The English Department encourages its undergraduates to pursue serious archival research, offering seed grants of $150 to any student with a research proposal that requires travel. This year, our undergraduates traveled to locales from Texas State-San Marcos and the University of Indiana to the British Library and an abbey in French Normandy, in pursuit of authors ranging from Cormac McCarthy and Ray Bradbury to Oscar Wilde and Aimé Césaire. Here in a new series on the blog, we’re sharing the archival reflections of a number of these undergraduates.

Fifth in the series is a reflection from Nashilu Mouen-Makoua (‘13), who explored three different archives in France (the Assemblée Nationale, the Abbaye d’Ardenne, and the Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet), each housing different manuscripts related to the poet and statesman Aimé Césaire.

Nashilu Mouen-Makoua

This winter break, thanks to the generosity of the English Department and the Institute of International Studies, I traveled to France to visit three archives that house manuscripts of, and documents relating to, the Martiniquan poet-statesman Aimé Césaire. Césaire’s poem Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land) is well-known, but the version that has been canonized is a heavily revised version from 1956, when Césaire was in his forties. I was curious about the three earlier, less explored versions of the Cahier, published between 1939 and 1947: each version is substantially different from its predecessor and pegged to a key moment in Césaire’s political career. I hoped to trace the journey of the poem and of Césaire’s life from the late-1930s (when he was fresh from Paris’s Ecole Normale Supérieure) to the mid-1940s (when he was mayor of Fort-de-France and a deputy to the French Assemblée Nationale) to the mid-1950s (when he published the most well-known version of the Cahier and his biting Discourse on Colonialism).

On my first day in Paris I boarded the Metro, pain-au-raisin in hand, and set out for my first archival destination: the Palais Bourbon, home of the Assemblée Nationale. Upon arrival, I was handed a rather official “Researcher” badge and a map detailing the location of the reading room.

The Library of the Assemblée nationale

The library of the Assemblée Nationale seems to have remained untouched since its construction in 1848. The ceiling, originally painted by Eugène Delacroix in the nineteenth century, depicts the French Revolution and the history of the Republic. Buried among century-old books, I waited for Césaire’s typescript of the Cahier d’un Retour au Pays Natal to arrive. My initial sense of awe only deepened when the manuscript finally arrived before me. Turning pages that this man had once held and putting my finger where his had once been was incredibly moving. For a couple of hours I lost myself in that room, putting aside my student self and appreciating instead the work of a man that I have followed and admired for a long time.  Studying the original typescript has been invaluable to my project, as I have been able to compare it to the first published version of 1939. Fascinatingly, there are handwritten additions to the typescript that Césaire stitched into his piece following a conversation with an unknown publisher.

The Abbaye d'Ardenne

The next step of my trip brought me to the Abbaye d’Ardenne, a thirteenth-century  abbey on the outskirts of the Norman city of Caen, surrounded by fields and forests. The Abbaye is home to the Jacqueline Leiner archives. Leiner was Césaire’s close friend and his official biographer until she passed away. Because of its secluded location, the Abbaye d’Ardenne provides full boarding; researchers dine together and discuss their findings. It was at this archive that I felt most motivated as a researcher. Surrounded by other scholars, I felt myself become one; my research took on new importance and responsibility for me.

Leiner’s papers document Césaire’s life from a third-person standpoint. In the seven boxes brought to me, I found cut-outs of interviews given by Césaire, reviews of his plays, programs for events given in his honor and articles written on him by his contemporaries. This archival trip allowed me to understand the context in which Césaire was working from the late-1940s to the late-1980s. Some of the most illuminating material included an interview given to a small Martiniquais newspaper (Le Progressiste) in which Césaire reflected on his friendship with the French Surrealist poet André Breton and on the influence of Breton on his life. This made for an incredible counterpoint to the material that I found in the third archive of my trip: the Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet.

La bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet

Upon my visit to this third library, I was able to read Aimé Césaire’s correspondence with André Breton between 1941 and 1947. It was here that I came face to face with not only the poet’s hand but also his personal life. The experience brought me closer to my subject, allowing me a privileged insight into a small but consequential moment in his life. I was particularly moved by Césaire’s description of the difficulties he faced while living under the Vichy Regime in Martinique during the French Occupation.

When I returned to Berkeley, I felt reinvigorated by my trip. I sensed that I had something of my own to add to the ongoing conversation around Césaire’s legacy, and I have aimed in my thesis to reopen the doors of interpretation on Cesaire as a crucial literary and historical figure. I sincerely hope to do his memory justice as I follow through on a project that seeks jointly to celebrate his art and understand his person.

Posted by Jeffrey Blevins

On April 17th, hundreds of spectators filled Wheeler’s Maude Fife Auditorium to hear Anne Carson read a selection of poems from her new volume Red doc>. The event was The Holloway Series’ last of the year.

Anne Carson

Graduate student poet Gillian Osborne, who was a 2012 Yale Younger Poets finalist, read first, choosing a selection of new poems. Beginning with a poem styled on John Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, and following that with one on the French Revolutionary Calendar, her work set up Carson’s well, because it began with concrete historical and scientific sources and then freely improvised around those sources (many of Carson’s poems, including those in Red doc>, do the same with sources ranging from Greek myth to Proust). In her first poem, for example, Osborne explored an early-modern/modern conceit by colliding natural and contemporary imagery, as in the following line from early in her poem: “The leaves are elevators.” Osborne continued to explore juxtapositions like this throughout both of her first two poems, which swirl with scientific and historical facts, even as they project exceedingly non-factual emotions, moods, and states of mind. Osborne finished with an elegy entitled “Garland.”

