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2009-08-20T15:28:00.001-07:00

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Faculty Respond to the Budget Crisis, Updated

2009-07-18T18:16:00.000-07:00

The devastating cuts to the University of California by the State now mean many different things to the diverse faculty at Berkeley. For some it has meant the imminent demise of the possibility of a great university that is also a public university with wide access. For others it poses a threat to intellectual diversity and excellence. Others feel that, because evidence shows that the State economy depends on excellence and innovation of all kinds, permitting the decline of the University of California will not save money but will mean the further loss of prosperity for all Californians, and that what might appear to be temporary savings for California certainly mean future losses of a much greater amount. For yet others, these things are true but the present is all consuming because, as for many across the State, immediate loss of salary with the recently approved furloughs means mortgage foreclosure for the faculty and the staff, the inability to meet childcare, and other basic costs or needs. For some faculty, the 800 million dollar deficit and resulting cuts mean all of these things at once.

During this crisis, which the U.C. Regents have declared as an “Emergency” with special conditions, including furloughs, our blog would like to present some of these different faculty perspectives. We hope that they interest you. We also hope that, if you feel moved to do so, you will forward them to your friends and co-workers.

1. By Anne Wagner, Professor of Art History and Class of 1936 Chair
Address to the Meeting of the U.C. Regents, July 15, 2009, in San Francisco.

Two weeks ago a discreet sign went up in Berkeley’s main library. It quietly announced yet another grim fact: sweeping Saturday closures of just about the whole library system, root and branch, till June 30, 2010—a full year. Only one facility is likely to be spared: Moffitt, the depressingly down-at-heel barracks to which the legions of undergraduates and graduates who in fact do study on weekends have long been consigned. From there a corridor will be kept open leading to the Gardner stack. Consider what this means even so: no reference services, no reading rooms, no “special collections” (periodicals, classics, graduate reserves), no rare books. No access to anything housed in the libraries devoted to music, architecture, anthropology, fine arts, East Asia, bio-sciences, law, chemistry, mathematics, public health, business, economics—and on and on. Student employment hours will be cut 25%. As the University Librarian puts it, there will be “blood on the wall.”

Perhaps you think these closures need some context; isn’t this happening at universities everywhere as a matter of course? No, it isn’t. Not at Yale, not at Harvard, not at Princeton, despite the huge drop in their endowments. Not at the University of Michigan, or the University of Mississippi, or the University of Alaska. Not, in other words, at any other University that aspires, however modestly, to be worthy of the name.

I am here because like so many of my colleagues who have devoted their careers to excellence in scholarship and teaching, I find this situation intolerable. It makes a mockery of our devotion, and that of the staff, and it puts California’s future under grave threat. The crisis we are facing has more to do with priorities than with economics. It is already creating a place where excellence does not—cannot—thrive. No one should confuse the thousands of responses we have sent the Office of the President with endorsement of or acquiescence to its plans. Entrepreneurship is not scholarship, and the economic harvest some hope to reap from our creativity risks utter sterility if it ploughs the University’s longstanding commitments to excellence, to diversity, and to openness into the dust.

2. By George Lakoff, Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science andLinguistics
An Open Letter to The Regents of the University of California

It is an honor to address the Regents. The wisdom of the Regents over many decades has made the University of California one of the world’s greatest public institutions. You have a great inheritance and an awesome responsibility.

As you deliberate, there are some things I hope you will bear in mind.

The university has an overall $19 billion budget. The salary cuts for faculty and staff of $195 million represents about one percent of the overall budget.

Is that one percent cut the best place to cut one percent?

President Yudof has said, “There's no way we'll be able to look students in the eye and say this will be the same university.” He’s right. The University of California has reached a tipping point.
Remember this:

The quality of this great university lies in its faculty.

UC has more Nobel laureates than any other university. Cuts in faculty and staff salaries will lead many of our most distinguished faculty to accept competing offers. With them will go their grants, which will deepen the crisis and lead to a cycle of ever more cuts and departures. The result will be a third-rate university system. When too much is cut, you cannot attract and rebuild a great faculty.

Research and teaching are inseparable in a great university. Research is the creation of knowledge. We create new knowledge, teach it, and teach how to create it.

I do research on neural cognition, on how the physical brain — neurons — can produce ideas and language. What I teach to my undergrads in Cognitive Science 101 is knowledge that did not exist 20 years ago, and in some cases it did not exist two years ago or two weeks ago. We on the UC faculty don’t teach the biology, computer science or economics of twenty years ago. We teach what is known now! And we teach our students how to think deeply and creatively on their own!

UC graduates are so good because they learn what is current and they learn not just subject matter, but how to think new thoughts on their own. They learn by direct connection with our faculty and with each other.

Online courses are no substitute. The University of California is not the University of Phoenix, and should never become it. The knowledge and creativity of our graduates does not, and could not, come from online courses. Kill that knowledge and creativity and you kill one of the greatest resources to our state.

Bear in mind too that faculty depend on staff, appreciate staff, and are loyal to staff.

Emergency cuts tend to become permanent. So do so-called “emergency powers.” The faculty will not stand for a denial of self-governance.

Do not kid yourselves into thinking the changes you sanction now will last only one year.

Finally, you have more power than you may think you have. You have the power of access and of information.

Do not accept the situation in this state passively. You have the ability and the responsibility to act.

The present refusal of funding did not occur by a force of nature. The people and corporations of this state are not bankrupt. There is plenty of money in this state for a great university. The majority of voters have elected responsible legislators.

The cause of the crisis we face is minority rule.

Right now a minority one-third plus one in the legislature determines our revenues and budget. This is a tyranny of the minority, and that tyranny threatens one of the world’s great institutions, the institution that you are guardians of.

You have a moral obligation to protect this institution from the tyranny of the minority.

Through your access to the press, to business interests, and especially to the hundreds of thousands of UC alumni throughout the state, you have a power you can and should exercise: the power of information, and behind it, the moral authority of majority rule, that is, the authority of democracy itself.

A state government has a moral mission to empower its citizens.

It does so through building roads and public buildings, maintaining public health, controlling our energy supply, stewarding the environment, providing needed public services — and above all through education. No one earns a living in this state without such empowerment by the government. No one makes it on his own.

The University of California, through its faculty, has played a central role in empowering Californians and California. The Regents historically have made this possible. It is your duty to protect what is great about this university, and not be complicit in its destruction.

With the greatest of respect,

George Lakoff,
Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor
of Cognitive Science and Linguistics, UC Berkeley

--"A Memo to the Faculty of the University of California following the Regents' Meeting" (17 July 2009)

To: All those who endorsed my letter to the Regents

From: George Lakoff

Date: July 17, 2009

More than a thousand of you responded to my letter to the Regents. I wish

I could thank you each personally. I have never experienced anything like

the warm flood of support from you all. The endorsements came in much

faster than I could transfer them to the letter, and some are still

coming, even well after the Regents meeting. I will make sure that all

endorsements are posted soon on Chris Newfield's blog,

http://toodumbtolivearchive.blogspot.com/.

That flood of support alone was an important consequence of the letter. It

means that we can actually organize over a thousand UC faculty, and we

will need to do so. But what the support was for is vital.

a. It was support for maintaining the quality and the research and

educational integrity of UC, as opposed to merely opposing salary cuts and

furloughs. This is crucial because Yudof is trying to represent opposition

as a matter of self-interest alone by faculty.

b. The support was for using all UC resources, including

entrepreneurial" resources to maintain UC's primary educational mission.

That would include money from athletics, corporate sponsorship, hospital

profits, new buildings, and so on.

c. The support was for real teaching and against a "new educational

delivery system," which means an online university, an end to real

teaching, and a University of Phoenix approach. There will be a

"commission on reinventing the university," presumably chosen from among

the Regents and campus administrators. The faculty must insist on

changing the constitution of that commission so that they are

truly represented.

d. The support was for activism by the regents, alumni, and students

against the current minority rule by Republicans in the legislature. The

current 2/3 requirement to pass legislation for budget and revenue allows

1/3 plus 1 of the conservative Republican minority to block legislation

unless they approve. Such minority rule is bankrupting the state, as well

as the university.

In short, you took the high ground, as you should. You were backed up by

Lt. Governor John Garamendi, who challenged his fellow regents and the

alumni to support Assembly Majority Leader Alberto Torrico's bill to raise

money for higher education by taxing oil extraction, that is, charging for

our oil instead of giving it away for free. All proceeds would go the

higher education-UC, CSU, and the community colleges.

We need to keep taking the high ground and we need to organize all of you

who wrote to me, and others as well.

Here is what we must avoid:

We must avoid looking weak or fragmented. Yudof is trying to portray us

as a small bunch of spoiled extremists complaining that our salaries were

cut and that we have to go on furlough. He wants us to make the cuts and

the furlough the issue. Then it will look like we are just being

self-serving. And Yudof will rest his case. The press will simply follow

suit.

That has already been happening. Fox radio called me to talk about the

furloughs and the cuts. I rejected their framing, pointing out that the

real issue is the long-term quality of the faculty and whether our great

university will be destroyed.

Some faculty are talking of strikes and coordinated furloughs and

cancelling classes for teach-ins. If such attempts fizzle, that is, if

they draw only marginal support, it will only strengthen Yudof's position

that the faculty supports him. We must be absolutely assured ofverwhelming

active participation before we call publicly for any such action.

Then there is what we positively need to do:

We must, following Garamendi, support Assemblyman Torrico's bill that

supports higher education by charging oil companies for our oil that they

extract and sell. Right now, we give our oil to oil companies for free.

We must shift the "entrepreneurial" frame. University entrepreneurs can

get their funding because they are using the academic reputation of UC,

the University of California brand established by our faculty and

graduates. Entrepreneurs should be paying a significant royalty to the

academic mission of UC for using the brand we established. This is exactly

the opposite of what Yudof has proposed.

We must get ahead on the Yudof "commission on reinventing the

university." Perhaps we should set up our own commission. Or make sure

that active faculty, especially in letters and science, not just

regents and administrators, and not just people from professional schools,

make up the bulk of the commission. And we need to make sure that certain

proposals put forth so far, like canceling departments to get rid of

tenured faculty, have no support.

We must organize, organize, organize. Both in support of higher education

and against the tyranny of the minority. Not just faculty,

but students, their parents, and alumni. They must be organized to do

very specific things, not just once, but by regularly writing to their

legislators, writing letters to the editor, speaking out in their

communities.

We are at two tipping points. The life or death of our great university,

and the life or death of a functioning state government.

We have never faced anything like this before.

We need to gain active support, from each other, and from those who care

about our university and our state. We can take courage from the more than

1,000 responses to my letter. The names have been listed publicly. None of

us is alone.

I wish that this were simply a disagreement about how to best proceed. But

today President Yudof went on the radio (KQED's forum) and told three

lies. First, that only a handful of faculty disapproved and that just a

few malcontents were sounding off. I had personally delivered 1,000

faculty endorsements of my letter to him at the meeting. He knew he was

lying. Second, he said that "the elected representatives" of the faculty

all supported his position. But all the faculty senates opposed his

position. He knew he was lying. Third, he said that the alumni had already

been sent a letter asking them to be active in supporting the university

with legislators and others throughout the state. That letter has not been

sent out, and though it is scheduled, it is not clear that a final

version has even been drafted.

There was no rational reason for our president to lie. He could have

admitted that the faculty overwhelmingly disagreed with his course, and

then given his reasons for making his decision. Lying will come back to

haunt him. When he lies, it creates unnecessary antipathy within

university ranks. We need an administration that works with us, not

against us. I call on President Yudof to publicly correct those

statements. He needs to establish trust. Leadership requires trust.

Many of us are angry. Anger won't help. We have a university to save -

and to serve.

Thank you again,

George Lakoff

The Budget Crisis and the Future of California: Timeline and Important Documents

2009-07-09T11:19:00.000-07:00

The Department of English provides these documents for the information of its faculty, students, and friends and not as an expression of endorsement of any point of view or opinion.

1. BACKGROUND (April – June 18, 2009)

April - May, 2009: UC President Mark Yudof submits drafts of two documents for discussion to the UC Board of Regents, the Systemwide Academic Senate, and the Divisional Chairs of the ten Campus Senates. The first is a Proposed Amendment to the Standing Orders of the Regents, which would grant to the President “emergency powers”-- in the event of a natural disaster or “extreme financial circumstance”-- to “implement furloughs and/or pay reductions on terms the President deems necessary” and “to suspend the operation of any existing Regental or University policies otherwise applicable to furloughs and/or salary reductions that are contrary to the terms he or she deems necessary to the proposed implementation." The second is a draft of the Furlough/Salary Reduction Guidelines.

For full documents, click here.

For further context, see “Notes from the Senate Chair,” by Systemwide Academic Chair Mary Croughan.

June 18, 2009: President Yudof announces a funding shortfall of nearly 800 million dollars, as a result of “a combination of actual and proposed cuts by the State to UC’s budget in the current and upcoming fiscal years.” At the same time, the President proposes, and invites responses to, three system-wide furlough/salary reduction options,

For full letter, click here.

For other Budget News from the UC Office of the President, see http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/budget/

2. SELECTED FACULTY RESPONSES ( late June – early July, 2009)

We have only chosen collective documents, and therefore these are a small sampling of the numerous letters available elsewhere. Readers interested in a fuller account of the developing situation should also see the documents posted on a number of other sides, including the following:

The UCLA Faculty Association site
The UCSC Senate website
The UCSF Faculty Senate

Letter to Governor Schwarzenegger from professors from all UC Campuses, Members of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine (June 30, 2009).

“Save the University of California,” a Collective Letter to Chancellors Birgeneau, Block, Blumenthal, Desmond-Hellman, Drake, Fox, Kang, Vanderhoef, White, and Yang (July 3, 2009).

Letter to Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost George Breslauer, from about 150 Berkeley faculty (June 29, 2009)

UC Berkeley Academic Senate Response (July 6, 2009)

Formal Response on Emergency Powers to President Yudof from the Systemwide Academic Senate, the Divisional Chairs of the ten UC Campuses, and eight standing faculty committees (July 7, 2009).

The UC Systemwide Response to President Yudof's 3 Options for Furlough and/or Pay Reduction. Also includes the responses submitted by each ofthe Academic Senates of the 10 UC Campuses, as well as the StandingFaculty Committees of the System (released July 8, 2009)

UC President Yudolf's revised recommendations to the UC Regents to amend the duties of the President granting "emergency powers" and to declare a state of financial emergency along with the approval of budget reduction actions. (July 10, 2009)

English Department Faculty Summer Plans, Now Updated

2009-05-31T11:19:00.000-07:00

As the spring semester draws the academic year to a close and the students start dispersing for home and summer jobs, the English Department’s faculty members are busy with plans and projects of their own. Many students wonder what it is that professors do in the long summer break, and what follows is a brief account of the way in which five professors will be spending this summer.

***

In general, faculty use the long break from teaching to conduct research and work on large writing projects. Sometimes these projects take them to far-flung places like Constantinople and Cologne, while others require long hours in the Berkeley library or the isolation of their offices in Wheeler.

For instance, Professor James Turner spent last summer tracking down clandestine art and literature in the Renaissance, the topic of his current research project. Because much of the classical sculptures that would have been known to Renaissance artists are now scatteredacross museums "from Malibu to Munich," as he puts it, Professor Turner was led to Knidos, a beautiful site on the Aegean Sea, to investigate the site of the most famous statue of Aphrodite. This summer, he notes, will be less ambitious, however, since he is traveling only for the first half -- to Fort Worth, TX to see an exhibition, entitled Art and Love in Renaissance Italy, which he helped to plan, to London for a Baroque exhibition, and then to Oxford to help his niece recover from Finals. The second half of the summer will, he says, be decidedly calmer and less interesting: he reports that he needs to file papers, organize his office and use some of his research time to work on his book and some articles.

Indeed, Professor Eric Falci plans to spend his summer cooped up in his own office on the third floor of Wheeler finishing the book on Irish poetry on which he has been working. While this kind of solitary writing will take up most of the summer months, he does plan to take a research trip to Atlanta, GA to visit what he calls “the most important archive dealing with 20th century Irish poetry after Yeats” at Emory University. In addition to coming across what he knows will be some unexpected and serendipitous documents, Professor Falci hopes to take a look at an unpublished essay by Paul Muldoon as well as some composition notebooks by the Irish poet Medbh McGuckian. Because his book is less about the cultural milieu of these Irish poets than about their poetry itself, he won't be giving a full account of the archive, but he does hope to highlight materials and documents that could be useful for scholars working on 20th century Irish poetry.

Professor Scott Saul has similarly domestic plans this summer. He is currently working on a biography of the comedian Richard Pryor, a project, which, he says, will necessitate a trip to Los Angeles to interview some of the last living members of the LA comedic and political scenes that constituted “the epicenter of black psychedelia” in the 1960s and 1970s. This larger project overlaps somewhat with an essay he will also be finishing for a collection on black Los Angeles at the millennium to be published by UC Press. His piece will address how contemporary novelists’ understanding of the history of black LA relates to the understanding of “the ‘hood” as represented in hip-hop music. Finally, he hopes the time off from teaching over the summer will allow him to wrap up a project on the essayist and translator Eliot Weinberger, whose “creative and politically trenchant” work is best-known outside the US. UPDATE: Professor Saul has an article being published in the June 22, 2009 issue of The Nation, entitled "Off Camera: Civil Rights in the North," but which can be found online here.

Yet, this kind of focused writing does not necessarily need to be done within the geographic bounds of Berkeley. Professor Ann Banfield will be finishing her book on Samuel Beckett, whose work belongs both to Irish and to French literature, this summer, but will do so, she says, from the apartment which she and her late partner bought near the Picasso Museum in Paris. She says that the density of a city like Paris, which was where Beckett lived and wrote most of his life, makes it easier for her to live and to work since she doesn’t drive. Paris’ proximity to the University of Reading in the UK, which contains a large Beckett archive, will also be helpful to her in finishing the last chapter of her book. Professor Banfield’s relationship with French intellectual life has also been facilitated by the France-Berkeley Fund. She organized with Prof. Gilles Philippe a conference on language from a linguistic point of view (one of
Professor’s Banfield’s main areas of expertise) that brought two French professors and one graduate student to Berkeley last spring and two Berkeley graduate students as well as Professor Kristin Hanson to Paris last June to present their work to a receptive audience. She hopes to continue this relationship in the future.

Professor Kristin Hanson looks forward to this summer as an opportunity to work on her book applying ideas about the universal grammar of linguistic rhythm to understanding English meter, research she has been pursuing since she was a graduate student, and which she hopeswill ultimately empower literary scholars to explore meter with more confidence and to consider in new ways its role in English poets’ work. She will also be speaking at an international metrics conference in Vechta, Germany at the end of July, where she has been invited to give an address surveying the contribution generative linguistics has made to thestudy of meter; in honor of being in Germany but speaking in English she plans to compare some aspects of meter in music and in poetry through Handel’s work based on Milton's poems, "l'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato," just performed with the beautiful dance composed to it by Mark Morris at CalPerformances. On her way home she will indulge in some applied metrics, joining her sister and mother in taking her two nieces to the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario, Canada.

As for the blog, it too will be taking a summer hiatus, so check back in mid-August when we resume our chronicle of the English Department.

Commencement Address by Nuruddin Farah: "A Fork in the Fork of the Footpath"

2009-05-25T19:17:00.000-07:00

Nuruddin Farah—among the foremost of contemporary African writers, author of numerous novels including the trilogies Variations on the Theme of An African Dictatorship and Blood in the Sun, and recipient of the 1998 Neustadt International Prize for Literature—delivered this year's English Department commencement address at the Greek Theatre on May 16. You'll find the text below the fold.

A Fork in the Fork of the Footpath

I will approach the topic at hand from the perspective of a Somali, born in Somalia and into the oral tradition. To this end, I take the liberty to seek out the wisdom of a fabulist named Sheeko-Xaiir - in Somali, the teller of silken tales.

A Somali fable has it that while the wordsmith and magician is on a soul-searching journey, Sheeko-Xariir comes to a road with several trajectories. Uncertain as to which fork in the road to follow, he lights upon a most original idea after giving the matter serious thought: he rolls up the other forks of the road into a very giant one and wears it like a belt as an Indian conjurer might wear a snake around his neck. He ventures forth, spurred by the creative courage that is of a piece with his commitment to going beyond the world known to his peers. He is eager to meet the people residing in other lands that are foreign to him in his desire to explore the unexplored, get to know the unknowable - unafraid.

He walks and walks and walks, bent on getting to the end of the road stretching before him. Whenever he comes to the end of one of the forks of the road, he unfolds the next giant fork on which he walks on and on. Motivated, in part, by the huge need to come to terms with the many-sidedness of his ambition, he is surprised that he ends up on the very spot from where he set off: in the land of his creative imagination. He reasons that all journeys start before the traveller has become aware of it; they begin in the mind.

I find this fable fascinating in its potential, because I believe that young people are fabulists too. Like a golden silk spider boasting a larger than usual body length, they too produce an elegance of a universal-wearable similar to the spider’s, ceaselessly dreaming into the future. The young imagine what it feels like to travel the silk route linking the world of the Orient to the world of the Occident, the route on which goods and ideas were ferried back and forth between two great civilisations. That the young graduates have, in their journey, taken the right forks in the footpath is implicit in the fable. After all, you have made your choices, in each of which you could have pursued different trajectories or followed dissimilar routes, with every fork likely to lead them to a different destination.

You have done a lot to get to where you are today – as graduates. This is the first of many of your ports of call to make of your life what will, a life by which you’ve done well so far. Now you’ve come to another fork in the footpath, where, after all the celebrations, you will look at your future, stare into it eyeball to eyeball and interrogate it. Dare I ask what you wish to do with your life – from today on? Dare I inquire how you think you have fared so far in your life? In what direction will you move? Where do you wish your journey to take you? I doubt I need to tell you that anyone who journeys will maintain the bright ardour burning in the eyes pursuing a vision in conformity with one’s ideals.

A word of congratulation is in order, because you’ve earned it. Measure it how you will, but you have done a great deal to get where you are today. Yours has been a long tedious journey, starting with nursery, through a school system, which many of you may not have found it inspiring enough, then through university – and we know what it is like: assignments to be submitted on their due dates; a calendar of academic commitments to meet; exams to sit. You are here today to harvests what you’ve sown, reap the benefits of the hard work you’ve put in. Every step you’ve taken from as far back as the first day when your finger was in the secure clasp of an adult taking you to your playschool, have been as important as learning to walk. Because every activity in which the young participate has something or other to do with learning: learning about the environment in which one is brought up; learning about one’s own potential and honing it, now with the help of one’s parents, now with that of one’s teachers, now with that of one’s peers, neighbours, and the larger community. Life has been made easier for you by dint of someone else’s hard labour, someone who has made sure there are no comforts lacking so you may perfect your inborn talent, supplementing it with the acquired book-based knowledge, which in and of itself is insufficient until one throws in the experience, that is to say, the act, the processes, which lead one ultimately to one knowing oneself a little more after one has studied oneself - the study of the world is the study of the person living in it, with the life of the person taken as the perimeter of our achievements and our failures, young and adult.

You dwelled in an in-between time as you gained your education and worked your way through life’s experience until you became an adult in years and in ‘knowledge’ too. It was to this end that you apprenticed yourselves to those hired for the purpose of guiding you, your teachers, your tutors, your instructors, and your professors – many of whom have also admittedly learnt many things from you. The teachers helped you learn about the world in a more organized way, different to a large degree from the way you were taught things at home. In a manner of speaking, the purpose of learning is to master your way out of crises and into solutions – via texts, literary or linguistic appreciations, through the act of training your rhetorical powers, through writing, reading and researching.

As graduates, and because you’ve now attained your degrees, this is the first of many stations at which you will call, each visit bound to expose you to demands unlike the ones with which you have been familiar, each demand defining you and your place in society, on occasion assessing how well you’ve coped with the challenges you face each step of the way – from choosing your profession and succeeding in it, putting into a practice the things you’ve learnt at school and university to charting your own route to professional success - in short, meeting the new challenges that you will perforce face. There are a series of stations at which you will bivouac, even if briefly beginning with one in which you will play a subordinate roll to some someone who is possibly senior to you in age and rank, and therefore experience. How you deal with the status of being subordinate to someone not equal in terms of education; someone of a different colour, someone of a different gender, someone, whom you think, is less intelligent than yourself: these will act as markers of your character, and whether you can make claim of belonging to UC Berkeley, a noble institution, which prides itself in being the lighthouse meant to penetrate the impenetrable entanglements of every villainous act known to humankind. You will come to a series of forks in the footpath. In fact, it is from the vantage point of being at the first fork of a crossroad that will prove one of the great challenges of your life.

But wait a minute. I keep talking about your life, making assumptions and I asking you questions about your life, as though your life is yours to do with it what you please. In all seriousness, however, let me wonder aloud and put this question to you: how much of a young person’s life is his or hers - to do with it what they please and let the rest be damned? Has it ever occurred to you that your life is as much yours as the bank in which you deposit your pay checks, your savings and pension will have made that bank yours, just because you entrust your earnings and all your savings to its vaults? Have you ever considered that you are a mere custodian of your life and that it belongs to many other persons, in fact, it belongs, in part, to those who have invested in it: your parents, your guardians, your relations, your peers, those of whom you’re enamoured and to whom you’ve committed yourself; it belongs to anyone who has invested in your well-being from the instant you opened your lungs at the moment of birth, broke into the groans of a mother moaning out pain, to the moment when as a grownup, you are self-sufficient.

What of the matrix of our neuroses born out of our uncertainties, considering the labyrinths at hand, for the journey continues, and you continue walking until you reach another cul-de-sac, with no more road to negotiate. You may think wrongly that you’ve done everything required of you now that you’ve graduated. Happily but also sadly, you are nowhere near that status. All you have done is migrate between different stations of your life, with the reality of a classroom situation replaced by another life-station at which you either join the work force in some capacity or pursue a life-long ambition – to register for another course at this or another institution.

You are at crossroads, ready to brave the unpredictable nature of the unknown, the untried. There is no need for you to fear, however, no need to close one of your eyes to enjoy a depth perception. You know there is a wrong and a right way of looking into a binocular - in one, you hardly see what you want to see; in the other, which is the correct way, you view things in their proper perspective from the proper distance which you select. A correct binocular vision points one to a life in an imagined land, a land marked out with a continuous filament within the cocoon. The fabled silk route then beckons yet again and one journeys forth. There is something exciting about embarking, unafraid and unperturbed, on your new journey past many life’s crossroads, along an unexamined road leading to an unknown destination, with you not knowing what is in store for you or where you may end up or what you may find.

You are lucky to be where you are, young, with a degree, your life of possibilities ahead of you, and so many crossroads waiting for you.

In conclusion, I’ll quote a poem by the great Greek poet in full, because I feel as though Cavafy wrote it with journeyers like you in mind. Here it is:

As you set out for Ithaka
Hope your road is a long one,
Full of adventure, full of discovery.

Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
Angry Poseidon – Do not be afraid of them:
You will never find things like that on your way
As long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
As long as a rare excitement
Stirs your spirit and your body.

Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
Wild Poseidon – you will not encounter them
Unless you bring them along inside your soul,
Unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope your road is a long one.

May there be many summer mornings when
With what pleasure, what joy.
You enter harbours you’re seeing for the first time

May you stop at Phoenician trading stations
To buy fine things
Mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony
Sensual perfume of every kind
As many sensual perfumes as you can
And may you visit many Egyptian cities
To learn and go on learning from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind
Arriving there is what you’re destined for
But don’t hurry the journey at all
Better if it lasts for years
So you are old by the time you reach the island,
Wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way
Not expecting Ithaka to make you rich

Ithaka gave you the marvellous journey
Without her you wouldn’t set out
She has nothing left to give you now.

If you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.

Wise as you have become, so full of experience,
You will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

Literary Links

2009-05-24T17:08:00.000-07:00

Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, a memoir of his earlier life in Paris, was actually pieced together after his suicide by his then-wife Mary, and as Christopher Hitchens points out in a review of the newly published “restored” version, what was eventually redacted or included presumably had a lot to do with what his final wife thought about what he had written about his earlier spouses (which was quite a lot). So there’s something attractive in the prospect of a new version with all the stuff that was cut out put back in, even if it isn’t clear how different the book is; Hitchens seems to imply that it’s basically the same book, except perhaps even more so.

Despite all the ironies that seem to collect around the life of Samuel Johnson, Peter Martin’s new biography still gives us -- ironically -- an enigma, a man who “we know barely enough to know what we don’t know.”

