The Salt-Box

In this month’s Bookslut, I review Brenda Maddox’s new biography of Ernest Jones:

Three of Brenda Maddox’s splendid biographies center on famous modernist marriages: D. H. & Frieda Lawrence, W. B. & Georgie Yeats, and James and Nora Joyce. Like many modernists, Lawrence, Yeats, and Joyce each was keenly interested in making art more psychologically rich and complex. That Maddox’s newest biography should focus on Ernest Jones thus makes a satisfyingly perverse sense: For what was Jones but Freud’s work wife?

Read the whole thing here.

The new Victorian Studies (Winter 2007), and included in it is my review of J. M. I. Klaver’s The Apostle of the Flesh: A Critical Life of Charles Kingsley (Brill, 2006).  Here’s the first graf:

In 1872, Vanity Fair remarked that “Time and opinions move so fast that it is difficult to recall the period, though it is really so recent, when the Rev. Charles Kingsley, sometime author of ‘Alton Locke’ and now Chaplain to the Queen [ . . . ] was one of the most daring and advanced revolutionists of his cloth” (qtd. in Klaver 472; Klaver’s ellipsis).  Vanity Fair omits many reasons why Kingsley might fascinate modern Victorianists: his complex emphasis on manliness, masculinity, and the body; his immersion in scientific projects (sanitation reform) and debates; his jingoism and sense of national mission, even when these sanctioned brutal or near-genocidal violence; the conflict with John Henry Newman; his children’s books, especially The Water Babies (1863); and his interest in sexual satisfaction within marriage as an almost sacramental blessing.  And yet all too frequently, knowledge of Kingsley can devolve into the following series: muscular Christian; self-destructive combatant with Newman; author of Alton Locke (1850) and The Water Babies, plus a few other works.  J. M. I. Klaver’s The Apostle of the Flesh seeks to restore Kingsley to a more central place in the Victorian period.

Interested parties without access to Victorian Studies can e-mail me for the review.  My edition of Kingsley’s Alton Locke is due to Broadview in a mere six weeks!

Over at Academic Commons, my first post is up: It’s about the so-called Voluntary System of Accountability being promulgated by the American Association of State Colleges & Universities (AASCU) and the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges (NASULGC) in response to the Spellings Commission.

Inasmuch as the VSA program relies on standardized testing to assess general education / liberal arts outcomes, I have misgivings about its utility.  And since it’s trying to capture “value-added” education, the problem of student motivation seems insoluble: The VSA methodology suggests testing random samples of first-year and senior students.  But, almost by definition, the assessment can’t be part of the student’s grade for the class.  Why any senior would take this seriously is beyond me.

Having said that, I’m probably a little bit more sanguine about the public reporting of assessment data than some colleagues.  On the one hand, I’ll admit that too much federal control of this would be disastrous; on the other hand, I do think that colleges have been so high-handed about the sanctity of their mission, and so blithely confident in the effectiveness of their methods, that unconventional methods are called for.

Anyway, read the whole thing there.

My weekly post at Blog of a Bookslut is up. Topics include the new book of Guantanamo Bay detainee poems, a new edition of Blake’s illustrations of “Comus,” the “Immanent Willy,” and more.