Jane Awesome

Today, December 16^th, is Jane Austen’s birthday. Happy Birthday, Jane!

Despite Austen’s popularity today in the form of multiple BBC miniseries, Hollywood films, Pride & Prejudice­-themed board games, Jane Austen novel continuations, and a plethora of other Jane Austen awesomeness (like the Jane Austen action figure or Jane Austen toothpaste—spoiler, it’s rose-flavored!), many people have a prejudice against the scribe of Bath.

For many, Austen is little more than romance—it’s frothy, lacy, ephemeral and, ultimately, shallow. Charlotte Bronte maligned Pride and Prejudice, writing in a letter that it was “a carefully fenced highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers—but no glance of a bright vivid physiognomy—no open country—no fresh air—no blue hill—no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen in their elegant but confined houses.”

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Jane Austen’s works became increasingly popular and the term “Janeite” was coined to describe people who adored Austen’s works and everything about them. It may very well be that the zeal with which some adore Austen is precisely what makes others hate her. Modern-day Janeites exist now too, and it’s probably quite easy to make fun of them, as they dress-up in Regency clothing, learn how to dance eighteenth-century country dances, and even travel to England for a “JaneAusten Weekend.”

The idolatry and fandom surrounding Austen can often overshadow her literary achievements; the zeal of some fans seems to put her work in the same category as Star Trek and Harry Potter—things to nerd-out over, but not take seriously.

Of course, I disagree! Austen’s novels are well-crafted, well-written works that comment on a variety of topics, both singular to the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as well as ones more universal and transcendent. In her works, she addresses both “domestic” issues, such as marriage, rules of civility, gender relations, family relations, entertainment, and the running of a household, as well as “worldly” issues, such as commerce, law, economics, nation-building, war, slavery, national character, landscape gardening, architecture, and aesthetics.

This is not to suggest that we can only designate literature as “Important” or “influential” because it addresses this second category of issues or theme. Instead, what I wish to point out is that there is no “domestic” without the “worldly”—and vice versa. Literature by women has, throughout history, been maligned, under-appreciated, discarded, forgotten, or otherwise neglected often because it deals with domestic issues. The same could be said of art or crafts or musical compositions by women. Alice Walker, among many women writers, has addressed this problem in her landmark essay “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens.”

Similarly, when we study history in high school, it is often a history comprised of wars, battles, elections, economics, and individual “important men.” For some reason, what people ate, how many children they had, how they lived, what jobs they had, how they loved, married and died is not considered history worth teaching and writing. This concept is slowly changing in the academy—but popular conceptions of what count as important histories or significant works of literature still focus on a male-centered story arc.

To get back to Jane Austen, it seems that her novels and her contributions to literature are often under-valued not just because she was a woman, but also because her fans are overwhelmingly women. And because her main characters are women. And because the surface plot line is often “will the girl get the guy?”  (Never mind that the same could be said of countless novels by men!)

Yet, to discard Austen’s works, to read them merely for plot, to suggest that plot is what makes a work great or not, is to miss the entire point of literary study. The best literary scholars are those who are the most open to new views, to new works, to possibilities, ambiguities, silences, and apertures in the works we study. This message is itself part of Austen’s novels, and the crux of her most well-known work, Pride and Prejudice. To be too proud to read Austen’s novel, or too proud to admit to liking it, or, what’s worse, perhaps, to be so prejudiced about a work that you refuse to even read it, is juvenile and shallow: the very opposite of Austen’s work.

 

It's not all about marriage...and even if it is,
well, why does that make her novels less important?

I’ve tried to write this post as logically and rationally as possible, but the truth is, I’m a total Janeite. My roller derby name is Jane AweStun. I would totally go to a Jane Austen Weekend if I could afford it. So, rock on, Jane! Happy Birthday, you badass.

…and to my fellow Janeites: be strong! Haters gonna hate…but it is a truth universally acknowledged that geeking out is a lot more fun than joining the haters…

Thoughtful Grading and Secret Sin

It’s the end of the semester, and that means grading. For many of us in higher ed, this is only a continuation of the grading madness that inevitably seems to engulf the second half of the semester.

