The Fictions of the Sexes

Final Examination

2009-12-03T17:38:00.001-08:00

Final Examination
Open-course-book Final Examination: Wednesday December 16th 19:00- 22:00, room HCC2245.

An Ironic Presentation of High Fidelity's Representation of Feminism

2009-12-02T20:17:00.000-08:00

In Nick Hornby's High Fidelity (as in Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary) Feminism is presented as a hostile, anti-male attack system which seeks to force men to change their behavior according female norms and standards.

Here is an ironic reversal of that view: "The gender wars are over: and men won."

On the Social Inferiority of Males

2009-11-25T16:59:00.000-08:00

Ahead of today's lecture on Nick Hornby's representation of failed masculinity and female superiority, read, via the indispensible Arts & Letters Daily, "The Puzzle of Boys." Discuss with your assigned Group, and prepare a five minute analytical reflection.

Rob, Barry, Dick: Sexual Selection in action

2009-11-23T10:30:00.000-08:00

What does science have to say about why ugly men survive if, as Darwin declares, women chose which men get to reproduce?

A new study explains why we aren't all born with Brad Pitt’s perfectly chiseled features or Angelina Jolie’s pouty lips.... [M]en with greater genetic diversity in areas of the genome relating to disease defense were also rated as more attractive by women. So because these males with greater mutation rates are more likely to mate, they will pass that higher rate on to their offspring, allowing sexual selection to propagate variation through the population, a finding that likely applies to all
organisms.
This propagation means that peacocks’ tail feathers will
vary in length and that some of us definitely won’t be America’s next top model.

And some of us will be Rob, Barry & Dick....

"Championship Vinyl" in Vancouver

2009-11-23T07:46:00.000-08:00

Ideally, we would do a class field trip to the Vancouver branch of "Championship Vinyl," which goes by the name Zulu Records. I myself have almost certainly met Dick there ....

On Jane Austen's Popularity

2009-11-22T22:19:00.000-08:00

Via Arts & letters Daily, please enjoy this tremendous article in the "Books" section of the New York Times which helpfully riffs on the intensity of enduring popularity of Jane Austen (which would include Helen Fielding's re-vision of Pride & Prejudice in Bridget Jones's Diary) and of the period's fiction more broadly. The author of the article mavels at the hunger for the minutiae of great novels which a new annotated edition of Pride & Prejudice slakes. Yet for all that, the chick-lit appeal remains strong -- perhaps primary.

The reader who does not know a farthing from a guinea, it’s safe to say, will nonetheless grasp the great drama of attraction and repulsion that plays out between Darcy and Elizabeth. The cut and thrust of their conversation is timeless. Generations of young women who do not know the first thing about an entailed estate or a quadrille will recognize in Austen’s heroine a kindred spirit, a contemporary, a valued ally in the eternal war between the sexes.

'Freemales' and Bridget Jones

2009-11-18T20:09:00.000-08:00

One cultural context for our present course of study will be explored in seminar this week. The present version of Bridget Jones is, mass media (here, Britain's Daily Mail) declares, the "freemale":

The number of single women has hit an all-time high, a study has shown - and most of them aren't looking for love.
They apparently choose to be alone, and rejoice in a life where they can spend time and money as they wish.
This new breed of singleton has been dubbed a 'freemale', because she chooses her freedom over a family.

Note the use of the Bridget Jones's Diary term in the article. Moreover, this social fact--if it is a fact--accords precisely with Helen Fielding's satire on modern middle-class consumer culture: freemale being simply the extension of self-indulgent capitalist participation:

"[Men are] Bastards!" yelled Jude, slurping her Pinot Grigio.
"Bastards," I yelled through a mouthful of raspberry pavlova mixed with
tiramisu.
"Bloody bastards!" shouted Jude, lighting a Silk Cut with the end of
another one.

The article also locates freemales precisely with the class demographic of Helen Fielding's satiric target: middle-to-upper-middle class urban women engaged in the production modes of industrial Capitalism:

Dr Jan Macvarish, a sociologist from the University of Kent and author of a research paper Understanding the Popularity of Living Alone....claims that changes in society have made it more acceptable for women to remain single for longer, and says the trend particularly affects urban and educated females in professional or managerial roles.

Further, the article echoes the sub-text of Bridget Jones's Diary that children are barrier to optimal participation in the Capitalist economy:

'There is also less of a stigma about not having children. Now, these women call themselves childfree rather than childless.

"Bridget Jones"-style cooking experience

2009-11-17T22:47:00.000-08:00

You remember the scenes in Bridget Jones's Diary where she tries to cook elaborate 'Britsh Home Cooking' dishes from a Delia Smith-type cookbook? ("SUNDAY 19 MARCH").

Here is a real life case, from England's Daily Telegraph.

Judith Woods thought it would be fun to revive the culinary delights of Eliza Smith - the 18th-century's Nigella Lawson - but, oh dear, how wrong can you be.

"Bridget Jones in Paris" - A Blogger

2009-11-17T22:28:00.000-08:00

'Petite anglaise' blogger wins sacking case

By Henry Samuel in Paris
An Englishwoman sacked for bringing her employers in Paris into disrepute by writing an internet diary under the pseudonym petite anglaise was awarded £30,000 for wrongful dismissal yesterday. a test case for bloggers in France and beyond, a tribunal concluded that Catherine Sanderson, whose blog is said by some to be the equivalent of "Bridget Jones in Paris", had been dismissed "without real and serious causes". >>more

Bridget Jones & Post-Feminism

2009-11-17T14:14:00.000-08:00

Update:
Well, here I go! I just found this 'letter to the editor' by Helen Fielding herself in which she explicitly identifies Bridget Jones with post-feminism.

Bridget is not just on a desperate quest to settle down. Like all self-respecting modern women she is struggling to balance her post-feminist independence and economic power with the human, not just female, need to love and be loved.

Whether one approves of Fielding's position is a matter of personal judgement.

[Original Post.]
I came across this article on Bridget Jones' Diary (only the film version, alas) and the post-feminist question:

Bridget Jones. Icon of post-feminist regression and celebration of marriage uber alles? Au contraire.
Neither role model nor nemesis, Bridget Jones is the epitome of the liberated woman - she can match macho in drink, smoke and swearing; she will stand up to anyone; and she takes both reputable career and sexual freedom for granted.

Diary of a 1920s Bridget Jones

2009-11-17T11:09:00.000-08:00

Jottings of 17-year-old Ilene Powell show women's obsession with diets and dating is timeless, reports Nicole Martin.
If you thought the angst-ridden singleton epitomised by Bridget Jones was a creation of the Naughty 1990s, think again.
A newly-discovered diary, written in 1925, shows that women 80 years ago were just as obsessed with men, diets and relationships as their modern-day counterparts. The leather-bound journal, written in pencil by 17-year-old Ilene Powell, from Bristol, bears a striking resemblance to the fictional memoirs of Helen Fielding's neurotic thirtysomething heroine.

"Bridget Jones" & "Pride & Prejudice"

2009-11-17T11:02:00.000-08:00

Chick-lit author Sarah Sands has this article in today's telegraph online about a new film version upcoming of Pride and Prejudice. She has this to say:

If it is true that there are only four stories, then Pride and Prejudice must be one of them. Poor but proud woman spurns and loves rich, humourless man. Women consistently vote for Pride and Prejudice as their favourite novel, ever. Mr Darcy remains the most romantic figure created, ever.

And also this:

Dignity is perhaps the most important thing in a romantic hero, which is why Hugh Grant was always going to lose out to Firth. The greatest fantasy figures - Mr Rochester, Maxim de Winter, Heathcliff - are all grumpy.

And again this:

They are also, I am afraid to say, men of means. Women can run off with the poor and light-hearted (and usually artistic) - as Dorothea Brooke did when she chose Will Ladislaw, but it was not really very satisfactory, was it? I am still suspicious when women describe their menfolk as "supportive". It usually means economically unsupportive, and they tumble down the romantic league table.

And yet more, this to be relevant when we get to BJD:

Working Title is proud of its contemporary Elizabeth Bennet in Keira Knightley. No bodices and bonnets here. You would not be surprised to see Lizzy rolling a cigarette on the kitchen table. By contrast, Matthew Macfadyen is resolutely period, with a deep voice and breeches.

To which I say, "Cad, Curate or Colin Firth"

Copy-Editing Symbols

2009-10-30T17:07:00.000-07:00

Follow this link, as well as this other link, for a legend of the standard copy-editing symbols used in the marking of your essays

Some of the more frequently-used are the following.

SYN: faulty syntax
GR: faulty grammar
AWK: awkward wording or awkward expression of idea.
SP: faulty spelling
PRON: missing or faulty pronoun.
AGR: faulty agreement (grammar.)
T: incorrect tense (grammar.)
M: incorrect mood (grammar.)
//: lack of correct parallelism
¶ : faulty paragraph structure
CAP: capitalise
MM: mixed metaphor
NO CAP: don't capitalise
WDY: excessive, roundabout or unhelpful wording that obscures the argument.
ARG: argument required.
DEV: faulty development of the argument
D: faulty diction (e.g. use of jargon or informal idiom.)
PASS: passive (usually adjectival rather than adverbial) form
WC: faulty word choice
WW: wrong word
RELEV: irrelevant remark.
PETITIO: a petitio principii ('begging the question')—assuming as a conclusion that which needs to be established as a premis. Often in essay argument, a statement delivered as a proof which itself is as yet unproven.
UNCL: unclear expression of an idea
REP: repetitive wording or repetition of a previously-presented idea.
REL: faulty relation of idea or no clear relation to surrounding idea.
TRUISM: statement of the obvious: unnecessary.
P: faulty punctuation.
ITAL: italicise this text.
DEL: unnecessary text requiring deletion
PLEON: pleonasm
REPORT: book report--i.e. absence of argument.
CIT: missing citation
DANGL: dangling modifier.
STR: faulty or absent argument structure.
R-O: run-on sentence.
FRAG: sentence fragment
THESIS: misplaced thesis-level sentence
X: false statement.
SS: faulty sentence structure

Present-Day Droogs

2009-10-29T22:00:00.000-07:00

Only the latest of the derogatory terms by which the English middle- & upper- classes refer to young, unmarried working-class males is "Hoodies". Here are a couple of articles from the centre-right (& Blair-ite) tabloid The Sun on a hoodie and a politico. Catch the sense of fear and see the Clockwork-Orangey-ness of the competing government responses to Hoodies. (Bonus points for finding more than two terms of abuse....)

It's perennial for the Lads.

Cameron 'pistol' lad arrested.

THE gloating yob who pretended to shoot Tory leader David Cameron has today been arrested and charged with possession of cannabis.
Hoodie thug Ryan Florence, 17, yesterday boasted of his life of drugs, guns and crime.

Will we tame the Mad Dogs?

TONY Blair says future generations of yobs like Ryan Florence could be stopped by targeting kids as young as six.
The PM believes cops and social services have a duty to intervene as soon as youngsters start to go off the rails.

Now, the slur "hoodie" obviously refers to the head-cover. But the irony -- if that is the right term -- is that Lads only started wearing hoodies 'up' in public when the Labour government blanketed major cities with surveillance cameras 24/7 as a modernised 'New Labour' response to droog-ism.

"Men's bodies are the most dangerous thing on Earth," Margaret Atwood.

"A girl's guide to writing chick-lit"

2009-10-29T21:12:00.000-07:00

This weekend's edition of Arts & Letters Daily features a review of a new book by Sarah Mlynowski and Farrin Jacobs: See Jane Write: A Girl's Guide to Writing Chick Lit. More than a review, it is an interview, a descriptive breakdown of the elements of chick-lit, and salient quotations from important chick-lit writers.