As Christopher Ricks describes it, Stanley Plumly’s Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography manages to do justice to both of its titular adjectives: while “the journey deathward” has to take center stage in the life of a poet who was already living posthumously even before his untimely death at 25, Plumly also has a “scrupulously pertinacious determination to set the record straight,” careful not to lose sight of the person behind the myth.

In a reprint from 1891, The Atlantic gives us a pre-presidential Woodrow Wilson reflecting on the vagaries of literary reputation and immortality: “Be a book never so scholarly, it may die; be it never so witty, or never so full of good feeling or of an honest statement of truth, it may not live.”

As new biographies are written for previously un-surveyed members of the James family, Colm Tóibín writes, we are getting not just a wider and broader context for the families most illustrious members, but also “the history of many human types as they circle each other, nourish each other, and damage each other is being written.” Tóibín reviews Alice in Jamesland: The Story of Alice Howe Gibbens James by Susan E. Gunter and House of Wits: An Intimate Portrait of the James Family by Paul Fisher

Alice Munroe wins the Man-Booker Prize. As Lisa Allardise puts it, the Canadian master of the short story can use the spotlight: “while critics and fellow authors have fallen over themselves to crown her "the greatest living short story writer", they have also formed a chorus lamenting her obscurity and lack of recognition. She is the secret everyone likes to shout about – and yet she somehow retains her secret status.”

Professor Lyn Hejinian's “Positions of the Sun: Latitudes and Lucy Church Amiably”

2009-05-24T12:08:00.000-07:00

Professor Lyn Hejinian recently delivered this year’s Gayley Lecture, an annual English Department event which showcases the current research of a distinguished faculty member. The text of Professor Hejinian's lecture, which we’re delighted to reproduce below, continues her extensive body of celebrated poetic and scholarly work. Its particular style, linking poetic diction with critical analysis, might ring some bells with students who have taken one of Hejinian's twentieth-century literature courses and encountered those writers she has most extensively studied, virtuosos in poetry and prose alike: William Carlos Williams, for one, or the subject of this lecture, Gertrude Stein.

Stein is a writer whose status as cultural icon—symbol of Parisian cosmopolitanism and open homosexuality, standard-bearer for difficult modernist writing, target of relentless parody—tends to overshadow her actual work. Hejinian admits that she doesn’t expect anyone in her audience to have read Lucy Church Amiably, the 1927 text which is the lecture’s centerpiece. In Stein’s own lifetime the situation was little different; she feared, Hejinian tells us, that her “identity,” the fixed public self that accompanied her celebrity, might overwhelm her “human mind,” the fluid, less definable self of everyday life. Yet Hejinian contends that Stein is important precisely because she is not alone in this predicament, and that Stein’s study of the relations between time and identity, labor and freedom, has much bearing on our own age. Her lecture recovers for us a bit of Stein’s human mind and offers a fine example of what literary scholarship can be.

Positions of the Sun: Latitudes and Lucy Church Amiably

Russian Formalist theory of the early 20th century made an important (and now familiar) distinction between plot and story. The story of anything is its strictly chronological unfolding, what happened in precisely the order in which it happened. The plot is the order in which those happenings are arranged artistically—the order in which they are offered for experience—liberated from their chronology, retimed, and given over to a different logic or logics. But there’s more to the plot than that.

The story is sequential. Therefore, in apposition, the plot should be consequential—and it is, but not within the same parameters as those of the story. The story transits and retransits the plot, crisscrosses it, often paying it little attention as it pursues its own set of possible consequences or transgresses against them, as was the case, for example, in the writings of the Marquis de Sade.

The plot includes not just the arrangement of the story elements but also all the artistic devices that are brought into play—digressions, puns, an inconsequential bird’s flight across an otherwise undisturbed sky.

Gertrude Stein describes such birds “in the sky of the landscape in Bilignin,” which is the inspiration for Lucy Church Amiably. “Magpies are in the landscape that is they are in the sky of a landscape, they are black and white and they are in the sky of the landscape in Bilignin. […] When they are in the sky they do something that I have never seen any other bird do they hold themselves up and down and look flat against the sky. […] They look exactly like the birds in the Annunciation pictures the bird which is the Holy Ghost […].”

With its structural and lexical motifs and their particular syntactic organization—and, in the little passage I just quoted, a small allegorical element—, the plot lays out the landscape of the work.

It is in the casting of its plot that a work of art generates recurrence and establishes patterns, analogous perhaps to the micro-systems current in a landscape, whether urban or rural, domestic or social. The plot draws things out into the serious imaginative game of art.

The notion of an artistic plot, with an explicit analogy to a plot of ground and hence to a landscape, puts the concept into a spatial frame. This belies one of this talk’s principal concerns, which is with temporal quality in high modernism and late modernity. It is also concerned with temporal quantity, but that is in most ways itself a qualitative problem, suffusing whatever sense one might have of a good life.

But framing matters in terms of landscape is inevitable in what follows, since, in the context of its temporal concerns, what I intend to talk about is based on a textual landscape, drawn from an actual one in which the author was living. The text from which I’ve drawn the ideas I’ll attempt to lay out is Gertrude Stein’s Lucy Church Amiably, a work that Stein described in the “Advertisement” at the front of the book as “a return to romantic nature that is it makes a landscape” and “a novel of romantic beauty and nature.” The landscape from which it draws is that of a region of France through which the Rhone flows just to the west of the French Alps. Lucy Church Amiably is a modernist text, written in 1927 and first published in 1930 as the initial offering of Plain Editions, the press that Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein created for the sake of publishing Stein’s work. Thanks to Dalkey Archive Press, Lucy Church Amiably is currently in print, but it is one of the less frequently read works of Gertrude Stein, whose works are not frequently read in any case. I don’t expect anyone in the audience to be familiar with the book.

In talking about this work—as a landscape of some temporal turmoil—I want to lay out a nexus of interests, one of which is an interest in the nexus per se—in nexicity, if you will—as a reality principle that structures what I will call, after Theodor Adorno and Edward Saïd but with my own twists on it, late work, as well as the conditions on which lateness reflects: everyday life.

The artistic imagination has gravitational pull—it attracts the world around it.

The distinction between foreground and background evaporates; as a relative concept “background” loses reality, and it disappears as an organizing principle of context. Everything enters the foreground, everything is pulled near. The imagination increases its magnetic charge by doodling or muttering, scribbling or humming while things flicker in increasing proximity.

The strength of the temporal charge of these things in return is a measure of their vitality.

For Gertrude Stein in 1927, spending the summer in the French countryside near the Rhone, the asparagus in the garden, the cascading of a nearby waterfall, the church in the town of Lucey some 6 miles to the east, and the rising bulk of Mont Blanc 55 miles beyond, all came to the imagination with equal force.

In her writings of the period—her landscape period, from approximately 1925 to 1934—Stein was exploring an area of explicit concern—narration—and particularly narration configured somewhat along painterly lines, with the significant proviso that it must be temporally charged.

For Stein, the problem for narration was that of creating “a whole thing, being what was assembled from its parts was a whole thing […]. [B]eside this there is the important thing and the very American thing that everybody knows who is an American just how many seconds minutes or hours it is going to take to do a whole thing. It is singularly a sense for combination without a conception of the existence of a given space of time that makes the American thing the American thing, and the sense of this space of time must be within the whole thing […].”

Time is a problem, American or not, given to narration, since it is in the nature of narration to give an account of change, even if, as in Stein’s novel Lucy Church Amiably, the changing occurs along courses of circulation or within microsystems of distribution. Lucy Church Amiably has the narrative (and also the theological) structure of a tableau vivant.

Vitality is the good temporality of life, just as life is the good inherent to time. That is Stein’s theological proposition. And it is offered not only out of a euphoric joie de vivre but also out of a dysphoric experience of temporal anxiety that had (and has) become an inherent feature of everyday life in its condition of lateness.

Hypotheses regarding the nature of time, or even verification of its reality, as distinct from its reality effects, are presumably matters for physicists to take up. To consider the reality effects of time, on the other hand—how people feel its plenitude or dearth, its capaciousness or confining insistences, the pleasures or pressures it brings, the size and pace of its increments, our ability or inability to fit into it, etc.—the consideration of such experiencings of time is a problem less for physics than for various branches of metaphysics and for history and art; it is also a topic for philosophy in its classical phase, or as it occasionally bears on art, as deliberative examination of the character of the good life.

Time has also been a matter that economists and socio-economic engineers have addressed, though, apart perhaps from Marxist or Marxian economists, economists often seem more interested in theorizing the means for getting the maximal profit rather than the maximal good out of time.

The good of the good life is of several, sometimes incompatible sorts: on the one hand, the good of happiness—consciousness of pleasure, a sense of well-being, consciousness of love—and, on the other hand, the good of fulfilled obligations: work, dutifulness, accomplishment, productivity, good citizenship. The latter are predicates of the good person; the former those of the good life. They co-exist but are generally incompatible.

I would speculate that, over the past two or more centuries, with the spread of what one might somewhat glibly call capitalocracy, despite propaganda from the commodity world to the contrary, emphasis has shifted from admiration and idealization of the good life to pressures on the individual to conform to a model of the good person, with goodness here appropriated to norms of dutifulness and productivity rather than to the eccentricities of delight, with consumption, though we are told that it contributes to individuation and delight, contributing to the networks that bind us to dutifulness.

In the first paragraph of the opening, dedicatory passage of Minima Moralia Adorno says, “What the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production, without autonomy or substance of its own.” I would agree, except that the principal things referred to in this sentence—“the sphere of private existence,” “consumption,” “material production”—no longer exist as they did in 1945, when Adorno wrote that paragraph. Consumption, productivity, and private life are, in our contemporary techno-culture, virtual as well as real, and as abstract as the time they take up in absorbing one another.

The temporal anxieties that afflict modernity and then postmodernity reflect somewhat different experiences of time. For Gertrude Stein, it is modernity, not postmodernity, that is the relevant temporality, but there are features in her work that, in being elements proper to lateness, foreshadow postmodernism—which contains lateness—perhaps even as its defining trait—in both its catastrophic and its resistant forms.

Modernity, of course, is the offshoot of industrial capitalism and of the commodity culture that it provides. The translation or transmutation of labor and time into product (as commodity)—as the site of what Marx famously termed time-congealed labor (obfuscated, mystified, fetishized—and in some sense allegorized, as a value-bearing fragment of an exhausted life in its indecipherable past)—this process went on at a relentlessly steady pace, and for a significant segment of the laboring population—although not for a member of the established middleclass like Gertrude Stein—everyday life was a matter of endurance, even suffering. It was not, however, generally fraught with panic or frenzy. The capitalist owner-manager might hound the workers, but the worker was not, so to speak, self-hounding. The figure of the exemplarily self-motivated worker—the so-called self-starter, the self-administering, self-martialing, adrenalin-fueled, competitive worker—the over-achieving contributor—belongs, rather, to postmodernity, in which what had been a middleclass work ethic spread into all strata of the general work force. In the transition, the senses of urgency that had formerly been imposed on the worker, are now composed by him or her. That sense of urgency, as long as it was imposed, remained unprocessed, in the current vernacular sense, where “to process” means “to internalize.” But with a shift in the nature of work from production to service, and from mechanical to technological modes, and with a shift in class-identification that seems to be commensurate with postmodernity’s technological and service-orientation, it is precisely process rather than product that is the focus of work. Or, rather, process is product. Such, in any case, is one account—cursory and over-simplified, but not altogether wrong. Under a regimen of maximal processing, maximal internalizing, we become our own owner—the other who drives us is ourself. The self with no time.

A determining feature peculiar to modernism’s particular temporality coalesced within modernity at a very specific moment—namely 12 noon on Sunday, November 18, 1883, when the standardization of time, brought about largely by relentless pressure from railroad and manufacturing interests, went into effect.

There was resistance.

Local populations in the U.S., for a variety of reasons, felt affronted that their time was to be superseded by someone else’s (and that the hour was to be based on that of the Greenwich [British] meridian tended to add to the effrontery). Boston, for example, was horrified to think that it would share noon with cities in the Deep South. Reform-minded people were concerned, too, at the corporate take-over of time. William B. White, a Congregationalist Church pastor in Boston, for example, “rose up and denounced standard time as an immoral fraud, a lie and a ‘piece of monopolistic work adverse to the workingman’s interest.’”

Western Union, too, was slow to come around, as a significant part of its business involved the selling of time. Beginning in 1877, Western Union had dropped a time ball every day at noon, local New York time (as determined by astronomical observation). In addition to allowing immediate observers to regulate their watches and clocks, the dropping of the ball also telegraphed a signal to paying subscribers, including the principal watchmakers of the city.

The commercial interests won the day, and at twelve o’clock noon on Sunday, November 18, 1883—“the day of two noons”—the standard went into effect. People in cities “gathered at jewelry stores and near public clocks” to see what would happen. According to the account given in Michael O’Malley’s Keeping Watch: A History of American Time, “Crowds of several hundred began forming in front of New York’s Western Union building as early as 11:30 a.m., to await the time ball’s drop. In Boston a similar crowd of about two hundred waited with ‘a sort of scared look on their upturned faces’ [St. Louis Globe Democrat].

The standardization of time, along with the invention of the telephone and the spread of electric lighting, produced “in the decades after 1880, a generally heightened sense of punctuality and urgency about time and clocks, a new and widespread formality in the experience of time in everyday work and life.” Among other things, an ability (or lack thereof) to cope with time became a class marker; “highbrow” theatrical and musical performances started punctually, “lowbrow” entertainments kept a more casual relation to clock time. “’Unpunctuality,’ a Boston newspaper claimed in … 1884 …, ‘shows a relaxed morality in the musical community.’ Indifference to time stigmatized the late-comer as a moral leper and a social inferior.”

The temporality in which modernism found itself was that of standardized, administered, and, with the advent of World War I, ultimately militarized time.

Postmodern temporality, on the other hand, (the time we have—the time, let’s say, of late and global capital), on the other hand, is experienced not as administered but as atomized—as unadministratable, uncontrollable, indeed out of control, a temporality that is everywhere and nowhere. With the advent of time-free, free-time, but also time-consuming technological instruments, we have all-time at our fingertips and no time for anything.

Email, cell-phones, list servs, wikis—these are all also place-less, and in them one finds oneself and others rendered simultaneously unplaced and replaced: unplaced because it doesn’t matter where you are as long as you have your technological device at hand, and replaced because this technology moves you, re-places you, virtually. Technology shares this power with ideology. We are shadowed ominously by the possibility that we can be replaced in another sense, too—that our presence in the system is arbitrary, impersonal—that we are signs rather than signifieds—signs rather than significant.

The high drama of Gertrude Stein’s struggle against insignificance and administered identity was only in its incipient stages in 1927, when she wrote Lucy Church Amiably, much of it in a state of pleasure—albeit an increasingly cloudy pleasure—over the beauties of the countryside in southwestern of France, where she and Alice B. Toklas, after considerable machinations, had secured the “summer house of our dreams.” When they first spotted it, it was occupied by a French naval lieutenant, who was stationed in the area with his family. The lieutenant had no intention of giving up the house, but, either serendipitously or as a result of months of behind-the-scenes machinations by Stein, Toklas, and some of their influential friends, the lieutenant was precipitously transferred to Africa. Stein’s success in acquiring the house surfaces in the novel:

Lucy Church rented a valuable house for what it was worth. She was prepared to indulge herself in this pleasure and did so. She was not able to take possession at once as it was at the time occupied by a lieutenant in the french navy […] there inevitably was and would be delay in the enjoyment of the very pleasant situation which occupying the house so well adapted to the pleasures of agreeableness and delicacy would undoubtedly continue. And so it was.

In this passage, Stein casts herself as Lucy Church, driven not so much by the pressure of the autobiographical truth but because Stein’s purchasing power provides her with a landscape, and in this sense it has the compositional force that Lucy Church in the novel, and, more importantly, her original, the eponymous church in the small town of Lucey, likewise commands. Both are able to command the field. Both establish a prospect of stability (a gravitational field) by incarnating the virtue of mobility (the moveable center that allows us to imagine time and experience a present moment in it).

Composition is a critical phenomenological possibility for Stein. It harbors the pragmatic truth of space and time in their application to human experience and to the work of art insofar as it attests to that experience.

She addresses the topic in “Composition as Explanation,” her enormously successful first public lecture, which she delivered in England, once at Oxford and once at Cambridge, the summer before she began Lucy Church Amiably.

The lecture builds on a realization she had come to after prolonged visual engagement with modernist realism. As she said in a 1946 interview, “Everything I have done has been influenced by Flaubert and Cezanne, and this gave me a new feeling about composition. Up to that time composition had consisted of a central idea, to which everything else was an accompaniment and separate but was not an end in itself, and Cezanne conceived the idea that in composition one thing was as important as another thing. Each part is as important as the whole, and that impressed me enormously….”

This insight, meanwhile, had emerged from another, which Stein had come to in the process of writing her 1000-page novelistic study, The Making of Americans. The gist of this discovery is that it is through one’s everyday habits that one makes oneself—which is also to say that the business of life—the process of living—and the being of individuality—the “bottom nature” of the individual—are inextricable.

In “Composition as Explanation,” Stein attempts to summarize this pair of insights—that each thing in a composition is of equal importance and that particulars make themselves what they are over time, which is to say by being what they are again and again.

Beginning again and again and again explaining composition and time is a natural thing […]

Composition is the thing seen by every one living in the living they are doing, they are that composing of the composition that at the time they are living is the composition of the time in which they are living. It is that that makes living a thing they are doing. […] The time when and the time of and the time in that composition is the natural phenomena of that composition and of that perhaps every one can be certain. (Library of America Stein, I, 522-23)

Stein wrote “Composition as Explanation” in 1926. During the following year, unnerved by her brief moment in the limelight of celebrity in England, she continued to explore, first in Four Saints in Three Acts and then in Lucy Church Amiably, the certainties that the pronouncements of “Composition as Explanation” claimed to establish. And she found herself returning to it a near decade later, in 1935, in the aftermath of her visit to America as a public figure, a famous personage. In becoming suddenly well-known, she had acquired an audience, and this had imposed on her what she termed “identity”—and the effects were devastating. She felt she had lost her mind—or, to be precise, her human mind. “Tears come into my eyes when I say the human mind,” she writes in The Geographical History of America. “To understand a thing means to be in contact with that thing and the human mind can be in contact with anything. […] Any minute then is anything if there is a human mind.” In the aftermath of her visit to America—her venture into the media-saturated climate that has created post-modernity—Stein felt she had acquired (or been afflicted with) identity and lost her compositional power. “Think of how very often there is not, there is not a human mind and so any minute is not anything.” The Geographical History of America is at many points a heart-broken work, in which the general happiness—the temporal success—of Lucy Church Amiably, only occasionally disturbed by ripples of anxiety, had been overthrown. She had been administered an identity, itself a product of administered time—what, in The Geographical History she calls history. “Now identity remembers and so it has an audience and as it has an audience it it is history and as it is history it has nothing to do with the human mind. […] identity is history and history is not true because history is dependent upon an audience.”

Perhaps time is nothing more than a term for a feeling about the quality and quantity of one’s life and of the period in which one is living it. Or rather, it is the medium for feeling—as light is the medium for seeing. It is mere ambiance—with the ubiquity and yet perturbability of the everyday and its small, crucial increments of difference.

Everyday life is comprised of the subhistorical details of numerous strata of experienced and unexperienced life. But it is everywhere a product of history-shaping forces (class dynamics, technologies, received and inherited ideas, established practices, derived expectations, established roles, etc.); the forms of everyday life and the practices that are undertaken as an expression of those forms, even when the practices deform them, are suffused with history.

It is perseveringly quotidian, banal, filled with insignificance; it is the microcosm of biological maintenance. And that, of course, is utterly binding on us. The microcosmic business of staying alive constitutes the macrocosmic realm of the habitual that allows for viable habitation—sheer survival.

Ever the same, repetitive, rippling with recurrence, the everyday is nonetheless the realm most susceptible to chance, contingency, the random, the unforeseen.

It is the realm of the absurd but necessary—the meaningless and arbitrary, the given—to which one commits oneself (or is bound) in full knowledge of its meaninglessness, its absurdity, its triviality, and in fundamental need of what it provides.

It is the sphere of commonality, of shared necessities, shared conditions, to which we attend dutifully, obedient to its exigencies.

And yet it is the realm in which we individually exercise idiosyncrasy; establish our distinctiveness. It is the realm in which we carry out a rich and autonomous private life—a secret realm, the province of free time and the personal. It is the world of our individuality.

Everyday life is a realm of decisions, choices (and thus, in some sense, it is an ethical sphere); it is the realm of living with one’s choices—or of enduring conditions and circumstances over which one has minimal or no control.

It is the realm of the inescapable, and yet forgettable. And yet again, it is a realm binding us to memory, where the particulars of our way of being who we are are situated.

It is the realm of accumulation and proliferation—to quote Stein: “This leading to that as conferring plentifully what each one did” (Lucy Church Amiably, 31). But everyday life is also the realm of decomposition and degeneration—the province of (everything’s) aging—a realization that brings to mind a comment that Edward Saïd, makes about modernism: “Modernism has come to seem paradoxically not so much a movement of the new as a movement of aging and ending.”

Any set of predicates, then, or list of qualities or characteristics attributable to, or descriptive of, everyday life will turn up binarisms and contradictions. It is a terrain of incommensurabilities. Of seemingly assimilated unassimilables or invisibilized visibles. It is the realm of multiple discourses and of what, borrowing Jean-Francois Lyotard’s term, we might call their differends. But they generate, too, what I will term allegorical features of the nexus of everyday life, features, albeit not the only ones, that mark modernist works of everyday life as late—or as the precursors of postmodernism, which is the lateness of modernism.

T.J. Clark offers an explicitly Situationist description of modernism in The Painting of Modern Life, where he characterizes it as a response to the “shift within production towards the provision of consumer goods and services, and the accompanying ‘colonization of everyday life’”; this shift, and the colonized condition of everyday life that it produces, is what I am attributing to postmodernism, as the temporal effects of this shift take hold and people become aware that their everyday life is fully occupied, as well as preoccupied.

It is important to keep in mind the negative, as well as the positive, features of a nexus; the threads and the web they produce are crucial, but so too are the holes—as well as the contextual peripheries. The nexus produces what Tolstoy insistently termed a “labyrinth of linkages,” and, as is the case in all labyrinths, it includes dead ends, “false halts.” And there are, between the labyrinthine lines linking things, gaps—holes, open spaces. It is these that help mitigate against the totalizing force within the everyday of naturalized ideology, of history (“history,” as Saïd put it, “as a grand system to which everyone and every smaller narrative is subject”), and particularly subject to forgetting).

Within what Adorno and then Saïd term late style we can locate something of art’s response to the forces bearing on temporal experience and notions of the good life.

Late style is a term that Saïd, in his posthumously published On Late Style, takes from Adorno’s provocative and concise essay of 1937 titled “Late Style in Beethoven.”

The lateness to which Adorno refers is concomitant with biographical or biological lateness in the life of a given artist, discernable in works produced toward the end of his or her life. This style might reflect the artist’s ultimate vision of greater harmonies than the turbulence of youth and history reveal, “a new spirit of reconciliation and serenity” as Saïd puts it; Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale or The Tempest are obvious examples and these are ones that Saïd cites.

“But,” Saïd goes on to ask, “what of artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution but as intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction?”

This is “late style” as Adorno describes it. As he puts it in the opening of the essay, “The maturity of the late works of significant artists does not resemble the kind one finds in fruit. They are, for the most part, not round, but furrowed, even ravaged. Devoid of sweetness, bitter and spiny, they do not surrender themselves to mere delectation. They lack all the harmony that the classicist aesthetic is in the habit of demanding from works of art, and they show more traces of history than of growth.”

And he concludes the essay with the famous comment, “In the history of art late works are the catastrophes.”

For Saïd, “late style” is not only the style of significant artists near the end of their life but of significant art in the context of lateness generally—whether we call it late capitalism, or the late days of earth—lateness as it is now and has been for a century or more. As Saïd has said, “Literary modernism itself can be seen as a late-style phenomenon.”

Saïd explores an array of late style works in his book, but, like Adorno, he generally refuses to list the elements that might be said to be peculiar to it. What they effect, however, is fairly clear: resistance in the form of discord—a refusal or failure to effect internal harmony; resistance in the form of untimeliness—anachronicity; resistance in the form of incongruity—being out of place, a refusal or failure to fit into or achieve harmony with external conditions.

In writing The Making of Americans, Gertrude Stein had been interested in typologies of human character. By 1927, a quarter of a century later, she was thinking about periodicity—about centuries. It was a topic she continued to explore. Thus, in Picasso, which she wrote near the end of the “landscape” period, she characterizes the twentieth century in terms that are much like those that Adorno attributes to lateness. “The twentieth century has much less reasonableness in its existence than the nineteenth century but reasonableness does not make for splendor. The seventeenth century had less reason in its existence than the sixteenth century and in consequence it has more splendor. So the twentieth century is that, it is a time when everything cracks, where everything is destroyed, everything isolates itself, it is a more splendid thing than a period where everything follows itself.”

The splendor of which Stein speaks is instantiated in modernism’s great works of art. For Stein, I think, they exist as a counter to the forces of “identity,” whose damaging effects Stein had had a glimpse of during her visit to England in 1926 and would be devastated by in the wake of her visit to America. In Picasso, she gives an account of a crisis that the great painter was undergoing at the time she was writing Lucy Church Amiably—an account that I suspect is as much autobiographical, her own, as biographical. “For the first time in his life six months passed without his working,” she says. “It was the very first time in his life.” “He having a sensitiveness and a tenderness and a weakness that makes him wish to share the things seen by everybody, he always in his life is tempted, as a saint can be tempted, to see things as he does not see them. […] During these six months the only thing he did was a picture made of a rag cut by a string, during the great moment of cubism he made such things, at that time it gave him great joy to do it but now it was a tragedy.”

The struggle against identity (against seeing things falsely), and the tragic sense that accompanies it, is fundamental to lateness. In Lucy Church Amiably, Stein stages it phenomenologically, as an intrinsic element in the plotting of the everyday landscape that the novel is and is about.

The elements of lateness that I can point out begin syntactically, in a proliferation of verbal infinitives and lexical repetitions.

In Lucy Church Amiably, Stein no longer uses the participial constructions that were such a marked and substantive feature of her earlier writings—as, for example, in “Orta or One Dancing”: “She was dancing. She was asking any one who had been one expressing that meaning is existing to be one assisting dancing to be existing. She was dancing. Any one was then assisting that dancing be existing.” And so on. In Lucy Church Amiably, the participial tense, the continuous present, and indeed continuousness itself are no longer accurate to experience. Instead we have infinitives, and the strangely dark nuances that they cast:

To understand they undertake to overthrow their undertaking. This stand and to understand to undertake to undertake to overthrow to overthrow their undertaking.

Lucy Church Amiably is a book of grassy, fine distinctions—of Jamesian distinctions (the James in question being, in this case, Henry, not William). Thus “in the corner there is an addition to destruction and so strangers will not be pleased and he and she have said that they will not do what they have not said that they will do,” and “he the son who is taller will not be especially anxious to be invited but as he was he was not to go. He did not mean to mean to be left lately.”

Repetition is a prominent occurrence in all of Stein’s work—it is not peculiar to Lucy Church Amiably. Indeed, for those, more frequent in her day than in ours, who bother to parody Stein, it is a readily available source of fun, disdainful though the fun may be. But repetition is not repetition in Stein. As she famously said, more than once, there is no repetition. Each thing that happens more than once happens at a different time and differently. This reiterative differing is constitutive of the thing, and of its visibility. Presence is temporal; it takes place not in isolation but in reiteration, by beginning again and again.

For Stein, what I am here terming “presence” is of utmost importance. A major function of a work of art is to sustain the vitality of the present—to sustain life in and as presence. The alternative is effective morbidity. But it is in the character of that presence—in its figurative peculiarity—that lateness, as a resistant negativity not unlike the one we find in Adorno’s dialectic, makes a stand.

Adorno sees this resistance figured in terms not of identity but as “non-identity,” resistant to being subsumed and administered in either an epistemological economy or a system of fungibility. Non-identity emerges from what Barbara Maria Stafford calls “the old opposition between Parmenides’s assertion that Being was identity and Heraclitus’s declaration that Being was difference.”

Non-identity is the means—the mediating presence, though it makes itself present by finding or making a gap—through which an individual in society or the aesthetic presence in a work of art or, let me dare to suggest, the good in life—evades domination. Non-identity is the shifty logic that undoes totalization, and screws up coherence. It has no place other than utopia (which is no place at all) or lateness—of the sort that I believe Stein, foreseeing the disaster of identity, plotted out in Lucy Church Amiably and populated with the kinds of grammatical and lexical reiterations I’ve referred to and with figures—characters, if you will—that are similarly reiterative.

