Late Night at the Social Club

I'm done with my talk on academic writing. It's basically a paraphrase of Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein's They Say/I Say, but with a little of my voice in it and of course nowhere near as entertaining or engaging. They'll hate it, but I don't care. They'll be learning.

I should have been in bed an hour ago; I should also have been done with The Protestant Ethic. Why is neither of those things true? Because a chance googling of Marlin Perkins lead to: the lemming; myths of lemming suicide; Lemmings the PC game; a Linux clone of Lemmings; Linux clones of games; Super Tux, a Super Mario clone; Lincity, a SimCity clone. The last ate two hours of my time. (This house cries shame!)

. . . meanwhile, one of my students has already emailed me a draft of an assignment that isn't due for a week. I'll read it in the morning.

Infelix Me

I've spent the past two weeks sick with the 97th Annual Departmental Flu, which I blame entirely on a certain colleague who just got back from England. While this isn't that bad—and I'm mostly over it—it did cause me to royally flub my Lysistrata lecture on Thursday. Curiously, it was only that lecture, out of the eight I've had to do in the past fortnight, but perhaps it was because I made the mistake of relying on memory to get things done rather than really going back and reviewing the text and my notes.

Actually, the past few weeks have been frustrating on another level, because while I have notes from the last time I taught World Literature, I don't have them all: I was in the middle of typing them up when the hard drive on the lappy gave out, and I was not yet the sort of person who backed things up all the damn time. Paranoia, born of multiple (hopefully not annual) crashes, was not yet a permanent resident of my skull. As a result, I've had to reconstruct the lectures for Gilgamesh and Lysistrata, and I've also discovered that the lectures for everything else are just awful. I guess trying to write the kinds of lectures I did for ENGL 2303 in the summer wasn't yet part of my game. So . . . research ahoy! Which is like Chips Ahoy only with less chocolate and more library. Mmm . . . . Library.

Otherwise, it's been kind of quiet. My birthday passed with little incident, because I was sick, and because I am indecisive and so are all my friends, so anything to do with it was very last-minute. The discussion of American Gods in MKB's Culture of Longing seminar (soon to be on a bookshelf near you!) [1] did not go very smoothly, nor will this week's of Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which if I hurry I might just finish in time for class. I'm also sitting in on WAQ's impromptu (and very crowded) Old English kaffeklatsch currently held in his office; we're doing what we've done before, which is the "go away and read this, come back and we'll all stumble over the language and the translations, and then you'll all go away again." It's good practice, though, because someday, should I get tenure, someone is going to ask me if I can teach an Old English course, and I'd rather not have to say no, to which they'll reply so why did we hire a medievalist and I'll say because you needed someone to teach Chaucer, not Beowulf and then there would be fisticuffs. So, let's learn OE!

I still haven't heard from ETS about scoring the AP exam this year, but as I and several of my co-scoring friends (Hi Amalie!) have determined, they seem to be running a bit behind this year.

Meanwhile, the Graduate Students in English held a workshop on publication, which was largely successful even if Certain Persons turned it once more into the this profession is dark and will chew you up and spit you out in tiny pieces conversation. It was pretty good, and had some useful advice, such as:

• Write publishable articles and do the marketing, which seems mean "read lots of criticism so you can get an idea of what good criticism looks like and what journal(s) are more likely to accept the stuff you do."
• Q: When should grad students begin to publish? A: When you can use criticism without using it slavishly.
• "On the job market" is too late to start publishing; however, having been accepted is what matters (i.e. you can list something as "in publication" on your CV).
• Don't always be daunted by responses/rejections.
• KEEP sending them to good journals.
• Start from the best journal and go down; that way, even if it's rejected by them, it hasn't been locked up by some journal with low prestige.
• It's okay to publish outside your field at first; some people will look askance at out-of-field publications, but they shouldn't. DO try to have something in your field, and you shouldn't go on the market with publications not in your field unless you're prepared to defend yourself.
• Always write for publication. Assume that other people are already part of the conversation; don't summarize too much. You don't have to tell them everything you know.
• Try to form a writing group of two or three peers to co-read each other's work; often this group will last beyond your college years.
• Read what the journal says its goals are. Don't send things to journals that they won't publish. (Apparently Shakespeare Quarterly gets a lot of non-Bard articles). ONLY library time will tell you for sure.
• Look for what the journal wants: its house style, the content of its articles, the LENGTH (usually ~30,000 words) and format requirements. Make sure your stuff is up to their standards BEFORE you send it off.
• Spend one day or so every few weeks just sitting in the library reading journals.
• Make the cover letter short and to the point (My name is this; this is my article; please consider it for publication). Don't pour your heart out. DO put it on departmental letterhead.

Sound advice, all.

Right. I've got a lecture on the Ramayana to finish, and another lecture on how to write like an academic (as if I know) to build from scratch/borrow heavily from Gerald Graff.

NOTES:
[1] If you think I'm kidding about this, then you should know that the syllabus for this seminar contained a very telling typo: This volume will detail the development of the various kinds of national myths . . . .

First Week Annoyances

I'm teaching two classes this term: one section of World Literature to 1650 and one section of Survey of English Literature to 1700 (really to 1660). I don't mind teaching either class, really; in fact, I think the first "real" lectures in both classes went pretty well (the background to Gilgamesh and the "conversion" of Britannia into Anglo-Saxon England). What I mind is this: apparently the "enrollment limit" attached to each section means nothing to the people who do overrides. The cap on my survey course is something like 38; I have 43 as of this moment. What's worse is the section of World Lit: the cap there is supposed to be around 25, but is currently 32, and has been slowly creeping up since Tuesday. I have, then, 75 students; not so bad as Jeffrey Cohen's 80 in one section, but still no walk in the park.

