What We're Reading: Clayton, Hirsch, Sugnet

Before our trio of retiring professors could depart campus, we asked them who they were currently reading and recommending. Their idiosyncratic responses include drama, fiction, and philosophy.

Regents Professor Tom Clayton retired this spring after 47 years of service at Minnesota, including decades of University and CLA committee membership and chairing. In a conversation on Northrop plaza in April, he talked mainly about important plays he has seen recently, since his non-professional reading is especially in articles on politics, economics, and ecology.

Three among other plays I saw in London in January were particularly invigorating intellectually as well as affecting and witty. Two were written by Mike Bartlett, a rising star playwright of 35. In 2011 I saw his Earthquakes in London, an ecologically apocalyptic play with an enigmatically hopeful ending, sort of, in 2525. Beginning in 1968, the play took us through and past the early twenty-first century and the edge of consequences Stephen Emmott addresses in his 2013 book, Ten Billion (performed in 2012 as a lecture in a facsimile of his study mounted at the Royal Court Jerwood Upstairs). The humor and satire of Earthquakes took the edge off what cuts like a razor in Ten Billion. The point of both was to question where we're all going, and why and how soon.

Bartlett's two "January plays" are vastly different: Bull, a 70-minute one-acter, and King Charles III, which fictionalizes the future when the Queen has died and Prince Charles becomes king. And he's not a good king, because he's too much of an activist. So he is forced out, and Prince William is to become king. William shares the Queen's philosophy, which is to be above party politics. The ghost in the play is of course Lady Di—who tells both Charles and William that they have a brilliant future ahead of them [laughs]. Bull by contrast was cutting and finally savage. You'd never know they were written by the same person, except that Bartlett's range of understanding and expression is extraordinary.

I also saw Tom Stoppard's first play in about eight years, The Hard Problem. It's all about the origins of consciousness and its nature in relation to human being [sic]. The question was alive and well in the Middle Ages, and John Donne saw it as "the subtle knot that makes us Man" and otherwise. How do you get from brain to mind? They didn't solve it, and Stoppard doesn't solve it, but he brilliantly contextualizes it especially in its psychological and ethical relations. Indeed, the play is partly about the compulsion to take up the hard problem and the impossibility of its solution—and also its not needing to be solved for people to get on with meaningful life.

Professor Gordon Hirsch, who launched the department's Victorian Literature Subfield (now 18th and 19th Century British Subfield) in 1984 with Margery Durham and served a decade as director of the CLA Honors Program, joined English in 1970. Interviewed this spring in his well-ordered office, he playfully named a recent St. Paul Chamber Orchestra performance of Bach as the most exciting reading he'd done recently. Of course, a book soon came to mind.

I did read a very interesting book by Sandra Peterson, in the Philosophy department. Socrates and Philosophy in the Dialogues of Plato is a book of philosophy. But for me it was like reading a literary text. She makes a case that when you read Plato's Republic and other texts by Socrates, you should read it as if it's fiction (although she wouldn't put it that way). When Socrates makes an argument, don't assume that it necessarily articulates Socrates' own position. Socrates is of course a teacher, and he has his school. He may be expressing a position that represents something that his auditors could understand and respond to, an argument that's based on their assumptions and that responds to them, in an effort to move forward. I thought it was a wonderful model of teaching: what do they need to know, what might they learn from this text, recognizing their assumptions—"I understand what you're saying, but here's another way."

I took some philosophy in college, and I never thought of it as fun to read. But to find a philosopher who's treating philosophy as a literary text, with all the tricks and shenanigans and deceptions of a novel: Socrates and Plato and his collocuters become literary characters! It's fascinating and fun.

In his 45 years with the department, Associate Professor Charles Sugnet helped establish working models for both our Creative Writing Program and the University's College in the Schools, in which high school students receive college-level instruction via specially trained high school teachers. Sugnet spoke this past March about his transformative mid-career embrace of African literature and film as research interests. His reading recommendations are likewise international.

La gloire des imposteurs: Lettres sur la Mali et L'Afrique by Aminata Dramane Traoré and Boubacar Boris Diop is an exchange of letters between a Malian woman and a Sengalese guy. She was the minister of culture for Mali; he's a novelist and a good friend of mine. They're writing letters back and forth about really two subjects: immigration from Africa to Europe and the problems in Northern Mali with Boko Haram. She started an organization to deal with people who immigrated to Europe and were returned—to deal with the psychic consequences.

Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land is one of my favorite books ever. And he now has this trilogy about the Opium wars. Volume three [Flood of Fire] is coming out this summer. The first one [Sea of Poppies] starts in India, where poppies are being grown and made into opium. The British East Indian Company is doing this to pay for empire; like all imperialists they don't want to pay the administrative costs. But then they don't have enough market, so they force the Chinese—eventually with gun boats—to take it. The Chinese Emperor was very suspicious; he doesn't think this will be a good thing for his people, and he was right. These are books that are political, linguistical, but they also have fairy tale qualities and big love plots. They're not grim modern works by any means. Ghosh is so imaginative, but also so knowledgeable: He's a writer and a scholar.