The Long Eighteenth

Bryan Waterman at NYU just sent me a link to their upcoming symposium, “Writing Women 1700-1800,” and it looks really exciting! The plenary talk is by Paula Backsheider, and other speakers include April Alliston, Toni Bowers, Joanna Brooks, Simon Dickie, and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, and Mary Poovey will be the respondent.

April 10-11th at NYU’s Fales Library and Special Collections

Hope to see you there!

It’s been quite some time since I did a teaching post here, but things have finally brightened to the point where I can see what’s been going on more clearly. I’m currently teaching two of my regular British Literature Survey II (late Renaissance to early Modernism) courses at Queens College as well as an elective in the Gothic Novel at Yeshiva University’s Stern College for Women. (The latter is a particularly fascinating and wonderful class, and I plan to post about just that one soon.) It’s more than I’m used to teaching, and quite a taxing schedule, with one of my surveys as a three-hour Monday night class ending at 9:20pm, two hours from where I live.

But this isn’t a pity party! Had I written this last week, it would have been. I’ve been absolutely exhausted by the schedule, the commute, and trying to remember what’s going on with each of my 80 students. I’ve been worried about not keeping up with the flurry of small interactions that make class much more pleasant for them. At both of these schools, spring break is at the end of April, due to Passover, two weeks before the end of the semester. We all need a break, now, and they’re as tired as I am. It shows. Conversation in class often dangles when it should be getting exciting, and the small irritations they have with me and with each other are magnified on their faces.

My friends who teach seem to be facing a similar drag. I’ve heard stories of friends waking up their night classes by suddenly throwing chalk at the ceiling or openly demanding to know what’s wrong with everyone. I find myself teasing my class about possibly not having done the reading for the day, which isn’t necessarily fair. Most of my students are either incredibly overbooked or they’re working professionals with day jobs, and they’re often tired because they were up all night doing the reading and are struggling just to do the bare minimum.

So this week I did what I always do at this low ebb in the semester. I asked them to write me a letter in the first seven or so minutes of class. In this letter (which I ask them to start with “Dear Carrie” or “Dear Professor Shanafelt”—cheesy, I know, but enforcing that sense of a personal communication makes their letters less rambling and more direct), they must address four issues:

1) How is class going for you, in general? (Is the pace reasonable? Are you enjoying the readings and discussions?)
2) What can I do to increase your happiness and productivity? (Would you like more group activities? Should we sit in a circle? Do you want more homework?)
3) How do you feel you’re doing in the class? (What are you struggling with? What do you think you’re doing well?)
4) What plans do you have to improve your written work and in-class participation over the coming weeks?

It’s not like an end-of-class evaluation, in that it’s not anonymous, and they also have to evaluate themselves, so I am aware that I am missing out on some of the more deeply structural criticisms they might have of me and the class. But, in general, I find they’re surprisingly honest about what they need and how things are going.

Over the past few days, I’ve learned that some of my students are shy in class because they’re intimidated by some of their classmates (many of whom, it must be said, would have intimidated me in undergrad, too). Some are quiet because they feel the readings are so difficult and they’re too tempted to just listen and take notes. Many asked that I give them specific questions to think about before they do the reading, as opposed to when they arrive in class. And yes, several asked for optional homework assignments (for practice, not for me to grade) and for more group discussion activities.

They often include notes about which of the readings they’ve particularly responded to, as well as the ones they struggled with. But all of them named at least one major aspect of their efforts they’d like to improve upon in the coming weeks. A few invited me to call on them even when they don’t have their hands raised, because they need to learn to be more assertive about their ideas. Several offered a few thoughts on what they think they’re learning that will be useful to them in other classes, and even a few anecdotes about the ideas from class that they’ve applied to outside reading.

I’m really impressed, every semester, by their bravery in response to this activity. Their criticisms are extremely productive for me as a teacher, never the sort of crass “LESS READING! LESS HOMEWORK!” sort of stuff one might expect from such an activity. They don’t give excuses, either, though I do often learn some personal reasons why they’ve struggled recently. I often don’t know which students can emotionally handle being pressed on a bit harder, and many of them invite me to do so. I’d say only a small percentage exclusively said positive things, but even those were productive. (”I really enjoyed our group activity on Wieland. Can we do a few more of those?”)

