One more nod to using pictures to explain concepts...

I really enjoyed reading all of your posts, today and throughout the term!!!!!

Writing with George Elliot

As I attempted to draft posts about Silas Marner this quarter, I routinely struggled with finding a way, not necessarily to make an argument relating the novel and the critical texts—but to make an argument I actually believed in or thought I could find enough evidence for that I could persuade others to believe in it.  I stated at the beginning of the quarter that I picked Silas Marner as my primary text in part because it is unusually simpler than the rest of Elliot’s work, and I found that intriguing.  Well, I also found it immensely frustrating.

By the end of November, I had become somewhat used to not really knowing what to write and wishing I had picked another book (One I had actually studied before!  Or even one I loved, despite all warnings against such a choice!)  I was thus pleasantly surprised to discover I had a lot to say about Silas Marnerand toxicity—enough that I could imagine making a basic lesson plan focused on it.  Toxicity, to my knowledge, is not something people generally see in Silas Marner.  Everyone is so busy talking about how dream-like the story is, how it has a warm and fuzzy ending, not it is just so nice.  The idea that toxicity is lurking just beneath the surface, never the main point of the novel or even of a scene where it appears, but still present, is intriguing to me and something I might like to explore further in the future.

The fact that it took me so long, several weeks and lots of thought, to get just the spark of an idea for something I might like to explore more is probably not atypical of the way I work, however.  I go through a lot of ideas that I eventually discard whenever I think about what I would like to say about a text.  This class was particularly useful for my style of work because the blog posts were challenging, but informal enough I didn’t feel as if were somehow failing to fulfill the expectations of the assignment if I did not have “the world’s most brilliant idea” every week.  I appreciate that I was able to put some ideas out without feeling overwhelming pressure and get useful feedback on them.  I think that this is a model I would like to incorporate into classes I teach in the future, perhaps through a blog like this or a discussion forum.

Writing, and sharing, things I am not necessarily happy with has also made me more open to the idea of sharing concepts and works that are still in progress.  Normally, I like to keep my work close to me and not let anyone see it until it is “finished.”  Clearly, that is not a great approach if one would like help refining or adding nuance to ideas.  It is much more useful to have someone say, “Have you thought of X thing?” early in the process of drafting, than to have them say it after a paper is finished.  So, even if I have not had major revelations about Silas Marner (yet!), I did learn a lot about my writing process!

Dear readers,

After reading what everyone else has said this week, I was a little speechless. I don't know why it all had the tenor to me of a sort of whirlwindy high-school-yearbook-on-graduation-day, but it did. I felt that same maudlin sense of "but what can I write to encompass for posterity how important all of this was?!?!?!"

How can ENL 200 really be ending? I feel like we've just gotten some kind of rhythm going, and if we did this for one more semester we'd emerge as some sort of superhero team. Once we were all trained up, each of our special powers would contribute to our collective ability to save the planet.

EARTH! WATER! WIND! FIRE! ... HEART!

Deep breath. Ok, I'm going to have to pull out of this nostalgic (and slightly premature) nose-dive for now; just know you all are loved. Here is what I learned from re-reading my posts.

(1) I was doing better than I thought I was.

As a recovering perfectionist, I definitely recall a troubling sense of fraudulence each time I pressed the 'submit' button. So I was surprised to re-read my own posts and discover that, on the whole, they weren't as bad as I remembered. Certainly there were "areas for growth," but at the same time (and at risk of looking down, cartoon-like, to see that I've been scurrying along across what I've only just realized is impossibly empty space) I was doing it! We were all doing it, and by 'it' I mean writing things that for the most part read like passable scholarship in this field. Well, with the exception of Rebecca's brilliant emoji post (and the other new media experiments enacted in this blog), but I think that's a promising direction for a new academic frontier.

While a little back-patting is always pleasant, that's not exactly what I learned here. I think the more important part of this realization is that it is possible to do experiments in writing even before you think you have something reasonable to say. You never know what will happen when you decide to mash together this article and this short story until you try, or at least that was my experience. Some of the most tenuous, questionable, and problematic transitions I made (along the lines of "but I’d like to end by using my primary text, chock full of 'thought experiments,' to try to literalize some parts of Flusser’s more abstract reasoning") actually sounded more or less ok in retrospect. Which makes me think I've been devoting way too much mental energy to worrying that some referee might step in and yellow card me for "insufficient self-evidence of connection between ideas." If you can articulate it, there's a good chance you can write it down without penalty.

