Literature

Loving the art but not the artist

Anonymous — Mon, 21 Oct 2024 19:45:24 +0000

Loving the art but not the artist Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 10/21/2024 - 13:45

Adamari Ruelas

ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder philosopher Iskra Fileva explores the complexities in separating the magic of a story from the controversies of its teller

The transition from summer to fall—trading warm days for cool evenings—means that things are getting … spookier. Witchier, maybe. For fans of the series, the approach of Halloween means it’s time to rewatch the Harry Potter movies.

This autumn also marks the 25^th anniversary of the U.S. release of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, book three in author J.K. Rowling’s seven-book series about a boy wizard defeating the forces of evil with help from his friends. Many U.S. readers of a certain age cite Azkaban as the point at which they discovered the magic of Harry Potter.

However, in the years since the series ended, Rowling has gained notoriety for stating strongly anti-trans views. Harry Potter fans have expressed disappointment and feelings of betrayal, and asked the question that has shadowed the arts for centuries, if not millennia: Is it possible to love the art but dislike the artist? Can the two be separated?

ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder philosopher Iskra Fileva notes that, "Even if you are an aestheticist, you probably cannot separate the art from the artist if the background information is affecting the proper interpretation of the story.”

“In principle, you can try to focus on the purely aesthetic properties of an artwork. This is the aestheticist attitude,” says Iskra Fileva, a University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder assistant professor of philosophy who has published on topics of virtue and morality. “But even if you are an aestheticist, you probably cannot separate the art from the artist if the background information is affecting the proper interpretation of the story.”

The Impact of Knowing

Fileva offered as an example the work of Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro. In a short story called “Wild Swans,” Munro depicts a young girl on a train who is sexually assaulted by an older man sitting beside her, but who pretends to be asleep and does nothing because she is curious about what would happen next.

Munro’s daughter came forward several months after Munro’s death in May to say she’d been abused by her stepfather and that her mother, after initially separating from her stepfather, went back to live with him, saying that she loved him too much.

Fileva points out that in light of these revelations, it is reasonable for readers of “Wild Swans” to reinterpret the story. Whereas initially they may have seen it as a psychologically nuanced portrayal of the train scene, they may, after learning of the daughter’s reports, come to read the story as an attempt at victim-blaming disguised as literature.

Fileva contrasts Munro’s case with cases in which an author may have said or done reprehensible things, but not anything that bears on how their work should be interpreted—as when Italian painter Caravaggio killed a man in a brawl, but the homicide is considered irrelevant to interpreting his paintings.

Fileva points out also that the question of whether the art can be separated from the artist may seem particularly pressing today, because modern audiences know so much more about artists than art consumers in the past may have. If no one knows facts about the author’s life, art consumers would be unable to draw parallels between an artwork and biographical information about the author.

“These are things that, historically, few would have known about—the origin of a novel or any other kind of artwork. Art might have looked a little bit more magical, and there may have been more mystery surrounding the author and in the act of creation,” says Fileva, explaining how the personal lives of artists have begun to seep into the minds of their consumers, something that has recently become common.

"The Crowning of Thorns" by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (ca. 1602-1607). Philosopher Iskra Fileva notes that even though Caravaggio killed a man in a brawl, the homicide is considered irrelevant to interpreting his paintings.

In 1919, poet T.S. Eliot wrote, “I have assumed as axiomatic that a creation, a work of art, is autonomous.” And in his essay “The Death of the Author,” literary theorist Roland Barthes criticized and sought to counter “the explanation of the work is always sought in the man who has produced it, as if, through the more or less transparent allegory of fiction, it was always finally the voice of one and the same person.”

However, early 20th-century movements such as New Criticism, which considered works of art as autonomous, have given way to more nuanced considerations of art in relation to its artist.

“I do think that if you want to understand what work literature does in the world, starting with its historical moment is an important step,” Amy Hungerford, a Yale University professor of English, told author Constance Grady in a 2019 story for Vox. “But I also am fully committed to the idea that every generation of readers remakes artworks’ significance for themselves. When you try to separate works of art from history, whether that’s the moment of creation or the moment of reception, you’re impoverishing the artwork itself to say that they don’t have a relation.”

Too many tweets

The growth of social media has added a new layer to the issues of art and the artists who create it. According to Fileva, social media have made it more difficult to separate the two because of how much more the consumer is able to know, or think they know, about the artist: “Artists are often now expected to have a public persona, to be there, to talk to their fans, to have these parasocial relationships, and that might make it difficult to separate the art from the artist,” she says.

In Fileva’s view, all this creates a second way in which facts about the author seem to bear on the public’s perception of an artwork. While learning about the revelations made by Munro’s daughter may lead some readers to reinterpret “Wild Swans,” other readers and viewers may feel disappointed and “let down” by the author even without reinterpreting the artwork or changing their judgment about the work’s qualities.

This fall marks the 25th anniversary of the U.S. release of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which many U.S. readers of a certain age cite as their entry point into the series.

This is another way in which it may become difficult to separate the art from the artist: The work becomes “tainted” for some audience members because of what they have learned about its creator.

It may have always been the case, Fileva suggests, that people who really loved a work of art, even when they knew nothing about its creator, imagined that they were connected to the artist, but this is truer today than ever. Fans are able to follow their favorite artists on social media and feel that they know the artist as a person, which creates expectations and the possibility for disappointment.

Perhaps inevitably, greater knowledge of the artist as a person affects how consumers interact with his or her art—whether it’s Ye (formerly Kanye) West’s music, Johnny Depp’s films or Alice Munro’s short stories.

So, where does that leave Harry Potter fans who have been disappointed by Rowling’s public statements?

Different books by Rowling illustrate the two different ways in which biographical information about the author may affect readers’ interpretation of the work, Fileva says. Rowling’s book (written under the pen name Robert Galbraith) The Ink Black Heart, featuring a character accused of transphobia, is an example of the first way: Facts about the author’s life may bear directly on the interpretation of the work.

When, by contrast, a transgender person who loved Harry Potter in her youth and loved Rowling feels saddened by statements Rowling made about gender, the reader may experience the book differently without reinterpreting it, Fileva says. Such a reader may think that the book is just as good as it was when she fell in love with it; it’s just that she can no longer enjoy it in the same way.

