A summer syllabus

Now that your semester is done and grades are in, no doubt you are itching to get back to work! I wanted to post a few titles up here to offer you some ideas about summer reading. Like -- I assume -- many of you, I am excited as all hell about the last Harry Potter book coming out in July. However, for those of you who might not be spending the summer rereading the last three Harry Potter novels, here are some suggestions.

A list of literary antecedents

Did you find yourself baffled by the allusions in the texts we read this summer? A goodly number of textual and structural allusions in English-language can be traced back to significant foundational texts from the European tradition. Here is my list of texts that I see coming up again and again, organized from most frequent to least:

1. The Odyssey, Homer (I hear the Fagles translation is quite good; I was raised on the Fitzgerald)
   
2. The Divine Comedy, Dante (Really you just need Inferno and the first bit of Purgatorio... I read the Sinclair prose translation, but I hear that Ciardi verse translation is better in every way)
3. The Metamorphoses, Ovid
   
4. The Iliad, Homer (I read Lattimore, although there are a million newer and trendier translations)
   
5. Oedipus Tyrannos, Sophocles (Lattimore & Green was the conventional translation for this and all Greek tragedies when I was in school)
6. The poetry of Horace
   
7. Agamemnon, Aeschylus
8. Don Quixote, Cervantes
9. The poetry of Catullus
   
10. The Aeneid, Virgil (I hesitate to even put this here -- a very persuasive argument was made in the Harper's review of Fagles's new translation that The Aeneid is scarcely worth reading; still, it's one of those books we're supposed to list as being a significant foundation for Anglophone letters)
    

This list is geared towards readers of twentieth-century literature. In any other context, and possibly even in this context, the Bible should be at the top of this list -- not until the most recent generations have we seen writers coming into their profession with only the scarcest knowledge of the Bible.

A list of literary analogues

If reading translated texts from a couple thousand years ago doesn't sound like quite your thing, how about some recommendations of somewhat more contemporary texts? This list is organized as a sequence of analogues tied to texts we read in class this semester. Because I'm not a verse reader, I will be sticking with prose.

• If you liked Middlemarch, you are a little bit out of luck, what with having already read the greatest novel in the English language. However, you might read in the work of Eliot's greatest admirers echoes of Middlemarch's thematic and structural qualities. I particularly recommend Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady as a late nineteenth-century gripping social drama -- like Eliot, James is concerned with social and psychological phenomena, and so, like Middlemarch, Portrait is a bit light on plot. Virginia Woolf revisited questions of relations and relationality in The Years -- one of the few books she felt genuinely satisfied about, and one that I have been longing to reread for quite a while.
  
• If you liked The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, you might really enjoy Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone (often called the first detective novel) and The Woman in White. Most of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories have a Stevensonesque feel to them, particularly The Hound of the Baskervilles. Although Stevenson has been largely ignored by the academy, I have been told by more than one reliable source that his other works are just an enormous pleasure to read.
  
• If you liked To the Lighthouse, then Mrs Dalloway is a must-read. If you've read them both, try Jacob's Room. If you haven't read A Room of One's Own then that is worth sitting down with for an hour or two -- it's a short literary essay, and Woolf's most enduring literary legacy. The other famous and successful Bloomsbury writer is E. M. Forster, who wrote several excellent novels, particularly Room With a View, Howards End (my favorite), and A Passage to India. Woolf was also, in some ways, Henry James's literary heir, so James's fiction (mentioned above) might be a good place to turn. Woolf also had an interesting literary relationship with Marcel Proust, whose work helped shape the style of her later novels. There is a wonderful new translation of the first volume of Proust's enormous A la recherche du temps perdu, called Swann's Way, by Lydia Davis.
• If you liked Endgame, you're in luck: Beckett wrote several plays and novels with the same twisted sort of nihilistic humor. I particularly recommend Malloy, a strange, short pseudo-novel that includes some of the funniest scenes in any twentieth-century fiction.
  
• If you liked Arcadia, you will probably like Stoppard's even more popular Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. (There's an amusing movie of it as well.)
  
• If you liked Disgrace -- and according to my statistics most of you did -- then you will almost certainly like Ian McEwan's Atonement. His subject matter is not exactly the same -- although there is sex, rape, and violence -- but the precision of his prose style is quite similar to Coetzee's. I have also heard good things about Coetzee's Foe, and his Waiting for the Barbarians is frequently cited as his most significant work.
  