What exactly is chick-lit?
Contrary to popular belief, it isn’t all about shoes. Or clothes. Or purses. Yes, some chick-lit characters enjoy their fashion collections, but if an interest in designers’ names is what made you look for advice here, maybe you should grab Vogue instead. Chick-lit is also not all about getting a guy. Love may be a happy diversion, or a painful pothole, but the chick-lit story is about the main character’s path to self-discovery. Although there’s usually a satisfying and uplitfing conclusion, the ending is more about hope for the future than snagging Mr Right.

Click the title of this post for the full review, & explore how well, in your estimation, it relates to Cranford.

Punk Rock & "A Clockwork orange"

2009-10-29T14:03:00.000-07:00

A section of The Sex Pistols' autobiographical documentary The Filth & the Fury was shown in class today to present the cultural context to Burgess' pre-recognitive novel A Clockwork Orange. The Sex Pistols were authentically working-class, and are thus in the identical cultural position in England that Burgess set Alex and his droogs.

I conceive of Punk as a British working-class social movement of the early-ninteen-seventies to early-ninteen-eighties which grew out of urban conditions obtaining in the years preceeding Margaret Thatcher's ascendency to the Prime Ministry. It is a class movement: 'class' in its proper historical sense of an upper, middle and lower class perpetuating the mediæval system of lord, vassal and serf, and, therefore, has merely a correlative relationship to economic standing (i.e. individual wealth does not determine -- and only incidentally has causative power over-- one's class position.) The class structure invented by Karl Marx is in contrast a bipartite system of a "bourgeoisie" owning the means of production and a "proletariat" producing; a system which Marx devised under influence of, first, Charles Darwin's fundamental belief in struggle as the elemental principle of Life, and, second, the commercialist assumptions of his Whiggish circle that life is economic at root.

Punk, then, is a nineteen-seventies' response by the lower class to the attitude that the ruling class holds toward them in the absence of Empire. Hitherto, being, pace Orwell, primarily a concern beneficial to the middle class, the British Empire had channelled, directed (indeed, developed) the physical and martial energies of the lower class as a means to build and sustain itself. With the loss of Empire after Britain had finally defeated in two World Wars the global Fascism of Germany and Japan, the lower class had no external outlet for their martial vigour, while the culture -- in terms of books, film, history, sport, comics, history, institutions, and language --that inculcated, developed and promoted it still remained operative.

Accordingly, in the absence of Empire and war as sanctioned outlets for the robust combatitiveness of lower-class single males (sport, of course, remains), the middle-class has experienced heightening of the sense of fear with which it historically regards the urbanised lower class. This produces intensification of the belittlement which, again historically, is the primary middle-class response to their fears; this expressed in pejorative labeling of young lower class males: thugs, hooligans, stroppers, lads, yobs, teds, punks, and (latterly) hoodies.

Hence, Punk: which, it must be kept clear, is class attitude not musical genre. Of course, there is characteristic style to punk music and lyrics, and characteristic style to the clothing. But for proof of the Attitude Thesis regards music, consider Pink Floyd. The hand-scrawled "I Hate" on Johnny Rotten's "Pink Floyd" T-shirt at his Sex Pistols audition cements the art-rock band as the punk bete noir. Yet it is not Pink Floyd's music or lyrics which mark them as anti-punk. The final movement of "Sheep" from Animals sounds like The Clash and the lyrics to the penultimate movement prefigure the Sex Pistols. It is rather that Pink Floyd are bourgeois to the core: Roger Waters' lyrics drip with the bathos, resentment, affectation, and "pity poor me" feelings that make loathesome the middle to both the class above and the class below.

The study, then, of Punk, in its English manifestation, follows a literary line that began with the 'angry young men' novelists of the fifties, through A Clockwork Orange in the sixties, through to Lad Lit and now at Punk .... and perhaps touching on non-fiction hybrids like Bill Buford's Among the Thugs, Lydon's Rotten: No Irish , No Blacks No Dogs, and the works of Robert Twigger.

H1N1 Registry for Students

2009-10-29T12:53:00.000-07:00

SFU has created an on-line registry in order to have students register their absence in the case of flu.

Students will inform their instructors in the usual way if they are absent due to flu and register on-line through the authenticated web survey.

Burgess & Orwell

2009-10-29T12:33:00.000-07:00

To re-emphasise the nature of the relationship drawn in today's lecture between Orwell's dystopia and Burgess' cacotopia, the latter designed A Clockwork Orange, in part, as a complement to -- a companion for -- 1984.
Update: 'counterpart' was the wrong word here (OED): better, 'companion' 22/01/07

Burgess is a novelist (among other things, as befits a polymath) not a politician, and therefore more than able to proceed, to create, in a non-adversarial, way.

1984 gives an imaginative representation of a dictatorship from the Right: modelled after the Soviet Union under the monster Stalin, it showed a rule from a single powerful voice -- to wit, Big Brother (albeit the text leaves a suggestion that the dictator may be in fact a façade for a ruling oligarchy.

Based on his experiences in late-1950s Britain under Socialism, and in harmony with his advocacy of individual free-will, Burgess designed a fictional representation of tyranny from the Left -- prefiguring very closely, as it turned out, the actual state of affairs in Eastern Europe. The will of the Collective, the meanness of life under the forcible egalitarianism of State control, and the irrelevancy of individual free-will in regard to the dogma of the 'greatest good for the greatest number' -- this is Burgess' contribution to a literary opposition to a fuller range of possible tyrannies, either of the Right or the Left.

Someone asked my how Burgess' vision relates to Ayn Rand. I would say that Burgess would be very uncongenial to Rand, for his vestigal Catholicism and his dislike (in harmony with Orwell) of the 'Will to Power' dogma that Rand so single-mindedly found alluring.

Nb:

u-topia lit. 'no-place'
dys-topia lit. 'broken-place'
caco-topia lit. 'evil-place.'

"Cold Comfort Farm" and an Uncertainty....

2009-10-14T16:35:00.000-07:00

I mentioned in lecture that I have a slight uncertainty about some — albeit minor and inconclusive — textual elements of Cold Comfort Farm that amount to a faint scent of Fascism. The following is offered as a example of the kind of minute clue-hunting which characterises the sensibility of the literary academic. It is also, I own, quite plausibly — & thus culpably — open to the Muggeridgean charge of 'taking a spade to a soufflé.'

As detailed earlier, there is only little readily-available biographical treatment of Stella Gibbons, and therefore until I investigate thoroughly and with scholarly rigour, the matter has to be left as a mere open question, and the satiric aspect of the text has to be affirmed as the currently-conclusive explanation covering the issues here raised.

The textual concerns begin at the opening of chapter II (p.19 in our Penguin Classics edition) with the narrator's unpleasant-sounding and unnecessary remark that Mrs. Smiling was returning to "....the slums of Mayfair" for something "....which she had noticed in a Jew-Shop." Next is the discovery, at the close of chapter IX, p. 108, of the parodied intellectual "....that his name was not Mybug but Meyerburg and that he lived in Charlotte Street...." Now,

"Meyerburg" is an emblematic Jewish name,
the shortening of the name (the sole such in the text) suggests diminution of person,
"My" makes him property
"bug" matches the Nazi (mis-)characterisation of the Jews as vermin
Charlotte Street is a Bloomsbury address, which fits with the text's satire of the entire effected ethos of the Bloomsberries, but it is also a London Jewish neighbourhood (e.g. Virginia Woolf's husband Leonard was Bloomsbury-Jewish.)

Lastly, at the end of chapter XIX, p.200, we read that "....Flora took advantage of her lassitude to impose her fresh will upon her cousin's flaccid one" and on p.202 Flora watches "....a distraught patient grow calm beneath the will of the [psycho-]analyst." (Emphasis mine.) (Note the psycho-analyst's nomenclature....)

The fetishistic attraction of the concept of Will for Fascists ― deriving from the German writer Friedrich Nietzsche's (paradoxically impotent) attempts to valourise what he called Will to Power" ― is set in motto by odious Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl in her film glorification of Fascism The Triumph of the Will.

Flora orients her actions around 'will-to-power': power for its own sake. The representation of Flora's attitude to will and power by Gibbons is chilling.

p.75: "And yet she shrank from boldly entering the kitchen where the family sat...and introducing herself. Such a move would lower her dignity and, hence, her future power. It was all very difficult"
p. 129; "Difficult times lay ahead. But this is what Flora liked. She detested rows and scenes, but enjoyed quietly pitting her cool will against opposition. It amused her; and when she was defeated, she withdrew in good order and lost interest in the campaign. She had little or no sporting spirit. Bloody battles to the death bored her, nor did she like other people to win.

Now this is all a textual interpretation, and could be absolutely off-base. The publication of Cold Comfort Farm in 1932 does coincide with the creation of the British Union of Fascists by the truly loathsome Oswald Mosley, and among its supporters were several London writers, intellectuals, and journalists. One early & consistent feature of the Fascist programme is anti-Communism, and it happens that the text of Cold Comfort Farm shows a sympathetic awareness of Communism. What is described as:

....a copy of the 'Internationally Progressive Farmers' Guide and Helpmeet', which Flora had ordered from London, where it was printed by some Russian friends of hers living in West Kensington' (p.195)

is unmistakably a typical Flora Poste attempt to modernise, here in a Communist direction, life at Cold Comfort Farm: the specific textual referent is on p. 172:

....Aunt Ada could dimly be discerned beating at everybody with the 'Milk Producers' Weekly Bulletin and Cowkeepers' Guide', and shrilly screaming....

Again, this is a pattern, but entirely inconclusive without biographical support, and should simply be allowed to stand as an illustration of a certain cast of scholarly mind, under the prick of sensible vigilance that the evil of fascism unceasingly demands.

Update: reference to the existence (not to the validity) of charges of fascism against English 1930s literati can be found in academic literary journals. See, e.g. Death of a Porcupine: D. H. Lawrence and his Successors. Author(s): John Fordham A1 A1 Middlesex University. Journal: Literature & History. ISSN: 0306-1973. Volume 9 Issue 1, Spring 2000, pp 56-66 (Available in online .pdf form through http://www.lib.sfu.ca/)
Update 2: An excellent way to understand how the abortive Fascict movement in England was .... aborted? is to read this article in the Atlantic Monthly by the uneavenly creditable Christopher Hitchens on a recent biography of the sublime P.G. Wodehouse. The portion available for free viewing treats of Wodehouse's supreme instance of the typical English derogation of Mosley. But best is to obtain your own copy of The Code of the Woosters.

Mid-Term Essay Topics

2009-09-30T20:41:00.000-07:00

Chose your topic for the mid-term esssay from the following three.You will need, for your choice, to formulate a strong thesis statement, using, ideally, the conceptions and techniques preseneted in lecture.

Emily of New Moon is a relatively rare example of a female künstlerroman--novel of an artist's development. Detail how L.M. Montgomery represents the development using a specific narrative form: i.e. the epic quest. You may refer to the autobiographical aspect of the text in your essay.
We learned in lecture how Kingsley Amis choses very specific words to diminish the masculine aspect of the fight between Bertrand Welsh and Jim Dixon in Lucky Jim. By close reading, show how Amis uses exact words to depict Jim at any two moments of successful masculine performance and in any two scenes of failed masculinity.
The portrait of Flora Poste in Cold Comfort Farm is evidently a model of the New Woman: independent, assertive, socially liberated and in charge. That is, so long as the reader is oblivious to, or choses to ignore, Stella Gibbons sophisticated satire. In your essay, make Gibbon's exquisite satire plain to such a reader.

