Gordon Hirsch: Making the Case
"There's a value in understanding other cultures, other historical periods, other peoples," Professor Gordon Hirsch declares, relaxed at his desk in a book-lined, tidy Lind Hall office. "You can really acquire a kind of breadth and analytical ability by reading things not just from your own time and not just from people who think exactly the way you do."A Victorian scholar--most recently as a leader in the reconsideration and revaluation of Robert Louis Stevenson, Hirsch has also been a regular teacher of Shakespeare. He enjoys the open-endedness of Shakespeare's plays, he says, which can lead to rich classroom debates about politics, gender, family, ethics, and revenge.
Encouraging student discussion was a lower priority when Hirsch joined the department in 1970. "The whole style of teaching has changed," he notes approvingly, "from formal lecture-style primarily to more interactive discussions."
At the same time, and perhaps not coincidentally, our understanding of classic texts has shifted. "When I was a student myself, and when I began teaching here," Hirsch recalls, "there was a very traditional emphasis--people often viewed Shakespearean tragedy as depicting a world that was highly structured and organized, where various kinds of disorder were eradicated and superseded." He laughs. "And now we teach just the opposite: Shakespeare's world is messy and complicated, and he, in an amazingly self-conscious way, doesn't allow the dissonances and the conflicts to disappear.
"Victorian literature isn't all that different," Hirsch continues. "It's fascinating the way the end of a George Eliot novel, to take a 19th-century writer, doesn't reach much of a resolution either." There isn't a neat solution offered to the problem of how a female character or an idealistic male fits into that world, given the limitations that society places on its young people. "That's the best material," he enthuses. "I love to teach it, whether it's Victorian fiction or Shakespeare."
Hirsch says he'll miss debating complicated ideas in the classroom and assisting in students' development. From 1989 to 2000, he was the director of the Honors Program in the College of Liberal Arts and had "a great deal of fun" working with students and helping them compete for national scholarships. Other aspects of the job may be more cheerfully set aside: "I don't think I'll miss being obliged to reread a long Victorian novel deep into the night because I'm going to teach it the next day," he admits with a rueful smile. "The preparation is something I can say goodbye to."
He hasn't given up on the era: One of his post-retirement goals is reading Victorian fiction he hasn't had time to explore. He doesn't know yet if he'll continue to write about Stevenson, an author he says had been long underestimated as merely a children's and adventure story writer. Over the past two decades, Professor Hirsch mostly wrote Stevenson criticism--in addition to helping found (and serving on the Editorial Board for) The Journal of Stevenson Studies--in order to address Stevenson's overlooked engagement with modern, difficult questions. [Read a book recommendation from Hirsch here.]
He definitely plans on swimming and traveling more. The Twin Cities' thriving theater, art, and music scenes will keep him a Minnesotan. "I went to one of the best concerts I've ever seen last night," he describes animatedly. "Jeremy Denk was playing piano with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, performing two Bach concerti--music that I'm very familiar with from recordings. And it was astoundingly moving; I was in tears. I'd never heard them in live performance before."
The arts and humanities promote not only intellectual understanding but empathy, he argues. With drama and fiction, for example, "we learn to put ourselves in someone else's place. It's really the virtue of the humanities, I think, to teach that identification with another person's or another culture's point of view."
"In this time when everything that politicians seem to find of value is science, technology, engineering, and math, we have to make that case to our students and to our politicians, to our graduates and to our college administrators." He leans forward, his face alight. "We have to make that case."
Charles Sugnet: Planting Trees
Professor Charles Sugnet received an unexpected retirement gift this past winter: His article about Senegalese novelist Boubacar Boris Diop appeared in the December Presence Africaine, a revered, long-running Parisian journal that published Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire.Sugnet is also pleased to be helping organize a first-time visit and retrospective of African filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako at the Walker Art Center April 2-4; he'll be interviewing Sissako after the screening of the controversial and highly successful Timbuktu.
And he just finished proofing another article, about the Rwandan film Grey Matter, which will be published in a special issue of Présence Francophone devoted to the 20th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide. (Right, Sugnet in front of the Fulbright House at the University of Dakar.)
These are not the activities of a professor heading into serene retirement. "I'm still interested in the research that I've been doing," Sugnet acknowledges. Nevertheless, he says, "I'm kind of just watching myself with curiosity, to see what it is I'll want to do. I may decide I'll never want to write another academic paper, or I may write a book. I don't know. I'm just going to let it happen." He pauses, a glint in his eyes. "The big problem I have right now is just to clean out my office."
It is difficult to find a clear seat in Professor Sugnet's office, among sliding stacks of books and papers. The room has the look of an occupant who has spent years moving quickly among a brace of compelling pursuits--many relating to an abrupt turn in scholarly focus that Sugnet took in the 1980s. A fan of African-American and African culture dating back to his teenage years listening to Miles Davis, he was energized by the arrival of postcolonial studies to teach and write about African literature and eventually film.
Sugnet directed the department's Creative Writing Program after it received the generous Edelstein-Keller endowment in 1985 (more about his influential tenure here), and he brought Somali novelist Nuruddin Farah to campus as a visiting writer. Farah welcomed Sugnet's interest in Africa, and Sugnet began regular visits to Dakar and elsewhere, learning Wolof, challenging himself in collaborations with the continent's writers and critics, and collecting music (which he shared for more than a decade on the KFAI radio show "African Rhythms"; more on that involvement here).
"I got to see that having only an American point of view was not sufficient," he says. "There's a whole world." Sugnet has taught in Senegal, Gambia, and South Africa, making friends among colleagues and students; he's traveled now to almost half of the 55 countries on the continent. "It's pretty fun to think of having your entire life transformed completely after 40," he notes with a grin. "It doesn't happen to a lot of people." [Read book recommendations from Sugnet here.]
Meanwhile, the department and the University have benefited from Sugnet's expertise, as East African immigration since the early '90s has led to increasing interest in African studies here. But state-side, Sugnet is most proud of the model he established in 1984 for College in the Schools, a now University-wide program in which high school students receive college-level instruction via specially trained high school teachers. Sugnet spent a year co-teaching an English course at Johnson High School in St. Paul before creating and shepherding CiS Literature, in which teachers collaborate on curriculum and teaching materials under the direction of University faculty. "We transformed the outdated curricula of about 40 Minnesota high schools," he describes. "And by bringing visitors like Chinua Achebe, Sandra Cisneros, and David Mura to talk with them at the U, we gave students struggling with English as a second or third language a living example of what they could aspire to--while introducing them to campus."
Sugnet revels in some of the changes he's seen in education, from his days at the University of Virginia when no women and blacks were allowed in undergraduate studies to a modern discipline enlivened by postcolonial intellectuals such as Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak. Other shifts he finds troublesome, such as the wide use of adjunct, temporary instructors. "The worst thing that's happened," he concludes, "is the general consensus that the liberal arts are worthless unless they can get you a problem-solving job." He fears the loss of the kind of education that he received: the kind that encouraged him to look beyond the surface conflict and seek out new paradigms. "What about the idea that the liberal arts can get you to ask better questions?" he queries bluntly.
Meanwhile, the office clutter remains, and, beyond it, retirement: "I've got three sons and two new granddaughters in the Bay Area, so I'm going to be spending more time out there," Sugnet reveals. "I've still got this cabin [in Northern Minnesota], and I'll be going up there to ski, swim, fish, plant some more trees." He stops a moment, as if envisioning the scene. "I've now got trees that are 35 years old, that I planted. It's a really nice feeling."
Regents Professor Clayton will be featured in the June issue.