Some art consumers are more inclined to be what Fileva calls “aestheticists”—Barthes’ account of the death of the author resonates with them. Aestheticists may find it easier to separate the art from the artist in cases in which biographical information about the author is irrelevant to understanding and interpreting the work.

Whether any reader, whatever their sympathies, can separate facts about Munro’s life from the story “White Swans” or Rowling’s public pronouncements on gender from the interpretation of her book The Ink Black Heart, Fileva says, is a different question.

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ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder philosopher Iskra Fileva explores the complexities in separating the magic of a story from the controversies of its teller.

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Are modern politicians really making a deal with the devil?

Anonymous — Mon, 23 Sep 2024 06:00:00 +0000

Are modern politicians really making a deal with the devil? Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 09/23/2024 - 00:00

Chris Quirk

In an election season when accusations of ‘Faustian bargains’ are flying, ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder scholar Helmut Müller-Sievers reflects on what that really means

Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard noted that “every notable historical era will have its own Faust.”

The current election season seems to have an abundance of them, judging by the frequent cries of “Faustian bargain” made by media pundits, candidates in races across the country and members of the opinion class. With the term so commonly used as Election Day approaches—generally as an accusation of having made a deal with the devil or of selling one’s soul—it seems fair to ask: Is this what Goethe meant?

Is claiming that a candidate made a Faustian bargain if they aligned themselves with a certain politician, voted a particular way or made certain stump-speech promises true to what the German author envisioned two centuries ago?

Helmut Müller-Sievers, a ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder professor of German, notes that “the Faustian bargain always has to do with the value of our conscience.”

“The Faustian bargain always has to do with the value of our conscience,” says Helmut Müller-Sievers, a professor of German in the University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literature. “You're basically saying, so long as I have created advantages for my family, created advantages for my political ideology, created advantages for my short-term goals in life, it will not bother me. I will be able to sleep.”

Müller-Sievers—whose academic focus includes the intersections of literature, science and engineering in the 18th and 19th centuries and the history of technology—teaches a course on Johann Goethe’s tragic play Faust, in which he also examines the motif of the Faustian bargain as it appears in literature.

A deal with the devil

According to Müller-Sievers, the mythical idea of the Faustian deal with the devil as we understand it today originated in Germany sometime around the beginning of the 16th century. Likely the first literary treatment is by Christopher Marlowe late in the 1500s.

“But already Marlowe situates the play in Germany,” Müller-Sievers explains. “There seems to be a sense that the Reformation might have emboldened people to make their own relationship with God and the devil, so there’s a little bit of polemics going on there.”

In Goethe’s rendition, Faust is a bitter academic who has been seeking truth and failing in his pursuit. “Nothing gives him satisfaction, and he falls into what we would today call a depression. He is a cynic,” Müller-Sievers says.

Faust meets the devil, who is in the form of a dog that soon transforms into the demon Mephistopheles, and they begin a debate over the price for Faust’s soul. “It's the banter of super clever people who have no values and are too highly educated. That was already a common criticism at the time—intellectuals who want to show their brilliance but have no inner core.”

The two soon agree to a contest: Mephistopheles will win Faust's soul if he is able to entice Faust into wanting to hold on to some experience or aspect of the world that he finds desirable or fulfilling. Faust is convinced at first that he can resist, but soon succumbs.

The story of Faust has inspired artists for centuries, including the etching Faust by Rembrandt van Rijn (left, ca. 1652) and a lithograph of Mephistopholes flying above the skyline (right) by Eugène Delacroix for an 1828 translation of Goethe's Faust.

“We use the term Faustian bargain, and we think there must have been some kind of decision, but it might well be a gradual sliding—small bargains you make along the way, and then can’t go back,” Müller-Sievers says.

“It is basically a question of whether we are able to push aside our moral qualms when we act. At a certain point, will they come and bite us, and make us change? Will our conscience ever rise up and force us to denounce compromises that we've made?”

Müller-Sievers cites the example of German actor Gustaf Gründgens, whose career is portrayed in the Oscar-winning 1981 film Mephisto by Hungarian director István Szabó. “It’s bizarre. He was one of the great actors of his time, and maybe the greatest actor ever to play Mephisto on the stage,” he says.

“But he made a deal with the Nazi regime so he could continue to work in theater.” Gründgens continued playing Mephisto in performance in Germany in the run up to and even during World War II.

Sometimes, as in Gründgens’ case, one makes a deal with a reigning power rather than an individual, Müller-Sievers notes, and sometimes a large percentage of a population makes a deal.

“In the former East Germany, the GDR, you had an oppressive regime, and many people thought, ‘Well, I have to cut a deal with this system to get a job or get ahead,’ and they started snooping on other people,” Müller-Sievers explains.

“There were conscientious objectors, but it was embarrassing that so many people consented to this, and it was embarrassing later when all the documents came out, and you could read all the terms of the bargains people had made.”

Top image: Faust und Mephisto beim Schachspiel (Faust and Mephisto Play Chess), artist unknown

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In an election season when accusations of ‘Faustian bargains’ are flying, ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder scholar Helmut Müller-Sievers reflects on what that really means.

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Uncovered Euripides fragments are ‘kind of a big deal’

Anonymous — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 06:00:00 +0000

Uncovered Euripides fragments are ‘kind of a big deal’ Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 08/01/2024 - 00:00

Clay Bonnyman Evans

ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder Classics scholars identify previously unknown fragments of two lost tragedies by Greek tragedian Euripides

After months of intense scrutiny, two University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder scholars have deciphered and interpreted what they believe to be the most significant new fragments of works by classical Greek tragedian Euripides in more than half a century.

In November 2022, Basem Gehad, an archaeologist with the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, sent a papyrus unearthed at the ancient site of Philadelphia in Egypt to Yvona Trnka-Amrhein, assistant professor of classics. The two scholars have also recently discovered the upper half of a colossal statue of the ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Ramesses II in their joint excavation project at Hermopolis Magna.

She began to pore over the high-resolution photo of the papyrus (Egyptian law prohibits physically removing any artifact from the country), scrutinizing its 98 lines.

ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder classicists Yvona Trnka-Amrhein (left) and John Gibert (right) spent months studying a small square of papyrus and became confident it contains previously unknown material from two fragmentary Euripides plays, Polyidus and Ino.

“It was very clearly tragedy,” she says.

