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2 0 1 7 R o b e r t P e n n W a rr e n Center for the Humanities

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Executive Director Report

he Warren Center’s conference room, where the majority of its seminars and meetings are held, was originally the library of one of Vanderbilt’s earliest faculty members, William J. Vaughn. At the university’s founding, members of the faculty were provided with houses on the campus, and from 1884 to 1912 the Warren Center’s building, now known as the Vaughn Home, was the residence of Professor and Mrs. William J. Vaughn. The crescent of faculty homes in the heart of the campus was the site of much lively activity, as young families raised their children in the midst of the campus. The Vaughns, for example, raised their five children—Eugene, Robert, Will, Harry, and Stella—in the faculty residence.

During his thirty-year tenure, Vaughn served as professor of mathematics; he was also professor of astronomy for sixteen years, and university librarian for twenty-six years. He is reported to have been a true polymath; a mathematician by training, he could read at least a dozen languages, including Sanskrit and Russian. His knowledge of history was highly regarded; his personal book collection of 6,000 volumes included 500 works in Napoleonic studies. Not surprisingly, Professor Vaughn played an active role in the establishment of a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa on the campus in 1901, a tribute to the growing successes of the young university. In December of 1912, Professor Vaughn died in his campus home at the age of seventy-nine. When he felt his death was imminent, he called for the university chancellor, James H. Kirkland, to come and meet with him. He instructed Kirkland, “Tell the boys for me that this is not a sad occasion, that I got more than was coming to me and have received more than was my share of the good things of life—that my classes have shared with me their youth and that perhaps they gave to me more than they received.” Professor Vaughn left his book collection to the Vanderbilt library; a portion of the Board of Trust minutes from June 1913 reads: RO B E R T P ENN WAR R EN CE NTE R FOR THE HUMANITIE S

Executive Director Report

The William J. Vaughn Memorial Library is the most valuable collection of books ever received by the University as a gift. It consists of about 6,000 volumes. In the Department of Mathematics it is, of course, preeminent, but it is of almost equal value in the fields of history and general literature.... It is with great satisfaction and gratitude that record is made of this gift characteristic in every way of the donor and a worthy memorial of his long and useful life.

It seems an extraordinarily appropriate tribute to Professor Vaughn that his former library is today a hub of robust intellectual activity on our campus, bringing together scholars and students from Vanderbilt and beyond to engage in lively interdisciplinary explorations. Over the course of the 2016/17 academic year, for example, forty-six visiting speakers representing forty academic institutions joined with Vanderbilt scholars in the Warren Center conference room for rich exchanges across a range of humanistic disciplines. Were he magically able to transport himself to the twenty-first century, I imagine Professor Vaughn as a strong supporter of the Warren Centerâ€™s mission and an active participant in many of the Warren Centerâ€™s programs. Mona Frederick Executive Director Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities

Professor William J. Vaughn in his home library which is now the Warren Center conference room

Warren Center conference room today

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2016/17 Warren Center Faculty Fellows Program Working for Equality and Justice: Theorizing from and with Lived Resistance to Economic Inequality and Injustice

rofessors Brooke Ackerly and Melissa Snarr led the 2016/17 Faculty Fellows Program. The group turned to the humanities for the study of inequality and injustice in two broad ways. First, participants considered how scholarship in the humanities can be informed by the experiences of those people who are living with the inequalities and injustices the group was exploring. Secondly, the seminar participants looked to scholarship in the humanities for instruction in how to do this work in the most effective way. On January 30, 2017, the seminar hosted “Scholarship in the Public Square: A Conversation with The Atlantic’s Yoni Appelbaum.” The Warren Center’s William S. Vaughn Visiting Fellow, Heath Carter, associate

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Front row: Melissa Snarr (ethics and society), Michelle Murray (Spanish and Portuguese), Kathy Gaca (classical and Mediterranean studies), and Brooke Ackerly (political science). Back row: James Fraser (human and organizational development), Heath Carter (history), and Juan Floyd-Thomas (African American religious history). Not pictured: Carwil Bjork-James (anthropology). (Photo by Steve Green.)

Working for Equality and Justice: Theorizing from and with Lived Resistance to Economic Inequality and Injustice

professor of history at Valparaiso University, moderated the wellattended discussion. Appelbaum is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he oversees the politics section, and he received his Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University. Katherine Hankins, associate professor of geosciences at Georgia State University, met with the group on March 20, 2017, to talk about her work on intentional living and poverty. Hankins’ current research focuses on the role of faith-based community development in inner city neighborhoods. She is also examining the activities of an urban ministry collective, which employs a “gentrification with justice” strategy to transform five impoverished neighborhoods in Atlanta. Luis Cabrera, associate professor in the School of Government and International Relations at Griffith University, met with the Warren Center Fellows and others at Vanderbilt to talk about his work-inprogress, “The Arrogance of Sovereignty,” on April 10, 2017. His talk was co-sponsored by Vanderbilt’s Social and Political Thought Workshop. Cabrera has written widely on issues of global justice and global citizenship, as well as on ethical issues arising around migration and economic integration between states. Additional programs are being planned for the 2017/18 academic year. Join our email list or visit our website for more information.

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Heath Carter (history) with Yoni Appelbaum (The Atlantic)

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2016/17 Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities Seminars

ast year, the Warren Center hosted twelve seminars, three of them led by graduate students, and the remainder led by faculty. The seminars facilitated interdisciplinary exchange on a wide array of topics. Below is a list of the seminars, coordinators, and visiting speakers who met with the groups.

18th-/19th-Century Colloquium

Seminar coordinators: Rachel Teukolsky (English) and Scott Juengel (English) • Seth Koven, G. E. Lessing Distinguished Professor of History and Poetics, Rutgers University • Orrin Wang, professor of English, University of Maryland • Elizabeth Miller, professor of English, University of California, Davis • Anahid Nersessian, assistant professor of English, University of California, Los Angeles

• Linda Heywood, professor of African American studies and history, Boston University • John Thornton, professor of African American studies and history, Boston University • Suzanne Schwarz, professor of history, University of Worcester • Kristen Block, associate professor of history, University of Tennessee, Knoxville The Contemporary in Theory Seminar

Seminar coordinators: Ben Tran (Asian studies) and Alex Dubilet (English)

Brazilian Studies Reading Group

Seminar coordinators: Cory Weaver (Latin American studies), Tiago Maranhão (history), and Kalliopi Samiotou (Spanish and Portuguese) • Katrina Dodson, professor of comparative literature, Bard College • Yanilda María González, assistant professor at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration • Valéria Rosito Ferreira, adjunct professor of Brazilian literature, Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro Circum-Atlantic Studies Seminar

Seminar coordinators: Celso Castilho (history) and Jane Landers (history) • Pablo Gómez, assistant professor of the history of science, University of Wisconsin, Madison • David LaFevor, assistant professor of Latin American history and digital humanities, University of Texas, Arlington • Teresa Cribelli, assistant professor of history, University of Alabama RO B E R T P ENN WAR R EN CE NTE R FOR THE HUMANITIE S

Environmental Humanities Seminar

Seminar coordinators: Teresa Goddu (English) and Catherine Molineux (history) Film Theory and Visual Culture Seminar

Seminar coordinators: Jennifer Fay (English, cinema and media arts) and Lutz Koepnick (German, cinema and media arts) • Johannes von Moltke, professor and chair of German and screen arts and cultures, University of Michigan • Davide Panagia, associate professor of political science, University of California, Los Angeles • Laura Mulvey, professor of film, media, and cultural studies, Birkbeck, University of London • Jean Ma, associate professor of art and art history, Stanford University • Karl Schoonover, associate professor of film and television studies, University of Warwick • Sara Blair, professor of English language and literature, University of Michigan

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Gender and Sexualities Seminar

Marx: Foundations and Contemporary

Seminar coordinators: Katherine Crawford (women’s and gender studies) and Melanie Adley (women’s and gender studies)

Seminar coordinators: Kira Braham (English) and Kylie Korsnack (English)

• Patrick Grzanka, assistant professor of psychology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

• Nathaniel Mills, assistant professor of English, University of Minnesota

Group for Pre-Modern Cultural Studies

Reading Between the Sheets: Sex, Desire, and the Erotic

Seminar coordinators: Bill Caferro (history) and Jessie Hock (English) • Paul Fischer, associate professor of religion, Western Kentucky University • Jane O. Newman, professor of comparative literature, University of California, Irvine • William Engel, Nick B. Williams Professor of English, The University of the South • Melissa Sanchez, associate professor of English, University of Pennsylvania Literature and Law Seminar

Seminar coordinators: Robert Barsky (French and Italian) and Daniel Gervais (law) • Gabriella Sanchez, assistant professor of security studies, University of Texas at El Paso • Kristina Touzenis, head of the international migration law unit, International Organization for Migration • Julius Grey, partner, Grey Casgrain, Montreal

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Applications

Seminar coordinators: Elizabeth Lanphier (philosophy) and Leah Roberts (human and organizational development, Peabody College) • Cricket Keating, associate professor of gender, women, and sexuality studies, University of Washington Science Studies Seminar

Seminar coordinators: Ole Molvig (history) and Alistair Sponsel (history) • Lukas Rieppel, David and Michelle Ebersman Assistant Professor of History, Brown University • Lynn Nyhart, Vilas-Bablitch-Kelch Distinguished Achievement Professor of History of Science, University of Wisconsin • Jenifer Dodd, visiting assistant professor of history, Berea College

Warren Center Special Events 2016/17

ashville mayor Megan Barry discussed a timely topic with “Women, Politics, and Progress in 2016,” held on October 10, 2016. The Warren Center co-sponsored the talk with the Margaret Cuninggim Women’s Center as part of their Women in Politics series and hosted a reception for Mayor Barry prior to the program. Once again, the Warren Center partnered with Humanities Tennessee to present a special series of programs at the Southern Festival of Books held October 14-16, 2016. Entitled “The Pulitzer Prize in the 21st Century,” speakers commemorated the centennial anniversary of this prestigious prize with an exploration of journalism and the arts and the legacy of the Pulitzer’s first one hundred years. Speakers included Annette Gordon-Reed, recipient of the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for her book The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family; Robert Olen Butler, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of short stories A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain; and Robert Cohen and David Carson, Pulitzer Prize-winning photographers for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Held October 28–29, the 2016 THATCamp