Epic Quest

2009-09-30T20:30:00.000-07:00

A useful webpage for understamding the aspect of the epic quest -- the 'hero's journey -- is this illustrative use of The Matrix and Star Wars. More pedestrian but straightforward is at this link.

Chick-Lit Prominence in BookStores

2009-09-30T14:49:00.000-07:00

To show how prominently Chick-Lit is market displayed, I took these pictures in the Lougheed Mall Coles Books. Click on the individual pictures for a larger image.

Here is the Lougheed Mall Coles Books' courteous and professional store manager, Ms. Lori Drazdoff, beside a sub-display of various fiction titles marketed to women.

Following are pictures are of several sections of the "Fiction & Literature" shelves that run along the main walls. The books marketed as chick-lit are clear: their covers are in bold pastels frequently with variations on retro-sixties movie-style line-drawings. My assumption is that the marketers are invoking the iconography of Breakfast at Tiffany's.

In addition to the covers, books marketed as chick-lit have titles that strongly declare their genre. Here, Mary Kay Andrews' Hissy Fit typifies the genre's reformative appropriation of idioms hitherto applied in the feminine pejorative.

British Class System

2009-09-30T10:16:00.000-07:00

I noted in lecture that North Americans are prone to some misunderstandings when reading British fiction due to a lack of awareness of the almost universal effects of the class system there. This, you will discover, is an essential -- arguably, by far the most significant -- aspect of the cultural background to British literature of the 19th & 20th Centuries.

Let me elaborate here. First, a former student's working class father (clearly a highly admirable man) earned Cambridge in the nineteen fifties, by which time the class boundaries were feeling the blows of many engines: the two World Wars for instance. And second, at a larger remove, remember that Britain has a system of class not caste: in other words, there had always been some opportunity for mobility - in both directions. Profligate aristocrats had for centuries dropped their posterity well into the middle class. Successful business acumen brought some middle (and even some originally lower) class men into the aristocracy via a knighthood. Consider Sir William Lucas in Pride and Prejudice. And elevation by marriage was also an avenue: the stage was an effective platform in more than one sense; and "let a man be ordained to the clergy and he can marry as high as he likes" is a line from Born in Exile by George Gissing.

But beside all this, mobility is only one aspect of the class system: the levels are enduringly divided by the behavior and attitudes that the members of each level share. Mr. Lucas could rise to status of gentlemen, but he could not prevent Mr. Bingley's sisters from sneering at him behind his back. Indeed, only Elizabeth Bennett's omnipotent womanhood could make Mr. Darcy repent (with obsequy) of his disdain for her Cheapside relations, the Gardners.

My point about North America is that culture is uniform to a degree not experienced in England. Members of the Canadian Senate watch NHL games in undershirts while drinking beer - as does a longshoreman in Surrey whose choice of beer is quite likely to be Stella Artois. During the last American Presidential election, John Kerry -- a north-eastern aristocrat -- rode a mountain bike, wore a trendy yellow Lance Armstrong bracelet and had rap on his iPod. Bank balances allow for important -- even critical -- differences in health and opportunity among North Americans. And ethnic diversity provides reasons to celebrate significant difference. But for all that, a remarkable similarity of taste and value makes "class" a problematic term to apply. The "Red State/Blue State" divide, for instance, is a geographic and regional divide, not a class divide. And the rural/urban divide in Canada does not map faciley to income.

Less so under New-Labour Britain (which is just what is argued as a master hypothesis by this course,) but still very much alive, is exactly a class distinction where North America has a conformity. It was the fact that Diana: Princess of Wales, behaved like Anna Nicole Smith that caused Her Unstable Highness to be ostracised by the British aristocracy. And, contrariwise, the fox-hunting passion of aristocrats -- nouveau and old alike -- produces derision against "toffs" from the man on Wigan pier.

Speaking of George Orwell, here is one of his many characteristically pithy insights into the British class differences in terms of attitude rather than mobility.

And again, take the working-class attitude towards ‘education’. How different it is from ours, and how immensely sounder! Working people often have a vague reverence for learning in others, but where ‘education’ touches their own lives they see through it and reject it by a healthy instinct. The time was when I used to lament over quite imaginary pictures of lads of fourteen dragged protesting from their lessons and set to work at dismal jobs. It seemed to me dreadful that the doom of a ‘job’ should descend upon anyone at fourteen. Of course I know now that there is not one working-class boy in a thousand who does not pine for the day when he will leave school. He wants to be doing real work, not wasting his time on ridiculous rubbish like history and geography. To the working class, the notion of staying at school till you are nearly grown-up seems merely contemptible and unmanly. The idea of a great big boy of eighteen, who ought to be bringing a pound a week home to his parents, going to school in a ridiculous uniform and even being caned for not doing his lessons! Just fancy a working-class boy of eighteen allowing himself to be caned! He is a man when the other is still a baby. Ernest Pontifex, in Samuel Butler’s Way of All Flesh, after he had had a few glimpses of real life, looked back on his public school and university education and found it a ‘sickly, debilitating debauch’. There is much in middle-class life that looks sickly and debilitating when you see it from a working-class angle.

Note how this corrects the mistaken North American misunderstanding that the proletariat pines in frustrated envy for the values of the middle and upper middle classes. As an exemplary aside, I often observe students and professoriat alike stating that some group or another of fellow citizen are "deprived" of a university education: making, that is, university attendance a quality of universal worth. Too flagrantly pretentious and distastefully preening, I believe, to insist that one's own accidental preference or aptitude must be the sine qua non of social worth.

style="font-size: small;">The class system (aristocratic, bourgeois, and lower classes) is, as mentioned, the vestige of the feudal system of noble, yeoman, serf. And thus it is a system based on wealth: finance correlates with class, but does not determine it. Indeed, to talk of wealth as class marker is to commit the solecism of elevating the value of one class -- the bourgeois -- to supremacy. North Americans do use "upper," "middle" and "lower" as synonyms for "Rich, average, and poor," but that is because North America simply is a bourgois continent. Moreover, making "weath" equal to "money" is more of the triumph of the bourgeoise; since turning worth into capital was the strategy of the Whigs .... and the means by which they effected their conquest.

Here is George Gissing to this end -- and bear in mind as you read this passage from the "Summer" section of The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft that Gissing is widely touted as being the pre-eminent novelist of the Reformers:

For a nation of this temper, the movement towards democracy is fraught with peculiar dangers. Profoundly aristocratic in his sympathies, the Englishman has always seen in the patrician class not merely a social, but a moral, superiority; the man of blue blood was to him a living representative of those potencies and virtues which made his ideal of the worthy life. Very significant is the cordial alliance from old time between nobles and people; free, proud homage on one side answering to gallant championship on the other; both classes working together in the cause of liberty. However great the sacrifices of the common folk for the maintenance of aristocratic power and splendour, they were gladly made; this was the Englishman's religion, his inborn pietas; in the depths of the dullest soul moved a perception of the ethic meaning attached to lordship. Your Lord was the privileged being endowed by descent with generous instincts, and possessed of means to show them forth in act. A poor noble was a contradiction in terms; if such a person existed, he could only be spoken of with wondering sadness, as though he were the victim of some freak of nature. The Lord was Honourable, Right Honourable; his acts, his words virtually constituted the code of honour whereby the nation lived.
In a new world beyond the ocean there grew up a new race, a scion of England, which shaped its life without regard to the principle of hereditary lordship; and in course of time this triumphant republic began to shake the ideals of the mother land. Its civilization, spite of superficial resemblances, is not English; let him who will think it superior; all one cares to say is that it has already shown in a broad picture the natural tendencies of English blood when emancipated from the old cult. Easy to understand that some there are who see nothing but evil in the influence of that vast commonwealth. If it has done us good, assuredly the fact is not yet demonstrable. In old England, democracy is a thing so alien to our traditions and rooted sentiment that the line of its progress seems hitherto a mere track of ruin. In the very word is something from which we shrink; it seems to signify nothing less than a national apostasy, a denial of the faith in which we won our glory. The democratic Englishman is, by the laws of his own nature, in parlous case; he has lost the ideal by which he guided his rude, prodigal, domineering instincts; in place of the Right Honourable, born to noble things, he has set up the mere plebs, born, more likely than not, for all manner of baseness. And, amid all his show of loud self-confidence, the man is haunted with misgiving.

The destruction of the class system in England is, then, the destruction of the aristiocracy and the lower class by the bourgeois: the former they tore down to their level from resentment & envy; the latter they pulled up by sheer condescention.

More for the Group Popular Culture Project

2009-09-16T12:55:00.000-07:00

We seem to have met a cultural resonance with our course theme, as there is an intensification at present of engagement in arts and letters with the relations between men and women, with a strong focus on manhood.

Here is a very engaging and informative diavlog on bloggingheads.tv under the heading Valley of the Dudes. The right-hand links on the page to the two foundational articles are especially valuable.
Then there is Mr. Manners: Can a book teach you how to be a man? at Slate.com which gives a list of ten essential books to manhood.
And not to be missed is another Slate.com article, this one titled The Most Interesting Man in the World: The star of Dos Equis' new ad campaign is too cool to shill beer. Consider, when you watch the ads, what they are saying about the performative masculinity model.

Class Opinions on the Differences between the Sexes

2009-09-12T00:41:00.000-07:00

I had good opinions from many of you on the issues that are coming up between the sexes.
Here is a keen one from classfellow Nicole M. on Petruchio's efforts to tame Kate:

....it stems from anxiety: He knows the power is going away and writes it as though he's giving it away, instead of it being taken from him.

I look forward to more opinions from all of you as the Term progresses: you have the bar set here!

Illustrative Examples of the Course Concepts

2009-09-09T20:02:00.000-07:00

Here's two obvious popular culture flotsam relevant to the course themes.

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, the film.
"I'm going to try to write a chick-lit novel in real time. In less than a month. And I really need your help," the article.
Why Women Have Sex, the book.

For Week Two

2009-09-09T20:01:00.000-07:00

Very good to meet all of you: looks like a great semester ahead!
For next week, remember:

Bring in your Seminar Writing Presentation written this week, accompanied by a one page justification of the quality of the writing. Use point-form: one bullet-point for each quality that you identify. (Example: "I use a thesis statement with a general and a particular half.") We will use this for a peer-to-peer evaluation.

Hand your writing presentation and your justification page at the end of class to receive a 5/5 grade.

Be prepared to review during class with your Group Project partner your comments on your choice of the two advertisements and write up a brief analysis to share with the class. This is the rehearsal of your Group Popular Culture Project.

Course Syllabus: 2009 version

2009-09-09T14:14:00.000-07:00

Be up-to-date with the reading schedule and you will be ahead of lecture. Note, however, that this schedule is not a Procrustean bed : week by week, lecture will follow students' developing interests and the course dynamic. Thus will all material be covered, sublimely, by the end.

READING SCHEDULE
September : L.M. Montgomery, Emily of New Moon
Course Wk. 2: L.M. Montgomery, Emily of New Moon
Course Wk. 3: Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim
Course Wk. 4: Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim
Course Wk. 5: Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm
Course Wk. 6: Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm
Course Wk. 7: Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
Course Wk. 8: Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
Course Wk. 9: Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones's Diary
Course Wk. 10: Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones's Diary
Course Wk. 11: Nick Hornby, High Fidelity
Course Wk. 12: Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

Nb: “For purposes of the Class Participation Grade, attendance and punctuality in seminar and at lecture, as well as constructive contributions to discussion, are necessary conditions.

Schedule of Assignment Due Dates
(Assignments coded by colour. See separate assignment posts for details.)