My back is aching, my wrists are tired, and my thighs are scorched from too much laptop-on-lap time, yet I have to admit I’m enjoying reading my students’ paper drafts in my American literature class.

I will be the first to voice my concern about rising class sizes
and the detriment they pose to student learning, but grading can also be a conversation.

The course is a survey, which I’ve written about before, and it’s my first time teaching an American literature course. I’ve been in my “BritLit” pigeon-hole for so long, and then suddenly I found myself discussing pilgrims and Puritans, conquistadors and Christians, revolution and social rebellion.

I found myself enjoying the course quite a bit. I still find American literature overwhelmingly earnest, moralistic, and overly didactic, but these qualities also provided excellent fodder for class discussions. The course covered the earliest texts of the Americas up to the Civil War/1865 which meant that, like many survey courses, it contained a little bit of everything.

As we wended our way to the close of the semester, I wondered how my students would approach the final paper, which charged them with choosing two texts by two different authors and discussing them together while also using outside sources. My students had struggled with the first paper of the semester, the first of two shorter response papers. There was significant improvement on the 2^nd response paper, but the final paper requires the students to analyze texts in conversation with one another and to make more complex arguments about them.

I was both pleased and surprised, however, when we discussed the thematic and stylistic connections between authors in class. Students put together texts in innovative and compelling ways—and these connections showed up in their paper drafts as well.

One student put Emily Dickinson’s poetry in conversation with Benjamin Franklin’s essay “To Those Who Would Remove to America” in order to make an argument about how these two very different authors approach the pursuit of happiness. Another student discussed Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s short story “The Two Offers” in order to make an argument about how these authors understand the self. A third student discussed the individual versus society using Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener.”

In many ways, these would not be combinations that I would have put together at first glance. I was less surprised, for example, when students wrote about slavery in Lydia Maria Child’s “The Quadroons” and Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, or death and horror in Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” and Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil.” Just when I thought I’d read all the unusual papers, I picked up another unusual combination: Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” and Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” as works that both explore characters who wish to escape reality.

It’s possible these combinations seem so unusual to me because I don’t normally study American literature, but regardless I was excited to note the different connections students made between texts. Maybe the execution wasn’t stellar, maybe they still need to flesh out the ideas or add in more quotations—these papers are still in the draft stage. Nevertheless, I already feel like I have learned a lot from reading these papers and from seeing my students’ improvement. While commenting on drafts before students turn in the final draft can be time-consuming, it does mean that paper-writing becomes a conversation between students and instructors.

When I think back, I realize that I never got as much feedback on papers in college as I give now to my students. Of course, I wish my classes were smaller so the burden of putting comments on papers wasn’t so heavy, but I can’t deny that this process leads to better communication of requirements, better student understanding of the writing process, and, ultimately, better quality papers.

Along the way, I also get to witness the transformation of ideas through writing and re-writing. I might even, sometimes, read something in a student paper that sparks my imagination, as when one of my students wrote that Bartleby perpetrates a type of “metaphysical crime” when he refuses to leave the office and just “hangs around.” The student further suggests that it is because Bartleby’s intentions are opaque that his behavior incites the social unrest.

It's hard to miss the irony of Melville's classic
short story when I sit down to grade stacks
of student papers.

This idea reminded me of our class discussions about “Bartleby” and Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil”, and how the behavior of Bartleby and the minister, with his refusal to explain the veil, provoke social unrest—merely by seeming to be so different than the rest of the people who surround them. Both Bartleby and the Hawthorne’s minister challenge social expectations by being unlike others—and by having veiled intentions. Others project their own insecurities, shames, and fears onto them, hating these “different” characters because they remind them of their own inadequacies, their own “secret sins,” to use Hawthorne’s term.