Next on stage was Michelle Ty to introduce Carson. Ty talked about a number of aspects of Carson’s life and work, including her training and teaching as a classicist, her competence as a translator, and her creative shatterings of traditional barriers between literary categories like “poem,” “novel,” and “criticism.”

The poster for the reading

Carson began her reading with a poem entitled “The Albertine Workout.” The poem centers on Albertine Simonet, a character in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. In the novel, she is the narrator’s love interest and, ultimately, his obsession. Carson’s poem, which proceeds in a series of short, numbered prose-verse units, explores both the character of Albertine as she appears in the novel and a critical-historical question surrounding a possible link between Albertine and Alfred Agostinelli, Proust’s chauffeur (which link Carson claims is called “the transposition theory”). Carson goes through the evidence for and against this theory, calmly splicing facts with close readings with witticisms with cleverly unimportant statistics—along the way, poking just a little fun at literary critics who lose so much sleep over the Albertine question. To take just one example: Carson gives us the half-comic, half-diligent observation that Albertine “appears on more than 800 pages” of the novel and that “on a good 19% of those pages she is asleep,” even as she also gives us original and serious close readings: “Albertine’s death removes only one of the Albertines he would have to forget.”

Carson followed with “Musk Oxen Song” and then an extract from a larger scene on a musk ox named Io waking up, both from her new volume Red doc>. They were reminiscent of Osborne’s reading, in that both mix “factual” information with lyrical, even whimsical descriptions: lines such as “Musk oxen are not in fact oxen” exist in very productive tension with ones like “blood crisping along arteries.” Carson next read a poem entitled “Time Passes,” which riffs on the famous second section of Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse. Carson cheekily began the poem by saying “stole that from Virginia Woolf.” After reading a few more, briefer selections from Red doc>, Carson finished with a poem entitled “Mothers.”

Post written by Jeffrey Blevins

Lili Loofbourow is a seventh-year graduate student who works on early modern constructions of reading as a form of eating—theologically, physiologically, etc. In addition to her research and teaching, Lili writes for a number of blogs, including The Hairpin, The Awl, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The New Republic, where she contributes TV criticism to the Dear Television series. She also maintains a personal blog called Excremental Virtue.

What follows is an interview with Lili, in which she talks about the relationship between her blogging and her academic pursuits.

Why do you blog? How did you get started?

Oh gosh. I started blogging a few years ago with a friend, Danielle Roderick. It was her idea. When we lived together we developed these patterns of obsessively rewatching and analyzing books and TV—especially when the narrative resisted making its female characters caricatures or even likeable. Danielle introduced me to the BBC’s The Office, and I think we binge-watched it at least 50 times, studying every writerly move, every directorial choice, every actor’s execution. (And camera angles—were those act break shots of the Xerox with the paper coming out supposed to look like an upskirt shot? Were we crazy?) We wondered when, if ever, American audiences would have a Dawn Tinsley or a Diana Trent.

Old Spice Guy and "mascularity"

Over the years we got kind of obsessed with all the Dawns we didn’t get to see. Why is the female spectrum empty in the middle where awkwardness and mixed feelings should be? And what about romantic comedies and the pleasure we guiltily got from them, and can you love something even if it programs you? Remember the Old Spice Guy and how incredibly he crystallized this abstract aggregation of things that added up to “mascularity,” to “the man your man could smell like”? We were trying to figure out the female side of that; what’s femscularity? At what point do these performances become parodies?

The blog started when my marriage ended and Danielle kind of swooped in and rescued me. Working through these narrative gender knots became a joint project, so we started a blog where we wrote letters to each other in the typically bloggy style—meandering, undisciplined, thinking aloud about whatever: sometimes belly-dancing, sometimes politics, sometimes storytelling. We kept stumbling across female characters in old movies and books who had more agency, more narrative importance than they did in the present. It was weird. It started to seem like the closer we’d come to gender equality as a culture, the more regressive popular fiction had become. (None of this is news anymore, but this felt like an isolated conversation back then. Women’s representation in media has gotten much more attention thanks to VIDA and Tina Fey and Amy Poehler and Lena Dunham, and it’s been an incredible thing to watch.) Writing letters released us from the compunction to definitively pronounce on things we wanted instead to wander carefully through—the wandering is always more interesting anyway.

All that stuff aside, it was an exercise in friendship. We blogged because we loved each other and each other’s voices.

Your blogging is so wide-ranging, with posts on multiple websites and so many different “genres” of posts, with subjects ranging from Milton to television. Can you say something about the differences between the posts you write for different blogs? Do you have a similar style across all of them, or do you cultivate a distinctive voice for each?

Ha! I haven’t thought consciously about this until now, but you’re so right, the style is somewhat context-dependent. If it’s a seventeenth-century culture post, I want to make it accessible, fun, and even (this is the Holy Grail) relevant for nonacademic audiences. The challenge becomes translating a somewhat alien historical artifact or conflict into an engaging read for experts and nonexperts alike. The tone in those posts is colloquial and jokey relative to the political posts, in which I tend to be drearily sincere. As for TV posts, the subject matter is so intrinsically pleasurable that there’s leeway to make the prose more serious—in my online incarnation, I think I’m at my most stylistically “academic” when writing about television.