Nb: There is a five percent per day late penalty for all assignments, documented medical or bereavement leave excepted. For medical exemptions, provide a letter from a physician on letterhead which declares his or her medical judgement that illness or injury prevented work on the essay.(The precise word "prevented" must be used in the letter.) The letter must cover the entire period over which the assignment was scheduled and may be verified by telephone.

September 9th, Seminar Writing Presentation #1, in-class.
September 16th: Group Project dates selected.
September 30th, Mid-Term Essay topics posted.
October 7th: Mid-Term Essay peer editing of thesis ¶ or draft outline.
October 14th: Seminar Writing Presentation #2, in-class
October 21st: Mid-Term Essay draft version due in class.
November 4th: Seminar Writing Presentation #3, in-class.
November 4th: Mid-Term Essay draft version returned with comments & conditional grade.
November 18th, Mid-Term Essay peer-editing of preliminary revision.
November 25th, Mid-Term Essay revision due in class.
December 2nd: Mid-Term Essay revision returned with summary comments & final grade
December 16th, Final Examination.

Three Seminar Writing Presentations
Three short in-class writing presentations, three hundred words each, designed to let you display and then analyse your ability to express your critical readings skill in written form. These assignments require you to justify to the class your writing method; receive constructive response from peers and Instructor; and prepare you practically for the Mid-term Essay and Final Essay respectively.

Group Popular Culture Project
A creative project for groups of two that allows you to engage with the present-day cultural context of our course novels. Each group can schedule their presentation on their most suitable available date. Presented in-class, the project will show an example from popular culture--advertising, film, television, etc.--that enlightens and contextualises the course thesis on the differing representations of masculinity and femininity in 20th & 21st century Western society from which our course authors have derived their unique literary engagements.

Mid-Term Essay
A relaxed eleven-week writing path which provides ample time, resources and in-class opportunity to perfect the writing and revision process, in line with the "Writing Intensive" designation for this course.

Final Examination
Open-book Final Examination: Wednesday December 16th 19:00- 22:00, room HCC2245.

Instructor Contact: Office Hours: AQ 6094 -- Tuesday one o'clock to three o'clock, Wednesday in person after class. E-mail to ogden@sfu.ca. Telephone 778-782-5820

Course Approach:
The course will read the books on their own terms, from the axiom that they 'instruct by delighting.' The books share a common characteristic of post-war British novels that focus on maleness or femaleness. Specifically, female protagonists triumph—in terms that are realistic and are her own—where male protagonists experience crises of masculine identity which resolve themselves only after they learn to accomodate diminishment or failure.The arc, that is, of the female-centred novel is upward, but downward for the male-centred novels. The teleology of the course is toward understanding of how the fiction expresses confidence and triumph "....intimately connected to the workings of the society around it." [Peter Keating.]

Mid-Term Essay: Structure

2009-09-09T09:27:00.000-07:00

Here is the Writing-Intensive arrangement and the schedule of dates for the Mid-Term Essay, fifteen hundred words and revisions. The assignment is worth twenty percent of the Course grade.
Eleven-week writing path.

September 30th: selection of topics posted on the blog
October 7th: peer-editing of essay outline and thesis paragraph.
October 21st: draft version due in class.
November 4th: draft returned with comments & conditional grade.
November 18th: peer-editing of draft revision.
November 25th: revision due in class.
December 2nd: revision returned with comments & final grade.

The draft is an opportunity to get your ideas and structure freely down on paper. The marking will identify the types of error which require revision: after studying these you are encouraged to bring the draft to Office Hours for additional and thorough-going help.

Grading structure:

Intensive copy-editing and analysis, in red ink, will be done on the first two-thirds of the essay. The remaining third is left unmarked, to provide you, once having read and studied my work, with a practical document on which to apply the same degree and type of copy-editing corrections yourself. Upon completion of that exercise, you are welcome to bring that to me in an Office Hour for discussion.
There is a circled grade beside my concluding comments at the end of your paper.
This is your conditional grade.
Upon revision of the draught, the mark can go down to the amount of one full letter grade and can go up as much as one full letter grade: conditional upon the quality of your revision.

If little revision is done, the conditional grade will stand
If no or poor revision is done the mark will go down.
If comprehensive revision is done, the mark will go up.

The mark after the revision will be the final grade for the assignment.
The revision will be graded according to the improvements made from the draft.
A complete re-write is possible, if the student feels that they wish to improve upon the range available from the conditional grade received. The complete re-write will be judged as a final revision and the grade on that re-write will be the final grade for the assignment.

Popular Culture Examples

2009-09-08T16:00:00.000-07:00

Here are two examples from popular culture which exemplify the type of representation of the sexes that our course novels engage with.

Watch both of these television advertisements.
Consider how they both represent masculinity.
Make a choice of one or the other.
Analyse your selection in detail—frame-by-frame if necessary.
Prepare a five-minute presentation that makes a strong thesis claim and support that claim with a description of a precise visual or oral component of the advertisement.

Example One, (British): "Shut up, Steve." (overdubbed American voices.)
Example Two, (American): "Where does he train to take a beating like that?"

Group Popular Culture Project

2009-09-08T15:51:00.000-07:00

This creative project allows us to experience the immediate social context in which the novels are written, and see the direct relevancy of the literary artistic genius. The keyword for the project is "enjoyment": the more fun you have with the ideas, the better (ceteris paribus) your result will be.

The project is worth twenty percent of the course grade and thus presumes that each group member will put twenty percent of the course effort into the project: i.e. each project will display 2 X 20% of course effort.

Groups of two will be set course week one
A trial 'run through' of the project will be done course week one.
Your group will sign up on week two for your preferred week to present their project in class.
In line with the information given in lecture over the first two course weeks, your group will look for some aspect of popular culture which shows one of the following:

enfeebling or disparagement of maleness.
female dominance or empowerment.

[Lecture will be considering the efficacy of Charles Darwin's model of maleness and femaleness—centred around the fundamentally performative and therefore necessary uncertain nature of masculine identity—to understand the artistic representations in the course texts.]
Some aspects of popular culture that you might consider are advertisements, television shows, university course transcripts, public speeches and policies, film, magazines, etc.
Put together a fifteen-to-twenty-minute creative presentation that informs the class about what your selection from popular culture is specifically saying (the analytic component), and what the significance is for cultural conceptions of masculinity or femininity (the thesis component.)
Choose a clear and consistent creative format for your presentation. Some possible alternatives are as follows:

visual and oral presentation
handouts
performance (i.e. re-enactment)
filmed documentary -- on DVD for instance.
artistic: e.g. a comic book or screenplay.
etc.

Choose the mode of your presentation: humourous, polemical, satirical, scholarly.
Give equal weight to the creative, informative, research and audience-engagement aspects of your project.
Hand in your presentation materials (e.g. overheads, notes, and similar), and an evaluation sheet and assignment grade will be handed back to your group the week following.

Course E-Mail Netiquette

2009-09-07T22:05:00.001-07:00

Here are the points of e-mail protocol for our course :

E-mail (indeed, all communication) between Lecturer and student, and TA and student, is a formal and professional exchange. Accordingly, proper salutation and closing is essential.
Business e-mail is courteous but, of professional necessity, concise and direct. It rejects roundabout or ornate language, informal diction, and any appearance of what is termed in the vernacular, 'chat.'
Customary response time for student e-mail to the Course Lecturer or TAs is two to three office days. E-mail on weekends will ordinarily be read the Monday following.
Use only your SFU account for e-mail to the course Lecturer. All other e-mail is blocked by whitelist.

In general, Course e-mail is for matters of Course administration solely. It is not an alternative to, nor substitute for, Office Hours or Tutorial. All questions about understanding of lecture material, course reading, assignment criteria, and deadlines are reserved for Tutorial and Office Hours.

Missed classes and deadlines are not to be reported by e-mail: if a medical or bereavement exception is being claimed, the supporting documentation is handed in, along with the completed assignment, either in person or to the Instructor's mailbox outside the Department Office.

Course Website FAQ

2009-09-07T22:02:00.001-07:00

Here are FAQ about the course website.

The 5 most recent posts are displayed on the main page.
A permanent link list, entitled "Pertinent & Impertinent" is always visible on the sidebar of the course website, containing direct links to crucial information.
Also on the sidebar, always visible, is the "Blog Archive" displaying direct links to all posts on the course website.
The "Blog Archive" has sections for years 2009 and 2007. Our course links are under the 2009 section. The 2007 archive is for a previous iteration of the course which may, or may not, be interesting for you.
An "Older Posts" hotlink is always visible at the bottom of the main page which displays the next 5 most recent posts.
Certain PowerPoint lecture slides are occasionally posted on the course website.

Course Outline

2009-09-07T21:46:00.000-07:00

ENGLISH 101W J1.00 Harbour Centre INTRODUCTION TO FICTION

(Writing Intensive)

Instructor: S. Ogden FALL 2009
THE FICTIONS OF THE SEXES: WOMEN’S & MEN’S NOVELS

It is contentious to claim that there are novels for women and other novels for men, notwithstanding publishing and marketing of genre labels such as ‘chick-lit’ and ‘lad-lit’. What is not disputed, however, is fiction’s characterisation of maleness and femaleness. In this course we will read popular and important twentieth-century novels which explicitly configure a male or a female protagonist and which each became notorious for their implied valuation of either the masculine or the feminine. To help frame our understanding of the fiction, we will consider the texts in light of authoritative statements of sexual identity—from Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud for instance. We will also bring in examples from our own experiences of portrayals of men and women in mass culture. The design of the course uses this particular type of literature as a practical means to learn how to read, analyse and appreciate fiction broadly—part of which involves improving the enjoyable practice of writing.

REQUIRED TEXTS:
Montgomery, L.M. Emily of New Moon N.C.L
Amis, Kingsley Lucky Jim Oxford UP
Gibbons, Stella Cold Comfort Farm Penguin
Burgess, Anthony A Clockwork Orange Oxford UP
Fielding, Helen Bridget Jones's Diary Penguin
Hornby, Nick High Fidelity Riverhead

COURSE REQUIREMENTS:
10% Productive Participation
15% Three Seminar Writing Presentations

20% Semester Group Culture Project

20% Mid-Term Essay (approx. 1500 words with revision)
35% Final Exam

To receive credit for this course, students must complete all requirements.

Dividing Post: 2009 from 2007

2009-09-07T21:20:00.000-07:00

Posts above this dividing post are for the current (2009) version of the course. Posts below this dividing post are archived posts from the 2007 iteration.

More on Zero-Sum: Kitsch

2007-04-06T09:07:00.000-07:00

I have a classfellow request to blog the kitsch I used to exemplify Zero-Sum thinking in regard to the sexes.
The first was a fridge magnet collection sold in the SFU BookStore. [Click on the image for larger view]:

The second was a metal plate found at a garage sale entitled "The Rules" and which read as follows:

1. The Female always makes THE RULES.
2. THE RULES are subject to change without notice.
3. No Male can possibly know all THE RULES.
4. If the Female suspects the Male knows all THE RULES, she must immediately change some of THE RULES.
5. The Female is never wrong.
6. If it appears the Female is wrong, it is because of a flagrant misunderstanding caused by something the Male did or said wrong.
7. If Rule #6 applies, the Male must apologize immediately for causing the misunderstanding.
8. The Female can change her mind at any time.
9. The Male must never change his mind without the express written consent of The Female.
10. The Female has every right to be angry or upset at any time.
11. The Male must remain calm at all times, unless the Female wants him to be angry or upset.
12. The Female must, under no circumstances, let the Male know whether she wants him to be angry or upset.
13. The Male is expected to read the mind of the Female at all times.
14. At all times, what is important is what the Female meant, not what she said.
15. If the Male doesn't abide by THE RULES, it is because he can't take the heat, lacks backbone, and is a wimp.
16. If the Male, at any time, believes he is right, he must refer to Rule #5.