This is doubly disappointing since my plan was—and to some extent remains—to follow a modified form of what Dr Virago suggests for teaching the research paper; since I, lowly worm of a grad student that I am, have no control over the books for my class, I can't assign They Say/I Say, so I've reduced that to a single lecture and handouts—and occasional "crux busters" instead of one every week or two. We'll see how it goes, but with 43 students there and another 32 in the other section, I don't know how much I can expect to get done.

Meanwhile, I'm still working on my reading list for comps; the primary-text list is just about done (I still need to make some decisions about lyrics and drama). From there, I ask another professor about theory, and then that list will be complete, and then I read it, and then I cry.

Nothing yet on publication; I still have every intention of going to SEMA this fall and possibly K'Zoo in the spring.

Unhealthy Behavior

All right, I'm back. Upcoming this year: another attempt at publication; SEMA in the fall (here's hoping!); and oh, my comprehensive exams, also in the fall. Sheesh.

Right now, I'm teaching a section of World Lit I and a section of Survey of English Lit I. Essentially it's the same schedule They wanted to saddle me with last summer, but this time I've taught both courses and have adequate preparation. Or will, when I get off the internet.

And why can't I get off the internet? Because they posted one of my class rosters today on ISIS, and I have spent the last hour with the roster in one window and Facebook in the other, stalking my students. I don't know if this is healthy (but the title of the post says otherwise), but it does let me get a "sneak peak" of my students so I can become biased no, wait determine who passes and fails based on taste er, better prepare my lectures. Yeah. That's it.

I'll do it again when the WLIT syllabus is posted.

Meanwhile, I'm thinking of trying to publish the paper I wrote for Alliterative Revival. While my adviser savaged it (as he is wont to do—I think it's part of the job of being an adviser: "Be the most horrible possible editor so that your advisees know what it's like to be ravaged by gorillas") he also offered many helpful tips toward publishing it, some of which I may take. It does need work, though; perhaps if I combine it with my paper from Discourse Analysis?

My last bit of "official" coursework ever is a seminar on "the Culture of Longing." It should be an interesting romp though American pop culture, especially the supernatural stuff. How will it fit with the medieval? Who knows? Maybe Jeffrey Cohen or Michael Uebel.

Comments About Utopia

And I'm back. I've brought with me the current draft of my conclusion to the paper for discourse analysis; though it's rough, and may cause contention, I post it here to see if there's any reaction at all.

The goal of this project is to examine the use of "utopia" by a few medievalists. As I note in the essay, the articles I have examined here constitute a small selection of the work having been done on the utopian impulse in medieval cultural production. The articles are drawn from a recent (Fall 2006) edition of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (JMEMS), which was entirely devoted to “essays that consider utopian dreams dreamt before or beside More’s work [Utopia]” (Ingham 480). Of the six essays published in that issue, three were on explicitly medieval topics. Karma Lochrie’s “Sheer Wonder: Dreaming Utopia in the Middle Ages” works largely with the important (though late-antique) Commentarium in somnium Scipionis (Commentary on the Dream of Scipio) by Macrobius. William Burgwinkle traces idealized communities through several crusader-era texts in “Utopia and Its Uses: Twelfth-Century Romance and History.” Daniel Birkholtz, in an essay titled “Mapping Medieval Utopia: Exercises in Restraint,” gives a close reading (quite literally!) of the mappamundi (world map) once found in Hereford Cathedral. I include as well Patricia Clare Ingham’s introductory article, “Making All Things New: Past, Progress, and the Promise of Utopia,” which sets the stage for the rest.

Taken as a whole, these essays represent the most recently available scholarly investigations of medieval utopia. I use “represent” deliberately: there have been many contributions to the scholarly conversation, as Ingham points out (480), and the present articles are but a small sample that may speak for a larger project. I have selected these essays for a number of reasons: they are all from the same journal, were written as part of a larger project, and are all in English. These, then, may not be all there is to know on the subject, but the knowledge they produce should be consistent and coherent, and can be compared with a minimal amount of suturing.

Please, if I mention you by name, and in the course of that mention say something you read as unfair, know that I don't intend you personally any harm. I'm just concerned about the state of utopian studies with a medieval bent, and I fear that a good number of people are not as vociferous as they might be.

Begin Conclusion:
We see, then, that “utopia” has a number of uses for these critics, some of which overlap and some do not. We are left with the question of whether there is such a thing as a “discourse of medieval utopia.” Recalling Foucault’s four stages of discursive formation—positivity, epistemoogization, scientificity, and formalization—what signs do these essays exhibit of having produced, become, or been produced under a science? What modes of inquiry do they produce? How do they produce knowledge of a “medieval utopian” kind?

First let us narrow down the possibilites for the state of the “medieval utopian,” using Focualt’s list as best we can. It seems clear enough that the discourse is positivized, for it has gained some independence from mainstream “utopian” thinking, has existed in some degree since at least the late 1970’s (though the part of the conversation in English has been more recent), and has enough recognition to have been made the special topic of a prestigious journal. The discursive formation seems also to be epistemic, since each critic “exercises a dominant function . . . over knowledge” (Foucault 186-7) in order to trace utopia in medieval cultural production. Can we call it a science, then? Perhaps: the discourse already has formal moves common across the articles: at some point, for example, each essay must come to terms with Thomas More’s Utopia and justify the ability to “circumvent” More chronologically. Some, like Lochrie appeal to “positive” and “negative” utopic functions—those that posit schemes for the future, and those that “foster and anticipatory consciousness” (509), respectively. Others, like Birkholz, propose heterotopias instead of utopias, or, like Burgwinkle, suggest that pre-More utopias are historical fantasies. In any case, this grappling with More would fit Foucault’s definition of “laws for the construction of propositions” (187): one must always justify one’s right to speak of the utopian as medieval, the right, as Lochrie phrased it, to “drag utopia back into the past” (494). So, then, it is a science, but it may be just past that threshold, since there is little evidence that the “medieval utopian” is “able, taking itself as a starting point, to deploy the formal edifice it constitutes” (Foucault 187). There would seem to be no “formal edifice” as such: a “science” that stresses its own paradoxical nature, that can be said to be both grounded (Lochrie, and to a lesser extent Birkholz) and rootless (Ingham, Burgwinkle), cannot have agreed on “formal” categories yet, nor may it be capable of “taking itself as a starting point.” We can say, then, with some degree of certainty, that there is an emerging “science” of the medieval utopian, one that still seeks an epistemic foothold, but has begun to generate propositions and eliminate alternatives.