More generally, though, I like the “blogging voice” because it presumes that thoughts and opinions develop flexibly and responsively—it lets you see thinking in action. Compared to an academic article with its hairspray, its corseting and perfect seams with a bag of extra buttons, a post is like sharing a dressing room. You know how Herrick loves the liquefaction of Julia’s clothes and is taken by the glittering? It’s never about the clothes; it’s about Julia’s relation to them and the narrator’s desire to have that relation to her too. Take Herrick down another half-step, from the “slight disorder” in the dress he finds ideal to a gawkier, more loving and befuddled approach to fabrics and people, and you get blogs. Writer and reader are in the same room, so it’s a way of thinking and speaking that’s social rather than homiletic.

Could you talk a little about your research at Berkeley and some projects you’ve been working on lately? Picking up on the idea of writerly voices, do you find your writing for your blog influencing the style and tone of your academic writing, or vice versa?

Starting with the last question: yep, if only because it’s given me a lot of practice with something I used to find really daunting, namely, writing for and arguing with people. I’m absurdly afraid of confrontation, but even if I weren’t, I think it’s genuinely difficult to disagree publicly in an academic setting. Substantive disagreement is uncomfortable and intimate and involved, and it often takes several steps to clarify the precise grounds of a disagreement and why that dissensus matters. A conference setting is wrong for that kind of back and forth and understandably so; there are too many people, too little time, and the stakes are high. No one wants to have their argument decimated in front of their colleagues, especially in this job market, and maybe there’s a Golden Rule operating wherein one refrains from decimating arguments in turn. Instead, there’s the ritual of listening to a paper read aloud—perhaps the least effective way to absorb a complex argument—then raising a hand to register mild dissent or ask for a clarification. The questions and answers are often quite good, but there’s a decorum to the thing that keeps it from going too far. More than two back-and-forths and the exchange can take on a tense aspect: dissonant, maybe even hostile. Why is this person insisting? you hear the audience think—or think yourself. Q and A’s are supposed to be cursory and there are de facto limits to the depth of engagement. And so academic writing remains intensely isolating and isolated.

It’s utterly strange to me that we don’t spend more time in graduate school workshopping each other’s writing (and I mean the writing itself, in addition to the scholarship and the argument). As if all that matters is the idea apart from its language, as if we were all as much in control of our prose as we could be. On the few occasions when we graduate students write for each other, I think we indulge our worst instincts; panicked that we might be impostors, we tend to write and reward the anxiously abstruse (which should not be confused with the powerfully complex). I wish we all knew each other as writers as well as people. Instead, we huddle in our respective corners until we’ve put so much work into our precious secret document that it would be heartbreaking to change it in any substantial way. There has to be a better way to circulate unpolished work. It’s essential.

Academic writing will always be more complicated and more ambitious than blogging, but I’ve found blogging and tweeting really useful because they force scholars into informal encounters. I find this hugely productive because MY GOD, we need to let the dynamic energy that goes into scholarly work express its dynamism somewhere. Conferences at one time served that purpose, but they’re part of the professionalization machine now; they’re not creative testing grounds, they’re where you recite some finished work to prove your competence and say you did. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard someone say they’re presenting a conference paper, then sigh that they finished it some time ago and are working now on other questions. The same is true for publishing. It takes passion to be an academic and yet the ways in which academics exchange ideas is so antithetical to passion, so glacially slow, that an article might receive a response (if indeed it receives any response at all) a year or so after it was published. Again, the original author will have long since moved onto other projects, and the conversation languishes and dies there, mostly unseen.

Blogging and Tweeting force speed. Twitter especially guarantees a sort of amnesiac impermanence, and that’s useful for a lot of academics who feel able to safely try thoughts and ideas out before developing them into their more formal and rigorous scholarly iterations.  It’s a format that encourages collaboration and dialogue and lets you sometimes say, “hey, look at this! It’s neat,” without having to say anything more about it. Which we should be able to do and say, because so much of the pleasure of academic work lies in those moments of discovery.  Unless you’re in constant contact with your colleagues at your home institution, the main  formats we academics really have for scholarly interaction are the conference and the article. It’s lamentable. That’s not to say that there aren’t potential downsides to “academic Twitter” (there are) but some of the most rewarding and productive academic conversations I’ve had have been with people I’ve never met. I’ve found a great, engaged community of thinkers online. (I should say here that I’m an introvert and not particularly adept at thinking on my feet, so it’s possible that Tweeting and blogging allow for a kind of engaged intellectual sociality that doesn’t make me anxious. I should say too that the conference seminar seems like a really positive development.)



Putting the question of style aside, it’s also true that you share subjects, or at least an early modern focus, between some of your blog posts and essays, correct? Which is the chicken and which is the egg, generally? That is, do you find yourself generating blog posts out of material that didn’t make it into an essay, or do essays ever emerge out of what began as a blog post? Or is the process for generating content for each type of writing more separate than I’m making it out to be?

Hm. Well, my idea, back in the day, was to actually write the dissertation online. I have a fourth blog, now private, that I’ve used for four years as a drafting board and note-taking device; I organize snippets and tag them into the different arguments and angles I might need them for. When that blog was public, I had a category called “Wild Geese To Be Chased At Some Point But Not Now,” and that’s where I put all the weird early modern stuff I tripped on that blew my mind but had no place in my current project.

That quickly became my favorite category. When I made that blog private and Danielle and I stopped blogging together, I needed a platform where I could post stuff like that—miscellaneous stuff that I thought was worth sharing but didn’t want to spend a whole lot of time working on. So that’s what Excremental Virtue became: it’s sort of a bulletin board where I can post my wild geese. Here’s what’s great about that: often other early modern scholars who know a lot more than I do will e-mail me to tell me about something they’ve found that relates to whatever I posted, and that turns into a conversation and sometimes even an article idea.