(2) The best experiments were with other people.

I really liked working through ideas with you all. I especially noticed this in doing the collaborative posts, but also in class and with the online comments. At least for me, the experience of writing something with Cassie and Sophia felt organic, totally engaging, and sort of magical: 1 + 1 suddenly equaled three, and I loved seeing where our thinking ended up from where it started. I hope I'll figure out a way to do more collaborative or semi-collaborative work with my peers, despite co-authoring things apparently not being a great idea.

(3) Okay, I know I'm supposed to mention specific post(s). Come to think of it, I did notice as I was re-reading that a lot of my posts had this kind of an argument:

"This person uses science or some kind of epistemological truth-holder to say x. They are misusing the truth-holding (sciencey, mappy, structuralist, enlightenmenty) discourse as a blunt weapon when really it's a fine instrument, as we can illuminate by putting all this in conversation with my primary text." 

Given that, I was surprised that one of my favorite posts was about how to read Chen's Toxic Animacies and/as science fiction. This post was about sharing through pedagogy, and NOT about poking holes in people's use of science. I'd like to expand my repertoire of generous readings like this one, and not always be grouchily stalking around like a science-security-guard. That said, and in complete contradiction to it, the post that stood out to me most was my first one. Rusty prose aside, my Chakrabarty takedown was actually kind of awesome, and I'll have to find an opportunity to recycle it one day.

In which I realize how queer Queer Theory actually is

When analyzing early modern drama, my MO is to be as cynical as humanly possible. This is why I enjoy studying and writing about tragedies more than comedies. Both comedies and tragedies expose serious problems with society, culture, and other systems, but while tragic endings acknowledge these problems and their "un-solve-ability" through death and the decay of society, comedies pretend to solve these problems with happy endings full of marriage celebrations and jigs. You're not fooling anybody, Shakespeare.

Of course, my binary between comedies and tragedies is oversimplified. But I reference it to explain why I assumed my readings of Gallathea would end up pointing towards one general direction, and why I'm so surprised that they haven't. When I began analyzing Gallathea, I knew immediately that I wanted to focus on the relationship between Gallathea and Phillida, because their relationship is what has drawn so many queer theorists to the play. I figured it would be easy to debunk the popular interpretation of Gallathea as a seminal queer text for many reasons: Foucault's argument in The History of Sexuality that our current ideas of sexuality are modern constructs; New Historicism's claim that literature ought to be read within the culture it was produced in and that history ought not to be read backwards; and, of course, my previous assumption that comedies, as a genre, affirm and enforce problematic social practices through their "happy" endings. My reading of Armstrong's "Gender Must Be Defended" appeared to prove this point, using her interpretation of Foucault's concept of biopower to read the marriage arrangement and promised sex/gender transformation of Gallthea and Phillida as simply another method of  assimilating the two virgins into the larger culture of sexuality and power in Gallathea.

When Jess and I wrote about Greenblatt's "Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion," I at first assumed that Greenblatt would only affirm my argument that Gallathea was a sexually reactionary text. As the father of New Historicism, I thought that Greenblatt would present ideas that proved how the sexuality presented in Gallathea was not at all radical. On the contrary, reading Greenblatt's "Invisible Bullets" helped me understand how truly subversive and radical my text actually was. The following quote from Greenblatt elucidated why such a play could discuss such subversive concepts and still remain a comedy: “Thus the subversiveness which is genuine and radical—sufficiently disturbing so that to be suspected of such beliefs could lead to imprisonment and torture—is at the same time contained by the power it would appear to threaten.” My ideas that the relationship between Gallathea and Phillida was sexually reactionary, and that they couldn't be seen as queer characters because "queer" is a modern construct, were wrong. Although the play's comic ending may be reactionary, it is only because it is containing the "genuine and radical" subversion of this female/female relationship. My initial assumption about the text were incorrect because they dismissed the radical subversion in Gallathea.

Studying Gallathea this quarter has helped me realize why students of queer theory are drawn to this play. My discoveries about different ways of reading the play have motivated me to study Gallathea further, to better understand its subversive elements and how they function in the play. 