Towards a Politics of Literature (Again)
Given that the science exists, what are we to make of what it says about the “medieval utopian”—that is, what are the propositions it espouses, and what are the ideological implications of those propositions? Common to each article is the notion of the utopian as a process that innovates, that cause us, in Ingham’s phrasing, to “reconfigure the familiar, to make us want it again in a new way” (488). This is a process that “begins in stupor and ends in wonder” (Lochrie 499), in which we “think we are constructing the new” where there is only the reworked past (Burgwinkle 540). These notions resonate with, on the one hand, Jameson’s statement that More’s own text “identifies those still-existing social spaces in which the new ideological values might be incarnated” (25) and, on the other hand, with Althusser’s notion that the ideological apparatus “may not only be the stake, but also the site of class struggle” (147, his italics). The theme of utopian as “innovative” not only allows critics to re-present the medieval as the site of class struggle, but it also opens up those texts to “colonization” by “modern” ideological constructions. Despite Birkholz’s observation that the medieval seems to be kept out of the utopian in order for the utopian to remain modern (591), it is very possible that in opening up the medieval through utopia, we are making it entirely part of the modern world and thus closing it off as a site of oppositional struggle. Yet this is, after all, a science still new, still wet behind the ears, and this is not to say the battle is lost.

Or is it? For another feature these articles share is their movement away from a direct political engagement with utopia. Both Ingham and Burgwinkle establish a reading of utopia as “paradoxical” which they leave unresolved, a move that leaves “utopia” as a free-floating signifier in Ingham (e.g. 485) and a figure of the eternal present in Burgwinkle (e.g. 553). Birkholz proposes in the end not utopia but heterotopia, a discursive formation that, as he admits “has its essence in difference, a taste for the multiple . . . [that] is effectively utopia’s opposite” (613), a bricolage of utopias that, like Birkholz’ definition of utopia, may itself be “unbuildable.” Even Lochrie “does not wish to suggest that medieval utopia can rescue our culture from its degraded sense of utopia” (445), although she does posit that the medieval utopia might foster a greater understanding of the utopian as “anticipatory consciousness” (509).

Thus, although medieval utopia carries with it the potential to establish ideological alternatives, to perhaps challenge ideology dialectically by returning it to a past made new, few medievalists have seemed willing to admit this. Although I cannot be sure, I suspect the reasons are largely ideological: consciously or no, a general trend exists in medieval studies to shy away from overtly political readings so as to preserve the integrity of ideological apparatuses. Recall that, for Althusser, the educational Ideological State Apparatus is the one that modern states most rely on for their ideological deployment and reproduction. For better or worse, that function can lie at the heart of any academic work: as “professional ideologists” (Althusser 155), our job is to reproduce the conditions of ideological production, to “treat consciousness with the respect, i.e. contempt, blackmail, and demagogy they deserve, adapted to the accents of Morality, of Virtue, of ‘Transcendence,’ of the Nation, of France’s World Role, etc.” (156). The pessimism inherent in Althusser’s phrasing may not be surprising—he is, after all, a Marxist describing the bourgeois state—and it may well be deserved. The academic who reproduces the sort of knowledge that is needed for bourgeois ideology has done only what is necessary for their job: they need not go further. Presented with Utopia, the academy may embrace it, or it may reject it, or—worse luck—it may commodify it, making it ideologically neutral.

This should not be. Medieval studies has often been the site of ideological struggle: it has, at times, represented the best and worst of Europe’s past: now the hope of English Church, now the scourge of the “Enlightened” mind, now the shiniest beacon of the Romantics. Yet, as Allen Frantzen has noted of Anglo-Saxon studies, medievalism fell into a period of philological omphaloskepsis in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, in which it was resistant to theory and withdrew from the job of cultural critique and production. Although scholars of the High Middle Ages were the quickest to embrace literary theory and cultural studies, the field is still (even nearly two decades after Frantzen’s book) largely dominated by formalist tactics that do not, in the end, produce readings that matter. As Franzten argues, “it is the connectedness of Anglo-Saxon studies that matters, not their age”(226). One might say the same for medieval studies broadly: the field must be connected both to its multiple pasts and to its potential futures. This, then, should be the use of utopian studies: not just to say such-and-such is utopian, certainly not just to say such-and-such is the source of or analog to More’s book, but to say that these things can incite the utopian function today, here and now. Given the position of “the medieval” as a body of texts and artifacts that lie outside the sphere of the modern world—however much we discover the “origins” of that modern world in those sources—we should use that space as the ideological enclave that it represents.

