To Delight and Instruct: Required Reading for Grad Students (and Others)

Click here. Read and click as directed, until done. End public service announcement. Back to bad bad bad bad bad ok bad bad bad bad bad decent bad bad bad bad [good coming anytime soon?] writing.

Perhaps It's Better to Be the Obscurest Blog on teh Internets

Heading off in a few hours to Hiroshima to meet some old friends now living in Oklahoma (that is, when they're not enjoying the best two-week-tour-of-Japan itinerary I've ever seen in my life--and I'm not just saying that b/c it's the only one). So of course I woke up way too early and I thought, "why not catch up on some bloggy doings?" Let's just say I should have stayed in bed. Stay strong, Scott, Chris, Ilyka, Kevin.... This, too, will pass.

Perhaps Google Needs to Work on Its Ranking Algorithms

Don't get me wrong--I'm flattered that this "multicellular microorganism" in the vasty blogular ecosystem of TTLB shows up second on google searches for "gothic and Enlightenment" just because of yesterday's unfinished post. I'm rather fond of it, to tell you the truth, but does it really deserve to come before Douglass Thomson's review of A Companion to the Gothic (2000) or Ruth Bienstock Anolik's review of William Brown's The Gothic Text (2004) or the Robert Miles-edited "Gothic Technologies: Visuality in the Romantic Era" issue of the Romantic Circles Praxis Series (2005)? Even on google blog search, is it right that my almost-post is listed ahead of John Holbo's call for papers and Miriam Burstein's musings on historical ghosts? I think not.

Now, I'm not saying that google's web and blog searches should imitate google scholar completely. Just that some measure of the quality, depth, and interest of a site/post should be incorporated into google search and ranking algorithms. Since that seems pretty difficult for them to do, let me propose instead that all five people reading this go now and link to the above pages and posts to drive that particular CitizenSE post down to the bottom of the first page where it belongs!

That said, I am perversely pleased that my plug for my friend Mike Davis's Reading the Text That Isn't There: Paranoia in the Nineteenth-Century American Novel in a comment over at Hug the Shoggoth (where the race and decay blogging is doing quite well, thank you) is ranked third on this google search. (Little-known and less-cared-about fact: the Davis duo will be visiting Japan in June!)

This public service announcement brought to you by The Hey, It's in the Mid-70s on a Friday in May, for Crying Out Loud, Subcommittee of the Celebrate the Weekend Early Committee.

"Main-street" at the Hawthorne in Salem Site

As to be expected from such a fine site, Hawthorne in Salem provides several good starting-places for understanding what's at stake in Hawthorne's representation of American Indians in "Main-street," their introduction, related literature, critical commentary, and documents pages, in particular. I can't recommend this site highly enough for anyone looking to get up to speed on all matters Hawthornesque or to jump-start a Hawthorney research project.

The Literazis Are Retreating

Scott McLemee and the good people at Critical Mass are no doubt quite pleased by Steven Colbert's interview with Salman Rushdie on the great book review purge in the corporate media (apologies for the commercial), but I thought Colbert's slogan appropriate for many doings in blogoramaville of late, particularly for those Blogging While Academic. (For those w/o time to click or even pass your mouse over the links, that's Hobgoblin, Joseph Kugelmass, Scott Eric Kaufman, and Adam Kotsko I'm referring to there--I'm sure there are more I'm missing who have contemplated giving up on the BWA thang.)

So I'm going to take a drastic step here. I'm proclaiming Summer Vacation. If anyone on my blogroll (or off it) wants to take a BWA break, go for it. I'll be back when you're back and so will your legions of adoring fans. Remember, Hawthorne was getting paid for his creative writing and he still took three multi-year breaks from it!

One Hundredth Verse Not Unlike the First

Well, well, well, CitizenSE has reached the century mark (in posts). Consider this an open call to anyone out there who wants to guest post or regularly blog on the matter of Hawthorne. I want to finish CitizenSE's second century faster than it took to close out the first!

In fact, though, this post isn't about Hawthorne at all. It's about a book/daddy post reviewing Jon Clinch's first novel, Finn, which, as the title suggests, reimagines the life of Huck's "Pap." And it's about the opportunity it provides me with to give you a preview of my American Adam and whiteness chapter from my book manuscript! Here 'tis--I think you'll see why I desperately want to read Clinch's novel after you read the book/daddy review and this post--and get a better sense of where I disagree with Arac's reading of AHF as a literary narrative drafted into a Cold War liberal nationalist project.

