February break is only a memory now: even this short distance into March, it feels as if we’re hurtling towards the end of term. I usually find this an invigorating time in my classes, as all the ‘getting to know you’ stuff is over, we’ve developed some routines and, ideally, some rapport in the classroom, and we’re far enough along in the material that usually students’ confidence for engagement is greater.

I’m not feeling quite this surge this term. One reason is that the attendance in my Introduction to Prose and Fiction section has not been … robust. I’m trying not to take it personally; it helps that I’m hearing plenty of anecdata suggesting that absenteeism is a conspicuous issue for my colleagues and maybe more broadly around campus these days (“I’m glad it’s not just me,” said yet another colleague as we chatted about this on the stairs on Friday). I have been speculating that a discussion-based class might seem particularly expendable to students because of the excessively results-oriented culture they are currently steeped in: if they aren’t intrinsically drawn to the material (which is likely, in a course often taken to fulfill a requirement) and the results of attending (or not) aren’t overtly quantifiable, other things might well take priority. Naturally, I think that’s a shame: one day they may look back and realize that they missed a fairly rare (and potentially transformative) opportunity to get involved in a conversation with at least one person guaranteed to be “listening very intently to everything” they say. But who knows: maybe I (inevitably, egotistically) overestimate the value of spending that time in the room with me following my lesson plan! I have tried hard in recent years to make quite explicit the ways I see our classroom work feeding into the assignments on which they will be evaluated (and the skills and objectives both of these aspects of the course serve). But if they don’t see the pay-off  (or they aren’t even present to hear the peroration) and don’t care about the discussion for its own sake, there’s not much more I can do. Once again the gym analogy seems apt.

For those Intro students who are coming to class, we’re working our way through The Road. I put a lot of work in preparing materials when I taught it for the first time last winter, so it’s nice to have a file of ideas and notes and handouts to draw on this time around, and to feel more certain what are useful lines of inquiry. For tomorrow’s class, where we’ll be focusing on McCarthy’s style, one of the most useful resources I have is my own blog post from last year, in which I asked (not disingenuously) whether McCarthy is a terrible writer – working through the post and then keeping up with the discussion that ensued was very stimulating, and as I’ve been rereading the book this year I’ve kept trying to figure out if there’s any way to answer the question more confidently than I could then. I’m still not sure, but I will say that on this rereading I’m taking what I can only describe as a tactile pleasure in his writing: I pause to read individual words or phrases out loud and enjoy their crunkly feeling, their resistance to easy reading — “rachitic,” “gryke,” “kerfs,” “claggy” — or, more rarely, their rhythmic poetry: “Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.” I also found, a bit to my surprise, that having spent more time intellectualizing the novel has not distanced me from it: rereading the final section this afternoon I found myself weeping uncontrollably. As I remarked on Twitter, I realize that crying over the book does nothing to settle the question of whether McCarthy’s a “good” writer. I wonder what value, if any, does attach to this kind of visceral response. There’s a way in which being moved to tears by a book is inarguable proof of at least something — but is it something about the reader or something about the book? It’s about the connection between reader and book, I suppose, that mysterious alchemical combination by which language becomes meaning and feeling of a particular, and sometimes particularly personal, kind. I value that kind of emotional connection: surely you would hardly choose to specialize in Victorian literature if you didn’t! But at least when I’m wearing my ‘professor’ hat I try to retain some skepticism about it too. Just because you can make me cry doesn’t make you right!

In my Women and Detective Fiction seminar, I’ve also been fretting a bit, not so much about attendance (though this group has not been as reliably present as I am used to in upper-level seminars) as about participation. Last week’s classes were pretty sluggish. But yesterday there was an up-tick in energy, so for now I have deferred my cunning plan to use some of the strategies I’m more accustomed to deploying in lower level classes: “think-pair-share” exercises, break-out groups, and so on. We are currently reading Sue Grafton’s ‘A’ is for Alibi: I had the sense on Friday that they mostly hadn’t even tried to do more than just read it, and I wonder if at first they were lulled into passivity by the fast-paced prose and suspenseful plot and forget to apply the critical frameworks we’ve been developing. By tomorrow we’ll have read to the end, so I expect we’ll talk a lot about [spoiler alert!] what it means that Kinsey turns out to have been sleeping with not just a suspect but one of the murderers: the novel raises all kinds of interesting questions about the temptations and risks of submission and the ways sexual desire can undermine a principled commitment to independence. The novel focuses especially on sexual politics as played out in marriage, but Kinsey’s role as a detective also prompts us to consider how these “private” issues intersect with wider questions of justice and accountability. I haven’t taught Grafton in a while and I’ve appreciated getting reacquainted with her tongue-in-cheek approach to the genre. I kept up with the series for a long time, but my interest in it has flagged over the years, partly because the humor that keeps this first one so fresh gives way to a much more sententious style. I should probably hunt up the latest ones just to see where things have gone. We start Indemnity Only next week and at this point I’m one Sara Paretsky behind as well.