You rarely post two pieces in a row that are the same “genre” of blog post: you do political posts on Occupy, reflective posts about yourself, cooking and recipe posts, posts that are a series of images with no text, and the list goes on. It seems like all the bloggers are specializing these days; why so wide-ranging? Is there a particular type of post you like best to write?

I guess I have a horror of personal branding. The minute I start feeling like “this is my schtick,” I hightail it like a coward and don’t write that thing again for a good long time (maybe ever). It’s sick. It’s like a fear of commitment or something.

(It’s funny, on Twitter, people sometimes sort the people they “follow” into lists. They title those lists things like “crazies” or “early modernists” and sometimes I’m notified I’m in one and it’s terrifying. I never check because I get freaked if the lists I’m in start looking the same. But I checked just now, and here are a few of the lists I’m on: “etc” “Politicky” “society” “Humanities” “tv watchers and thinkers” “Arts Reporting” “other mediations” “Peanut Gallery” and “A.” My favorites are “A” and “etc”.) Basically, I’m training to be a specialist, but elsewhere I defend the undiscipline to write about whatever I want. The magic of these informal platforms is that real discovery can sometimes happen there (tucked in among the dull, the easy and the weird) when the professional formats feel overly performative or sclerotic.

The "Urine Wheel"

One last, long-ish question, focusing on your “Stuff in Art” series, which was a series of posts entirely composed of images. The images you found for a lot of these posts are not only new to me, they also feel fresh to the internet as a whole, which is quite a remarkable feeling in this post-lolcats world. Let’s take for example your post on painful groins from last year. There is a strange, but very intriguing, tension in a piece like that between the archive and, to briefly invoke websites like Buzzfeed—which also blog posts only of images—the meme. The novelty of your images is one discovered through a kind of literal close reading, in which you actually take the time to look closely at all the tiny little figures in early modern paintings like this one, in order to find bits to extract, like this delightful image. To me, one of your great innovations as a blogger is how you point out the novelty contained within what the typical blogger world brush aside as old and unfunny. Could you speak a bit about those posts where you show your readers funny things you’ve found simply by looking closely at paintings, or searching carefully through an archive (like the “Urine Wheel” to the left)? Do you have any thoughts on skirting the line between archives and memes?

Oh wow, thanks. I loved doing that Stuff in Art series. I went a little nuts. I spent two weeks doing nothing but looking at paintings and creating weird categories. (I have dozens of those that haven’t been published.) One of my favorite close-reading games is to see how the same element gets represented across different time periods in literature or art or whatever, and speculating on how a culture’s attitude toward that object changed or congealed. When Google Art posted high-resolution images of a few works of art, images you could zoom in on forever, I sat down and zoomed and zoomed and didn’t look up for days. My neck was destroyed by the end.

Woman Laughing Alone With Salad

One of the most famous Hairpin memes is Edith Zimmerman’s “Women Laughing Alone With Salad” (see image to the right), which was this brilliant wordless exposé of how ridiculous advertising to women is and has become. I loved what that post helped me see. So I decided to do it with art, in the hopes that it might be similarly revealing and also because I’m such a failure at museum-going. You’re supposed to go, drink in the experience and come away with some larger ineffable impression you didn’t have before of whatever the exhibit was about. Maybe you have a cup of coffee. You ponder, synthesize. I do none of that. I see all these things I’m supposed to absorb, each of which took hundreds of hours and panic—there’s no time!—and I’m totally undone by the bits of information you’re fed while looking at different works of art. You know, the artist’s name, the title, and perhaps a line or two about when the piece was composed. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s deeply necessary, but due to faulty wiring I find it actually undoes my experience of the work of art. I can’t not read it, but when I read it, I’ve lost something. I actually know less than I did before. (This happens to me with the descriptions on the back of rental videos too.) I wish there were a museum where things were captioned: When Cassatt painted that yellow splotch on the third teacup from the left, she’d just gotten over a bout of the flu and was trying to match the color of phlegm. I want to see things in a way I can’t on my own, and I want some sideways connection that brings me closer in a slightly inappropriate way. I loved the exhibit at the MOMA that included Gertrude Stein’s will—that will totally transformed my experience of the exhibit.)

Anyway, after I’d spent eighty-odd hours dissecting paintings, forcing myself to see the stuff I’d never normally notice, and filing that stuff in folders titled things like “Angry Monkeys,” or “Tiny Men,” or “Insouciance, it occurred to me that I was copying Edith’s “Women Laughing Alone With Salad” structure. Since I was already stealing Edith’s idea, why not suggest an art series? Present people with decontextualized objects and let them scroll from chair to chair to painted chair until chairness becomes a neurotic constant weighed down by all these bitter centuries of artists having to paint chairs and think about chairs and shade chairs. Plus it’s a reprieve from the ruthlessness of biographical data. If you click on any of the fragments you can see the thing in context and the name of the painting, but I wanted that to be a deliberate choice. You don’t find out the name of the artist or the date or the title unless you really, really want to.

That’s a really long way of saying that I think the archive, with its marvelous bibliographic minutiae and surgical precision, and the meme, with its jagged juxtapositions that rip context away, can marry beautifully sometimes. The more hooks we have in our heads to snag ideas and hold them, the better.

Posted by Jeffrey Blevins

The English Department encourages its undergraduates to pursue serious archival research, offering seed grants of $150 to any student with a research proposal that requires travel. This year, our undergraduates traveled to locales from Texas State-San Marcos and the University of Indiana to the British Library and an abbey in French Normandy, in pursuit of authors ranging from Cormac McCarthy and Ray Bradbury to Oscar Wilde and Aimé Césaire. Here in a new series on the blog, we’re sharing the archival reflections of a number of these undergraduates.

