Genre and Ethics: The Education of an Eighteenth-Century Critic (review)

Reviews Edward Tomarken. Genre and Ethics: The Education ofan EighteenthCentury Critic. Newark and London: University of Delaware Press, 2002. 284pp. US$47.50. ISBN 0-87413-767-5. Near the end of his book, Edward Tomarken sums up his argument: "The central thesis of this study is that genre needs ethics and that ethics needs genre in order for the critic to explain how art applies to history" (p. 263). The "critic" in question here, as well as the "critic" referred to in the book's title, is Tomarken himself. From die beginning, he underscores how his own education, as an undergraduate at UCLA in the late 1950s and as a graduate student at the University ofToronto in the 1960s, influences what he does in his own classroom. In paying tribute to his mentors—most prominently, Ralph Cohen and Northrop Frye—Tomarken reminds us that much ofwhat we do as teachers and scholars is intensely personal, that to understand where we are we need to remember where we have been, that history, especially our own history, shapes how we interpret imaginative works (whether literary or cinematic), how we write about them, and how we present them to our students. In this scheme, genre is not an abstract, rigid system of mechanical classification but a fully historicized, supple heuristic device created by human beings to serve human needs. Tomarken powerfully articulates our ethical responsibility to—and for—our students and the works we choose to teach them. This thought-provoking book speaks to our present moment, when what we do as teachers and scholars is under increasing scrutiny from university administrators and government agencies anxious to balance their budgets. I read Tomarken's book at the end of a sabbatical year, as I prepared to return to the classroom.Just by coincidence, several of the works he discusses in detail—MacFlecknoe, Oroonoko, The Life ofRichard Savage—appear on my syllabus for an upper-division course that I have taught several times over the past twenty-one years and now happen to be teaching again. In short, the book seemed perfectly suited for someone contemplating crossing that invisible yet very real line between our lives as scholars and our lives as teachers—lives which, while presumably related, rarely (at least in my EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 16, Number 1, October 2003 128 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION16:1 experience) complement each other. Though sometimes we might find ourselves teaching the subject of our research, we often teach courses that have little to do with it. Simply put, the two activities compete for our attention, so that, in practical terms, the time we devote to our research is very likely time taken away from our students. Tomarken offers an arrestingly simple solution to this problem: we should talk to our students about our scholarly publications and thus forge a link, in the classroom, between our research and pedagogical lives. One possible disadvantage of this pedagogical procedure is that, in making our research the central topic of classroom discussion, we might find ourselves indulging in the academic version ofthe egotistical sublime, awing our students with the number of our books and articles rather than facing them—in a formulation Tomarken borrows from philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas (p. 45)—as fellow human beings entrusted to us for our care and instruction. This reservation aside, I found in Tomarken's book precisely the inspirational message I needed to remind myself that what we do as teachers really matters. Moreover, I discovered, in his close readings ofworks that I was about to teach again, practical advice to enrich my own teaching with the critical insights of a generous scholar who, on the evidence of the story he so movingly tells, is also a caring and remarkable teacher. AlbertJ. Rivero Marquette University Barbara M. Benedict. Curiosity: A Cultural History ofEarly Modern Inquiry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. ix + 321pp. US$45. ISBN 0-226-04263-4. Barbara M. Benedict's new book is an ambitious and fascinating account of the ways curiosity—everything from scientific inquiry to illicit sexual peeping—was represented by the various discourses at work in English culture from the Restoration through the beginning of the...