From among the exchanges, two stick in my mind. One is the way that The Rules -- especially Rule 15-- highlight male insecurity / performative masculinity. The other was the suggestion that if "the Female" in The Rules is changed to "God", then you have sixteen points of understanding Kafka's conception of God.

A classfellow from a previous course emailed me the following commentary.

My personal response to popular examples of "kitsch" such as 'The Rules' and the "boys are stupid" magnets is very unsettling. More than the objects themselves, what I find especially disturbing is that these sorts of blatant exploitations of gender stereotypes are intended to be funny. 'The Rules' example in particular operates on exactly the same logic that allowed women to be oppressed for centuries, yet a simple gender reversal apparently makes it appropriate to laugh at today. I think any sort of humor that operates on the principle that a certain sex is contemptible because they necessarily possess some undesirable trait is unacceptable. It is offensive not only to the targeted gender but any person who doesn't feel like they fit the prescribed role for their sex. For instance, I feel insulted by the insinuation that the female is always the pushy, overbearing partner in a relationship, and while most children experience a certain amount of antagonism towards the opposite gender at some point, I certainly don't see how it's appropriate to encourage them to deal with it by throwing rocks. Despite all the intellectualizing university students do about gender theory and social conditioning, the existence of humor like this makes me question whether sexism hasn't simply been institutionalized.

Zero-Sum & the Sexes

2007-04-06T08:59:00.000-07:00

A classfellow sends along this example of zero-sum thinking, on her Starbucks Coffee cup, in the context of relationships:

The most relevant piece of advice I received regarding marriage: You can only be as happy as the least happy person in the house, and two bathrooms are mandatory.
[Nb: This is a variation on the image displayed here.]

Mothers, Fathers, & Non-Zero Sum

2007-03-30T18:48:00.000-07:00

In preparation for the concluding lecture on High Fidelity ("where is Hornby going with this?") I found an excellent example today to illustrate Zero-sum thinking, in the context of our course and, as they say 'ripped form today's headlines, on Broadsheet: the salon.com 'women's issues' blog.

Why "Broadsheet"? For one thing, we like the word "broad," which for us conjures up images of Rosalind Russell as Hildy Johnson, ferociously pounding out copy on deadline in "His Girl Friday," her tailored suit wrinkle-free and sexy. But the term also applies to our content. The issues we'll tackle are limitless, really, given the fact that our subject includes half the world's population. Katie Holmes' pregnancy, Harriet Miers' Supreme Court nomination, the FDA's stalling over Plan B -- we've got something to say about all of it. Our goal is to be opinionated about topics that affect women, but also a filter by which we can look at the news from a (mostly) female point of view.

Broadsheet is responding to a lawsuit that the activist National Organisation for Women has initiated against the use of "....federal dollars -- to the tune of $50 million a year -- [to] fund a program aimed at promoting responsible fathehood."

Broadsheet argues, in effect, that NOW is stuck in zero-sum thinking: acting as if the promotion of good fatherhood must be detracting from the promotion of good motherhood. Broadsheet's response (one very congenial to my way of thinking, I confess) is that one can promote one to the advantage of both.

Nb: the classic book-length argument against zero-sum thinking is Bob Wright's "Non Zero":

Meanwhile, some examples of non-zero-sum things: arms control negotiations, trading gossip, the relationship among genes on a genome, and such transactions as buying a car, buying a book, buying a book or, finally, buying a book.

SFU, Rachel Marsden, Fox News & Salon.com

2007-03-30T00:44:00.000-07:00

During lecture on Bridget Jones in the context of 'post-feminism,' I brought up the notorious case of Rachel Marsden, and how it had been a tipping point of sorts that had resulted in substantial institutional change here.

À propos something else, I was surfing salon.com — a large-traffic left-of-centre American daily e-media — and to my astonishment found this major feature story on Ms. Marsden, who, I am to understand, is now a conservative commentator on Fox News Channel, being, it says, groomed for a very big profile. The article presents the SFU affair in prominent detail, puts the university (which it calls "....the famously progressive, Utopian Simon Fraser University") in high profile, and is compelling -- not to say alarming -- reading.

The sordid saga wreaked havoc on the lives of Marsden, [Swim Team Coach] Liam Donnelly, [Harrassment Co-ordinator Patricia] O'Hagan, and [University President John] Stubbs. But it also took a steep ideological toll on feminists....

The Devil's Writing

2007-03-28T22:40:00.000-07:00

Do not read this article. It is evil.

Classfellow E-mail

2007-03-28T22:24:00.000-07:00

I wanted to share this e-mail from a classfellow:

Given the number of times Jane Austen comes up in lectures I'm surprised none of her books were on the reading list....I found an interesting little bit about how her publisher find her appearance too plain and are sexing-up her likeness with Photoshop. I guess the idea is that you can't write romantic things if you're plain looking. Thought you might be interested [in this.]
....Also, I'm not sure if [a certain classfellow] mentioned this to you yet, but near the beginning of the semester, she was telling me about a nasty man-bashing calendar she spotted for sale in the Burnaby campus bookstore. It features images of men as wind up dolls and contained sweet sentiments like "men are only good for sex." We wondered why it's OK to portray men that way in a school that's so outspoken about gender issues. It seems even some women are offended by this. Not sure if that calendar is still for sale.

I'd love to teach Jane Austen -- I had rather thought that P&P would be too obvious & well known for you all. Perhaps we should have a marathon nightime showing of the A&E version....

"Twitter": Cell-phone Mini-blogging

2007-03-25T20:09:00.000-07:00

From FT.com

By Richard Waters and Chris Nuttall in San Francisco
Silicon Valley is abuzz over a new mini-blogging service for mobile phones that some predict will be a mass-market hit with the reach of a YouTube or MySpace.
Over the past two weeks, Twitter has attracted the sort of hyperbole the Valley reserves for its next internet darling – though such self-reinforcing adulation also led to dotcom mania.

Harlequin Romance Covers

2007-03-23T09:01:00.000-07:00

This seems disturbingly relevant....

And this, perhaps more so...

Replacing Fabio with Regular Joe
This is so great, because you’re pretty much exactly what we were trying to avoid,” says Blake Morrow, one of the judges, and an art director with Harlequin, while choking back laughter. “Hit the gym man, and we’ll see.”

Writing Support

2007-03-23T08:25:00.000-07:00

From the Student Learning Commons people at our Library:

As we near the end of the term, the Yosef Wosk Student Learning Commons would like to remind you of the additional academic support we provide students in writing and learning skills. (Via one-on-one appointments or drop-in .)

As....students enter the semester's 'writing crunch' and then final exams, please take a minute to remind them that there is additional writing and learning skills support available in the Student Learning Commons (room 3695-Podium Level 3-to the right of the Library). (Emphases mine.)

Some of the areas our friendly and knowledgeable Peer Educators and myself can assist students in are:
- planning and flow of a paper,
- integrating quotes (sic) and paraphrasing,
- improving coherence and cohesion,
- controlling sentence structure and punctuation,
- exam strategies,
- overcoming exam anxiety,
- ....more.

.....we do not edit or proof papers. The YWSLC Coordinator and Peers provide the insight, skills, and techniques to improve a students own performance, including learning how to write, edit and proofread their own work.

High Fidelity: Book -vs- Movie

2007-03-20T13:32:00.000-07:00

A good article evaluating the film version of High Fidelity in comparison to Hornby's novel, from salon.com

"For publishers, every day is Mother's Day"

2007-03-17T23:42:00.000-07:00

Mr. Green sends along this article, à propos Bridget Jones, from today's online edition of the Guardian (venerable British newspaper, Left of centre.)

Bridget Jones is 11 years old and immortal. She is pickled in chardonnay and shielded from the ravages of age by celluloid and the comic potential of big pants. But it is just over a decade since she first appeared in print. By the calculations of British publishers that means many of the women who first bought her diaries have since got married and had children.
Women over the age of 30 buy more new fiction than pretty much any demographic segment in the country, accounting for up to 70 per cent of the market. If you listen carefully on a quiet day in bookland you can discern the hum of a hundred agents making a hundred pitches: 'It's Bridget Jones with a boring husband, kids and a lover. Madame Bovary meets Grazia magazine. V funny, v sexy.'

Mid-term Final Version: Grading Turn-around

2007-03-17T20:40:00.000-07:00

Ms. Keating & Mr. Green are hard at work this weekend, reading, contemplating and grading your revised mid-term essays. In order to give you as much time as possible to study your graded essay before the Final Exam, they are aiming to have them returned to you within two weeks ... incredibly, perhaps as early as one week this from coming Tuesday.

In the mean time, I hope you are enjoying your (second) reading of High Fidelity this weekend.

Dr. Ogden's Schedule this Tuesday

2007-03-12T13:04:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow after the lecture I will be taking Mr. Green's tutorials in his absence, from ten thirty to twelve thirty. To replace the Office Hours normally scheduled then, I will be in my office from twelve thirty to one thirty.

Helen Fielding on Hangovers

2007-03-10T22:05:00.000-08:00

The (to me, hilarious) passage that I read out in lecture from Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim that, I suggest, Helen Fielding has in mind in her portrayal of Bridget Jones' hangover (pp 59-60) reads as follows, for you to better make the comparison.

Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. he lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again.A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.

There is a literary point of some significance here pace Bridget Jones' Diary, to be discussed in Tuesday's lecture.

Dr. Ogden's Grading -- Scaled

2007-03-10T17:43:00.000-08:00

For those of you in Mr. Green's tutorials whose first-version essay I graded or examined, here is the scale of the given number grades to SFU-standard letter-grades. This harmonises my grading & Mr. Green's for consistency across tutorial groups.

5 = A, 4.5=A-, 4=B+, 3.5=B, 3=B-, 2.5=C+, 2=C, 1.5=C-, 1=D, 0-0.5=F

Mid-Term Revision

2007-03-08T14:08:00.000-08:00

The mid-term first version essays have now been graded and handed back. As I laid out in lecture, the project for you now is to incorporate your marker's corrections, analysis and recommendations into a full revision. This final version will be graded on degree to which it incorporates both the letter and the spirit of what your essay's marker has added to the first version.

Any questions about the grading can be brought to the marker in Office Hours, keeping the following two things in mind. First, the grade for the first version can be revisited any time until the end of term: the concentration over the upcoming week is most advisedly put on the work of revision. Second, the first version grade is only five percent of the assignment: in my view, a key point.

For students in Mr. Green's tutorials, I will be available on Tuesday in Surrey for Office Hours at a different time for the week only, as I will be taking Mr. Green's tutorials during my regularly-scheduled Office Hours. I am also available at the Burnaby campus in AQ6094 on Monday and Wednesday between ten thirty and three thirty. Furthermore, I can be contacted for a by-appointment Office Hour outside these many hours.

Write away ....

Sloan-iness Satirised

2007-03-07T18:18:00.000-08:00

For more information on the Sloan set -- the object of Helen Fielding's satire -- see this 'quite posh' website. Younger Canadian women may recognise some of the fashion they originated....

The Laura Ashley site is right here. Observe the too too perfect Sloaney model they use.

The Etymology of "Hooligan"

2007-03-04T10:19:00.000-08:00

In light of a Clockwork Orange and the City of Surrey's "....very new broom", here is the origin of one of the slurs used against 'lads':

In the distinctive language of British journalism, the English football fans who caused so much trouble in Marseilles variously “went on the rampage”, “ran amuck”, were guilty of “thuggish behaviour”, or “caused mayhem”. They were variously described in news stories as louts, yobs, thugs and ruffians, but the word that was universally employed was hooligan.
It’s an odd word, which the Oxford English Dictionary says started to appear in London police-court reports in the summer of 1898....