Fourth in the series is a reflection from Spencer Janssen (‘12), who visited the Cormac McCarthy papers, which are located in the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University.

Cormac McCarthy

My initiation into archival research began at the Wittliff Collections, housed at Texas State-San Marcos, an hour’s drive from Austin. The Wittliff Collections specialize in Southwestern writers like playwright Sam Shepard and novelist Cormac McCarthy (the artist at the center of my senior thesis), and have a distinctly Southwestern flair. During off-hours, you’re barred from entry by an enormous wood-framed door, fortified with a black iron gate. During business hours, the enormous door swings open—and you step into the vestibule, where you are immediately greeted by cream white walls bordered with light brown wood paneling, the alternating tones of auburn-checkered carpets, and Kate Breaky’s Las Sombras photogram exhibition, in which Southwestern flora and fauna are entombed in an eternal, material shadow. The architecture and decor coalesce into a harmonic singularity, one which evokes the Texas plain as a restful idyll.

From the entrance, you can see what I came to think of as the scholar’s sacristy—the archival reading room. In the hallway approaching the reading room, there are a number of relics on display: a reproduction of McCarthy’s own Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter, annotated typescript pages from the manuscripts of The Road and No Country for Old Men, and first print editions of The Orchard Keeper, Child of God, and Blood Meridian. The McCarthy papers are considered, in the words of archivist Katie Salzmann, the archive’s “coup de grâce.”

I had come to the Wittliff Collections to look at the manuscripts of Blood Meridian and other materials related to its composition. In a sense, the “Southwest” evoked by the Wittliff Collections’ ambience is the exact opposite of the region as described in Blood Meridian, McCarthy’s magnum opus. In the novel, the border region is an endless void littered with the bones of beast and man alike, wherein shadows of beings seem to move of their own accord and the only architecture likely to be encountered is that of ramshackle hovels, mud haciendas, or the stone ruins of the Anasazi.

My research trip consisted of five alternately panic-stricken and ecstatic days of intense investigation. My primary goal was to comb through the drafts of Blood Meridian, and on the first day, I mainly tried to situate myself in relation to the massive amount of Blood Meridian material contained in the Wittliff Collections. Katie Salzmann (the archivist) was extremely helpful: she explained that the order of the fifteen boxes containing McCarthy’s correspondences, manuscripts, notations, and fragments were all kept in the precise order that they were given to the Wittliff by McCarthy. The manuscripts are filled with corrections and inquiries McCarthy scribbled to himself about his character’s situations or his own word choices. Overall the manuscripts are largely dateless: most of the time he simply labels drafts as either “Early”, “Mid”, “Mid-to-Late”, “Late”, or “Late or Final”. The marginalia, meanwhile, can be even harder to date.

At first I felt utterly sunk, overwhelmed by the task I had set before myself. However, as my research progressed, I was able to quell these self-doubts. I fell into a synchronicity with the materials at hand, making two major discoveries along the way.

The first pertains to a scene entitled “The burning tree,” which I consider pivotal to Blood Meridian. While most critics have ignored the scene or simply written it off as a falsified apotheosis, I’ve been haunted by its power since I first read the novel, and I had wondered, before arriving at the Wittliff, if McCarthy invested as much energy writing the scene as I’ve spent interpreting it. I discovered that my hunch was correct: McCarthy deliberated upon the scene for an extended period of time, drafting and redrafting, working and reworking, until it reached its final published form.

My second major discovery involves the source material McCarthy used to project his vision of violence in the borderlands. Examining a photocopy of the very research notebook McCarthy used to chart his historical sources, I was able to see exactly where he was drawing his historical information from, particularly in relation to the massacres within the novel. Strikingly, much of the extreme violence of the novel, much of what we think of as McCarthy’s personal stamp as a stylist, was inspired by what he found in the historical record.

I came away from the Wittliff with the sense that I had spent five days entering into Cormac McCarthy’s mind. I had experienced the proliferation of his thoughts as he had progressed, and had bore witness to the novel in its process of becoming: in all its available forms and fragmentations, from pupa to pièce de résistance. In the end, it is this opportunity to isolate the undiscovered qualities of a text that makes archival research so worthwhile. Through such exploration, one can uncover how the composite pieces move within and shape the material, see how they make up the whole, and find a fresh perspective on the final work of art. The archive represents a critical opportunity to the fullest extent, an opportunity that, with the right materials, can very well be endless.

Posted by Jeffrey Blevins

Simon Palfrey, Professor of English Literature at Oxford, traveled to Berkeley on April 1st to give a talk entitled “Shakespeare: Where is the Life?,” drawn from his forthcoming book entitled Where is the Life?: Shakespeare’s Possible Worlds. The event was sponsored by the English Department, the Center for British Studies, the Townsend Center, and the James D. Hart Chair in English.

A picture of William Shakespeare—believed to be the only authentic image of him made during his lifetime

Palfrey began his talk by asking: “What world are we in?” For Shakespeare’s plays, Palfrey explained, the answer to this question is not always simple. Another way to phrase the question, in terms of Shakespeare, would be: “What is the plot of a play?” Palfrey believes there are two ways to answer this. One way is by pointing to what are called “plot scenarios,” which were the summaries of events in the play distributed to theaters and used in advertising performances. Another way is to look at the breakdowns of parts for individual actors; these are the “parts” that define each individual actor’s role in any given scenic block. Palfrey suggested that Shakespeare wrote “to parts and for parts,” rather than for plot scenarios. The problem with scenarios, as Palfrey said, is that they imply that a plot can be fully exhausted by description and summary. By attending to the parts for each actor in each scene, we can re-envision Shakespeare’s plays as collections of such parts—”Each one,” as Palfrey noted, “potentially a whole, an essence, a world.”

