The Salt-Box

Just in time for my birthday Saturday, I received a royalty statement for Lost Causes. The book is doing ok in its first year–actually, it’s sold better than I would have expected–but I do have some observations:

• Buy the CD version! (It’s .pdf files, not an audiobook.) A minimum of $13 cheaper for you, and I get royalties right away!
• The book was simultaneously released in paper and hardcover, but the $30 difference in price seems to have driven libraries to buy the paperback.  (Which is actually fine, b/c the paperback edition has a very spiffy cover.)
• In fact, I’d be stunned if the hardcover sold enough for me to get any money from that edition. (Not that you’re not welcome to try!)

It’s got chapters on Carlyle (”On History,” “On History Again,” and The French Revolution), Dickens (Barnaby Rudge and A Tale of Two Cities), Brontë (Shirley), and Eliot (the essays, Felix Holt, and Middlemarch), as well as an introduction and epilogue that urge the usefulness of psychoanalytic theory in thinking about narrative and historical change.

On the whole, the book suggests that Victorian narrative frequently seems to respond more subtly to history than does the historicism that has been so popular in contemporary Victorian studies.

And it’s not so dense as the last two sentences imply:

This book’s original title was Lost Causes: Psychoanalysis and Victorian Literature, which was a bit misleading inasmuch as the book doesn’t spend that much [explicit] time on psychoanalysis.  But that subtitle did offer both a specific conceptual promise and a bit of gallows humor, which are worth sketching briefly.  . . . The joke is less abstract: Defending the psychoanalytic account of anything, much less a nonsexual topic such as history or causality, seems a bit of a lost cause these days, especially outside of English or cultural studies departments.  Outside the academy, the clinical efficacy of psychoanalysis is either openly ridiculed or simply bypassed by pharmacological interventions.  Inside the academy, the influence of historicist theories, as well as theories rooted in identity politics and the self-inflicted wounds of reductive psychobiographical approaches, have lessened Freud’s influence significantly.

So, buy the book!

Devoted readers of this blog–a number I believe to be in the millions–will recall that, a couple of weeks ago, I got some strange news: Despite having been elected chair of a particular committee, and despite having been told that I was re-elected to the committee, a flaw in election design meant that, in fact, I wasn’t re-elected, and hence couldn’t be chair.

That was the state of play on Monday, when the faculty senate met. Someone had proposed a motion to rectify the situation by having the senate declare me a member of the committee for the year. This passed, and so I went from being chair-in-exile to just chair.

This morning, however, a friend on the senate circulated a senate policy document from 5 years ago, which says, in part:

Members on Standing Committees of the Faculty that are elected into office during their last term shall be granted a one-term extension.

One reading of the policy is that we didn’t need a special resolution of the senate, because officers automatically have their term extended. Another reading is that, if you’re elected officer, you can get another term afterwards.

So, to recap:

• I was chair, then not chair, and am now chair again
• To a first approximation, no one fully understands the complex rules governing senate elections
• In general, it is not good news when a senate resolution specifically mentions you by name.

Hrm. At any rate, the committee should be a good one this year; the first meeting was fun, there’s a cool proposal coming next meeting, & people seem–against all odds–to be lining up to be on subcommittees.

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A random service-related thought that doesn’t deserve a separate post: It’s always a special moment in shared governance when a colleague says, “It doesn’t matter what the administration thinks. It’s the *faculty* senate, it advocates for the faculty, and it can pass any policy its members like.”

Today’s Ms. Mentor column offers a juicy pop-culture tidbit:

Certainly there is a public image of fashion for academics. . . . For women it is the frumpy Marian the Librarian look — thoroughly unlike Julia Roberts’s professorial character in Mona Lisa Smile and even less like the Amazonian Shannon Tweed, the women’s-studies professor in one of Ms. Mentor’s all-time favorite movies, the thoroughly underrated Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death. (Ms. Mentor has never met another living soul who’s seen it.)

Ms. Mentor needs to hang out at The Valve, where two years ago Ray Davis alerted readers to the DVD re-issue:

I first heard about CWitAJoD when it wowed a 1989 women’s film festival in Portland. After fifteen years, my VHS copy’s a bit bedraggled; happily, I was given the new DVD a few days ago. Very bare bones — it screams for a bootleg commentary track — but within an adjunct’s travel budget. On your way to the MLA, pick up a copy as an interview icebreaker.