City of Surrey uses "a very New Broom" against its 'Droogs'

2007-03-01T06:49:00.000-08:00

The recent stories in the local media on how the government of the City of Surrey's is taking intensified action (".....what they call a very new broom") against men -- referred to only as "criminals" by the politicans and media writers -- are repetitions of the opening chapters of Part Three of A Clockwork Orange:

I kaputted a gazetta....[t]here were very boastful slovos about what the Government had done, brothers, in the last year....improved social services and all that cal....But what the Government was really most boastful about was the way they had recokoned the streeets had been made safer for all peace-loving night-walking lewdies in the last six months, what with better pay for the police and the police getting tougher with young hooligans and perverts and burglars and all that cal.

From the City of Surrey's homepage:

Surrey Unveils its Crime Reduction Strategy
February 26, 2007
This morning (Februrary 26, 2007), Mayor Dianne Watts was joined by Attorney General Wally Oppal, local MPs and MLAs and community leaders to officially unveil Surrey’s Crime Reduction Strategy.
The Crime Reduction strategy (CRS) is a comprehensive, multi-faceted approach to addressing the root causes of crime. It seeks to implement new and innovative programs with practical applications that will result in a concrete, measurable reduction in crime.
The CRS represents the culmination of the efforts of the Mayor’s Task Force on Public Safety and Crime Reduction....
“The Surrey Crime Reduction Strategy is a complete paradigm shift from what is currently being done in Canadian municipalities to combat crime,” said Mayor Watts. “It is an approach that seeks to incorporate all the key stakeholders and create one, unified, comprehensive plan to address the root causes of crime in our community.”

Locally, then, as with the English case, bad press for the hooligans, i.e. men.

Plant blogging

2007-02-26T16:49:00.000-08:00

It's wet, cold & snowing outside, but inside my aeschynanthus is blooming. The full delight is in the contrast: true for the literary as well as the horticultural voluptuary.

"Draught" versus "Draft"

2007-02-26T14:17:00.001-08:00

I am frequently asked why I use the spelling "draught" over "draft" in the context of writing composition. I give a three-part answer. First, until I left England, that was the spelling I used (for instance, we played draughts, not checkers.) Second, I have an æsthetic preference for the original over modern, commercialist (over-)simplifications ("hi-lite," "donut" and such-like are to me visually unappealing.) And third, I affirm the long-standing Canadian spellings against the expansion of Americana. Nothing against Americans, but I prefer to promote the little pieces of culture which make us unique, as a non-aggressive and positive affirmation of Canada's culture. (Yes, I write "favour," "flavour," and "cheque.")

"Clockwork Orange" Links

2007-02-24T00:30:00.000-08:00

Anthony Burgess wrote a reflection on A Clockwork Orange in 1986 which you may enjoy reading: it is titled "A Clockwork Orange Resucked."

Now there is, as you all almost certainly have found out, a rash of Nadsat-English dictionaries on-line, such as this one. I didn't link to one earlier because Burgess meant for the novella to be read without one, & I remember how much I enjoyed in pre-internet days working things out for myself and sharing with friends. However, as Mr. King would say, tempora mutantur, et nos mutamur in illis, so use the title link if you havn't found a translation page already....

On the Mid-Term

2007-02-23T16:51:00.000-08:00

I love this Bizarro cartoon on the ever-more degraded state of language use!

A word about the mid-term essay project now well underway. The TAs are currently marking the first version of the essay and will return it to you by March 8th.

As you know, the objective of compulsory Writing Intensive Courses like ours is to provide an excellent opportunity for improved student writing ability. To that end, this first version of your essay is worth only five percent of the twenty percent that the Mid-Term represents in the ultimate course grade. Accordingly, your TAs have a mandate of marking to strict criteria for your greatest benefit.

Expect, then, this five percent grade to be an effective and accurate guidepost for you to improve your writing -- and, one hopes, your grade -- on the final version worth the remaining fifteen percent of the assignment grade.

So, for example, first versions which ignore the criteria set in the Mid-Term Topics -- say, failing to ground the essay in textual quotation, and using mere personal reflection instead following the instruction to argue -- can receive a first-version grade of less than 50%.

Study the first version carefully when it is returned to you, as it is a practical means of, for one, becoming a much better writer, and, for another, getting a significantly higher grade on your heavily-weighted final version.

Here's to good writing!

Why are These Models Scowling?

2007-02-23T10:16:00.000-08:00

I am not sure exactly how this blog post is as relevant to our background understanding as it seems to be, but it is more than worth reading and doing the quiz.

"Bildungsroman"

2007-02-22T11:35:00.000-08:00

There is a helpful webpage on bildungsroman -- 'novel of development' -- at the reliable online resource The Victorian Web at this link. In fact, I gave today's specific arrangement to assist your effective follow-up study of this important concept for the lecture approach to A Clockwork Orange.

The Victorian Web is a reliable internet resource in contrast to the Wikipedia website which is an un-reliable -- and, here, unacceptable -- internet resource for academic purposes.

A literary rephrasing of the term 'bildungsroman' (if my word 'development' is already not a re-phrasing of the German 'formation') could be "novel of apprenticeship": apprenticeship, i.e., to Life.)

Even more real ultra-violence

2007-02-21T13:23:00.001-08:00

The wider relevence of Burgess' text is further indicated in this article from the Sunday Telegraph:

The violence seen in the video obtained by this newspaper has echoes of the extreme violence portrayed in Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film, A Clockwork Orange. In the film, a gang of youths travels the country to commit violent acts, including rapes and murders, for fun. Jan Harlan, the late director's brother-in-law, who helped to make the Oscar-nominated film, said that such violence was "beginning to make A Clockwork Orange seem like Bambi".
He said: "Violence is on a totally different level than it used to be. We do not realise how violent the whole world has become in the last few decades. The danger is that in the next 30 or 40 years there will be a huge crowd of uneducated young men with nothing to do except become more violent and anti-social."

"A [real] bit of the old ultra-violence"

2007-02-20T14:45:00.000-08:00

The pre-recognitive quality of fiction that I referred to in lecture -- the ability of literary genius to present in fiction attitudes or forms of behavior ahead of their full-blown appearance in culture -- is exemplified by the current news story under the headline "Teen 'sport killings' of homeless on the rise." The documentary from which a short section was shown in today's lecture shows the state of affairs in England in 1970, matching precisely to the narrative-future state of England in Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange

Our Guest Speaker in Big Media appearances

2007-02-19T12:42:00.001-08:00

Nancy Warren is featured in today's New York Times 'Books' section with an article and impressive photograph.

USAToday also has this article on her Harlequin-NASCAR tie-in, focusing on the commercially-impressive demographic numbers of female NASCAR fans:

Nielsen Media Research figures from 2003 show NASCAR led the NFL and major league baseball in percentage of female viewers on broadcast networks. Women were 35% of the total audience for NASCAR, two percentage points more female viewers than for the NFL and MLB.
The percentage is of a stunning seventy-five million total NASCAR viewers. So consider this to have been our class' brush with literary celebrity....and with signed copies to prove it.

"Stalky & Co." in "The Peak"

2007-02-18T21:37:00.001-08:00

A thoroughly delightful article by our own Andrew Tuplin, referencing Kipling's Stalky & Co. in last week's campus student newspaper under the beloved-80s-song title I said, do you speak-a my language?

I'd gratefully blog the writer's picture, but I found none on-line so far.

English Scholarship for Sciences Students

2007-02-18T00:42:00.000-08:00

For students in the Sciences who are taking Introductory English as a 'Required Course,' the (to them) unfamiliar form in which English conducts its studies can present a challenge.

However, English literature and the Sciences are both academic fields of study and share a rational approach and a scholarly analysis with an empirical component that differs between the two faculties primarily by degree.

To exemplify this, it is possible to translate a Topic on an English Mid-Term assignment into a Problem in the mathematical form of an Equation.

Here is Topic #5 from our current Mid-Term, first in its English Literature form and then, second, expressed in the form of an Equation.

5. Imagine that you have been commissioned to write a satire of Elizabeth Gaskell in the way that Stella Gibbons satirised certain other types of authors in Cold Comfort Farm. What aspects of Cranford's cultural view do you think should be satirised and why? You are free to sketch the character outline of a Flora Poste equivalent who would feature in your Gaskell satire.

Left Side of the Equation. (Empirical.)

Text: Cold Comfort Farm
Literary aspect: Satire: (the emendation of folly)
Target: Various Modern authors
Method: A central character embodying the virtues implicitly affirmed.
Specific value: "Flora Poste"

Right Side of the Equation. (Hypothetical.)

Text : Cranford
Literary aspect: Satire: (the emendation of folly.)
Target: Elizabeth Gaskell
Method: A central character embodying the virtues implicitly affirmed.
Specific value: "X"

SOLVE FOR VALUE "X".

Mid-term: study direction

2007-02-16T22:07:00.000-08:00

A number of you are applying yourselves to Mid-term topic #4, and are asking about the aspect of 'the future' in the question. The best help that I can give here, and indeed with all the topics, is to read the topic in the light of lecture material. For #4 here, for instance, this, then, means in light of the direct and repeated engagement in Cold Comfort Farm with two concepts of modernity. Best wishes for productive & rewarding writing!

Use of Blogs in Academia

2007-02-15T13:55:00.000-08:00

An excellent & concise blog entry from EdTechPost detailing "some uses of blogs in education" here. I recommend it highly as an excellent introduction to the ways in which blogging will, to a virtual certainty, become integrated into university practice to the same degree as e-mail, on-line registration, and digitised databases are now.
Click the diagramme below for a full-size version of the author's matrix of some of the possible uses of blogs in education.

Blog from MS Office

2007-02-15T13:53:00.000-08:00

OK, this is officially awesome. Blogger now has a free add-on downloadable at this link that integrates blogger.com into Microsoft Office Word.

Nancy Warren Thanks

2007-02-15T12:31:00.000-08:00

Our collective thanks go to Nancy Warren for sending us a boxful of her latest Harlequin, Speed Dating. She is in Daytona right now to launch the Harlequin-NASCAR collaboration.

[This is my cellphone camera shot from her talk here last week. Click on the image for a larger version. Also remember that many blog-post titles are also hotlinks - this one, to Ms. Warren's website.]

Lad Lit: boys and reading

2007-02-14T13:42:00.000-08:00

Here is a blog by a retired Elementary-School Librarian with a post on Young Adult Novels and the Teen Boy -- set, by the first half of its title (Making It As a Modern Male), in terms of masculinity as performative and in terms of the effect of a type of literature set according to sex: one of the premises of "lad-lit" studies.

Many social commentators have lamented the "lost" generation of American boys, growing up in a time in which girls have garnered a lot of attention in the public mind. Although teenage boys are considered a hard sell for fiction writers, guys probably stand in greater need of the vicarious experience offered in novels than do girls, since boys often find their life experience in riskier behaviors and since they are thought to be less comfortable with sharing personal events and feelings with each other.

Article via Instapundit.com

PS: The blog also has this post on girls' reading -- here, the 'princess' reading craze (e.g. Ella Enchanted.) Note how the heroine's character is written in the "Flora Poste" mould....