***

The fact that both Tom and Huck assume that they are at fault for attempting to “steal” Jim out of slavery, the narrative of white resentment at black liberation, and the equation between African Americans’ emancipation and avoidance of work that are implicit in the evasion scene are all prominent features of Pap Finn’s infamous diatribe:

“Call this a govment! why, just look at it and see what it’s like. Here’s the law a-standing ready to take a man’s son away from him. . . . That ain’t all, nuther. The law backs Judge Thatcher up and helps him to keep me out o’ my property. . . .

“Oh, yes, this is a wonderful govment, wonderful. Why, looky here. There was a free nigger there, from Ohio, a mulatter, most as white as a white man. He had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too, and the shiniest hat; and there ain’t a man in that town that’s got as fine clothes as what he had; and he had a gold watch and chain, and a silver-headed cane--the awfulest old gray-headed nabob in the State. And what do you think? they said he was a p’fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain’t the wust. They said he could vote, when he was at home. Well, that let me out. Thinks I, what is the country a-coming to? It was ’lection day, and I was just about to go and vote, myself, if I warn’t too drunk to get there; but when they told me there was a State in this country where they’d let that nigger vote, I drawed out. I says I’ll never vote agin. Them’s the very words I said; they all heard me; and the country may rot for all me--I’ll never vote again as long as I live. And to see the cool way of that nigger--why, he wouldn’t a give me the road if I hadn’t shoved him out o’ the way. I says to the people, why ain’t this nigger put up at auction and sold?--that’s what I want to know. And what do you reckon they said? Why, they said he couldn’t be sold till he’d been in the State for six months, and he hadn’t been there that long yet. There now--that’s a specimen. They call that a govment that can’t sell a free nigger till he’s been in the State six months. Here’s a govment that calls itself a govment, and lets on to be a govment, and thinks it is a govment, and yet’s got to set stock-still for six whole months before it can take ahold of a prowling, thieving, infernal, white-shirted free nigger. . . .”

On the one hand, Pap sounds like a pro-slavery Southern secessionist: “Sometimes I’ve a mighty notion to just leave the country for good and all. . . . Says I, for two cents I’d leave the blamed country and never come anear it agin.” His complaint that, “A man can’t get his rights in a govment like this” is not only over his custody battles with Judge Thatcher and Huck’s six thousand dollars; it is also over his status as a white man. Because Pap assumes that the government’s role is to maintain white racial status and privilege through protection of the right to hold property in slaves, he sees any incidence of black freedom as a direct attack on white rights. Furthermore, his association of black freedom and black criminality--“a prowling, thieving, infernal, white-shirted free nigger”--is itself an ironic confirmation of the anti-slavery notion that the only way out of slavery was to “steal away” even as it enacts the pro-slavery logic that to escape from slavery is to steal yourself (not to mention a foreshadowing of the novel’s end).

Yet there is a more specific context for Pap’s particular configuration of class and racial resentments than the antebellum South. As Eric Sundquist explains, “In the figure of Huck Finn’s father, [Clemens] had, in fact, already painted his darkest portrait of the crude, illiterate white racist authorized by the disfranchisement decisions to vote at the expense of qualified black (male) voters.” Indeed, Mark Twain’s staging of Pap’s diatribe is one of the first analyses of the way that the figure of the black “fop” was used to mobilize racial resentments in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, in order to constitute a segregated society. Where the figure of the black rapist signified the inherent savagery of freedmen no longer under the control of the plantation system, the black “fop” signified the inability of African Americans to fit into white civilization and implied that their striving for higher education was motivated by sheer laziness—a desire to shirk work. Pap’s diatribe, however, shows that it was not the failure of freedmen to “become civilized” that so enraged racists; rather, it was precisely African Americans’ success that led to resentment and calls for government protection of white rights.