Top left: Nashville Mayor Megan Barry (photo by Anne Rayner). From top right: Ben Tran (Asian studies) with author Robert Olen Butler at the 2016 Southern Festival of Books; Rebecca Vandiver (history of art) with St. Louis Post-Dispatch photographers Robert Cohen (left) and David Carson at the 2016 Southern Festival of Books; Author Annette Gordon-Reed (Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History and professor of history, Harvard University) at the 2016 Southern Festival of Books (photos by Kristi Irving Photography)

(The Humanities and Technology Camp) featured keynote speaker Amanda Visconti, digital humanities assistant professor and librarian at Purdue

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University Libraries. She discussed “Public + Participatory: Infinite Ulysses and a More Open Humanities.” THATCamp is an “unconference” designed to bring together people from a variety of fields and skill levels with an interest in digital humanities. Co-sponsors were: the Center for Second Language Studies, the Center for Teaching, the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy, the Jean and Alexander Heard Library, the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, the Vanderbilt Center for Digital Humanities, and the Vanderbilt Institute for Digital Learning. Noah Warren, Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University and the 2015 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, read from his book of poetry, The Destroyer in the Glass, on November 1, 2016. This event was co-sponsored by the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities and the Vanderbilt Creative Writing Program. On November 7, 2016, Robert Dreesen discussed “Writing a Book and Getting It Published.” Dreesen is the senior commissioning editor in politics and sociology for Cambridge University Press. Geared towards junior faculty members and advanced graduate students, this event was co-sponsored by Vanderbilt University’s College of Arts and Science’s Program in Career Development, the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, and the Social and Political Thought Workshop. “Fort Negley: A Symbol of the Struggle for Civil Rights in Nashville” was a public event held at the fort on November 5, 2016. Occupied by U.S. federal troops in Nashville from 1862 to 1867, the fort was built on behalf of the occupying U.S. Army by men and women who had recently escaped from slavery and who were living under the protection of federal From top: Slide from keynote speech presentation at THATCamp 2016; Mona Frederick (Warren Center), Noah Warren (Stanford University), Kate Daniels (English), Mark Jarman (English); Students at a reception following Noah Warren’s reading; Unveiling the mock-up for the new Fort Negley interpretive marker: Monique Odom (Metro Parks and Recreation) and Ashford Hughes (Nashville Mayor’s Office) (photos by Kristi Irving Photography)

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troops. This program highlighted the role that Fort Negley has played as a tangible site for freedom during the Civil War and also featured the unveiling of a new interpretive marker to commemorate the story of those who built the fort. Bobby Lovett (history, Tennessee State University) gave the keynote address. A panel discussion followed with Crystal deGregory (history Ph.D., Vanderbilt University); Reavis Mitchell (history, Fisk University); and Daniel Sharfstein (law and history, Vanderbilt University). This program was co-sponsored by the Friends of Fort Negley, the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, and the Tennessee Historical Society with additional funding from the National Humanities Alliance Foundation. Funding for the permanent commemorative marker was provided by the 2014/15 Faculty Fellows of the Warren Center. Bradley Nelson, professor of Spanish at Concordia University (Montreal), presented a program on “Baroque Science Fiction: A Cervantine Proposal,” on November 14, 2016. Nelson’s research focuses on the aesthetic representation of the cultural and political upheaval that accompanied developments in the sciences in early modern Spain and Europe. His primary goal is to understand the ways in which science and technology structure our cognitive and artistic relationship with the worlds around us. “The Banjo: A Conversation with Laurent Dubois and Dom Flemons” included music performed by Flemons on Janauary 26, 2017. Flemons co-founded the Grammy Award-winning band Carolina Chocolate Drops. Referred to as the “American Songster,” Flemons pulls from the traditions of old-time folk music to create new sounds. Dubois is the author of The Banjo: America’s African

Top: Musician Dom Flemons (Photo by Kristi Irving Photography) Center: Playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes presents the 2016 Harry C. Howard Jr. Lecture (Photo by Steve Green) Lower: Author Kristen Green (Photo by Kristi Irving Photography)

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Instrument and is the Marcello Lotti Professor of Romance Studies and History at Duke University. This program was co-sponsored by the Africa at a Crossroads: Challenges and Prospects program and the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities. This year’s Harry C. Howard Jr. Lecture featured playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes, who discussed “A Writer’s Many Selves” on February 2, 2017. Hudes is the author of Water by the Spoonful, which was awarded the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. She also wrote the book for the Broadway musical In the Heights, which received the 2008 Tony Award for Best Musical and a Tony nomination for Best Book of a Musical. The video of the program is available at vanderbilt.edu/rpw_center/audio_video.php. In 1959, after being ordered by a federal court to desegregate the public schools in Prince Edward County, Virginia, white leaders chose to close them

instead. Those schools remained closed until 1964. Kristen Green, author of the book Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County, talked about the long-lasting and devastating effects that decision had on the people who live there. Held on February 20, 2017, this program was co-sponsored by the Bishop Joseph Johnson Black Cultural Center and the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities. Susan Ferber, executive editor of American and world history at Oxford University Press, discussed “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Academic Publishing (But Were Afraid to Ask),” on March 27, 2017. This event was co-sponsored by Vanderbilt University’s College of Arts and Science’s Program in Career Development, the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, and the Social and Political Thought Workshop.

Edward Friedman (Spanish and Portuguese) (fifth from left) next to Queen Emerita Doña Sofía of Spain. Friedman gave a talk entitled “Don Quixote and Literary Spaces: Cervantes in the World” in December 2016 at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, a research institute in Madrid.

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Graduate Student Fellows Present 2017 Public Lectures

uring the spring semester, the Graduate Student Fellows present a public lecture related to their work. This serves as a capstone to their year and is also a chance to share their research, not just with their peers, but with other students, faculty, staff, and the public.

Spring 2017 Lectures:

• “Moving Images: The Contemporary Distribution and Canonisation of Latin American Cinema” by Michael W. Purvis, School of Modern Languages, Queen’s University Belfast • “Understanding Cultural Transformation through Revitalization: Taki Onqoy and Early Spanish Rule” by Scotti M. Norman, Department of Anthropology • “Mexico City in the Age of Theater, 1830-1901” by Lance R. Ingwersen, George J. Graham, Jr., Fellow, Department of History • “Redefining a Rape Culture: The Influence of Anti-Violence-Against-Women Organizations on Mass Media Discourse” by Allison R. McGrath, Department of Sociology • “Survivorship in Women of Color: An Examination of Psychosocial Resources for Black Women Diagnosed with Breast Cancer” by Kanetha B. Wilson, Department of Sociology

Front row: Shelby Johnson (English), Scotti Norman (anthropology), Allison McGrath (sociology), Tatiana McInnis (English) and Kanetha Wilson (sociology). Back row: Lance Ingwersen (history), Timothy Foster (Spanish and Portuguese), and Michael Purvis (School of Modern Languages, Queen’s University Belfast). (Photo by John Russell)

• “Missing Miami: Rethinking Region, Nation, and Diversity” by Tatiana D. McInnis, Elizabeth E. Fleming Fellow, Department of English • “Dissonant Conquests: Literature, Music, and Empire in Early Modern Spain” by Timothy M. Foster, Joe and Mary Harper Fellow, Department of Spanish and Portuguese • “A ‘time fast approaching’: The Futures Past of Robert Wedderburn’s Messianic Prophetics” by Shelby L. Johnson, American Studies Fellow, Department of English

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Top left: Allison McGrath, a Warren Center Graduate Student Fellow, at a spring public lecture. Top right: Graduate Student Fellow Shelby Johnson delivers her public lecture. Bottom, front row: 2016/17 Warren Center Graduate Student Fellows Shelby Johnson (English), Scotti Norman (anthropology), Allison McGrath (sociology), Tatiana McInnis (English) and Kanetha Wilson (sociology). Back row: Lance Ingwersen (history), Timothy Foster (Spanish and Portuguese), and Michael Purvis (School of Modern Languages, Queenâ€™s University Belfast). (Photo by John Russell)

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Humanities 1100

(Formerly Humanities 101) Edward H. Friedman

“Science and technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition, and myth frame our response.” —Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

“Technology is the engine; the humanities are the steering wheel and the brakes. The humanists don’t create nearly as much force for getting things done as technology does, but technology is just plain lousy at directing its energy or managing itself.” —James Alan Gardner

et us imagine a “basic” introduction to the humanities. What could an instructor include in such a course in order to make students think analytically and critically, learn important tools for the acquisition of knowledge, and recognize the relevance of the humanities in what has been called the real world? At the same time, how could one strategize so as to underscore the value of the humanities according to a comprehensive blueprint and to illustrate the depth of options for conveying the seemingly infinite methods deployed by self-described humanists? How could the humanities be presented as a crucial complement, rather than as a low-priority “other,” to the

STEM disciplines? How could the theoretical models used in the humanities be shown to encompass deep conceptual, moral, and, yes, aesthetic concerns? A philosopher might answer, “How indeed?” Since I am not a philosopher, I would venture to respond, “It isn’t easy, but I’ll try,” evoking, coincidentally, the theme song of the 1967 film To Sir, with Love, which is, after all, about a teacher with a hard-to-please clientele. It is unfortunate, but true, that a defender of the humanities must be on the defensive. That is a given, and the circumstances seem unlikely to improve. The good news, however, is that humanists are on the right side of the debate, egalitarian thinking notwithstanding. Still, the ranking of the humanities 2017 | LETTERS

