The Missing Frontispiece

No, this is not a post about Shel Silverstein's book.

Yesterday I went to Suzzalo Library where a librarian from the Maps collection helped me re-scan the over-sized woodcut images for my chapter to be published in a forthcoming collection about material life in the British Empire. To accomplish this task, I had the same bound copy of The Graphic 1869 (an illustrated weekly newspaper) brought out from the Auxiliary Stacks that I had used when I originally wrote the essay about four years ago.

I discovered that the frontispiece to the volume is gone. Where did it go? Was it stolen? Destroyed? Who would do such a thing? Here is what it looked like:



It's beautiful, isn't it? It's a woodcut reproduction of Edouard Richter's "Odalisque." Richter was a French painter of the Orientalist school of art. My essay discusses the figure of the Odalisque in relation to the Angel of the House (linked to one another through a breath mint, of all things--that's what my essay is really about, Victorian Altoids). Anyway, thank God for digital reproduction. A mysteriously missing frontispiece: that's what I get for dithering with ephemera.

Moving

We are moving. Mathilde is moving.

We, as in my family, are moving across the country to the East Coast, to a charming beachy-yet-metropolitan area where I accepted a tenure-track English Literature professor position at a SLAC. I was hired to teach my specializations: Victorian literature, post-colonial theory, women's studies. I have captured a unicorn.

Mathilde, as in the 13-month-old, is moving her body in all kinds of new ways. Here she is trying to sit back down after pulling herself to a stand using her toy bin as an anchor.

This morning, after a physical therapist came to find out why, at the ripe old age of ONE YEAR, our kid still isn't crawling, sitting up by herself, or pulling up to stand, Mathilde decided to start doing all of those things. Little Miss Contrary. Now we have to babyproof the house. The first thing she did after crawling back and forth across the living room floor was make her way over to my laptop cord and wrap it around her neck.

We have four weeks left of Seattle's crappy "summer" weather before we hit the heat. I am packing up my books for the third time in four years. Only this time? Most of them are going to go live in My New Office, on shelves where they'll stay more or less for years (unless I'm using them) to inspire students to read! question! analyze! write! learn! My books are verrrrrrry happy about this (unlike in July 2010).

ONE

Mathilde is one year old today. She wanted you to know.

Mid-March Miscellany

It's the middle of March. Must be time for an update.

The 9-month sleep regression? As bad as they say.

This kid? As cute as can be.

To Do List (not in order of priority):

1. Complete grades for ENG 200 by Sunday
2. Compose scientific article for DAT study guide (freelance writing gig) Deadline? weekly
3. Develop syllabus for ENG 2201, starting 3/28/12 (entails writing three scaffolded assignment sequences and course calendar, figuring out how to deliver course readings to students [goal: no book order]) Deadline? 3/28
4. Begin VSAWC conference paper (entails working through archive of matrimonial advertisements from London Journal and reading relevant chapter in Jennifer Phegley’s new book) Deadline? 4/25
5. Campus Interview Presentation: TBD (I’ve got nearly three weeks; I’m thinking Sensation Fiction, sensational fictions of marriage, a return to my book chapter on bigamy in England and polygamy in India) Deadline? 4/1
6. Spring Cleaning and baby-proofing of home (we’re going to have a crawler/cruiser any day now) Deadline? Mathilde's choice
7. Begin book review of Ian Ward’s Law and the Brontës (currently re-reading The Professor as preparation) Deadline? 5/1
8. Format article for NCGS, plus fine-tuning and tinkering because I can’t keep my hands off it (but hurrah! My Mr. Meeson’s Will article will be published this fall!) Deadline? 5/1
9. Work scheduled hours at other part-time job (for a little online shopping company you may have heard of called Amazon.com) Why? To support my teaching hobby.
   
10. I am pretty sure I am forgetting something. Like exercise, or healthy eating, or trip to CostCo, or dentist appointment. Oh!
11. Schedule dentist appointment—add to that eye doctor, haircut, and lobotomy.

Global Dickens?

One of the schools that I interviewed for at MLA this past January has a “Global Shakespeare” course in its catalog. This was promising, I thought, since my work conceives of Victorian Studies as something that should be global in scope, if only to acknowledge that what made the Victorians who they were was their vast-reaching empire. Maybe this school would like a “Global Victorianist?” I thought to myself. No, no they would not, it seems.

