Links, links, and more links...

These have been sitting in my bookmark folder for awhile now:

1) Some takes on the new Great Gatsby movie. We talked about this in my ENGL 301 class (after reading Gatsby). I am going to withhold judgment for now, but I do find Ta-Nehisi Coates' points quite compelling:

"As in so many of the books I love, I found the plot in Gatsby to almost be beside the point. Whenever I see it translated to cinema, the film-maker inevitably crafts a story of doomed romance between Daisy and Gatsby. It's obviously true that Gatsby holds some sort of flame for Daisy, but what makes the book run (for me) is the ambiguity of that flame. Does he really love her? Or is she just another possession signaling the climb up? I always felt that last point—the climb up—was much more important than the romance. What I remember about Gatsby is the unread books. His alleged love for Daisy barely registers for me."

2) Random, but kind of cool: Kevin Harvick's wife is a 1996 graduate of UNCG's English program. See, you can do anything with an English degree.

3) I've been wrestling with how to help students in my advanced composition class write stronger reviews of the Buffy episodes we are watching. Carrie, my friend/colleague, pointed me towards a terrific TV critic, Heather Havrilesky (most recently, she worked at Salon). Here's a link to Havrilesky's take on Glee that rings pretty true to me. I think the show is more great than awful, but it can be so very bad and still doesn't seem to know what the heck kind of show it wants to be. She's got another keeper on Modern Family.

4) A study from The University of Chicago that isn't surprising at all: "Writing about worries eases anxiety and improves test performance." Composition teachers have been saying this for years, but I guess we've got scientific proof now. 

5) And this one is from way back in January: healthy cats pretend to be sick when we annoy them. Duh. They are geniuses that way.

Portfolio: done!

For those of you keeping score at home, check another item off my huge Fall 2009 semester to-do list. This morning I handed in my pre-tenure review portfolio (also known as "third-year review portfolio").

It actually was a pretty easy process--time-consuming, I suppose, but not all that difficult since I've been saving and organizing all the materials from day one here at Shepherd. (That's a piece of advice to all my friends who are also in new academic jobs--be pack-rats! Save thank-you notes and emails, fliers with your name on them, write-ups in local papers, etc.)

Incidentally, I think part of the reason the process was relatively pain-free is because at UNCG, we were encouraged to create and constantly update our teaching portfolios. The pre-tenure portfolio is a lot like a teaching portfolio, but with sections about your scholarship and service, as well. Anyway, just another reason I am glad to have gotten my degrees at UNCG.

Now...back to work on that SSAWW paper!

Also, someone please explain to me why in the last week or so I agreed to A) serve as a reader for a manuscript submitted to a journal (I can't say which journal) and B) write two introductory essays for an anthology? I might never get out of this hole...but that's okay.

Link Dumping: Academia Edition

1) Have you heard about these 60-second recaps of "great works"? Kind of fun, no? (Yes, I know some students might use these instead of doing actual reading, but let's face it, they are going to use Sparknotes or whatever.) Maybe start with this one. After all, it's my favorite book. More about the girl behind them here.

2) Teaching after midnight? Seriously?

3) A pretty cool lesson about how math can be useful and interesting in the "real world." Here's a teaser: the express lane at checkout is NOT necessarily faster. (I could have told you that, but it's nice to have math backing me up.)

4) What do you think of colleges and universities scheduling a mid-day activity hour for meetings and such? At first blush, I gotta say I like the idea, since there are few things more hellish than trying to schedule a freakin' meeting. Another alternative: one of my friends teaches at a university that doesn't have Friday classes, so all the meetings and things are on Fridays. Not a bad solution, either, although this means classes meet (at most) twice a week and I do best with classes that meet three times a week. [If you work outside academia, you might consider this a really boring and unimportant question, but trust me--it matters. I have already had seven committee/organization meetings this week...]

5) Community premieres tonight and I am planning on watching, primarily because of my love for Joel McHale. As you may have heard, this show is already a bit controversial...