I wish to stress that I am not accusing the particular authors of these studies of being apolitical; indeed, I know that several of them are politically strong, and that some branches of medieval studies are not only theoretically strong but engaged in the social here-and-now. But it doesn’t often seem that way, and the exciting thing about the science of “medieval utopia” its hope: the utopian function in medieval texts provides an opportunity to critique present structures of power through discourses that preceded—and perhaps even those that gave rise to—the “modern” age. Since “utopia” is a term that carries with it the potential for such a critique and such change, it seems a shame to be tentative about its use.
It is crucial when dealing with a theory that is still barely a science, still largely what Althusser would call descriptive (136), that we do not allow ourselves to fall into the old habits of the ideological state apparatus. The precise point of any utopian study should be not only discovering the status and function of utopian imagination at a given historical moment, but also, where possible, to re-energize the utopian potential. That is, faced with a moment of hope in the past, it is the duty of the critic to see that moment forward into he future. To do otherwise is to freeze hope into the past, to mark it as the “once was” instead of the “not yet.” Hope , it is said, springs eternal, but in order to spring at all it must not be held down.

References:

Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation).” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. Monthly Review Press: New York, 1971. 127-183.

Birkholz, Daniel. “Mapping Medieval Utopia: Exercises in Restraint.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 36.3 (Fall 2006): 585-618

Burgwinkle, William. “Utopia and Its Uses: Twelfth-Century Romance and History.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 36.3 (Fall 2006): 539-560.

Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. 1969. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon Press, 1972.

Frantzen, Allen. Desire For Origins: New Language, Old English, and Teaching the Tradition. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1990.

Ingham, Patricia Clare. “Making All Things New: Past, Progress, and the Promise of Utopia.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 36.3 (Fall 2006): 480-492.

Lochrie, Karma, “Sheer Wonder: Dreaming Utopia in the Middle Ages.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 36.3 (Fall 2006): 493-516.

Blog Hiatus

Just to make it official, I'm putting this blog on temporary hiatus. Right now, between grading and being on the cusp of research, I'm too busy to blog.

I promise I'll be back in a few weeks, perhaps by or before the end of November, with plenty of strange and fascinating thoughts on discourses, utopias, medieval things, and how much my students annoy me.

See you in a few weeks!

De realitatis falsis
I'm teaching composition this semester, and at the moment I am grading their first papers, which are to varying degrees an analytical explication of the elements of short fiction. Most of them are all right, but I've come across a disturbing pattern of error in not only their prose but also their thinking: several of them have proposed that something is a "false reality" or that "reality [is] that nothing is as it seems."
As I understand it, these terms would seem to be paradoxical: the idea of reality, especially as we mean it in the post-Enlightenment world, is that there is a single state of being from which all our knowledge arises. To adapt and perpetuate a misinterpretation of Gertrude Stein, there is a there there, and it cannot be changed. What changes is our perception of reality, and that perception is what can be said to be "true" or "false." So why, then, have my students conflated their idea of reality with reality itself, to the effect that they feel it possible to say that reality itself can, on occasion, not be real?
In all likelihood, there are a number of factors at work, from the trickle-down Romantic idealism so popular in American bourgeois culture to the daily barrage of poorly constructed syllogisms that is our current political climate. I'm not out to lay the blame anywhere, but I am sincerely disappointed that not one but several of my students appear to think that reality itself can be unreal. Surrealism I can accept; dreams I can accept; but an unreal reality is too paradoxical for an old materialist like me.
It does lead me to ask, though: what do you think? Am I overreacting, or are there in fact reasons why our students can't tell the difference between "false perceptions of reality" and "false realities"?

Edit: Meanwhile, my parents are in town, and we had brunch (how bourgeois!) at La Maison des Tartes (how aristo!), which was very tasty. On the way back, we took the bike trail, and overtook not only several nice people but a very strange pair of animals: a Great Dane and a small pig, both with the same piebald markings. The Dane was friendly, but the pig was confused. Overall, an amusing afternoon.

Gonzo Journalism Science

Aside from everything else in my life being about normal (behind on reading, behind on projects, behind on grading, life, love, and happiness—hey, it is grad school), I now have a new hero. See, I work in the University's Writing Center sometimes, and today I met with a master's candidate to set up times to work over his thesis. The kicker?

This guy blows up chickens for a living.

Well, not really, but he does inject them with a virus that causes their skins to rupture. So, it's either he blows up chickens or he makes George-Romero-zombies out of them. Either way, that's pretty cool.

Gross, but cool.

Project Updates

I've begun stabbing blindly at writing toward the Utopian survey project. In the course of this research, however, I turned up last Autumn's issue of the JMEMS, which was Karma Lochrie's special Utopian issue. There are a few good moments in that issue, and in Lochrie's essay especially but I haven't been impressed by the scholarship at all. Indeed, at the risk of being that wide-eyed idiot who dismisses things he doesn't like as "excessively bourgeois," I suspect that a lot of utopian scholarship either doesn't go into the HX sections of college libraries, or does but wanders out in a daze (I'll admit that the latter happens to me quite often, though the Ernst Bloch dazes are especially rhapsodic). In any case, a lot of what I've read so far has been fluffy scholarship, full of ifs and mights and lacking in a lot of common sense. Medievalists also seem keen to grapple with "utopianism-before-Utopia," as if More's libellum nugarum was some sort of foundational text along the lines of Wealth of Nations or Das Kapital. But it's not: it's the culmination of one tradition and the inception of another, less Also Spracht Zarathustra and more Le Morte Darthur. But I'll go into greater detail on this as we move through the semester.

I've done less work on my alliterative revival paper, though I do think I'll shoot for working with Pearl. Thankfully a recent article by Helen Barr, "Pearl—or 'The Jeweller's Tale,'" has explored a lot of the class issues inherent in Pearl; moving from that to "utopian visions for the emergent bourgeoisie" should be a snap. Whether it's a snap of the fingers or a snap of my neck we'll know soon enough.