In other news, as the Dickens’s World online conference put on by Wiley-Blackwell this week (3/7/12 and 3/8/12, though in some other time zone) goes on, I am currently thrilling to the themes in John Jordan’s essay “Global Dickens.” My first reaction was to fantasize about the course I could teach by the same name. Or better suited, “Postcolonial Dickens!” But such gut reactions are best quelled in this job market. Instead, I buckle down to consider in what ways it would be possible to conceive of Dickens globally and what kind of horizon such a configuration must have.

The article praises Professor Ada Nisbet for conceiving of Dickens as an artist whose work has achieved global significance and circulation. Jordan’s essay describes Nesbit’s ambitious project to create an international bibliography of Dickens Studies. The project, essentially a global reception study heartily limited by language, seems to have had a positively Casaubonian scope to it. Nesbit never finished it. Jordan accuses the postal system of slowly stifling the project and understates the point: Nesbit lacked adequate technology to complete the project.

My own concern, given my scholarly background, is Dickens in India. For sure, recording the reception of Dickens in India alone would have driven any scholar mad: Jordan writes, "The essay on 'Dickens in India' was especially anomalous, since it would have contained references to some 14 different languages spoken within the Indian subcontinent, including English." Oh right, that national language problem (just imagine the voting ballots). Also listed as an obstacle to the completion of the project: “appropriate contributors were difficult to find. India proved especially challenging, and Professor Nisbet was obliged to locate new researchers there as one prospective contributor after another declined or withdrew from the project.” One wonders what is meant by an “appropriate” contributor? Literary criticism looks very different in India than in North America; in my reading experience, what passes for literary criticism in India is far more erudite and historical (literary historical and biographical in flavor), far less theoretical or formalist (formalism having always already been limited by its European contours). Jordan does give a proper shout out to Priya Joshi’s archival work, but then I wonder, when will we finally stop pointing to Joshi’s work as exemplary because it’s finally been extended by other scholars?

I think the moral of this story, though Jordan does not overtly call for it, is to digitize this project, “Global Dickens.” Something like RaVoN.

In conclusion, this line from Jordan’s essay made me chuckle: “A Dickens Fellowship supposedly exists in Poona, although little evidence of its presence can be found.” Maybe Poona is where my tenure-track job is, too.

With Regard to My Insomnia

I have a nice long teaching-reflectiony post percolating on my laptop, all about how rewarding it is to be teaching a literature course in my specialization this term, my successful Orientalism lecture, my thoughtful students dialoguing thought-provoking things on the online discussion board. But then some colleagues drew my attention to recent articles and blog posts on the topic of adjunct, contingent faculty. Michael Bérubé's "Among the Majority." Copy & Paste's Crowdsourcing Google doc. An infographic from Online PhD that makes things all too clear.

My kid wakes me up in the middle of the night to nurse. Yes, I'm still doing that. But after she nods back off to sleep, I'm usually awake for 2-4 hours considering the facts. I finished my PhD in 2007, and I've done MLA five years in a row now. 12 (or is it 16?) interviews, 3 campus visits, no tenure-track job. My scholarship has gotten to be an increasingly expensive hobby: I still attend conferences 2-3 times a year, each of which might cost me $500 to $1,000 in travel, hotel, registration, and meals. I spend uncompensated time writing articles, book reviews, and working on my book project when I could be working a paid job. (My family has been scratching their heads about this for years.) This is all fine--I love my research like I love my daughter. But now teaching, too, is beginning to seem like a very expensive hobby. Next term, I've got one contract for one 3-credit course for which I'll make about $2100 over three months. That might cover my half of daycare, but it certainly doesn't cover rent and other bills.

That's all. I just wanted a place to dump this information for the next late night session of not-sleeping.

CFP: Victorian Transnationalism

This is exciting. VISAWUS is doing a conference theme of Victorian Transnationalism this fall at SUNY Plattsburgh. What the advertisement on The Hoarding does not reveal is that Amanda Claybaugh, Professor of English at Harvard University, is to be the keynote speaker! (I confess that it was I who suggested to the Board when we met last fall that we invite Dr. Claybaugh. I really enjoyed her monograph The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World. My only complaint is that her scope was limited to literary/reformist relations between Britain and America. I think some targets of social reform, such as marriage, were global concerns, not just shared across the Atlantic, and some day I will substantiate this claim with a shiny new book publication.)

*edit: I just found my very long review of The Novel of Purpose on Amazon.com. I'd forgotten I'd done that. How silly. I wonder if anyone has ever read it all the way through?