And a commenter points to some multimedia previews at badmovies.org.

No point, necessarily–but the movie does have a fan base.

Back when I was in the Psychoanalytic Studies Program, it would have amused me to no end to be characterized as a Freudian:

(We’ve become strangely Freudian over at Bookslut, what with Jason B. Jones’s new column and my reading his essays at the suggestion of a friend. We’ll try to throw in some Jung or Piaget [who doesn’t love a little genetic epistemology] or someone to balance it out.)

Within the world of psychoanalytic studies, I would identify as a Lacanian.  But since–as my column suggests–people *outside* that world don’t care about such differences, I speak of Freud.

Plus, one wants to have readers, right?  The # of people who’ve read part of the Dora case, or The Interpretation of Dreams, or Civilization and Its Discontents, or “The Uncanny” is a lot higher than the number of people who’ve read Lacan’s Seminar XVII (despite my  best efforts).

When I started using online tools in my classes, it wasn’t to keep track of students: I wanted to help them engage with the material.  I will say, however, that a significant advantage of moving assignments and readings online–especially an environment that requires a login–is that you get a very clear picture of who has done those readings or that assignment.

For example, rather than wondering why one section of a class was so much more reticent on Friday, I can look online and see that only half as many people in that class had bothered to access the online material.

Even though that kind of data isn’t terribly precise (it can’t tell you whether someone’s read the material, just whether they’ve accessed it), having it probably would influence the way one manages a class and designs assignments.  I actually have daily online quizzes, but clearly I’m leaving them open for too long, and I need to re-explain when students should be taking them.  (I.e., before class, not after.)

But it is not a happy moment to realize that more than 50% of the students in one section didn’t bother to do the reading.  (Honestly, who doesn’t love Edmund Burke?)

Look what’s new at Bookslut this month:

This month we introduce two new columns: Culinaria Bookslut, which is pretty much what it sounds like; and PsychoSlut, which hopefully is not. . . . And in PsychoSlut, Jason B. Jones, also known as Bookslut’s poetry blogger and reviewer, will be rereading The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud one volume at a time. Note that “rereading” bit there.

It should be fun. This month’s column sketches the plan, and talks briefly about the transition from my psychoanalytically-intensive doctoral work to a community where the appraisal of Freud is a wee bit more skeptical. Since these will usually be linked to a recent book, there’s a glancing look at Drew Westen’s The Political Brain.

It goes without saying, right, that the column’s title is in keeping with Bookslut’s naming conventions, and isn’t some sort of weird confession.

Today, while running a last-second back-to-school errand, I saw this sign emphasizing the life of the mind:

Stay classy, Chili’s!

Tomorrow’s theoretically the start of classes, though in the great division of labor A teaches TR and I teach MWF, so I guess there’s one more day still to wait prep the ungodly number of online doodads and tools we’ll be using across my classes this semester. (Moodle, PBWiki, del.icio.us, & blogger, at the start. More later.) And what *are* those classes? Glad you asked:

• Honors 210: Western Cultures II: Utopias/dystopias (1 section, with a friend in English; here’s the syllabus)
• ENG 206: Brit Lit II (2 sections; online syllabus forthcoming)
• Eng 476: The Modern British Novel (1 section; online syllabus forthcoming)
• Honors 440: Thesis Preparation & Proposal (1 section; online syllabus forthcoming)

5 sections, 3.5 preps. (Honors 210 is co-taught; I’ll be leading units on cyberpunk, Victorian medievalism, and 20thC responses to The Tempest.)

Anything missing? (Oh, right–Victorian literature. Also courses for 1st-year students. One of the things that’s sort of unsettling is that, even with a 4/4 load, there’s not enough time to teach all the things that one would like to teach / could be good at teaching.)

Via the Kenyon Review blog, here’s a post at the Oxford UP blog about prepositions, which defends the honor of these little words and points to a new website, The Preposition Project, “a monumental undertaking that systematically describes 673 distinct senses for 334 prepositions in English.”

All I have to add is that when the Little Man was an infant, A used to recite an alphabetized list of the most common prepositions in order to quiet him down for sleep.  (She’d memorized it in Catholic grade school.)  I will say that he’s always been pretty fluent with them.