This has been an exhausting but exhilarating week, and next week promises to be more of the same. Lots of my colleagues have been doing Black History Month and Being Human events - psychogeographic walks, story-telling performances, masterclasses and the like – all of which are good for us as much as wider society: it's great to get out and talk to strangers about the things we and hopefully they are enthusiastic about.
I've also hit a run of good classes - today was Jilly Cooper's Riders, a novel which pretty much single-handedly encapsulates 1980s conservative feminism and is the perfect vehicle for all the cultural studies-influenced things we do here with popular fiction. For instance: we talk about how and why one could or should make room for a 900 page novel in one's life; about popular fiction as a vehicle for serious ideological and social perspectives, and how pop fic can be used to track social change.
In some ways Riders is fairly progressive: it's very positive about sex toys and women's sexual pleasure as an end in itself, but it's also deeply reactionary (posh people shouldn't be expected to conform to conventional sexual morality but admired for breaching it) and has aged extremely badly: it's attitudes towards older men having sex with younger women are echoed these days by Prince Andrew and virtually nobody else. It also contains two rape scenes, neither of which are taken particularly seriously and one of which is concluded with the rapist-hero making a knob gag. None of this, you may be unsurprised to learn, is mentioned in the breathless, cheery interviews Jilly gives whenever she publishes a new bonkbuster. Only snowflakes and academics ('hairy-legged' if they're female, 'bearded' and 'goaty' if they're male) care about this stuff. Oh, and teaching a book which praises Franco and whose German characters 'goose-step' and make Nazi salutes for a laugh is a bit uncomfortable in a class with more Spanish and German students than British ones.
Next week I'm teaching Armistead Maupin's Babycakes in American Literature - it's the fourth in his Tales of the City series and I picked it partly as an example of serial fiction, partly because it has a transatlantic plot, party because it's the volume in which Aids signals the end of the party, but mostly because it's a brilliant example of the wrenching you have to do to traditional realist fiction to include homosexual lives – when you can't tie everything up neatly with a heterosexual marriage and children, you have to wholly reconsider how novels work. Babycakes (like some of the others in the series) is funny, witty, chatty and moving, but Maupin struggles every time to convert stylish newspaper columns into a novel because he clearly knows that plots and resolutions are corny and artificial. Wilde knew that too, and employed irony and pastiche to signal it, but Maupin adds on plots in an unconvincing way – which is a shame because pretty much everything else about the series is perfect.
I'm staying in North America for the next class: Anne of Green Gables in Children's Literature, which I read it as a mix of colonial and postcolonial attitudes. Influenced by the other two children's novels I just read (Pixie O'Shaughnessy and Nancy Finds Herself), I see Anne as another Irish or Celtic subaltern whose romantic, impractical nature can infuse the Presbyterian Anglo-Scottish Canadian dominant culture with heart, while requiring her to submit to Anglo rationality and stolidity - both the other novels value the other-worldly ethereality and happy-go-lucky nature of the Irish and Welsh while accepting that those nations are helpless without English leadership, a very Arnoldian construction of Celticity (see also my paper on Celts in video games).
Once the two are united, Canada becomes a real place, eventually taking its place in the world by shedding the blood of its sons. In the sequels, Anne's hair gradually darkens and one of her sons dies in WW1. In real life, Montgomery was a leading supporter of Canadian involvement and one of the reasons she committed suicide in 1942 was guilt at her responsibility. I know this reading is a long way from the romantic comedy of popular perception, but it makes a lot of cultural sense to me. I'm also lucky that I'll be teaching it alongside my flame-haired PhD student, who will no doubt be responding to it in a more personal sense!
At the end of the week I'm teaching Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve but it's a long time since I read it and I can't remember what I thought then other than 'wow'. I'm sure I'll scare up some more detailed reckons by the time the class rolls by. There's so much going on that I'm opting out of keeping up with the election campaign's trail of lies, and the Trump Ukraine enquiry - exhaustion is no excuse for disavowing a citizen's duties but I get the distinct impression that the knowing employment of fake news tactics and extreme posturing is political tactic designed to leave us passive and incapable of coherent resistance. If so, it's definitely working. I'll still be voting though…
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