The Shapiro syllabus

Here, because I have a blog and the inclination to indulge myself, are some books I really wish everybody would read. I don't make any special claim about them other than that they are fun and enormously satisfying reads.

• Special Topics in Calamity Physics, by Marisha Pessl, starts off sounding like a slightly more interesting than usual coming-of-age novel, but then about 300 pages in it becomes a murder mystery, and then another 150 pages in it becomes a meditation about literature and life. Even if this sounds boring, it isn't.
• Some more contemporary lit: Zadie Smith's White Teeth is stunning and hilarious -- it is basically a novel about the madness of polyphony. Try also Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated. These young authors -- JSF is barely 30 -- are throwing a wrench into earlier literary mechanisms by which pious authors try to make the whole world feel sacred. Smith and Foer and others are taking problems that are supposed to be solved and showing us that solutions are unnecessary and uninteresting.
  
• Midnight's Children, by Salman Rushdie. Rushdie might be the most interesting living writer in English -- if I had to guess whose books students will be reading in 200 years, I would guess Rushdie (and Toni Morrison). Midnight's Children might be a difficult book -- I didn't think so, but I've heard this complaint about it -- but it is also the book with the most interesting narrator and the most satisfyingly serpentine plot. If you would prefer a slightly more conventionally-plotted story that focuses on the history and effect of popular music, The Ground Beneath Her Feet is a pretty good one.
• You have to be a certain kind of person to love it, but Henry James's The Ambassadors ranks with Middlemarch as one of the great atmospheric novels of the English language. Ambassadors is really made for the sort of reader who likes to sit down and read for two hours and get through only 30 or 40 pages: it is a book that requires rumination, and that will eventually shift the way you see the world. It is an utter masterpiece.
• As long as I'm going on about utter masterpieces, Moby-Dick is not read nearly often enough. It's silly and strange and all sorts of brilliant, and although it's long it's also the kind of book you can read one chapter a night for four or five months.
• Finally, if you're just itching for Deathly Hallows and you want some magnificent YA lit to read, try Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy (first novel: The Golden Compass). I usually try to give an ideological caveat before recommending it -- the last novel of the trilogy is strikingly anti-church -- but the story is so wonderful and the moral language of the novels so articulate that even readers who are deeply invested in church life probably won't feel offended by Pullman's take on Catholicism and Episcopalianism.
  

Gradedown! Post 9 -- Grades are in!

A few minutes ago I submitted grades to MOR for approval. If he approves them today, it is my understanding that they will go online around midnight tonight.

If you're impatient to see your grade, feel free to send me an email! Forgive me if it takes a little while to get back to you -- now that I'm done grading for the semester, I can devote fuller attention to packing up the rest of my apartment.

It has been a pleasure working with you all this semester: this was the first non-100-level English course I've taught, and it has been a welcome challenge to try to keep up with active and critical readers. Please don't hesitate to stay in touch!

Gradedown! Post 8

My grades are due in to MOR tomorrow afternoon, so this might well be the last Gradedown! before the end. Check back later this week for some thoughts about how you might keep your literary muscles in shape for the summer!

Right now, all I have left to grade are

• 18 hebdomadals.

I've been finding that these last hebdomadals are, with some exceptions, the most consistently strong textual interpretation and analysis I've seen this semester. It seems that the brutal practice of writing weekly hebdomadals helped many of you find the right language with which to articulate your literary investigations. I know that as a student it can feel as though all learning is too incremental to be immediately appreciable; however, if you were only to look back at your first hebdomadal and your last you might immediately appreciate the ways you've become better writers. In fact, you might want to go do that now.

Consider Louis Menand's remarks about higher education in last week's New Yorker. He concludes that in recent years colleges and universities have sought to make students feel prepared for whatever unpredictable life awaits them, whereas in fact students would do far better to be aware of just how unprepared they are, and how impossible it would be to be prepared. In an odd way, an English degree can do what a business degree can't: it can show you what happened when Beckett, and T. S. Eliot, and Auden, and Woolf -- all at the heights of their careers -- came into direct and expressive contact with the real, and found themselves lost and hapless.