Wellcome Library, London

disciplines is hardly secure. As a form of selfprotection, scholars in the humanities need to define their far-reaching fields of inquiry and, without doubt, to be inclusive. Is there currently a sense of hierarchy within the humanities? I believe that there is, and I believe that this hierarchy does a disservice to the span of areas, approaches, and recourses involved. The dissemination of data and the exploration and examination of texts, traditions, societies, and the world at large are enhanced by the dialectics of breadth and depth. Stated a bit differently, the success and the continuity of the humanities depend on a mixture of the old and the new, on the play of perspectives, on recognition of and respect for difRO B E R T P ENN WAR R EN CE NTE R FOR THE HUMANITIE S

ference, on diversity and the sharing of ideas, and, last but not least, on the interplay of high tech and low tech. A strength of the humanities disciplines is the range of focal points and objects of study, which cover, in essence, a type of history of the world, from antiquity to the present, as framed in a limitless variety of vehicles and media. Creation, ingenuity, and art combine to project visions of human interaction and ways of perceiving all manner of signs. Past accomplishments coexist with and often vie with the latest innovations, in a system of intellectual and psychological negotiations and mergers. The intersections of inclusiveness, multiplicity, the “classic” (and the classic refashioned), and cutting-edge discoveries attest to an admirable both/and sensibility that can mark— and should mark—the trajectory of the humanities. From the late-1960s onward, the lessons of structuralism (and its aftermath) spurred a growth in self-consciousness, self-reflection, and self-reference in the humanities disciplines, as theory, collaborative investigations, and technology, most notably the realm of digital humanities, widened and intensified the options and the recourses of humanists. What does one communicate in a humanities class? “Anything and everything” would be an accurate yet overly general retort. I frequently allude to two elements from ancient times as points of departure for teaching: poetics and rhetoric. Poetics describes how literary objects are put together and prescribes how writers can re-create patterns, concepts, and stratagems. In his Poetics, for example, Aristotle looks at the precise mode in which Sophocles crafts the tragedy of Oedipus Rex, with com15

mentaries on catharsis, anagnorisis, the disposition of the protagonist, and so forth. A key consideration in this instance is the dialectics of product and process, the construction and the “constructedness” of the text and its effect on an audience or potential audience. A poetics is, simultaneously, a paradigm and a bouncing-off place, wherein a particular structural design may replicate or deviate from a prototype. A poetics accentuates the form and the components, aesthetic and conceptual, of a work. Rhetoric begins, and continues, as the art of persuasion, but persuasion is equally a line of attack for argumentation and a set of formal properties, such as tropes and rhetorical figures. Rhetoric serves the orator (including the politician) and the poet. On one end of the spectrum is “spin”—observable in every news report—and on the other is linguistic adornment or poetry, such as baroque verse, dense with figures and flourishes. Rhetoric has to do with devices of expression, a blending of form and content. Rhetoric invites and is dependent upon discourse analysis of one kind or another. Exposition and explanation require interpretation. In the presidential campaign of 2016 and in the political climate thereafter, to cite a prominent case, it is obvious that statements lead to restatements and clarifications, elucidations, and revisions without number, in the style of “When s/he said this, s/he meant.…” One could submit that there is no declaration without what could be labeled a rhetorical “deep structure” or without a possible recasting that not only may change a premise modestly, but that may be the antithesis of the original assertion. “Truth in advertising,” as viewed within an array of permutations, is not a universal commodity or standard, it would seem. That may be bad for those who seek absolute truths, whereas the predominance of the relative over the absolute becomes a sine qua non of discourse analysis, which thrives on signifiers and signifieds—signs and what they denote—that do not fit seamlessly. The political analogue demonstrates a familiar and inevitable facet of rhetoric: the underlying 16

mechanisms behind all language. Aristotle distinguishes between the objectivity of history and the subjectivity of poetry (fiction), but, although objectivity may be an intention of writing and reporting, every attempt must fall short, and the input of readers, listeners, and spectators—devotees of words— factors into any interpretive equation. In this sense, everyone is a critic, an arbiter of affirmations and propositions. We may be steadfast evaluators, adherents, detractors, and interested or disinterested moderators; likely, we will hear what we want to hear and will allow our biases to affect our judgments. Nonetheless, the more aware we become of rhetorical structures, the more successfully and thoroughly we can navigate the rough waters, as it were, of discourse. The job of gap-filling can be a tiring yet sweet affliction. My thesis here is that the humanities disciplines provide theoretical and practical guides to “reading” —understood broadly—the world, its people, and its business, and that these templates enable us more easily to comprehend and to contemplate the “big picture.” The creative arts are an offshoot of reality and a container of reality, as well.

n a collection of essays titled Reality and the Poet in Spanish Poetry, Pedro Salinas indicates that the work of the baroque master Luis de Góngora (1561–1627) “exalts” reality by adding an imaginative dimension to nature. Góngora captures the world around him as he amplifies and embellishes objects through words, through supplementary figures, conceits, and verbal maneuverings. He represents and re-presents what is “already there” by employing the instruments of the creative artist. In essence, he converts poetry into the macrocosm and nature into the microcosm. Art thus becomes, concurrently, a mirror of reality and an indelible and inseparable component of reality. Form and content function reciprocally, each advancing, modifying, and contextualizing the other. Attention to the artist’s formulation of the art object and to the response of a reader, spectator, or listener can encourage one

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to scrutinize a rhetorical operation and a structural configuration. The author of a literary text may strive to evoke reality through “realistic” means (via mimesis, or imitation) or through circumlocution (indirectly, anti-mimetically), and inspection of the arrangement of materials is indispensable to the revelation of themes and messages, transparent and subtle. A text, like reality, is open to interpretation, analysis, and adjustment. A text “performs” on its

Every text—and every phenomenon—offers a mystery of sorts to solve, to classify, and, almost certainly, to critique. And every text and every phenomenon will elicit a unique reaction and will inspire a series of associations. A bottom line of what we do as scholars, teachers, and students is to make connections. own terms and is subject to the terms imposed by its consumers: the purveyors of frames, boundaries, and insights. Reading with care and with acknowledgment of the synthesis of creation, expression, and interpretation lies at the heart of the humanities and at the heart of the pedagogical precepts within the humanities disciplines. As educators, we may be all over the map with regard to topic, technique, and personal style, but, as a rule, how we teach will be inflected by something along the lines of a critical attitude, that is, a challenge to decipher signs and to unravel meaning (with helpful hints to do so). Every text—and every phenomenon—offers a mystery of sorts to solve, to classify, and, almost certainly, to critique. And every text and every phenomenon will elicit a unique reaction and will inspire a series of associations.

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A bottom line of what we do as scholars, teachers, and students is to make connections. The internal frame is magnified and integrated into new and constantly shifting frames. A stable text meets unstable contexts, and the result is movement, rethinking, and breakthroughs, big and small. This is part of what makes academic pursuits fascinating and productive, and part of what motivates instructors to design and redesign courses. Goals may differ, but some amount of “shaking up” of the status quo—of previous juxtapositions and conclusions—is a feature of the undertaking. The study of literature has felt the impact of the boom in theory of recent decades and the consequent transformation of theory into a lingua franca for dialogue and cross-overs among disciplines. One of the legacies of structuralism—though hardly without precedent—is a consciousness of the stages and methodologies of critical analysis. In years past, students commonly were prohibited from using the first-person pronoun in essays, and the return of the “I” was significant and symbolic. The emblematic beholder now has a clear role in the scheme of things. While the canvas may grow larger, the aim is no longer a definitive or all-inclusive reading, but instead an enlightening— or enlightened—vision, akin to what Jorge Luis Borges characterizes as “partial magic.” The dialogical thrust gives criticism a new temper, kinder and gentler, with greater tolerance yet with no sacrifice of rigor. (Will the climate of today’s “real world” negatively influence the open-mindedness to which I refer? We shall see.)

aturally, classrooms do not operate as they did generations ago. With reasonable exceptions, instructors are less inclined to depend on a pure lecture format. “Interactive” is the norm. Technology reigns. The “flipped classroom” is in vogue. Schools such as Vanderbilt want students to feel driven toward excellence and happy in the academic environment. It is assumed that one should not have to suffer to learn. Teachers are spurred to be 17

inventive in their syllabi and in their course proposals and objectives. One could put forth examples of “high-end” plans that take advantage of the latest—and flashiest—technologies, geared to impress and engage students. In such courses, students could be trained in the humanities through updated focal points, groupings, and apparatuses, to wit, through the loftiest of technologies. I would like to move in the opposite direction, or in the same direction with a detour, by suggesting that revised approaches to the humanities, as stimulated by the increased momentum of theory, the growth of cultural studies, the force of digital humanities, and other resources can be brought into a deliberately low-tech classroom. “Deliberately low-tech” may seem to be a silly or off-putting phrase. It is meant to support my argument that not only does innovation take many forms, but that inclusion is better than exclusion and that—pardon, if you will, the poetic license (and the self-reference)—old dogs can learn and teach new tricks. I am not claiming, or denying, that everything old is new again, but that “classic” strategies and state-of-the-art technologies can work in tandem and without the establishment of hierarchies among the academic disciplines or within the humanities. I would also like to defend, just in case it may be necessary, my chosen branch of the humanities—literature—against those who would contend that literary study is little more than aesthetics or art appreciation. My position is similar to Góngora’s take on poetry. The reading and analysis of literary texts unearths countless treasures and prompts endless questions about books and life, forever joined at the hip. Like the baroque poet, I would deem art as the repository of a reality, or realities, that it depicts and heightens. The hypothesis is simple. A literary text consists of ideas, points of view, polemics, reflection (thought and imaging), and rationalization within an artistic structure. The concept of poetics—description and prescription—from classical antiquity can give clues to the linkage and reciprocality of form and content. Analogously, the principles of rhetoric—persuasive 18

tactics and figurative language—permit one to assess a work’s structure from diverse vantage points, internal and external. The text is, at once, a commentary and a creative object, and the very act of creation boosts the value, the intricacy, and the scope of the enterprise. The signifier expands, thereby expanding the parameters of the signified. Art becomes more than a complementary layer; it is the outer (as well as the inner) sphere, the common denominator of what could be deemed the collective renderings of human perception. A work of art exhibits the filling-in of spaces between meditation and representation, where form and content can bear equal weight or can elect to emphasize the disproportion. Every discipline and the practitioners of that discipline will celebrate specific achievements and theoretical ideals, and, of course, this is true of literary scholarship and literary scholars. Historical, socio-cultural, political, philosophical, theological, ideological, and comparative issues, among others, may be incorporated into the discussion of a literary text, in conjunction with “literary matters” per se. Genre, style, structure, language, intertextual relations, reception, etc., joined by the broad strokes and nuances of writing and analysis, augment the critical options. The study of literature yields findings that are like and unlike those of other disciplines, thanks to what the Russian Formalists of the early twentieth century named “literariness,” qualities exclusive to literature that can mix with nonliterary elements. New texts, new approaches, and new combinations guarantee that the gamut of topics will be inexhaustible.

t is evident that I am promoting the importance of the humanities, the vast horizons of study within the humanities, and the special standing of literature. I would advocate, as part of this stance, eclecticism and liberality in framing approaches and courses and in judging what is valid, what is relevant, and what is up to date. Trends in globalization, for example, seem to favor the present and the future over the past. This would be a mistake, I believe,