Change is Good

My dear officemates (Jess, Jessica, and Kate Jylkka) will confirm that I have experienced a variety of emotions during the weeks of this course in preparation for blog writing.  I once described my writing process as follows:

“Read, read, read; think, think, think; panic, panic, panic; PICTURES.”

After laughing about this for some time, I then decided to look back at my posts and realized that I not only did not always use pictures, I actually wrote a few things that will be useful to future-me.  Especially now that I am in the throes of *writing* (read: somewhere between the think/panic stage described above) my term paper on The People in the Trees for Mark’s class on Race, I believe that thinking through this book in ways that were not always comfortable was a very useful practice.  I have also experienced, in no particular order, the following other mental meanderings:

1. Writing every week

    ...is a scary and unfamiliar practice for me.  I knew this would be good for me to do because of the scariness business I mentioned above, but it is not something I have had to in a very long time.  I tend to be one who ruminates on something for a long time--days, weeks, months--makes lists in the meantime, and then in a flurry of somewhere between 12-48 hours, writes the whole damn thing.  I wrote about 70 pages of my master’s thesis in two weeks, and had previously prided myself on my 15 hours-15 pages schedule.  Now, in this new ballgame of professional rumination, dialogue, and critique, I find myself making adjustments to what had heretofore worked for me.  To extend the metaphor with another metaphor, let’s just say this game’s been a nail biter.  

2. Change to the routine can be a good thing.

    I am no longer a high school teacher, and realize now how much I had become one.  I spent the last 6 or 7 years thinking about how to explain very complicated ideas to teenagers.  Teenagers are exactly like what you think they’re like, including but not limited to, having very short attention spans, very ego-centric, highly emotional, starved for attention, and absolutely hilarious.  As many teachers (hopefully) do, I realized that not all students learn the way I learned.  There are all kinds--auditory, kinesthetic, those who can do rote memorization, those who want nothing more than to know all the answers and all the right ways, and those who could give approximately zero f*cks.  After many of my long think-think-thinks, but not quite panics, I found pictures.  Pictures became my way to explain all kinds of things, especially what those who said they were not “English people”...whatever that means (and not British citizens, nor Anglophiles).  I taught essays with geometric proofs and geography with dice and the American Dream with triangles.  Of course we did close reading and discussion too, but the larger, and in my mind, more exciting learning happened when we had to think differently than we thought we were supposed to.  Now that those around me give more than many f*cks, I am reorienting myself to thinking about the words, then using the words to talk about them, and writing words about the words.  Strangely, as one who considers herself a words person, it has been a challenge, but a welcome one at that.  

3. This is fun.

    I honestly didn’t think I would laugh this much in graduate school.  Perhaps I spent too much time on the East Coast with old boys in brick buildings with marble floors, but I never expected the camaraderie that I feel around this community of scholars.  I love hearing from my professors that they go to each other for help, or that the graduate students schedule work sessions just to make sure we’re doing the thing we came here to do.  And should we feel compelled to make a joke about this week’s readings, everyone gets it.  Did I always enjoy doing all the readings? No, but they forced me to get out of my weird island world that I spend the rest of my time in my head in, and they aided my process of making meaningful adjustments to work that I truly care about.

All Stitched Up: The Final Frankenpost

In reflecting upon the work we’ve done in this course, I thought about the process I followed for each blog post and how I approached the task of bringing Frankenstein and the secondary texts into dialogue with each other. The first and most surprising observation here was that I had spent very little time in my primary text. I suppose that is the genius of the “choose a text that you are very comfortable with” directive: because I know the text so well, I didn’t really need to consult it very often in order to effectively position it in those dialogues. Still, what surprised me about this is the extent to which it violated my usual mode—which is to say, forcing myself to investigate the reasons for my surprise resulted in the revelation that I had what could be considered a “usual mode.” In retrospect, I have realized that my default approach to primary texts has been strongly centered around very close readings and attention to the smallest, word-level details; in my work, secondary texts have most often served as a way to expand upon and contextualize my readings of those moments. The assignments for this class encouraged a reversal of that mode: thinking about Frankenstein through the critical lenses we explored in the secondary readings required a broader, stepped-back approach that was novel for me but happily not uncomfortable. In that sense, I not only identified an area of weakness but also gained quite a bit of confidence in my ability to overcome it with practice.