Is it learning, then, to be able more effectively to articulate the techniques and the nuances by which these writers understand their blindness and their confusion? I think so, if only because it gives you (1) the language with which to describe to yourself your own situation when you look around you in three months or three years and feel that utter panic of uncertainty, and it gives you (2) the absolute certainty that people have been here before, and that comparatively few of those people drowned themselves.

Gradedown! Post 7

Due to a counting-related problem, I had 10 more hebdomadals than I thought. After a couple hours of grading last night and this morning, however, I am down to (I think)

• 37 hebdomadals

It is taking me on average 5-6 minutes to grade each hebdomadal, which means I can do about 10 hebdomadals an hour -- meaning about 4 more hours of grading. These numbers mean that my comments on your hebdomadals are becoming increasingly terse. If you would like me to expand on any of my remarks, please don't hesitate to email me back. (If your question isn't urgent, I might delay until after grades are in to respond.)

I really wish I had set up hebdomadals to be more responsive -- I ask a question on the blog, you respond in your hebdomadal, I ask a question in my response to your hebdomadal, you answer my question in your next hebdomadal, and so on.

Gradedown! Post 6

I managed to finish the rest of the exam essays yesterday, leaving me with just:

• 45 hebdomadals

My mother is flying into town in a couple hours -- she hasn't come here to visit since 2002 -- so I hope to spend most of my weekend with her. Still, if I can fit in a couple good bouts of grading then there's still hope that grades will go in on Tuesday. I'll keep you posted.

Congratulations with the end of finals, everyone!

Gradedown! Post 5

Thursdays are usually given over to planning for section, so you might have imagined that my habits would lead me to focus on pushing through grading hebdomadals. Hah! Today was more of a packing (and video games) sort of day than yesterday was, but that's not to say it was a complete wash. If my counting skills aren't letting me down, I have left

• 31 exam essays
• 47 hebdomadals (still)

Unless I get overwhelmed trying to move my books tomorrow, it might in fact be possible to finish grading by the Tuesday deadline. (I have an ugly history of turning in my grades at the last possible second -- it's a wonder that MOR agreed to let me teach for him again.) Weirdly enough, all this blogging seems to have helped keep me on track. Huh.

I found that the second essay topic -- about violence in the action and structure of texts -- was a serious stumbling block. I've graded all the essays on the first (texts within texts) and second topics, and for some reason essays written on the first topic were substantially better than essays written on the second.

I wrote the second topic, actually, so it's really important to me that I figure out what went on here so I don't do it again. It doesn't seem to me that the second prompt is inherently more difficult than the first -- both ask writers to engage with structural and thematic analysis. Is it simply that we've had a couple of discussions that center around the texts-within-texts problem, and that we only began discussing violence last week?

By the way, if you could read through all the answers I got to this topic you might get a better understanding of why I appreciate essays that make use of unexpected texts. I read four essays in a row that looked at violence in "Porphyria's Lover," Disgrace, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The two of you who used Middlemarch get major props for venturing beyond the obvious -- thank you. (Weirdly, almost no one wrote about "Goblin Market." I guess it's hard to predict exactly what texts count as obvious.)

By the way, thank you guys for the comments on earlier Gradedown! posts: you're helping to keep me awake and working away.

An interhebdolude

The endlessly delightful Heather from section 305 generously agreed to share this gem of a hebdomadal responding to the prompt about epiphanies in To the Lighthouse. (She sent it a few weeks ago, of course, though I just read it yesterday.) One of the pleasures of reading so many hebdomadals in a row has been the chance to run into so many gob-stopping readings: I really want to thank all of you for the work you put in to really thinking through some of the philosophical and stylistic underpinnings of the work we've read this semester -- there are too many excellent essays to feature them all here without drowning people in glorious analysis. Consider Heather's work here as a tribute to the good work so many of you have done these past few weeks.