One such is Lucy Church—or the Lucy Churches, whose various iterations include the church in the town of Lucey, with a cupola-topped steeple which provides Lucy Church with the occasional pseudonym of Lucy Pagoda. The incoherence of these iterations—their failure to consolidate into a single identity—spreads across the text. Even gender resists coherence; the names that move through the text include a frequently sighted Simon Therese, a Sarah Frederick, and various Marys (James Mary, and John Mary, and a Mary who marries a Mary and becomes Mary Mary, and William Mary).

William Mary was […] to come and he came and he was to come and he came and he had been and he had been William Mary he had been. He had been and he was then a pleasure to something something equivalent to right left and everything William Mary and individually coffee and individually wedding and individually acting and individually adding and individually left and left with him left and left with him additionally left and with him William Mary and his pleasure in this and this and this and this and one and a million of individual addition.

Probably the most famous instance of Stein’s use of repetition, against redundancy, and for the sake of particularization, occurs in one of her best known sentences, “A rose is a rose is a rose.”

During her travels in American in 1935, asked to explain the line, Stein said, “We all know that it’s hard to write poetry in a late age; and we know that you have to put some strangeness, something unexpected, into the structure of the sentence in order to bring back vitality to the noun. […] Now listen! I’m no fool. I know that in daily life we don’t go around saying ‘is a…is…is…’ Yes, I’m no fool; but I think that in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years.”

The effect of Stein’s non-identical, non-identifying “beginning again and again” is not just that it makes lateness manifest in the nexus of modernity but that it proffers lateness as that nexus—as its internal condition, a salutary incoherence.

To begin again and again is to stand repeatedly clear of the force of administered history. “There must be no remembering,” as Stein put it, “remembering is repetition, remembering is also confusion […] anything one is remembering is a repetition, but existing as a human being […] is never repetition. It is not repetition if it is that which you are actually doing because naturally each time the emphasis is different just as the cinema” [from one frame to the next] “has each time a slightly different thing to make it all be moving. And each one of us has to do that, otherwise there is no existing.”

The topos of “beginning again and again” bears affinities with features that Walter Benjamin ascribes to allegory.

To allegorize is to speak of one thing in terms of another. That’s what the term means etymologically, in the original Greek, and that’s generally what it means in practice. But, in the allegorical figures that are of interest to Benjamin, the other of which the allegory speak is what the figures have lost from themselves. The figures exist as emblems of what capital History obliterates, which is little h history—the experience of being in time, with the possibility of the knowledge, the sheer memorability, of what has been. As Benjamin says (in The Origin of German Tragic Drama), “Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things.” They embody lateness, as the loss of time.

But the allegorical also has constellating—or, in Stein’s terms, compositional—force. For Benjamin, it is the structuring principle of history, the gathering of historical particulars. For Stein, “beginning again and again” mobilizes particularity, rescuing things from the totalizing power of generality and time from the obliterating force of history. Beginning again and again makes time.

Temporal experience was something that Gertrude Stein had given much thought to ever since she liberated literary realism from its narrative condition and embarked on the radical experiment of mind and matter that became her early masterpiece Tender Buttons. The allegorical element that inhabits Lucy Chutch Amiably is not a tragic one, though it does harbor something of the pathos that is inherent to the temporal dispersal that is characteristic of lateness. But, there is a gravitational force that Stein’s allegorical figuration exerts as it undertakes its imaginative work. The landscape that Stein, as she put it, “tried to write […] down” in Lucy Church Amiably was “a landscape that made itself its own landscape.” As such, it exists in a rich and resonant temporal present, a site for a lively life (which is to say, for Stein, a good life—even a saintly one). This present temporality is not the specious eternal present of omnitemporality—expressed grammatically in sentences like “cows eat grass”—a timeless truism that has no true temporal reference point at all. It is, rather, a constellated present, replete with temporal reference points. It is the role of artistic composition—imagination—to make present, as the present, the experience of “two noons.” The bells of the Lucey church toll the hours: “2.30, 3.30, 4.30, 5.30, 6.30, 7.30, 8.30.”

“It is the pleasure of the very different difference every afternoon after noon.”

Professor Scott Saul Wins American Cultures Teaching Award

2009-05-17T07:52:00.000-07:00

The English Department is delighted to announce that Professor Scott Saul is this year’s recipient of The American Cultures Innovation in Teaching Award. This campus-wide award, given by the American Cultures Center, “recognizes the use of pedagogical developments to enhance the students’ learning experience in the American Cultures classroom.” Professor Saul was awarded this distinction for the ENGL 166AC course he taught this past Fall, “Race and Performance in the 20th c. U.S.”

This award is particularly impressive, since it rewards pedagogical innovation for a requirement that every undergraduate at Berkeley must fulfill. Professor Saul noted that students sometimes bring mixed feelings to any course they’re required to take, and so he wanted to create a course that would be surprising and pleasurable as well as intellectually challenging. To that end, Professor Saul designed a course that took head-on the quicksilver qualities of race in American life. As he put it, “I wanted students to grapple with the reality and unreality of race in America — which is to say, I wanted them to understand how race has structured American history through institutions like slavery and I wanted them to see race as a fiction or performance.”

Though he gave his course a generally chronological organization, Professor Saul included a number of different media – literature, music, drama and film – to show the diversity of cultural conversations which race has galvanized in America. He swung from the 19th c. melodramatic narrative of Uncle Tom’s Cabin to the music of Duke Ellington, from the short stories of Sherman Alexie and Donald Barthelme to the films of John Cassavetes. If students were learning about, say, the rise of “soul” culture in the late-‘60s, they might do so by analyzing a YouTube clip of Aretha Franklin schooling Sammy Davis, Jr. on the art of soulfulness. He even took the class on a “field trip” to see Anna Deavere Smith (whose Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 the class read) perform at the Berkeley Art Museum. Students were confronted, that is, with the immediacy of race so that they might think freely about the play of race and ethnicity in our culture. Indeed, Jeffrey Romm, the environmental scientist who presented Professor Saul with his award, testified that the prize committee was especially impressed by the course’s attention to the ephemeral aspects of performance – the energy of a gesture, the ambivalence of an intonation — that are so crucial to making a performance “work,” yet that few courses register.

To get students to see the big picture in the small detail: this was, Professor Saul said, the challenge he took up. He wanted his students “to slow down, to rein in their multi-tasking impulses, and to learn how to concentrate on concrete particulars — the choice of one word rather than another, the choice of a particular melody and a particular way of singing it, the choice of one camera angle at a particular moment in a film.” To help facilitate that act of concentration – and to assuage the academic anxiety that non-humanities majors might feel with such demands — Professor Saul also handed out detailed outlines of his lectures. This strategy ensured that his students would receive all the “major points” and, rather than scribble furiously in class, would be able to meditate on their own reactions to the course materials and the argument he was making about them.

Professor Saul shared one powerful student testimonial to the class’s success. At the end of the term, he was visited in his office hours by one of the class’s less traditional students, a man in his mid-fifties. This student hadn’t gone to college after graduating from high school; he had begun working in the budding computer industry of the ’70s and quickly hit his stride in the tech sector, rising to become the systems architect for a major corporation.

When his parents died in quick succession a few years ago, he told Professor Saul, he started reassessing the meaning of his success, and decided that he wanted “more life out of life”. He had gone to Berkeley to pursue a music major, and had signed up for the class simply to satisfy the AC requirement. What the course taught him, though, was that there was a hidden richness to every cultural text, waiting to be delved into. What began for him as a game — finding the ‘telling detail’ — became a pleasurable obsession. And what he realized, in the end, was that looking closely at details was a fantastic way to answer the doubts that had been tailing him ever since his parents’s deaths: it was, precisely, a way to get “more life out of life”.

Please join us in congratulating Professor Saul on his teaching award.

(You can hear Professor Saul speaking on the topic of worship on the syndicated radio program Philosophy Talk. He is discussing the way John Coltrane modeled a sort of preaching, and a sortof sainthood, in the way he played his saxophone.)

New Professors Look Back At Their First Year

2009-05-10T13:53:00.000-07:00

As the end of the semester approaches, the English Department blog is looking back at the past year. Since one of our first posts announced the new faculty who had arrived at Berkeley this year, we checked back in with Professor Emily Thornbury and Professor Namwali Serpell to see what their first years had been like. In what follows, Professors Thornbury and Serpell give two brief accounts of their experience settling in at Berkeley. Oddly enough, as you will see, spiders are the linking theme.

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Professor Namwali Serpell: “Students and Spiders”

As of yesterday, one academic year has passed since I made my way across the continent to begin my time as an assistant professor in the Berkeley English Department. My office, which seemed at the start incredibly—undeservedly—large has now acquired masses of unfiled paper, three small neglected plants, and just enough décor to suggest that it is Namwali, lover of bright colors, who works here. I did all of my course preparation in my office and of course, I held office hours there. It is within its tall and still mostly bare walls that I learned a great deal this year about teaching at Berkeley.

I learned, for example, that students will come to you to talk about nothing, about everything, and wonderfully, on occasion, about one singular spectacular thing, an idea that will light up our eyes and lighten my workload. Indeed, I learned so much—so, so much—from the wonderful, gifted graduate and undergraduates students I’ve taught and advised. I am still startled that in this jaded day and age, they can still be so wildly curious. I am growing used to their acuteness—as Sam Otter once said to me, “They see inside you!” A tad gothic, but I think he’s right. I also learned how lovely it is to encounter my colleagues in the labyrinthine hallways of Wheeler, to have a 5 minute chat that will make me laugh or make me think or make me change my syllabus. Thanks, Scott Saul, for that passing reference to Taxi Driver. Thanks, Elizabeth Abel, for letting me know about the Toni Morrison reading in San Francisco, the occasion for my first “field trip” (I managed to get free tickets for my students) and my first “teaching meltdown” (I managed to get stuck on the Bay Bridge driving there; bless cell phones and savvy students for saving that near disaster). Thanks, Charlie Altieri, for saying the word “tone.”

I wrote 40 or so lectures in Wheeler 464 last semester; its corners are thoroughly familiar; if gazing cast stains, my window would be dark as night. The most surprising thing about writing lectures is how weirdly the writing translates to speech. In graduate school, I pretty much just read my guest lectures out loud with a measure of panache. After a week of trying to replicate this at Berkeley, my lecture process become far more amorphous: sometimes I’d read, sometimes I’d chat, sometimes I’d ask the students questions, sometimes I’d pause for what seemed like forever, searching for a word that probably wasn’t that important. Often—and this was a revelation to me—I walked. Who knew? Namwali is a walker-talker! I found myself strolling up there, just meandering back and forth in front of (most of my) 66 students. They didn’t seem to mind. I would speak off the cuff on what I found interesting about this or that, occasionally pausing in my peripateia to glance at notes on the wooden lectern, which I barely touched because one time a spider emerged from a crack in it, floating over my page like an afterthought, then scurrying away to its presumably better business. A first, indeed.

Yes, spiders are a first for me in Berkeley. They are legion in my apartment and each time I encounter one, I suffer the same moral quandary: do I release it into the outside world where, for all I know, it will perish or do I ignore it altogether? This is possibly true for firsts as well, many of which I have ignored, but some of which I have aired to friends and colleagues as sources of grief, delight, angst, surprise—thereby diminishing their newness. But as with the spiders, these firsts at Berkeley—and my varied responses to them—have taught me less about them and more about me. One thing I now know about Assistant Professor Namwali Serpell is that I don’t know as much about her as I thought. This knowledge is more pleasant than you might imagine. I am, for instance, not actually afraid of spiders.

Professor Emily Thornbury: “Unpacking my Library (with apologies to W.B.)”

Between June 2007 and December 2008 I moved five times, so liberating my books from their boxes is something of an act of faith. Most of mine were introduced to their new home in Wheeler on a Saturday in mid-October: it took about six hours and had to be done with some caution, because book boxes are a known vector for Tegenaria domestica, a spider that in my experience ranges from 1’-2’ in diameter and can render rooms uninhabitable for days.

Fortunately, the books were uninfested, and are now distributed about the shelves according to my relation to their subject. The ones I need and use often are close to hand (The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records); the ones I can imagine myself using in the near future a little further off (The Riverside Chaucer); those I’d be tempted to amuse myself with out of line of sight on the bottom shelves (archy & mehitabel); and those I bought for reasons I can’t recall clearly visible across the room, in case I ever remember (Teach Yourself Visual Basic). Most of my older and rare books are directly across from my desk for purposes of admiration, although a few are just behind me, in the ‘working collection’. I have calculated that if there is a major earthquake I shall most likely be killed by Napier’s 1883 edition of Wulfstan’s homilies. It is an excellent edition and quite a rare book now; it would be an honor to be crushed by it.

The other and most quickly growing part of my library is invisible: this spring I taught a course on nineteenth-century medievalist literature, which for the first time really let me use the wonders of Google Books. However one feels about their plans to digitize everything, it is splendid to be able to assign part of the Moxon Tennyson, or the attractively-printed first edition of Edgar Fawcett’s odd W.S. Gilbert-esque The New King Arthur, without requiring students to spend thousands.

At the same time, I hope those same students don’t altogether lose the chance to spend too much money on books. I still have the first book I bought when I decided I was serious about being an Anglo-Saxonist; I find from the sticker that it was only $20, but it seemed a lot of money then. Buying a book can be a kind of pledge to one’s future self; and the cost—to me, at least—can give the thing a kind of moral seriousness that even the largest PDF doesn’t seem to attain. Walter Benjamin would not have mentioned the visit to the pawnshop that paid for Balzac’s Peau de chagrin if he were not really proud of it. And unpacking books, after all, is not a burden, but a pleasure.

The EUA Production of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida

2009-05-03T13:33:00.000-07:00

The full cast of the EUA's production of Troilus and Cressida

In what follows, Professor Kevis Goodman -- usually a silent partner in the composition of blog postings -- recounts the English Undergraduate Association's recent staging of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida.

Kyle Binkowski (Class of 2009) is drawn to plays that have never or have rarely been performed. This attraction started during the Spring term of 2008, when Kyle and a number of his classmates, who had just completed a semester of the English Department’s upper-division lecture course on John Milton, decided to produce the dramatic poem Samson Agonistes—a work that Milton insisted “never was intended” for the stage. It culminated last weekend (April 24-26) with a splendid production of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, perhaps the least frequently staged of Shakespeare’s plays. Professor David Landreth, who teaches Shakespeare regularly at the undergraduate and graduate levels, explains some of the reasons why. With its thirty different roles, Landreth commented, “not only are there so many characters for the audience to keep track of, but this bewildering variety of roles serves to articulate an even more bewildering variety of divergent and incompatible perspectives on the same events.” For these reasons and others, Kyle had initial trouble persuading the English Undergraduate Association to sponsor the production, but the EUA and other sponsors (the ASUC, the English Department) came through in the end and provided the necessary support, both moral and financial.

Several days after the performances, I interviewed Kyle, classmate Marc Juberg, who played a melancholy Troilus, and Kevin Ligutom, who acted the part of Diomedes. Marc and Kevin had previously collaborated with Kyle on Samson Agonistes—Marc playing Samson. A rarely

Marc Juberg and Ellie Garber as Troilus and Cressida respectively

performed play “is easier to make your own,” Kyle explained, because “the audience comes with no preconceptions about how it should be staged.” Moreover, Marc added, Troilus and Cressida is a drama that “speaks to a postmodern audience” in particular, because it “multiplies inconclusive endings,” resists closure, and “leaves its audience with unanswered questions.” “The exigencies of the present take precedent over happy endings and other formulations of fiction,” he continued, and “there is something very beautiful about that.” (Marc, in case you are wondering, is writing his senior Honors thesis on the play.) Kevin Ligutom agreed, pointing out that Shakespeare’s version of the plot flouts the expectations that most viewers bring to the enactment of the story of the Trojan War. Shakespeare’s Achilles (played by Zach Ritter, formerly the blustering giant Harapha in Samson Agonistes) is neither particularly heroic nor especially good in battle—in fact, he needs an entire brigade of Myrmidons to ambush Hector (David Andres Mejia) before he can kill him.

The logistical challenges were formidable for the entire cast. They had to locate rooms for rehearsals and acquire performance spaces large enough for the epic scale of the story and the size of the assembled cast. The usual division of labor between actors, on the one hand, and stage crew, costume designers, and set engineers, on the other, became irrelevant, as the cast came together to draw on their own resources. Aeneas (Lauren Mueller) and Andromache (Aileen Ritchie) designed the set, which was built and engineered with the additional help of Diomedes, Troilus, Achilles, Priam (Randy Eisenberg), Calchas (Jenny Elizabeth Oberholtzer), Thersites (Elizabeth Osborne), even Helen of Troy herself (Jerrine Tan), and others. Pandarus (Rachel

An example of the handiwork of Aileen Ritchie

Levinson-Emley) and Ulysses (Vivian Wauters) helped with the costumes, while Andromache crafted the beautiful masks that helped single actors play multiple parts. “I cannot stress the community aspect enough,” Kyle insisted, noting numerous unsung heroes, who labored long nights and hauled sets between the several spaces that the cast had wrested from several campus departments, which control them during the day. The blog, too, regrets that it cannot sing—or name—them all in this space.

The strong bonds forged were all the more remarkable because most in the group had never met each other; they came together from a wide variety of majors and with very different degrees of experience. Kyle’s open call to the campus netted both trained actors, well versed in Shakespeare performance, and first timers, discovering both the play and acting for the first time. Ellie Garber, who was radiant and playful as the unfaithful Cressida, has performed in many Shakespeare festivals, for example, while Agamemnon (Andrea Johnson), a Physics major, was encountering his work for the first time. Others fell in between, like the poignant and prophetic Cassandra (Hayley Housman), who reported that she “came into the play having taken English 117S [the department’s Shakespeare lecture],” and now, after “three months of living and breathing Shakespeare, [is] beginning to get a glimpse of the endless tragic, twisted, hilarious beauty that exists in his work.”

The performances draw enthusiastic reviews from the audience, which included veteran faculty instructors of English 117, including Professor Landreth and Professor Stephen Booth, the production’s Executive Producer. Professor Landreth wrote the blog that, in spite of his original reservations about the choice of this difficult play, he “was impressed by how continuously lucid the EUA production was, not to mention how frequently delightful.” He added that he found

Elizabeth Osborne as Thersites

Pandarus (Rachel Levinson-Emley) “skilled and interestingly elusive, often making surprising plays for sympathy rather than going over the top with the character’s creepiness.” For one GSI who came to the performance, “the star of the show was certainly Thersites” (played by the enviably limber Elizabeth Osborne), because “her tenacious interpretation of the character of the fool as equal parts devilish and humorous, wanting to bring others down but only as a way of surviving, brought the tenor of the tragedy into a more complex relationship with that genre.” This professor, who is so far gone as to confess her peculiar preference for Milton in general, felt that three hours went by without a moment’s notice.

Kyle, Marc, and other members of the cast are graduating this month, as are many of this year’s board of the English Undergraduate Association. But the EUA goes on and hopes to mount a Shakespeare play next year. We admire their energy and intelligence, and we hope they do, too.

Literary Links

2009-05-01T12:54:00.000-07:00

In the Guardian, Martin Amis remembers J.G. Ballard, musing on how so orderly a life could produce work so unpredictable, savage, and sinister. In the New Statesman, John Gray writes that these two sides of the author were not unrelated, that “after experiencing the sudden disappearance of conventional existence he was never able to take the pretensions of civilised humanity terribly seriously,” but that his work's exultant lyricism and macabre comedy represented “the transmutation of senseless dross into visions of beauty.” Ballard passed away April 19th, best known for his fictional autobiographies, Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women.

A new anthology of Graham Greene's letters has been published, including a trove of family correspondance that had hitherto not been available, but, as the editor put it, "The sum of all these discoveries is to make Graham Greene a stranger to us again." He's always been that, though; in Michael Orange's words, from his review in The Nation, Greene was a “devout Catholic, lifelong adulterer, pulpy hack, canonical novelist; self-destructive, meticulously disciplined, deliriously romantic, bitterly cynical; moral relativist, strict theologian, salon communist, closet monarchist; civilized to a stuffy fault and louche to drugged-out distraction, anti-imperialist crusader and postcolonial parasite, self-excoriating and self-aggrandizing.”

If you've read just one Portuguese novelist, it's probably Nobel winner José Saramago. But in Portugal, Saramago has a rival in António Lobo Antunes, as Peter Conrad writes in the New Yorker (ostensibly reviewing a new volume of essays and short stories called The Fat Man and Infinity); “the two writers, like rival political parties or sports teams, have noisy partisans, and those who cheer for Lobo Antunes claim that the wrong man won the Nobel. Lobo Antunes himself apparently agrees: when the Times called for a comment on Saramago’s victory he grumbled that the phone was out of order and abruptly hung up.” In any case, we're lucky to have both; as hep puts it, “Saramago is a benign magus whose fictions smilingly suspend reality; Lobo Antunes is more like an exorcist, frantically battling to cast out evil and to heal the body politic.”

There's something fascinating about the idea of Franz Kafka working a desk job (specifically, the Prague Institute for Workmen’s Accident Insurance). Even if the new-ish translation of The Office Writings doesn't make for riveting reading, as Michael Wood writes in a LRB review, “we can certainly agree that anything we learn about his job will strengthen ‘our sense of the conditions under which Kafka accomplished'...the writing he did, that is, when he got home from the office.” But in an interesting piece in The New Republic, Louis Begley argues that Kafka's office job was hardly any more a source of inspiration for the writer than anything else: “It is simplistic, to put it mildly, to reduce his literary astonishments to his work as an insurance lawyer.”

Graduate Student's Literary Journalism

2009-04-26T09:27:00.000-07:00

The issue of “relevance” is a constant concern among Humanities departments today, especially in these troubled economic times. How do you make literature interesting and important to a population that seems to be increasingly indifferent to, or perhaps simply too busy for, it? Third-year graduate student Dimiter Kenarov has some very strong opinions about questions like this one, and, as a freelance journalist and contributing editor to the Virginia Quarterly Review, he has put his thoughts into action. He has published an article on Milosevic's Serbia (Summer 2006) which was the co-winner of the Staige D. Blackford Prize for Nonfiction, a piece on the Roma in Bulgaria (Summer 2008), which was recently selected for the Best American Travel Writing of 2009, and an account of the double identity of Radovan Karadzic, the “Butcher of Bosnia” (Winter 2009). The blog recently sat down with Dimiter to find out more about the relationship between his academic work and his journalistic pursuits.

Dimiter is a native of Bulgaria where he began writing short stories, poetry and translations from a very young age. Attending an American high school, he developed his skills in English and found that the Anglo-American canon offered new and exciting ways to think about cultural figures. Rather than the mythologized writers of the Eastern European tradition, the Anglo-American writers had a certain “coolness,” Dimiter says, a kind of humanity that made literature matter to him in new ways. His ambition was evident early on: he once waited outside the door of Bulgaria’s most important literary magazine’s editor to offer his translations of some poems by the American poet Theodore Roethke. (They were published, to much praise.) When he went on to study as an undergraduate at Middlebury College, he eventually wrote a senior thesis that compared the poetics of Joseph Brodsky and W. H. Auden and showed the revitalizing influence that English poetic tradition was able to have on Russian poetry.

This kind of revitalizing crossing is exactly what is at play in Dimiter’s award-winning journalism. He emphasizes the similarities between the research he does for his academic writing and for his journalism. If the former investigates the context of a literary work, the latter consists of interviewing people – rather than reading books – as a way of learning about his subjects. He reports, though, that he uses the same kind of critical thinking, measured questioning and imaginative analysis in both endeavors.

These skills were especially helpful in his well-regarded piece on the Roma in Bulgaria. An ethnic minority that lives under almost apartheid like conditions, the Roma – also referred to as “gypsies” – make up 6-7% of Bulgaria’s population. Inspired by a course on African-American literature that he had taken at Middlebury, Dimiter wondered why he knew so very little about the culture and ways of life of the Roma. He thus proposed his piece to the editors of the Virginia Quarterly Review and set off to Bulgaria to explore a part of his home country that was eminently foreign. Aided by a guide, he crossed the barbed-wire border of the Roma ghetto and immediately found himself as the outsider. As a reporter, he says, he was very much the wayward, traveling gypsy that he had expected to be investigating. The tables had suddenly turned. His training in 18th century literature also helped him contextualize the situation of the Roma, however, since the latter are alternately romanticized as some kind of “noble savage” culture (we might think, perhaps, of the “Gypsy King” in Fielding’s Tom Jones) or completely demonized as a dirty, subaltern race to be scorned. Dimiter’s piece traced the lack of incentive that the Roma have to assimilate with larger Bulgarian society and the roadblocks that are put up on both side of the divide which seems to co-exist with the developing integration of Europe under the growth of the European Union.

Back now in Berkeley studying for his qualifying exams, Dimiter reports that he is delighted to be a part of a department that fosters this kind of thinking “outside the academic box.” He enjoys his peers and mentors who, along with their dedication to literary scholarship, make time for other interests like music, social justice work and other extra-academic pursuits. For all the talk of the insularity and isolation of the Humanities, Dimiter sees Berkeley’s Department as being particularly – if sometimes almost invisibly -- engaged with the world outside the walls of Wheeler Hall. He especially credits the administration and faculty of the department – particularly the support of the Graduate Affairs Officer Lee Parsons – who gave him the liberty and flexibility to pursue his interests, even if they didn’t seem, at very first glance, to line up with his specialization in 18th century literature.

Literary Links

2009-04-23T16:50:00.000-07:00

John Pipkin's first novel Woodsburner brings to life an incident that Henry David Thoreau, America's greatest transcendentalist philospher/arsonist, left out of Walden, the time he accidentally burned down 300 acres of Maine birch and pine forest and earned the enmity of the locals. As Ron Charles writes in his review: "Over the course of this momentous day, Pipkin moves back in time and across the Atlantic, describing several other characters whose lives are lit by their own fires and altered by Thoreau's conflagration."

Thatcher's Britain through the eyes of the generation of 1979; Philip Hensher for The Guardian reads Durrell, Golding, Lessing, Greene, Pym, and Ballard.

Two hundred years after the birth of Edgar Allen Poe, Jill Lepore reflects on the economy of horror, the story of an author who never made much money at the genre he created, and died trying. "Poe didn't write "The Raven" to answer the exacting demands of a philosophic Art," she writes; but "in a world of banking collapse, financial panic, and grinding depression that had a particularly devastating effect on the publishing industry," he knew the value of good nightmare.

After five years as a colonial policeman, George Orwell "goes native in his own country" and discovers himself to be a writer: George Packer reads Down and Out in Paris and London in The New Yorker.

On the occasion of the author's 90^th birthday, Tom Leonard confirms that J.D. Salinger is still pretty much the most reclusive famous author possible: "The man who stopped talking to the world more than 50 years ago doesn't intend to start now."

Professor Mitch Breitwieser wins Campus’s Highest Teaching Honor, the 2009 Distinguished Teaching Award

2009-04-19T21:01:00.000-07:00

“When teaching, it’s tempting to make it seem as if one’s ideas came effortlessly, and to hide the truth, which is that coming up to a blind wall is a permanent feature of everyone’s intellectual life,” writes the English Department’s latest winner of the campus-wide Distinguished Teaching Award in his teaching philosophy. But,” as Mitch Breitwieser reflects, “such an apparent facility on the teacher’s part can reinforce a student’s feeling that, because he or she is struggling when those around seem not to be, there must be some intrinsic personal deficiency. And feeling that way greatly reduces the chance that the intellectual problem will be solved.” He therefore tells his students, both in class and in office hours, that “academic success depends upon properly understanding that encounter with difficulty”—because failure “most often comes not from a lack of intelligence or preparation, but from a wrong choice concerning how to respond to having come up against that wall.”

When it comes to ranging across subject matters, however, all walls come tumbling down. After thirty years on the English Department’s faculty, Breitwieser must surely hold the record for the greatest number of different areas represented by his teaching. His most frequently taught courses cover—at both the graduate and undergraduate levels—Early American Literature (i.e., of the 17th and 18th Centuries), 19th-Century American Literature, 20th-Century American Literature, 20th-Century British Literature, Critical Theory, Narrative and the Novel, and Literature and Religion. However, if you are thinking that four hundred years of American Literature and over a century of British Literature might suffice, think again. The list also includes Shakespeare, survey courses that cover 18th- and 19th –Century British Literature, plus some notably venturous seminar offerings entitled: “Contemporary Scottish Fiction,” “Detective Fiction,” “Film Noir,” “Science Fiction,” “British Suspense Fiction,” and “Hardboiled Fiction.” Even more remarkable, perhaps, is the fact that his scholarship mirrors that range. Breitwieser’s three published books illuminate all centuries of American Literature, and authors from the Puritan minister Cotton Mather to Graham Greene, the focus of his fourth book, to be finished this year. His recent volume on classic American Literature, entitled National Melancholy, has been hailed as one of the “small number of absolutely essential books on American literature written in the last decade.”