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as would the assumption that only the most recent theoretical and technological postulates are superior to their predecessors. We all should endeavor to be “current.” We should do our homework, but we should be wise about jumping on bandwagons or presupposing that classic and canonical models are somehow outmoded. Graduate students should be informed about the latest pedagogical aids and about the ways in which they might use the digital humanities in their research. They should be inspired, in turn, to broaden their bases, to make an effort to go to sources, and to realize the power of backgrounds, back stories, and history. To reiterate: education is about making connections, and so is technology. Neither pedagogy nor technology should dismiss, reject, or underestimate the benefits of the other, nor should conflicts erupt over priorities. There is room in the academic inn—and in the world—for humanists and scientists of every stripe. And, among humanists, each group should place cooperation above competition; internal tensions should be avoided at all costs. Scholars at Vanderbilt appear to applaud the call for interdisciplinary alliances. I have observed that graduate students in my home department of Spanish and Portuguese are extremely well received in other departments in which they take seminars. Never have I heard a student complain of having been treated as an “outsider” or of having been made to feel other than entirely welcome. Exposure to new texts, new theoretical models, and new dialogues can only be a plus. Does it behoove me to justify—and “exalt”— the field and the methods of studying literature? Probably not, but I have enjoyed doing exactly that for quite a while, with modifications, needless to say. The task can be summarized through fundamental dichotomies: text/context, form/content, tradition/ innovation, art/reality, literal/figurative, center/ margin, reliability/unreliability, mimesis/diegesis (showing/telling), realism/antirealism, high culture/ popular culture, action/description, and the like. Again, poetics puts forward systems of rules, and

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rhetoric concentrates on the interdependence of form and content, as discourse becomes a story in itself. The construction of a text is a multifaceted achievement, moving from a writer’s initial notion to readers’ (and critics’) responses and to changes wrought by time. The notions are molded by literary and experiential encounters, the responses are subject to individual criteria and taste, and the changes take into account succeeding texts, theories, and events, fictional and historical. The instability, or openness, of texts—single works, groupings, and works not conventionally categorized as literature— assures the continuity and development of criticism. Courses can be designed to showcase texts through unlimited frames. In the past, I have joined my favorite text, Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, for example, with other narratives of early modern Spain, with other works of experimental fiction, with other self-referential narratives (metafiction) in Spanish and English, with trends in Renaissance and contemporary theory, and with other manifestations of the baroque mindset. If one could give me from fifteen minutes to all the time in the world, I would be able to expound on—in the short or long versions—the virtues and the complexity of the narrative. The boundless range of topics treated by Cervantes moves from a portrait of Spanish society at the beginning of the seventeenth century—its institutionalization of theology, authoritarian practices, and rigid divisions—to literary in-games that connect to the past while forging a path to future creation. Cervantes redefines satire in an age of cruel and unbending censorship. A list of topics for discussion would include challenges to authority, history and historiography, absolute vs. relative truth, multiperspectivism, perception, madness, honor, social classes, gender issues, orality and the impact of print culture, the clash of Catholicism with Islam and Protestantism, censorship, physical and verbal humor, the craft of storytelling, and many more. The effects of reading and writing dominate a good percentage of the proceedings, and the plot line is 19

bidirectional, dealing with the adventures on the road of the self-proclaimed knight errant and the story of the composition of the chronicle of his ups and downs.

cide in the narrative, which is calculated to attract, surprise, and amuse the reader, the decoder of penetrating and unremittingly flexible messages.

s would follow, critical approaches to Don Quixote vary widely. The elaborate structure of the narrative and the substantial points of reference, from within and beyond the immediate frame, readily lend themselves to commentary: literary, extraliterary, or both. This work of fiction and metafiction can be analyzed through its criticism and allusions to theory (hence, it can be viewed metacritically and metatheoretically) and through its reception history and its place within comparative studies. Don Quixote has been seen as a literary, historical, political, theological, and socio-cultural allegory. It is a period piece and a universal and timeless work of art, tied to a historical moment, to the progression of narrative from its ancient roots to the twenty-first century, to human conduct and to human nature, and to readers the world over. A graduate student in a recent seminar on Don Quixote— using models from cultural studies—wrote a final paper on wallpaper, in a bedroom at Nashville’s Belmont Mansion (completed in 1853), that depicted scenes from Cervantes’s novel as a means of moral instruction. The solidly researched essay addressed home decoration in the nineteenth-century South, the history of wallpaper from its European origins, and the “reading” of the text in this setting and in America in general. In a seminar on Spanish theater from 1700 to 1850, in the spring of 2017, I received a final paper that applied the digital humanities— data mining and network analysis—to two plays by seventeenth-century women playwrights, María de Zayas and Ana Caro, in a testing of feminine discourse against masculine discourse. Each essay was formidable, and each displayed inventive thinking and sound analysis. The two papers were by the same student (Melanie Forehand, Ph.D. candidate). The study of literature is enriched by the tools of the social sciences and other disciplines, and specialists in

ervantes is premodern and postmodern. A virtuoso of precociousness, he anticipates hotoff-the-press theories related to art, letters, and culture. His primary trope is irony, which unifies the discrete themes and transforms satire into philosophy, critique (arguably with a capital c), and the novel. To foreground the ideal of objective history against the inescapable subjectivity of historiography, Cervantes introduces a corps of narrators, some in the guise of historians and some decidedly untrustworthy. He reveals that the major portion of the narrative is the translation of an original chronicle in Arabic. Don Quixote is a fictional text and a social document. It pays homage to earlier texts and customs and serves as the inspiration for future works and meditations. Every episode, every action, every character, and, for hopelessly quixotic types, every detail seem to have significance. Furthermore, every element seems to do double, triple, or quadruple duty; the narrative is a testament and tribute to polysemy, the play of multiple meanings of a word or concept. Cervantes manages to meld hybridity and unity and to bring the world into the work of art and the work of art into the world. Part 2 of Don Quixote (1615), published ten years after Part 1, stresses the effects of the published chronicle. Don Quixote and his squire Sancho Panza are known quantities; characters in the second part have read the text and devise chivalric plots of their own. The uncertainty of life makes its way into art when a writer, under the pseudonym of Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, publishes a “spurious” continuation in 1614. Although offended and infuriated, Cervantes handles the serendipitous situation ingeniously, since it fits perfectly—as if it had been planned—into the self-referential plot, which makes space for outside influences. The premeditated and the random coin-

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literature can be trained—and can train themselves— to make their work interdisciplinary (and “current”) without forfeiting their expertise in literary theory and criticism, literary history, and analysis. Playing from strength will include keeping fictional texts as literary objects within the analytical frame. Close reading is an essential means to any end. In the 2017/18 academic year, I will have the opportunity to teach an honors seminar on contemporary American drama. This is a course that I have taught several times since 2010, at Vanderbilt and in the Department of English Philology at the University (Universidad Complutense) of Madrid. While the format has remained largely the same, the primary texts have varied slightly. The latest group of plays includes Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie (1944); Arthur Miller, All My Sons (1947); Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun (1959); James Baldwin, Blues for Mister Charlie (1964); Wendy Wasserstein, The Heidi Chronicles (1988); Rebecca Gilman, Spinning into Butter (1999); Neil Labute, The Shape of Things (2001); Richard Greenberg, Take Me Out (2002); David Henry Hwang, Yellow Face (2007); Bruce Norris, Clybourne Park (2010); Jon Robin Baitz, Other Desert Cities (2011); Quiara Alegría Hudes, Water by the Spoonful (2012); and Ayad Akhtar, Disgraced (2012). I have chosen four films—The Purple Rose of Cairo (Woody Allen), The Normal Heart (Larry Kramer, dir. Ryan Murphy), The Piano Lesson (August Wilson, dir. Lloyd Richards), and The Laramie Project (Moisés Kaufman)—and, although the selection will be open, I will encourage students to write their final papers on Tony Kushner’s two-part Angels in America (1990, 1992). The objectives of the seminar are to present an overview of the study of drama and theater, as literature and as performance, and to focus on how U.S. drama has served as a reflection of society, how the works deal with questions of identity, and how theater can highlight intersections among history, politics, society, and the arts. Theater is a business, a drawing card to big cities, a community venture, and an academic discipline. The plays

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are commentaries on society: the family (usually dysfunctional), race, gender, gender identification, class, ethnicity, religion, economic status, etc. The playwrights survey such topics as the “normal” vs. the “abnormal,” forms of prejudice and discrimination (including affirmative action and “reverse discrimination”), the practice of “political correctness,” and the polarities of contemporary America. Each play is extraordinarily complex as a literary construct and as a statement on life and on drama. Each playwright adds art to life, taking nothing away. Theater history may be and may not be directly equivalent to U.S. history, and the points of contact and the differences can be telling. The humanities, in sum, are exceedingly adaptable. They are, metaphorically speaking, both enduring monuments to the past and testimonies to mutability. The humanities should not be regarded as subordinate to the sciences or to technology. What lies at the center of the intellectual universe is a debatable issue, and humanists should dare to enter the debate, with enthusiasm and with confidence. Why choose to play second fiddle if you can be first violin? We have a case to make. Within the humanities disciplines, practitioners in each field should be looked upon with impartiality and should be given latitude to explore their distinctive areas of competence and their bonds with colleagues in other fields. Restrictions and marginalization are unfair, hierarchies of values can be dangerous, and constraints never should be accepted blindly, nor should they be self-imposed. Interdisciplinarity can be the best of all possible worlds. Learning is a joint endeavor. An individual can profit from every partnership. Teachers always should be students. And, finally, we should trust that an open mind rarely will go unrewarded. Edward H. Friedman is Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of Spanish, Professor of Comparative Literature, and director of the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt. 21

What We Are Writing

he following is a list of books published in 2016 by our colleagues in the humanities and social science departments.

Ellen T. Armour, Signs and Wonders: Theology after Modernity, Columbia University Press. Robert F. Barsky, Hatched, Sunbury Press, Inc. Larry M. Bartels, co-editor, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government, Princeton University Press.

Markus Eberl, co-editor, Entre reyes y campesinos. Investigaciones arqueológicas en la antigua capital maya de Tamarindito, Archaeopress Access Archaeology.

Lauren Benton, co-editor, Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law, 1800–1850, Harvard University Press.

Juan M. Floyd-Thomas and Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas, co-editors, The Altars Where We Worship: The Religious Significance of Popular Culture, Westminster John Knox Press.

Piyali Bhattacharya, editor, Good Girls Marry Doctors: South Asian American Daughters on Obedience and Rebellion, Aunt Lute Books.

William Franke, co-editor, Transcendence, Immanence, and Intercultural Philosophy, Palgrave Macmillan.