It bears repeating that Clemens is not simply mocking “white trash” in this passage. That is to say, more is at stake in Pap’s diatribe than his individual ideas, beliefs, opinions, and prejudices--or even the fact of their prevalence among many of his peers. As James Cox reminds us, the point of reading this passage should not be to join in the “self-indulgent public emphasis on the negative character of Pap in order to expose his bigotry to the lash of criticism”--self-indulgent, that is, because after the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, most white readers have learned to dissociate themselves from this kind of public expression of overt racism. The idiosyncrasy of Cox’s warning to contemporary readers and critics should not obscure his point about the dangers of treating racism as something out there, as something we have gotten beyond, as somebody else’s problem, as the exclusive property, that is, of “white trash.” Yet Cox’s reading, in its effort to criticize Clemens’s liberal elitism and our contemporary “complacency,” underplays the violence of night riders and the Klan, the virulence of lynching and race riots, the force of mob rule, the extent to which Pap’s views were shared in the North as well as the South (and disseminated by a calculatedly racist media), and, most important, the consistent attack on African Americans’ rights by the Supreme Court, as well as federal and state governments, even before the 1877 Compromise that ended Reconstruction. In other words, as Mark Twain was composing Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, calls like Pap’s for state protection of white privilege were being answered; or, more precisely, the state’s interventions were made in the name of people like Pap. In this climate, Clemens’s biting burlesque may well have been the most effective way of foregrounding the widespread investments in Pap’s racism.

To put this point more strongly, Mark Twain’s aim is precisely not to single Pap out unfairly; on the contrary, Clemens makes Pap a representative American man. Recall that Pap’s diatribe is introduced by an apparently off-handed joke by Huck and ends with an apparently inadvertent fall. Upon seeing Pap, Huck jokes to himself, “he had been drunk over in town, and laid in the gutter all night, and he was a sight to look at. A body would a thought he was Adam, he was just all mud.” Not only does Pap, before he begins speaking, remind Huck of Adam, he also reenacts the Fall in the midst of his tirade: “Pap was agoing on so, he never noticed where his old limber legs was taking him to, so he went head over heels over the tub of salt pork, and barked both shins.” Clemens here superimposes the issue of racism on what R.W.B. Lewis has identified as an “emergent American myth” in nineteenth-century U.S. culture. This myth of the American Adam

saw life and history as just beginning. It described the world as starting up again under fresh initiative, in a divinely granted second chance for the human race, after the first chance had been so disastrously fumbled in the darkening Old World. It introduced a new kind of hero, the heroic embodiment of a new set of ideal human attributes. . . .

The new habits to be engendered on the new American scene were suggested by the image of a radically new personality, the hero of a new adventure: an individual emancipated from history, happily bereft of ancestry, untouched and undefiled by the usual inheritances of family and race; an individual standing alone, self-reliant and self-propelling, ready to confront whatever awaited him with the aid of his own unique and inherent resources.

In effect, Mark Twain uses this myth of the American Adam to comment on what he correctly identified in the early 1880s as a major turning point in American history. Clemens ironically portrays Pap as “a new kind of hero” for post-Reconstruction America--yet he reverses the value of every attribute that the myth of the American Adam affirms. Pap is ignorant of history and jealously protective of the privileges of ancestry, family, and race he fears are being eroded; he portrays himself as self-reliantly standing alone, but is actually appealing to the state. Clemens aims to dramatize the racism and the state investments underlying rugged individualism, as well as to show his contemporaries that rolling back Reconstruction would not produce “a divinely granted second chance for the [white] race.” In short, by implying that Pap is an American Adam, Mark Twain places racism at the very heart of nineteenth-century America. His American Adam is a white supremacist.

***

Well, there you have it. 100 posts down. How many more to go before the manuscript is done? Before the book is out?

[Update: Well, having finished two posts in less than 45 minutes here at little 'ol CitizenSE, what do I find out when I visit one of my favorite large mammals (that is, if TTLB isn't screwing with his numbers as bad as it's been messing with mine!) has called for a blogwide strike. In solidarity with Scott Eric Kaufman, then, I will not post here until he gets his 500th comment and is forced to write a post on the topic of the commenter's choice. And my first post will be a response to his that somehow brings Hawthorne in while still adhering to my programming schedule. Oh, and I tried to start a pool on date/time and topic for his first post back. It's only a quarter stake, people, so hop to it. I've got May 12 @ 3:45 pm and "explanation of strike."]

Happy Birthday to You

Over at Mostly Harmless I have a Radiohead City Music Hall flavored tribute to imoto, who turns 1 today. Tanjobi omedeto, imoto!