Yet, as the English Department Nominating Committee noted, his objective is not to “wow” students but to empower them. According to the Campus Committee on Teaching, which judges the award each year, this empowerment appears to be a longer-lasting “wow” after all. Student letters to the committee included the following comments, from recent or current undergraduates. One, who is a transfer/re-entry student, wrote that “the manner in which Professor Breitwieser conducted his seminar almost single-handedly convinced me that I had an individual place in the campus community.” Another transfer student, who arrived from the City College of San Francisco, reflected in these terms: “I am not only a better student because of him, I am a better thinker.” Moreover, his influence extends from incoming students in the Freshman Seminar Program (he takes on such seminars almost yearly in addition to his regular course load) and the Summer Research Opportunity Program, to graduate students at all levels, and, beyond that, to established scholars around the country. Former PhD students, now Professors at the University of Southern Carolina, the University of Washington, and Indiana University, sent the Committee long letters of support that remembered Breitwieser as a “legendary” mentor while they were here. One recalled with some envy his uncanny ability to speak “without notes for ninety minutes, in crystalline, perfectly composed paragraphs.” Another summarized very well Breitwieser’s characteristic form of sincere wowing: his lectures were “electrifying,” she wrote, but “the brilliance of Mitch’s persona is bound up in its seeming artlessness: there is no smoke and mirrors, not ‘star’ persona, just a remarkably gifted teacher who makes you listen and care when he talks.”

This department is very proud to hold the record, across the entire campus and its professional schools, for the greatest number of Distinguished Teaching Awards winners since the inception of the honor in 1959. Mitch Breitwieser now joins that group and will be honored, with this year’s other winners, at the Award Ceremony on April 22, 2009, at 5 p.m. at Zellerbach Playhouse. A reception will follow in the Zellerbach foyer. Please come, and join us in giving him your applause.

Looking Back at Literature

2009-04-15T12:49:00.000-07:00

I had forgotten that The Atlantic had been around long enough to have reviewed books like Great Expectations, Adam Bede, and Vanity Fair when they were freshly published but they have. A selection of "classic" book reviews are re-printed here, and they're worth flipping through. My favorite was the blistering review of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, which hopefully predicted that the book would sell badly, such that "the chief damage done will be to the author himself, who thus dishonors his own physical nature; for imperfect though the race is, it still remains so much purer than the stained and distorted reflection of its animalism in Leaves of Grass."

As of April 16^th, Strunk and White's The Elements of Style has been teaching us how to unsplice a comma for fifty years and a fiftieth anniversary edition has been published. Geoffrey K. Pullum, however, is deeply, deeply unimpressed; as he writes in The Chronicle of Higher Education, "The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students' grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it." Whew!

Gabriel García Márquez's literary agent told a Chilean newspaper that she thought he was done writing, but a week later he was quick to correct the misapprehension. "Call me later, I'm writing," he said, tartly, when El Tiempo called him for a comment; "The only thing I do is write"

Ron Rosenbaum in Slate has no interest in the question of what Shakespeare looked like, but he thinks that the "controversy" over the new Shakespeare portrait reminds us of something important about the man who wrote those plays; as he puts it, "the fact that we now are faced with dual, or dueling, portraits, is that it reminds us that despite his singularity as literary genius, he was the supreme artist of ambiguity, sexual and poetic...whether or not the "new" portrait gives us another face of Shakespeare, the controversy over it reminds us that one of the things that makes his work so memorable is that it is so often, so deeply and profoundly, two-faced."

Hilton Als has a nice piece in The New Yorker on Katherine Anne Porter (with guest appearances by Truman Capote and Edna St. Vincent Millay. I'm not sure what to make, though, of the backhanded compliment that her only novel, Ship of Fools, is "interesting to read alongside her other work, if only because it confirms Porter's superiority as a writer in the short form."

Jane Austen plus zombies? How could it not be good? Well, Macy Halford is not amused and breaks down the math: "Eighty-five per cent Austen, fifteen per cent a television writer named Seth Grahame-Smith, and one hundred per cent terrible, the book effectively undermines the seriousness of, in the original, the Bennet sisters' matrimonial quest by suggesting a non-linear positive correlation between the number of zombies present during courtship and the degree of difficulty in obtaining a husband."

And some quick hits" Paul Freedman reviews a new translation of The Song of the Cid, Denis Donoghue reviews a new biography of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Marina Warner reviews Daniel Karlin's new edition of Edward FitzGerald's Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.

Calling All Readers!

2009-04-12T13:57:00.000-07:00

In what follows, San Francisco native Lisa Riordan Seville, a 2006 graduate from the English department, with a second major in Art Practice, talks about the importance of “reading” for her. Lisa currently lives in New York where she is finishing up an internship at the literary magazine Lapham’s Quarterly and also works as the Communication Associate at the International Justice Network, an organization involved in litigation on behalf of detainees at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan. Though, she reports, she does not plan to be a lawyer or a literature professor, she finds herself returning often to an eclectic mix of her favorite writers: Joan Didion, Herman Melville, John Milton. In doing so, she opens up the question of literature’s place in today’s world, more specifically: what does it mean to read? It is a question which we hope will not only interest the readers of this blog, but will spark some reactions that you will feel comfortable sharing with our online community.

Hers is thus a contribution, from her life outside the academy, to a debate going on inside it, namely the discussion over the practice of “close reading” (the meticulous attention to small verbal details of mostly canonical texts) vs. “distant reading” (a more globally historical view of the production of texts that ranges far outside of the canon and considers statistical matters like publication trends).

***

During my tenure as an undergraduate in the English department and in the two years since, I’ve struggled with the tension between reading critically and reading for pleasure. Though by no means mutually exclusive, there are moments in which the act of explaining words robs them of their meaning, or proves limiting. We so often claim to know; we point to our discoveries in symbols or syntax in order to stake a territory of truth. All the while, reading (and English as a discipline) depends upon the ability of words to elide those meanings and subvert our claims. Reading for truth is an elusive promise. Our forty acres and a mule.

Perhaps because I remain unsure of my relationship to the established notions of reading, I find myself setting out to make a place for a reading that walks a line between critical and I’ll call “emphatic” reading, an activity that gives a life to words on paper. I’m using that term tentatively, for I’m not sure what I mean by it. It’s slippery to attempt to talk about the more visceral, aesthetic, or essential relationship between reader and written, and that is why this is going to have to be a group effort.

That is, I mean this column to be a forum for talking about reading, one in which discussions use texts (and I’m taking advantage of the broad contemporary definition of that word) serve as starting points for a discussion of what it means to read, and be a reader, right now. Subjects might range from Lincoln’s inaugural to David Foster Wallace’s posthumous “Wiggle Room,” from Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” video to our understanding of the word “torture” -- because at the heart of each lie questions essential to people who care about words. At the same time, I want to think about when and if we must draw lines between reading literature and “reading” other kinds of “texts.” Is reading Shakespeare essentially and importantly different than reading the New York Times? Yes, I think it is. But why?

I hope to build a conversation, perhaps a series of posts on this topic treating particular pieces. Reading a blog, significantly, is an exceedingly fluid activity, and our collective energies can take this in almost any direction. That said, respondents should feel free to comment now, offer up their own readings of reading, or argue with others’ — all we ask that everyone remains mutually open and respectful. I hope that we can allow the conversations that take place within the hallowed halls of Wheeler Hall to permeate outwards, and those outside to seep in.

Graduate Exchange Student Flourishes at Berkeley

2009-04-05T10:07:00.000-07:00

In what follows, Assistant Professor Nadia Ellis profiles graduate student GerShun Avilez, a PhD candidate in English at the Univeristy of Pennsylvania who has spent the last year at UC Berkeley participating in the Exchange Scholar Program. The program enables a graduate student enrolled in a doctoral program in one of the participating institutions to study at one of the other graduate schools for a limited period of time so as to take advantage of particular educational opportunities not available on the home campus.

***

Not long after the beginning of the semester last Fall, I got a lovely, if shy, email from GerShun Avilez, asking if we might meet up. I was a new professor in the Department and GerShun was a visiting graduate student, on the Exchange Program from his home institution at U Penn. I liked that we were two newbies to Berkeley, but we shared more than that in common. GerShun’s dissertation, which he completed while on his exchange this year at Berkeley, is about the relationship between literary history and aesthetics, a conjunction of abiding interest to me as well. Entitled “The Wake of Blackness: The Black Aesthetic and the Post-Black Arts Era,” GerShun’s dissertation re-examines the Black Arts Movement in light of contemporary African American literature and culture, filling in gaps in a genealogy of black American literature that might leap from, say, Ellison to Morrison without accounting for the period in between. The larger questions around literary history find concrete expression in GerShun’s interest in contemporary representations of space, sexuality, and concepts of whiteness and in how these resonate with, reflect upon, and contest earlier articulations in the Black Arts Movement.

GerShun, who grew up in Arkansas and attending Hendrix College as an undergrad and Temple University for an MA, developed some of the questions for his project early on in coursework at Penn. A graduate seminar led by Prof. Herman Beavers on contemporary African American writing, he notes, “produced so many questions….How do we think about the contemporary moment? What language do we use to describe the contemporary?” Meanwhile, coursework with Prof. Thadious Davis—who eventually became his dissertation advisor—allowed him to develop theoretical positions that inform the project. The project reads work by Samuel Delany, (Cal’s own) Darieck Scott, Jane Cortez, Sherley Ann Williams, and Audre Lorde. Its critical influences include Hortense Spiller, Michael Warner, Houston Baker, Phillip Brian Harper, and Robert Reid-Pharr, whose preoccupations in Conjugal Union: The Body, the House, and the Black American connect particularly closely with GerShun’s own. And this has been a busy year for GerShun: in between applying for fellowships, testing the job market, and completing the diss, he published his first article, “Housing the Black Body: Value, Domestic Space, and Segregation Narratives,” which appears in the current issue of African American Review (42.1).

When we last met up, I asked GerShun what it has meant for his life and work to spend this academic year on exchange at Berkeley. He reflected on the ways in which moving from East Coast to West, from Philadelphia to San Francisco, necessitated a spatial re-orientation for himself which, coincidentally or not, was happening at the same time as he wrote a chapter about urbanity and dwelling. He had been ensconced in Philadelphia for six years—experiencing himself to be “part of the architecture of Penn;” chairing the Education Committee of the annual Philadelphia Black Gay Pride events—and now he needed to re-imagine his life in a city, and a university, that were new to him. Things have gone well. Apart from the productivity that often accompanies distance from the familiar, GerShun has found that the initiative he has had to take in negotiating a new institution and forging new connections is great training for the impending transition from graduate student to academic job candidate. Also, in San Francisco he has been able to foster the balance between activism and academia that he valued in Philadelphia—GerShun volunteers at the San Francisco LGBT Community Center.

When I asked if GerShun would recommend the exchange program to other graduate students, he enthusiastically responded yes. His year at Cal delving deep into his dissertation and reaching out into the unfamiliar seems to be going very well.

Literature Today

2009-04-01T15:55:00.000-07:00

Relations between Russia and Ukraine have deteriorated in recent years, but now we know the real root cause: on the 200th anniversary of literary giant Nikolai Gogol's birth, both countries are attempting to claim him. As Tom Parfitt reports in the London Guardian, "While the two countries sprang from a common east Slavic civilisation centred around the proto-state of Kievan Rus, Gogol's identity is contentious because he lived in a period when Ukrainian national consciousness was awakening. Vladimir Yavorivsky, a Ukrainian novelist and MP, said that if Gogol was a tree, "the crown was in Russia but the roots were in Ukraine".

From the London Times, the story of TS Eliot's "snort" of rejection for George Orwell's Animal Farm,which he turned down for publication because it was unconvincing: As he wrote, "your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm - in fact there couldn't have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so that what was needed (someone might argue) was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs."

At the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, an exhibit entitled To Sleep, Perchance to Dream explores "the nocturnal landscape of Elizabethan England, which "turns out to be a place in great flux, as new scientific and pseudoscientific ideas jangled with the old, haunted, superstitious ones." The Washington Post and The New York Times have some fascinating reviews.

The London Guardian reports that subversive cartoonist Robert Crumb has completed his long-awaited take on the book of Genesis. Crumb, working from the King James Bible and (Berkeley's own) Robert Alter's translation. In an interview at the New York Public Library recorded by Time magazine, Crumb talks about the difficulties of drawing God for the book: "He had considered, he said, drawing God as a black woman. 'But if you actually read the Old Testament he's just an old, cranky Jewish patriarch.'"

In Slate, Jesse Sheidlower reveals that the dirty pun in Britney spears' newest single is actually a intertextual reference to dirty punsters James Joyce and William Shakespeare, though neither have put out a new single in a while.

Finally, at Psychology Today, Satoshi Kanazawa asks the hard questions: "Is Aaron Sorkin better than Shakespeare?" Evolutionary psychologist Robin I. M. Dunbar "argues that good writers like Shakespeare are rare, because complex dramas like often require the writer to possess a fifth-order theory of mind (or sixth-order intentionality), which is beyond the cognitive capacity of most humans." And if that is the standard for literary quality, then the answer is apparently yes.

Conversations with Distinguished Alumna Young Jean Lee, Wed April 1, 5 PM

2009-03-29T07:31:00.000-07:00

Young Jean Lee, Photo by Gene Pittman courtesy Walker Art Center

On April 1, the English Department will be having its second event in its new series, “Conversations with Distinguished Alumni/ae.” Professors Catherine Gallagher and Scott Saul will be talking with playwright Young Jean Lee, who received her BA, with highest honors, in 1996. Young Jean went on to spend six more years as a PhD student in the Department where she focused on Renaissance literature under the mentorship of Professor Stephen Booth, whose own acerbic wit and willingness to shock his own audiences into thought finds their echos in Young Jean’s work. After what she calls a “quarter-life crisis” in 2002, she decided to abandon academia to try her hand at writing, rather than studying, plays. She moved to New York, started her own theater company and, since then, has shocked, challenged and entertained audiences with plays that treat touchy contemporary issues like race and religion with unremitting self-awareness and unexpected humor.

Indeed, Young Jean even describes the philosophy behind her writing process with her tongue somewhat—or somewhere—in her cheek: “When starting a play, I ask myself, ‘What’s the last play in the world I would ever want to write?’ Then I force myself to write it.” Not only does this allow her to silence her inner critic so she can get something down on paper, but it has also led her to tackle issues that she might otherwise shy away from. This was particularly the case in her 2007 play Church, which consists of an evangelical Christian service (complete with sermon, praise dancing and a gospel choir) that sincerely attempts to convert people to Christianity. Having grown up resisting the religion her extremely evangelical Korean family pressed on her, Young Jean confessed that the play was “a nightmare and a challenge for me.” Church received rave reviews from audiences, however: Time Out New York went so far as to say that they “would happily worship in the house of Young Jean Lee.”

Young Jean tackled another delicate subject – Asian-American racial identity politics – with characteristic humor in Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven: A Show About White People in Love. The play follows a character named “Korean-American” as she navigates a cliché-ridden “Korean” world until a white couple appear to take over the stage with the drama of their dysfunctional relationship. The play is rife with caustic moments – for instance, when one of the white characters announces, “You know what’s awesome? Being white” – but as the audience laughs and squirms in its seats, Young Jean Lee makes them confront the realities of racial bigotry head-on. Similarly, her searing treatment of racial identity politics in her latest play, The Shipment, tweaks, pulls and twists contemporary cultural stereotypes of black America, such as the black comedian, the thug rapper, and the African American class. The form of the play – perhaps her most eclectic yet – includes a song-and-dance number, a stand-up comedy routine, a surrealist sketch and a short naturalistic play.

Controversial? Certainly and deliberately so. But The New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, The Village Voice, Time Out New York, and other papers or journals have joined in their acclaim for what one review called “the jittery, jagged, body of work that resists pat definition.”

With her inexhaustible audacity, her fearless humor and her exceeding self-awareness, Young Jean promises to shock and delight both Professors Gallagher and Saul as well as those of us in her audience. Come to the Maude Fife Room at 5 PM on April 1. We’re confident that you won’t be disappointed, and we know you will not be bored!

Literary Notes

2009-03-25T18:08:00.000-07:00

The first volume of The Letters of Samuel Beckett has been published, and it was no small accomplishment. As Nicholas Lezard at the Guardian notes, "the breadth of allusion, and the allusive and elusive wordplay you might have expected between intimate and highly educated correspondents ("'nastorquemada nyles' has not been identified with certainty," say the editors, and I can't say I blame them)" made transforming the corpus of correspondence into something readable a daunting task. Apparently he even had terrible handwriting, which he called his "foul fist." But since the writer's famous privacy didn't stop him from writing a staggering number of letters, the idea of "the authentic early Beckettian tang, straight from the source, unmediated by artifice," is a wonderfully attractive prospect. Kevin Jackson at the Sunday Times observes that his "immature voice," is still, "highly entertaining...[that] these letters are crammed with unexpected treasures, including displays of his dazzling erudition as an amateur art historian and his charmingly impractical ideas for the alternative careers he might pursue." And while Anthony Lane, in the New Yorker, notes that "Beckett was no Byron," and that "nobody could maintain that the letters brim with a zest that exceeds the range of the printed works," Lane still can't turn away: "The correspondent's phrasing has a natural, gusty soar to it, but the novel takes it higher." Yet "if you want to trace the tributaries of that book's mournful wit to their source," he writes, "the letters are invaluable..."

Until around mid-20th century, Jennifer Schuessler notes that Jane Austen was regarded as an author for men and boys. Benjamin Disraeli read Pride and Prejudice 17 times, and Matthew Arnold and John Henry Newman read Mansfield Park every year. The historian Thomas Babbington Macaulay read Austen obsessively and, as a colonial administrator in India, wrote letters home comparing various colleagues to characters in Emma and Pride and Prejudice. Kipling's 1923 story "The Janeites" was about a platoon of British soldiers who use Austen talk to distract themselves from the horror of the trenches.

As Matthew Pearl (writing in Slate), discovered while doing research for his historical novel about Charles Dickens, when the world famous author toured the United States, he found himself the victim of a phenomenon he had difficulty making sense of: the celebrity stalker. "How queer it is," Dickens lamented "that I should be perpetually having things happen to me with regard to people that nobody else in the world can be made to believe." Pearl claims that "authors like Byron, who promoted his personality along with his poems, tempted readers into feeling themselves engaged in a personal relationship with the author beyond the pages of a book," but that it was "in crafting the biggest brand name in literature by writing for all classes, and making himself publicly visible through his unprecedented reading tours, [that] Dickens set the stage for a whole new perception of intimacy with his readers. He also set the stage for the modern disjunction that comes from the realization that the celebrity who seems to be part of our lives is in fact another stranger."

Thomas Mallon writes, in The Atlantic, that while the thirty year correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell "have already been published, separately and in part...the letters' new joint arrangement, a volume called Words in Air, allows readers at last to experience the full responsiveness of one poet to the other, as it occurred, letter by letter."

Peter Ackroyd has just finished a prose translation (his publishers call it a "retelling") of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, which Bryan Appleyard notes seems appropriate: Chesterton declared that Chaucer was English before there was an England, and Ackroyd has just finished the first volume of a six-volume history of England, which he anticipates will take him another 12 years. In an interview printed in the London Times, Ackroyd told Appleyard that ranslating Chaucer into modern English verse was out of the question. "for a start, it would be ----ing difficult to do poetry. And this is not an age of poetry. It would be difficult to reconstruct the vivacity and the melody of Chaucerian verse in terms of 21st-century English...Modern prose is a much more vigorous and resourceful instrument." And as Appleyard notes, "translating Chaucer [into prose] is an aspect of Ackroyd's wider belief that literature is not set in stone; rather, it partakes of the fluidity of language: 'Retelling is a way of trying to convey the fact that redaction, translation, reinterpretation, reordering is just as important as any fresh act of so-called individual creation. It is an antiromantic idea in every possible respect, because it is nothing to do with self-expression...My main model was Chaucer himself, who didn't give a s--- what the actual words were. He was true to the spirit, if not the letter, of the stories he used, and I try to do the same."

For a taste, here's an excerpt from the Wife of Bath's prologue:

"I don't care what anyone says. Experience of the world is the best thing. It may not be the main authority but, in relationships, it is a good teacher. I know all about unhappiness in marriage. Goodness me. Oh yes. I was 12 years old when I first got a husband. I've had five altogether, thanks be to God. Five of them trooping up to the church door. That is a lot of men. By and large they were gentlemen, or so I was led to believe..."

Helon Habila, a prizewinning Nigerian novelist, notes in Next that the Commonwealth Writers Prize shortlist for the Africa region was absolutely dominated by South African writers, nabbing eleven of the twelve nominees for best book and best first book. Though Uwem Akpan, the lone non-south African writer would nab the prize for his short story collection Say You're One of Them, Habila is concerned by the broader trend this represents in African writing: "Are South African writers better than other African writers? Not necessarily so. Is their publishing industry better? Yes."

In the wake of the tragic suicide of Nicholas Hughes, Syvia Plath's son, a New York Times panel of Joyce Carol Oates, Peter D. Kramer, Erica Jong, Andrew Solomon and Elaine Showalter consider "why, of all the stories of creative, brilliant people who have suffered from fatal depressions, does Plath's tragic legacy resonate so widely."

Finally, Prague's "Franz Kafka International" is named the world's most alienating airport.

"Invincible" Graduate Student Publishes Novel

2009-03-22T11:14:00.000-07:00

In what follows, graduate student Austin Grossman tells how he came to write and publish his novel Soon I Will Be Invincible during his time in the Ph. D. program. He talks about the process of creating the novel, learning how to move back and forth between creative and academic writing and the unexpected twists and turns that are integral to a life of letters.

The novel is a literary treatment of the the interior life of people enmeshed in a culture of superheroes and supervillains. As Austin puts it, "I can only describe it as silly and serious at the same time."

***

I started in the English Ph. D. program in the fall of 2001. I knew Berkeley didn't have an MFA program, and I came expecting to work as an academic, full stop.

The novel began as two or three short stories I wrote in Tom Farber's graduate fiction workshop in my first semester. The first one gave me the voice and character and situation all at once – a frustrated graduate student, reborn as a mad genius bent on conquering the world (I refuse to blush at the transparency here!). More stories appeared, piled up and linked themselves in my imagination - characters, history, events. There was a tipping point late in my second year when I admitted to myself that the stories were chapters and that I was in fact writing a novel. Jonathan Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude coming out in 2003, which hardened my conviction that there was something here worth adding to the literary fiction world.

After coursework I stopped doing teaching and started writing full-time as I was preparing for orals. This was the crucible period - I worked and reworked passages over and over, structured and re-structured and re-re-structured the project, to what seemed like the point of insanity. I was conscious of working without the support and training an MFA program provides, and I might not have finished without a somewhat romantic vision of my situation - working alone, the odds against me, with almost no hope of recognition. I promised myself I'd finish it, and then all those who doubted me would be sorry, very sorry indeed!

I wrote on, and late in the process I showed it to an agent at Janklow and Nesbit (who also represent our own Vikram Chandra), who gave me some encouragement. A year or two(!) and countless rounds of editing later, I was taken on as a client by agent Luke Janklow, who saw the process through. The manuscript sold to Pantheon Books after an auction, and was immediately optioned as a film. I went on a nationwide tour, gave readings, sat on panels at Comic Con and read at literary evenings. The paperback came out this year from Vintage books. The book was nominated for a Sargent award. I'm working on the film adaptation, and writing a new novel.

It has all meant a change of life for me. I will always want to be involved in a literary intellectual culture, but it probably won't be inside the academy. I never expected things to turn out like this, even as I was working to make it happen, and I'm profoundly grateful for it.

It's hard to say what the relationship is between the academic and the creative work. There is the simple discipline of reading literary writing and criticism, having beautiful, varied, exacting writing to look at, day by day.

There is the constant imperative in critical writing to work out how to say fully and exactly what you mean, and you borrow this as a fiction writer. As a novelist you can set yourself any challenge in language you like, and find the truth and authority in it no matter how silly. In fact, I guess I wanted to put this to the test, by picking the silliest subjects possible - the challenge of saying vividly, plainly what it feels like to need to conquer the planet, or explaining who would win in a fight between a cyborg and a faerie. And why, exactly, and why it matters so awfully much to the cyborg and faerie involved.

And it does matter. Belonging to an English department makes you part of a community of people who continually make you aware of the value and stakes of literary writing, the feeling that what’s on the page matters. That it’s worth – more than worth – the passion and effort one invests in it. This is probably the most crucial thing of all, so it’s worth saying that although I didn’t write Soon I Will Be Invincible as part of the degree program, it would never have been written without it.

As a postscript, I’d like to extend an invitation to any fiction writers in the program who have more questions about the nuts and bolts of writing and publishing prose fiction – I’m more than happy to talk further about the process.

Professor Robert Hass's "Green Fire, the Still Point, and an Oak Grove: Some Reflections on the Humanities and the Environment."

2009-03-17T14:46:00.000-07:00

On Thursday, March 12, 2009, Professor Robert Hass gave the first of this year's Faculty Research Lectures, the full text of which follows here.

AN OAK GROVE

Thank you. It is an honor and a bit daunting to be here today. Since I don’t actually do research so much as read around to try to put my thoughts in order, I thought I would subject you to that process this afternoon. My subject is thinking about thinking about nature and my thesis is that we don’t do it very well. By “we” I mean citizens and poets and scholars in the humanities and perhaps the university community as a community. When I was asked to give this talk, I threw some words at what the endeavor might look like and later, wading into it, I had a better idea. So, if I could retitle this lecture, and I can, I thought to call it “The Egret Fishing Through its Smeared Reflection.”

The line comes from the beginning of my wife Brenda Hillman’s long poem Death Tractates. In the opening lines of the poem, the speaker, stunned by the sudden death of a beloved friend, seems to be rehearsing to herself a bit numbly the myths we have learned about what happens to us after death—and before birth. The opening goes like this:

That the soul got to choose. Nothing else
Got to but the soul
Got to choose.
That it was very clever, stepping
From Lightworld to lightworld
As an egret fishes through its smeared reflections—

That last line seems a metaphor not only for the blurring effect of human desires and projections, but for consciousness itself. “Every creature,” the entomologist E.O. Wilson has remarked, “lives in its own sensory world.” And this must especially be true of human consciousness, though I have often wondered if it is not something that all mammals know about each other instinctively. Still it must especially be true of human consciousness which emerged in this world rather late to radically alter it, and to invent ingenious ways in which to study it, and to piece together the story of how it got here to be the world thinking about the world that, in the past century, has come into its care entirely.

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So I thought a place to start, because it is near at hand, would be the sit-in in the now-vanished oak grove on Gayley Road. I think everyone will recall the general outlines of the controversy. The university administration proposed to remodel, upgrade, and retrofit for earthquake safety the football stadium in the mouth of Strawberry Canyon and to build a student athlete’s training facility up against the stadium on Gayley Road where a beautiful old grove of mostly coast live oaks was situated. Coast live oaks are indigenous trees and the common, in fact, the representative tree of the Coast Range.

This was the tree that became an object of contention. The City of Berkeley had an ordinance which forbad cutting down live oak trees, though it was not clear whether the law applied to the university. The administration had considered and rejected alternative locations for their facility. The argument for convenience and the argument for the recruitment of student athletes and of coaches and the need to preserve space for intramural sports seemed to be their primary concerns and they had filed a detailed and scrupulous environmental impact report on their intentions and the history of the site including the trees.

There was from the outset a good deal of opposition to the plan, some of it having to do with the idea of revisiting the locating of a stadium on the Hayward fault. But many people in the community also opposed cutting down the oak grove. The city of Berkeley tested the university’s right to take out the trees in court and lost. A group of citizen activists, including three older, if not elderly women, among them a youthful 71-year old Shirley Dean, environmental activist and former mayor of the city, Betty Olds, an 86 year-old member of the Berkeley City Council, and 90 year-old Sylvia McLaughlin, the legendary environmentalist who in the early 1960s founded Save the Bay, the organization that saved San Francisco Bay from a development plan that would have wiped out its wetlands and reduced its size by half. They perched on the sturdy limb of an old oak and had their photograph taken looking very cheerful. And a more longterm opposition developed—a community group, which included a few Cal students and recent graduates, pitched camp in the trees while the university litigated various issues surrounding the project. Once the university had won and the last protestors were removed from the trees, a long and somewhat delicate process in a community that remembered both the Free Speech Movement and the Peoples’ Park riots, the trees were summarily dispatched, and construction at the site has begun.