Another area of growth for me during this course came about through the collaborative work. As obvious as this seems, the task served as a timely reminder that “obvious” is a very subjective term. In my writing I am often anxious about appearing to over-explain or give too much tedious detail in explicating something that is “obvious” to me. The experience of working with bright, articulate people whose initial readings, interpretations, and ‘aha’ moments differed wildly from my own underscored how unlikely it is for any two people to read something and find the exact same takeaways to be “obvious” and unnecessary to unpack. This is such an easy thing to forget, and failing to account for those differences can be disastrous for literary scholarship, so I appreciated the illustrative reminder.

As to the question of how my views on Frankenstein have changed over the course of the quarter, I think that the “stepping back” approach forced by the arbitrary pairing of critical and theoretical material with this particular text made the novel feel significantly less fixed as an object of study. Especially given the number of articles we read that sought to un-fix various taxonomic boundaries of literature, the juxtaposition of all of these texts highlighted the idea that Frankenstein is not essentially a Romantic novel, a British novel, a Gothic novel, fiction, speculative fiction, etc.; rather, the ways in which it functions in those modes within those historical contexts can inform our understanding of those modes and historical contexts as well as the text itself. More than anything, I think this has implications for my ability to teach literature effectively—and I mean “literature” both in the sense of individual works and as a powerfully constitutive, interpretive, and quintessentially human endeavor.

Sally's Two Cents about ENL 200 and Life ...

This is what I’ve learned this quarter:

1.     The people who surround you make or break any experience in life. Making the decision to begin a PhD program at this point in my life—and to come to UCD for this endeavor—was not difficult. It was the realization of a personal dream that has become a passion. Many of my friends have not lived long enough to discover, let alone pursue, their passions. Always, I remember those friends with love. And I am grateful every day to be living my passion. I am also grateful to have been welcomed into this cohort and into this university by people who understand and support passion—such people are a gift that I appreciate more now than ever. I shall always remember what Cassie said early on, that UCD was the only graduate program she explored where the graduate students “looked happy.”  I think she is right.

2.     You can go home.  I started my academic career at UCD so long ago that the ‘new’ dorm complex that I called home has since grown old and is now being replaced with new housing. I was not a happy camper during the two years I spent here and eagerly anticipated transferring to UCLA to complete my education. However, Life deemed it necessary that I consider UCD once again if I hoped to complete a PhD. Life was right. There could not be a better place for me than this campus and this program at this point in my life. UCD has changed and I have changed. Time has a way of making that happen. I am very happy here.

3.     Serendipity, synchronicity, and coincidence in all things. These might be the new buzz words for the new millennium but I embrace them and hold on to them for dear life because they got me here and I’m sure they’ll get me to wherever I need to be in the future.

4.     I don’t understand the hype about the literary quality of Pale Horse, Pale Rider any more now than I did when I first read the text. But that’s probably more about me than about the work. It’s a fine novella (or short novel, as Porter would admonish me to call it), and it certainly gives us the only first-person glimpse into the devastating neurological assault the 1918 flu virus visited on its victims. For me, however, it still lacks a story cohesive enough to draw a casual reader into the text—but perhaps that’s how it was deliberately designed, again to show the brain-scrambling left in the wake of that influenza. No matter. I took up the book because of my interest in all things pandemic, it served as the basis for a fine presentation for a Science and Lit class (if I do say so myself,) and I devised my (obviously successful) writing sample for grad school apps on the information Porter provided. So I’ll always keep this ‘short novel’ and think warm thoughts about it whenever I spy it on my bookshelf.

5.     I’m still trying to understand why some (most?) academic writers convolute and contrive the wording they use to describe their research.  I understand that academics are writing for an academic audience when they publish but I regret that so much wonderful knowledge will never filter down to even a highly educated group of readers because the works are so heavily laden with institutional and departmental jargon that discourages all but the most devoted (or masochistic) scholar from exploring such articles. When I helped a student in my current TA class revise a thesis statement so that it made sense, she exclaimed with horror “but that doesn’t look like college writing!” Well, yes it did. But the revision no longer contained any extraneous words that confused what she was trying to say. I guess our students learn from the academic sources that we assign that writing should difficult, even to the point of nonsensical. We must be careful what we teach…and what we write.