Meanwhile, I've been served with jury duty sometime between the first of October and the end of December. I wouldn't mind it if it wasn't for the fact that they will not call me until a day or two before they want me, so I get to spend [n<90] days waiting for a phone call that will cause me to panic and reschedule, probably at the last minute and with some degree of pain toward my students.

Blog Is Not Lost

No, I haven't disappeared: it's just been a busy two weeks, is all. I'm back to teaching composition for the first time in a year, and it's both refreshing and frustrating. I have rather enjoyed teaching literature, being able to come in and just say "What is this about? How does it work? Does it even work at all?" and while one can do that with the composition courses, I also have to spend time explaining how they need to construct arguments and sentences: it's teaching two and a half liberal arts at once (dashes of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic), and it's a bit of a drag. On the upside, the classes are smaller and the prep is easier, leaving more time for the insane class schedule I now find myself taking.

I've signed up for two seminars: one on Discourse Analysis and another on the Alliterative Revival. Both should be good, and both should generate material towards my dissertation. My current plan in the DA course is to build a chapter in which I examine (to borrow a Raymond Carver title) what medievalists talk about when they talk about utopia. So far I've got some Le Goff, a few articles in German, Spanish, and Italian, and (for better or worse) Michael Uebel's Ecstatic Transformation: On the Uses of Alterity in the Middle Ages. I'll plough through these and whatever else turns up, and with any luck produce something worthwhile and possibly part of an opening chapter.

The same holds true for the Alliterative Revival. Right now, the dissertation looks to be shaping up into an examination of dream-visions as sources of utopic energy, specifically how the middle ages imagined the city, the other, and the self. The AR paper will likely focus on Pearl, Langland, or something more obscure. In any case, I've had to put aside any plans for popular romance until another project.

Right now, I'm at that stage in a project where I'm excited to find out what's been said, but I'm afraid I'm not going to have anything to say myself. I'm also beginning to get burnt out on doing coursework, as I feel like having to take classes is sapping my ability to do my work. Is that normal for a second-year PhD, do you think?

In completely one-off news, I am now the proud owner of maps which show the world's landmasses as they will look when the oceans rise by 100m. Frankly, I can't wait to sail the Gulf of Louisiana or live on the island of Wales, just south of the Irish archipelago. Despite the loss of just about every major capital of the world—London, Washington, Rio, St. Petersburg, Shanghai, etc.—I can't help but think that these maps also show some hope: new oceans in the deserts, new kinds of politics, perhaps even entire nations cobbled from the seas (shades of China Miéville). Those maps are here, by the way.

A shiny penny for the first person to title this post

I read my evaluations from the survey course this week. There were high marks overall, with a lot of praise. The lowest marks were in "keeps student attention" or somesuch, but I'm not terribly worried, as even those were no lower than three on a scale of five. They did suggest I try to make my lectures more interesting, which I intend to do over time; they also suggested I somehow make the book less heavy, something I cannot do unless I work for Norton, or can get the University to only buy Volumes A and B of the NAEL rather than Volume 1—especially since I know that Volume C is useless, as we teach the 18th century course with the Longman Anthology. Insert rant about standardized book orders here, I suppose.

I also got a number of very nice comments; indeed, the only quizzical comment was the rather cryptic note that "there was a lot of yawning." Since there wasn't any context for that statement, I'm not sure what this person meant: was there a lot of yawning on my part? Among the students when I wasn't looking? In this person's head?

Ah well. They've asked me to teach it again in the spring, and I'm all for it; right now, I'll be teaching our "Writing About Literature" course, which given the coursework I'm set to do right now, will be a welcome relief. However, expect more posts about the Alliterative Revival and the analysis of discourse over the coming months.

Some regrettable news: fellow TA C---- P---- has decided to take a semester off to pursue mental health and well-being. It's for the best, but he'll be missed. Take care, C---- P----.

Utopian Musings

Utopia is the hope that the scattered fragments of good
that we come across from time to time in our lives can be
put together, one day, to reveal the shape of a new kind of life.
The kind of life that ours should have been.
— Nick Bostrom, "Letter from Utopia"

You lot. You spend all your time thinking about dying,
like you're going to get killed by eggs, or beef, or global warming,
or asteroids. But you never take time to imagine the impossible.
That maybe you survive.
— Ninth Doctor, "The End of the World" (Doctor Who)

Sorry I've been out lately; work's got the best of my time, and what's left goes to, oh, old serials from Doctor Who, or having to call maintenance to vacuum out the water from my A/C on the hottest day of the year to date, or other little things. But I've been working, oh don't you think otherwise! Today was the second of three lecture/discussions on Paradise Lost, one of the many texts I've felt under-qualified to so much as attempt to teach. On Monday I was faced with lecturing on Donne, and discovered to my horror that Elegy 18 is not as innocent as I'd previously hoped (frankly, I always liked it for being clever, but several of my students pointed out that she has no say in what he demands, and is never really there at all other than as a thing to be possessed ["Oh my America! Oh my New Found Land!" etc.]) The week before was the Faerie Queene, which I'd like to think I handled all right. Overall, though, it's been a slog.

But I'm not here for confessional, your grace; I'm here toss out a dissertation idea. I want to deal with the medieval utopian. What is "utopia" in the middle ages, you ask? Well, I don't know yet, but when I do, I'll let you know. The scope of the project, though, is likely to include both elite (yay canon!) and popular (yay, er, this book) understandings, and may focus on dreams and dream-visions. If anyone out there knows of a good dream vision in, say, popular romance or a nice one-off chronicle, I'd be glad to know ye.