I always read these things with one eye closed, waiting for someone to really blast me on something, but they never do. I’m quite positive that some of them aren’t the world’s biggest fans of my class, and that will come out in official evaluations and on RateMyProfessors.com, but on this activity, they’re pretty productive and courteous. I come away learning a lot about how to be a better, more responsive teacher, and they make various vows to become better, harder-working students. All this stuff about their goals might just be lip service, but it’s lip service that’s worth doing anyway.

In the past, I’ve seen post-evaluation classes take a remarkable turn for the better. What I thought were petty resentments turn out to have been mild grievances that are easy to address, or, even more frequently, expressions of self-doubt and exhaustion. Spring has been pretty relentless for all of us. After this evaluation day, we all seem to come to class with a slightly better attitude and a renewed sense of what we’re doing all this work for.

How about you? Do you face this same kind of mid-semester slump? What do you do to combat it? Have you tried a class evaluation day? How did it go?

Got back from Shady Side last night, which leaves me not enough time to finish up my paper for my Thursday morning panel on conceptual history.  I’ll be staying at the Westin, and hanging in there through Sunday.  Here’s the program:

http://asecs.press.jhu.edu/2008%20Program.pdf

  So who else is going, and what are you going to be doing in Portland? 

Best,

DM

Sorry, I’m still fixated on the Bousquet Wire post I put up yesterday, because it recognized something that I’ve been thinking about for some time: the fate of the “common good” among institutions intended to serve the public.  We see this dynamic as often in universities as in municipal governments, and in both cases the erosion of the common good occurs when these institutions find themselves ruled by a new complex of local and remote managers.  This cost-cutting style of management, supported by a language of continual assessments and self-improvements, seems to be favored by local managers struggling under the gaze of a yet more distant management class indifferent to local concerns.  And, of course, the language of institutional self-improvement cannot conceal the deep failure of these institutions as they attempt to meet people’s needs.

Significantly, The Wire paired its tales of institutional dysfunction in the public domain (public schools and police departments) with analogous tales of dysfunction in the corporate domain (the newspaper).  Though these interlaced narratives puzzled the critics (why complain so much about newspapers, the print critics wondered?), it seems to me that the show’s creators were trying, as Bousquet recognizes, to show that the cause of this dysfunction lay in a management style common to both, in which the primary obligation of the manager is to shrink his organization and his workers’ wages to the smallest size, so as to minimize its claims upon the public.  It is a quintessentially defensive institutional strategy, emblematic of the era in which Grover Norquist dreamt of cutting government to the size where it could be drowned in a bathtub.

Bousquet notices this cost-cutting dynamic running throughout the The Wire’s depictions of Baltimore, and he immediately applies it to the contemporary public university, where assessments and accountability receive far more administrative discussion and support than educational goals, and yet the results of those assessments seem curiously open to manipulation “from below”:

What the [The Wire] grasps is that private corporate and public institutional managers both employ “quality” in an Orwellian register in which a “quality process” is one of continuously increasing workload and continuously eroding salary and benefits, with a single, doltish mantra employed everywhere—in police departments, in social services, and school systems, just as on college campuses: the perpetual command to “Do More With Less.”

As [one critic] observes, what this actually means “is doing less with less and cutting corners to make it look like more.” Hence the need for assessment instruments that everyone inside an organization understands to be trivial and easily spun to nearly any purpose by agile institutional actors.

The instruments are supposed to be easily defeated. As upper management continuously urges lower management, who in turn urge the workforce: “Be creative” with the numbers. Being creative with the numbers allows managers to survive in their own culture of claiming ever-larger improvements in productivity while papering over the enormous human cost.

The human cost isn’t just the immiseration of the workforce. It’s also the failure of these intrusively and anti-socially managed institutions, “highly productive” on paper, to actually deliver the policing, health care, and education they exist to provide.