Using the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, a comprehensive, digitized database of ancient Greek texts maintained by the University of California, Irvine, Trnka-Amrhein confirmed she was looking at previously unknown excerpts from mostly lost Euripidean plays.

“After more digging, I realized I should call in an expert in Euripides fragments,” she says. “Luckily, my mentor in the department is just that!”

Working together, Trnka-Amrhein and renowned classics Professor John Gibert embarked on many months of grueling work, meticulously poring over a high-resolution photo of the 10.5-square-inch papyrus. They made out words and ensured that the words they thought they were seeing fit the norms of tragic style and meter.

Eventually, they became confident that they were working with new material from two fragmentary Euripides plays, Polyidus and Ino. Twenty-two of the lines were previously known in slightly varied versions, but “80 percent was brand-new stuff,” Gibert says.

“We don’t think there has been a find of this significance since the 1960s,” he says.

“This is a large and unusual papyrus for this day and age,” Trnka-Amrhein says. “It’s kind of a big deal in the field.”

Retelling a Cretan myth

Polyidus retells an ancient Cretan myth in which King Minos and Queen Pasiphaë demand that the eponymous seer resurrect their son Glaucus after he drowns in a vat of honey.

“Actually, it has a relatively happy ending. It’s not one of these tragedies where everyone winds up dead,” Trnka-Amrhein says: Polyidus is able to revive the boy using an herb he previously saw one snake use to revive another.

The papyrus contains part of a scene in which Minos and Polyidus debate the morality of resurrecting the dead, she says.

A marble statuette of Euripides, found in 1704 CE in the Esquiline Hill at Rome and dated to the 2nd century CE, lists several of the tragedian's works on the back panel. It is on display at the Louvre-Lens Museum in France. (Photo: Pierre André/Wikimedia Commons)

Ino came close to being one of Euripides’ best-known plays, Gibert says. Part of the text was inscribed on cliffs in Armenia that were destroyed in modern conflict. Fortunately, early 20th-century Russian scholars had preserved the images in drawings.

The eponymous character is an aunt of the Greek god Dionysus and part of the royal family of Thebes. In previously known fragments of a related play, Ino is an evil stepmother intent on killing her husband the Thessalian king’s children from a previous marriage. The new fragment introduces a new plot, Trnka-Amrhein says.

“Another woman is the evil stepmother, and Ino is the victim,” she says. “The third wife of the king is trying to eliminate Ino’s children. … Ino turns the tables on her, causing her to kill her own children and commit suicide. It’s a more traditional tragedy: death, mayhem, suicide.”

Of course, in matters of ancient Greek, there is always room for interpretation, and such bold claims will receive careful scrutiny from other experts. Gibert and Trnka-Amrhein decided not to pull any punches with their conclusions.

“We could play it safe,” Gibert says. “We are establishing a solid foundation, and on top of that we are sticking our necks out a little.”

They’ve already entered the gauntlet of scrutiny, making their case to 13 experts in Washington, D.C., in June and having their first edition of the fragment accepted for publication in August.

On Sept. 14, they will host the Ninth Fountain Symposium on the ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder campus, supported by long-time Boulder resident and classics enthusiast Dr. Celia M. Fountain. The day-long event will feature three illustrious experts: Professor Paul Schubert, a Swiss specialist in papyrology; specialist in ancient Greek literature and drama Laura Swift of Oxford University; and Professor Sarah Iles Johnston, an expert in Greek religion, goddesses and magic from the Ohio State University. They will be joined by Trnka-Amrhein, Gibert and Associate Professor of Classics Laurialan Reitzammer.

“In a departure, instead of having the guests give hour-long papers, we’re going to present for 20 to 25 minutes each, in pairs, in dialogue, followed by Q-and-A,” Gibert says.

And as the academic year gets underway, Gibert says he and Trnka-Amrhein will “take the show on the road” to such places as Dartmouth and Harvard.

“John’s contacts and readers in the Euripides world have given us reassurance we’re not going to have too much pie on our faces,” Trnka-Amrhein says. “We feel extremely lucky to have worked on this material and look forward to the world’s reactions.”

Top image: A marble bas-relief show Euripides (seated), a standing woman holding out a theater mask to him (left) and the god Dionysus (right), dated to between the 1st century BCE and the 1st century CE, from the Misthos collection in the Istanbul (Turkey) Archaeological Museum. (Photo: John-Grégoire/Wikimedia Commons)

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ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder Classics scholars identify previously unknown fragments of two lost tragedies by Greek tragedian Euripides.

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Dystopian ‘fissures of disaster’ intensify our own world

Anonymous — Fri, 12 Jul 2024 18:55:16 +0000

Dystopian ‘fissures of disaster’ intensify our own world Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 07/12/2024 - 12:55

Rachel Sauer

In newly published story collection The Rupture Files, ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder’s Nathan Alexander Moore explores identity and community in dystopian worlds

Nathan Alexander Moore was thinking about the end of the world—not how to survive the apocalypse or overcome it, necessarily, or even how to fix it, but rather the decisions we make when the world collapses around us.

“Who do you become?” asks Moore, an assistant professor in the University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder Department of Women and Gender Studies. “What choices do we make in this new world? How do we understand ourselves, and understand ourselves in community, in the larger context of a world that is ending or starting anew?

“For me, as someone who loves all things speculative fiction, dystopias are so interesting because these worlds become dystopic because of who the events are happening to. And the largest impacts, in fiction and real life, often happen to people who are marginalized. Dystopia largely impacts people who are Black or Brown, in places that are underdeveloped and underfunded.”

Nathan Alexander Moore, an assistant professor of Black trans and queer studies in the ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder Department of Women and Gender Studies, explores issues of identity in her newly published dystopian story collection The Rupture Files.

From that end—or beginning—of the world was born The Rupture Files, Moore’s newly published story collection. Touted by publisher Hajar Press as “supernatural stories of life in the fissures of disaster,” Moore’s tales actually plunge deeper into the ruined Earth, with Black and queer and trans characters exploring who they are and who they might become.

“I’m very aware of all of the history and the many cultural representations that have shaped Black people, and specifically Black queer people,” Moore explains. “I feel so much in our culture and in representations in film and television and literature, that Black characters and Black queer characters either become paragons or, on the opposite end, they’re kind of the worst of the worst, the villains, the despicable ones.