David Blackbourn, Landschaften der deutschen Geschichte: Aufsätze zum 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen. Celso Thomas Castilho, Slave Emancipation and Transformations in Brazilian Political Citizenship, University of Pittsburgh Press.

Jefferson Cowie, The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics, Princeton University Press.

Lesley Gill, A Century of Violence in a Red City: Popular Struggles, Counterinsurgency, and Human Rights in Colombia, Duke University Press. Lenn E. Goodman, Judaism: A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation, Routledge. Barbara Hahn, Endlose Nacht. Träume im Jahrhundert der Gewalt, Berlin: Suhrkamp.

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Barbara Hahn and Meike Werner, The Art of Dreams: Reflections and Representations, Walter De Gruyter Inc. Christopher M. S. Johns, co-editor, Benedict XIV and the Enlightenment: Art, Science, and Spirituality, University of Toronto Press. Christopher M. S. Johns, China and the Church: Chinoiserie in Global Context, University of California Press. Judy Klass, Ismene’s Press Conference, Brooklyn Publishers. Christopher P. Loss, co-editor, The Convergence of K–12 and Higher Education: Policies and Programs in a Changing Era, Harvard Education Press. Noam Lupu, Party Brands in Crisis: Partisanship, Brand Dilution, and the Breakdown of Political Parties in Latin America, Cambridge University Press. Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, co-editor, Christian Practical Wisdom: What It Is, Why It Matters, Eerdmans. Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, co-editor, Conundrums in Practical Theology, Brill. Roger E. Moore, Jane Austen and the Reformation: Remembering the Sacred Landscape, Routledge. Bruce T. Morrill, co-editor, The Essential Writings of Bernard Cooke: A Narrative Theology of Church, Sacrament, and Ministry, Paulist Press. RO B E RT PENN WARR EN CE NT E R FOR THE HUMANITIE S

Emily C. Nacol, An Age of Risk: Politics and Economy in Early Modern Britain, Princeton University Press. Kelly Oliver, Hunting Girls: Sexual Violence from The Hunger Games to Campus Rape, Columbia University Press. Efrén O. Pérez, Unspoken Politics: Implicit Attitudes and Political Thinking, Cambridge University Press. Philip D. Rasico, Joan Coromines: Llibreta de Camp XXV de l’Onomasticon Cataloniae (Enquestes toponomàstiques i dialectals realitzades a la Catalunya del Nord,1959–1960), Barcelona, Institut d’Estudis Catalans/Fundació Pere Coromines, “Biblioteca Filològica LXXIX.” Joerg Rieger, co-editor, Unified We Are a Force: How Faith and Labor Can Overcome America’s Inequalities, Chalice Press. Bruce Rogers-Vaughn, Caring for Souls in a Neoliberal Age, Palgrave Macmillan. Cecelia Tichi, co-editor, The Gilded Age and Progressive Era, ABC-CLIO, LLC. Benigno Trigo, Malady and Genius: Self-Sacrifice in Puerto Rican Literature, SUNY Press. Andrés Zamora, Featuring Post-National Spain. Film Essays, Liverpool University Press.

Reconsidering My Whole Position

ven though I was born and raised entirely in the South—born, in fact, in a Richmond hospital named for Confederate General J.E.B. Stuart—the first time I recall consciously thinking of myself as a “Southern” writer was in the late 1970s. I was twenty-five, a graduate student at Columbia University. I had earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English literature at the University of Virginia, and then booked it for Los Angeles, where I lived for a year and a half before moving to New York in the fall of 1978 to pursue an M.F.A. I often felt, with relief, as if I might no longer be a true Southerner. Somehow, I had avoided a close call with a bad destiny. Although I couldn’t have articulated it then, I had always been a conflicted Southerner—a conflicted white Southerner. Almost from the beginning of consciousness, I had spent a good deal of my childhood wishing myself out of the region that spawned me. My first disavowal was based on language: I disliked the sound of my own Southern accent. Part of this feeling must have come from having an English mother, a G.I. bride of World War II. I idealized my mother’s speaking voice, so different from mine: the accent that remained ineradicable over the years, her impeccable grammar, and her recitations of lengthy narrative poems she had

By Kate Daniels via Chapter16.Org

memorized in grade school. Although she came from Lancashire folk of modest means, Mother had absorbed (and passed on to me) a surprisingly intellectual set of values that included the ordinary Englishman’s respect for spoken language and literature, a sense of the dignity of working people, and an astonishing lack of prejudice against people of color. (This last attribute would be worn out of her by sixty fractious years of impoverished life in the American South, but as a young woman she impressed upon me the beauty of human diversity.) My father’s family could hardly have been more different. They were people whose kin had only recently moved up to Richmond from the small farms that had sustained them since the end of the eighteenth century. Although many of them fought in the Civil War, none had been slaveowners, a fact that almost certainly originated from economic imperatives, rather than from moral convictions. By 1920, many members of my father’s family, including my grandparents, had relocated to the city, where they worked as unskilled laborers in the tobacco companies. None of them had gone beyond junior high school. As far as I know, none of them ever exhibited a feel for art, respect for higher education, or a love of literature. They spoke ungrammatically, sprinkling their talk with ain’ts and not hardlys and might coulds—illiteracies that fit right in with their Southern accents, oozing with broad vowel

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sounds and consonants lopped off lazily at the ends of words. I loved them—mightily in most cases—but their language, especially compared to the literary qualities of my mother’s, shamed me. When I got to graduate school, I thought I had escaped embarrassment of my origins when I found myself living away from the South among a group of new friends, all but one of them from New York City. I loved how rapid and percussive New York speech was, and how alive it felt in my mouth when I was mimicking what I heard on the street. In New York, the sound of ordinary people talking was something like a communal stir fry—sizzling, fast, and spicy. In the South, speech stalled in my mouth—a lukewarm, overly sweetened, mushy pudding I didn’t care for. Linguistically, I committed to changing my diet. There were a lot of things that weren’t so great about the Columbia M.F.A. program thirty-five years ago, but its one surpassingly excellent attribute was location. On any given night, poetry readings worth going to were happening all over the city. Most were just a fifty-cent subway ride away. Thus it was that one evening in 1979 I gathered up a group of my new writer friends and planned an outing to the 92nd Street Y to hear a reading by Robert Penn Warren, who had just won his second Pulitzer Prize for poetry. A year earlier, back in Los Angeles, I had bought that book, Now and Then, when it first came out. I still have my copy, all marked-up and dogeared, which begins with the ever-haunting line: “Beyond the last house, where home was….” I insisted we go early enough to sit near the front, so we were in the second or third row when John Hollander walked out on the stage to introduce Warren. Finally, Warren himself approached the podium. He opened his mouth, and—it is not too dramatic to say—my whole identity as a writer shifted from one space to another. Here is how Warren began his reading on that unremarkable-until-then night in Manhattan:

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Eye—uhd Lahhk Tuh Thah—ank Maw Fur—rend—uh Jaaaaw—uhn Haul—un—duh I’d like to thank my friend John Hollander. Those words, washed in the heat and blood of early-twentieth-century Southern speech patterns, stormed into me and have never left. The moment was an epiphany. Not an epiphany of sorts but an actual epiphanic moment of transformation that reframed my understanding of myself, who I was, where I was from, and to what extent I might change, revise, or refute that understanding. At the sibilant sounds of that old Kentucky accent, undiminished and still testifying to its origins after all Warren’s years at Yale, I was somehow undone. Something inside me, all coiled up and confused until then, began a long unraveling. Warren went on talking, and a few seats down the aisle from me, one of my friends leaned over and whispered irritably in his own distinctive Brooklyn accent, “What the hell is he saying? I can’t understand a word!” From out of the darkness and struggling through the traffic jam of neural transmitters crowding each other onto the limbic pathways leading to confusion, shock, dismay, and something that might be joy, one clear sentence made its way through: I think I might be a Southern poet. And I burst into tears. Although many of the young writers I read and with whom I shared my work in the 1980s found Warren’s poems outdated or irrelevant, I was unable to stay away from them. Continually, I circled back until, almost without much conscious awareness, they became necessary to me: not just to me as a poet, but to me as a person. And not just as a person, but as a Southern person—a white Southerner who had more to learn than I could ever have imagined. If I thought I was learning how to write my own

version of the long, loose, garrulous free-verse line that is so distinctive of Warren’s poetry (and that I longed to emulate), surely that was true. But as I studied and absorbed his expansive body of idiosyncratic poems, puzzled over their many voices, dissected their disconcerting rhetorical moves, and talked back to them, their metaphysics began to enter me as imperceptibly but perseverantly as the odor of a long-simmering stew eventually escapes the kitchen to infuse the entire house. Again and again, the poems pricked me into noticing the many privileges that my skin color had conferred—privileges available even to me, arising from the impoverished, uneducated, lower echelons of society. In one of the first long poems of his that I loved, “Tale of Time,” again and again, I pored over section 7: Planes pass in the night. I turn To the right side if the beating Of my own heart disturbs me. The sound of water flowing is An image of Time, and therefore Truth is all and Must be respected, and On the other side of the mirror into which At morning, you will stare, History Gathers, condenses, crouches, breathes, waits. History Stares forth at you through the eyes which You think are the reflection of Your own eyes in the mirror. Ah, Monsieur du Miroir! Your whole position must be reconsidered. This was a poem that broke just about every “rule” I had made for myself in my first decade of writing seriously—overuse (and even capitalization of!) ridiculously huge abstractions; lines ending on prepositions; a wildly rhetorical (even oratorical) tone; and an almost complete lack of personal language. Why it stirred me so deeply was a mystery I kept return-

ing to the way one returns to an exciting, on-again/ off-again lover. And every time I reread it, the final line hit me sharply as a slap in the face. Your whole position must be reconsidered. When I look back on those early years of reading Warren, sometimes it seems to me that I went to his poems the way a person who loves puzzles and mind-ticklers might seek out the challenges of cryptic crosswords or double sudoku. I read them, slowly, repeatedly over the years, constantly asking myself (like any young poet), How did he do that? But even as I tried to teach myself something about how he put language on the page, the great questions of my own personal existence kept springing up to confront me. They distracted me with their harping queries: Who am I? Why am I here? Where have I come from? What is the right thing to do with my life? These were the awful self-interrogations I could not get away from as I kept on reading Robert Penn Warren. “How thin is the membrane between himself and the world,” he wrote in Audubon: A Vision. “He cannot bear what he sees.” “He cannot think what guilt unmans him.” “Why//Therefore, is truth the only thing that cannot/Be spoken?” And finally: “In this century, and moment, of mania,/Tell me a story.” Through Warren’s poems I began to know myself—not just as a person with an individual reality and destiny, but as a citizen of a world far larger than myself and my concerns. His poems drew me out of the house and into the world. Of course, as soon as I stepped across the threshold onto the porch—and sometimes even before, still inside among family— personal identity became a problem. I might pat myself on the back sometimes for having descended from a long line of Southern poor whites who never owned slaves, but that was a cheap mind game. I knew from the attitudes and stories that had filtered down over the years that my people were no freer from racial prejudice, no less implicated in the ongoing oppression of black Southerners, than richer white people who had grown up among African-American cooks