6) Finally, some GOOD news: UNCG has decided to renovate--not demolish--the historic quad. Fantastic choice, folks!

Missing Greensboro...

Believe it or not, this cool new commercial for UNCG has made me feel a bit homesick and nostalgic. (I like the video, although I think they should slow it down a bit.)



Two of the most important decisions I ever made in my life--where to go to college and where to go to grad school--were made for entirely economic reasons (I went where I got the most money) because I wasn't willing or able to do any deep thinking about what the "right" choice should be. I just stumbled into both choices.

I don't consider myself an extraordinarily lucky person, but in both cases, I lucked out beyond measure. I couldn't have made better choices if I tried.

Raymond Carver's "Cathedral"

Last week, we read Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” in my English 102 class. In preparation for class that day, I did a little online reading to brainstorm for some discussion topics and stumbled upon this article by Samantha Gillison from January 2000.

“What would you do if you made the uncomfortable discovery that the most imitated writer in America might have lifted the plot, characters and theme of one of his most famous stories?

Well, for starters, you might try to dismiss the charges. Any old literary saw would do the trick. After all, everyone knows that Shakespeare cribbed his plots, that good writers borrow and great ones steal, and that all literary artists struggle under what Harold Bloom calls "the anxiety of influence." Maybe, as some have said, there are really only a few basic narratives, and a writer can only come up with different ways of telling them. But what if the similarities between two stories by two acknowledged masters were just too close to be easily brushed aside? If you were D.H. Lawrence scholar Keith Cushman*** and believed you had stumbled upon a brilliant rewrite of one of the master's tales you might draft a letter to the most influential short-story writer of your time. And Raymond Carver just might write you back.”

Great hook, right? It’s a fascinating read, as Gillison discusses how Carver’s most famous story might have been influenced (perhaps too light a word in this case) by D.H. Lawrence's “The Blind Man,” a story I haven’t read myself (or even heard of before this article).

As she examines what Carver said about the Lawrence story and puts together a bit of a literary criticism detective tale for us, Gillison also makes some smart points about the (ultimately impossible) quest for originality with which writers often struggle. She also asks great questions about what difference it makes to readers when we find out the “original” texts we loved are, in fact, influenced by other texts:

“But unacknowledged, unconscious ‘borrowing’ or no, what does all of this matter when Carver's fiction has given so many people so much pleasure? All artists (from great to lousy) in all media from time immemorial have borrowed and stolen, reinterpreted and reworked the art and ideas of their predecessors and contemporaries. It's the nature of creativity. So who cares if Carver shoplifted some ideas? Isn't Lady Chatterly herself a descendant of Emma Bovary? Isn't the most famous blind man of them all Oedipus Rex? And, as Professor Cushman suggests, isn't Lawrence himself working closely with Sophocles' ideas in his story? Yet, in the end, isn't there a line between being influenced and knocking off someone else's work?

Nevertheless, to suggest such an influence and to note Carver's denial of it can't fail to be seen as throwing down a gauntlet. Even in our era of sampling, of pastiche as high art and of the endless Hollywood remake, we still cherish originality as a cultural ideal, especially when it comes to the hallowed practice of literature.”

By the end of the article, there’s pretty convincing proof that, despite his denials, Carver had read Lawrence’s story, although that’s not really the important question. More important is why he felt the need to deny doing so. Again, by examining just what “Cathedral” and its acclaim meant to Carver, his reputation, and his place in the canon, she comes up with some interesting answers.

In the end, it’s kind of sad that Carver felt the need (apparently) to deny lawrence’s influence, especially if, as Gillison speculates, he does so because he feared estimation of his own story would suffer. “Cathedral” is an amazing story, whether influenced by Lawrence or not. In fact, the Lawrence connection almost makes it more interesting to me. For the record, my students enjoyed it, too—no small feat for a group of non-majors. I’ll end with Gillison’s conclusion:

“What then to make of this man who clearly saw himself as first and foremost a writer of literature, an art that he in turn claimed was of little more significance than bowling a rubber on a Saturday night? Nothing Carver himself didn't already identify and write in his stories for us: ambivalence, insecurity, ambition, need, cowardice and hope -- all the demons that beset the soul who wants to be Somebody. But judging from Carver's enduring popularity and beloved status with a whole new generation of short-story writers and readers, he needn't have worried.”