Meanwhile, I've been poking at the idea like a boy with a stick and a dead badger, and have begun generating the sort of philosophical musings that will probably—deus voluit and the creek don't rise—work their way into the first chapter.

No, you can't see them. What are you, some dead-badger-fetishist?

Oh, all right. Here, tell me what you think:

Writing on the Utopian in the European Middle Ages is dangerous, because there is a great temptation to conflate the Utopian impulse with Ecclesiastical notions of the millennium and have done with it. While the Millennium is an outgrowth of the Utopian, it is not solely one and the same. Rather than asking how they are alike, we might better consider the ways in which the anticipated Heavenly Jerusalem is not Utopian.
#
The particular fascination with the urban, built-form concrete Utopia is an early modern obsession, stemming from More's Utopia and (another text the name of which escapes me--JCL). The form "Utopian" thought took before this period—More's use of it in Utopia is no surprise—was metaphysical and theological; when it talked of cities at all, only Heavenly Jerusalem came up. Few would talk of building heavenly Jerusalem—such work was God's, not man's—and as such we expect few examples post-More to apply.
#
The question remains: what do we mean by the medieval Utopian? On the one hand, we can say, as Ernst Bloch does, that the Utopian represents a universal ideal of human freedom, an imaginary space where alternatives may be contemplated and hope for a new world nurtured. This level of definition seems however almost too encompassing: do we include as Utopian all sides of alterity, all moments of subversion, all instances of hope? The Carnivalesque, the queer, the millenarian, even the fundamental? "Yes" is the answer—yes, but not today. Not all at once.
#
As Nicola McDonald writes, “Modern narrative is often distinguished by the way in which it frustrates the conventional trajectory of desire, pulls it up short and resists the closure that is otherwise, in narrative terms, inevitable. Our desires, such narratives contend, are not finally satisfiable” (Pulp Fictions of Medieval England 13). It is no surprise that one modern descendant of romance is categorized as “fantasy”: those narratives in which it is even remotely possible for desire to be fulfilled must be separated from the vast, shambling herds of “real” fiction. We cannot hope for better than this life, in which, like Milton’s Satan, we have said “farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear / Farewell remorse” (Paradise Lost IV.108-9). Indeed, the world where all desires are known and met is often dismissed as a trivial place, not even worth experiencing—yet, as Fredric Jameson notes, “the complaint about the boredom of Utopias can much more clearly be seen to be so much propaganda for the excitement of market competition” (Jameson, Archaeologies 339).


There, that's the whole start of things. Nobody steal this or I'll. . . hurt you somehow.

Mass Media Consumption Day

What have I been doing all day? Was it "finish reading the things on which you'll be lecturing on Monday"?

NO!

Was it "offering editorial suggestions for the thesis of the Bachelor C---- P---- of Elkins, AR, as you agreed to do yesterday?

NO! (well, mostly—there was a bit of a lag in the morning before I could off, so I did read most of the rest of it. . .)

Was it "running to the post office to pick up your package from Canada, which contained your copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which you then, on receiving, drove straight home, opened, and read through from 9:30 AM - 5:30 PM?"

YES!

That's right, friends, I'm now up-to-date on the latest bits of Harry Potterdom. I've learned all about his last adventures, and have come to several conclusions:
This book beats Half-Blood Prince, and while it's true that a dead mackerel coated in polystyrine could have done that, it's also true that
J. K. Rowling has become a better writer over the past 17 years.
This was a much better book: she's got a stronger sense of pacing, for one, and for another, the fact that SPOILER most of it takes place outside of Hogworts frees her up to explore much of the rest of the world. Frankly, that castle was becoming a bit of an annoyance, and it's good she's gotten away from it. END SPOILER.

That said, I'm looking forward to seeing what her post-Potter literary career is like.

I'm also looking forward to some Monty Python's Flying Circus, and probably MST3K's riffing on Ring of Terror.

I'll do the school stuff tomorrow.

At Week Four's End

Cometh the hour, cometh the man: this week has been the start of something early modern, by which I mean I've been reading sonnets for most of the week. The week began, as I mentioned before, with Malory, whose inclusion on this side of the test I justified by claiming that he was going through a bit of self-fashioning. The self-fashioning theme continued through the sonnets of Wyatt (Tuesday), Spenser (Wednesday) and Shakespeare (Thursday), and the works of Elizabeth (Friday).

On Thursday I got a little fed up with the lack of participation, and decided that since they'd had two days of sonnets, and since it was Shakespeare for chrissakes, they could do group work. I split them into groups of three, and had each group select three sonnets. Those sonnets had to be connected thematically—i.e., they couldn't just pick three sonnets that used red as an symbol. They were to spend the majority of class determining how their selected sonnets fit together, and how they might not fit together. How, I asked, did they support or disturb the dominant theme of the group? It went pretty well, I think: I heard from a few students I'd not heard from before, and instilled some confidence in them that they could produce viable, valid readings.

Today, though, there was none of that: I gave them a lecture on Elizabeth. It was, perhaps, shorter than I might have liked, but that's okay. I figure, I've done them the best I could, and if that didn't fulfill today's time requirement, who cares?

But the hell with all that: you're here for the statistics, aren't you? Actually, you're not here at all, but that doesn't matter. The numbers are:

A: 38% (6)
B: 50 %(8)
C: 6% (1)
D: 6% (1)
F: 0% (0)

Still, no-one's failing, so that's pretty good. I did have one student come up to me today and ask me whether it was all right if she deliberately sabotaged her own grade so that she'd get a C. My response was that it was her right to make the grade she wants to make, but that she should do her best; what I didn't tell her was that she would have to nigh on fail miserably on the remaining classwork to make anything less than a B.

