothing which God needs to forgive.

How can, and should, the rape of Clarissa be taught to today’s students in light of Richardson’s aims to portray her as an ideal Christian martyr and the essence of virtuous femininity?

Sunday, September 24, 2006

Housekeeping

I wanted to write a quick post here to update where The Long Eighteenth is, so far. If people would like, I'll make this a regular (maybe bi-weekly?) feature.

So far, we have sixteen contributors with access to the front page. Many of you have yet to introduce yourselves, so please remember that it's not too late. This was formed as an international and interdisciplinary site, so your perspectives on eighteenth-century scholarship and pedagogy will be greatly welcomed.

We also have an active and responsive commentariat. Allen Michie has proposed that we find a way to get larger space for comments, but Haloscan keeps a strict 10,000-character limit on comment length, unless we are willing to spring for Haloscan Premium. I imagined, in my paranoid brain, that it was expensive, but now I find it's a one-time fee of $12. I will be happy to pay this when my checks come in, but due to endless administrative errors, I have not been paid yet this semester and have $24 to my name. The widow's mite? I'd rather buy eggs, at the moment; then I'll pony up for Premium.

The other suggestion I have for our prolific commenters (who are truly thoughtful and amazing—I seem to be the only one-liner among us) is to ask yourself, "Could my reply to this post be posed as a post on the front page?" We needn't confine all our conversations to comment format, which can be rather limited, both in format and readership. If you have a substantive response to another post, it would generate more conversation (and traffic) to respond with a post, linking to the previous post's permalink page. (I have never written so many P's in one paragraph in my life.)

Speaking of traffic, here is a screenshot of the traffic we've had since August 15th:



If the text of this image is illegible on your computer, click on it to view it full-size.

The orange part of the graph reflects the returning visitors, the blue part represents new visitors, and the green part reflects the total number of clicks, which includes people reading through older entries and refreshing their browsers. You'll notice there is a natural ebb and flow of traffic, which roughly corresponds to the work week. (For some reason, half as many people read blogs on Fridays.) Spikes in traffic occur whenever another blog links to us or when people post to C18-L about this site.

Our first blog event is coming up, of course, on October 3-5, when we'll be discussing Michael McKeon's The Secret History of Domesticity, in conversation with the author. Thanks to David Mazella for setting up this exciting event! I urge everyone to contact your colleagues and students to let them know about this. I sent an email to my department and found that everyone from Renaissance to Romanticism was excited to hear about it.

Again, I urge, with regard to posting, that we not be shy about it. Many people seem concerned about accidentally posting at the same time as someone else. In my experience, this is not a problem at all. People tend to read through feed aggregators that list posts by title and subject, and even those who read by clicking on the page seem to have no problem finding and reading whatever is new.

You will also notice that there is a new, improved "Recent Comments" section in the sidebar. Haloscan has finally put out its own ad-free widget, and I love it. I hope you do, too.

Thank you, everyone, for your ongoing contribution to this project. Although I am young, I am continually impressed by how effective the internet has become at creating communities of people who want and need to speak to one another. Please spread the word, and feel free to start conversations here at will!

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

The Remnant of the Unimpressed

I hope that title sounds like a horror movie. It should. By now I'm up to the ninth sequel, The Remnant: Life is Very Long.

Now a month into my ninth term of classroom teaching, having taken two year-long fellowship breaks, I finally face two classes full of delightful, smart, engaged, funny English majors, all curious and bright-eyed at the prospect of three hundred years of British literary history. Well, not all of them are so bright-eyed.

In every class I've ever taught, at Case Western Reserve, NYC College of Technology, Hunter College, and now Queens, no matter what the subject or group of students, no matter how exciting and judiciously chosen the texts, no matter how caring, entertaining, strict, or pleading I get, there is always a Remnant of two or three students who seem to wish I was dead.

Go look it up! Somewhere in the annals of my RateMyProfessors.com ratings at each college, you'll find at least one comment reading "B-O-R-I-N-G. Like watching paint dry" or "she is so hyper u want 2 shoot her n the FACE." There are plenty of kind things too ("Carrie is DA BOMB"), and, despite the apologetic comments ("I know she is really hard and obsessed with the 18th century (lolz, C!) but you'll learn alot!!"), I get the sense that my classes leave behind a wake of happy students who've learned something valuable. But in every classroom, the more the tide turns toward engaged, edge-of-the-seat discussion, the deeper into the ether the Remnant drifts.