***Another reason this article really caught my eye? Dr. Cushman teaches at UNCG. I never worked with him while I was there, but I did know him and once wrote a short review of a collection of essays on D.H. Lawrence that he edited. I’ve gotta say, it’s pretty cool to think he wrote a letter to Carver—and that Carver wrote back. When you write about nineteenth-century American authors, that never happens.

How many students is too many students?

An interesting article from the Daytona Beach News Journal online tackles the question of how many students is too many in an English Composition class. The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) recommends no more than 20 students per class--and that no teacher has more than 60 writing students per teacher per term. As this article explains, though, with so many schools encouraged to increase enrollment (without increasing the number of faculty), the stress on these general education courses is growing.

My composition classes here at Shepherd are capped at 25. At UNCG, we were capped at 22. At Richmond it was 15 (what a treat that was!). Fifteen was awesome--as a teacher, I could give each student and each paper lots of time and attention. We could have meaningful discussions about writing and revisions. Twenty-two worked just fine, though, too. And even 25 isn't too bad--but it's clearly not ideal. (I can't remember how many students were in GST 101/102 classes at Roanoke--do any of my fellow alums remember?) Here's an excerpt from the article explaining why--and why there aren't any short-term solutions to this growing problem:

"Here is how it works: La'Shonda Broxton, an 18-year-old DBCC student, wrote a process essay on what it takes to be a successful high school freshman, and she was proud of her work.

Her professor, Carolyn West, wanted her to do better.

"She said I wasn't specific enough," Broxton said. "I wrote that it takes a good attitude and self-esteem. And she asked, 'How are you going to get attitude and self-esteem?' I wasn't specific enough."

That kind of individualized attention takes time, which is why the English teachers' council guidelines for a professor in one semester is three courses of no more than 20 students per class.

Evan Rivers, chairman of DBCC's English Department, said comp classes' enrollment was capped at 22 when he took over last year. This year, the cap was raised to 25 (and in one case 26) mostly because of the enrollment surge and the fact that English composition is a requirement for so many other classes.

"There's nothing I would like better than to follow National Council of Teachers of English guidelines. Nothing would make me happier . . . but there's nothing we can do," he said.

As I said above, 25 students is manageable, though not ideal. I am just worried that soon it will be 26, or 27, 0r 28--you get my point. As my previous posts about weekends spent grading indicate, the work load for these classes can be quite daunting. I hate to complain about my job because, as I've also written about before, I feel pretty darn lucky to get to do this for a living. But I do think there is a point where the quality of instruction will suffer too much to justify increasing enrollments. On the simplest level, as a teacher, I am a lot happier having to read 20 papers than having to read 25. That really isn't fair to the "extra" five students in my class.

Here we go...

I've been thinking about this blogging thing for a long time now. So why start? Well, here's a simple reason: my friends Heather and Burt started a blog for their baby (due any day now), and in order to post a comment, I had to sign up for my own blog.

But the other reason is entirely self-serving: I think I am at a place of transition in my life. Big changes and all that. And it feels right to document it (for me more than anyone else--believe me, I know I am not all that interesting to others) in order to better understand it all--in order to be a better person. Yes, the writing teacher in me really does believe that good reading and careful writing can make you a better person. So here we go. I want to start kind of small, though, with a bit of "Where I've Been" and "Where I'm Going."

Where I came from:
Rocky Point, NY (birth to age 17, 1977-1995)
Roanoke College (undergrad, 1995-1999)
The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (MA and PhD and a lectureship, 1999-2006)
The University of Richmond (a one-year visiting position, 2006-2007)

Where I am going:
Shepherd University (a tenure-track position in the Department of English and Modern Languages)