“For me, it’s about telling a story about a person who is nuanced. Some will see them as the hero, some as the villain, but at the core they are a person who is learning and growing and struggling. I want to show them—to show us—as beautiful, nuanced, complex characters, and that whatever their experience is, it’s a real experience. To try to be universal would strip us of what makes it interesting.”

Becoming a writer

Moore, who identifies as Black and trans, was a reader before she was a writer, finding motivation to finish her homework so she could crack open an Anne Rice novel. One of the first stories she wrote and shared with other people was called “Midnight and Nocturnes”—“I was using big words,” Moore recalls, “I thought I was so cute in high school”—about a vampire who was turned in ancient Egypt.

The vampire wakes at dusk “and she’s like, ‘I’m gonna go eat some people, I’m hungry.’ Then she runs into a vampire hunter, and for the first time she pauses at killing because he has the exact eyes of someone she knew in life. She says, ‘I remember when I was human, I loved you. You broke my heart, and I loved you’ and it ends with her making a big choice whether she’s going to live or die.”

Moore wrote it when she was 16 or 17 and submitted to a contest on Facebook and ended up winning third place. “It was the first story where I very much remember writing it and thinking, ‘OK, I think I’m writing, I think I might be a writer.’ And then when I came in third, I was like, ‘Oh, she’s on her way!’ It also helped that I wrote that story when Twilight/True Blood/Vampire Diaries was of the moment, and I was reading all of those books.”

Through graduate school, she focused on creative writing and Black literature and cultures, delving deeper into speculative fiction through a lens of feminism and collective memory. Her PhD, earned at the University of Texas at Austin, focused on contingency and Black temporal imaginations, and included a chapter titled “From Catastrophe to the Cataclysm: Black Speculations on the Limits of the Anthropocene & the Temporality of Disasters.”

In fact, writing The Rupture Files wasn’t completely Moore's idea. An editor at Hajar Press saw a presentation she gave for Black Women Radicals about writing Black geopolitics through speculative fiction and asked Moore if she wrote her own speculative fiction.

As it happened, there were some people she’d been living with for a while…

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVaoC1JgHnE&t=680s]

‘The world we’re living in’

“The first story (in The Rupture Files) is called ‘Sequela,’ and it’s about this far-future dystopia where the world is mostly ocean and everything is transient,” Moore says. “There were portions (of that story) I had written as series of prose poems, and they had been kind of living in my head. With the other stories, I had characters who weren’t fully realized—I had a snapshot, a photograph, they were peering over the fence and I was like, ‘Hmm, what are you doing?’ For a long time, they were thought experiments, and in writing them they became real.”

The story “Sequela” is about a woman named Shalomar, who lives in one of a series of stations in this new ocean world—“I imagine the stations like metallic squids, though I never said it in the story, and they kind of hunker on land and then jump around,” Moore explains—and whose job is station archivist. Whatever the station pulls out of the ocean, it’s her job to analyze it and think about its historical value. As a Black woman, Shalomar had been trying to document Black history before the apocalypse, and after it she discovered that the water wanted her to tell a different story, as did the mermaids.

In a story called “Ashes for Your Beauty,” Moore tells the story of a woman who is the consort (read: food source) of a vampire in a bombed-out, post-nuclear world, who discovers that she has power, and she can make power. “So, she has to decide, ‘Am I going to stay in this life that’s very scary and terrible but stable, or burn shit down?’” Moore says.

Writing the four stories in The Rupture Files was a different experience from the novel manuscript Moore wrote while earning her master’s.

“I was thinking about narrative arcs, about character development, who is the main person, whose perspective feels the most interesting,” Moore says. “I was balancing the expansiveness of living in a brand-new world that even I didn’t know all the rules of and also making it containable in short form. It was a steep learning curve but really fun.”

It also, she says, allowed her to more deeply consider the world as it currently is: “What’s always interesting about dystopias is they are projected as far futures, but any time someone’s writing a dystopia, they’re writing about the present—expanded and intensified, but the present. Dystopic writing is really about looking out at the world we’re living in today.”

Top: Background dystopia image by Daniele Gay

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In newly published story collection The Rupture Files, ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder’s Nathan Alexander Moore explores identity and community in dystopian worlds.

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A guy, a gun and a dangerous blonde … and why we like them

Anonymous — Thu, 28 Mar 2024 19:52:42 +0000

A guy, a gun and a dangerous blonde … and why we like them Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 03/28/2024 - 13:52

Rachel Sauer

Remembering writer Raymond Chandler at the 65^th anniversary of his death, a ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder English scholar reflects on the hard-boiled investigator and why this character still appeals

Philip Marlowe was in a grubby waterfront hotel room “with a hard bed and a mattress slightly thicker than the cotton blanket that covered it.”

A neon light outside the window illuminated the room in red. He got up to splash cold water on his face, feeling “a little better, but very little. I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.”

Call him hard-boiled or hard-bitten, call him jaded, call him a relic—he’s all those things, and one of the most alluring and enduring archetypes in fiction. As written by Raymond Chandler, who died 65 years ago this week and who is increasingly recognized for the artistry of his writing, Philip Marlowe is the private investigator who’s seen it all and is surprised by little. He drinks too much, smokes too much, cracks wise, cracks the case and is, above all things, alone.

Mary Klages, a ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder associate professor of English, notes that part of the appeal of the hard-boiled investigator character is he's a "knight in soiled armor."

Many consider Marlowe the patron not-saint of all the hard-boiled and hard-edged private investigators who followed, the semi-heroes of literature and film who solve crime, yes, but generally by immersing themselves in the sordid world of it—at the expense of relationships, health, happiness and sometimes the law.

What is the continued appeal of the hard-boiled investigator character, who’s brilliant and kind of a jerk, handy in a fight and charming when it’s convenient, all kinds of trouble—or troubled—and the ultimate cipher?

“What Marlowe and other characters like him bring in is being more of the people,” says Mary Klages, an associate professor of English who teaches a course called Crime, Policing and Detection. “(Marlowe) doesn’t have a partner, never has anybody he works with, doesn’t need a Watson figure to explain how the great brain works. He’s just a guy, and he’s not apart from the dirty world that he has to investigate. He doesn’t have this sensibility of, ‘Oh, bad guys and criminals, they’re over there and I’m something different’ that you get with other detectives or investigators.”