For ten months the protestors, some of them inspired, I know, by the example of Julia Butterfly Hill, the young activist who in 1998-99 sat for 738 days in the canopy of a very old first growth redwood forest which the Pacific Lumber Company owned and was intending to log, sat in the trees and tried to marshal support for their cause. “Native California oak woodlands,” their website read, ‘are a crucial component of our natural environment, supporting higher levels of biodiversity than any other terrestrial ecosystem in California. Over 300 vertebrates and thousands of other plant and insect species depend on California oak woodlands for their survival.” As argument, that seemed promising. The authors on the website were trying to find an ecological basis for their stand. But the newspapers and the demonstrators’ posters and the sportscasters who cover Cal football could not resist the symbolism of an archetypal battle. “Ancient Oak Grove at UC Berkeley Wins Court Injunction,” a headline read in one environmental newsletter, considerably aging the trees in question and giving the trees themselves a victory over the university.

I could provide many instances of this vision of the conflict as a war between the peace, innocence, antiquity, and natural harmony of the grove and the chainsaws and fence of a university hellbent on financing its athletic programs by delivering ranked teams to the corporate giants that deliver audiences to advertisers at the expense of all the species supported by an oak woodland ecosystem. On the other side were letters to the Chronicle about ‘sports-hating Berkeleyans” and, I heard one Saturday afternoon, a sportscaster remark with a sigh that it was a tragedy that the mindless hippie kids of Berkeley had no feeling for the traditions of Cal sports that were unfolding so magnificently (I think Cal was ahead at that stage of the football game) on the field on that crisp autumn day.

Aware of my own public silence on the issue, as the young people sat in the trees and fences went up around the oak grove and campus police arrived with the unlucky job of policing the fences (which it seemed to me they did with admirable tact), I was aware of the silence of most of my colleagues. The university public affairs office produced reasoned and informative press releases on many of the issues, and made plausible but somewhat peremptory responses to the issues that were touchy. Question: Couldn’t the university have chosen another site? Answer: The university took many factors into consideration in arriving at its decision about the location of the facility. Steven Finacom, from the Office of Physical and Environmental Planning, wrote a press release which lay out clearly some of the history of the site as described in the Environmental Impact Report.

The EIR, prepared by Turnbull and Page, a San Francisco architecture, historic preservation and urban design firm, is quite interesting. First of all, it describes each tree in the grove, specifying the species, age, and health of each tree, and identifying those that were, in the language of preservationists, ‘specimen trees,’ vigorous examples of their kind. There were 139 trees in the grove and 91 were to be removed. Of the 70 mature specimen trees in the grove, 42 were to be removed, 27 were to stay, and one youngish redwood was to be transplanted. Based on a study of old photographs and of trunk diameters, the team determined that four of the oaks on the hillside were more than eighty years old and so predated the construction of the stadium. Two of them, including the oldest and largest—the tree the demonstrators called “the grandmother oak”—were in the construction zone and were slated to be taken down. The two others would remain.

The rest of the report is a history of the site, beginning with the early history of Berkeley, which it dates from the formal grant of a parcel of land by the King of Spain to Luis Maria Peralta in 1820. It then proceeds quickly to Misters Hillegass, Shattuck, and Blake who, after the treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo and after the California Legislature ( a brand-new entity) had passed a law in 1852 stating that a squatter could gain possession “of any land not reasonably known to be claimed under any existing title,” and after the legal precedent had been established in the brand new courts (and in federal courts as well) that all grants of land by the King of Spain were of dubious legality, so squatted, and claimed thereby most of what would be Berkeley. Then comes an account of the arrival of the College of California and the hiring of Frederick Law Olmstead in 1864 to lay out the college and the town. Then the University of California, and then by 1873 the completion of a U.S. Coastal topographical survey of the Strawberry Creek region and the donation—according to the Oakland Daily News—by a Mr. Nolan “and other liberal nursureymen” of trees and plants for the new campus.

To make a long story short, as people in my family were inclined to say and were genetically incapable of doing, the campus was laid out on Strawberry Creek. Its eastern limit was probably about where Gayley Road is now and the palce where the roadbed is was probably the university’s first botanical garden, just below the site of the grove. Piedmont Avenue was developed, according to Olmstead’s plan, as an elegant residential neighborhood. On the property where Memorial Stadium now stands, two brothers named Palmer built a pair of handsome mansions. The place where the grove stood was the spacious front garden and probably contained in the 1890’s, or they planted, the four coast live oaks that predate the stadium. At least one of those, the grandmother oak, was probably older than the Palmer mansions. You can still see remnants of the Palmer garden. The very old olive trees are an instance, and so is the beautiful old pepper tree that stood, until fairly recently, next to International House. It was a remnant reminder of the Anglo squatters’ Victorian gardener’s effort to naturalize themselves to a Mediterranean climate by planting trees brought to Mexico from Spain and from Mexico to California in the case of the olives and from Peru and Mexico to Spain and then back to Mexico and then to California in the case of that noble and graceful old pepper.

The next incident of interest in this history is the paving or macadamizing of Piedmont Avenue. By the turn of the century the automobile had arrived in Berkeley, as well as elegant carriages and delivery wagons for elegant houses, and they required paved roads. Piedmont Avenue was a handsome sort of Gilded Age neighborhood in 1900 which the early residents had lined with English walnut trees, but came the paving and the idea of widening the road and giving it a gracious median strip, the trees had to go. There were, of course, protests, though the city assured residents that it intended to add new plantings. The EIR quotes the November 12, 1900 edition of the Berkeley Gazette: “Added to the handsome attractions of beautiful new trees and gardens of flowers on this avenue is the parking to be provided in the center of the avenue. Old residents of Berkeley will part reluctantly with the old walnut trees that have for so many years given that portion of the city an eastern and rural aspect, but are compensated in the plans for a handsome boulevard in the future.”

The grove itself came into existence as a byproduct of the need for a football stadium which the surge in the popularity of college sports in the 1910’s had brought into existence. Fundraising for the stadium began in 1921. The decision to build the stadium on the earthquake fault in Strawberry Canyon was made in January of 1922. Access through the canyon to the ridge above had been part of Frederick Olmstead’s initial vision. “In the nineteenth century,” the author of the EIR writes, “the hills above the young campus were vegetated in grasslands.” But Olmstead, to whom the dry Mediterranean landscape of the West, did not look like much, had noticed the rich diversity of native species in the moist microclimate of Strawberry Canyon and had seen the canyon and the ridge above it as important attractions of the site. The university built paths, benches, and a carriage road to Grizzly Peak, and the canyon was alive—this is the author of the EIR—“with bracken, wild currant, oaks, and bay trees, and wildlife like quail and rabbits.” It was here next to the remarkable Phoebe Hearst’s Greek Theater that the stadium was built. It was designed, of course, by John Galen Howard, and in March 1923 a San Francisco landscaping firm was chosen to landscape the site. As part of the fundraising effort the stadium was going to honor students and faculty killed in the First World War. So the Stadium became Memorial Stadium, and the grove that the landscape architects planted, drawing on a San Mateo nursery that “produced between two and three thousand plants a year” and imported ornamentals “by carloads from different parts of the world,” became the Memorial Oak Grove.

My point, I suppose, is that the actual story, buried in the EIR, is more interesting and useful than the archetypal drama that played in the press and in the minds of many of the participants. And that’s not the end of it. The firm the university hired was called MacRorie and McLaren. MacRorie handled the business end and McLaren the design.

McLaren was Donald McLaren, the only son of John McLaren, the Scottish-born immigrant who laid out Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, became its first superintendent, and in a series of books for gardeners and horticulturists has been said to be the inventor of California gardening. McLaren senior was a close friend and compatriot of two other Scotsmen who played important roles in this phase of California history, the environmentalist and writer John Muir and the painter William Keith. These three Scotsmen in their turn became friends of the architects Bernard Maybeck and John Galen Howard and among them the five men might be said to have created the sensibility that put together the Arts and Crafts movement in California and the conservation movement and, in doing so, to have made the culture of brown shingle and Beaux Arts Berkeley—the culture that sent a 90-year old woman up a hundred and fifty year old oak tree.

(Let me pause to suggest that one outcome of hearing this talk might be to set aside an afternoon to take a look at one of the landmarks of that movement, a little Arts and Crafts Swedenborgian church at 2107 Lyon Street in San Francisco, designed by Page Brown and Bernard Maybeck from a sketch Maybeck made of a little village church he had seen in Italy and for which he commissioned four murals of the California seasons by William Keith.)

William Keith is not so famous a name as he was from 1900 to 1920, though I think he is generally regarded as the foremost northern California landscape painter of his generation and he was a crucial member of the Hillside Club, the environmentally conscious planning group that included Maybeck and Howard and laid down the guidelines for the domestic architecture, contoured roads, paths, and gardens of the Berkeley hills. The Oakland Museum has a good collection of his paintings, and the Hearst Gallery, at Saint Mary’s College in Moraga where I went to school, has a better one.

I mention this because his most famous painting, called Berkeley Oaks, is a portrait of an oak grove. It was a painting John Muir liked so well that Keith gave it to him and in the last years of his life, it hung above Muir’s desk in his study at the ranch in Martinez. It occurred to me wondered what had become of it—this is the research in this research lecture—and I found that, after Muir’s death, the Muir family had donated it to the Pacific School of Religion where it is still housed this afternoon, hanging on a wall in the receptionist’ office.

Here is a photo of the Keith painting. Very Scottish-looking oaks, to my eye.
And here is the photograph of the vanished oak grove on the SavetheOaks website. You can see that the photographer was able to suffuse the grove in the same golden light that Keith saw.

I wish we knew more about Donald McLaren. There is some evidence that he visited the Muir home as a boy and he certainly knew Keith, so it is very likely that he saw the painting. The EIR on the oak grove reports that he wanted to be a baseball player, but became a landscape architect at his father’s insistence, that he graduated from Berkeley, that his young wife, whose maiden name was Leonard, descended from one of the businessmen-squatter families, died in childbirth when Donald was 27 years old, that their daughter Mattie lived in the lodge at Golden Gate Park with her grandparents. Donald McLaren wrote about landscaping and the principles of California gardening for professional journals, was retained by John Galen Howard to landscape Sather Gate, so we probably owe the coast live oaks and incense cedars and redwoods along the south fork of Strawberry Creek to him. He worked with his father on the landscape design of the Panama-Pacific Exposition, and was hired, after doing the Memorial Grove, to design a landscape setting for the new football stadium at Stanford University, to which he gave a much more European and classical treatment, though the flood plain between San Francisco Bay and the Palo Alto foothills where it is located would have been much more likely to have been once an oak grove than the grassy hillside where Memorial Stadium was built.

There is almost always a point in any narrative when the story exceeds the theme. It is the point, I have noticed, when student evaluations in my lecture classes sometimes complain about their insructor’s tendency to digression. While he was working as the architect for the Transcontinental Highways Exposition in Reno to celebrate the completion of the Truckee-Reno Highway (a moment from which we could mark the end of the story of the Donner Party and the full-hearted opening of California to the automobile), he disappeared. I assume that ‘disappeared” means that his wife and associates didn’t know where he was. His body was found a week later. He had checked into a hotel on Mission Street in San Francisco and died by asphyxiation from a gas burner that had been left on. He left no note, so it was unclear whether his death was a suicide or an accident, but the circumstance of his disappearance suggest that it was a suicide.

Here is the digression inside the digression. The poet of San Francisco in those years was a man named George Sterling. He was the first West Coast poet to achieve a national reputation and he is remembered, when he is remembered, because he described San Francisco in one of his poems as “the cool grey city of love.” Here is a bit of the poem:

Tho I die on a distant strand,
And they give me a grave in that land,
Yet carry me back to my own city!
Carry me back to her grace and pity!
For I think I could not rest
Afar from her mighty breast.
She is fairer than others are
Whom they sing the beauty of.
Her heart is a song and a star--
My cool, grey city of love.

The winds of the Future wait
At the iron walls of her Gate,
And the western ocean breaks in thunder,
And the western stars go slowly under,
And her gaze is ever West
In the dream of her young unrest.
Her sea is a voice that calls,
And her star a voice above,
And her wind a voice on her walls--
My cool, grey city of love.

Sterling did not die on a distant strand. He was a friend of Jack London and in Jack London’s novel Martin Eden, which is the only fictional portrait we have of Berkeley in the decade of the 1900’s, there is a character named Russ Brissenden based on George Sterling. Brissenden is the fin de siecle figure in a naturalist novel and he commits suicide because he is too sensitive to live in this coarse and violent world. The novel was published in 1909. Sterling was honored as the premier poet of California at the Panama-Pacific Exposition in 1915 in a ceremony that took place—I imagine—on a gazebo-like stage amid a surrounding landscape of native Californian plantings designed by Donald McLaren. George Sterling killed himself by taking cyanide in the room where he was living at the Bohemian Club on Taylor Street (624 Taylor for anyone inclined to pass the place with a ritual and commemorative nod) in November 1926, a year and a half after the death of Donald McLaren. The California historian Kevin Starr said of Sterling’s death that with it “the golden age of San Francisco’s bohemia had come to its miserable end.” Actually the golden age of San Francisco’s bohemia was yet to come. But the two deaths do seem to signal the end of the arts and crafts era in northern California, of which the oak grove was both a product and an emblem, and so, driving past the demonstrators on Gayley Road, the passionate young activists who were defending the existence of a work of art that was in all probability based on another work of art and that they thought of as a remnant of primordial forest, I thought about those two men.

And we are not quite through with the story of the live oaks. The campus in the 1900’s was full of them, enough so that the university’s young assistant professor of botany chose to write a brief monograph on the subject. Willis Jepson was born in 1867 on a ranch near Vacaville in the Sacramento Valley. He graduated from Berkeley in 1889, did advanced study at Cornell and Harvard, returned to Berkeley where he received his Ph.D. in 1899. He wrote 11 books, including A Flora of California (1909), The Trees of California (also 1909), and A Manual of the Flowering Plants of California (1925), still much beloved and, I am informed, a groundbreaking work that, by connecting plant distribution to geological history, connecting flora distribution to life zones, and providing a separate and extensive treatment of endemic species, and introducing a sophisticated classification of the plant kingdom taking into account the new research in genetics, set a standard by which local and regional botanical manuals were measured for the next fifty years. It made him—I’ve heard said—the university’s first internationally important scientist.

What else? In 1892, at a meeting with John Muir and Warren Olney in a San Francisco law office, he became, over a handshake, one of the founders of the Sierra Club; the university’s Jepson Herbarium is named for him, and so is the bible of California botany, The Jepson Manual of the Higher Plants of California, edited by James Hickman, but the work of 200 botanists building on the foundation of Jepson’s Flora; he walked and botanized every county, wetland, coastal strand, and most of the mountain peaks and mountain valleys in the state; he delivered the Faculty Research lecture in 1934; and, more to my purpose, as a new faculty member he was probably Donald McLaren’s botany instructor and, in 1903, he composed the little monograph entitled “The Live Oaks of the University of California Campus.”

He begins this essay by remarking that the Coast Live Oak, Quercus agrifolia, “is the only native oak found on the lower slopes of the Oakland hills,” and he proceeds to catalogue the trees on the campus. There are 686 of them, 290 on the lower campus, which he describes as the area “below the College Avenue bridge,” 296 on the upper campus, plus those acquired by the purchase of the Palmer tract, the territory of the stadium and, a hundred and five years later, the contested grove, which he says, proprietarily, “gave us about a hundred trees large and small which form part of the dense scrub on the south side of Strawberry Canyon opposite the dairy farm.” (The existence of that dairy farm is not in the EIR and my research has not reached it. But milk cows give us yet another glimpses of the uses to which that grassy upland had been put.) Some of “the finest and largest trees” on the lower campus are, Jepson observes, were far past maturity and dying from dry rot, which is caused by a spore that enters through wounds in the bark and eventually reaches the heartwood. The middle-aged trees, also afflicted, could be saved by diligent care before the rot had penetrated too far into the tree’s core. Young trees, he notices, naturally propagated by the resident jays and squirrels, will eventually replace them all. And then he was this to say: “If, therefore, the stand of oaks on the lower campus is to be maintained forever, it is necessary that there be systematic planting so that the young trees may gradually succeed those we now have. By such a course the ‘Berkeley Oaks’ immortalized on the canvasses of Keith, may also be preserved ‘in the flesh’ forever.” In the remainder of the essay he recommends the planting of other native trees in the campus—which was done—consider the beautiful Valley Oak outside the entrance to Mulford Hall--, he complains about the depredations of “the genus ‘Berkeley Small Boy’ individuals of which arrive on the campus armed with carving knives, and he concludes his small treatise this way: “The greatest natural charm of the grounds is due to the presence of Live Oak trees. The graceful outlines of their low round heads repeat the lines of the hills which back the University estate. What the Elms are to New Haven, the Live Oaks are to Berkeley.”

There are a number of interesting and poignant things about the essay. I am about at the end of my time so let me just mention two of them. The first is Jepson’s desire to give the raw young university a sense of hallowed tradition, of timelessness, through the evocation of Keith’s paintings and of the elder, Eastern institution in New Haven. There is other evidence from this period of the effort to use the oaks to give the university a sense of tradition. Here is a photograph of the cover of the literary magazine—pointed out to me by David Duer—in which Frank Norris made his literary debut.in 1901. And it is there, for that matter, in Olmstead’s siting of the university in 1864—some idea of giving the land to the still imaginary institution and the institution to the land. We didn’t know the story of the oak grove for a number of reasons. One of them is that it is the story of the origins of a provincial university. Another is that we are not late stone age people making our living off the land. Universities have a very odd relation to tradition, especially very good universities, which are driven first of all by innovation, by excellence, wherever it comes from, and by originality and by innovation. And in that way a university is very like a market economy.

If we lived in a different world, if the university administration was run by a hereditary monarchy, and the chancellor were Benjamin Ide Wheeler’s great-grand-daughter, nobody would have touched those oak trees. But we are not that institution. We are inclined to hire administrators and faculty who did not go to school here, and hire them for talent and talent alone, and from all over the country and the world, so we have not especially bred a public or institutional memory that needed in the first place to know the names of the plants or to find in them any resonant symbolism or to take any particular interest in the intellectual history of the institution. Probably the only person who knew the whole story at the time of the demonstrations was 90 year old Sylvia McLaughlin, who climbed the tree on behalf of a whole culture, an era that gave us the arts and crafts sensibility of the city and its conservation movements, the Sierra Club, The Redwoods League, and Save the Bay, and that laid the foundations for the study of the natural history of California that the new instructors arriving here from the east did not know and that their students who were born and raised here probably didn’t know very well either since most of their parents were likely to have been recent immigrant themselves so there was no one to teach it to them. The question of the grove might have been an occasion to have that conversation and it’s a pity that we didn’t have it.

The second interesting thing about the essay is the story of the infestation of dry rot. It tells us that many of the older oaks on the campus wouldn’t be here, were it not for the pruning of diseased limbs and sealing of wounds in the bark a century ago, and since the spores are wind-borne and the breezes from the bay are distinctly westerly, it probably means that many of the old trees in the grove wouldn’t have been there to be sat in and then cut down, had not the botanist and the arborists of the university seen to their health. The story of dry rot is a way of remembering that the grove was, and the university campus is, a garden. If we are going to think about nature, the distinction between a garden and a wild place would be fundamental. And so would what we mean by “wild.”

In the humanities these days the starting point for much thinking about nature occurs in the writing of the German critic Theodor Adorno. A very short version of Adorno’s view is that “Nature” was a concept developed in the Enlightenment and early Romantic era by the middle class to sweep away the corrupt, artificial, and unnatural social arrangements of the landed aristocracy and their monarchies, that it was useful in its time as an evocation of frankness and simplicity in manners, freedom and diversity in social arrangements, unstoppable force in social movements, whatever notion of nature was usefully oppositional at a given point in the process of wrenching power from the old order, and that in the later 19th and 20th century nature had returned to its previous role as an irrefutable standard by which to justify various forms of racial, gender, and sexual discrimination. In the humanities, therefore, the first thing one says about nature is that it is an idea, socially constructed in the service of someone’s ideology, and about wildness and wilderness one says that they are constructions of American westward expansion connected to the ideology of the free market and a masculine conquest of a feminine earth.

This fundamental skepticism is bracing, but it also has its limits. It is not of much use to the scores of living species about to perish from the earth to know that nature is socially constructed. A wildlife biologist’s definition of “wildness” is helpful here. I am thinking of an essay by Donald Waller, who observes that a biologist or restoration ecologist means by “wild” an organism living in an ecosystem among most of the processes in which it evolved. This definition gives us a practical measure by which to gauge what is at stake in projects of sustainability, preservation, and restoration. You could see that the young people in the trees felt that they were defending something wild and free against all the repressive forces in their society that might be symbolized by a university bureaucracy and by what millions of dollars in advertising money have done to American sports. But the grove was not wild. It was a garden. There might have been very good reasons for preserving it, but they were not the reasons in those young people’s hearts or on their posters. And not having that conversation was a missed opportunity.

One of the gifts we have to give our students is a sense of complexity, because desire tends to simplify what it sees. We are usually, left to ourselves, egrets fishing through our smeared reflections. Another thing we can give them is the gift of seeing what’s there. We can give them some of the skills of distinction, discrimination and description that have been given to us and also concepts of enormous power. Seeing what’s there usually requires patient observation and the acquisition of particular skills and disciplines—not that those things guarantee our seeing clearly or freshly. Often in both the arts and sciences, we see what’s there is a flash, but it has taken us hours or years of patient labor to get there.

The ancestor of the live oaks on the hill arrived here ten million years ago. The coast live oak, Quercus agrifolia, migrating in and out as the weather changed, has been here for two million years. It is less adaptable than we human beings are, but it understands this weather better. It is exquisitely adapted with its cupped, waxy, dark green leaves and its patient vascular system—one writer about oaks remarked that the lobed deciduous oaks of the East Coast are sprinters and the evergreen oaks of the West are marathoners—to this place with its summer droughts and winter rains and its fogs and drying spring winds. The first people who came here adapted to it better, or at least differently than, we do. They harvested its acorns and made them their staple food. Ethnobotanists who have studied the matter estimate that the coast live oaks provided every individual person in this part of California about 500 pounds of food a year, and they did it for 12,000 years. In their way of thinking the trees liked being used. Everything liked being used, if you used it respectfully. We use the trees for beauty. Because we are eaters of the seeds of grasses, we are, as Michael Pollan has observed, the culture through which grasslands came to dominate forests on the planet, and though we are great and talented removers of trees, we like having them around, for various practical uses, but also, I suppose, because they remind us of our origins and because they live longer than we do, which can be reassuring, and because we love their shapes and the way they reach toward light and the way they smell and their shades and the sound of wind in their leaves. And because we are inveterately social beings and build housing so that we can crowd around and hear and see each other, we like them in order to escape our social being for quiet and for reflection. And that s why we make art out of them—make gardens, like the Memorial Grove. And this is another conversation that we did not have.

My friend Steven Edwards, paleobotanist and director of the Tilden Park Botanical Garden, a man who knows as much as anyone alive about the flora of California, remarked to me that, while the demonstrators were trying to save the oak trees on a campus full of oak trees, the city of Los Angeles was pumping excessive groundwater in violation of a fifty-year-old agreement and drying out alkali meadows and shrinking the range of native grasses in the Owens Valley, a habitat that contains some of the state’s rarest endemic wildflowers (including a very beautiful star tulip). And developers in the Livermore Valley were bulldozing a score of endemic plants to put up a mall. What the young people in the grove gave us was their passion to save the earth from human depredation—which must, as poets are always telling us, get some of its urgency from that fact that we can’t save ourselves from the predations of time—and they gave us this urgency, a gift that can be both useful and very irritating because, unlike most of us, they aren’t already too busy doing what they are doing.

So this was the story of an oak grove. I want to end, very briefly, with a parable about cranes to bring us into the 21st century. Cranes are as a family of animals between eight and twelve million years old and most of them are threatened or endangered. In Asia there are eight species and seven of them are in trouble. There is, as you know a demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. It’s about 155 miles long and 3 miles wide. It is the last tripwire of the Cold War and the most militarized piece of real estate on earth. And because no human being has entered it for the last 50 years, it has become an immense, accidental game preserve. Two species of Asian cranes—cranes, as you know, are symbols of longevity and good luck in Asian cultures—have been making a dramatic comeback because they do their winter foraging in the demilitarized zone. Ten million years, they have been on the planet, performing their ritual mating dances, guarding and hatching their eggs, and if there is ever peace between the Koreas and the threat of nuclear war lifted, the DMZ will probably be developed and those two species, Grus vipio and Grus japonensis, the white-naped and red-crowned cranes, will be that much nearer to being gone from the kinds on earth.

This is the world our students are inheriting. They are going to need a sense of urgency and patience and a sense of complexity and everything they can learn about the processes of the natural world, if we are going to protect what our science tells us is at the core of life, the richness and diversity of the gene pool. The task may be beyond us. Wildlife biologists these days often have meetings with titles like “Which Species Can We Save” or “Which Species Are We Willing To Save.” But we have to act as if we can accomplish it. We have to act as if the soul gets to choose.

Professor Eric Falci and the Science of the Lyric

2009-03-15T10:04:00.000-07:00

This past fall sophomore English major Sarah Watson enrolled in Professor Eric Falci's ENGL 180L: Lyric Verse. Reading the semester's course descriptions, she had been intrigued by the course's claim that much of the semester would be spent "sorting out what the title of this course means." When it went on to mention an exceedingly diverse list of poets -- from Sappho to Dickinson, Marvell to Ashbery -- along with a no less various catalogue of critical concepts -- chaos theory, cognitive science, ecology -- she wasn't exactly sure what she was in for, but she knew it would be fascinating. The wide-ranging concerns of the course actually coincided with Sarah's own academic orientations because, in addition to majoring in English, she is pre-med and tackles her science requirements with interest (if not always with total enthusiasm).

Sarah's hunch about the course turned out to be accurate. As Professor Falci's syllabus and lectures lived up to the course description and ranged widely across poets and critical texts, Sarah found new delights in and new insights into literature that she had never expected. One of her favorite parts of the course was re-reading Dickinson, since, she said, she hadn't enjoyed her poetry very much when she had read it in high school for the first time. When Professor Falci assigned Virginia Jackson's book Dickinson's Misery along with the poetry, Sarah saw how one could read history back into the lyric form, which had seemed, at first glance, to be outside of time. Sarah's interest in the argument that Jackson makes about the Dickinson's fascicles -- small, hand-tied volumes in which Dickinson bound her poetry -- led her to write an essay on a Dickinson website which contextualizes the poetry with their manuscript versions.

Professor Falci noted that he took a lot of chances in putting his course together. Not only did he include a number of difficult and experimental poets on his syllabus, but he also challenged his students with works as opaque as Martin Heidegger's "Poetically Man Dwells," Giorgio Agamben's "The End of the Poem," and "The Rejection of Closure" by the department's own Lyn Hejinian. Falci was delighted, however, by the chutzpah and motivation of his students as they wrestled with these difficult texts. For her part, Sarah said that she greatly liked the Agamben but wasn't sure if she really understood the Heidegger. Reading essays like these together with works like Harryette Mullen's Sleeping with the Dictionary showed her how much
fun it could be to watch people try and figure out how to make meaning out of theoretical or poetic opacity.

Sarah also said she enjoyed reading Marianne Moore's poem "The Fish" along with the linguist Roman Jakobson's famous essay "Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances," which uses research into aphasia to present a theory of language on the basis of to two fundamental functions of metaphor and metonymy. To her surprise, her roommate was reading the same essay for an Anthropology course. The coincidence sparked some interesting conversations as the two compared their professors’ different uses of Jakobson's theory. This cross-over with science -- along with her own interest in medicine and chemistry -- led Sarah to write her final paper on the prevalence of chemical metaphors in some of the poetry and theory she had read over the semester. She was particularly intrigued by T.S. Eliot's metaphor of the catalyst in his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and the imagery of "precipitates" that cultural theorist Theodor Adorno has used in his work. What is the bridge, she wondered, between science and literature that our current organization of knowledge obscures?

For that matter, as this blog has been wondering over the past few weeks, what is the bridge between literature and the "real world" that we sometimes forget to notice? After Professor Falci's course, it seems as if Sarah is in prime position to give that question some very interesting, and perhaps unexpected, answers.

