Graduate Student's Literary Journalism

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.

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"Invincible" Graduate Student Publishes Novel

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.

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Out of the Classroom, Into the Community

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.

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Literary Blogging

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.

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The Early Academic Outreach Program

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.

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The MLA Tourist, 2008

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.

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Passed from one mouth to another

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) Read full post....

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

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.

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English Dept Teaching at San Quentin Correctional Facility

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.

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Summer Travel Tales

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.

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