A desire for story

Understanding the appeal of the jaded investigator whose native habitat seems to be dark and rainy city streets begins with understanding the basic human desire for story, Klages says.

“Human beings love narratives, we love telling stories, and with mysteries there’s that added element of, ‘Can I figure out who the villain is?’ Then we get the reward of a sense of justice—somebody out there is fighting crime and that makes us feel a little bit better about living in a dangerous real world. As a reader, I can go to mystery novel and say, ‘Oh, if only there were a Sherlock Holmes or a V.I. Warshawski in the real world solving crimes and making us safer.’

“Also, stories—especially mysteries—give us all that in nice container. Anything can happen, but it’s not going to happen. Reading words on a page lets us empathize with characters and have a vicarious experience that we don’t want to have happen in real life. We experience it in a way that makes it vivid, and that has shape and that wraps up in the end with a nice, neat bow. That’s the convention in most mystery stories.”

And while there are as many types of mystery solvers in fiction as there are audiences for them—from elderly knitting enthusiasts and roadster-driving teens to insufferable British geniuses with superhuman powers of observation—the hard-boiled private eye character brought a new and interesting layer to the mystery genre.

Both Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett honed the literary hard-boiled investigator writing for Black Mask magazine.

A knight in soiled armor

The character really came into his own—and in the beginning, it was always a “he”—when the pulp magazine Black Mask was launched in April 1920 by H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan. One of the first iterations of the hard-boiled investigator slouched through its pages in December 1922, embodied in Carroll John Daly’s novella “The False Burton Combs.”

The titular false Burton Combs memorably introduces himself in the story's fourth paragraph: “I ain’t a crook; just a gentleman adventurer and make my living working against the law breakers. Not that work with the police—no, not me. I’m no knight errant either. It just came to me that the simplest people in the world are crooks.”

His progeny includes Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade, Mike Hammer, V.I. Warshawski, Harry Hole, the Continental Op, Kurt Wallander and further generations of fictional investigators who often exist as shadow opposites to the upstanding police detectives, the crime-solving priests, the kooky Southern bookstore owners who happen upon murder, the otherwise decent people in whom readers like to think they see themselves.

Both Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, who wrote hard-boiled investigator Sam Spade, published in Black Mask and brought dimension to an essentially unknowable—and sometimes unlikable—but always compelling archetype.

“In Philip Marlowe, Chandler gives us guy who’s educated, who’s been to college, who quotes Shakespeare, but works with lowlifes,” Klages explains. “He gives us a portrait of a very dirty underworld where you can’t trust anybody, the police are corrupt, rich people are corrupt, and he looks for a kind of moral compass to guide him. I think of Marlowe as a knight in soiled armor, and Chandler makes that image at the very beginning of ‘The Big Sleep.’ He has Marlowe go into the house of a very rich client and he’s looking at this stained-glass window that shows a knight trying to free a woman from being chained up around a tree. Marlowe says something like, ‘I wanted to go up and help the guy, but then I realized he was never going to get that woman free.’

“Marlowe’s attitude is, ‘I know there’s supposed to be nobility and self-sacrifice in world, but I don’t see them, and I don’t’ believe in them. But I still want there to be some kind of morality, some kind of code,’ so he makes his own. He doesn’t follow anything traditional, he’s not religious, not spiritual, not a law and order and justice guy, so he makes his own code, and that’s part of the ongoing appeal of this character, this knight in soiled armor.”

Humphrey Bogart (left) starred as Philip Marlowe in "The Big Sleep" with Lauren Bacall. (Photo: National Motion Picture Council)

Trench coats for a modern audience

Philip Marlowe was notably embodied on film by Humphrey Bogart, as was Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, and he’s the image many people bring to mind when they think of the hard-boiled investigator, Klages says—trench coat, cigarette and, by today’s standards, appalling attitudes toward women.

In fact, some might claim that the hard-bitten investigator is a relic of the past, but Klages argues that this character and what he (and not as often, she) represents and embodies remains relevant for modern audiences.

“It’s this idea of, ‘Why should we believe in anything when we’ve had time after time the proof that the politicians are corrupt, the police are corrupt, it’s all over the place,’” Klages says. “I think the question is, from a hard-boiled perspective, why would anybody give a damn about anybody else? You have to be in it for yourself, and I think the genius of Chandler’s portrait of Marlowe is that you have to be in it for yourself, yes, but it has to be something bigger that you stand for rather than just your own selfishness and your own greed and desires.”

She notes that Marlowe sees the world with very clear eyes, without delusion or traditional notions of hope, yet he still crafts his own kind of hope and his own code of morality, which resonates with readers and viewers today.

“I just watched first season of ‘True Detective’ and that’s a perfect example,” Klages says. “You’ve got two guys with torn up, terrible lives and part of the plot is, let’s find out how these guys with messed up lives can pursue justice. How do you take somebody who is flawed as a character and make them be the vehicle for something as elevated as truth, justice and the American way? As people who love stories, we like that complication.”

Top image: Humphrey Bogart (center) as Philip Marlowe in "The Big Sleep." (Photo: Warner Bros.)

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Remembering writer Raymond Chandler at the 65th anniversary of his death, a ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder English scholar reflects on the hard-boiled investigator and why this character still appeals.

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Even after 180 years, A Christmas Carol is no humbug

Anonymous — Wed, 20 Dec 2023 17:50:28 +0000

Even after 180 years, A Christmas Carol is no humbug Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 12/20/2023 - 10:50

Cody DeBos

ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder Victorian literature scholars discuss why Charles Dickens’ classic is still retold and probably will be retold in Christmases yet to come

This month is the 180th anniversary of Charles Dickens' classic, A Christmas Carol. For nearly two centuries, this tale of redemption and reflection has buoyed readers with its depictions of regret and the enduring tenacity of hope.

Dickens’ novella also can be read as a social commentary, reflecting his views of Victorian England through themes that remain relevant today. The narrative keenly addresses issues of wealth imbalance, labor inequity and the harsh realities the working class faced—all struggles Dickens experienced personally.

But why, among Dickens’ body of work, is A Christmas Carol the story that still gets told? Why does a reflection on social injustice in Victorian England ring true for readers in the 21st century?

Emily Harrington (left) and Elizabeth Anderman are Victorian literature scholars who cite multiple factors influencing A Christmas Carol's enduring place in culture.

