Tuesday 27 May 2008

Unread books

The top 100 or so books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users. Bold the books you have read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: A novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked: The life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault's Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela's Ashes: A Memoir
The God of Small Things
A People's History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics: A rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood: A true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield

Monday 26 May 2008

huge urls and marking essays

It's that time of year again. I've just come across my first essay in which absolutely all the refs are to websites, but include some good solid academic sites as well as JSTOR, and books from Google Books. The referencing is scrupulous in terms of providing citations for most quotes, but weak in that the author, title etc is usually omitted. The JSTOR URLs take up 5 lines and even if I could be bothered to type them in, probably wouldn't work anyway. I suppose I have to give the student credit for finding decent sources online, but it'd be nice to have them usefully referenced.

Saturday 24 May 2008

erotics of higher education

There's an interesting piece by Hannah Fearn in THES on sex and the university. The issue of eroticism in the lecturer-student relationship is one that I first encountered in bell hooks's Teaching To Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. People get very passionate about their topics, and encouraging students to appreciate the same material, or questions, or methodologies can be seen as a seduction of sorts.

But that's a topic for another time. What I wanted to have a look at is this blatant piece of sexism:

The issue is compounded as universities become more diverse working environments. Whereas in the past a typical student-teacher relationship would have been an older male tutor beginning a sexual liaison with a young female undergraduate student, now it is just as likely to be a situation where a former City trader in his thirties returning to higher education begins a relationship with his grad tutor in her late twenties.


Right. So it was OK when it was Prof. Porky-Pants sleeping with his women undergraduates (never with men students!), or, in the lovely turn of phrase reportedly used by Alan Ryan (New College, Oxford, but talking about his Keele days), “Freddie (A.J.) Ayer (the philosopher) fell into bed with everyone who was remotely willing, and an awful lot of young women were very happy to tick him off on the list of famous professors they had laid. ” Right. Yes. Sure. That was fine. But now that it's older men undergraduates sleeping with younger women graduate tutors, that's a problem.

The quoted paragraph leads straight into this:

This has also erased some of the previously held beliefs about undergraduate students being off limits and postgraduates being fair game. In higher education today, where students of all backgrounds and all ages are studying at all levels, there are no clear boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable relationships.


This is sloppy writing, apart from anything else. The previous para claims a 'typical' relationship is lecturer-undergraduate but then immediately claims this has eroded the belief that ugs were off limits. What? If the typical relationship was male lecturer-female ug, then there's apparently no belief that ugs were off limits.

I guess it would be interesting to see just how widespread the two types of relationships are. In the departments in which I have studied or worked, it has only ever been men lecturers sleeping with women postgraduates. Or at least, those are the only ones I've known about.

IMHO, it's simply not appropriate for lecturers to sleep with students. The power balance is a big problem, and I guess people are also frightened about students using that to their advantage. Then there's pillow talk, and the kind of sharing of confidences that often happens in a close relationship. (If it's mostly the power issue that's the biggie, then presumably that means it would be OK if a lecturer's spouse started studying at the same department after the lecturer was in post? I wonder if that has ever happened.) It's interesting that this is often framed in a way that implies that bodies have no place in an educational institution--higher ed is about valuing minds, not bodies. One of the things hooks points out about learning and teaching being supposedly all about the mind, is that basically it's only (white?) men lecturers who can be 'all mind' (doesn't matter if their hair is a mess or they turn up in the same shirt three days in a row)--lecturers who are 'other' in some way do not have the privilege to be 'all mind'.