NASHVILLE, Tenn. ñ You need to understand something about the slave trade of Herman Melville’s time to fully grasp his Moby Dick or Benito Cereno. Familiarity with voodoo culture can illuminate the works of Edgar Allan Poe.
The Department of English at Vanderbilt University continues to lead the "radically interdisciplinary" movement in literature studies with the hiring of three prominent professors, researchers and authors who began teaching this fall: Joan Dayan, Vera Kutzinski and Dana Nelson.
"They represent part of a bold new redefinition of what the study of literature can be," said Jay Clayton, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English and chair of the department at Vanderbilt. "As literature professors, we care about literature the most. But literature is just a component inside the culture, and we have to change our viewpoint to see the broader field and the place of literature within it."
Kutzinski, who came from Yale University and holds the Martha Rivers Ingram Chair of English at Vanderbilt, is the director of the Center for the Americas at Vanderbilt. A forum for innovative interdisciplinary approaches, CFA is dedicated to investigating the political, economic and cultural interactions between the countries and territories of the Western Hemisphere. The center’s aim is to promote greater public awareness of those interactions and identify areas for positive intervention. Kutzinski’s research interests as a comparative Americanist have included race, gender, sexuality and translation, and she is currently working on a book about Langston Hughes in the Americas.
"The range of poetry she studies is astounding," Clayton said. "She is an expert on the poetry of white, English-speaking canonical writers such as William Carlos Williams, African-American writers such as Langston Hughes, and Spanish-language modernists from the Caribbean such as Nicolas Guillen."
Kutzinski says the transinstitutional environment at Vanderbilt was a major attraction for her.
"It strikes me as absolutely crucial that those of us in the academy do not work in isolation, neither from each other nor from the real world," Kutzinski said.
Nelson and Dayan will contribute to projects at the Center for the Americas at Vanderbilt in addition to their duties in the Department of English.
Dayan left the University of Pennsylvania to assume a Vanderbilt post as Robert Penn Warren Chair in the Humanities. She is an expert in Caribbean studies and 19th century American, French and English literary studies. Her books include Haiti, History, and the Gods, and Fables of the Mind: An Inquiry into Poe’s Fiction, along with fiction, creative nonfiction and several memoirs.
"All of her books weave personal commitment, cultural history and literary criticism," Clayton said. "It makes for remarkable reading: powerful, poetic and intellectually challenging. Her current work on slavery and the American legal system is only the latest example of how a passion for social justice animates her scholarship."
Nelson, who comes from the University of Kentucky to Vanderbilt as Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English, is "one of the most important Americanists of her generation," Clayton said. She has written two highly acclaimed books, National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men and The Word in Black and White: Reading ‘Race’ in American Literature.
She is currently working on a book she describes as a "plea for a different civic relation to the presidency," observing that the growing power of the president often works against fuller democratic expression. Nelson suggests "that we put less energy into being mad at the president and more energy into finding ways to revitalize democratic practice in ways that bypass or counter the presidency ñ no matter who is president."
Nelson, Kutzinski and Dayan strengthen a Department of English already breaking new ground in the study of literature. That is part of a university-wide trend to get faculty from widely divergent disciplines to work together in search of commonality and fresh insights.
"The first reason to do this in the Department of English is because we are filling in a major blind spot in our understanding of literature. It’s just plain accurate," Clayton said.
"Reason number two is to revitalize our discipline. This new understanding of literary studies is pumping so much energy into what it means to be a literature professor. Suddenly, you have all these cultural crosscurrents that have never been studied before, and you are called upon to develop new skills and historical knowledge.
"So basically, it’s just thrilling."
Media contact: Jim Patterson, (615) 322-NEWS
Jim.patterson@vanderbilt.edu