Letter from the Chair

Ramazani
Photo by Stephen Boykewich

Dear Friends of the English Department,

Greetings to you from the Grounds of the University of Virginia. The English Department’s move in 1995 from Wilson Hall to Bryan Hall didn’t carry it a great physical distance. But many of you have moved far from Charlottesville, and our electronic newsletter is part of our effort to reconnect with our alumni and friends, whether nearby or far-flung. This fall the Department also launched a redesigned website, where the newsletter and other information about the Department are housed. If you haven’t yet seen it, please visit us at http://www.engl.virginia.edu/. We welcome your suggestions about the new site.

Although the English Department hasn’t physically moved very far, it is a place where people are constantly on the move. Every day, tightly packed crowds of students and faculty flow across the Bryan Hall breezeway that links the Lawn to the Minor Hall area, and there are other senses in which the English Department, though grounded on the Grounds, constantly travels. Last summer, for the first time, the Department sent one of its faculty members, also an alumna, Anna Brickhouse, on the University’s new shipboard Semester at Sea program, and she describes her experience of teaching during her South American journey in a newsletter feature story. This spring, two other faculty members, poet Gregory Orr and critic Mark Edmundson, will teach aboard the same ship as it circumnavigates the globe. Other faculty members, including Michael Levenson, Steve Cushman, Cindy Wall, and Clare Kinney, have traveled frequently to London to teach a select group of undergraduate students in an acclaimed English Department summer program centered on the literature and culture of that great international city. Of course many faculty regularly catch planes and trains to deliver papers, read their creative work, or conduct archival research at other universities. A group of us are flying to Chicago between Christmas and New Year’s for the Modern Language Association convention, hoping to recruit two new professors to teach British, American, or transnational literature before 1800. As an alumnus of UVa, I received a Cavalier Travels brochure a few days ago that may also have arrived in your mailbox, graced with pictures of English Department faculty ready to lead us on color-drenched journeys to India (Steve Arata) and the Alps (Steve Cushman).

Perhaps it’s only appropriate that so many members of the English faculty travel, since literature also travels. Novels and plays circulate around the world in briefcases, boxes, and shipping containers, and readers have long experienced wonder at distant worlds they discovered in books. One of my favorite instances of a traveling book is a poetry anthology, The Pocket Book of Verse, happily discovered on a humble toilet seat in Italy by the modernist poet Ezra Pound. Incarcerated for treason near Pisa after World War II, he exclaims in The Cantos: “that from the gates of death: Whitman or Lovelace/found on the jo-house seat at that/in a cheap edition!” Modern mass printing made it possible for Pound to read Whitman and Lovelace in Italy, and now iPods, websites, and other digital media still more rapidly circulate poems and other literary works around the world. Without a library or a laptop ready to hand, Pound had to conjure other poems from memory, and indeed another reason why poetry travels is its compression and patterning — features that led the poet W. H. Auden to define poetry as “memorable speech.”

Sometimes a writer’s encounter with traveling literature can change everything. Participating in a Yale symposium on “Why Literature Matters” a few years ago, I heard the black British novelist Caryl Phillips read an “autobiographical story” about his coming of age as writer. But in this story, instead of the book traveling to the writer, the writer travels to the book. He discovers his vocation as a writer at twenty not in England, but having 

travelled to the United States, and crossed the huge exciting nation by Greyhound bus. ... In California he goes into a bookstore. He buys a copy of a book that has on the cover a picture of a young man who looks somewhat like himself. He takes the book to the beach, and sits on a deckchair and begins to read. When he finishes Richard Wright’s Native Son it is almost dark, and the beach is deserted. But he  now knows what he wishes to do with his life.

In the absence of local models, the young black British writer discovers his experience as being worthy of literature through the detour of an African-American novel devoured on a California beach. Other authors have described how their lives were transformed by reading a poem or book written thousands of miles away. Sometimes our particular experience is made accessible and expressible only through what Phillips calls a “strange connection” with another culture in a distant place.

Literature travels, teachers travel, writers travel. More important, perhaps, than all this physical movement by buses and cars, planes and electronic media, is literature’s imaginative travel. In the turn from one line or chapter or image to the next, readers and writers of literature can traverse vast geographic spaces. Having seen her knife-sliced thumb as a pilgrim scalped by an American Indian, the speaker of Sylvia Plath’s poem “Cut” addresses it as a 

Saboteur,
Kamikaze man—

The stain on your 
Gauze Ku Klux Klan 
Babushka
Darkens and tarnishes. ...

By means of pain-sped metaphorical substitutions, the poem jumps across great cultural distances, from the Allied saboteur (French) to the Axis kamikaze (Japanese), from the Klansman’s hood to a Russian head kerchief. Whether written in anguish or exhilaration, literature makes possible imaginative journeys across hemispheres and cultural landscapes by boundary-leaping metaphors and mind-engrossing stories.

Traveling to you from Bryan Hall, this third issue of the electronic newsletter was prepared by the Department’s associate chair, John O’Brien. He and I thank you for taking the time to read it. We’d be delighted to hear from you. Please send news, comments, and suggestions to .

With best wishes for a joy-filled holiday season, whether traveling or at home,

Jahan Ramazani