Another Plucky Princess.... Here's another royal romp to add to my earlier list of "Princess Stories That Won't Shrink Ze Brain." It's Kate Coombs' 2006 title The Runaway Princess. This one really is a romp, as fifteen-year-old princess no-wannabe Meg refuses to be the bait her slightly greedy father King Stromgard dangles before a gaggle of princes who fill the Kingdom of Greve to win her hand The princes straggle forth to slay a dragon, return his hoard, banish a witch, and capture a bandit, while the unwilling Meg is sequestered in a tower complete with embroidery kits. Meg, of course, readily escapes the tower, befriends the witch (with her own army of bewitched frog princes), adopts the dragon (he's just a baby), and captures the aid of the Bandit Queen (and the romantic interest of her brother "Prince" Bain.) Meg is no Ella, but she's a fun gal to spend a few hours with.

Cold Comfort Farm

2007-02-13T14:26:00.000-08:00

So, we're looking at Stella Gibbon's masterpiece in terms of its satirical aspect. My lectures are based on an itemised list of the attributes of Gibbon's satire: we ended on "Self-Referential" today, and will finish that item on Thursday. The interesting point about the self-referentiality, to me, is what it implies. Gibbons uses the character Flora Poste as the axis around which her satiric energy is polarised. But Gibbons then inverts the field of energy and presents Poste herself as an object of satire.

This is breathtakingly deft, and only literary genius could do this without the artistic whole becoming a mushy muddle, without losing any sense of ground or stability to support the satire, or without turning into the sneering, denunciatory, censorious fulminator so effectively characterised in Amos Starkadder.

But returning to what is implied by this self-reference; for the satire to work -- for it to have been worth bothering about -- the type of confident, modern, self-assured, accomplished and superior woman must have been notable in the literature in and before the year Cold Comfort Farm was published: 1932. I offered C. Bronte's Jane Eyre, several of Marie Corelli's leading characters, Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennett, several Agatha Christie heroines (notably Prudence Cowley); and among male novelists, Gissing's Rhoda Nunn (one of several) and (probably Gibbons' direct model) the great P.G. Wodehouse's Bobbie Wickham.

Update: how could I forget the perfect exemplar that I gave in lecture? Pamela Lyndon Travers' Mary Poppins.
PS: Here is a contemporary satire of the type: the "Scary Mary" viral.

Course Theme Song

2007-02-13T14:20:00.000-08:00

From classfellow "A.":

Do we have a theme song for English 105? As you were talking about Bridget Jones's Diary in class today it occurred to me that what we're talking about is pretty much summed up with in the immortal lines of Shania Twain's "Any Man Of Mine."

Hmm....

This is what a woman wants...
Any man of mine better be proud of me
Even when I'm ugly he still better love me
And I can be late for a date that's fine
But he better be on time...

Lecturer Office Hours

2007-02-11T14:12:00.000-08:00

I want to remind you that my scheduled Office Hours are Tuesday and Thursday, 10:30-12:30 in room 3220 (same floor as lectures, on the SW side -- i.e. at the opposite end from the mezzanine and on the same side as Tuesday's lecture hall.)

Drop in to discuss any issues at all related to course material. If the scheduled hours are otherwise booked for you, contact me by e-mail for a time by appointment.

Paglia warns internet: "Only Art Lasts"

2007-02-10T22:56:00.000-08:00

Camille Paglia intends her latest book as a pertinent warning against putting technology before art, or, put another way, against giving the transient form more importance than the permament substance.
Paglia has been and continues to be a strong booster of the internet's benefits for scholarship & effective polity, so her caution has weight.

UPDATE: Here is her article version.

Danger: Boys being Stalky again

2007-02-08T11:27:00.000-08:00

Now, this is interesting. Via the Dr. Helen blog, discussion of an article in Britain's online Daily Telegraph titled "Danger: Boys Having Fun" about a bestselling boys book (boys today reading at all is an arresting fact in itself) called The Dangerous Book for Boys that encourages boys to, in effect, be Stalky.
The cover of the book is a reinvocation of the "Boys Own" papers that Kipling's Stalky & Co. directly inspired, and this list from the book's authors of what every boy should have on hand makes the stalkiness unmistakable (especially if you read between the lines of the explanations, as I did & noted in just a couple of the places):

Compass - your trusty guide
Swiss Army knife - removes splinters
Handkerchief - doubles as a sling [& sling-shot, SO.]
Magnifying glass - look at small things, start a campfire
A marble - big one, for luck [& slingshot, SO.]
Needle and thread - to sew up wounds, mend torn shirt
Pencil and paper - note down criminals' car numbers
Torch - read secret plans by night
Fish-hook and thread - add stick and worm and you won't starve
Box of matches - dip the tips in wax (it waterproofs them)

The book is now being released in North America.

Flora Poste's Sensibility in Fine Art

2007-02-08T02:40:00.000-08:00

Moulding Elfine to her own, urban, ideals, Flora Poste advises her to turn to "....the style of Jane Austen, or a painting by Marie Laurencin," as exemplars of the sensibility she seeks to impress upon her protégée. Information on the early twentieth-century French painter Marie Laurencin is at this link, and images of some of her paintings can be found here.

Mid-Term Questions

2007-02-08T02:15:00.000-08:00

Choose one from this list of available topics for step 1. in the Mid-term Essay Schedule post.

1. In the “Regulus” chapter of Stalky & Co., Mr. King is teaching a Latin ode to the Fifth Form. Analyse how his character interacts with individual boys in terms of what this reveals about Kipling’s view of performative masculine culture.

2. Detail some of the main values that Cranford and Cranford represent in fiction, and make an argument either for or against the claim that these values are designed to express a female view of culture superior to traditional male culture.

3. Do you agree or disagree with the claim that Peter Jenkyns’ attitude toward violence would exclude him from membership in Stalky’s “company” of performative males? Use quotations from both Gaskell’s & Kipling’s texts in support of your argument.

4. The NOTE at the reverse of the title-page of Cold Comfort Farm reads "The action of the story takes place in the near future." This in mind, what do you think is the significance of the following paragraph for the literary technique in Stella Gibbon's masterpiece?

Claud twisted the television dial and amused himself by studying Flora's fair, pensive face. Her eyes were lowered and her mouth compressed over the serious business of arranging Elfine's future. He fancied she was tracing a pattern with the tip of her shoe. She did not look at him, because public telephones were not fitted with television dials. (p.128)

5. Imagine that you have been commissioned to write a satire of Elizabeth Gaskell in the way that Stella Gibbons satirised certain other types of authors in Cold Comfort Farm. What aspects of Cranford's cultural view do you think should be satirised and why? You are free to sketch the character outline of a Flora Poste equivalent who would feature in your Gaskell satire.

Nicholas Sparks

2007-02-06T18:23:00.000-08:00

Nancy Warren was praising Nicholas Sparks as a man who writes romance novels with an overwhelming female readership, several of which are successful -- and I quote -- "chick-flicks:" The Notebook being the most prominent.

L'Écriture Féminine

2007-02-04T14:48:00.000-08:00

A student from an upper division course of mine sends me this from her current research into L'Écriture féminine. "Ann Rosalind Jones (professor at Smith College) writes:

Symbolic discourse (language, in various contexts) is another means through which man objectifies the world, reduces it to his terms, speaks in place of everything and everyone else--including women." Jones explains that women historically, reduced to mere sexual objects by the dominant male voice, "....have been prevented from expressing their sexuality in itself or for themselves." Finding a female form of expression would succeed in revealing the phallocentricity Western language. As I understand it, feminine expression appears de-centralized. Women experience the world sensually with their entire bodies whereas men tend to transmit and receive from their 'antenae' located just below the belt. Male language = logical, linear, even. Female language = contradictory, ambiguous, inconclusive. Theorist Luce Irigaray contends "'She' is infinitely other in herself. That is undoubtedly the reason she is called temperamental, incomprehensible, perturbed, capricious-not to mention her language in which 'she' goes off in all directions and in which 'he' is unable to discern the coherence of any meaning."

A Stella Gibbons Website

2007-02-04T00:52:00.000-08:00

There is a very good web resource (albeit low-tech) for information about Cold Comfort Farm at www.stellagibbons.org. The site is run by her nephew nephew Reggie Oliver, whose biography of his aunt, Out of the Woodshed, is nearly history's sole source for interesting & relevant information about Gibbons.

His article on Cold Comfort Farm, here, is extremely helpful.

Article Links

2007-02-02T21:32:00.000-08:00

Please leave comments or send me an email with any articles you find on-line relating to our course themes -- anything from scholarship to journalism to kitch is equally welcome -- & I'll put them up on the blog.

Here are a couple that I have found, relating to lecture.

An essential article for our course in today's online Guardian, here. I wanted to excerpt the pith, but it seems to be all pith. Certainly it addresses concisely and vigorously some of the genre issues with which we have been engaging.
It follows on this earlier piece sub-titled "Research shows men mainly read works by other men."

2007-01-31T07:21:00.000-08:00

Here, as mentioned, is the picture of "the Coll" -- the United Services College, at Westward Ho! in Devonshire, "Twelve bleak houses by the shore ...." -- where Kipling's Stalky & Co. is set.

Guest Speaker

2007-01-30T21:59:00.000-08:00

Great news: Chick-Lit writer Nancy Warren will be a guest lecturer at a soon-to-be-determined date. It won't be the back-end of February, however, because she is off to Daytona to promote the partnership between NASCAR .... & the Harlequin publishing empire exclamation-mark question-mark. (She is writing the first book in a series which will be launched at the Daytona 500. Can you guess the book's planned title?)
Update: Nancy Warren will be speaking at next Tuesday's lecture (February 6th.) Here is a succinct 'blurb:

Nancy has an honors degree in English literature and has had previous careers in Journalism and Public Relations.
She lives in the Pacific Northwest (i.e. here) with her husband, two children and an ever expanding assortment of pets.
Nancy's great loves, apart from her family, are Jane Austen novels, old movies, Swiss chocolate, and men who believe in feminism, but still hold doors open for women.
Literary Recognition:
2004 RITA for Best Traditional Romance Finalist
2004 RITA for Best Short Contemporary Romance Finalist

Being a Man ... is bad for your health

2007-01-30T14:37:00.000-08:00

À propos (just) Kipling's "Tommy", an article at the BBC reports that, according to University of Michigan's Randolph Nesse, "Being male is now the single largest demographic factor for early death."

Simply being a man is bad for your health, doctors have suggested.
A study in the United States shows men take more risks than women and are more likely to die from almost everything from heart disease to murder.
While men are more likely to die than women at practically every stage of their lives, the authors found the risks are highest in early twenties and in old age. More >>>

The Stalky Model of British Masculinity

2007-01-28T14:57:00.000-08:00

Here are the twelve elements of British masculinity that comprise the Kipling's 1890s representation of male-ness in Stalky & Co. -- derived by Kipling's genius from historical British culture and forming the inescape centre of gravity for the universe of British boys' book, film and comic for the century that followed.

A Kind and Sapient “Head” as immediate authority.
Male sub-cultures have quasi-automonous existence within a over-arching patriotic system: e.g. Britain. [N.b. Patriotism is implicit but heavily tabooed: vid. "The Flag of Their Country" chapter in Stalky & Co.]
A Chaplain-figure as council and side-access to the Head and the external political system.
Judicious violence encoded equally all levels of the system.
Encouragement of rebelliousness as a means to forestall revolution.
Stalkiness: cunning trumps size.
Stoicism, with Christian admixture, the background code.
Meritocracy through action: successful performance of Masculinity (vid. “If”) determines the individual male's place in leadership hierarchy. [(a.) based on situational performances: i.e. not one permanent alpha-male; (b.) original entrance to Man-hood is by major performance: a Rite of Passage.]
Women are on the margins -- the culture is monosexual – but they represent the external object of desire (the quest trope) once “man”-ness is achieved through culturally-sanctioned performance.
A small group of complementary individual types: vid. The Beatles.
Exclusive shared access to an esoteric code of speech – i.e. slang -- & cultural artifact – e.g. Boy's fiction in Stalky & Co., or the popmusic miscellania in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity.
Boyhood is not training for life; rather, Life is boyhood writ large.