Enduring social commentary

As Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, he took aim at attitudes toward poverty and those living in it.

“There was a lot of tension at the time, in the sense that some people had everything and some people had nothing,” explains Elizabeth Anderman, an associate teaching professor, English lecturer and English teacher for the College of Arts and Sciences Residential Academic Programs. “Obviously, I think that’s still true for us today, right? Scrooge, who starts as a miser and is converted, speaks to our culture of aspiring to wealth—and I think we all know there are some potential negatives with that.”

Dickens’ choice to confront the widening gap between the richest and the poorest was uncomfortable for many at the time, Anderman says. When the story was published in 1843, England’s wealth gap was expanding dramatically.

Choosing to address income inequality via a ghost story made the tale and its themes more approachable—and possibly more palatable—for a broader swath of readers, says Emily Harrington, an associate professor of English and associate chair for undergraduate studies in the Department of English. Also, ghost stories were very popular at Christmas in the 19^th century, much more than they were at Halloween.

“Ghost stories and other gothic horror genres are great for representing big unwieldy social problems because they make those problems safer for readers to encounter them,” she says.

However, Dickens ultimately balances the spookiness and social critique with nostalgia and visions of an ideal holiday—one that readers can embrace even if they’ve never experienced it.

Bob and Tiny Tim Cratchit (illustration by Frederick Barnard, noted for his work with editions of Charles Dickens' novels published between 1871 and 1879)

“I would say this story remains popular because it offers a fanciful solution to those big problems,” Harrington says. “Bob Cratchit gets a raise, his family gets a turkey. Everyone who reads or watches can feel good about a problem with a resolution.”

Eternal archetypes

The enduring appeal of A Christmas Carol isn’t exclusive to its commentary on social injustice. Dickens’ use of archetypal characters—figures like Scrooge, Tiny Tim and the Christmas spirits—emphasizes a desire for redemption narratives, and for good things to happen to people who deserve them.

“We really want our leaders and rich people to be nice people and to be able to be converted,” Anderman says. “We want to believe that being rich doesn’t make you horrible. Seeing Scrooge’s transformation from a miserly figure to being redeemed is something people want to hold onto.”

However, Dickens’ characters, though beloved, are not without criticism. Tiny Tim, Bob Cratchit’s preternaturally wise son, has in recent years been criticized as an objectifying portrayal of disability. While using disabled characters to tug at the heartstrings was a common technique in Victorian literature, and even though some readers gain significant emotional connection to the story via Tiny Tim, many view this use of the character archetype as harmful.

“People working in the area of disability studies have felt like Tiny Tim does their community a real disservice, because he is a poster child,” Harrington says. “In that sense, he is an object—not a subject. There’s a need for stories that put the experiences of disabled people at the center and don’t just make them sentimental objects for eliciting sympathy.”

Transcending the page

The fact that Dickens’ story still elicits strong opinions and that people are still discussing it bespeaks its enduring themes and characters. It is a story that holds up through countless adaptations and retellings, from animated films to stage plays to modern twists on the core story

Harrington notes that the story’s adaptability is thanks, in part, to its theatrical structure. Scrooge serves as a fill-in for the audience, while the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future transport the audience through scenes and, depending on the adaptation, acts.

“My dad has read A Christmas Carol to us each year for my entire life,” Anderman says. “So much of what Dickens wrote was meant to be read out loud. I think this is part of what has helped it convert really well into more modern media we understand better today. So many lines have a rhythm we want to speak and hear out loud.”

Both Harrington and Anderman, researchers of and experts in Victorian literature, cite a beloved adaptation: 1992’s The Muppet Christmas Carol.

A scene from The Muppet Christmas Carol (photo: Disney)

“I can say that The Muppet Christmas Carol is my favorite adaptation because of the whimsy and playfulness,” Harrington says. “It doesn’t take its subject too seriously.”

Embracing fantasy and continued relevance

Though Dickens used Christmas themes and a patina of sentimentality to tell this story, the issues he aimed to address transcended the holiday season, and the decades of holiday seasons since its publication in December 1843.

“Dickens really wanted to work and help the poor in his own life,” Anderman says. “There’s a part of me that wishes we could get back to that part of the text. There are some moments where he really wants us to take a look around and see the people in our communities we don’t often see. He wants us to embrace this aspect, but sadly, I think this gets glossed over by the Christmas side.”

Harrington adds that she hopes to see a change in the type of stories people celebrate around the holidays. “I think it’s really important to understand how the stories we tell operate culturally, and to me, this one has maybe held on too long, suggesting that charitable giving will solve big problems rather than fundamental systemic change,” she says.

Nevertheless, A Christmas Carol remains the story people read year after year, with its catchphrases “Bah! Humbug!” and “God bless us everyone.”

“Yeah, it’s a nice fantasy to enjoy,” Harrington says. “It’s a fairytale, right? It’s a ghost story. These are the stories we love to connect with and feel good about.”

Or, in the words of the author himself, “There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor.”

Top image: A closing scene from The Muppet Christmas Carol (photo: Disney)

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ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder Victorian literature scholars discuss why Charles Dickens’ classic is still retold and probably will be retold in Christmases yet to come.

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Isn’t it strange? That human is actually an animal

Anonymous — Tue, 12 Dec 2023 21:51:50 +0000

Isn’t it strange? That human is actually an animal Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 12/12/2023 - 14:51

Rachel Sauer

ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder researcher Antje Richter studies early medieval Chinese records of the strange to understand how literature explores what it means to be human

It may seem like a wholly modern affliction, but replacement anxiety has haunted the human condition for a very long time—the worry that not only could someone or something else fill our roles, but possibly do a better job.

In medieval China, the privilege that was perceived as inherent to being human could be convincingly undermined by, of all things, animals—at least in the popular literature of the day. Called “records of the strange,” these largely forgotten narratives are tales of mistaken identity in which an animal successfully impersonates and replaces a human until it is eventually found out.

These stories, which have frequently been denied the esteem granted to the poetry and other “serious” literature of the time, nevertheless touch on important issues of identity and privilege: What is required to exist, or even just pass, as human? How is personal identity conceptualized across gender and species? How can literature illuminate “true” identity?

Antje Richter, an associate professor in the ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations, has researched themes of identity and privilege in Chinese records of the strange.