Next week: Colonialism and the Other!

Didn't I have a curve somewhere?

So, as promised, I've finished grading. I also delivered a lecture this morning in which I partially used Malory to talk about two key theories: Stephen Greenblatt's ideas about self-fashioning, and Benedict Anderson's origins of nationalism. Both theories are, of course, about periods after Malory, but I am one of those people (you know, those people) who see Malory's text as a step toward English nationalism and toward ideas of the self. Whether that's because it actually is used in the Early Modern age as a tool for moral development, or whether it's that I've decided to read Caxton's preface in earnest:

humbly beseeching all noble lords and ladies with all other estates, of what estate or degree they been of, that shall see and read in this said book and work, that they take the good and honest acts in their remembrance, and to follow the same. . . . For herein may be seen noble chivalry, courtesy, humanity, friendliness, hardiness, love, friendship, cowardice, murder, hate, virtue, and sin. Do after the good and leave the evil, and it shall bring you to good fame and renommee.

In any event, I talked too much today, but that's the way it goes. Sometimes you get the bear, and sometimes you're ambushed by a giant lecture. Ah well.

Anyway, statistics: as of this morning I have all the exams graded, and including this morning's attendance, we see the following figures.

Exam Grades:
A: 44% (7)
B: 44% (7)
C: 6% (1)
D: 0% (0)
F: 6% (1)

Current Grades
A: 44% (7)
B: 44% (7)
C: 6% (1)
D: 6% (1)
F: 0% (0)
18 enrolled; 2 withdrawals
16 total current students

I had one 100% A, and frankly, with 88% of the class passing at or above expectations, I wouldn't give a curve for all anything. That said, I was pretty proud of this last exam—but the next will be sneakier indeed.

Numbers Game

Normally, I'd post about this week in teaching, but I'd also like to do that after I've graded the exams. To make matters more annoying, I've left my flashdrive at work, and can't get it again until Monday.

Expect, then, a post. . . then.

*sigh*.

From the left, a Challenger. . .
Confessio docendis No. 3*

The classroom in which I teach is angled in such a way that I can approach it from the stairwell without being seen. Doing so today, I heard some students discussing the day's reading (the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales, in middle English thanks to Norton's brilliance). Initially, they were in agreement that it was hard to read (no surprise—in a summer course, how much of a crash course can I give them?), and then they complained about my pedagogy. So when I finally rounded the corner, I said something flippant and defensive, and then one of them asked why we needed all this history in a literature course. Would it be on the test?

After the few seconds it took to recover from my internal weeping, I responded that I don't teach to the test (it's not No Child Left Behind, after all), and that while I do realize I don't talk about the text enough, I generally believe that they're smart enough to read the text without me having to explain it to them. Granted, with the Canterbury Tales and perhaps later with the Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost, there will be some moments where syntax or sense runs away from the text, and I'll have to slow down and point at stuff. But generally speaking, in a class full of Junior and Senior English majors, I would expect them to be capable of reading a text, especially one whose language has been modernized, understand the content, and form some opinion of its meaning. My job, then, is not to say "There is meaning in the text," but to say, "there is extra meaning around the text that you need to understand the text further."

For instance, yesterday I taught the second half of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. On Wednesday I had left them with the thought that it might all be an allegory for the soul's journey from perdition to perfection—but then we get to day two, which is, as always, kinkier than I remember.** So, I thought, what better time to explain courtly love? Granted, I needed to take them back a bit and explain its origins, especially given that those origins are so contentious,*** but overall it went pretty well. Once I'd explained how it worked, I took them into the text and demonstrated how Gawain embodies those virtues and how the Pearl-poet challenges them. That, ideally, is the sort of thing I do every day.

So, I explained this to the student, who seemed to accept this as an explanation. Most of my fellow TAs who have heard this story have agreed with me: lectures are for context, not content. That said, I'm not against talking about content if the students are having trouble with it; however, what I want is connections made and understanding brought into focus.

I'm glad someone challenged me, though; most of the time I only hear such complaints after the fact in our evaluations. Getting it here allowed me to articulate it for the class as a whole, and probably staved off a few negative reviews while opening a few minds to the real goal of this course: getting them to think about why we produce literature and to what ends we do so.

Grade Statistics: Week Two:
A: 2 (13%)
B: 7 (44%)
C: 3 (19%)
D: 1 (6%)
F: 3 (19%)
16 enrolled students.
2 withdrawals.
Grade is based on 9 days of attendance. That's almost a curve, really, and it's doing what it ought: most students have been there most of the time, and only a few are really screwing off. We'll see how things are next week, after I get and grade their exams.
_____
* No. 1? The larch. Seriously, you expect me to keep track of this, as if it were some series, here to amuse you?
** Bercilak's wife pins Gawain to the bed and says he can't get up until she gets a kiss. If that's not wonderful, I don't know what is.
*** I did a combination of The Allegory of Love and The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History.

Confessio docentis No 28:
Lecture Notes

So, sometimes I'm pretty sure I've said ridiculously stupid things in class. I don't mean the non-sequiturs, I don't mean random innuendo—not the sorts of things that just sort of jump out when you're not really filtering—but genuinly stupid comments that you don't realize until later. Today, for instance, I was doing the symbolism of Gawain's pentangle (reading without a net, as usual) and something in the back of my brain forgot that the six-point star is not called the same thing as the five-point star, i.e. both are not the star of Solomon. It wasn't until much later that it occured to me that I could have said one brought echoes of the other--but the real critic in the back of my head says "why mention the star of David at all?"