Palfrey expanded on this idea by describing the parts in Shakespeare’s plays as forming complex “ecologies” on the stage. Palfrey quoted Timothy Morton to elucidate the term’s relationship to literature: “[an ecology] is a vast, sprawling mesh of interconnection without a definite center or edge.” In relation to Shakespeare’s parts, this means that each part does not remain static in relation to the parts of other actors on stage in any given scene. Rather, there is a give and take between them: an organic, living relation. In these so-called “ecologies,” parts can can engage in rivalries and alliances; can multiply and disappear; can combine and divide. As Palfrey went on to say, scenes can also generate “virtual” parts: “parts within parts within parts … parts breeding other parts, each a whole.”

The crux of Palfrey’s argument is that, though we normally “grant life to easily summarizable elements” of a plot, as with a plot scenario, in Shakespeare the life is in the parts. This has two major consequences for Shakespeare criticism. First, it provides a way of talking about Shakespeare’s multi-voicedness; on this point, Palfrey suggested that Shakespeare was “frustrated by the necessity of being tied to a single speaking voice in any given moment” and that he strived to find ways of mimicking the “overlapping parts” of a piece of music. Second, by acknowledging the life of Shakespeare’s parts, we recognize that the whole of any play cannot be pre-supposed. There will never be a scenario vast enough truly to contain it. Instead of in this mythic ur-scenario, the life of a play lies in what Palfrey called “the wounds of the work,” the highly-complex, ever-changing relations between many different parts in tension on a stage in any given scene. To enter into these “wounds,” or these relations between parts, we must distrust the need for coherence and reject the need for plausible narratives for the relations between parts. Or, as Palfrey finished by saying, to find the life in Shakespeare we need to “derange the senses, escape our daily bodies, and leave behind what we expect to occur.”


Post written by Jeffrey Blevins

Justin Park, a senior in the English Department, has been awarded a Gates Cambridge Scholarship; only 39 students nationwide received the award this year, out of 769 applicants.

What follows is a brief post from Justin about his work at Berkeley and his plans for Cambridge.

I first encountered Old English poetry in a class at City College of San Francisco and was struck by the strange beauty and unexpected complexity of the words and images. After transferring to Berkeley, I took Professor O’Brien O’Keeffe’s class on Anglo-Saxon England. I was hooked. My senior honors thesis focused on the Latin and Old English hagiographies of Saint Guthlac of Crowland—a warrior who became a hermit in the fens of Crowland. Hagiography imparts authority and authenticity by representing its subject in terms of universal aspects and qualities held in common among Christian saints. Some texts directly borrow episodes from other saint’s lives, transplanting them into the narrative to show how the individual is connected to the universal ideal of sainthood. I was curious as to how a genre with such universalizing tendencies could produce such a culturally specific and local individual like Saint Guthlac. My thesis focused on how local details (geographic and topographical) were deployed within the narrative to both signify place and to subtly participate in Guthlac’s transformation into a saint. These very minor details produced the major effect of binding the universal saint to the specific place and connecting the culturally specific to the religiously universal.

I was recently awarded the Gates Cambridge scholarship. At Cambridge, in the department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, I intend to continue researching hagiography. I am interested in the representations of slaves and criminals within the hagiography of Saint Swithun at Winchester written by Lantfred, a monk originally from Fleury. My research will look at the possible connections between Lantfred’s text, Carolingian law codes and the hagiography of Saint Benedict written at Fleury. I hope to show that by redeploying these sources in an Anglo-Saxon context, Lantfred was articulating a new relationship between the saint, law and the slaves and criminals living within the community.
-Justin Park

Posted by Jeffrey Blevins



The English Department encourages its undergraduates to pursue serious archival research, offering seed grants of $150 to any student with a research proposal that requires travel. This year, our undergraduates traveled to locales from Texas State-San Marcos and the University of Indiana to the British Library and an abbey in French Normandy, in pursuit of authors ranging from Cormac McCarthy and Ray Bradbury to Oscar Wilde and Aimé Césaire. Here in a new series on the blog, we’re sharing the archival reflections of a number of these undergraduates.

Third in the series is an interview with Lauren Ballard (‘12), who worked with dozens of surviving original editions of Susanna Rowson’s novel Charlotte Temple housed at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts. She was especially interested in how American readers appropriated this late-eighteenth-century British novel as their own; she explored this process of appropriation by pursuing American editions containing information such as advertisements, sermons, illustrations with captions, marginalia, and deviations from the original plot. After returning from the archives, Ballard went on to complete her thesis on Charlotte Temple, under the guidance of Professor Joanna Picciotto.

In addition to her grant from the English Department, Lauren also received support from the Student Activities Center and the Center for British Studies.

A copy of Rowson's novel at the archive

What first got you interested in Charlotte Temple?
I was assigned Charlotte Temple in Kathleen Donegan’s class on “Early American Women Writers.” Once I started reading it, it was impossible to put down. That really surprised me. Most of the pre-1800 writing I had been studying I enjoyed for its historical richness, but the language was something you had to work through. But with Charlotte Temple it was the opposite. It grabs you and doesn’t let you go. I found it just as engrossing as any modern novel. A week later a friend of mine came to visit for the weekend. She’s not a big reader, but I suggested she read Charlotte Temple while I was busy doing my other reading. She had the exact same experience that I did. She couldn’t put it down and we spent the whole weekend reading until she finished it. When I started the English Department’s honors course [for senior thesis writers] I found myself thinking about Charlotte Temple a lot, trying to puzzle out how such a simplistic novel could retain such power after two hundred years. My argument for my thesis ended up focusing quite a bit on the interplay between genre and cultural assumptions of value.