6.     Nevertheless, pouring over the articles for ENL 200 introduced me to many foundational works that have shown up already in other readings and classes and have enriched my understanding of our discipline.  More than that, they’ve given me historical focus in a direction that I hadn’t formally entertained before this course. Only two articles really excited me to the point of reading ahead: Smyth’s (not to be confused with Smith) “Shreds of holinesse”: George Herbert, Little Gidding, and Cutting Up Texts in Early Modern England” and Justice’s “Did the Middle Ages Believe in Their Miracles?” I’ve decided I must be a medievalist at heart. Who knew? Fortunately there is plenty of trauma, disease, and pandemic in Medieval Studies to feed my medically-oriented brain. But more than that, there is an otherworldliness of spirituality and mysticism that calls my soul. I probably lived there in former life (and died of plague) and I think I would like to live there again at least for the rest of graduate school.

7.     So, that’s all folks. It’s been a fun ride. I’ll really miss having a cohort class with all of you next quarter. My thanks to Desiree for allowing us to laugh and share and grow together as a group. As a cohort builder, this class--along with the great grad school-focused articles Desiree introduced us to early on--could not have been better designed; it was a wonderful way to begin graduate school.

I would prefer not to prefer not to: a quarter of negative negativity

As the quarter comes to a close, I find myself looking forward to delving back into a number of exciting new texts I've discovered through this course, as well as continuing to think about "Bartleby the Scrivener" and the way the text has been deployed in a contemporary context. I have also been really inspired by how everyone has received my ideas and some of the weird posts that I've churned out. You all are amazing! Anyway, here are a few thoughts to wrap up my last blog post.

"Bartleby" isn't going anywhere, and evidently, neither is the renewed interest in the story or the character. I've long thought of writing something about the Bartleby character-type, and I think I have a lot of material to work with now (thanks also to Sophia for being such a great co-author!). But I also think that this series of posts has made me think about the rhetoric surrounding the story, and that  a rhetorical analysis or a deconstruction of the debate might actually be something I'm more interested in pursuing.

I read some incredible articles that I hope to engage with more in the future. "Necropolitics" by Mbembe took me by surprise; I was inspired both by his frank writing style and the massive scope and implications of his work. Meanwhile, Christopher Nealon's "Affect, performativity, and actually existing poetry" got me thinking about the dichotomy of American and European philosophical discourse and the relationship of discourse to place. It also made me think about poetry as a form of rhetoric in a community, a mode of communication in a language outside the sphere of capital. Spivak's introduction to "Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography" and Foucault's "Mesh of Power" were also influential, as was The Static Hero in American Literature and Culture: Social Movements, Occupation, and Empowerment, a text I discovered through the course of my research for one of my blog posts. 

Since I've been primarily teaching film, it's been good to think through teaching literature, though I can't say that any of my blog posts about teaching were particularly realistic. It's actually been really helpful for me to read other people's takes on teaching their text. As I wrote that last sentence, I realized just how nice it's been to read everyone's posts and how much I think I've learned by reading and thinking about different styles of doing this literature thing.

Making that video with Bethany was weird, but I'm so glad we did it, and it got me thinking about how I have previously aspired to do weekly podcasty things and that those dreams have never materialized. So with the momentum of "the circle of life," I'm really hoping to brainstorm and get a gimmicky pseudo-intellectual video-based weekly-commentary thing off the ground. The question is, if I did, would you watch it?

Last Spring, when I was considering what graduate program to attend, I was not only choosing between schools, but between fields. My final choice was between the Visual Studies program at San Diego, or English at Davis. This was a "what do you want to be when you grow up moment" and I decided I would look better in a tweed jacket than a black turtleneck. No offense to any art professor who happens across this post, either in the distant future or in the infinity of the archive. But, I've been able to work in some visual studies components to a few of my posts, and it's felt really good to think in that medium while working with literature. This is something I'm really concerned with, especially because I think that both visual studies and literature have critical roles in steering social movements, and I want to think about them comparatively. So as I move forward, I have to remember how important art is to me!

Since I can't end on this note, watch this video to help you get through finals!

A Study in Personal Bias

Like most of us, I had to page back through my own posts from this quarter to remember what topics I chose and why. This then became an unavoidable study in the biases I had cultivated over time towards certain aspects of scholarly work. What fascinated me most (if I can be allowed to embrace the thrilling perversity of being fascinated by myself) is the apparent resistance to close-reading. Even in my heavily idealized and hypothetical teaching posts, there is a marked distaste for creating lessons out of small, particular moments of textual analysis in Woman on the Edge of Time. In most cases, my engagement with our articles from this quarter emerges from a place of structural interest and a constitutive need to see why this thing of all the things in the article matters.

