New Faculty Profile: Brad Pasanek

Brad Pasanek

Brad Pasanek brings the tools of modern digital scholarship to bear on some fairly old writing, the literature of eighteenth-century Britain. Taking advantage of keyword searchable, online archives of eighteenth-century literature that have in recent years been made available in digital formats, Professor Pasanek analyzes how metaphors for the mind permeated eighteenth-century writing in ways both familiar and surprising. Pasanek earned his PhD in 2006 from Stanford University, and joined the Department as an Assistant Professor this fall, after completing a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Southern California and a visiting professorship at Pomona College.

Professor Pasanek’s current work stems from his dissertation, Eighteenth-Century Metaphors of Mind: A Dictionary, which collects and organizes metaphors all throughout eighteenth century writing, canonical literature and popular writing as well. Using digital databases to identify, aggregate, compare, and then analyze the figurative language that eighteenth-century writers called upon to represent the mind in language, Pasanek treats eighteenth-century metaphors in a series of case studies—tracing development and usage in a wide variety of eighteenth-century texts. His dictionary of metaphors, which responds to eighteenth-century preoccupations with lexicography in its own right, tells the story of the Enlightenment from “Beasts” all the way to “Writing,” with each term prompting an essay on the ways in which eighteenth-century writers deployed metaphors relating to, say, animals as they described the operations of human thought. Pasanek says that this project is a perfect way for him to “inhabit this eighteenth-century genre while turning it inside out.” His research will, he hopes, produce a book that speaks to not only those who study the eighteenth century in earnest, but to those who look for an accessible way to navigate through any constellation of unfamiliar texts.

In order to drill deeper into this taxonomic information, Pasanek has started collaborating with D. Sculley, a computer scientist from Tufts University who is currently working for Google. With help from another USC undergraduate and other programming colleagues, Pasanek created a usable database called “The Mind is a Metaphor,” to sort, tag, flag, and package the sheer number of metaphors appearing throughout the body of eighteenth century work. Currently, Pasanek, with D.’s help, wants to bring the concept of “machine learning methods to literary studies,” and hopes that this digital database will be used as a platform for other text-mining experiments. As a result, Pasanek can look to non-canonical writing produced by Grub Street hacks, women writers, and working-class poets in order to study the human record. “The Mind is a Metaphor” can be viewed at: http://metaphorized.net.

And finally, in a more personal, yet no less publicly experimental digital project, Pasanek keeps an online journal called “Blog-Like Pages.” He says that this blog is really his way of experimenting with academic writing as a prose-poem, of exercising different techniques for his dictionary by compressing and modifying the kind of writing that appears in his book. It reads like an academic’s conversation with himself, but “Blog-Like Pages” also invites an audience to read, contemplate, and engage in the world of the eighteenth century metaphor along side of him.

Brad Pasanek also regularly engages with a particular audience outside of the blogosphere—his students. His first semester on grounds has been spent with upper-level undergraduate students in an eighteenth-century literature course entitled “The Pre/Postmodern Novel,” which investigates the eighteenth-century literary universe in direct conversation with the world of modern fiction.  In this course Pasanek and his students concern themselves with “re-writing and imitation” as “theoretically significant” concepts, and the paired reading—Defoe with Coetzee, Pope with Nabokov, and Austen with a contemporary bestselling novelist—frames their discussion and hopeful conclusion that these seemingly incompatible worlds, in fact, comfortably inhabit much of the same literary space.

Pasanek opens his classroom to graduate students this spring with “Metaphor, Character, Fiction,” a seminar designed to traverse the eighteenth-century literary and philosophical landscape in search of the theoretical and cultural links between those three concepts in the works of writers like John Locke, Jonathan Swift, Eliza Haywood, David Hume, Henry Fielding, Olaudah Equiano, and Denis Diderot, among many others. In this “criss-crossing of genres,” studying empirical temperament, reading broadly, and organizing disparate material through conceptual history, Pasanek will show his students how, through a dual theoretical and culturally historic lens, “Anglo-American analytic philosophy responds to its own prehistory,” as he asks the students to develop and refine their own concept of the eighteenth-century’s grasp on metaphor, character, or fiction.