Got a post cooking on Twain, Arac, Hawthorne, and Melville (hopefully for Saturday), but while you're waiting with bated breath for it, I thought I'd ask a certain exasperated London scholar what he thinks of The Iron Heel and what he recommends I read to make sense of its representations of Japan besides Colleen Lye's work....

Oh, and you need to read Robert Farley on the dangerality of Melville and Hawthorne. Heh! Indeed.

[Update 4/29/07: d celebrates his daughter's first birthday at Lawyers, Guns, and Money. Which just goes to show that for some who Blog While Academic, April can't possibly be the cruelest month.]

The Hobgoblin Returns

No, this is not about Spider-Man 3 getting its world premiere in Tokyo. Much better news. You'll be as glad as I am that The Hobgoblin of Little Minds is back in blogoramaville. He just lost his father to cancer, so be sure to pay him a visit.

A Newish Book on the Peabody Sisters

Caleb Crain recently put up a long review of Megan Marshall's The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism (Houghton Mifflin, 2005) over at Steamboats Are Ruining Everything. Sounds like another book I've got to check out, particularly for what it might reveal about Hawthorne's racial politics in the 1830s and 1840s (the book stops at 1843, for reasons Crain doesn't think much of, and from what he writes neither do I). But the review copy of Jennifer Weber's Copperheads just arrived in the mail today, so I can pace myself on this one....

On Hawthorne and Copperheads

This is more a place-holder than a post, reminding me to check out H. Arthur Scott Trask's Was Hawthorne a Paleolibertarian? (12 April 2004) and A Northern Man of Southern Principles: President Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire on Politics and the Sectional Conflict, League of the South Institute Papers 10. When a noted neo-Confederate takes up Hawthorne's political writings, I need to be there. Probably would do me some good to get a hold of Jennifer Weber's Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln's Opponents in the North as I'm doing this. Suggestions, anyone?

[Update 4/7/07: New reader Rebecca Ford of OUP, my new favorite person in the world, just sent me a link to this interview with Weber. Thanks! Keep those suggestions coming!]

Liverpool, the Slave Trade, and Hawthorne

More lazy blogging and blegging today! This time it's inspired by a short article in the 21 March 2007 Japan Times that gives a brief history of Liverpool and the slave trade; an online version isn't available, but you can check the history out for yourself here, here, here, and here (for starters). What does this have to do with Hawthorne? Let me quote from the end of the first chapter of my manuscript:

Hawthorne’s comments in a letter of June 14, 1854, to George Sanders, an opponent of abolition, neatly encapsulate many of the issues we have been tracking in this chapter. In one sense, Hawthorne’s remarks seem uncannily applicable to his own career. Sanders, who had rebuked the exiled Italian revolutionary leader Giuseppi Mazzini for implicitly criticizing U.S. slavery in a public letter to an English abolitionist society, asked Louis Kossuth (who had taken a neutral position on slavery in his celebrated tour of the United States) for his response to Mazzini’s remarks, and then sent all the relevant materials to Hawthorne, requesting his opinion of them. After praising Sanders’s own response in his letter to Mazzini, Hawthorne continued:

Now, as to Kossuth’s reply, I do not know but that I ought likewise to be satisfied with that. . . . I do not like it well enough to be glad that he has written it. Is it quite worthy of him? Does he not trim and truckle a little? Will not both parties in America see that he does so?--or suspect it and accuse him of it, whether justly or not? Doubtless, he says nothing but what is perfectly true; but yet it has not the effect of frank and outspoken truth. I wish he had commenced his reply with a sturdier condemnation of slavery; it would have operated as a stronger sanction to what follows.

Of what sort of consequence is my opinion? But there it is.

Perhaps Hawthorne’s own position on slavery could be seen as analogous to Kossuth’s; as a Northerner, practically a foreigner to Southern society, Hawthorne simply kept his abhorrence of slavery to himself, maintaining neutrality for the sake of maintaining the Union. Perhaps he even was offering a subtle critique of his own writings on slavery in his response to Kossuth’s letter, wishing that he himself had offered “a sturdier condemnation of slavery” so that his position for neutrality would not be mistaken as anti-black or pro-slavery. Certainly, this is a sentiment many of Hawthorne’s readers would endorse; like Hawthorne on Kossuth, they, too, often seem to be wishing that Hawthorne had “trim[med] and truckle[d]” less, so that his own positions would have the “effect of frank and outspoken truth.”