I couldn’t help but connect this discussion in class to what has been happening in Ferguson, MO. Ferguson has been in my classroom conversations all semester, as I discussed the representation of African Americans on screen in my Writing 1 class; as students researched police brutality in my Writing 2 class; and as we discussed the history of slavery, abolitionism, and the fraught nature of personal narrative and the American Dream in my American literature course.

As with many controversial news stories, the events in Ferguson are subject to interpretation; each day we see the war of different perspectives on what happened there. Ferguson is our black veil, it is our Bartleby who won’t leave the office….we each project onto it our own secret sins, our own explanation of why it happened and what it means. But like the minister’s veil, which covers his face even in the grave, sending posthumous shudders through the remaining citizens, there will never be a simple explanation to the events in Ferguson.

How do we interpret the many images, headlines, news clips and
sound-bites coming out of Ferguson, related protests around the US,
or any other news story, for that matter?

And so, it’s the end of the semester, and though I’m tired in body, I feel energized in mind. It’s moments like these that I see clearly why we who research should also teach; the intellectual interactions we have with our students allow us to see things anew, to consider new angles, to question the usual juxtapositions that we rely on for interpreting the world around us—and our research.

Happy Anniversary—to Notes & Petticoats!

It’s been just over a year since I started the blog, so I figure it’s as good a time as any to reflect on the blog and, more generally, my life as a scholar online.

When I first heard about academic scholars in the humanities using Twitter to connect with other scholars, I couldn’t imagine anything stranger. Even now, when it seems the most natural thing to me, I mention it to other non-twittizens, and they bristle a bit. I can see them thinking of me in a different light—I’m one of “those people”; I’m a tweeter!

While I’m sure I could very easily do much of my research without every foraying into the world of e-cademia, I have found so many advantages to being on Twitter.

I have become exposed to all sorts of scholars whom I wouldn’t otherwise have heard of, merely because they mostly write about the Victorian period or the Early Modern period. Or they are from some other discipline that I wouldn’t otherwise come into contact with. And yet their links, thoughts, comments and responses have often brought some interesting issues to my attention.

Though Twitter I have also found more 18^th-century blogs as well as blogs about literature, culture, representation and the body. And occasionally these blogs have actually revealed to me texts, images or historical personages about whom I have heard but didn’t know where to find this information.

I have even met people on Twitter…and then met them in real life—at conferences!

And finally…without Twitter, the readership of this very blog would be much lower than it currently is. I have found that the two platforms complement each other, allowing my ideas and words to become part of a larger conversation—even if I only post once or twice a month.

Even at only a low-to-moderate rate of publication, however, I’ve managed to write about female cross-dressers like the real-life Hannah Snell and the fictional Harriet Freke...

I’ve written about films set in the eighteenth century, like A Royal Affair…

I’ve explored issues of pedagogy, such as teaching eighteenth-century women poets and how to approach teaching literature survey courses…

I’ve even commented on issues of professionalization, such as conferencing successfully and top interview questions at job interviews.

Finally, I’ve had the opportunity to make connections between the 18^th century and our own time period and culture. I’ve discussed bearded women, strong female protagonists, racial representation, and…well…pockets!

The blog form allows for a variety of topics, from the serious to the light-hearted. It also encourages interaction and discussion and open-endedness, as opposed to more traditional forms of academic writing (the dissertation, the journal article, the book), which are about one person making a clearly-defined and supported argument, whose reviewers may engage with the text months or even years after.

A recent article by Anne Helen Petersen, who left academia to write for BuzzFeed, discusses some of these publication issues. Petersen notes that one of the aspects of journalism that she enjoys is that when she writes something, thousands of people can read it—for free—as opposed to academic publications, which are usually only read by other specialists in the field or the occasional undergraduate working on a paper and are often inaccessibly priced.

While in many ways I agree with Petersen, I believe the academic blogosphere is opening up an increasingly-rigorous, exciting, and inclusive space in which to discuss our scholarship and its relevance to the world around us.

So…thanks for reading! I’m looking forward to another year of musing, writing, and tweeting!