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and cleaners, babysitters and gardeners. For whatever reason, I had been given the opportunity to evolve out of the world that spawned me. Every book I read, every experience away from home, enlarged my perceptions and carried me farther away from my origins. Now Robert Penn Warren had widened the lens, forcing me to focus on the people I loved, including the fact that some of their attitudes and beliefs were abhorrent. This

“There is only one solution,” Warren’s poetry kept reminding me, nudging me closer and closer to topics I did not want to write about. “If/You would know how to live, here/Is the solution: … Your whole position must be reconsidered.”

was a terrible struggle for me during my twenties. More than anything else, it was Warren’s poetry that helped me acquire the necessary psychic fortitude to look at the realities of the world I was born into. His poems forced me to ask myself (partly because of all the rhetorical questions he loved to include in his poems) how I was going to address those realities. We live in a different time now, but during my early years it seemed to me that most Southern whites practiced a kind of “polite” denial about the indefensible differences, the immoral gap between white lives and black lives. If you can’t say anything nice, Southern parents had a habit of telling their children, don’t say anything at all. This adage might be helpful for creating compliant offspring, but for writers denial constitutes the kiss of death. “There is only one solution,” Warren’s poetry kept reminding me, nudging me closer and closer to

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topics I did not want to write about. “If/You would know how to live, here/Is the solution: … Your whole position must be reconsidered.” Sometime during the early-1970s, I came across Warren’s nonfiction work from 1956, Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South. I read it shuddering, standing up among the shelves of Alderman Library as an undergraduate at the University of Virginia. Back then, it was all too real, and its bald, frank narratives conveying racial attitudes of black and white Southerners alike frightened the hell out of me. Documentary-style, it provided my first glimpse into the private thoughts and imaginings of black Southerners, my fellow citizens, people I had lived in shadowy proximity to for all my life. I was stunned by the book’s revelations that forced me to confront the enormity of the gap between the preconceptions that my white upbringing had instilled in me and the evidence that Warren presented of the real lives of black people, described in their own voices. The shock was radical enough to create an opening that allowed me to take in brand-new thoughts: “For segregation has test steel into the Negro race and that is one valuable point of segregation,” an unnamed AfricanAmerican minister said. It was an analysis that surprised me. In the parlance of that time, I could not get my (white, increasingly liberal) head around it. Continuing, he said: “It’s just foolish thinking for people to believe you can get the South to do in four or five years what they have been doing in the North for one hundred years. These people are emotional about their tradition, and you’ve got to have an educational program to change their way of thinking, and this will be a slow process.” The forgiving tone of his assertion was reassuring, but then he complicated his assessment by concluding on a more Darwinian note. A black man, he said, “has got to outthink the white man, has got

to outlive the white man.” Comparing such complex, nuanced thinking to the stereotypes about African Americans with which I had been raised induced in me a now-familiar skin-shame. Twenty years old, I reshelved the book and walked away from it for more than a decade. I had a lot of living to do to catch up with that book. By 1989, when Warren died, I was on the faculty at Lousiana State University, where Warren himself had taught in the 1930s. A founding editor of The Southern Review, he was in many ways still alive there, so his death was felt very personally by the LSU community. Preparing to participate in the university’s memorial service for him, I thought to read some of the materials I had avoided until then. That is how Who Speaks for the Negro? first came into my life. In that book, Warren’s nonfiction writings on segregation and race relations reached their culmination. Although mostly a compilation of interviews with African Americans working in the civil rights movement (including MLK and Malcolm X, Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young), the book includes passages of Warren’s personal ruminations on race, as well. I can still remember the relief of reading his words as he revisited, for the first time, his own deeply troubling essay defending segregation in I’ll Take My Stand, published in 1932 when he was only twenty-seven. “I never read that essay after it was published,” he wrote more than thirty years later in Who Speaks for the Negro?, “and the reason was, I presume, that reading it would, I dimly sensed, make me uncomfortable.” Even as he was writing it, he recalled, something about his own position unsettled him: “I had experienced some vague discomfort, like the discomfort you feel when your poem doesn’t quite come off, when you’ve had to fake, or twist, or pad it, when you haven’t really explored the impulse. … [E]ven then, thirty-five years ago, I uncomfortably suspected, despite the then prevailing attitude of the

Supreme Court and of the overwhelming majority of the population of the United States, that no segregation was, in the end, humane.” And then this extraordinary confession emerged: “It never crossed my mind that anybody could do anything about it.” Dear God, I remember thinking: if it had never crossed the mind of the young genius Robert Penn Warren that “anybody could do anything” about the tragedy of segregation, perhaps it might be possible to admit my own shortcomings and conflicts. Maybe then I could make some progress as a person, as well as a poet. Of course, within the context of his literary genius, Warren was one of the few Southern writers of his generation who did “do something” about what he called the inner conflict that characterized and deformed all life, white and black, in the region where he was born in 1905. There were other white Southern writers who pulled polite veil after polite veil from the white Southern psyche, revealing the immorality of and mutual damage inflicted by segregation—Peter Taylor, Harper Lee, Erskine Caldwell, Flannery O’Connor. But I don’t believe there was anyone besides Warren who had the moral rectitude to recant his own earlier work, or the courage to dissect in public the uglier, less evolved statements that were part of some of his earlier work. There was certainly no other Southern poet of his time who did so, and his example made all the difference to me. No wonder I wept when I first came into his presence at twenty-five years old, in New York City, in full, unconscious flight—until that moment— from my freighted, unwanted identity as a Southern writer. In a women’s support group I attend, one of the commitments we make to ourselves and to each other is to “get clean.” By “clean,” we mean a kind of emotional honesty, first with ourselves and then with others. We mean: as much integrity as we can

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summon in any given moment, taking into consideration our all-too-human limitations, and our conscious acceptance not only of our own shortcomings and failures, but those of others, as well. We mean: not avoiding the hard thing just because it is hard or might displease someone else. When one has been raised without those habits, they are hard practices to develop. Robert Penn Warren helped white Southern literature understand the importance of getting clean— or, at least, he helped later generations of white writers born in the South understand the moral necessity of trying to get clean, and to live that way, regardless of the filthy wickedness of our shared past, and in spite of the heavy burden of trying to change. Warren began to seem to me—as he has come to be regarded by so many—a rare white Southerner of conscience and moral courage who devoted his prodigious abilities and his expansive consciousness not just to poetry, but to the moral development of Americans—especially of Americans of the South. I have always thought he should have received the Nobel Prize for literature. All these years later, the poetry of Robert Penn Warren is part of my bedrock. I read and re-read it, quote it to myself in necessary moments, teach it, and probably proselytize about its healing brilliances. In my head, I hear his iconic voice when I want to, or need to—a set of sounds that unfastens from the present and reattaches me to some aspect of the past that I hadn’t known I was in need of. For me, Warren’s voice is the sound of a home I never realized I had until I heard him. And his poetry is the evidence of what a hard place it has been to call home, and how necessary it still is to grapple with its challenges. As a young writer, I needed Warren’s poetic demand that I undertake, as a Southerner, the hard thing not just for my personal benefit, but in order to live among others with a clean conscience and a raised head. Now, in my sixties, I require the sustain-

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ing, dynamic example of his work over time. More than any other writer who is personally important to me, Robert Penn Warren understood, I think, what it really means to live in time, to admit that we are powerless over time. That was one of his great subjects. I find myself quite often these days thinking of how his remarkable intellect and his extraordinary humanity might have been stimulated by our own era of radical realignments of racial paradigms, moving rapidly from a white majority to a society in which people of color are the larger cohort. Every day, it seems to me, the old questions of race and identity become increasingly outmoded, replaced by new complexities that seek their own original articulations of this moment in time. We are all still working it out. I can’t guess what kind of work Robert Penn Warren might have made from present opportunities, but I am confident that he would not have evaded engagement with the present moment, fractious and uncertain as it is. After all, he is the one who wrote these words at the end of All the King’s Men and offered them to all of us: “[S]oon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time.”

Kate Daniels, professor of English, directs the creative writing program. Her most recent book is A Walk in Victoria’s Secret. For more coverage of Tennessee authors, please visit Chapter16.org, a publication of Humanities Tennessee. To listen to Robert Penn Warren’s interviews with civil rights activists, visit the digital archive “Who Speaks for the Negro?” on the Warren Center website.