In addition to reading Hawthorne’s letter as a subtle admission of regret or an allegory for our own dilemmas as critics who want to see in Hawthorne a ratification of our own values and beliefs, we might also treat the letter as a clue to the social circles in which Hawthorne traveled as consul to Liverpool during the Pierce administration. We know, for instance, that London consul Robert Campbell was suspected of Confederate sympathies, and that Hawthorne’s successor at Liverpool, Nathaniel Beverly Tucker, was a Confederate agent. Hawthorne’s question to Sanders, “Of what sort of consequence is my opinion?” not only may be another version of his characteristic self-deprecating humor, but may also have been implying a set of genuine and pointed questions: Who wants to know? Why did you ask my opinion? How will you make use of this letter? To my knowledge, no study of Hawthorne carefully considers the full range of his activities in Liverpool, the former slavery capital of the world, and one of the last bastions of pro-slave-trade politics in early nineteenth-century England. By the time Hawthorne arrived, of course, times had changed. But it would be an interesting project to consider which Liverpool Hawthorne saw. What I am trying to suggest is that treating the question of Hawthorne’s racial politics in the most pedestrian, practically empiricist manner--in terms of the people and projects with which he aligned himself at different times and in different places--may be the best way of investigating them.

One of the things I have to do is find out if anyone has addressed this issue since I last researched it. Besides the resources I have at the three universities in Fukuoka I'll be teaching at in a few weeks, there's also Google Scholar. So I have some fun detective work ahead of me the next few weeks! Anyone want to help me out by pointing me to the best sources? Do I need to schedule a research trip to Liverpool?

Six-Word Spoilers

Think of this post as a mash-up of norbizness (happily ruining movies for the rest of us since 2004) and Scott Eric Kaufman (riffing on Wired's six-word stories by sf writers). Inspired by what has to be SEK's summary of "Roger Malvin's Burial"--"The hunter squeezes. His son falls."--I present the following spoilers of well-known Hawthorne novels and tales. Have fun IDing them in the comments.

Walk in woods: no good end.

He loved her? WTF?!

Don't touch the girl! She's poison!

She learned to love the letter.

Their marriage ends families' feud--hopefully.

Obsessed scientist purifies wife, killing her.

Hawthorne was such a hopeless romantic (that is, in the romance sense--and not the medieval one), wasn't he? Feel free to add your own in comments, including improvements on these!

Oh, and if you write them yourself, why not submit your best to SJ Rozan's Six Word Stories blog?

Pop Hawthorne

All right, folks, it's time to explore the wild world wide web of Hawthorne. Just for you, I've culled out the whining about having to read Hawthorne in school, the adult sites that reference Hawthorne, the undergrads and the book clubbers, plot summaries and meandering musings--just to bring you the more interesting non-specialist Hawthorne-related pages. What do you think they reveal about the ways he is perceived by non-specialists? What do you see as the relation between these pop Hawthornes and the various academic Hawthornes?

FILM: The Scarlet Letter (주홍글씨 2004) (Screen: An Asian Film Blog)
MUSIC: The Parallel Universe (Noise Filter)
MUSICAL THEATER: Pearl: the Musical (Katie Kring)
LITERARY FANDOM: Lovecraft on Quantum Physics (Chris Perridas)
POLITICS: Hypocritical Bush the Dictator's Friend (Buddy's Bemusings)
PARENTING: Of Goths, Satanism, and Teenage Quicksand (John Botscharow)
SPORTS: Hockey as Written by Nathaniel Hawthorne (Sitting in the Stalls)
SELF-HELP: The Scarlet Letter (All About a Girl)

FYI, Susan Cheever has a new book out this year, American Bloomsbury, that deals in part with Hawthorne.

Lance Tooks Working on Hawthorne Project

I have some good news for fans of Hawthorne and the graphic arts. Lance Tooks, a former assistant editor at Marvel Comics and author of Narcissa and Lucifer's Garden of Verses who has already adapted several works by other nineteenth-century American authors to the comics medium, has announced plans to work on a Hawthorne piece this year. Details forthcoming. Here's hoping CitizenSE can snag an interview with Tooks. And that he puts his work in dialogue with the many other contemporary artists, writers, and critics working with Hawthorne's texts!