The problem is that I was usually an eager undergrad, even when I wasn't the most careful reader. I could never keep my hand from shooting up to contribute to conversation, and I know how much my eagerness alone led to me receiving kind help from professors. I never imagined how painful it would be to stand in the front of the room and look out at those few rolling eyes and weary grimaces, those of the people I used to ignore from my teacher's-pet perch.

Things I do to shrink the Remnant:

1. I make participation and attendance a not-insignificant portion of the grade.
2. I talk about the classroom as a laboratory and the need for everyone's voices.
3. I ask them to write for 5-10 minutes at the beginning of every class in response to a question about the reading.
4. I often remind them that admitting to not doing the reading is preferable to lying about not doing the reading.
5. I make eye contact with the quietest students first every time I ask a question, looking for the tell-tale brow-furrow of thought.
6. I ask questions that range from the extraordinarily difficult to the Sunday-School easy.
7. I give research assignments in which each class member becomes the resident "expert" on a topic.


I'd say this makes my odds pretty good, altogether. I've had reluctant students who've said they appreciate that I draw them out without humiliating them. But the Remnant, now down to just one or two per class, remains unmoved. They respond thusly to the above strategies:

1. They declare they're just there to pass, not to excel.
2. They express contempt for their own abilities to contribute.
3. They write nothing down or copy a single way-off-base sentence from a neighbor, verbatim.
4. They continue to lie, waiting for me to challenge them, or they declare they don't have time to read, ever.
5. They stare back, incredibly still, in the hope I'll somehow not see them.
6. They roll their eyes at the easy questions. No meatballs for me, thanks!
7. They refuse to do the research until long past its usefulness to the class.


I plead. I cajole. I contact them by email. I ask their friends what's up. I put the class in a circle. I talk to them after class. This sometimes gets a few on board, but still the shrinking Remnant refuses even to bring the day's reading with them so they can concentrate fully on a space about two inches behind my forehead. What have I done? You'd think I'd killed their goldfish or forced them to read Clarissa. (Still waiting for your explanation of how you get them to do that, David!) I guess they're angry at me for not allowing them to go gently into that good night. I just won't let them fail. I refuse to believe that English literary history is so unlearnable that anyone--especially English majors--should have to take it twice.

Perhaps the problem is my amour propre, rather than their lack of it. I want to feel I'm a good enough teacher to reach them all. I am young and this is what young people do: we imagine we're heroes.

I wonder whether this still happens in elective classes. I'd hope not. British Literature II survey is a requirement for the major at Queens, so I know some of them would rather be reading Bukowski on the lawn with a cigarette, but I've been teaching some incredibly steamy stuff. The only pattern I've noticed is that the size of the Remnant is always smaller in classes with non-humanities majors in them. Who'd have thought?

What do you do with the Remnant? Do you let them do their thing, or do you intervene? How do you wash off all that eye-rolling at the end of the day? Have you eradicated them completely? If so, give me the secret formula!

Friday, September 15, 2006

Open ASECS panel, open tenure-track position

I just ran into David Richter in the hallway here at the CUNY Graduate Center, and he claims there are still open spots on the "Menippean Satire" panel. Please contact him at the email address below with proposals.

“Menippean Satire: New Approaches” David H. Richter; E-mail: drichter at nyc.rr.com

Since arriving within the literary lexicon through the theoretical work of Northrop Frye and Mikhail Bakhtin, Menippean Satire has proven to be a term of flexible application. What it means depends on what work it is called on to perform, and it has functioned in a variety of critical approaches to the literary history of the long eighteenth century. Papers invited on Menippean Satire, especially on the interaction of theory and literary history. Respondent will be Professor Howard Weinbrot of University of Wisconsin at Madison, author of Menippean Satire Reconsidered.
I have also heard from Jon-Christian Suggs that the John Jay College of Criminal Justice English Department is looking to hire a tenure-track faculty member in eighteenth-century literature. Ideally, they'd like someone whose interests include law, but they will happily consider candidates who concentrate on other topics. Personally, I'd also add that this job is great for anyone looking for a small, friendly, collegial department that also provides nearly limitless potential for contact with other schools, as part of the City University of New York. Also, CUNY students make up one of the most truly diverse populations anywhere on the planet, and teaching them is often a great pleasure. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions about CUNY, but also send a letter of inquiry to Prof. Suggs (jsuggs at jjay.cuny.edu), who would be happy, I'm sure, to describe the position more fully.

Royal Society Journals Online

royalsoc22.jpg

[Xposted to my blog]

In case any of our readers does not subscribe to C18-L:

Over 340 years of landmark science available for first time: "The complete archive of the Royal Society journals, including some of the most significant scientific papers ever published since 1665, is to be made freely available electronically for the first time today (14th September 2006) for a two month period" (heads up from Kevin Berland at C18-L).