I say this because I've been having some thoughts about teaching with notes, specifically the degree to which each lecture should be a well-researched, multi-viewpoint demonstrating presentation. That, I think, is the platonic ideal of lecture: the sort of brilliant talk given about a text that someone like the other medievalist named Lewis or Fleming or Tolkien would have given. Granted, these people had time, and, as my friend Craig is fond of pointing out, they didn't have television. I tried for that at the start of the term, but after I ran out of notes on Beowulf (i.e. after I'd run out of the things I'd cribbed from Andy Orchard and Bill Quinn), I started having to do research on a regular basis, and between that and reading the text and somehow boiling all that down into 120 minute speech every day, I just sort of fell apart.

So I reverted back to the old way, which is "read the text, make some notes, and come up with discussion questions." The latter usually devolve into rhetorical questions that I have to answer, which I don't want to answer, because I'd like to hear from them. In the end, I get nervous and zip around from topic to topic, and cover things I didn't think about until after I'd got into the classroom. It feels fine, but it also looks, on reflection, like a mess. But I'll do it again tomorrow, and probably on Friday and for the rest of the term. Perhaps eventually I'll have those well-researched lectures, but not today.

Besides, as my occasionally uncomfortable students can tell you, I move around too much to lecture. If I stood behind a podium for an hour, I'd probably explode.

I'll never abandon you, sweet blog of mine!

Don't worry, loyal fan(s), I'm not gone forever now that the "book club" is done. In fact, I'm still around, and thanks to a new part-time job, I'll be chained to a desk for about seven hours a week, so there will be plenty of time for me to screw around at the computer. It's a Mac, though, and it's running an ooooold version of Firefox, so I'm not too terribly sure what I'm doing. Fun!

The first few days have been pretty good. Lectures have gone smoothly, with me doing most of the talking—but I expected that, even planned it that way. It's much easier to get things done if I know where I'm going, and the less dead air (the usual response to questions in these parts) I have, the better I feel. So, lectures it is, even if it kills me.

The lectures, though, seem to be boring some people, to which all I can say is, "tough it out." One woman was even trimming her nails (what disrespect), which to me says, I'm not here to learn, I'm here for you to give me answers to things. Tch. Most of them, however, seem alert if not attentive, and one or two even ask clarification questions and respond when I ask them general-knowledge questions.

So far, the stuff hasn't been too bad: we did a few OE lyrics (The Wanderer, Bede's account of Cædmon's hymn, The Dream of the Rood) and now we're onto Beowulf. After that, there will be some more nation-building texts (selections from Anglo-Norman chronicles about the origins of the English), then Sir Gawain, Chaucer, Second Shepherd's Play, then an exam, then some Renaissance stuff I'll probably tell you about later, whoever you are you strange people. The goal for the whole course is twofold: explore the creation of the self (interority, alterity, etc.) alongside the creation of England as an idea (what does it mean to be English? To encounter things that are not English?) Hopefully it will give them some idea of the usefulness of literature. We'll see.

Summer Reading Reviews: Part the Last
The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance

Carol Heffernan. The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003. Pp. x, 160, two illustrations. $70.00.

The title of Carole Heffernan's work implies a large and perhaps ambitious project, surveying not only Chaucer but all of "Medieval Romance" for traces of "the Orient." Alas, in its scant 160 pages, it does not live up to that promise. Focusing instead on a few of the Canterbury Tales (The Man of Law's Tale and the Squire's Tale), two episodes from the Legend of Good Women (Dido and Cleopatra) and two Middle English romances (Floris and Blauncheflur and Le Bone Florence of Rome), Heffernan seeks to uncover the "remarkable oriental influence" in these selections, and "to call for a reconsideration of the textual exchanges as well as other cultural interactions linking English (and European) romance literature of the Middle Ages and the Orient" (2). Even in this last paring, one can discern problems with this study: a chronological marker—even one that, as Norman Daniel pointed out years ago, is patently Eurocentric—is not equivalent to a spatial marker. For Heffernan, it seems, either the Middle Ages is a place or "the Orient" is timeless.[1]

Heffernan's study is largely balanced in its scholarly approach, though proving that Christians and Muslims exchanged stories where they met seems rather straightforward. Each of the sections discusses a different exchanged story type: the Man of Law's Tale depends on an understanding of the trade networks in the Mediterranean; the LGW selections view the Muslim Female Other[2]; the Squire's Tale is a moment when 1001 Nights-style interlacing comes into European narratives; and the romances deal, in their own way, with the working out of courtly love paradigms. Each argument is on the whole valid; each has its flaws. For example, the discussion of the interlacing of the Squire's Tale is technically right: the interlacing exists and is better done than its analogs and precursors. Yet the context around Heffernan's reading—the "how and why" the technique derives from Oriental sources—isn't well argued: instead, Heffernan spends time talking about the 1001 Nights, Spenser's Faerie Queene, and a number of modern, secondary works without ever driving all the points home.

This is the pattern throughout The Orient: a strong, sometimes faultless reading is combined with a less-than-satisfactory critical apparatus. Indeed, at times the critical work reads more like a literature review than an argumentative synthesis. This, combined with some issues of diction (the repeatedly-used "Mohammedan" is so 19^th-century) and a lack of clear linkage between each of the readings leaves this work lacking. Perhaps there is something to be made of the connections between "the Orient," "Chaucer," and middle English romances, but it's not made here.
_____
[1] Of course, as Catherine Brown points out in "In the Middle" (JMEMS 30.3 [Fall 2000]: 547-574), sometimes it is useful to consider the past as a place rather than a time. Heffernan doesn't seem to do that in The Orient, though.
[2] Though both Dido and Cleopatra lived before rise of Islam, this hardly matters to Chaucer; time is static in the Middle Ages, and the past is just a better version of what we have now.