"Young Goodman Brown" Link-o-rama

Although I've attempted to keep the scholarly apparatus on this blog to a bare minimum and treat it as a place to think through passages and parallels that matter to my book project--a mix of formalist, intertextualist, and historicist pre-draft "free" writing--anyone who's already published on the topics I'm addressing will recognize their influence on my arguments and methods and/or my abject failure to show an awareness or appreciation of their work. As I get more into the revision-of-existing-chapters part of the writing process (there's a big pile of books and articles on the picturesque and nationalism, colonialism, and ethnicity/race waiting for me to finish grading, for instance), I'll do more overt positioning of my project in relation to traditions of scholarship on Hawthorne, antebellum American literature, and African-American, American, and Postcolonial studies.

Too much scholarly work, however, is trapped behind commercial firewalls, available only through online services like Project Muse that charge libraries to make their collections available to their university's or college's faculty and students. Although I can download .pdf files from them, I'm not going to undermine the university presses by posting links to them here. Still, I wish more presses would see the value of at least making their back issues (say, from ten years ago on) available to all for free. Until that happens, there's a proliferating host of online journals that you can find through a simple google or google scholar search. As I've been writing on "Young Goodman Brown," I've been looking around to see what others have been saying about it that overlaps with my concerns. Here are two examples of what I've found that I'd like to recommend:

Scott Harshbarger, "National Demons: Robert Burns, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the Folk in the Forest," Sullen Fires Across the Atlantic: Essays in Transatlantic Romanticism, eds. Lance Newman, Chris Koenig-Woodyard, and Joel Pace, Romantic Circles Praxis Series (November 2006).

John S. Bak, "Suddenly Last Supper: Religious Acts and Race Relations in Tennessee Williams's 'Desire,'" The Journal of Religion and Theatre 4.2 (Fall 2005).

I meant to take some time to comment on them today, but family and work make that impossible. It's worth thinking, however, about the kinds of formalist, intertextualist, and historicist moves Harshbarger and Bak make and similarities and differences between their online writing and those who Blog While Academic and talk about or share their research.

Transnational Hawthorne

Not exactly a link, but I'm not exactly on Fukuoka time, plus my internet connection is down in the office, so I can't turn my Hawaii talk into a .pdf file as planned and give "you all" a link to it. Hopefully by next Thursday or Friday....

In any case, I just came across this graduate course at the University of Maryland being offered in Spring 2007 by Gene Jarrett. Here's the description, then a sentence or two on Gene.

ENGL748A / G. Jarrett

SEMINAR IN AMERICAN LITERATURE: TRANSNATIONAL AMERICAN LITERATURE. What does it mean to study American literature in terms of transnationalism? This course will examine recent Americanist scholarship on the so-called transnational imaginary, as well as transnational representations of cultural, ethnic, or racial similarity and difference in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature. The contexts of comparative analysis include British culture, ancient Egypt, the Caribbean, Cuba and cosmopolitanism, anti-imperial internationalism, Afro-Orientalism, and Mexican borderland culture. The primary texts include Henry James's The American Scene, Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood, Claude McKay's Home to Harlem, Martin Delany's Blake, W. E. B. Du Bois's Dark Princess, and Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter."

Gene is a dynamo, as his profile suggests. Back when I was an ABD and he was an undergraduate, he somehow talked Toni Morrison into offering a seminar on her own novels for selected undergraduate and graduate students (personally, I would have asked her for classics of African American lit, but I have to admit it was an amazing experience that only he could have initiated). We've pretty much been out of touch since then, or rather only in touch through mutual friends, but I'm glad to see he's teaching Hawthorne in what looks to be an amazing course (I guess The Marble Faun was too long and Anna Brickhouse's work on "RD" is perfect for what he seems to be shooting for). Here's hoping he posts a syllabus online soon!

The Hobgoblin of Little Minds, Hester Prynne, and Student Cheating

Since BikeProf was nice enough to devote a post to CitizenSE, I want to say a word or two about the post that made me decide to put The Hobgoblin of Little Minds on my blogroll. In it, he describes the confrontation with a student other students of his had accused of cheating on the final exam for the course he was teaching. Over the course of the conversation he starts feeling more and more like Roger Chillingworth or Governor Bellingham from The Scarlet Letter (assuming they had the capacity to recognize that they might be judging Hester just a little harshly). Was the student just guilt-tripping him? Or was she guilty? His title, "The Opacity of Truth," says it all. I encourage my readers to put their two cents in on his blog (but read the earlier posts, too). I have three cents (or is that six?).