These are themes Antje Richter, a University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder associate professor of Chinese, explores in a recently published paper that focuses on three particular records of the strange. In it, she highlights how the political and social changes that shook early medieval China raised important questions about ethnic, social and personal identity—and records of the strange were an accessible medium in which to address them.

“This literature has tended to be compartmentalized by scholars because it’s not ‘high’ literature,” Richter explains. “’High’ literature is poetry, it’s historiography, it’s several other genres that get taken seriously, while these texts are often regarded as leftover literature.

“But they enjoyed enormous popularity in the period they were written, though so many of these story collections have been lost. But the area of animal studies has really grown more prominent in the last 10 to 15 years, and scholars are looking to these records of the strange to learn more about how people thought about the human-animal boundary and what these stories had to say about species and social class.”

The human-animal barrier

Throughout her scholarship, Richter has been fascinated by records of the strange, especially the ones that venture beyond the most common trope of “animal spirits impersonating women in order to have sex with men, which is a whole different can of worms,” she says.

Richter instead focused on records of the strange from the collection Records of an Inquest into Spirit Phenomena, compiled by Jin Dynasty historian Gan Bao, and Latter Records of an Inquest into Spirit Phenomena, generally attributed to poet Tao Qian. Her focus is male protagonists, since at the time men could aspire to a broader range of social roles and activities.

In the story “The Old Yellow Dog at Kuaiji,” an inattentive, frequently absent husband named Wang returns to his deeply unhappy wife one day and is much more loving and attentive. A suspicious servant sees this and reports it to the real Wang, who challenges and fights the imposter, eventually revealing it to be an old yellow dog. Wang beats it to death, and his wife is so ashamed that she grows sick and dies.

In “The Old Raccoon Dog at Wuxing,” two sons mistake their father for a demon and kill him, only to have the demon return to their home in the appearance of their father. For many years, the imposter lives in their home until a ritual master recognizes the evil, utters a spell and reveals their “father” to be an old raccoon dog. The sons then capture and kill it.

The third story Richter highlights, “The Brindled Fox Scholar,” involves a fox who passes as a highly respected scholar until it, too, is revealed and eventually boiled to death.

“Each of these stories is told not from the perspective of the animal, but by a human narrator, and an important aspect of the human-animal boundary is this question of what constitutes human identity,” Richter says. “It’s exploring the difference between ‘passing’ and ‘being.’

“I think an important point is the human struggle with animals and drawing lines between us and them. Animals are either working for us, like dogs, or they are, like foxes, habitually crossing over from the wilderness into areas populated by humans in a way that can feel very threatening.”

Questions of identity

The records of the strange that Richter highlights also reflect the upheaval and changes in Chinese society during the early medieval period, which is generally considered to have begun with the fall of the Han Dynasty in 220 CE.

I feel that these kinds of uncertainties and insecurities, these questions of identity, are expressed in these stories. This is still a very relevant theme today.”

“A large part of the northern Chinese aristocracy was driven south because of invasions by northern ‘barbarians,’ and they then were living together with people of different cultures, different looks, different preferences,” Richter says. “For people originally from the north, the area south of the Yangtze River, in early China, was not regarded to be highly civilized.

“I feel that these kinds of uncertainties and insecurities, these questions of identity, are expressed in these stories. This is still a very relevant theme today.”

Records of the strange also can be interpreted as a commentary on principles of meritocracy—which then, as now, were frequently more ideal than reality.

“In these stories we see this aspiration to rise,” Richter explains. “The aspiration may have been there, but success was reserved only for certain people. We see it in the fox posing as a scholar, this idea of ‘how dare you seek to live in this realm where you do not belong.’ Being denied access was very likely a very common experience for quite a lot of people.”

Top image: "Six Horses" ink and color on paper handscroll, by unknown artists in the 13th and 14th centuries CE.

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ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder researcher Antje Richter studies early medieval Chinese records of the strange to understand how literature explores what it means to be human.

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The Iliad’s ‘alien familiarity’ gets a makeover

Anonymous — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 16:50:03 +0000

The Iliad’s ‘alien familiarity’ gets a makeover Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 11/28/2023 - 09:50

Clay Bonnyman Evans

In a critically acclaimed new translation of The Iliad, ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder classics Professor Laurialan Reitzammer sees the enduring relevance of Homer

It’s not easy to create a work of literature that truly lasts. Many authors considered the brightest lights of the 20^th century are now virtually unknown, while countless critically acclaimed novels fade into oblivion once they slide too far down TheNew York Times bestseller list.

So, it’s no little feat that The Iliad and The Odyssey—attributed to the ancient Greek writer Homer, but the product of a thousand-year oral tradition—are not only read and studied nearly three millennia after their creation, but still generate excitement among both critics and readers.

Enter Emily Wilson, a University of Pennsylvania classicist who earned rave reviews for her 2017 English translation of The Odyssey.

“In the history of Odyssey translations, few have exerted such a cultural influence that they become ‘classics’ in their own right,” one critic wrote. “I predict that Emily Wilson will win a place in this roll-call of the most significant translations of the poem in history.”

ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder classicist Laurialan Reitzammer notes The Iliad's enduring relevance may stem, in part, from how it reflects the real world's complexity and messiness.

The enthusiasm and plaudits have continued with the release of Wilson’s translation of The Iliad (W.W. Norton & Co.) in September, which TheWashington Post called “a genuine page-turner,” despite its reputation as the considerably more challenging of Homer’s two famous epic poems.

Not everyone’s a fan, of course. Some critics and scholars have balked at her modern sensibilities, word choices and even the meter of her translations.

But whatever the translation, Homer clearly remains relevant all these centuries later. Why does the work continue to speak to modern audiences?

“Because some things don’t change—we still have war, unfortunately, and (The Iliad) doesn’t really take a side; it shows that everyone is human, the cost of war, what violence does to people and what is left behind when people die,” says Laurialan Reitzammer, associate professor of classics at the University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder. “The end of the poem is about grief and pain, big issues that speak to us all.”

Yet The Iliad complicates that sense of familiarity with its portrait of a “deeply alien, radically foreign” culture, Reitzammer says.