Lad-lit: Canadian and non-fiction.

2007-01-26T21:49:00.001-08:00

A new book that is clearly lad-lit and clearly Canadian was reviewed very favourably in the centre fold of the "Books" section of the Toronto Globe and Mail. It was also well-reviewed in Quill & Quire, and elsewhere. The book is With the Boys: Field Notes on Being a Guy by Jake MacDonald, and is non-fiction of the reads-like-fiction type.
The Toronto Globe and Mail has the book's first chapter available online, and the following passage is worth our attention - especially as it echoes some of the ideas suggested in lecture.

Women appear in some of the stories too. Even when they're not on the scene, their absence is a kind of presence. Women keep an eye on men and exert a moderating inﬂuence on their behavior. That's one of the reasons that men like to occasionally get away from them. The singer Garth Brooks once remarked that he was teaching his little daughters a simple concept: "Men are pigs." All men know this about themselves, and they think it's funny. But at the same time, they have their own gender-speciﬁc code of ethics. Some kinds of piggy behavior are allowed, and some aren't. There are hundreds of rules affecting male behavior. That's too many to list here, and in any case every guy knows them. But women might find the male codebook strange and interesting. Women, for example, commonly assume that men like to talk about their spouses or sweethearts with their buddies. This is what psychologists call "projection." Women do it, so they think men do it too. A woman will happily dump the entire kitbag of her romantic woes on the table for the amusement of some other woman she's met four minutes ago. But no matter how late the evening or how debauched the conversation, you'll seldom hear a man say more than a few neutral words in passing about his mate. In the male codebook, talking about your love life is considered to be craven and unmanly. So women can at least relax about that.

Words and World

2007-01-26T10:32:00.000-08:00

An inside secret about Language is the extreme degree to which it is metaphorical: that is, perhaps most of our lexicon is simply an application of images from the external world. Consider the word "understand." It means, literally, "to stand under" and that is the original sense of "understanding" something.

Steven Pinker is one of the world's great minds: until 2003, he taught in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, now Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, authour of The Language Instinct, The Blank Slate, and How the Mind Works. These books are renown for being both intellectual and extremely funny: Pinker, a Canadian unacknowledged here in his own country, is a superior writer to most published novelists.

Pinker has a new book about language due later this year: The Stuff of Thought. He has this interview in the Toronto Star.

Says Pinker: "Look at almost any passage and you'll find that a paragraph has five or six metaphors in it. It's not that the speaker is trying to be poetic, it's just that that's the way language works.
"Rather than occasionally reaching for a metaphor to communicate, to a very large extent communication is the use of metaphor," he says.
It could be that 95 per cent of our speech is metaphorical, if you go back far enough in language."

The Iffy-ness of Manhood

2007-01-25T14:38:00.000-08:00

Kipling's poem "If" underscores the performative masculinity thesis: the argument that manhood is perpetually uncertain and under threat, requiring repeated confirmation, through the performance of actions codified by one's civilisation. In Kipling's poem -- which, as we saw in the film clip, still has culturally-resonant sensibility -- a son is a man IF he performs distinct actions according a known code; and a son is not a man IF he fails in those actions.

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by
waiting, Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
' Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

Lectures this week

2007-01-22T20:55:00.000-08:00

Tuesday's lecture we will finish our look at Cranford, and get a summary statement about the nature of the chick-lit genre. (See the earlier post here on the Mlynowski and Jacobs text.)

Thursday we will begin studying Stalky & Co. and the complementary lad-lit genre.

Actually, this reminds me to emphasise a point made in opening lecture about the purview of our course of study: to wit, two literary genres. Obviously, chick-lit & lad-lit say something worthwhile about the culture which creates, markets and reads the books in the respective genres. And the books hopefully stimulate interest in, as another genre writer put it, Life, the Universe, & Everything. However, our discipline -- university English -- is properly limited in on literary texts as its empirical and theoretical domain, and with the Print culture more widely. And the object of the course of study -- like any academic practice -- is understanding. Any moral judgement beyind this on the texts or surrounding print culture is, of definition, a purely personal matter: the place for moral judgement, praise or denunication is called Church.

A reminder here that if you are interested in the state of the current theoretical and literary-cultural engagement with chick-lit, please pick up our recommended course text, Ferriss & Young's Chick-Lit: The New woman's Fiction. Positions from this helpful text will be elaborated, now a basic foundation is laid, as the term progresses.

Update: there is a sequence of academic practice -- call it "Ogden's Ladder" -- which goes like this:

Data collection.
Information sorting.
Contextualisation.
Comparison.
Analysis.
Description.
Evaluation.
Understanding.

I came up with Ogden's Ladder some years ago in response to an encounter, which seemed to have wider relevancy, with a scholar who was intensely frustrating an interlocutor by, as I realised on reflection, actually beginning the academic practice with judgement, and then doing every other related aspect (including, as it happens, even data collection) from pure prejudice: in its strictest etymological sense, "pre-judice."

I'll phrase this list into specifically literary terms as our term progresses.

Borat & the British Class System

2007-01-22T11:36:00.001-08:00

The following quotation, from this article , in today's Times of London interviewing Sacha Baran Cohen on the success of his "Borat" persona, is very revealing; not only of the continued existence of, but also some of the different defining characteristics between, the three social classes in Britain, as we have touched upon them in lecture. (The supporting comment on America is pertinent, on the MacNeil thesis that southern American landowners are -- as their Elizabethan accent reveals -- vestigal British aristocracy who emigrated to the American colonies.)

One of the most intriguing questions about Baron Cohen’s characters is: why do so many people fall for the act? Partly he relies on good manners and politeness: “Ali G and Borat worked very well in England with the upper class because they were so polite. They would keep this person in their room. Members of the working class might have thrown him out; members of the middle class might not have revealed themselves as much.
“We found that the Deep South of America was very good for Borat because people were so polite and so welcoming of strangers. They were so proud of their American heritage that they would talk to this person about America and American values for an hour and a half.”

Teen Chick-Lit

2007-01-19T21:46:00.000-08:00

A class-fellow came across this chick-lit link while proctrastinating earlier this week. Chapters Books knows that they are onto a good thing with teen chick lit - an exemplary title is Angus, Thongs & Full Frontal Snogging: Confessions of Georgia Nicolson - as the eagerly made theatrical version of Ann Brashares' Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants testifies. I discovered recently that my younger daughter had simply devoured them -- and she is not much of a reader.
My prediction is that this will be an emergent genre ....

Class Cancelled: Thursday January 18th

2007-01-17T11:52:00.000-08:00

Covering the wicket here besides the email notice, I have had to cancel tomorrow's lecture to attend my mother's funeral. Tutorials will still be held.
Thanks for your understanding -- See you next Tuesday.

Asssigned chapters for Stalky & Co.

2007-01-16T15:06:00.000-08:00

Just a reminder that only specific chapters of Kipling's Stalky & Co. are assigned -- though of course you can read the entire book for fun & profit. It's quality over quantity in the required readings, but of course the recommended texts are opportunity for scope!

As listed in the syllabus , the assigned chapters are:

'Stalky'
'In Ambush'
The Moral Reformers
Regulus
Slaves of the Lamp, Pt. II.

Jane Austen Dives Between the Chick Lit Covers

2007-01-16T13:43:00.000-08:00

From the online Telegraph a year back:

Jane Austen is to be relaunched as a romantic novelist in the style of Danielle Steel and Dame Barbara Cartland. Her six novels are to be given glossy, pastel covers designed to appeal to women put off by the idea of reading a 19th century writer. Click for more >>>>

"Men 'cannot write romance.'

2007-01-15T00:37:00.000-08:00

A controversy from this past autumn followed this report:

Men just cannot write romantic fiction, according to a new television programme that examines the success of one of the most denigrated of literary genres. Daisy Goodwin, the presenter of BBC 4's Reader, I Married Him, a three-part series on the novel to be shown in the autumn, said yesterday that, after interviewing writers and readers, she had concluded that "you can't have a really seriously-written romantic book written by a man".

This then provoked this now-famous debate in the Daily Telegraph between two writers of the opposite sex....and opposite point of view.

Stop Procrastinating: Right NOW!

2007-01-14T14:04:00.000-08:00

A very helpful article in, of all places, the Toronto Globe & Mail, on the student's vice of procrastination:

....15 to 20 per cent of us are procrastinators. The condition is even more prevalent among the student population, where a third of most students' days are eaten up by procrastinating, something he pointed out yesterday while students seated around him gabbed, surfed the Internet and slept in a lounge on campus.
"Usually when I have an assignment I put it off until later," confessed Robert Maxwell, an 18-year-old biology student as he was distracted from his textbook on plants.
"It's a bad habit."
Three major factors contribute to precisely that habit, according to Prof. Steel. Self-confidence is key. Those who believe they can, essentially, will and those who don't, won't. The value of the task is important in whether it gets done. Is it something to enjoy or dread? And finally, delay. When does the task need to be completed? It's hard to get motivated about something that can be put off until some distant deadline looms.

Click here for more >>

Mid-term Essay: Schedule

2007-01-13T11:57:00.000-08:00

Here is the arrangement and the schedule of dates for the Mid-Term Essay, fifteen hundred words and revisions. The assignment is worth twenty percent of the Course grade, of which five percent is for the draught and fifteen percent for the revision.

Five-week writing circuit:

Course week five, Thursday February 8th: Choice of topics posted on the blog
Course week seven, Thursday February 22nd: first version of the essay due in lecture.
Course week nine, Thursday March 8th: essay returned with comments & grade.
Course week ten , Thursday March 15th: final revision due in lecture.

There is, then, a good three course weeks to analyse the completed paper and the writing process and discuss with the TA, if required.

Blog Post promise

2007-01-11T18:29:00.001-08:00

I remember saying I'd blog something, but I failed to write a note down. Anyone happen to remember what it was .....?
Update: I remember. It was this statistical article on the demographics of Romance Fiction readers. It has such data as "Romance fiction comprises 53.3% of all popular paperback fiction sold in North America." Click here for the three sections:

Getting an "A" in the Course

2007-01-09T14:45:00.000-08:00

Well, there are effective strategies to help achieve this.

Stay in touch with Lecturer and the TA by visiting Office Hours regularily: with the former, to talk over the primary course texts as you read them, with the latter, the writing assignments in lecture
Stay on top of the reading schedule, which will ensure that you have already read the book being lectured upon.
Draft your writing assignments -- even roughly -- as soon as possible after each is assigned, and then bring that rough draught to an Office Hour for discussion.
Draft a rough run through of the thesis paragraph for the Mid-Term essay as soon as the topics are released, and then bring that draught to the TA's or Lecturer's Office Hour for discusion.
The Final Exam -- worth thirty-five percent of the course grade -- is based one hundred percent on material presented in lecture and familiarity with the primary texts. Attend the lectures and read the material and the Final Exam will be very straightforward: you will finish the exam with an hour to spare for revision. Fail to attend lecture, or fail to read the material thoroughly enough or with time for reflection .... & it will be a very tough three hours -- the more so since, alas, lectures are not taped nor are notes posted online.

Getting an "A" on an English Paper

2007-01-09T00:24:00.000-08:00

An excellent article here with practical advice from Jack Lynch at Rutgers University on success, lovely success; "A" glorious "A."