Epiphanies allow for insight not only into the minds and lives of specific people in the story but more general truths as well. Epiphanies also allow for the stream of consciousness form to have meaning. Without epiphanies, stream of consciousness would just be a jumble of thoughts and ideas, personal and about the external world. Narrative events are different from epiphanies because they have no internal power or outlook. Narrative events are purely external. They create the frame, the setting, the place in the outside world where epiphanies occur. Narrative events drive the narrative and create the skeleton of any story. Epiphanies fill in the gaps, the meat of the story in characters’ thoughts, emotions, feelings, etc…Epiphanies depend on events, are created in and through events. Without events, epiphanies could not be. Lily’s epiphany about marriage comes years after the actual event when Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay have eight children. “So that is marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing a ball…And suddenly the meaning which, for no reason at all, as perhaps they are stepping out of the Tube or ringing a doorbell, descends on people, making them symbolical, making them representative, came upon them, and made them in the dusk standing, looking, the symbols of marriage, husband and wife” (72). Not only is the event related to this moment from years ago, the actual marriage, but also an event in the present, Prue and Jasper throwing a ball. Epiphanies bring together, in this instance, past (Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay’s marriage), the present (Prue and Jasper’s game), and the future (Lily’s possible marriage to William Bankes).

Though events set the stage for epiphanies, many times the epiphanies come at different times in relation to certain events. When we learn of the deaths of Mrs. Ramsay, Prue, and Andrew, there are no epiphanies relating to the events themselves and the events that surround it until later in the story. The significance of events is to tell the audience what has happened in the characters’ lives we’re reading about. I think it’s important Lily is the only one who gets epiphanies because she is outside the spheres of influence, outside the sphere of connections, more accurately. She is not married like Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay or about to be like Minta and Paul. Her parents aren’t in the story and she’s not one herself. She is not like anyone else in the story. She has no great work completed or fame achieved in the external world. She has few friends, few acquaintances. She seems to always be on the outside, separated from the bias that could affect what she sees and how she sees it. Because she is not connected, she is able to see more, experience more, because she is not closed off or tied down. Her last epiphany, possibly the greatest, is seen at the end and deals with watching Mr. Ramsay, Cam, and James finally reaching the lighthouse. “‘He has landed,’ she said aloud. ‘It is finished’… It was done; it was finished…I have had my vision” (208-209). If Lily had been in the boat with Mr. Ramsay, James, and Cam she would not have had the ability to see what she saw. If she had been part of the Ramsay family or gotten married, she would not have seen what she saw. It is her disconnectedness that allows her to step back and see the bigger picture. Not only does she see the bigger picture but she can see where all the smaller scenes fit into that bigger picture. Making herself separate makes her aware.

In Middlemarch, many different people have epiphanies, symbolizing how disconnected the people in Middlemarch are from their own lives. Dorothea receives hers when she realizes it is neither a sin nor a crime for her to marry for love. She realizes she loves Will and the notion comes as an epiphany because she had not known it before, had not realized it was ok to love and to marry for love and not just for duty or honor. Lydgate experiences his epiphany when he realizes he has lost all control of his life and it’s falling down around him. He tried so hard to please others, mostly his wife, to fit it, and do what was good for society that he forgot to live for himself. When that happened, his life got worse and worse, and farther out of his control. His epiphany grounds him again and by then it’s too late to do anything to save himself which he also realizes. The epiphanies seen in “The Dead” are very personal to Gabriel, about him and seen (realized) by him. There is a much more narrow scope of vision in “The Dead” and though the epiphanies cover a wide array of characters, there is still a single voice they focus on and a specific person, not the world or more general life questions that is affected and/or changed. In To the Lighthouse, the audience also knows what the epiphanies are, to whom they occur and are about, and what they pertain to. There are questions posed throughout the story that the epiphanies give answers to. In Heart of Darkness, the epiphany that comes is very abstract and general, never quite pinned down. Though we, as the audience, can assume that any epiphany will deal with what the heart of darkness actually is we never know. We may get some ideas but nothing is ever made concrete or obvious. In To the Lighthouse, we see the buildup and resolution, or conclusion to almost every epiphany. They reveal secrets of life to the characters themselves and to the world which would otherwise remain forever hidden from view.

Gradedown! Post 4

Finally began attacking the essays last night, leaving me with:

• 47 hebdomadals
• 48 exam essays

It's always somewhat amusing to see all the heat-of-the-moment misnamings that come through on the exams. Within a single essay, for example, there might be a Dr. Jekyll, a Dr. Jeckyl, a Dr. Jekyl, and a Dr. Jeckyl. George Eliot is sometimes an Eliott, an Elliot, and an Elliott -- but she made up the name anyway, so why shouldn't we modify it a little bit at will? My favorite, though, was seeing new versions of my own name crop up on the fronts of blue books: "Kevin Shapiro," for example, or "Meier." Really I'm in no position to tease: a couple years ago I wrote a 20-page essay for MOR that referred regularly to Edmund Casaubon.