Thursday, September 07, 2006

Emotional responses to literature and scholarship

Bill Benzon at The Valve has an interesting post up about "tears and laughter" as critical responses to literature. His own post was inspired by Laura Carroll's answers to a "Name a Book that . . ." meme in which she gave Jane-Austen-only answers to questions like "One book that made you laugh" and "One book that made you cry." Benzon feels like laughter and tears have little to do with his own critical work, but he wonders how much others think about emotional response as a part of their work.

I suggested, in my comment there, that this seems to be a common and explicit part of much literary and historical study in our period. I thought, first, about Jim Chevallier's post about the "almost infantile pleasure" and excitement of the eighteenth century, and Sharon Howard's post expressing genuine thrill in the face of so many wonderful, individual, untold stories in her work on plebian and criminal accounts. For me, as I've said before, the eighteenth-century novel surprised me by being not just "interesting," but deeply moving, emotionally, and genuinely entertaining.

In conversations with other people who teach eighteenth-century texts, I've heard almost universal agreement that it is an especially difficult era because the authors seem to expect that readers develop sympathetic emotions in order to understand the moral or intellectual arguments. That is, the feeling comes before the understanding, just as Hume suggests it does in An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals. Those who don't empathize, laughing or crying along, seem not to understand what the author is getting at. Those who do can't understand why the other half of the class is so sullen and silent.

Last semester, I went to a wonderful talk by Prof. Carrie Hintz of Queens College on her research into Restoration-era spousal biographies. Her talk was extremely detailed, learned, and analytical, meeting every criterium for an excellent intellectual exercise, but, at more than one point in the talk, she brought up how personally moved she was by reading these works, that it had a similar effect on her as watching a romantic dramatic movie. No one would suggest that her emotional investment could have compromised her work, which was so clearly excellent, and yet that comment certainly made everyone sit up in their chairs. I remember hearing many of my fellow grad students approach her afterward to say things like, "This is why I study Cavendish! She makes me excited to be alive!" It was liberating to hear a role model speak so earnestly about emotional response.

I've noticed that other eighteenth-century scholars often talk about this personal, visceral, emotional reaction quite freely around others working in the period, but to do so in "mixed company" often comes out sounding like an admission of guilt. Are we embarrassed by our emotional investment in the texts? Scholars of other periods seem to worry that this emotional investment may spoil analysis, but we seem to take for granted, as a discipline, that Clarissa makes us gasp and cry and Evelina makes us wince and laugh. I even feel that my understanding of Samuel Johnson's aesthetics has improved with the refinement of my emotional sensitivity to reading.

And I've begun to bring this deeply visceral kind of interpretation to works in other periods as well. While discussing Donne with my class yesterday, I kept trying to talk to them about why the Holy Sonnets give me goosebumps, and how deeply shocking and blush-producing I find his elegy "To His Mistress Going to Bed." I felt like they were thinking through the poems, but a little shy or unpracticed at feeling through them, which, biased as I am to the connection between the two, I hope to be able to urge them to do.

Are we just odd ducks? Is it that there is such a clear Humean association between emotional sensitivity and moral understanding? Is it that there is a deep suspicion in current scholarship of the possibilities of individual emotional response as interpretation? Do you find that your treatment of the emotional content of texts changes either with the period of the work or with the company you're keeping?

Monday, September 04, 2006

Coffeehouses/public sphere

[Xposted to my blog]

A couple of weeks ago Henry Farrell posted about Brian Cowan’s The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the English Coffee House. Fascinating review and illuminating discussion (in more ways than one) in the comments. Quibble, and not having read the book: I think Farrell overstates when he describes "the typical academic view of the coffeehouse" "as the empirical manifestation of Jurgen Habermas’s 'public sphere'." Surely anyone with a passing knowledge of the period knows that the ideals of rationality and civility were more honoured in the breach? I wonder just to what extent the Habermasian ideal has been taken literally, at least with regards to coffeehouses?

Friday, September 01, 2006

Posts on teaching

Our own George Williams has just posted the beginning-of-the-semester Teaching Carnival on his own blog. There are great posts on how we decide what our students call us, regional differences in student introductions, wonderful (and less wonderful) first-day surprises, and expectations for the semester. Enjoy!

[For those of you new to the Carnival genre, a blog carnival on a particular topic is a post by one blogger in which many various recent posts on the topic are organized and described for you, the curious reader.]