But we are also interested in your thoughts on the issue; feel free to leave a response!

A bard by another portrait...

2009-03-11T14:03:00.000-07:00

Everyone is excited that we have a new picture of the Bard. And isn't he a looker! As reported in the NYT:

"His face is open and alive, with a rosy, rather sweet expression, perhaps suggestive of modesty...There is nothing superior or haughty in the subject, which one might well expect to find in a face set off by such rich clothing. It is the face of a good listener, as well as of someone who exercised a natural restraint."

While the LA Times cheered that we are now blessed with a "hot young Shakespeare," the Irish Times and Irish independent are quick to point out that the portrait hung for years winking at an Irish house in an Irish family.

Verlyn Klinkenborg is on the other hand, is more meditative: "The most that can really be said is that the Cobbe portrait...was probably painted in Shakespeare's lifetime and that it bears a likeness to other reputed Shakespeare portraits...But given the stylized conventions of Elizabethan portraiture, a police dragnet in London circa 1610 might have turned up many dozens of men with a resemblance to this image. What we have, as always with Shakespeare, is a trail that leads us back to the past and dissolves into uncertainty..." And Andrew Dickson and Charlotte Higgins are more skeptical; Dickson notes that "this isn't the first 'new' image of Shakespeare we've seen," and despite the approval of Professor Stanley Wells (chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust) Tarnya Cooper, the 16th-century curator at London's National Portrait Gallery is "very sceptical," and notes that while she does "respect Wells's scholarship enormously...portraiture is a very different area, and this doesn't add up."

In any case, the hits keep coming as architects discover the remains of Shakespeare's first theatre (before the Globe) out in "the suburbs of sin" surrounding central London. The Tower Theatre company, which owns the site, plans to build "a 21st Century equivalent of the original playhouse, a 'no frills, hard-working place of entertainment' that would bring London theatre 'back to its roots.'" And because it was the right time, apparently, the archaeologists even found a piece of 16th-century pottery with what looks like Shakespeare's face on the site. "There is no proof that the face on the fragment of Beauvais pottery is the Bard's," Maev Kennedy reports, "but insiders are excited."

Teaching at San Quentin, Installment 3

2009-03-08T08:49:00.001-07:00

This week we present a third-installment of graduate student Annie McClanahan's account of teaching at San Quentin correctional facility with the Prison University Project. Annie has contributed two previous posts on this topic, in which she addresses, first, the nature of the program in general and a short account of the class she most recently taught and, second, the nature of the prison itself as well as that of the students she teaches. In what follows, Annie speaks more pointedly on frequently asked questions about issues of safety and academic achievement specific to prison teaching.

Are you scared?/Is it safe?

The short answer is that no, I’m not, and yes, it is. In one way, it’s often very easy to forget that you are in a prison at all; it’s easy to slip up and say “Why don’t you email me your thesis statement?” forgetting that unlike at Berkeley, the students at San Quentin don’t typically have access even to word processors, let alone the internet. Almost every week a student will say to me as I’m leaving “Drive safe,” and nearly every time I have to bite back the quick-to-the lips commonplace “You too.”

In other ways, of course, it’s hard to forget you’re in an institution, and the guards at San Quentin constantly remind us, explicitly and implicitly, not to forget this important detail: one unique issue I’ve encountered there is the intense, difficult complexity of race and gender in the prison context; on this issue, it can occasionally feel like my students and I are speaking entirely different languages, and it is a continued challenge to walk the razor-thin line between understanding that we have on these questions fundamentally-different experiences and assumptions, and refusing to allow racist, sexist, or homophobic speech of any kind.

How does teaching at San Quentin compare to teaching outside of the prison, at Berkeley, for example?

I will say that my prison teaching has been particularly pedagogically challenging when it comes to the issue of classroom authority—not because the students there require more disciplining than students anywhere else, but because these are students who are in many cases older than I am, and who have a kind of “real world” experience that I obviously don’t. Being in the prison makes me even less inclined to rely on the kind of abstract authority behind “Why? Because I said so,” but once in a while I have to recognized that that’s the most appropriate answer. And the students there are, unfortunately, right to insistently ensure that they are being held to the same standard as students in any other college classroom—as Jody Lewen, the director of the Prison University Project and a former Ph.D. student in the Rhetoric Department puts it in her recent (and highly recommended) article in a special issue of PMLA dedicated to prison education, “many instructors [are] unsure of their students’ intellectual capabilities. Some of this may [be] related to the teachers’ lack of experience teaching adults with poor basic skills, but…it also [has] to do with largely unconscious stereotypes about the intellectual potential of people in prison…Trapped in these stereotypes, teachers fear frustrating or even humiliating students…The ‘look on the bright side’ attitude also seem[s] to reflect…the simple desire to feel positive about the program—to feel effective rather than inadequate” (Jody Lewen, “Academics Belong in Prison: On Creating a University at San Quentin,” PMLA May 2008, p. 693-4).

Jody goes on to point out that questions of grade inflation are nearly as likely to emerge in “normal” classrooms—certainly I’ve struggled with this at Berkeley too—but she is right in observing that the main challenge of San Quentin is not that it is frightening or intimidating to teach the students there, but that it is sometimes hard to know when to take their context and life experience into account, and when to hold them to a more universally-acknowledged standard of academic achievement. Lest this seem too intractable a problem, however, I want to note that this has become easier for me as I’ve gotten more accustomed both to teaching in the program and to teaching generally; confronting these questions has, I think, made me a much better teacher in whatever kind of classroom I’m in. And because I recently graded a fantastic bunch of revised critical essays from my students this semester, I can also say that it has not been hard with this particular class to know what standard to apply, since they are almost without exception performing at an impressively high level.

Literature on the Web: “a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit…”

2009-03-04T12:53:00.000-08:00

In a TLS review, Jonathan Bate suggests that Milton has been a mirror which each era's biographers have used to reflect their professional self-image. "For Masson," he writes "it was sufficient to be clubbable around the Athenaeum. For William Empson in the following century, the professor of literature could be the naughty schoolboy throwing paper darts from the back row of the classroom (the Christian-baiting of Milton's God)." In reviewing Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns' new biography, then, Bate notes that we see, in turn, "a Milton who would have been at home in the corridors of New Labour power or in the managerialized modern university. He is a nimble committee man, like some wily pro-vice-chancellor who proudly wears his radical credentials yet is prepared to write position papers to order and to modify his stance in response to subtle changes in the ideological direction of his leader." Bate doesn't much care for this approach, it seems, judging "an authoritative Life of Milton in which the pamphlet "Animadversions upon the Remonstrants Defence against Smectymnuus" is given three times as much space as Lycidas" to be only "symptomatic of an age in which professors in English departments have been 'making literature history.'" I have to admit, though, I don't mind seeing the pendulum swing this way a bit. It's not like anyone is going to stop reading "Lycidas" (or that long epic he wrote), and there are just too many gems buried in Milton's non-fiction prose to bemoan the fact that a little light is getting cast on the stuff he spent most of his life actually writing.

John Banville may think that civilization invented the sentence, but the death of writing does not - Adam Kirsch tells us - necessarily mean the end of writing: "Human beings wrote long before there were newspapers or books or even paper, and they will continue to do so when these have been replaced by pixels and bytes." In his Slate review of several new biographies of Samuel Johnson, Kirsch suggests that the age of the professional writer may be coming to an end, an ironic three centuries after "the greatest professional writer in English literature" declared that "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money." Kirsch has a very low opinion of "a future when writing is something done casually, in brief blog bursts in one's spare time" and wonders whether "the kind of professional confidence and expertise that Johnson cultivated over a lifetime of paid work will appear as regrettably obsolete as books and newspapers themselves."

In that vein, it probably says something that Motoko Rich's NYT article doesn't focus on the literary merits of Jonathan Littell's 983-page novel The Kindly Ones - which are presumably great enough to justify "Publisher's Big Gamble on Divisive French Novel" - but rather on how amazing it is that an American publisher would take a risk on publishing a novel not only translated from French but also saddled with the handicap of having won France's most prestigious literary prize. Quel surprise!

In the same issue as it published fragments of the late David Foster Wallace's unfinished novels (and D.T.Max's tremendously sad account of Wallace's "Unifinished"), the New Yorker also had a review of Blake Bailey's new biography of John Cheever, and I couldn't help paying more attention to the by-line (the late John Updike) than to the substance of the review. I did, however, enjoy Bailey's estimation that he was one of possibly ten persons to have read through the the "forty-three hundred pages, mostly typed single-space," of Cheever's private journals, what he calls "a monument of tragicomic solipsism." But as the good people who are blogging Henry David Thoreau's journals (here and here), a sort of "this day in Thoreau's journal," there's nothing wrong with a bit of good old fashioned solipsism every now and again.

Out of the Classroom, Into the Community

2009-03-01T08:53:00.000-08:00

In last week's post, we focused on the ways in which two current graduate students are

Artwork currently on display at the Alphonse Berber Gallery.

leveraging the new media of the blogosphere to disseminate critical thinking on history and literature in broad new ways. This week, we bring you examples of a different, perhaps more "concrete" kind of outreach by describing the efforts of the Department's students to get out into the community with their thoughts on art and literature by opening a new art gallery and participating in poetry conversations on the radio.

Indeed, undergraduates Cameron Jackson and Jessica Cox have dived headlong into the community in their roles as co-directors of the newly opened Alphonse Berber Gallery on Bancroft Avenue across from the University. Housed in a beautiful 7200 sq. ft. Julia Morgan-designed building, the gallery had its grand opening on February 27 and presents the work of dynamic, aggressively innovative emerging to mid-career contemporary artists. It describes its inaugural show, "New Nature," which runs until April 11, in the following terms:

"'New Nature' will focus on how fourteen West Coast artists engage with and interrogate their relationship to the natural world in ways that are personal, provocative, and at times seemingly hostile toward traditional notions of ecological awareness. The work of Reuben Margolin, Justin Margitich, and MachineHistories (Jason Pilarski & Steven Joyner) translates their experience of

Artwork currently on display at the Alphonse Berber Gallery.

the wild, elemental, and biological into a mechanistic idiom. Viewers find themselves contemplating the natural by way of the very ontological mode that supposedly alienated them from it in the first place. In part, "New Nature" seeks to challenge the mindset that regards technology and environment as inherently opposed, exploring how they serve as means for engaging with and understanding one another. Imagining the possibilities for reconciliation, the artists presented in "New Nature" compel us to find new modes of participation in our continually evolving environment."

In a somewhat different way, the department's graduate students have also ventured out of the classroom and into the larger community. Second-year PhD student and practicing poet Gillian Osborne describes how Professor Cecil Giscombe (whose award-winning book we recently profiled here) took the helm of the graduate poetry workshop which the department offers each fall. Though the workshop had its usual diverse enrollment from a smattering of departments — from English to Public Health, with a variety of other Humanities sprinkled in between, Gillian notes that, with Professor Giscombe, something was different. His sights were set, she reports, on steering the class not only toward an expansion of their poetic practices, but also toward a broadening of where those practices might occur. Over the semester, they were to embark on an experiment of poetry in public.

This public was reached via the air, courtesy of a local radio station in Point Reyes, KWMR

Professor Giscombe and his workshop in Point Reyes.

whose DJ Brian Kervin had invited the class to participate in the “Swervin’ Kirven Show.” The class thought about what poetry on the radio could mean, how it might sound. Making three trips to KWMR, each time with a different assortment of students from the class, the workshop conducted live and wandering conversations that forged their way into the thickets of debates over “poetry of place,” questions of form and translation, and investigations of different poetic registers. They read their own work as well as that of other poets, ranging from the deeply canonized to the insistently disruptive; there were contests—limericks and clichés—and callers. Gillian writes, "We couldn’t entirely anticipate what would happen, and, since allowing oneself to be surprised is an essential element to Cecil’s pedagogy and poetic approach, this was entirely the point."

The English Department is proud to have such vibrant and pioneering students as part of its community.

Literary Blogging

2009-02-26T22:06:00.000-08:00

What does it mean to be a public intellectual in 21st century America? And to what extent does the often intensely private work of an academic speak to larger issues in today’s world?

Aaron Bady blogs at zunguzungu.wordpress.com.

Two fifth-year English PhD candidates, Aaron Bady and Paul Kerschen, think often about these questions. Both Aaron and Paul are active bloggers – though with somewhat divergent styles and objectives – and they see the forum of the blog as a way to redefine the border between the private work of the academic and the public role of the intellectual.

Aaron’s blogging practices seem to exhibit this redefinition of boundaries most explicitly. He is present online in three different venues: his personal blog, the history group blog Cliopatra and the literary studies group blog The Valve. He started his personal blog during an extended trip to Tanzania –the blog’s name “zunguzungu” is a combination of the Swahili word for white person and for “dizziness,” especially the disorientation of love. From the reportage of his African travels, Aaron developed an online voice blending personal reflections with the more academic concerns which have led him to participate in more explicitly academic blogs. He reports that the practice of presenting intellectual ideas to a wide audience of educated readers has made him consider the practical terms of academic communication; the difficulties of writing between multiple audiences has forced him to rethink the assumptions and information he takes for granted that might prevent his readers (wherever they might be) from following his writing. In this sense, Aaron sees his blogging practice as an exercise in a radical interdisciplinarity – not just between discourses of History and Literature, but between the academy and the world beyond. Indeed, Aaron is particularly successful at bridging these boundaries: we are delighted to announce that his personal blog recently received Cliopatra’s “Best Writer” award for history blogging. As a result of this award, Aaron decided to “come out” as the writer of his personal blog, which he had been previously been writing under a pseudonym.

Paul Kerschen’s involvement with blogs participates in another kind of interdisciplinarity. As an English major at Stanford in the late 90s with an interest in computers and web design, Paul took a summer internship with IBM in the summer of 1998.

Paul Kerschen blogs at www.metameat.net.

He reports that he helped to maintain a number of internal websites for the company, but that his skills in writing proved even more useful when the computer scientists needed to write a technical manual or press release. He also notes that, since summer internships like this often involve long stretches of idleness, he got the chance to read and puzzle over novels like James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (Since both Joyce and Faulkner figure prominently in Paul's dissertation project, one might say that IBM is responsible for his intellectual development in more ways than one.) Paul started blogging at http://www.metameat.net/ in 2000, when blogs were scarcer than today and often took more personal and idiosyncratic turns. He reports that his writing over the years has consistently taken advantage of the mediation provided by an online persona, which offers various sorts of protection or veiling, and therefore also a testing ground for his favorite modernists' theories of the relation between author and text. Paul's interest in veiling corresponds, in fact, to his role on this blog, since he is the technical wizard "behind the curtain" whose computer skills are responsible for the blog's elegant appearance and smooth operation.

Given the potential for new kinds of connections and sociability which blogs make possible, Paul and Aaron note the rise of the “institutionalized” blog – newspapers, university presses and magazines have all begun an online blog component – but observe that literary studies is trailing fields like history and anthropology in this respect. Yet the English Department at Berkeley, whose faculty and students often write or think about media theory as an extension of the study of literature, seems an ideal place to explore the medium of the blog more explicitly. Because the literature taught in the English department in many cases predates not only the electronic medium and blog form but also the printing press itself, the writers we teach often meditate on the changing technology and new media responsible for the dissemination of their words. (Geoffrey Chaucer, for example, wrote a poem to the scribe who copied The Canterbury Tales.) Our own blog is thus also an exercise in this kind of meditation. Aaron has agreed to join Paul on the department’s blogging team and will be posting a weekly collection of interesting and relevant literary links, so that the UC Berkeley English department’s foray into the online sphere will contribute to the fullest extent possible to the public mission of the nation’s premiere public university.

Worlds of Literature

2009-02-25T10:18:00.000-08:00

Every Wednesday, we'll post a round-up of links which may be of interest to the larger Berkeley English community. Let us know if you see anything you think we should pass along!

The great Sudanese writer, Tayeb Salih, passed away late last Tuesday. He's best known for his 1966 novel Season of Migration to the North, which Edward Said called "among the six finest novels to be written in modern Arabic literature." I want to know what the other five on that list were; it's a remarkable novel, and one that only gets better and more interesting with re-readings. Obituaries in the New York Times, the Guardian, and the Sudan Tribune. And Mustapha Marrouchi writes a more personal remembrance in Arab Comment and in a lovely memorial, the editors of AllAfrica hope that Tayeb Salih went "with a heart full of song and a face awash with a huge smile."

Was Dorothy Wordsworth "one of the casualties of 19th-century femininity" or "the most distinguished of English prose writers who never wrote a line for the general public"? In the New York Times, "A Brother's Keeper: The Other Wordsworth," Dwight Garner reviews Frances Wilson's The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth: A Life.

Janet Maslin, "What Was With the Peacocks and the Gothic Fiction?" reviews Brad Gooch's Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor, noting that "this mystical, ornery, ardently admired Southern writer" has been long overdue for a major new biography like this one.

In "The myths of Gabriel García Márquez," Philip Swanson reviews Gerald Martin's Gabriel García Márquez: A Life, the culmination of seventeen years of research which he predicts will be the authoritative work on what he calls the Nobel Prize winning novelist. Swanson is the author of Latin American Fiction: A short introduction, so presumably he knows what he's talking about, but I'd love to know on what basis he judges Garcia-Marquez to be "Latin America's perhaps only truly global writer."

In the Sunday Times, "Salman's Perfect Safe House," Geoffrey Robertson remembers hiding Salman Rushdie in his home, and how it "brought many of his left-wing friends into a closer and warmer contact with officers of Special Branch than they would have ever thought likely or even healthy."

Claudia Roth Pierpont's "Another Country," in The New Yorker, explores how James Baldwin made Istanbul what she calls his "second or third not-quite-home," during a period she also notes to have been "inescapably Baldwin's American decade." The essay is essentially a very long review of Magdalena J. Zaborowska's new book, James Baldwin's Turkish Decade.

In the Times Literary Supplement, "Amos Oz and Reverie" Anthony Cummins reviews Amos Oz's new novel, Rhyming Life and Death, which Oz has called a challenge to the reader who would rather be "handed a prepared dish" than be "invited into the kitchen." Cummins notes that such "solemn metafictional musing rarely feels like anything more than ballast for the breezy draughtsmanship of the character sketches," and wonders in the end whether "the novel may in the end be too slight to survive its own scrutiny."

A Sense of Where We Are: Two Professors Win Awards for Recent Books

2009-02-15T09:18:00.000-08:00

In the past year, Professors Ian Duncan and C. S. Giscombe were each awarded prizes for their recent books. Duncan’s Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh won the The National Library of Scotland Saltire Research Book of the Year, while Giscombe’s book of poetry Prairie Style received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Two graduate students, third-year Alex Covalciuc and first-year Rebecca Gaydos, have put together some reflections on the significance of these books, which, though different in scope and genre, share a deep and abiding interest in the influence of place.

Taking as its subject post-Enlightenment Edinburgh (a period stretching roughly from 1802, the year the Edinburgh Review was founded, to 1832 with the passing of the first Reform Bill and the death of Sir Walter Scott), Scott's Shadow received recognition from the National Library of Scotland for the new insights it adds to the understanding of Scotland. Covalciuc, who has studied with Professor Duncan, details some of these insights:

"Duncan’s title evokes not only Walter Scott’s pervasive influence in the period but also, and more importantly, 'Scott’s own presence,' which, as Duncan notes, 'was not reducible to any of its various public, private, and secret personae' (xii). It is Duncan’s recognition of and detailed attention to Scott’s variegated 'personae'—the most successful novelist of the period; his involvement, both as an author and subject, in Edinburgh periodical culture; his patronage of future literati like James Hogg—that makes Scott’s Shadow more than just a story of influence. Indeed, Duncan’s richly textured narrative of Scott’s involvement in Romantic literary culture makes almost-forgotten figures like John Galt newly interesting, at the same time as it reorients and rethinks our conceptions of canonized figures like James Hogg and Thomas Carlyle. Although Duncan focuses primarily on the literary culture of Edinburgh, his discussion of Scott’s influence, influences, and ubiquity as a man of letters provides revised accounts of Maria Edgeworth, marginal figures like Susan Ferrier, Scottish Romanticism as a literary movement and even the novel itself as a genre. The large scope and erudition of Scott’s Shadow, coupled with its careful and meticulous argumentation, will ensure that it casts its own long shadow of influence over the future study of Scottish Romanticism in particular, and British Romanticism more generally."

Across the Atlantic, the American Booksellers Assocation recognized the way in which C. S. Giscombe’s book Prairie Style roots itself in a different kind of landscape by awarding it one of its American Book Awards. Established in 1978 by the Before Columbus Foundation, the American Book Award is unique in that there are “no categories, no nominees, and therefore no losers.” The highly unusual and unpredictable assemblage of recipients attests to the fact that the Awards “are not bestowed by an industry organization, but rather are a writers’ award given by other writers.”

Rebecca Gaydos, a student and friend of Professor Giscombe’s, describes how fitting it was for Prairie Style to receive such an award: just as the Awards aim at recognizing “literary excellence without limitations or restrictions,” Prairie Style is, for her, itself an exercise in unpredictability. She expands on this unpredictability in her account of the work:

"Hovering on the border between verse and prose, Prairie Style entertains the feeling and the fact of range. Thinking about neighborhood, location, and architecture, the book wanders from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonian homes, to the Robert Taylor housing projects of Chicago, to the campsites of the multi-racial, nomadic Tribe of Ishmael. Giscombe explores the ambiguity of location, and yet, ambiguity itself is interrupted by the certain and sudden appearance of animals (foxes on the prairie, crocodiles in the Caribbean). Giscombe engages the “slang and lazy talk” of jokes and love, as well as argument’s 'formal economy.' Prairie Style is about the shape of getting horizontal. It’s also about image, exchange, property, laziness, articulation, love, Frankenstein’s nameless monster, William Carlos Williams’ Elsie, the outline of appearances, Jamaica, the American Midwest… Prairie Style, like all of Giscombe’s poetry, does not lend itself to summation. Rather, it unfolds into a poetics of breadth and ambivalence: 'I prefer going over the junctions to being part of the argument. I like two buses rocking perilously close and metaphor judging you. I’m partial to ugly. I vary about the point where pleasure’s a train of waves.'"

Please join us in congratulating Professors Duncan and Giscombe for their outstanding contributions to the arts and humanities.

Berkeley Poetry Review: Call for Submissions

2009-02-11T08:53:00.000-08:00

The Berkeley Poetry Review publishes poetry by UC Berkeley faculty, students, staff, and alumni. The deadline for the 40th issue is March 1.

Those interested can submit up to four poems to berkeleypoetryreview at yahoo.com or leave them in our mailbox in 322 Wheeler. Detailed instructions can be found here.

Two English Majors Chosen for Inaugural Cohort of Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship

2009-02-08T08:34:00.000-08:00

In what follows, second-year graduate student Monica Huerta describes the inauguration of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellows Program at Berkeley. A Mellon Fellow herself, Huerta playfully profiles two undergraduate English majors, Cecilia Caballero (who also focuses on Chicano Studies) and Teresa Jimenez, who are part of the first cohort of Berkeley Fellows.

***
In Arts and Humanities Graduate Diversity Program Director Josephine Moreno’s words, there is “something very special” about the five students chosen to inaugurate the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellows (MMUF) Program at Berkeley. Founded in 1988 to address the shortage of faculty of color in higher education, the MMUF “targets students with exceptional academic promise and potential for careers that will contribute to diversity and equal opportunity in the academy. The program supports Fellows by providing guidance, role models and the environment and resources to strive for the highest academic goals.” We in the English Department are particularly proud to be represented by Cecila Caballero and Teresa Jiminez, two outstanding young scholars.

Becoming a Fellow is not easy. The application process is much like applying to graduate school and involves a statement of purpose, a lengthy writing sample and an interview in which each applicant is expected to articulate not just their scholarly contribution to their chosen field, but also how they envision their academic career in relation to Mellon’s mission of promoting diversity in universities. Before all of this, however, there occurs what Mellon Fellows refer to as “the talk:” a professor pulls you aside after class, or shifts in her seat during a routine office hours visit before asking, “Have you considered going to graduate school?” Glowing compliments about your “work” follow, and you are honored (surprised) that they consider your late-nights turned into essays and ideas turned into clumsy questions something called “work.” Often, “the talk” is the first time a student considers the professoriate a viable career option. In the cases of Cecilia and Teresa, we have Professors Genaro Padilla, Laura Pérez, Gautam Premnath, and José Saldivar to thank for nudging these powerful women in the direction of MMUF and the academy.

After chatting with these two English majors over coffee, I found that Cecilia and Theresa certainly proved Moreno exactly right: there is something very special and, I would add, very exciting about these young scholars.

Cecilia Caballero
Hometown: Antioch, California

About CC: She is most likely reading several books at once. The day we met, she was in the middle of at least The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest, Carla Trujillo’s Living Chicana Theory, and Ana Castillo’s The Guardians.

Caballero began her career in reading obsessed with any written material she could get her hands on, including the backs of cereal boxes. She prioritized her education even as, in high school and through her time attending community college, she became the main source of income for her family. Her father had suffered a work-related accident that left him disabled; he could no longer perform his physically demanding jobs in agriculture and construction. She repeats his cautionary words, “Use your brains, not your hands,” and it’s clear her strength is her family.

Caballero hit the ground running as soon as she transferred to Berkeley. Her eyes shone with excitement describing the transition, especially in Professor Laura Pérez’s Chicana feminism class, where she discovered an interest in Chicana performance art to compliment her study of Chicano literature.

Caballero sees her work in comparatively analyzing forms of indigeneity in Chicano culture as fulfilling both intellectual and social concerns. She envisions her role in the academy as part of the larger movement toward continuing to broaden the parameters of “American” literature and culture. Through her career as a scholar, she hopes to use her intellectual work as an exemplar so that her students might nurture their own aspirations. For her work as a Mellon Fellow, Professor Genaro Padilla of the English department will serve as her mentor.

The only one of her four siblings and the first in her family to attend college, Caballero is already changing her community’s notion that Berkeley and schools like Berkeley are “for geniuses.” The reality is that higher education draws its strength from students as committed to their curiosity as Caballero.

Book that made CC first love reading: The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros

Book that made CC first love scholarship: Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America by Mae M. Ngai

Favorite Berkeley smell: incense (“…someone always seems to be burning it.”)

Favorite affective response to literature: challenged

Teresa Jimenez
Hometown: Berkeley, California; Portland, Oregon (born: Guadalajara, Mexico)

About TJ: When telling me why she worked after finishing high school before going to college, Jimenez stops to consider, “I just kept getting promoted,” and smiles. Even chatting with her briefly, it’s not hard to figure out why.

She affectionately calls her mother, whose family is from West Virginia and Pennsylvania, a “hippie Catholic,” to explain how it is her older brother and sister came to be born in Yugoslavia and Zambia, respectively. Her father preferred that she be born in Guadalajara, although she lived in Berkeley until she was eleven. Jimenez’s parents met as students at Laney College in Oakland, before they transferred to Cal to finish their undergraduate degrees. Jimenez would later move to Portland – where she attended high school – with her mother, who had by then converted to Buddhism.

Returning to Berkeley after high school, Jimenez worked in local restaurants, where promotions kept her busy and writing creatively kept her imagination fueled. Two years ago, Jimenez decided it was time to go back to school. “I knew from the get-go,” she says, “that I wanted to be an English major and that I wanted to go to school full time.” Her mother has an M.A. in education and her father completed his PhD in Berkeley’s Spanish department. Teaching, suffice to say, is in her blood. “I idolize teachers; I always have.”

She says of her aspirations for mentorship in the academy: “I want all my students to know that academia or writing are possibilities for them.” Jimenez is equally dedicated to her scholarship and to her creative writing and wants her students to feel authorized to explore all their writerly voices. Currently, Jimenez envisions working with her mentor, Professor José Saldivar of the English department, on a project that compares W.E.B. DuBois’ idea of “double-consciousness” with Gloria Anzaldúa’s “mestiza.” Jimenez is also interested in exploring representations of alienation and solidarity in the work of Sandra Cisneros and Toni Morrison.