What was it like working at the American Antiquarian Society?
If I had had any idea of how much material there was to go through I would have stayed much longer, but I was only there for four days. I crammed those four days. First I got to go into the archives to collect all of the existing copies they had of Charlotte Temple. They filled up two whole carts. At first I took very meticulous notes on each copy—binding, condition, who printed it when and where, and, of course, penciled notes, names, and other marginalia—but then I realized I was never going to get through all of that. So I tried just recording marginalia, but there was so much I still didn’t make it all the way through. On my last day I went through the entire periodical database. That went faster since it was all scanned into their computer system and I could just email myself whatever I needed.

Can you describe a typical day for you at the archive? How early would you arrive? How late would you stay? Did you have to call up books, or could you browse?
I would get up around 7:30, eat breakfast at the hotel, then catch a ride over to the AAS. I’d get there around 9 or so, work until lunch time. Break for an hour, then come back and work until they closed. Most days they closed around 5, but on Wednesdays they stay open until 8, so Wednesday was a long day. The first day I was there we called up all the books that I would use for the rest of my stay, and they kept that cart of books behind the main desk for me. Normally you don’t even get to go into the stacks, but the woman who was helping me was really nice and gave me a tour through the stacks as we collected the books. Usually you are also only allowed to take one book to your desk at a time, but since I had so many they let me take three at a time.

How was it working with such old papers? Did you have to take precautions? How did the pages/ink feel and look after all that time?
Working with the old books was amazing. I had to use a clear plastic book holder that kept me from opening the book at anything wider than a 45-degree angle. It preserves the binding and minimizes contact. Most of the books were remarkably well-preserved. A lot of them were much smaller than the standard book size today, like little pocketbooks. I even got to handle a Munro’s “Ten Cent Novel” copy, which is like a little magazine. There was a lot more writing and marginalia in them than I thought there would be. Anything written in pencil wasn’t legible any longer, but in ink there were crystal clear signatures from as far back as the 1790s.

Can you talk about some particular discoveries at the archive that you felt were especially interesting or surprising?
I found dozens of fascinating things that I wasn’t able to put into my thesis. For example, “Charlotte Temple” was a very popular name for race horses for at least 50 years. There was also an obituary for a former slave woman in Ohio who was named Charlotte Temple. And there were a few poems that I found written inside the back covers of the old copies. Of course I couldn’t read all of them because the handwriting is so different, but I could read snippets. They were about lost love and death and such.

Charlotte Temple's grave

In addition to your work at the archive, you also found time to visit the mythological grave of Charlotte Temple in Trinity Churchyard in Manhattan. First, do we know why there is a grave for a fictional character at all? Who put it there and why?
Supposedly, the grave belongs to Charlotte Stanley, on whom the novel Charlotte Temple was based. She was from a prominent English family, eloped with Colonel Montressor during the Revolutionary War, and died in America. Several accounts say that she was buried in the Trinity Churchyard with a silver plate on her grave that said “Sacred to the memory of Charlotte Stanley—aged 19 years.” At some point, the plate disappeared. Some accounts say it was stolen and others that it was removed by relatives of the family. After the plate was gone someone carved the name “Charlotte Temple” into the grave.

Being able to see the grave ultimately played a large role in your thesis. Will you speak briefly about your visit to the grave and why it mattered to you so much?
Seeing the actual grave was awesome. It’s very rare for literary history to exist in a physical space like that, where you can see it and touch it and take a picture of it. Given how contradictory the historical accounts were, it was amazing just to know that it really is there. It also helped tremendously with sorting out the historical accounts. For example, there’s a blank rectangle where the stone is distinctly lighter. That’s where I assume Charlotte Stanley’s plate used to be, so that gives credibility to the whole tale of the silver name plate being pried off. I would have had no way of knowing that if I hadn’t seen the grave in person. I was very interested in how people in the nineteenth century engaged in the debate on how much of the novel was fact and how much was fiction, and the grave came into that argument.

What have you been up to since graduating from Berkeley?
I’ve been teaching English as a second language at Buddhist school in Thailand.

Have you visited any other archives since graduating? Is it something you could see yourself doing again?
I would definitely like to do it again, but I probably won’t get another chance until I bite the bullet and go to graduate school. Right now I’m trying to take advantage of my freedom while it lasts. I’m enrolled in a travel-writing course and am planning my next moves for when my teaching semester ends here in Thailand. I intend to come back to the Academy eventually. I miss being able to nerd out over old books with other English folks. But it may be a while before I make my way back.

Posted by Jeffrey Blevins

Professor Robert Hass at the conference roundtable (photo credit: Jen Coleman)

From February 22nd to 24th, the UC Berkeley English Department hosted its first ever Conference on Ecopoetics (with “ecopoetics” meaning the theory of poetry that has an ecological emphasis). It was a huge success, with over 250 participants from within and outside the university: a diverse group of environmental activists, ecologically-minded poets, eco-critics, and educators. In addition to the English Department, co-sponsoring the event were the Townsend Center for the Humanities, the UC Davis English Department, and the UC Berkeley Contemporary Poetry and Poetics Working Group.

