I joke with my minister that he’s the only person I know who works less than I do: while I teach nine hours a week, he only preaches for half an hour on Sunday morning. We both get the joke.

 

This semester, I teach three courses: two sections of an American literature survey and one graduate course on bibliography and methodology. For the survey course this week, we are reading Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Preparation for a class session – rereading the texts, reviewing criticism, and preparing class notes – takes about two hours; for graduate classes, the preparation is closer to six. In my graduate course, we’re covering theories of textual editing and what has come to be called “the history of the book,” which examines physical books as they are designed, produced, marketed, and purchased. The theory is that physical books communicate meanings about texts and about conceptions of literature at a particular historical moment.

 

On the previous Friday, I gave my second exam in the survey course. With 71 students, this batch will require about 20 hours to grade. Like all of my departmental colleagues, I give only written examinations, and the grading burden is heavy, even heavier when essays arrive, as they will, three weeks hence. During my five office hours this week, I see most of my 20 advisees for upcoming registration, talk with four graduate students about their Ph.D. examinations, and have a long talk with a Master’s of Fine Arts student about which Ph.D. program he should attend. An assistant professor stops by to discuss her leaving UNC-G for a position at Harvard. We also discuss a search committee I’m chairing (on which she serves) for two visiting positions. I spend two hours reviewing applications (the heavy lifting will be next week). This week I have (miraculously) only one committee meeting, at which the English faculty discusses altering our Ph.D. exam structure.

 

This week, my research work is fairly heavy. I begin drafting a proposal in response to a request by Professor Mark Smith of University of Southern California. He wants me to identify, edit for re-publication, and write an introduction for a “Southern classic” that’s currently out of print. I decide on Walter Hines Page’s The Southerner, a novel about the racial politics of the 1890s. Next, I copy-edit my essay that will appear in a scholarly journal, and after several hours of work checking quotations, responding to the editor’s queries, and rewording a few sections, I send it on its way. Next week, I’ll be giving a conference paper on another Southern novel, and I begin cutting down a forthcoming essay to an eight-page version suitable for oral presentation. After six to seven hours of work, it’s in decent shape. Progress on my current book, on contemporary Southern narrative and the problem of cultural authenticity, is slow this week. I finish a short section on Alex Haley’s Roots and begin sketching a longer discussion of Julie Dash’s 1992 film, Daughters of the Dust.