Book that made TJ first love reading: The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkein; Greek mythology; The Yellow Fairy Tale Book by Andrew Lang; Mexican folktales

Book that made TJ first love scholarship: Collected Poems by Pablo Neruda

Favorite Berkeley smell: jasmine

Favorite affective response to literature: inspired/empowered

Professor Kathleen Donegan: "Finding the Story"

2009-02-01T09:18:00.000-08:00

This past November, Professor Kathleen Donegan was asked by a student of hers who was serving as the President of the Prytanean Women's Honor Society to speak to the society on finding a balance between life and work as a female academic. Speaking at the Gender Equity Resource Center, Professor Donegan designed her talk as a continuation of the thread of the conversations she had had with the students in her course on early American women writers. Thinking about the forces that shaped the narratives which these early American women told about their lives, she contributed a story of her own, the narrative of the poignant intersection of her life as both an English professor and as a woman and mother.
***

When women talk about a career/life balance, we often step away from figurative language and toward a language of figuring. We are rightly skeptical about cultural messages that come wrapped in the words of “value,” “worth,” and the final “measure” of a life, and turn instead to a different model of “accounting” for ourselves: costs and benefits, sacrifices and investments, opting-in or opting-out, and always, always management. To chart our paths, we get good at making charts, and learning how to follow them.

So tonight, I am going to take a bit of a risk in turning back to the figurative. It’s not that I don’t live by lists and charts and calendars, because I do. Even if my “five-year plan” changes, there’s a part of my mind that’s always set in the future, and operating backwards. (As in: If I want to accomplish “X” by 2010, what do I need to do be working on right now?) But tonight I want to talk about what might happen if one loses confidence in the accounting and the balance sheets; loses a sense of the bottom line: loses, perhaps, the very story of one’s life.

When I was a sophomore in high school, I came across a phrase that I had no art to decipher, but that nonetheless made a little knot in my memory. In her book One Writer’s Beginnings, Eudora Welty says that the job of the writer is “to find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists.” Maybe it was the rhythm, the way the words swerved and swayed innocently into a dark place – and then stood still. “To find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists.”

The whole quotation is this: "Writing fiction," Welty says, "has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, to find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists. The strands are all there: to the memory nothing is lost."

Since I wanted to be a writer, I took this mystery as my charge, and knowing nothing of persistence, or clarity, or anything beyond an overwhelming desire to go deep, I threw myself into the tangle with all my heart and soul. A career path it wasn’t.

For many years, if I wasn’t actually finding a story, stories were finding me. And losing me too. Some of those stories protected me, and some surprised me. Some I clung to, and some I fought fiercely. Many were not about me. Many were not even true but, believe me, the tangle was thick with them. Getting older, one is tempted to refer to whole swatches of the complicated past by a single name. Here I’ll give in to that temptation, and call this time of remitting pursuit of the tangle: “my twenties.”

Later, in graduate school, there was a certain real thicket where two of my important life stories collided. I was at Yale in the American Studies Department, and I was working on the early periods of contact and settlement in the Americas. The “unknown in a human lifetime” long ago won my abiding respect, and I found in the archive of the New World a place where the unknown was the central experience to an extraordinary, and fascinating, degree. I was 30 year old as I finished my coursework; I’d been married for four years; and I wanted to have a baby.

Now I had this largely figured out. I’d entered graduate school late, and would probably not receive my degree until I was over 35. If I got a job right away, and received tenure as soon as possible, I could be tenured at 42. I knew I wanted three children. So, plugging those imaginary babies into this projected formula, there were a few outcomes. I could finish my dissertation quickly, get a job, and then have “the children” close together during my assistant professor years. Or, I could wait until I got tenure and then have perhaps fewer children, but as a securely employed, if older, mother. Or, I could just start now, at 30, and see what happened. That’s the one I chose.

In the third year of graduate school, my job was to study for oral examinations. My four fields were: Early American Literature, 19th Century American Literature, American Women’s History, and Colonial American History. So, my thinking was this: be pregnant while reading for orals (when most students fell out of sight anyways), take the exams, have the baby, stay home with the baby for the next few months (when most students are just recovering from their exams anyway), slide through the summer, and be ready to go again in September. The baby would be six months old, and I’d be back in action. It would be like a stealth maneuver. I’d finish coursework with my class, and emerge in a year’s time with orals passed and a baby in tow.

What I didn’t fully anticipate was that this marvelous agenda placed me sitting for my oral examinations when I was nine months pregnant. The whole plan actually hinged on this convergence, when the transition to candidacy for the PhD came at the exact time as the transition to motherhood.

My methods of accounting could not account for this: being entirely and extravagantly embodied as a woman at the very moment when my future capacity as a scholar – the depth, reach, and promise of my individual intellect – was ritually examined and evaluated. On entering the room, and lowering myself into a chair, I made a small joke – something about being glad I was supposed to sit there for two hours because I was afraid I might not be able to get back up. A titter, a laugh – enough to both acknowledge and distract from the insistent reality of my condition, and my choices. But despite this deflection there emerged, in the thick of that particular tangle, an undeniably clear line that persisted. It was me in that chair – all body, all mind, copious language pouring in and out of me, the steady galloping beat of another heart inside me – never before had I been so large, so full.

I had three children before I finished graduate school. Zeke was born in 1998, Leo in 2001, and Mercy in 2003. I received my Ph.D. in 2006, my dissertation won national recognition, and in 2007 I began as an assistant professor in Berkeley’s English Department – my first job. No doubt: I had found the story I wanted and it was incredible, and it was true.

Except that this is not really a true story. Because in my true story, the balance between my work and my life has very little to do with figuring things out, and everything to do with the unknown.

Let me approach things this way: There are moments in one’s writing when one feels the work shift its direction. The language begins leading the argument into a different territory. For me, one of these moments came in my dissertation when I was writing about the early years of the settlement of Plymouth Colony. After narrating some basic history of the settlement, I commented: “While this account is factual, it is not true.” The sentence surprised me. I could anticipate history professors and future editors making unpleasant comments in the margins of my manuscript. But in the act of writing that sentence, I knew I was committed to following out the mysteries of its claim, regardless.

Here I was, asserting that the facts about early Plymouth Colony, as we have understood and transmitted them historically, were not in dispute. But they masked a greater truth. Just a moment ago I gave you a series of dates and names and places that summed up my life/work narrative, and those were the plain facts. But those facts are different from truth, different from finding the clear line that persists. And in my experience, being willing – or being forced – to let go of the story you’re following is what brings you closer to that line. One day after my son Leo was born, he died. And I was forced to let go of my story.

I think the words “forced to let go of my story” are not right. No language is right, but maybe this: The story of my life burned hot in my hands, seared my chest, and then flew away from me like a meteor, scorching, roaring, blazing across the sky. Gone. A split-second that lasted forever. The losses involved in Leo’s death were, are, unaccountable. I know more about them than anyone, and they remain deeply unknown. But even to speak of losses implies the biggest lie of all – that somewhere, sometime, a “balance” of “gain” will be found. Where? … in wisdom, in compassion; in the sheer courage of surviving; in healing; in the miracle of another child; in places deepened by sorrow being filled with joy? Fine; but any narrative I tried to figure out missed a big truth. Learning how to be Leo’s mother – and that is a very long story – I had to stop looking for balance, or at least looking for any comfort there.

How? Just one story for tonight. Every year on the anniversary of Leo’s death, my husband David and I would go down to the ocean where we scattered his ashes, and repeat the prayers and poems we read at his memorial. Ring the chimes that we rang then, say the words that we said then, let the waves splash up onto our shins like we did then. Then we would turn around, walk back up the beach, and return (almost) to our lives. On the fourth year, it was different. Our other children, Zeke and Mercy, were with us – still very young. Walking down to the surf, I just turned to David and said, “I’m going in.” And I did, all the way in to where the waves were breaking, and beyond that to where waves broke that never reached the shore. And I fought them, and ducked them, and let them crash on me. I battled the ocean. I cursed it. I got turned around in it, and got pulled under by it, and then pushed back up and still buoyed along. Whether or not I liked it. And I floated on top of some waves and dove under others, and rode on some, and threw myself against others until I was exhausted. And I said – I yelled to no one – “I give up. You win.” Back on shore there was my family, and I swam toward them. Back at home, I had wet sand stuck to my body, like you always do after a day at the beach. I showered and put on clean clothes. That was the last time I needed to mark – in time – the day I lost Leo.

When I was asked to give this talk, I didn’t know I would share this with you. But I suggested the title “Finding the Story” because Eudora Welty’s phrase immediately leapt to mind: “to find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists.” Revisiting the passage, other phrases led me deeper in: “an abiding respect for the unknown,” “where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect,” and finally this: “The strands are all there: to the memory nothing is lost." I realize that my work, the honor of my work, is to not ignore the knots, but to find and follow and connect what might be there in the tangle. Not only in my own story, but in the stories of countless, countless others. When I read, I need to ask: What if this is not the story I think it is? What else might be true? How might this story want to be told? Pursuing these questions requires going in deep – to archives, to texts, to histories, to memory itself. In order to read so that nothing is lost on me, some stories need to unravel.

How does this translate into scholarly practice? Again, just one story for tonight. In that example of Plymouth Colony, Governor William Bradford recounted that during first winter in the settlement, so many died that “the living could scarce bury the dead.” Given the numbers, it was not just a figure of speech. Bradford’s words have famously settled those first colonists’ suffering into an image of hardship and survival, but who else might have told the story differently? Native peoples, of course: the Patuxet, Wampanoags, and other groups in the eastern woodlands, but where would we find it? Where would a Native record of deaths in Plymouth exist when many of these groups themselves were suffering catastrophic mortality in response to European diseases, and contending with the social, political, cultural, and spiritual upheaval that followed? Who else told this story? Knowing that early New England court records often included long narrative depositions, I began searching there, and found a story about Plymouth told by a man named Phineas Pratt, four decades later, in 1662.

Pratt was not part of the Plymouth colony initially, but belonged to another group of Englishmen at a place called Wessagussett, whose colony had failed in a disaster of starvation and horrid violence. Pratt alone escaped to Plymouth. Much later, in a court case about land claims, Phineas Pratt was asked to narrate his earliest memories of the planting Plymouth settlement. Having barely survived Wessaguestt, Pratt remembered being shocked at the diminished population of Plymouth, and asking “where were all the people that had come over in the Ship.” He was told that they had died. And moreover, that the colony was so weakened, the people “so distressed with sickness” that, “fearing the savages should know it, [they] had set up their sick men with their muskets upon their Rests and the backs leaning against trees.”

Although Pratt’s testimony was confirmed by the court, it was completely expunged from later accounts. Other colonial writers quoted Pratt verbatim right up until the moment he talks about “men with their muskets and their backs leaning against trees,” and then cut him off. And, of course, future histories followed suit.

So: here is another image entirely that lays buried deep in old court records, one to answer and complete Bradford’s own. Those pilgrims who were scarce able to bury their dead also propped their sick men up in the forest, a ghostly sentinel, hoping that the silhouettes of the dying might look like an armed force when seen from the other side of the woods. Now suddenly, many other bodies, and many other stories, become visible. The dead men at Wessagussett, lost to history. The native scouts looking in at the English settlement, venturing out from weakened Indian villages whose strength the English still feared. The sick at Plymouth taking up this final and unlikely post, staking themselves against tree trunks in act that could only confirm they had entered a wilderness of spirit as well as form. All these hidden acts of witness and display and denial. Suddenly there is much more to read, a truth upon which factual accounting is content to cast only the merest glance, and then look away.

The point is to not look away. Sometimes not looking away comes like this, through doing more research. Sometimes it is by teasing at small threads that, when tugged, start to change the whole fabric of a text. Sometimes it means finding a story by piecing together elements of a life that have been scattered, carelessly, elsewhere. Sometimes it is simply refusing to move on from something mysterious. A woman named Mary Rowlandson, returned from Indian captivity, lies in bed at night. She is the only one awake in a house that is asleep. “I can remember the time,” she writes, “when I used to lay whole nights together without workings in my thoughts. Now it is other ways with me.” These are the sentences that started my study of early America.

After all, what if it is true? What if it is true that: “to the memory, nothing is lost.” Surely, then, a different type of accounting is necessary, because we have to chart our courses two ways at once: back, back into a past, and on into a future.

The Early Academic Outreach Program

2009-01-25T12:34:00.000-08:00

In what follows, PhD candidate Jhoanna Infante details her experiences with the University's Early Academic Outreach Program and shows another way that the English Department gets involved with the surrounding Bay Area community.

***

One afternoon last summer, I unexpectedly found myself behind a podium defending the U.S. War on Mexico of 1846, channeling President James K. Polk’s argument that Mexico instigated conflict by “invad[ing] our territory and shed[ding] American blood on American soil.” At the time, I was teaching a summer writing course for high school students, entitled Founding Words: Powerful Arguments in U.S. History. As part of an in-class debate designed to prepare the students for an upcoming essay, I had to muster all the zeal and evidence I could to defend an argument with which I disagreed. Though this was exactly in accord with the advice I had given my students earlier that day -- “You must understand your opponent’s argument in order to understand your own” – it was nevertheless strange to inhabit a pro-war, expansionist argument that had led to the deaths of thousands of American and Mexican soldiers. It reminded both me and my students how powerful words can be, and, over the next week, they became increasingly enthusiastic and skilled in the use of those words. I saw the results in their written analyses of the U.S. War on Mexico, which demonstrated their firm grasp of the multiple ways of interpreting that historical event.

This course was the fifth College Writing course that I have taught for the Pre-College Academy (PCA), a summer enrichment program of the University of California’s Early Academic Outreach Program (EAOP). Since 1985, EAOP has enrolled more than 200 students each year from under-resourced public high schools in the Bay Area in PCA math and/or writing courses; it reaches out in particular to students who come from low-income families or who will be the first in their family to attend college in the United States. EAOP also offers an SAT academy, year-round academic advising, and several programs that enable students to complete college courses while still in high school. EAOP’s philosophy that students will succeed if presented with opportunity, high expectations, and a well-coordinated support network shows results: 76% of EAOP students go on to two- or four-year colleges or universities.

PCA students in a 2008 College Writing class: left to right, Devonté Jackson, Gloria Vo and Christian Vasquez. Photo by Sarah Padula.

PCA courses have taught me that six weeks can positively transform a young student’s (and a young teacher’s) life. I first taught as a PCA instructor in 2004 and, having returned every summer since then, I have gained additional skills in empowering students by drawing them into a community of scholars. My own experience as the daughter of immigrants and the second person in my family (after my older sister) to attend college taught me that one needs a sense of academic belonging and intellectual community to succeed at the university and in careers beyond it. EAOP generates that sense of belonging by bringing students onto the Berkeley campus and by making them part of the university in a larger sense. Inspired by this vision, I have tried to teach my students not only to be transformed by college culture, but also to transform it by contributing to and, in some cases, even redefining intellectual debates.

Both English Department undergraduates and graduate students contribute to the program by working for EAOP in the summers. Last summer, I had the pleasure of collaborating with two undergraduate English majors who are both pursuing careers in education: senior Felix Chinchilla who served as a Teaching Assistant and junior Sarah Padula who served as a Tutor. Their skills in textual analysis and in working with students were essential to the success of the course. I am looking forward to returning to PCA as an instructor this coming summer, and I hope to report back on even more collaboration between members of the English Department and EAOP in future posts.

In the meantime, though its programs have been dramatically successful, EAOP faces funding challenges, and always welcomes donations. They are also constantly in need of volunteers (particularly those who are people of color, among the first in their family to attend college, graduates of under-resourced public high schools and/or bilingual) to speak to students and families about higher education: to describe their personal experience, to answer questions, and to speak to any concerns. If you are interested in volunteering for these crucial events, please email Chase Adams at eaop@berkeley.edu.

Teaching at San Quentin, FAQ

2009-01-18T10:37:00.000-08:00

One of the ongoing ways in which some members of the English department involve themselves with the larger community of the Bay Area is, as we’ve already touched on here, through the Prison University Project. Below, graduate student Annie McClanahan continues her account of teaching at San Quentin by answering some “Frequently Asked Questions” about her experience. As the semester progresses, the blog will include a number of posts that describe the members of the departments' involvement with the program in more detail.

What is the prison itself like?

It’s about as hard to generalize about the prison as it is to generalize about the students: for those who don’t know, San Quentin is located on one of the most beautiful pieces of property in the Bay Area, on a kind of headland near San Rafael, between the Golden Gate and Richmond bridges. Set up high, it overlooks the ocean. Parts of it look like the 19th-century building it is, with castle-like turrets and old stone. But you can see guards with guns up in watch-towers, and there are of course lots of very large metal gates to walk through. The courtyard in which you enter contains lovely manicured gardens in parts, while you find lots of concrete and asphalt in other parts of the complex. The education program used to be housed in a very old and somewhat unpleasant building, but in the last few years the classrooms have moved to new, much nicer spaces. They have tables, desks and blackboards, and inspirational posters decorate the walls just like any other classroom. And, yes, there are guards at the entrance to the building but not in the classroom with us.

What are the students like?

Two of my current co-instructors this past semester were new volunteers to the program, and both of them, after their first night teaching, said the same thing with surprise (and some relief) in their voices: “Wow, it’s just like any other classroom!” In other words, our students at San Quentin are in some ways just like our students at Berkeley: they complain about homework; they love some of the course texts and hate others; they are sometimes sleepy in the classroom; they disagree with each other sometimes and other times give each other support. Some are very adept and some struggle with the material. I’m often asked whether I hold them to the same expectations as I hold my Berkeley students -- indeed, I’m most often asked that by the San Quentin students themselves, who want to be reassured that they aren’t being treated differently. The answer, of course, is yes. There are more non-native English speakers and far more students with learning disabilities in the San Quentin program, but there are also students there who are quite proficient. This past semester we had a few students with prior college coursework and a number of students whose writing skills are actually more developed than a typical Berkeley Reading-and-Composition student.

The students at San Quentin, however, are less likely to have experience with literary texts, especially poetry, and they are not always as familiar with certain customs of academic writing and language. But they are incredibly fast learners and hard workers, and they never take their presence in the classroom for granted. They are more likely to be curious about history, and very often know much more about it than I do. They are also more willing to be critical -- of the texts we read, of each other’s arguments, and of their instructors! And they are as ready to admit that they don’t get something as they are to question our authority, though rarely in a disruptive way. They are argumentative, funny, and imaginative. To give one anecdote from this past semester, for instance, one of the students raised his hand after discussing Mina Loy’s futurist aphorisms. “Wait,” he said, “what do these have to do with Africa?” Puzzled, the teachers asked him to clarify: “Well,” he went on, “aren’t these supposed to be Afro-risms?” Laughing, the teachers explained the word aphorism more clearly, but asked, jokingly, if he had an example of an Afro-rism. “Yeah,” the student shot back, smiling. “How about ‘Pick your hair, not your nose!’?” The rest of the class burst into laughter.

Most interestingly, the students don’t necessarily want to think only about the kinds of “obvious” issues that many of us initially assume will interest and engage them. For instance, they don’t only want to read literature about prisons! In fact, many of them see the education program as a chance to escape intellectually or emotionally from their daily lives and the constraints of the institution. However, they do often want to talk about their personal experiences and their lives before and in prison; they just want to do so in a context that gives choice and doesn’t hem them into one particular way of using those experiences in the classroom. One of the most successful negotiations of this I’ve seen was in a class I co-taught a few years ago with another English grad student, Peter Godwin. Peter designed a fantastic literature course around the theme of islands. Texts from Robinson Crusoe to The Tempest, from Derek Walcott’s “Omeros” to Kurt Vonnegut’s Gallapagos allowed us to discuss a wide range of topics, including free will, magic, race, imperialism, and evolution. But the themes of isolation, seclusion, and the survival of the fittest also allowed them to speak and to think about their own experiences on another kind of deserted island.

The MLA Tourist, 2008

2009-01-11T19:04:00.001-08:00

In what follows, fifth-year graduate student Matthew Sergi reflects on his experience “visiting” the Modern Language Association convention that recently took place in San Francisco. This is a somewhat condensed version of Matthew’s more colorful account which can be found on his own personal blog.

***

MLA members are the custodians of language, and language is at the heart of virtually all disciplines (at least the humanistic ones).– Rosemary Feal, MLA Executive Director

The thirty thousand scholars of language and literature who form the Modern Language Association convene annually in late December. In a different city every year, we critique each other's research, compare notes on teaching and evaluate the current state of humanities education. We also hold preliminary interviews for the majority of academic jobs available in the humanities.

Graduate students' futures are set in motion at this conference. Which is why, well before entering the job market as interviewees, some Cal graduate students attended this year's San Francisco MLA as tourists: to adjust ahead of time to the gravitational pull of a conference so massive. To see and not be seen, and to learn tips and tricks about the profession.

As overwhelmed as I was by the sheer size of MLA, I found my way to some truly memorable panels, particularly on the second day of the conference. In "Public Shakespeares," after Bryn Mawr's Katherine A. Rowe deftly analyzed three virtual Globe theaters on Second Life (one with a paid "acting company"), Harvard's Marjorie Garber presented her talk on "Shakespeare's Brand." With clever insights on branding in Sonnet 111 and in twenty-first-century advertising, Garber argued that American education in Shakespeare, which had once been representative of broad literacy, now threatens to overshadow and replace broad literacy. The National Endowment for the Arts, according to Garber, supports Shakespeare programs to the exclusion of other literature; its new Shakespeare in American Communities initiative, whose logo features the Bard's bust before a rippling American flag, appeared immediately after the White House cut back much of its funding for contemporary American poets, many of whom were protesting war efforts.

"Liturgy, Literacy, and the Literary: Katherine Zieman's Singing the New Song" came next for me. Well-respected medievalists gathered at this session to present responses to Cal English alum Zieman's 2008 debut book. Andrew Galloway (another Cal English alum) discussed, via Zieman, the importance of "unanalyzable utterances" in understanding the words of the medieval liturgy, and cautioned literary scholars that too much attention to the meaning of words can eclipse the use of words. Then our own Steven Justice, shrugging off his narrower pre-planned topic, embarked on a relentless and at times unforgiving evaluation of Zieman's arguments, including examples of "unnecessary scaffolding" in her language which, when removed, would truly reveal the groundbreaking impact of the book. After the session, Zieman stood up, and was given only ten minutes (!) to respond to the respondents: extempore, Zieman summoned up a poised and very effective counter-counterpoint. Go Bears, indeed. The direct, aggressive (though never disrespectful) debate was representative of the kind of "big league" mentality that I loved about MLA.

At the conference, however, job anxiety weighed heavily on the sessions, the talkbacks, the informal conversations, straight through to Executive Director Rosemary Feal's convention blog: "Between the decline of available positions this year and the erosion of full-time tenure-track positions in the academic workforce overall, we are facing a situation that demands our advocacy and action." The California Report on NPR has even done a feature on the subject. When I ran into the fabulous Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe, though, she assured me that an English Ph.D. from Cal, even in this market, was a powerful thing. And this helped quell my anxiety a bit.

Leaving Professor O’Brien O’Keeffe, I shuffled into "Publish and Flourish: A Roundtable on Academic Publishing for Graduate Students," hosted by the MLA Graduate Student Caucus. The Caucus had invited six professors to advise nervous grads like myself on when and how to publish, and how it would affect our job searches. But (to the Caucus leader’s surprise, I think) the first speaker, Stanford English Professor Franco Moretti, vehemently discouraged graduate students from publishing at all. Publishing before the dissertation, he said, potentially allows “external signs” of professionalism to distract from the kind of "profoundly serious, deep, even religious commitment to a subject" that was characteristic of academics only decades ago. Moretti lamented that the profession itself has "lost its fire. It's boring. It's not about the ideas anymore.” Berkeley’s own Charles Altieri rejected the implicit premise of the session: that any scholar (grad or not) should approach academic discourse as a means of résumé-padding. He pointed out that sessions which offer standardized rules for a profession that should focus on the insight of individuals only “tend to create, rather than allay, anxiety.” His advice, instead: “You submit [your article] when you have something to say. That’s the time when you should try to publish something… once you believe in it.”

The MLA lesson seemed to be the following: the professorial career is not built on anxious, generalized rules, or on ways to game the job market, but only on a solid corpus of solid work. Seeing my friends nervously prepare for their job interviews reminded me that, in order to study the humanities, you have to be human: not just a functional conglomeration of "external" signs of professionalism. Only humans, with room for failure and not paralyzed by fear, can maintain the kind of productive, active debate like the professors of the Zieman session did. I do not wish to belittle job panic, only to draw attention to the negative effects that it can have on the work we do, by skewing our attitudes about our work. We cannot address the situation with CV-padding and small fixes, but only by, as Feal put it, direct "advocacy and action" (if you're looking for a place to start, click here). But in the meantime, for me, the time for tips and tricks and tourism is over: it is time to get to work, and if I get my dream job in the process, all the better.

Undergraduate Major Spends a Research Summer at Yale

2009-01-04T17:10:00.000-08:00

UC Berkeley is famous for inspiring its undergraduates to pursue advanced degrees in graduate school, and the English Department is no exception. Senior English major Ana Schwartz, one of the department’s very promising young scholars, spent this past summer participating in Yale University’s Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship, where she was funded by the Leadership Alliance, a program that helps to prepare minorities who are under-represented in the academy for graduate school. A Mexican-American who grew up in Sonoma County and a transfer student to Berkeley, Ana reports that she was a bit dumb-founded by the gothic grandeur of a university like Yale (and she also reports that she was happy to return to the sunshine and tall trees of Berkeley’s campus).

As a participant in the program, Ana spent her summer exploring the rich holdings of Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library. She was paired with a faculty advisor from Yale, with whom she met once a week to discuss the progress and development of her research. Though she initially began with a plan to think about Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, she quickly turned to more contemporary issues. What is the ambivalent relationship that contemporary “highbrow” culture has to the phenomenon of the Oprah Book Club?, she wondered. What is the resistance to this kind of “democratization” of literature in the hands of a minority female leader? Indeed, how is the “female reader” figured in contemporary popular discourses and why is there such a critique of “book clubs” in general? These questions led her to trace the representation of and response to Oprah’s book club in the New York Times and the ways in which these representations either coincided or diverged from treatments of Toni Morrison’s difficult book Beloved (which, Ana noted, Oprah has never chosen as a selection despite having starred in the film version).

Ana’s research culminated in a presentation at a conference in Hartford where all the undergraduates who were funded by the Leadership Alliance (and who had spent their summers at over 20 different universities) met to exchange their ideas. As one of the few humanities students in a sea of scientists (of the 25 students at Yale alone, only 5 were in the humanities or social sciences), Ana quickly found her niche and reports having stimulating conversations about a wide range of issues.

Ana is currently working on an honors thesis that, at the time of this writing, is provisionally about the mother-daughter dynamic in postcolonial literature. She was one of Berkeley’s nominees for the Rhodes Scholarship (no small feat, to be sure) and has applied to graduate programs in English and American Studies. She hopes to continue her work on contemporary literary and cultural issues, especially the role that literature plays in the process of immigration and naturalization.

We'll Take a Cup O' Kindness Yet...

2008-12-21T08:51:00.000-08:00

The English Department wishes everyone a safe and happy holiday. As the students depart for winter break, the department blog is also taking a short hiatus. We will be back online with our weekly Sunday posts (and an all new lay-out!) starting January 4, 2009.

Until then, we leave with you a classic holiday poem: Robert Burns' "Auld Lang Syne."

SHOULD auld acquaintance be forgot,

And never brought to min'?

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,

And days o' lang syne?

We twa hae rin about the braes,

And pu'd the gowans fine;

But we've wander'd monie a weary fit

Sin' auld lang syne.

We twa hae paidl't i' the burn,

Frae mornin' sun till dine;

But seas between us braid hae roar'd

Sin' auld lang syne.

And here 's a hand, my trusty fiere,

And gie's a hand o' thine;

And we'll tak a right guid-willie waught

For auld lang syne.

And surely ye'll be your pint-stowp,

And surely I'll be mine;

And we'll tak a cup o' kindness yet

For auld lang syne!

For auld lang syne, my dear,

For auld lang syne,
We'll tak a cup o' kindness yet

For auld lang syne.

For those of us not fluent in Burns' native Scots, The Oxford Book of English Verse provides the following glosses:

gowans] daisies. fit] foot. dine] dinner-time. fiere] partner. guid-willie waught] friendly draught.

Reading Recommendations: Children's Lit

2008-12-12T07:49:00.000-08:00

In what follows, Ph.D. candidate Natalia Cecire offers what she calls an "idiosyncratic list of recent (i.e. from the last ten years) children's fiction that I've enjoyed, with a bias toward fantasy." Natalia is the co-founder of the Children's Literature Working Group and offers these recommendations as suggestions either to get your young niece or nephew into good but entertaining reading or to access your own inner child-reader.