If you would like to read more about the conference, a number of attendees have written about it. In particular, conference organizers Angela Hume, Gillian Osborne, and Margaret Ronda will be making a series of posts related to the conference over the next few months on the website Jacket2. They have also written up a post-conference report, which in turn links to numerous other blogs talking about the weekend’s events.



Posted by Jeffrey Blevins

The foundation, which is dedicated to raising awareness for pedestrian safety in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond, awards the scholarships yearly, to reward excellence in public education, and to support the University’s commitment to access, equity, and inclusion. This is the second year in which the scholarships have been awarded.

In a statement quoted on the foundation’s website, Teslich says that she plans to use her award to pay graduate school application fees, as well as to further her professional goal of teaching high school English in the Bay Area.

Posted by Jeffrey Blevins

The English Department encourages its undergraduates to pursue serious archival research, offering seed grants of $150 to any student with a research proposal that requires travel. This year, our undergraduates traveled to locales from Texas State-San Marcos and the University of Indiana to the British Library and an abbey in French Normandy, in pursuit of authors ranging from Cormac McCarthy and Ray Bradbury to Oscar Wilde and Aimé Césaire. Here in a new series on the blog, we’re sharing the archival reflections of a number of these undergraduates.

Second in the series is a reflection from Kathleen Miller (‘13), who visited the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies at Indiana University.

Ray Bradbury

The Center For Ray Bradbury Studies at IUPUI is tucked away in a little windowless room in a blue basement level accessible only by several flights of stairs and many doors; like the Sun Domes in Bradbury’s short story “The Long Rain,” the experience of arriving is comparable to entering one of those fabled yellow sanctuaries (albeit without the requisite “hot chocolate crowned with marshmallow dollops”). The bright and colorful swirl of movie posters, records, and memorabilia that adorn the walls faintly pulses with an inner vitality, as do the shelves of books themselves – a floor-to-ceiling compilation of anthologies, critical sources, and all kinds of edition runs, flanked in turn by banks of filing cabinets home to even more lurid spectacles of science-fiction grandeur. Cozy, warm, and made possible in part by wonderful folks from the Institute for American Thought who work on teasing out the finer points of textual editing and collations, I had come to the Center to immerse myself for the week in all things Bradbury, in preparation for the writing of my senior thesis. The Center’s director, Jonathan Eller, is one of the kindest and knowledgeable Bradbury enthusiasts you will ever meet; a continual source of passion and expertise throughout my time there, he constantly provided more materials to consider with every page that I turned. It was an incredible experience to jump back and forth between reading his recent work Becoming Ray Bradbury (2011) in tandem with the manuscript for his forthcoming sequel, Bradbury Unbound, not to mention conversing with the man himself – such that authorship took on a physical reality of exchange and interaction that transcended the printed page.

I marveled in the chance to look at early works and editions which have grown harder to get a hold of in the wake of Bradbury’s passing last summer, and hungrily poured through countless pages of pulp magazines in search of the material culture that initially nourished the fledgling writer. Indeed, as more avenues of exploration continued to emerge, I had to keep revisiting the projected scale and scope of my project and wrangle with the ever-shifting landscape of inquiry that unfolded before me. I even managed to encounter a distant part of my own flesh and blood along the way – my great-uncle, the fantasy writer and critic Jack Cady, whose work appeared alongside Bradbury’s in later editions of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and included a critical survey of American Literature. In tracing Bradbury across multiple mediums, I came to gain a richer sense of his mastery across genres, a mastery cultivated in part through respect for one’s predecessors, and underscored at times by uncertainty regarding his abilities as expressed in correspondence to his editor Don Congdon. His reverence for the past and the common ties that bind further resonated with my determination to pay tribute to someone who had held such a cherished place in my literary upbringing, and whose work continues to speak out in defense and praise of the collective voices which shape and make us. And I found myself equally indebted to my hosts in Indianapolis, who opened their homes, shared their stories, and let me sleep on their couches, renewing my hope in the goodness of strangers and the human heart, not to mention confirming the magic of networks like CouchSurfing.org which help make such connections possible.

Kathleen Miller with Jonathan Eller, the Center's director

Homeward bound after a long week of reading and devouring every source within eyesight, flying conditions were clear enough so that traveling over the continental U.S. by starlight nearly felt like soaring through space – a surreal and beautiful close to what had been a magical week of research, revelry, and wonder. From diving with Bradbury into the waters of Moby-Dick and his space-opera adaptation of the former, Leviathan 99, to peering behind all manner of masks and magazine marvels, I am humbled to have had the opportunity to be surrounded by so many great souls, a humming dynamo of collaboration and energy that has further ignited and nurtured my ongoing foray into the world (or should I say multiverse!) of science-fiction, fantasy, authorship, creation, and possibility. Pathology of authorship, I came to find, was really a reflection of my own obsession – living, breathing, and partially becoming Bradbury – and my project has since taken on a finer texture as a result of this immersive foray into his world. Much as he championed his literary heroes throughout his lifetime and through his writing (and even quite explicitly at times, elevating the likes of Edgar Allen Poe and Thomas Wolfe to living, breathing characters in some of his stories!), I can’t help but be drawn to the position of championing his legacy in turn. His conception of literature as a healing balm, a medicine for melancholy bridged by adventures of shared experience, is most evident in the truly prolific body of work he has left behind, whose pulp, flesh, and poetic spirit will continue to nourish readers for light-years to come.

I leave you all with Bradbury’s blessing –

“Live forever!”



Posted by Jeffrey Blevins