Gradedown! Post 3

A few more hebdomadals down, and the alterna-essay:

• 47 hebdomadals
• 66 exam essays

I'm being too indulgent with these, aren't I?

Here are some quick statistics about peer review. The average grade increase from Essay 1 to Essay 2 was 0.43 percent. The essay grades of students who peer-reviewed their essays went up, on average, 3.0 percent: an impressive difference amounting to about a third of a letter grade. The most impressive datum, though, is how amazingly effective star reviewers were -- those five peer reviewers who earned mondo extra credit for putting serious thought and time into peer-reviewing their peers' work. Students whose second essays were peer reviewed by these star reviewers saw grade increases of 8.9 percent: basically a full letter grade. That is seriously, seriously amazing stuff.

Remember that when I graded these second essays, I didn't even glance at the peer reviews: in most cases I didn't know that an essay had been peer reviewed at all.

Thank you, peer reviewers, for making essays on average 3% more pleasant to read. I hope you all keep at it: the statistics here seem to show that a couple hours spent working through a peer's critical comments can boost your grade massively. Massively.

Gradedown! Post 2

Just took care of the peer reviews and one of the hebdomadals, leaving me with

• 1 alterna-essay
• 51 hebdomadals
• 66 exam essays

Here are some interesting things I noticed about the IDs on the final exam:

1. If you were an economist -- and maybe some of you are, actually -- If I were an economist, I would have expected students to approach IDs beginning with the passages about which they felt most confident and proceeding on to passages and texts about which they felt less confident. If a student was only sure about, say, four texts, s/he would take an educated stab at a fifth text. If this hypothesis were right, ID grades would begin high and get lower as the student proceeded. What I noticed, though, was that for most students grades went in the opposite direction -- except in cases where you had to guess at a passage, you more or less improved as you got more practice writing out IDs. What this tells me is that practice really pays -- maybe next semester I will more strenuously urge students to work through several full IDs in the days before the exam.

2. Something I hadn't thought of before: Tristen (306) used the IDs not merely to talk through the thematic problems of the texts but to connect those texts to thematic problems in other texts. It was really smart work, I think, saying that texts could be identified not merely in isolation but also as parts of a larger discourse. That was pretty cool, and I urge all of you to steal Tristen's idea if you take ID-based exams in the future.

3. Whether or not you guys liked a text had little bearing on how well you identified it. This is strange to me -- it's an axiom in literary instruction that getting students to like literature is the entire battle: once they like a text, they will have little trouble working with it. Yet though Disgrace was the massive favorite -- at least according to Friday's quiz-poll -- the average ID score for passage #3 was 4.8/6; IDs of Endgame (passage #4), the second-least-favorite text according to Friday's poll, averaged exactly the same score. While Heart of Darkness had no votes as favorite text and 2 as least favorite, the average grade for HoD IDs (passage #8) was a massive 5.3/6. Here's the breakdown, organized by passage number:

1. Arcadia (3 votes as favorite; 1 vote as least favorite): 7 answers; mean score 4.3
2. The Waste Land (2 votes as favorite; 3 votes as least favorite): 20 answers; mean score 4.8
3. Disgrace (8 votes as favorite): 30 answers, mean grade 4.8
4. Endgame (5 votes as least favorite): 12 answers; mean grade 4.8
5. "Araby" (2 votes as favorite; 1 vote as least favorite): 31 answers; mean grade 4.7
6. Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1 vote as least favorite): 25 answers; mean grade 4.8
7. Middlemarch (6 votes as favorite; 7 votes as least favorite): 8 answers, mean grade 4.1
8. Heart of Darkness (2 votes as least favorite): 22 answers; mean grade 5.3
9. To the Lighthouse (2 votes as favorite; 5 votes as least favorite): 10 answers; mean grade 4.6

I promise to get back to grading later tonight... well, whether I promise or not clearly it has to get done. I will probably regale you with a later post articulating some thoughts about peer review (the numbers here are interesting). A little bit later -- maybe after I finish grading; maybe as a reward for getting through some of the exam essays -- I'll write a little bit about next steps for you guys: continuing education, and all that.