So, in continuing service of the aforementioned perversity, I'm going to somewhat grossly reduce my posts (excepting the collaborative) to a single descriptor each and use that to indulge in more wanton structural play.

• Week 2, "Can literary criticism create its own object of study?", in which I take an offhanded comment in Chakrabarty and use it to ask how we make the concept of literature an object with a pre-defined purpose

• Week 3, "Cutting the body and text," in which I have a visceral reaction to Smyth's use of the word and end up existentially wondering if it's ever really possible to avoid doing violence to a text or a body

• Week 4, "The Obligation to Instruct," in which I make an entire post out of Raley's lifehacking footnote and implicitly add to my own first post by suggesting we make the concept of literature at the same time it's always already a concept

• Week 7, "Teaching in Concentric Circles," in which I give up pretending my interest isn't completely structural and create an impossibly abstract lecture out of Spivak's idea of reading for a class that would hate it even though I started with a gesture at close-reading

• Week 8, "The Porous Body," in which I use the structure of Chen's critical/personal piece to build a lecture around my own political motivations and discover a strange value in using a fictional, 1970s ungendered (though not unproblematic) pronoun

(I have not listed the two collaborative posts with Katherine and Rebecca here so that I can avoid reducing collaborative work to my own interpretation of that work, and also because it would be curious to see a different structural analysis on the way those collaborations were pursued and enacted).

This brings me to my larger point--because of course there is one [insert bad meta-structure joke]--about the one issue I've developed this quarter. For all the variety in the articles and the richness of the text in Woman on the Edge of Time, my topic has been the same in each post: the value of The Question. For me, structural, theoretical, or merely abstract analyses are an alternative way of approaching my own frequent frustration with my work and scholarly analyses in general, which manifests as a desperate "why should I care," or even "why do I care."

Though this is something I think probably depends on an individual's ability to reconcile the practice of studying literature with the value questions asked of those studying literature, I personally find that there is great utility in asking myself what the point of doing this actually is. It's apparent to me from my posts over the span of the quarter that I have been using Woman to ask this, and, in many ways, watching it answer my question via the continued push into structure.

Several of you are already aware that I have decided to exit the program after this quarter and pursue an "alt-ac" career for the time being (and for those of you who weren't aware until now, please forgive the crassness of finding out via blog). I mention this because I think it has bearing on the topic that has been coming out of my novel and the articles for the past couple months. I would suggest that my creative process has been an attempt not so much to get at the "point of it all," as it were, but at what I think is a more crucial question in pursuing higher education: "what is the point of this for me and right now?"

If the Chen article taught us anything, it was that the critical can be deeply embedded in the personal, and I think that always defaulting to close-reading can make us forget to ask ourselves the more difficult, abstract, or structural questions about our work. In our obsession with the criticalness of literary criticism, it's all too easy to ignore that, at the same time literature is Chakrabarty's object of study, it's also an experience, a medium for self-analysis, and a strong marker of our own temporality. Graduate students are often told that they will go through phases of crisis and self-doubt, but I rarely (if ever) hear someone suggest turning to the very texts that cause this crisis and letting them show you the structure of your own relationship to your research. I think we'd all find a surprisingly ally in our work no matter what direction it seems to be taking.

Let's start from the very beginning

As I was rereading my posts, I realized that while I certainly found new ways into this novel (I am particularly interested in continuing to explore the idea that each of Maisie’s parents desires to ‘map’ her body, which I never would’ve considered had we not read Moretti), I also in the end circled back to an idea I was struck by in the very first blurb about the book I posted:

“If we do take Maisie’s social and legal situation seriously, we may see that her final choice to go off with Mrs. Wix is severely constrained and that if that choice is based primarily on moral considerations, it is tragic.” Smit, David. “The Wishful Fantasy of ‘What Maisie Knew.’” American Literary Realism, 1870-1910 29.3 (Spring, 1997): 1-14.

