Henry James was never called ugly*

So, I really enjoyed this podcast of the Diane Rehm Show today.  It was about the Edith Wharton novel Ethan Frome, in part in recognition of Wharton's 150th birthday this year.  In the midst of an enjoyable discussion (though I found some of the callers inane--who on earth thinks that high school students don't enjoy depressing books?), there was mention of Jonathan Franzen's New Yorker article (the link is to the abstract--I read it through the library subscription to Factiva) about Edith Wharton.  What readers generally agree seems to have intended to be a positive reading of Wharton instead--despite some nice analysis of her texts, especially Custom of the Country--reads as sexist jealousy.

Basically, Franzen's reading of Wharton is based on the fact that he finds her--the author--almost completely unsympathetic as a person because of her wealth and privilege.  To Franzen, Wharton had only "one potentially redeeming disadvantage: she wasn't pretty."  Franzen sees Wharton's major works as being strongly motivated by her unhappiness with her own looks, and her disappointing marriage and love life.  (He even reads her affair with Morton Fullerton as "somewhat embarrassing.")  He does own up to his own jealousy of her lifestyle, which he assumes the reader shares: "To be rich like Wharton may be what all of us secretly or not so secretly want, but privilege like hers puts her at a moral disadvantage."  I don't really get this perspective, as there are plenty of authors I know I wouldn't have wanted to have met--some of my favorites even (Faulkner, for example, being pretty high up on the list)--but I don't think it's appropriate to let my distaste color my reading.

Franzen's preamble is unfortunate, because like I said, some of his insights into her work are quite interesting.  His recognition that "the alchemical agent by which fiction transmutes my secret envy or my ordinary dislike of 'bad' people into sympathy is desire." However, his focus on Wharton's appearance undermines what insights he does have.  His claim that, "An odd thing about beauty, however, is that its absence tends not to arouse our sympathy as much as other forms of privation do.  To the contrary, Edith Wharton might well be more congenial to us now if, alongside her other advantages, she'd looked like Grace Kelley or Jacqueline Kennedy."  He goes on to claim that Wharton was fully aware of her own ugliness and created characters such as Lily Bart in part as a way of torturing pretty women to make up for her own shortcomings. 

When trying to find the original Franzen article, I came across several responses I agreed with: Jonathan Franzen, Edith Wharton, and the Problem of Personality, for example, Shut Up, Jonathan Franzen, and--a brilliant perspective--Kenyan Review's Jonathan Franzen on Edith Wharton.

In terms of my own work, even though he's not talking about southern literature, the fact that he is so focused on Wharton's own lack of beauty is striking.  First of all (as many people have pointed out, even though all of this should really be irrelevant when talking about Wharton), is this an image that many would characterize as "not pretty"?



Second, I'm intrigued that Franzen seems to think that the absence of beauty is an unforgivable privation.  Poverty, we have sympathy for; ugliness, we don't.  Especially if it's ugliness that gets to loll about in bed all day and write.  Jealousy is assuaged if the person is pretty--meaning deserving--enough?

*With apologies to Jonathan Richman, a Jonathan whose opinions I always agree with (well, those I know about, anyway).

MLA CFP: Women's Work

Join the Women's Caucus of the Modern Languages at the MLA convention to 2013! (Boston, Jan. 1-3 2013). Our general rubric for our three panels is "Women's Work," by which we mean not only working conditions for women in academia, but also the gendering of those conditions, which includes male workers as well. We would appreciate it if you would circulate these calls widely to appropriate lists, as well as sending in proposals yourself.

1) Gender Work and Two-Year Colleges. We’re interested in the material conditions of, and organizing activities in response to, gender relations in community colleges. Campus labor, policies, co/teaching experiences. 250-word abstract and brief c.v. to Jessica Ketcham-Weber by 3/15 at jweber@cascadia.edu

2) In collaboration with the Committee on Contingent Labor in the Profession
Gender and Contingent Labor. How is contingent labor feminized (or not) on your campus? We particularly seek examples of successful or promising avenues toward equity. 250-word abstract and brief c.v. to Kirsten Christensen by 3/15 at kmc@plu.edu

3) Labor Negotiations: Family Medical Leave. Schools have official and unofficial practices about eldercare, parenting, and medical leave. We're interested in best practices and advice that could help others. 250-word abstract and brief c.v. to Michelle Massé by 3/15 at mmasse@lsu.edu

Teaching and Tech

This Chronicle article has me thinking more about effective teaching, especially as I continue to struggle with my current class.  Its primary claim is that technology works best in the classroom when it fosters stronger connections between teacher and student.  This has been the idea that I've been circling around in the past week, that key to a productive classroom is one in which there is a strong connection between teacher and students.  In my current classroom, because the students came in with such strong connections already among themselves, it's been difficult to get their attention focused elsewhere. 

I've spent the past week meeting with students about their first papers--part of my intention in doing so has been to try to forge stronger connections individually with students, in an effort to improve the classroom.  I want them to engage with the class material during class time, rather than be chatting and passing notes about their social lives.  Friday, they workshopped their rough drafts in class, and I had them pair up with a random partner, in order to cut down on extraneous "underlife." 

I noticed an interesting change Monday.  In general, the students were a bit more focused and participated in class discussion more (partly after realizing that they wouldn't get 10s for participation just for showing up).  However, my overachiever student had the student newspaper out and read for part of class instead of participating.  I wonder if he's protesting my not letting him write the treatise on the effect of commercialism on marriages he wanted to write, instead of the assigned rhetorical analysis of a print ad?  Or perhaps I'm reading too much into it.

Either way, I realize that for the first time I'm missing that sense of "wonder" in the material.  This is definitely a sign I need to shake something up.  I really wish that the department would go ahead and announce fall teaching assignments; knowing what I'm working toward in the fall might be helpful in facing the rest of the semester, too.  I think I'm more generally missing a sense of "wonder" right now--even though my reading for class/comps is right down my alley right now, I don't want to read.  The part of my brain that translates words into meaning is tired.  It's not too terribly bad--when I feel this terribly, I get up and work out, or do something crafty (I haven't been too musical lately--that might help).  Still, when I come back to the book,  it's still feeling like work.

As I write this, I realize that (with a few exceptions), I have been enjoying the writing side of things more lately.  I'm quite happy with the pedagogy conference paper I'm giving this week (ironically, I suppose--though it's about group projects, which I really enjoyed last semester), and once I get through this new round of revisions for the <expletive omitted> Transatlantic paper I received two days ago, I'm looking forward to the writing projects I have going which I actually am excited about.  Hmmm.  Perhaps I should keep my focus on writing--I've got a really good writing partner right now, and our commitment to meet once a week has kept me working diligently on writing. 

And here's why writing is important--it allows me realizations such as this.