She points to a famous episode in which Hector stands on the walls of Troy and prays to the gods that his infant son will grow up to “kill his enemies and bring home the bloody spoils”—not exactly the first impulse of most contemporary parents when trying to sooth a crying baby. Hector feels utterly compelled to go to war to maintain his status, and his wife agrees, though both understand that she will be violated and enslaved, and his own child will be hurled from the same high walls, as a result.

“These moments are about the glory of the warrior and violence. … Yet the end of the poem is a scene of lamentation in which three women speak about what it means to lose Hector,” Reitzammer says.

Having read The Iliad in English and the original Greek dozens of times over the past three decades, Reitzammer also is struck by how different facets of the poem have shone through or faded away with each new season of her life.

For example, when she first read the poem as an undergraduate, she took little notice of Achilles’ mother, the minor goddess Thetis, who seeks intervention by Zeus, the big dog of the Greek pantheon, when her valiant warrior son comes to her for help.

“She was really involved in his life. In a lot of ways, she was the first ‘helicopter mom’,” Reitzammer says with a laugh.

Yet now that she’s been a mother herself for some 13 years, Reitzammer better understands the powerful impulse to protect and help one’s children.

“We see ourselves in this epic, but in different ways each time, because we ourselves change,” she says.

Wilson has chafed at oft-made, well-intended praise for being the first woman to translate, and providing the first “feminist” translation, of Homer into English, which generated a backlash on social media (no doubt by many who had not read the book) accusing her of being “woke.”

“It may be the first non-misogynistic translation,” Reitzammer notes wryly.

"Achilles Defeating Hector" by Peter Paul Rubens (1630-1632)

For example, she praises Wilson's avoidance of words like “servant” or “maid” to describe the enslaved women slaughtered by Odysseus upon returning from his eponymous journey, a translation of a Greek word usually rendered as “sluts” or “disobedient maids.”

She praises Wilson’s careful choices in bringing Homer to a modern audience without diluting his potency or poetry. She points to Wilson’s use of “cataclysmic” wrath for a Greek word that similarly has four syllables describing Achilles’ rage in the first lines of the poem, usually translated as “destructive.”

“It defamiliarizes ‘destructive’ and makes us think of a washing over, torrential violence, being flooded with emotions, and flooded with rage that will have such dire consequences,” Reitzammer says.

“(Wilson’s) attention to these kinds of things shows why we need new translations,” Reitzammer says. “We don’t see things the way someone in 1950 or even 2000 saw them.”

The fact that women in Homer’s time were viewed as objects and property is part of what gives The Iliad its “alien nature,” she says.

“I think (Homer) is worth reading,” she says, “in part because our own culture has deeply embedded misogyny.”

And rather than flatly rejecting Homer because of offensive norms held by a culture so far removed in space and time, Reitzammer argues that studying his work can help students think about modern societal ills.

“When teaching ancient Greek literature, especially fifth^-century Athenian literature, I get to have intense conversations with students about gender or citizenship or immigration, in the context of a culture from thousands of years ago,” she says. “My hope is that they will come back to modern times and think about our modern constructions in different ways.”

Reading Homer may be uncomfortable, Reitzammer says, but it’s a valid reflection of the real world’s complexity and messiness. And that’s another reason we’re still reading, translating and arguing over his work.

“(The Iliad) offers this complexity, celebrating the warrior, then showing us what is left behind,” she says. “It’s so much harder to hold different strands and perspectives at once than to have just one perspective.”

Top image: "Hektor wirft Paris seine Weichlichkeit vor" by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein (1786)

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In a critically acclaimed new translation of The Iliad, ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder classics Professor Laurialan Reitzammer sees the enduring relevance of Homer.

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ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder to revamp doctoral studies in the literatures

Anonymous — Tue, 08 Nov 2016 22:22:06 +0000

ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder to revamp doctoral studies in the literatures Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 11/08/2016 - 15:22

In an effort to recruit the most talented students, the University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder will fundamentally restructure the support for doctoral studies in its six literature PhD programs with the new Consortium of Doctoral Studies in Literatures and Cultures.

ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder’s six doctoral programs in literature include French/Italian, Spanish/Portuguese, German, classics, English and Japanese/Chinese.

Helmut Muller-Sievers

Students accepted into the consortium programs will be guaranteed five years of support, of which the first and fifth years offer cost-of-living stipends and are free of teaching obligations. In the intervening years they will teach a reduced load and receive a substantial stipend during their four summers on campus.

“With a fifth year dedicated to writing their dissertations, less teaching in the intervening years and support during the summers, students will be able to complete their degrees and enter the job market much earlier than they are able to do now,” said Helmut Muller-Sievers, director of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder’s Center for Humanities and the Arts (CHA).

Students also will be encouraged to choose mentors from outside their departments, emphasizing a more cross-disciplinary approach. In combination with advising in literature, they might seek advising in law, popular culture or media, for example.

“We have amazing strengths in a variety of related fields that might not come into view if there’s no collaboration between departments, said Muller-Sievers. “Often, colleagues who work in the same areas don’t know about each other’s work. Through workshops and presentations, we will create new communities of scholars that include both faculty and students.”

The new consortium structure was designed after extensive consultation with chairs, admissions officers and the deans of the College of Arts and Sciences and the Graduate School. CHA will administer and monitor the consortium in its first years.

An important feature of the new structure is the inclusion of English, classics and Asian literatures.

“Often, universities try to streamline their literature offerings into a generic program in modern European languages, or such,” said Mullers-Sievers. “Having Chinese and Japanese in the mix gives students an understanding of non-European traditions and cultures. Also, the inclusion of classics—of ancient Greek, Latin and classical archaeology—deepens our students’ understanding of our literary heritage, as well as of the materiality of texts and artifacts. The presence of English gives students access to faculty who are working on today’s most hotly debated topics.”

The consortium is also rethinking how the PhD in the humanities should be shaped in the coming decades. CHA received a coveted Next Generation PhD grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which brings 28 private and public universities together in an exchange of ideas and practices.

“The initiative affirms the innovative and forward-looking approaches that ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder is taking to doctoral education and promises to foster intellectual community and academic excellence among students and faculty in the participating disciplines,” said Ann Schmiesing, interim dean of the Graduate School.

In an effort to recruit the most talented students, the University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder will fundamentally restructure the support for doctoral studies in its six literature Ph.D programs with the new Consortium of Doctoral Studies in Literatures and Cultures.

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