***

M.T. Anderson, The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation. Volume I: The Pox Party. Candlewick, 2006.: In colonial America, a boy grows up surrounded by scholars, trained extensively in Greek and Latin but unaware of his own origins. The outbreak of revolution leads to disturbing revelations about Octavian and his mother. Dark and Gothic in sensibility, it's Johnny Tremain meets Vathek, taking a long, chilling look at the U.S.'s Enlightenment heritage. A sequel was released this year.
Blue Balliett, The Wright 3. Scholastic, 2006. Illustrations by Brett Helquist.: This is the second of three mysteries by Balliett centering on famous works of art (the other two are Chasing Vermeer and The Calder Game). Balliett's everything-is-connected! sensibility has resulted in comparisons to The Da Vinci Code, but I prefer to see it as a descendant of Thomas Pynchon's paranoid fantasias, minus the bizarre sex scenes. In this volume, three middle-school students at the University of Chicago Laboratory School fight to save a local Frank Lloyd Wright masterpiece, the Robie House, which is (fictionally) in danger of being torn down. As the friends work together, Balliett offers sensitive insights into gender and class dynamics.
Mary Hoffman City of Stars. Bloomsbury, 2003.: Hoffman's Stravaganza series features present-day Londoners who travel magically ("Stravagate") to Renaissance Talia, the Italy of a parallel universe. In this, the second novel of the series, the protagonist is a fifteen-year-old girl named Georgia. Her main goals in life are to ride horses and to evade sexual harassment at the hands of her brutal step-brother Russell. When she learns to Stravagate to Talia, she becomes involved in dangerous political intrigues surrounding a magical winged horse. It turns out for Georgia that, once you've crossed the Medici family of an alternate universe, you become less scared of your jerk step-brother.
Diana Wynne Jones, Dark Lord of Derkholm. Greenwillow, 1998.: In a parallel universe filled with magic, the people are under the thumb of an unscrupulous businessman, who sets up elaborate tours featuring every fantasy cliche in the book. Nerdy, bumbling Derk is selected as this year's Dark Lord; with his large, genetically engineered, multispecies family, he has to pull off a convincing performance while trying to figure out how to stop the tours forever. Jones lovingly and hilariously mocks the cliches of the sword-and-sorcery genre. Jones is also the author of Howl's Moving Castle, which was adapted to film by Hayao Miyazaki a few years ago.
Gail Carson Levine, The Two Princesses of Bamarre. HarperCollins, 2001.: Two sisters, princesses both, are the best of friends. Meryl is a sword-wielding tomboy; Addie is painfully shy. Meryl has always protected Addie, but when a magical plague strikes Meryl down, Addie must be the one to save her. Suddenly she is forced to fight dragons, wear seven-league boots, and of course, wield her bad-ass embroidery needle. An interesting negotiation between difference feminism and the third wave (with princesses), this novel is both literally and figuratively about sisterhood.

The Importance of Being "Ernest"

2008-12-07T14:53:00.000-08:00

The following is an account, written by first-year student Marsha Polovets, about the Freshman Seminar she took this semester. Freshman and Sophomore seminars are one-credit courses given by a faculty member to a small group of lower-division students to explore a scholarly topic of mutual interest together. Marsha has been enrolled in Professor Katherine Snyder’s “Rethinking Hemingway” course which focused on gender issues and the way they have reinvigorated Hemingway studies over the past two decades.
***

On the first day of class, Professor Snyder asked the students to list what images or words we associated with this iconic author. The entries on the board quickly piled up: “expatriate,” “fishing,” “war,” “journalist,” “bullfighting,” “stoicism,” “alcoholic,” and so on. Many answers flashed through my mind, but now that I look back on it, the most important one never came until writing this blog. Hemingway was special to me because I associated him with my grandfather through his rugged character, his love for boxing, and his noble looks. I signed up for the class because I wanted to see the essence of the man and the writer. Do I still connect Hemingway to my grandfather? In some ways yes, and in some ways probably no, but I definitely appreciate Hemingway more than I did before.

The course began with analytical essays by literary critics Debra Moddelmog and Thomas Strychacz who posed challenging questions about the role of masculinity and identity in Hemingway’s works and introduced us to some of the themes and issues we would encounter. First we tackled a chapter from Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway’s highly idiosyncratic study of Spanish bullfighting. Next, we read a selection of short stories, including “Indian Camp,” “The Battler” and “Big Two-Hearted River,” and discussed the ways in which race, sexuality, and gender intersect as well as how Hemingway understands both his male and female characters. The character of Margot Macomber in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” particularly intrigued us: is she weak or powerful? does she mean to save or kill her husband? does his death destroy or liberate her? Our discussion of this complex female character and Hemingway’s ambivalent attitude toward her set the stage for our reading of the gender-bending Lady Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises. We also focused on the male characters in the story: the epicurean Count Mippipopolous, the Jewish boxer/author/scapegoat Robert Cohn, the bullfighter Pedro Romero, and of course Hemingway’s narrator, Jake Barnes, whose sexual war wound makes him, above all, the emblem of masculine lack in the novel and, paradoxically, its epitome of ideal manhood.

Our discussions in the class engaged issues of form as well as content, as we considered how Hemingway’s style—at once concretely descriptive and yet leaving much unspoken, at once flowingly associative and yet awkwardly abrupt—might be understood in gendered terms. Is there such a thing, we asked, as “masculine style,” and what are its implications for narrative voice, character development, and symbolic meaning? Since this was just a one-unit seminar, we didn’t write any full-scale, formal essays, but each week students posted informal responses to the readings and to each others’ comments on our bSpace course website, enabling us to engage more actively with the readings and to develop questions for class discussions. In the final weeks of the course, we reading some parodies from The Best of Bad Hemingway, and then try our hands at writing (and reading aloud in class) our own Hemingway parodies: Hemingway-style prose so bad that it’s good!

The seminar has been a wonderful introduction to Hemingway’s works, and it helped me improve my analytic skills. Professor Snyder really challenged the class to be active readers and look for deeper meanings in the texts. She encouraged us to question the notion that there is a unified essence of masculinity and to recognize that Hemingway’s work can be interpreted in many different ways. I learned that I am interested in exploring the role of gender and identity in literature, and I began to read from a new point of view. It was a special way to start my journey at Cal, and I am very thankful for it. Hemingway has been transformed from a cultural figure and the symbol of masculinity to a complicated person and an insightful author whose works possess an intricate, challenging style and reflects some of the most beautiful and human emotions. I hope to return to Hemingway in the future and “rethink” him again, remembering what I learned in Professor Snyder’s class. Like my grandfather, “Papa Hemingway” will always hold a special place in my heart.

Passed from one mouth to another

2008-12-04T07:09:00.000-08:00

PASSED FROM ONE MOUTH TO ANOTHER.*

(a poetry event featuring UCB grad students)

Cecil Giscombe’s English 243 class presents an evening of poetry and song along with food prepared by the poets.

Graduate students Anthony Bello, Rachel Carden, Rebecca Gaydos, Nikhil Govind, Mariah Hamilton, Charity Ketz, Gillian Osborne, Samia Rahimtoola, Robert Reyes, and Rachel Wamsley will read, sing, and recite.

Monday, 8 December • 7 pm • English Department Lounge (Wheeler 330)

(*from “Anthem” by Samia Rahimtoola)

Faculty/Graduate Colloquium -- Modernism: Material, Spectral, Aural

2008-12-02T07:19:00.001-08:00

In what follows, second-year graduate student Juliana Chow, one of this year's organizers for the English Graduate Association's series of colloquia, reports on a recent department event, entitled Modernism: Material, Spectral, Aural.

***

Rubbish, refuse, trash. Noise, static, din.

I know when I go to talks, I'm supposed to be able to make sense of all the words flung out at me, that there is, subtly or conspicuously, a line thrown out to lead me out of one labyrinth and into another. As William Carlos Williams writes, "jumble is superb."

This was my sense of things at the English Graduate Association's third colloquium of the semester. Graduate student Kea Anderson and Professor Mark Goble each presented on modernism's medium, whether it be sound for Jean Rhys (Anderson's presentation) or archives, vintage office furniture, industrial e-waste, and what James Agee lists as, "fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement" (Goble's presentation). If Williams and Agee reorganized material waste into a poem or photograph, Rhys remade sound into a medium for registering the world. Each visually or aurally mapped a way out that was simultaneously a way into their material.

This was probably the eleventh or twelfth EGA colloquium I've been to, and each time I've left thoroughly impressed by my colleagues and the faculty here at Berkeley. I appreciate their generosity and skill in, well, mapping a way for me into their work. Both Anderson and Goble, in their own way, reminded me that the presentation of what looks like waste (here Goble contrasted Chris Jordan's photograph of a jumble of cel phone chargers with Jackson Pollock's paintings) or snatches of rote recitation (like the Heine lyrics from Rhys' Midnight! that Anderson selected—"Ja, ja, nein, nein…") is never a blank, artless rendering, but a mediated deliberation. On this page at this moment, what html codes translate the font, size, color, and style of these words? What modernist sense of medium underlies Williams' poetry, Rhys' novels?

Of course, if I knew, I wouldn't have gone to the colloquium—but no one knows everything and each day there is more to know, maybe too much to know. As Rhys writes, "Oh Lord, keep me blind." Yes, keep me blind—and thank you for leading me out.

Distinguished Alumni Series Kicks Off: Peter Chernin

2008-11-26T09:02:00.001-08:00

Peter Chernin (BA, English, 1974) serves as President and Chief Operating Officer of News Corporation, and Chairman and CEO of the Fox Group. He has overseen Fox’s tremendous growth in sports, cable, and entertainment programming, and gained a reputation as an executive with a unique mastery of the creative side of the business. Mr. Chernin is also Chairman of Malaria No More, a non-profit dedicated to ending deaths due to malaria. Please come to hear him in conversation with incoming Chair Sam Otter and Professor Bob Hass this coming Monday!

Literature and the Environment

2008-11-23T07:57:00.000-08:00

In what follows, fourth-year English major Stacy Lee gives a brief meditation on what is it like to balance a study of literature with her second major, Conservation & Resource Studies.
***

When I see aching beauty in T. S. Eliot’s verses or understand why a no-till system is beneficial for soil fertility, I get the same kind of joy in learning something new and interpreting it in my own way. Because I major in both English and Conservation & Resource Studies, I constantly adjust my vision to see the connections between both fields. In analyzing novels, for instance, the role of the environment often goes unnoticed in the pursuit of a character’s agency. Yet, we are realizing the significant impact of nature in our lives now more than ever; why should it be any different when it comes to the works created to reflect our experiences? The resources within a region have a way of shaping how communities think, behave, and live. Perhaps the closest we come to this realization is through poetry: Whitman aptly writes, “if you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.”

So much of our humanity lies within our environment. Agriculture itself is a story of humans trying to manipulate nature, a world of struggles between protagonists. The greatest tragedy can be found not in books but on marginal lands and waters, in which farmers and fishermen export their food in debt-accumulating systems that leave them too poor to feed themselves. What is more horrifying than societies which consume resources at a rate that reduces the quality of life for future generations? Do we have any agency in determining how this story will end? These are the questions that my English classes inspire me to ask, to find the human heart that beats beneath policies of conservation and behind the manmade sources of particulate matter in parts per million. Just as we try to explain ourselves with words, we also define our humanity with our interactions with nature.

Balancing the two majors is not hard (obtaining advisors’ codes from both L&S and CNR is another story) when I remember to acknowledge a holistic perspective that connections are everywhere between English and Conservation & Resource Studies. I equally admire the flowing syntax of William Cronon’s works in environmental history and that of Tobias Wolff’s short stories. And I see how the portrayal of resource extraction in Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness is not much different than what continues today. In a narrow view, it would be easy to create a simplified dichotomy between nature and culture. But studying both has taught me otherwise: each becomes a lens through which I can examine the other and enrich my understanding. My hope is that others might also adjust their sights for another look.

English Dept Teaching at San Quentin Correctional Facility

2008-11-17T06:47:00.000-08:00

In what follows, Annie McClanahan, a sixth-year PhD student in the English Department, gives a brief overview of her teaching at San Quentin Correctional Facility. This is the first of a number of posts about the English Department’s involvement with the program. In the future, both Annie and other members of the department will report specific stories from their classes as well as describing the different facets of the experience in greater detail.

***

I imagine that most of us are pretty sure we’ll remember where we were on election night this year—I know I will, because I happened to be in prison. Lest you think the academic and financial pressures of graduate school have led the department’s students to a life of crime, let me explain: on election night, I was teaching my class at San Quentin Correctional Facility, through the Prison University Project’s program there. I teach English 101, a “freshman comp”-style course which is one of the main requirements towards the AA degree that students in the San Quentin program can earn. I learned of the election results from one of my students who had a portable radio with him; besides celebrating the news—and as if the scene couldn’t have gotten more surreal—that evening our class was dedicated to watching Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 Dr. Strangelove, a film whose image of the potentially apocalyptic results of political stupidity certainly amplified our shared sense of the stakes of this election!

The teachers in the San Quentin College program are all volunteers, though there is an incredibly dedicated and hard-working three-person staff that manages all the organizational aspects of the program as well as doing fundraising, outreach, and probably a thousand other things behind the scenes. The San Quentin program was started in the mid-90s when legislation was enacted that prohibited the use of federal Pell Grants for inmate higher education. This legislation effectively ended over 350 college programs in prisons across the country, but through the dedication of a number of people, San Quentin's program persisted. Currently the program offers about a dozen classes each semester, and has graduated almost 70 students with an AA degree (though many more are paroled and continue their education on the outside).

This is not my first time teaching at San Quentin—in fact, I’m now in my sixth year in the Ph.D. program and also teaching my sixth class at San Quentin: I’ve taught a range of courses, covering the main curriculum of the English Department. I TA’ed for my first class during my first year at Berkeley, a class called 99B that is the second (after 99A) of the two “gateway” courses most students take before beginning the college-credit classes in the program. 99A and B are basic college writing courses but also introduce students to study skills, good reading habits, college-level classroom discussion, and a host of other skills that may be new to many of the students, especially those who haven’t been in school for many years. Since then, I’ve taught 101 a number of times and have also taught English 102, Introduction to Literature. This semester, I am teaching with a fantastic team of 3 other graduate students, two from the English Department and one from Philosophy—two of us teach on Tuesday nights and two on Thursday nights, from 6:30-8:45 pm. One of the best things about my work in the program has been this rare opportunity to try out team teaching. Teaching at San Quentin has allowed me to to teach with faculty and graduate students from colleges and universities all over the Bay Area, including both those with many years of teaching experience and those who are newer to teaching; I’ve thus been able to find great mentors and to do some ad-hoc teaching mentorship of my own.

This semester, we have a fantastic group of 7 students (an unusually small class). The reading for our course is designed around a specific topic: the manifesto, a type of text that offers a critical perspectives on the world as it is and a vision of the world as it might be. Manifestos we’re reading include Plato’s Republic; the Declaration of Independence and 19th-century feminist responses to it; essays by Thoreau, Ezra Pound, and Salvador Dali; poems by Aime Cesaire, Sonya Sanchez and Oscar Wilde; hip-hop lyrics; professions of religious faith; and platforms from both mainstream and marginal contemporary political parties. The idea of the course is to connect the reading students are doing to their writing: as I say in the syllabus, writing does not just describe the world, it brings a new world of ideas into being. And nowhere is that creative potential clearer than in the manifesto.

Stay tuned for future posts about teaching at San Quentin that will describe the nature of teaching in the prison, interactions with students and other anecdotes about this amazing pedagogical experience.

Undergraduate English Major Combines Literature and Medicine

2008-11-12T07:10:00.001-08:00

Medical school is not necessarily the “traditional” career path of English majors, but department alumna Elana Shpall, who graduated in 2007, has found a program that allows her to combine her humanist interests with research in science and medicine. Unsurprisingly, this forward-thinking course of study is the Joint Medical Program at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health and the UCSF School of Medicine, where Elana is a first-year student.

Elana reports that she was always curious about the functioning of the body and used to page through her sister’s medical school books. But she found the draw to literature at Berkeley too difficult to resist. Though she had been considering a number of courses of study as an undergraduate, she said that reading Mrs. Dalloway in Professor John Bishop’s 45C course clinched her decision to major in English. It was reading Ulysses with Professor Bishop in his Fall 2005 course on the Modern Novel, however, when Elana began to perceive a way to connect what seemed to her like unbridgeable discourses. Joyce’s famous investigation of the body in his novel stimulated Elana to keep reading Ulysses (the “Lestrygonians” episode in which Joyce treats the digestive system is her favorite part) as it also made her enroll in science classes to investigate the subject from a different point of view.

As Elana combined her science classes with volunteering experiences in the immune-compromised unit at Oakland Children’s Hospital and began to foresee a fruitful career in medicine, she was not willing to give up her interests in literature. The Joint Medical Program was a perfect fit for her because, after an intensive summer course in gross anatomy, it offers its students a holistic, case-study approach to learning medicine. Rather than didactic lectures, Elana and her classmates receive a patient scenario which they are expected to investigate and recommend treatment for. She says the kind of flexible, creative thinking that she learned as an English major, along with the skills in research and critical reasoning, helps her immensely in this kind of learning. In the meantime, she is also pursuing a scientific research project that explores the relation of Vitamin D to the development of certain types of cancer. After three years of this kind of intellectual exercise in Berkeley, she will spend two years in the hospital at UCSF for her clinical experience. She will graduate in 2013 with an MD and a MS from UCSF and Berkeley, respectively.

Literature remains, however, one of her great loves and she said she has tried to follow Professor Bishop’s advice that everyone should re-read Ulysses before any major life event. So, this past summer, she picked it up again. The demands of a scientific approach to the body in her anatomy class proved daunting, however, and she only made it half-way through the book. She says, though, that she’s marked her place and is waiting for this coming summer to return to it.

Michael McClure, Holloway Reading

2008-10-28T19:56:00.000-07:00

The following is the introduction which fourth-year graduate student Megan Pugh gave for poet Michael McClure on 14 October 2008. A podcast of the reading that followed will soon be posted here.

***

I’m honored to introduce Michael McClure. McClure’s one of our most exciting and prolific poets, and has written some 20 plays and 14 books of poetry since his first appearance on the Bay Area literary scene at the famous Six Gallery reading with Allen Ginsberg, Phillip Whalen, Gary Snyder, and Phillip Lamantia in 1955.

Since then, he’s become something of an icon, famously reading his poems to the lions at the San Francisco Zoo, triumphing over censors who tried to ban his Obie award-winning play The Beard, and reciting Chaucer in Scorcese’s The Band’s Last Waltz. Greil Marcus told me that “If James Dean had lived, it's not hard to imagine that Michael McClure is what he might have become.” It’s a lovely thought experiment: Dean’s rebellious and charismatic angst matures into a poetry with direction and careful attention to the world it’s a part of. Pauline Kael called James Dean—who said as much with his gestures as with his lines—a “beautiful, disturbed animal.” And McClure’s poetry, restless and gestural, reminds us that we’re all animals.

The opening of his poem “Oh Hail to Thee Who Play,” for example, turns the epic into the biological:

OH MUSE,

SING THAT I BE ME, BE THOU,

BE MEAT,

be me, be I, no ruse
—A MAMALLED MAN

In the 1960s, McClure began blending human language with “beast language” to discover what he calls “the energies a-roar,” the inner workings of the body—both spiritual and scientific. It’s part of a larger, ecological project designed to show us that all living things are connected—and for McClure, poetry’s part of that connective tissue.

McClure has described his poems as complex organisms. He usually centers his lines, creating a kind of spine that gives the poems organic solidity; but the structure also suggests that the words are always reaching out, moving away from themselves and toward the rest of the universe. They’re explosions of energy.

I think you’ll find that explosiveness in his reading tonight, too. McClure’s books often include instructions on how to experience the poems—“READ ALOUD AND SING THEM,” says the back cover of Ghost Tantras. We’re lucky to hear them as intended, relentlessly physical, traveling from mouth to air to ear.

McClure describes his own poems as ears—and shoulders—in the forward to September Blackberries, where he gives a beautiful summary of the kind of work poetry can do: “Poetry is the way that we extend our inner life. The real inner life is cut off from us—but we can put it out there and call it a poem. We stand on poetry—like a steppingstone in a torrent—and are more free.”

Please join me in welcoming Michael McClure.

Summer Travel Tales

2008-10-13T20:40:00.000-07:00

The beginning of the fall semester means that members of our department make their way back to Berkeley from many corners of the globe. Though many students and faculty stay around campus in the summer, there are just as many that jet off to far-away places to learn, study, research or, sometimes, just to have fun.

In fact, two grad students from the English Department spent this past summer in Europe doing preliminary research for their dissertations. Ruth Baldwin, currently a fourth year in the department, won a grant from the Center for British Studies to do summer research at the British Library in London and the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh. Ruth is beginning work on a dissertation that investigates the way that the early nineteenth-century novel re-imagined criminality by poaching on "real life" biographies of famous criminals. She spent her days elbow deep in criminal biographies and crime novels of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Back in Berkeley now, Ruth is turning this research into important insights about the the way the novel form enabled the mythologization of criminal figures.

At the same time, John Lurz, another fourth-year graduate student was wading through the bureaucracy of the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris to find an ever deeper morass in the manuscript notebooks of Marcel Proust. Having won a Summer Research Grant from the Graduate Division, John was examining Proust's unconventional treatment of his manuscripts, the way he liked to paste in long extensions to the tops and bottoms of his notebooks pages to add a passage or give himself more room to write. While Proust doesn't exactly fall in the middle of the English-language canon, John's dissertation focuses on the way the modernist novel started to conceive of the materiality of print and writing as something that could influence a writer's and a reader's relationship to a literary work. Though he reports spending hours looking at microfilms of Proust's indecipherable handwriting, he also was able to request to examine a few original notebooks, a thrilling experience to be sure. Back in Berkeley, John is trying to conceive what to do with his pages of notes but says he has confidence that something will come of it.

Beat Poet Michael McClure Reads at Berkeley

2008-10-04T18:19:00.000-07:00

As part of this year's Holloway Series in Poetry, Michael McClure will be reading on October 14th. This is the second year in a row that McClure has "performed" at UC Berkeley. Last year, he was a guest lecturer in Lyn Hejinian's undergraduate survey course, ENG 45C: Literature in English from the late Ninteenth Century to the Present.

As always, McClure put on a good show. He regaled the undergrads with stories of psychedelic experimentation, mind-expansion and what it was like to live in the Bay Area in the 60s. At first, many of the students were as put off by his wild stories as they had been by his difficult poetry. They had good reason to be perplexed by the selections from Ghost Tantras that Lyn had assigned them. For example, take the first poem of the collection:

GOOOOOOR! GOOOOOOOOOO!

GOOOOOOOOOR!

GRAHHH! GRAHH! GRAHH!

Grah gooooor! Ghahh! Graaarr! Greeeeer! Grayowhr!

Greeeeee

GRAHHRR! RAHHR! GRAGHHRR! RAHR!

RAHRIRAHHR! GRAHHHR! GAHHR! HRAHR!

BE NOT SUGAR BUT BE LOVE

looking for sugar!

GAHHHHHHHH!

ROWRR!

GROOOOOOOOOOH!

But, once McClure explained his thinking behind the series of poems, the way he wanted to think of a new language and to think of inarticulate "baby language" as having as much expressive power as more conventional forms of speaking, some of the students started to get pretty excited. One undergrad said that he had never been so fascinated or entertained and he was surprised at how much meaning he had taken away from McClure's performance of the poems. When asked to articulate that meaning, he wasn't sure how to proceed, but said that he just liked it. "You know, it's like what the poet said it was: 'cosmic breathing.' It makes me think."

Certainly there are many here in Wheeler Hall who love to think and who are looking forward to the next installment of McClure's cosmic breath. Look out for a report on the reading!

Our New Faculty

2008-10-04T17:15:00.000-07:00

The start of this academic year has been especially exciting here at Berkeley because we begin with six new faculty members, five of which are new Assistant Professors! Below is some brief info about these new junior faculty.

Namwali Serpell recently received her PhD from the Harvard English Department for a dissertation called “The Ethics of Uncertainty: Reading Twentieth-Century American Literature.” Her interests include ethics and literature; theories of reading; twentieth-century novels and plays; world literature; aesthetics; and the literary essay. This fall, she is teaching a lecture course on the twentieth-century American novel. In the spring, she will teach a junior seminar on post-war American fiction and the problem of evil and a graduate seminar on the phenomenology of reading.

Steven Lee finished his doctorate from Stanford's Modern Thought and Literature program in September 2008. His dissertation traces the interactions of American and Soviet conceptualizations of difference, focusing on how socialist internationalism shaped ethnic literatures and liberal pluralism in the U.S. In 2001-02 he was among the inaugural group of Fulbright students to conduct research in the Central Asian Republics, where he compared Soviet Korean and Korean American literatures and histories. For 2008-09, he will be a postdoctoral fellow at NYU's Center for the United States and the Cold War.

Emily V. Thornbury is an Anglo-Saxonist who joins the English Department as an Assistant Professor after almost nine years in Cambridge, England. While there, she got her PhD in 2004 through the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at the University of Cambridge, and afterward was a Junior Research Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge. Some of her other adventures in medievalism while in the UK include discovering the worst Mexican restaurant in the world while on a trip to look at manuscripts in Worcester Cathedral Library, and viewing the mummified hand of the seventh-century St Æðelðryð, foundress of Ely, which was nearly as alarming as it sounds. Most of her work has been on the poetics of Old English and medieval Latin, and she is currently at work on a book about how people became poets in Anglo-Saxon England.

Elisa Tamarkin received her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2001, and joins English at Berkeley after several years in the English Department at UC Irvine. She specializes in American literary and cultural history before 1900, with special interest in the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Her research and teaching focus on transatlantic cultures, slavery and antislavery, theories of style and social form, the intersections of class and race, and the history of literary studies in America. She is the author of Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion and Antebellum America and is currently at work on a book project entitled "Irrelevance: The Scholarly Life in the Age of News" on ideas of relevant and irrelevant knowledge since 1830 and on the relationship between the academy and the press. Professor Tamarkin is the recipient of an ACLS Fellowship, a President’s Research Fellowship in the Humanities, and, in 2007, was named Chancellor’s Fellow at UC Irvine.

Mark Goble comes to Berkeley after six years as Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of California, Irvine. He received his Ph. D. from Stanford in 2002, and specializes in twentieth-century U. S. literature and media studies. He is the author of Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life (forthcoming from Columbia University Press in 2009), and has published essays on such topics as U. S. poetry and visual culture, cinema and the avant garde, and Henry James. His current project, “Downtime: The Twentieth-Century in Slow Motion,” examines the relationship between the experience of slowness and the limits of high technology from early modernism to contemporary digital art.

Nadia Ellis joins the Department as an Assistant Professor. She works on twentieth-century trans-Atlantic culture -- on the circulation and intersections of Caribbean, British, and African American cultures. She has traversed the Atlantic a few times herself, completing her undergraduate degree at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica and an M.Phil. in modern English literature at Oxford. There followed various study and research stints on such Atlantic coasts as New Jersey and London. Her dissertation, completed this summer at Princeton University, focuses on affect and the West Indian subject in Britain. It includes readings of work by CLR James, George Lamming, and Andrew Salkey, as well as the archival record around West Indian immigration and homosexuality in 1950's Britain. Other research and teaching interests include post-colonial studies, modern fiction, and African diasporic popular culture.

STAY TUNED for a profile of our newest senior faculty hire Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe!

Welcome to the English Department Online!

2008-09-26T17:57:00.000-07:00

In an article in the September 7 issue of The New York Times Magazine, entitled “Brave New World of Digital Intimacy,” Clive Thompson discusses the way that a rise in social networking applications is (unsurprisingly) changing the kinds of relationships we are having. He points out that web applications like Facebook and Twitter explodes the number of “weak ties” – the term sociologists use for loose acquaintances with whom one is more or less friendly – a person is able to cultivate and maintain. Any member of a networking site like Facebook has had the experience of reading all about someone with whom they haven’t spoken in years. It’s both exhilarating and disorienting, but whatever it is, it is redefining what it means to be part of a “community.”

It is our hope, here at the Berkeley English Department, that this blog will help to increase and strengthen the “weak ties” that the alumni and friends maintain with us. For those of you who aren’t local, we hope this blog will be a way for you to keep in better touch about a place where you once spent some formative time. For those of you who are local, we hope it will reveal a different side of the Department, one that is impossible to show in formal events which the Department sponsors. Indeed, a blog seems like a great way to foster a sense of academic community for those off and even on campus, since the nature of intellectual pursuits sometimes inhibits close personal interactions. (It is never harder to make friends than when one has one's nose stuck in a book.)

So, check back to this site for announcements of on-campus happenings like lectures, events and readings, for everyday mundane anecdotes of goings-on in Wheeler Hall, for reports of the amazing achievements of our students and faculty, for updates on our continuing fundraising process. We hope that it eases the difficulty of staying in touch and makes you feel a part (however technologically mediated) of our community.