In my last post Averyl and I discussed Greenblatt’s idea of subversion and I focused on the role of divorce in What Maisie Knew, and, without consciously realizing it, I came to a conclusion similar to David Smit’s in the above blurb (to quote myself): “James wraps up the narrative in the only more-or-less culturally acceptable way: he has Maisie leave with Mrs. Wix, the only woman who can somewhat adequately perform the role of motherhood. Without her, Maisie would be left to either fend for herself, which doesn’t gel with our conception of innocence and childhood, or she would be forced to choose between her real parents and her pseudo-parents…in an uncomfortably adult capacity that she’s not equipped to handle.” In a nutshell, I found myself agreeing with Smit that this is a somewhat tragic narrative. Smit argues that James becomes invested in Maisie’s psyche, but that as readers we cannot fully ignore the social and legal constraints within which the novel operates (which perhaps circles back to Colebrook and context). When viewed through the light of Maisie struggling to find a niche for herself in a society ill-equipped to handle divorce, the ending is anything but satisfactory. Instead, within the cultural possibilities for a constrained version of pseudo-happiness, James sticks the two agency-less females together to create a new life – but we are still left wondering, what does Maisie know and is she happy? It feels sticky because it seems unlikely that Mrs. Wix is the parent Maisie would choose for herself if given any other choice (in the recent adaptation, in fact, Mrs. Wix is entirely cut out of the script and we are appeased by a somewhat happier ending in which Maisie does choose the ending she wants by finding her voice). But of course, does it really matter if Maisie is happy? Does James want us to focus on that? I think so, but it could be argued either way.

So why this particular retrospective? I am surprised first that I in the end circled back to an idea I had at the beginning of the term and second that I am concerned with the novel’s ending. When I first wrote about this text at NYU and as I wrote this term, I found that I am generally more interested in how James ruthlessly ‘cuts’ (to go back to the Smyth) and rearranges the heteronormative, late 19^th-century family and how this might apply to his oeuvre in general. It was great to have to delve into Maisie specifically without considering his other novels, and to realize that James’s endings are as significant as the nitty-gritty, crazy details that make up his arguably subversive plots. Perhaps it seems obvious that the ending of a novel should be considered and can be a focal point for analysis. I, however, am a person who likes to shy away from trying to draw conclusions from how an author might wrap up his or her novel as I feel it becomes particularly easy to revert to analyzing the ending’s significance in terms of how it makes the reader ‘feel,’ which I am not sure is super useful. Here, though, I think it is interesting to not necessarily focus on whether it's a tragic ending/tragic novel, but rather how analyzing the social and legal constraints of the novel's context might cause us to rethink the novel, though I am still exploring in what way(s).

Finally, thank you to everyone for your comments this term! It was great to write about this novel and receive comments from scholars unfamiliar with the book and therefore with fresh perspectives, as I think I need to set this novel aside for a little while and even then might not ever be able to approach it as if reading it for the first time. Sally, I hope you enjoy reading it! 

(and, per usual, sorry for the odd white highlighting...blogger's formatting still eludes me)

Memoirs of a Fall Quarter of Pleasure

This quarter got me to think about broader contexts and new research projects that could include Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. It also made me super happy that you all seemed to be on board with my crazy ideas of film commentary and magazine interview as critical practice: thanks friends! There is sure to be more off-the-wall critical production in the future.

Here are my four takeaways from the work we’ve done together this quarter:

1. Check out American literature as a place for more sexy texts in the 1700 and early 1800s. Elizabeth Dillons’ “The Secret History of the American Novel” had many points of intersection with the work I’d like to do, but I’d not even thought about trying to get more transatlantic in project scope. Reproduction, the novel, the metropole, race, libertines… there are so many avenues to explore across the sea! Who knows what comparative readings these texts could unlock? 
2. Cool kids revise their past work. Nancy Armstrong’s frank discussion about her initial oversights in reading Foucault made me think about how important rereading is for critical work. Now I keep thinking about the idea of revision, much as Desirée mentioned in her last post. Not only should we reread primary texts and criticism, but our own work too. Change happens and it’s often super fruitful. 
3. Make an erotic literature survey course. I want to teach the class that I started to build in our teaching posts (here and here) someday. I will not give into the urge to start drafting a dream syllabus until this quarter’s papers are done… as much as I may want to. All ideas as to material are welcome.
4. Production is everywhere, everytime. “The Circle of Life” isn’t just about lions, Hamlet rewrites, and the savannah. It’s also about legitimate production and a denial of those who refuse to reproduce. Memoirs, I never knew you and The Lion King had so much in common. Averyl’s and Jessica’s comments in particular made some great connections between things that, on the surface, have absolutely nothing in common.