What I find most intriguing about Bousquet’s account of the university is the degree to which it echoes the complaints of journalists like Jon Talton, who diagnoses a newspaper industry in decline largely because it grew too monopolistic, money-hungry, risk-averse, and detached from local communities and their needs to sustain any “sense of a public trust.”  And once again, the indifference of upper management to the actual purposes and values of journalism have helped to erode whatever public support or authority journalism might have had at one time, while driving the most capable people out of the organization.  Sound familiar?

Which leads me to my final question: are universities run nowadays by people who can speak credibly about the public trust?  And what, exactly, would “the public” demand if it could ask universities to change their practices or their priorities?

DM

1.  Academic life department.  This might piss you off, or it might amuse you, if you’re in the right mood.  (Question: from what perspective is writing a PhD the same as watching a really good cable TV show?)  On the other hand, this will definitely piss you off.  (For yet more amusement/schadenfreude, read this, but not for too long, since it’ll make your skin fall off)  (courtesy of The Valve and How the University Works)

2.  Contemporary relevance of 18th century writers department.  John Holbo at Crooked Timber analyzes an 18th century right wing blogger precursor of Edmund Burke, Justus Moser, and his pamphlet, “On the Diminished Disgrace of Whores and their Children in our Day” (1772).  In the meantime, Steven Waldman at TPM Cafe wants to make us feel good about the success of religious toleration in America, despite the fact that ordinary liberals and conservatives–meaning all the angry folk filling up his comments section–are still clueless  about what it means.  It would also be nice to see a historically accurate, or at least precise, definition of “deist” somewhere in this discussion, but it is a blog, after all.  (Though this discussion, including the comments, from Boston 1775 seems a whole lot less woolly-headed than Waldman’s.) 

3.  Superb 18th-century window-dressing department.  While we’re still on the topic of the FFs in all their ugliness and Giamatti-like tics and insecurities, Boston 1775 has a nice round-up concerning the HBO wigstravaganza, John Adams.  Don’t miss Jill Lepore’s NYer review essay, either.  Love the wigs and the sets, not so sure about the dialogue.  Isn’t it always that way when we see our period depicted in the movies?

DM

On behalf of Laura Rosenthal and the rest of the Long Eighteenth, wherever you are, I’d like to thank Anna Battigelli, Carrie Hintz, Laura Engel, Dwight Codr, and Joseph Roach for participating in our collaborative reading of IT (and thanks to Carrie S. for some last-minute formatting help, too).  The link to the archived reading can be found here.

 Best wishes,

DM

As I’ve been thinking about our exchanges about Roach’s book over the last week or so, I’ve come to feel that we need to reflect some more about the nature of Roach’s object of study–performance–and how studying that field of activities affects the questions of evidence we’ve been discussing, especially in regard to the genres of historical writing.

One starting-point would be this passage from David Simpson’s well-known discussion of the varieties of history and the New Historicism, in “Is Literary History the History of Everything“:

New historicists have been noticed for their eschewal of grand theory and their alternative reliance upon anecdote and happenstance; for their immersion in the empirical plenitude of antiquarian history, from which items are plucked like rabbits from a hat, which turn out to illuminate a more traditionally “major” text or topic; and for their general effacement of hermeneutic problems about doing history in favor of the sheer vividness of the data of history. Nietzsche hoped for just such a history, one whose value would not lie in “general propositions” but in its “taking a familiar, perhaps commonplace theme, an everyday melody, and composing inspired variations on it, enhancing it, elevating it to a comprehensible symbol, and thus disclosing in the original theme a whole world of profundity, power and beauty” (92).

I think many of the terms plucked out of Nietzsche here could be applied to Roach’s work: the “empirical plenitude” of his discussions of wigs and the early history of Hollywood, and their surprising relevance to the topics usually found in monumental histories (e.g., monarchy and popular government); how the vividness of the data of “antiquarian history” may very well make this mode of history-writing more illuminating than the materials of monumental history; how the point of antiquarian history’s “everyday melody” is the extent to which it inspires rococo “variations”; most importantly, however, antiquarian history’s “commonplace theme”may be “elevated” into a “comprehensible symbol” in which we discover a “whole world of profundity, power and beauty.”  This, to me, is a good description of what Roach has achieved in his study of the “It-effect”: this book has disclosed a whole world of performance, one whose profundity, power and beauty seem closely related to its roots in “the deep eighteenth,” the never-quite completed transition to Modernity.