2017/18 Warren Center Faculty Fellows Program TELLING STORIES: MODES, MEDIA, AND MEANINGS

elling stories is fundamental to human life, but what makes certain stories “telling”? When, where, why, by whom, and to what ends do stories get told—and who listens to them? Many academic disciplines have witnessed renewed interest in the meanings and functions of stories and the modes by and the media in which people tell them. Taking a humanistic, interdisciplinary approach to pressing empirical, theoretical, and methodological issues associated with storytelling has the potential to deepen understanding of what makes some stories “tell” or compel. This yearlong Warren Center Faculty Fellows Seminar, co-directed by Laura Carpenter and Catherine Molineux, will explore innovative scholarly and popular approaches to telling stories emerging from the various humanistic disciplines and consider how these new approaches reframe the politics and ethics of storytelling. 2017/18 Faculty Fellows:

Ellen T. Armour is E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Chair in Feminist Theology at Vanderbilt Divinity School and director of the Carpenter Program in Religion, Gender, and Sexuality. Her latest book, Signs and Wonders: Theology after Modernity (Columbia University Press, 2016), uses photographs to diagnose and respond to our relationship to modernity. Her current book project, tentatively entitled “Seeing is Believing: Politics, Theology and New Media,” will analyze the impact on and import for our communal political life of significant changes in the media landscape by following photography’s role in specific recent story lines connected to critical issues that we confront in our time and place. James F. Brooks, the 2017/18 William S. Vaughn Visiting Fellow, is professor of history and anthropology at University of California, Santa Barbara. His most recent publications include Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship and Community in the Southwest Borderlands and Mesa of Sorrows: A History of the Awat’ovi Massacre. Brooks serves as editor of The Public Historian and co-directs UC Santa Barbara’s Public History 30

program. During his fellowship at the Warren Center, he will be completing a work of creative nonfiction, Picketwire, that tells the story of intertwining lives in the southern Colorado coal country. He has previously held distinguished fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe. After his fellowship at the School for Advanced Research, he served as director of the SAR press from 2002 to 2005 and president from 2005 to 2013. Laura M. Carpenter, Spence and Rebecca Webb Wilson Fellow, is associate professor of sociology. An expert on gender, sexuality, health, embodiment, and the life course, she is author of Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences (NYU Press, 2005) and coeditor of Sex for Life: From Virginity to Viagra, How Sexuality Changes Throughout Our Lives (NYU Press, 2012). Her research has addressed sexuality in adolescence and midlife; controversies over male circumcision, female genital cutting, and the vaccine for human papillomavirus (HPV); depictions of sexuality and romance in popular media; and qualitative research methods, and been supported by the National Science Foundation, National Institute on Aging, and Social Science Research Council. An 2017 | LETTERS

avid digital storyteller, she has recently embarked on a study of coming-of-age road trips. John Wayne Janusek is professor of anthropology. He has worked as an archaeologist in the Bolivian high Andes for the past thirty years, conducting research focused principally on the Pre-Columbian civilization of Tiwanaku and its precursors. His books include Identity and Power in the Ancient Andes (Routledge, 2004) and Ancient Tiwanaku (Cambridge, 2008). His current research engages the political ecology of incipient urbanism in the Pre-Columbian Andes, and specifically the centrality of particular landscapes and elements—stone, water, soil, and celestial cycles—to emergent civilization and its religious foundations. Anthropomorphic stone sculptures in Tiwanaku were powerful, ancestral animate beings that embodied dynamic landscape forces as lithic materiality and narrative iconography. The Warren Center will afford an ideal forum for exploring the multiple dimensions of these sculptures as lithified ancient “storytelling.” Shaul Kelner is associate professor of sociology and Jewish studies specializing in the sociology of contemporary Jewish experience and the intersections of culture and politics in Jewish life. He is completing a National Endowment for the Humanities-supported book project, “Red Pharaohs, Let My People Go!” about the cultural consequences of the American Jewish community’s successful Cold War-era mobilization for Soviet Jewish emigration rights. An alumnus of the Wexner Graduate Fellowship program, Kelner has been a Fellow of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Institute for Advanced Studies and the University of Michigan’s Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies. His first book, Tours That

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Bind: Diaspora, Pilgrimage and Israeli Birthright Tourism (NYU Press 2010), won awards from the Association for Jewish Studies and American Sociological Association. Stan Link is associate professor of the composition, philosophy and analysis of music at the Blair School of Music. His creative work includes music for both carbon- and silicon-based performers. “Splinch,” from his piano quartet, Portmanteaundefjam, was performed in New York and Paris by The Atlantic Ensemble, while his RH- 2.0, for solo violin and laptop, was premiered at Zeitgeist Gallery in Nashville. His scholarship focuses on the film soundtrack, with publications, papers, and presentations on the keyboard in European vs. American cinema, dancing nerds, deathly silence, horror, children, sociopaths, and horribly sociopathic children. His teaching focuses on interdisciplinary explorations of music’s relationship to nearly anything assumed to be nonmusic, and he is currently developing a new course on music, art, and disability. Letizia Modena is associate professor of Italian. Her research and teaching center on the interplay of the arts and the city, exploring how the narrative viewpoint found in written and visual fictions of the city creates alternative ways of seeing, describing, and constructing urban space. She focused on the urbanistic roots of the bestselling novel Invisible Cities (1972), a perennial favorite of architects and city planners, in her Italo Calvino’s Architecture of Lightness: The Utopian Imagination in an Age of Urban Crisis (Routledge, 2011, 2014). Her current book project, “Peripheral Visions: The Arts and Urban Planning,” is a sustained reflection on creative works about urban spaces and relationships between persons 31

and the built environment. A recent essay from that project examines self-portraits by African American photographer Carrie Mae Weems that interrogate long-standing monuments to colonialism in Rome. Catherine A. J. Molineux, Jacque Voegeli Fellow, is associate professor of history and Chancellor’s Faculty Fellow 2016–2018. She has published Faces of Perfect Ebony: Encountering Atlantic Slavery in Imperial Britain (Harvard University Press, 2012), as well as articles and book chapters. She is currently finishing a book manuscript tentatively entitled, “The Making of Kings: African Sovereignty in the British Atlantic World,” which, among other things, considers the relationship between empire building and the making and telling of stories. Her interest in stories and storytelling derives from a desire to understand how they have historically functioned in social justice causes.

Haerin Shin is assistant professor of English, with secondary appointments in Asian studies and cinema and media arts. Shin works on late twentieth-century and twenty-first-century fiction and media across American/ Asian American/Korean/Japanese literature. Her research focuses on telepresence technology, digital/ visual media aesthetics, and the ontology of alterity concerning race and ethnicity. Past and forthcoming publications include essays on techno-Orientalism; the affect in apocalyptic and disaster fiction and film; cyber fandom and trolling; alternative temporalities in digital film techniques; and posthuman race politics. Wrapping up her first book project entitled “Technology of Presence: Being and Reality in the Age of Cyberculture,” Shin is beginning to work on her second project on Asian American speculative fiction.

Jonathan Rattner is assistant professor of art and assistant professor and assistant director of cinema and media arts. An artist and filmmaker that primarily produces experimental nonfiction films and videos, Rattner holds an M.F.A in film and video production from the University of Iowa, an M.F.A. in intermedia art from the University of Iowa, and a B.F.A. in film and television from Tisch School for the Arts, NYU. He has exhibited work at the Anthology Film Archives, the Walker Art Center, the World Social Forum in Brazil, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, the European Media Arts Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, L’Alternativa Film Festival, as well as at other colleges, festivals, and galleries in the United States, Europe, and Australia.

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Warren Center Graduate Student Fellows Program

ach year, the Warren Center sponsors an interdisciplinary Graduate Student Fellows Program. Vanderbilt University graduate students in the traditional humanities departments or those whose work is of a humanistic nature are invited to apply for the seven dissertation-completion fellowships. The fellowship provides a stipend as well as a modest research fund. Students are not allowed to hold any other form of employment during the term of the fellowship and are expected to complete and defend their dissertations before the start of the next academic year. They meet weekly at the Warren Center, giving presentations from their work to the seminar and discussing texts of common interest. The Warren Center also arranges for speakers to meet with the group during the year to provide opportunities for discussion of issues pertinent to scholarly life, such as the art of writing, successful strategies for publication, funding opportunities, grant writing, and workshops on delivering academic presentations. Each Warren Center Graduate Student Fellow gives a public lecture in the spring term. Fellows will also be expected to be active participants in the life of the Warren Center during their fellowship year. The application deadline for 2018/19 graduate student fellowships is January 30, 2018. Further information is available on the Warren Center’s website. 2017/18 Warren Center Graduate Student Fellows

Alexandra Alekseyeva, the 2017–2018 George J. Graham, Jr., Fellow, is a doctoral candidate in philosophy. Her dissertation, “From Spinoza to Hegel: Ideology as Pathological Desire,” seeks to give a coherent conceptual account of ideology and, in so doing, to revitalize the seemingly outdated practice of ideology critique. Drawing on Baruch Spinoza and G. W. F. Hegel, she posits that desire is the necessary structural feature of subjectivity. Building on this foundation, Alekseyeva argues that ideology is inverted or pathological desire, i.e., desire that tends toward the disempowerment and destruction of the subject, which emerges from and is made possible by forms of life that fail to actualize the relational structure of subjectivity. Lastly, Alekseyeva contends that the upshot of conceptualizing ideology as pathological desire is the ability of the concept to perform both epistemic and functional critique, thus synthesizing two divergent traditions of ideology critique. Sarah Koellner is a doctoral candidate in German, Russian, and East European studies. She is working on the aesthetic evaluation of privacy in her disserRO B E R T P ENN WAR R EN CE NTE R FOR THE HUMANITIE S

tation, “Reenvisioning Privacy in German Literature and Culture after 9/11,” which examines the value of privacy for the “self ” under (post-) panoptical surveillance. Through the analysis of selected literary, filmic, and theatrical works by Ulrich Peltzer, Juli Zeh, and Angela Richter, she develops a “participatory” dimension of privacy, which allows her to reenvision privacy as a tool for political activism. By expanding the idea of a “Right to be Forgotten” to communities as a whole, the dissertation suggests a deeper understanding of the double-sided nature of surveillance and the willingness to share data on the individual level, when it promises to simplify, orient, or facilitate everyday life in an information society. James Phelan is a doctoral candidate in English. His dissertation, “The Turn to Too Much Information,” considers modernist literature’s part in the history of the encyclopedia, that is, the history of formal solutions to the problem of information overload that runs from Pliny to the Encyclopédie to Wikipedia. It is often said that works such as James Joyce’s Ulysses and Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project are encyclo33

pedic, but their relationship to actual encyclopedias is seldom specified. Phelan argues that modernism’s big books consolidate and repurpose nearly the entire repertoire of innovations introduced by earlier permutations of the genre and that in their engagement with the encyclopedic tradition, those works anticipate the internet’s transformation of how we read and think, and point to the trouble it poses and the promise it holds. Danielle Picard is a doctoral candidate in history. Her dissertation, “Analyzing the Human Factor in British Industrial Psychology, 1919–1939,” investigates debates about workplace efficiency and the development of applied psychology. By examining the development of the National Institute of Industrial Psychology, her work reveals three things about the scientific knowledge-making process: how moral and ethical considerations shaped the boundaries of a new discipline; how a scientific institution molded its research, methodologies, hiring practices, and engagements with diverse publics based on social and political concerns; and how those concerns also shifted as a result of NIIP’s involvement. In chapters that discuss public knowledge of science, gender, scientific funding, and early research ethics pertaining to human subjects, the dissertation shows how scientific credibility was gained and lost through interactions with a diverse range of scientists, politicians, industry leaders, and the broader public. Rachel Skaggs, the 2017–2018 American Studies Fellow, is a doctoral candidate in sociology. Her dissertation, “Writing Up: Commercial Success, Reputation, and the Career Pathways of Nashville Songwriters,” uses statistical models, social network analysis, and qualitative interviews with highly successful songwriters to examine how songwriters navigate complex social relationships with co-writers, account for changes in the music industry, and balance their own artistic goals and financial needs. As songwriting is a mostly informal labor market, this research posits that the network of songwriters 34