I don't give final exams in most of my classes to avoid this problem. You can look at my syllabi for the rationale and for the way I typically handle assessment in my classes (profile-->web site for those who need the direction)--I don't have time today to write about it. So if a problem comes up for me it has to do with plagiarism. But forcing students to formulate their own final project and check in with me at various stages tends to cut down on the opportunities for this. It's time-consuming to meet and correspond with my 70-100 students per semester to make this work, but the students generally do better work and you can really tell who's fired up about it and who's just checking it in. I've taught well over a thousand students and graded more than six thouand papers and only had to deal with a handful of plagiarism issues. I wonder what other people's experience has been?

I've thus experienced the pleasures of plagiarism mainly vicariously. The personal part has been the pleasures of wrangling as a department and university over how to stop it. Topics for future posts. Maybe I can get my fantasy football buddy to guest blog here, too. He has the worst two cases I've ever heard of and they both happened the first semester he escaped from adjunct hell and began to enjoy life as a tenure-track professor. Two stories from grad school I can pass on, though. Student walks into professor's office and says, "The grade on this paper is unacceptable." The professor, an earnest young tenure-tracker, agrees and launches into an explanation of what went wrong and how to improve it when the student interrupts and says coldly, "You don't understand. I said, this grade is unacceptable." The professor is taken aback and speechless for a moment (must have been a priceless moment if you happen to know the guy!). The student continues, "My father is a very important donor to this campus...." but before he can finish his tirade the professor kicks him out of his office. The next day, he worries that he just ended a heretofore promising career and goes to his chair for advice. The chair says not to worry and calls the alumni giving office to see just how important a donor the dad really is. The answer comes back, "Just six figures. Expendable." End of story 1. Story 2 is simpler, and I think just as true. A rumor was going around that a student turned in a senior thesis but left the receipt in it. Heh. The Ivy League. You gotta love it!

My third comment is simply to note that in The Scarlet Letter Hester's pregnancy is irrefutable evidence of her having had sex, so the case is somewhat different from BikeProf's. But given that her husband was missing and presumed dead--and that Mr. Prynne (i.e., Roger Chillingworth, or am I making an unwarranted assumption that Hester took and kept his name?) never came forward to prove otherwise--my students and I this semester were a bit confused as to why she was accused and convicted of adultery. I know as a responsible professor I should have looked this up, but for American Puritans did adultery include having a child out of wedlock? Yeesh, you'd think I'd have a good answer to that already....

May I add that right now the Spider-Man villain is winning out over Emerson as my mental image of BikeProf? How bad is it that ads for Spider-Man 3 here in Chiba are more influential than "Self-Reliance"?

Oates on Lovecraft

Here's a long and interesting review essay by Joyce Carol Oates from the October 31, 1996 issue of The New York Review of Books. It's on Lovecraft, the gothic, Puritanism, and more, so of course Hawthorne plays a role. A small one, but enough for me to use it this windy and freezing Friday. Time to put the diva girl down for a nap!

McFawn on Exhuming Hawthorne

Given the themes of death and hauntings and the disproportionate number of appearances of ghosts and cemeteries on this blog, this post from a mysterious blogger known only as McFawn, called Exhuming Hawthorne, from the blog The Vacant Post of the God of Appreciation, is quite appropriate for my second post in my now-ongoing Weirdest Hawthorne Link CitizenSE Can Find in 15 Minutes series, and first to actually fall on a Friday.

Special first Friday WHLCSECFi15M bonus link (more troubling than weird): check out Digby's "Scarlet Barcode" piece from Hullabaloo.

Off to Chiba in a few hours. Time to get some rest! Enjoy!

CitizenSE Interrupts Blog Hiatus to...

...bring you not-exactly-breaking-Hawthorne-news-to-me: Sophia and Una Hawthorne's remains were shipped to Concord to be with Nathaniel's, thanks to a Dominican Order founded by his daughter Rose!

And yes, the musume futari got their mama and papa sick.