Simpson seems to assume that in the current discursive environment, with its suspicion of grand narratives, that certain kinds of Monumental history have become difficult or perhaps even irrelevant to readers, critics, and scholars:

It is within this climate of expectation, wherein grand narrative is morally discredited and (perhaps more important) massively difficult to perform, that the anecdote and the contingent connection do their work.⁶ Levi-Strauss wrote of biography and anecdote as “low-powered history,” requiring subsumption within a “form of history of a higher power” for significant intelligibility. But he also noted that while low-powered history is the least explanatory, it is “the richest in point of information, for it considers individuals in their particularity and details for each of them the shades of character, the twists and turns of their motives, the phases of their deliberations” (261).

I appreciate Simpson’s observation that certain forms of anecdotal or contingent history really do rely upon earlier or more general narrative frameworks to become intelligible.  But when I think, for example, about Simpson’s opposition between anecdotal, and therefore “low-powered,” histories, and the more synthetic “high-powered” academic history, I immediately recall Boswell’s powerful mythologizing of Johnson, and wonder how that could be distinguished from the kinds of work Roach does with Garrick and Siddons and the rest of performance history.  Isn’t Boswell as much a historian of gesture and dress as he is a writer of dialogue?  Conversely, we can cite Thackeray’s equally powerful biographical mythologizations of figures like Swift and Sterne, and wonder whether Simpson’s distinction between the high-powered and the low-powered approach really holds in literary history, which seems absolutely dependent upon the anecdotal and the contingent in its most powerful instances, and certainly in its earliest phases.  So Simpson’s distinction, I think, ultimately rests on a hierarchy of textual over non-textual history that seems untenable, at least for any model of performance studies, and perhaps for literary and cultural studies generally.

And, indeed, Roach’s book demonstrates precisely the need for such biographical and anecdotal materials in performance history, because of these materials’ value as a hitherto-unnoticed archive for the cultural contexts of performance.  So even if Simpson seems (ultimately, though I think grudgingly) to endorse some version of the “antiquarian” history of everything, I think that a book like Roach’s argues much more persuasively for this kind of approach, largely because it is able to document and thereby raise the It-effect into a comprehensible symbol of one of the hallmarks of Modernity, synthetic experience.

DM

I briefly pop my head up out of an excruciatingly busy semester to note that Harvard is in the process of scanning their collection of Johnson’s letters. From the OASIS website:

This collection consists of 746 letters and fragments written by Johnson between 1731 and 1784, and manuscript transcripts and reproductions of other Johnson letters which are unavailable elsewhere. It is the largest single collection of Johnson’s letters in existence, comprising nearly half of the known surviving letters. It includes 232 letters to Johnson’s most regular correspondent, his friend Hester Lynch Thrale (later Hester Lynch Piozzi), from 1765 until Johnson ceased his correspondence with her in 1784.
Other particularly noteworthy correspondents were actor David Garrick (1717-1779); the painters Frances Reynolds (1729-1807) and Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792); and novelist Samuel Richardson (1689-1761). Regular correspondents represented most heavily in the collection include Mrs. Thrale’s daughter Hester (later Hester Maria Elphinstone, Viscountess Keith, 1764-1857); friend and protege Bennet Langton (1737-1801); stepdaughter Lucy Porter (1715-1786); and boyhood friend John Taylor (1711-1788).

So far, only a fraction of these letters has been scanned, but they appear to be working through their collection to make them available to the public. If you scroll down on their site, you’ll see links to color facsimiles from this collection. (I’m particularly fond of this one.) And I’ll also put a link in our resources sidebar, so if you’re looking for it later, it will be here.

-Carrie Shanafelt