who collaborate to make country music is the main opportunity structure through which individuals mobilize social relationships to gain access to the music industry. This research will contribute to the understanding of reputational labor markets and relies on a novel methodological approach that situates qualitative interviews directly within their larger industry and network context. Wietske Smeele, the 2017–2018 Elizabeth E. Fleming Fellow, is a doctoral candidate in English. Her dissertation, “The Victorian Posthuman: Monstrous Bodies in Science and Literature,” explores the anomalous body as a site in which science, medicine, and the literary meet. By focusing on the way in which nineteenth-century literature interacts with the fields of science and medicine, she shows that the Industrial Revolution pioneered a new way of defining the human as a scientific being. The innate interdisciplinarity of post-industrial literature demonstrates further the important role that literature plays in mediating and practically utilizing the specialized language of the sciences. As science and medicine became progressively specialized, literature and cultural apparatuses of nonfictional publication took on an increasingly important role in defining the sites of human and scientific interaction. David Vila Diéguez, the 2017–2018 Joe and Mary Harper Fellow, is a doctoral candidate in Spanish and Portuguese. His dissertation, “Punk in Democratic Spain: Resisting Franco’s Legacy since 1975,” studies the relation between punk culture, antifascism and social movements in democratic Spain. His work questions the hegemonic narrative of an exemplary transition to democracy in Spain through the study of such an overlooked culture as punk. Vila aims to overcome the elitist and classist approach to Spanish culture produced by most scholarship, and he does not see any difference between canonical poetry and the lyrics of punk bands. In order to argue these points, he combines a musicological and cultural studies perspective.

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Coming Events 2017/18

Speech and Space: Discursive Environments across Non-Arab Islam Presented by the 2015–2016 Andrew W. Mellon John E. Sawyer Seminar September 7–9, 2017 As Islam extended beyond the Arab world, its practitioners found themselves inhabiting and domesticating new physical environments and inhabiting ever-more diverse language communities. These linked activities—the appropriation and domestication of local speech and space—gave rise to new and diverse expressions of Islam. Yet whatever the local variation, these activities conveyed a recognizable sense of what it meant to be a Muslim, inhabitants of a “Balkans to Bengal complex” as Shahab Ahmed put it in What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton, 2016). A range of conference speakers, including Shahzad Bashir (Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Humanities in the Department of Religious Studies, Brown University), Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi (professor of history and near and middle Eastern civilizations, University of Toronto), Faisal Devji (professor of history, University of Oxford), and Vanderbilt professor Emily Greble (associate professor of European studies, Germanic and Slavic languages, and history), will explore historical and contemporary facets of being Muslim in locales from twelfth century Central Asia through twentieth century Yugoslavia and contemporary Turkey. All members of the Vanderbilt community are welcome. Sebastiaan Faber, Chair and Professor of Hispanic Studies at Oberlin College 2016–2017 Warren Center Fellows September 18, 2017 In addition to some eighty articles on topics ranging from the theory of ideology to the Spanish Civil War, Faber is the author of Exile and Cultural Hegemony: Spanish Intellectuals in Mexico, 1939–1975 (Vanderbilt, 2002) and Anglo-American Hispanists

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and the Spanish Civil War: Hispanophilia, Commitment, and Discipline (Palgrave, 2008). Alison Piepmeier Memorial Lecture: George Estreich September 25, 5:00 p.m. Alumni Hall 206 Estreich is the author of Textbook Illustrations of the Human Body, a collection of poetry, and The Shape of the Eye, a memoir about raising his daughter Laura, who has Down syndrome. Co-sponsored with the Warren Center by the Margaret Cuninggim Women’s Center, the Department of English, and the Program in Women’s and Gender Studies, this lecture will honor Alison Piepmeier, a renowned feminist scholar who died in 2016. Piepmeier completed her Ph.D. in English at Vanderbilt and taught in English and Women’s and Gender Studies before becoming the director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at the College of Charleston. She was the author of Out in Public: Configurations of Women’s Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America and Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism, and the co-editor of Catching a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the 21st Century (with Rory Dicker). With the help of another scholar, Estreich is completing a manuscript on prenatal testing that Piepmeier had been writing. 2017 Southern Festival of Books Presented by Humanities Tennessee October 13–15, 2017 The Warren Center is cosponsoring a series of speakers related to the topic of storytelling in conjunction with our Faculty Fellows theme. This series will explore the various media used in storytelling such as film, music, video games, graphic novels, podcasts, and more. Speakers include Jonathan Gottschall (The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human), Andrew Ervin (Bit by Bit: How Video Games Transformed Our World), and Kristen Radtke (Imagine Wanting Only This). 35

Coming Events 2017/18

Raoul Peck October 18, 2017, 4:10 p.m. Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck’s 2016 documentary, I Am Not Your Negro, was based on James Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript Remember This House and narrated by Samuel L. Jackson. The film examines the lives and the untimely deaths of civil rights leaders Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evers, and Malcolm X, as well as Baldwin’s writing and reflections on the U.S. civil rights movement. Using television clips from the current time period as well as from the 1960s, I Am Not Your Negro powerfully demonstrates the connections in the contemporary period to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The film was nominated for an Academy Award. His campus visit is cosponsored by several Vanderbilt University departments and programs. In addition to the Warren Center, sponsors to date include the Bishop Joseph Johnson Black Cultural Center, Office of LGBTQI Life, Program in Cinema and Media Arts, Jean and Alexander Heard Library, Department of English, and Callie House Research Center for the Study of Global Black Cultures and Politics. Don Quixote Symposium October 21, 2017 The Warren Center will sponsor a workshop titled “Don Quixote in a Day.” The workshop will be codirected by Edward Friedman, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of Spanish and professor of comparative literature, and Kirsten Mendoza, doctoral candidate in the Department of English. Cory Duclos, a Vanderbilt Ph.D. in Spanish and Portuguese and currently director of the Keck Center for Language Studies at Colgate University, will be the invited lecturer. Friedman will focus on the background, structure, and theoretical premises of Cervantes’s novel. Mendoza will look at comparative approaches to Don Quixote and to early modern literature in general. Duclos will address questions of 36

technology, including ties between Don Quixote and the digital humanities. The workshop will be geared toward both those who have read Don Quixote and those who would like to prepare themselves to read the novel. John L. Jackson Jr., Dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy and Practice October TBD 2016–2017 Warren Center Fellows Jackson’s research examines racial and class-based differences in contemporary urban environments, including a focus on how urbanites themselves theorize and deploy those differences in everyday interactions. His scholarship uses ethnographic research methods to extend and expand critical race theory as an analytical and explanatory framework for understanding contemporary social conflicts. Harry C. Howard Jr. Lecture March 13, 2018, 4:00 p.m. Speaker: Danielle Allen is director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics and James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University. A political theorist who has published broadly in democratic theory, political sociology, and the history of political thought, Allen is widely known for her work on justice and citizenship in both ancient Athens and modern America. Allen will discuss her latest book Cuz: The Life and Times of Michael A., a family memoir regarding the life and tragic death of her cousin.

Please check our website for additional programming information, including locations for upcoming events.

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2017/18 Warren Center Faculty Fellowship Opportunities

he 2018/19 Faculty Fellows Program, co-directed by Mark Hosford (associate professor of art) and Kevin Murphy (professor of history of art and Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Humanities), is entitled “The World of Print(s): Multiples and Meanings in Early Modern Europe and North America.”

The seminar will explore the significance of printed words and images in Early Modern Europe and North America. Though the current age is often considered unique in terms of the amount of information constantly flooding the airwaves and the internet, it is important to historicize the current phenomenon in comparison to the Early Modern period when there was an explosion of printed materials that similarly saturated the West. The advent of cheap print in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries meant that larger audiences than ever before had access to the marketplace of written words, some serious and thoughtful, some salacious and sensational. Images on woodblocks combined with moveable type made possible the publication of a variety of illustrated texts as well. The visual culture brought about by the advent of this technology in the Early Modern period was the backdrop to the work of some of the greatest printmakers of all time. The seminar participants will put printed works—comprising both textual and visual ele-

ments—at the center of an analysis that sees them as representations of discourses external to the objects and, at the same time, as material things. Engaging in this interdisciplinary methodological approach, the seminar participants will draw upon contemporary scholarship through various disciplinary lenses, including literary theory and art history. By bridging a variety of disciplines, scholars in the seminar will produce a synthetic view of Early Modern visual culture and its role in shaping political and social opinion. This collaborative work will lead to new perspectives on current debates regarding the presentation and circulation of information and images in the twenty-first century. The Warren Center will sponsor a Visiting Fellow with expertise in the area of study, in addition to selected members of the Vanderbilt faculty. Information regarding the internal and external application process can be obtained from the Warren Center or its website, vanderbilt.edu/rpw_center.

Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities VU Station B 351534 2301 Vanderbilt Place Nashville, TN 37235-1534

vanderbilt.edu/rpw_center The Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities Warren Center Staff

Statement of Purpose

Edward H. Friedman, director Mona C. Frederick, executive director Terry Tripp, activities coordinator, Letters editor Emma Furman, seminar coordinator Kylie Korsnack, HASTAC Scholar Kevin Lubin, graduate student worker

Established under the sponsorship of the College of Arts and Science in 1987 and named the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities in 1989 in honor of Robert Penn Warren, Vanderbilt alumnus class of 1925, the center promotes interdisciplinary research and study in the humanities, social sciences, and, when appropriate, natural sciences. Members of the Vanderbilt community representing a wide variety of specializations take part in the Warren Center’s programs, which are designed to intensify and increase interdisciplinary discussion of academic, social, and cultural issues.

2016/17 Executive Committee: Edward H. Friedman,Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of Spanish; Director, Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities Celia Applegate, William R. Kenan, Jr., Chair of History Teresa A. Goddu, Associate Professor of English James Hudnut-Beumler, Anne Potter Wilson Distinguished Professor of American Religious History Sara Igo, Associate Professor of History José Medina, Professor of Philosophy Mark L. Schoenfield, Professor of English Virginia M. Scott, Professor of French Letters is the yearly publication of the Robert PennWarren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt University VU Station B #351534 2301 Vanderbilt Place Nashville, Tennessee 37235-1534 (615) 343-6060 Fax (615) 343-2248

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