5th Annual English Undergrad Conference

On Thursday and Friday, April 3 and 4, the Department of English is pleased to present the fifth iteration of a conference celebrating our undergraduates' creative and critical work. This year, there will be papers on everything from Shakespeare to the video game Mass Effect, along with poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Actor and BA alumna Naomi Ko, who has a featured role in the new independent film Dear White People, will speak at the top of a panel on fiction, identity, and desire Thursday evening at 7 pm. A panel of alumni discusses employment and the road out from English on Friday morning at 8:50 am. Plus much more! Free and open to University students, faculty, and friends.

5 X Friday: PhD Candidate Anne Marie Spidahl

Very few debut novels are reviewed in the august New York Times Book Review: as of December, PhD candidate Anne Marie Spidahl's Nothing stands among them--surveyed favorably by polarizing novelist Tao Lin, no less. Under the name Anne Marie Wirth Cauchon, Spidahl published her first novel with the small press Two Dollar Radio in November. She started Nothing while an MFA student in creative writing at the University of Montana six years ago and won a MacDowell Colony Fellowship to continue work on it. With influences as disparate as Lou Reed's songs and Theodor Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, the book follows two young people stumbling around Missoula in a haze of alcohol, pills, and wildfire smoke, seeking at once annihilation and some recognition of their painful emptiness. Spidahl is now studying 20th- and 21st-century novels and theory. Read more.

1. The Missoula Nothing portrays is not most people's idea of Montana. You've written: "The dream of salvation in the West is real even if the West is not." Could you expand on that?
I'm slightly obsessed with Missoula's sinister underbelly. The day I arrived I saw my first dead body: A biker had just been hit by a mini-van-driving-dad, and he lay dead in the road, his leathers all twisted around his bald head, the dad and kids staring, nauseated with fear. Maybe it's partly because Missoula is based on transience: students, tourists, hobos, bikers, rivers. But I love Missoula, and Montana in general. For my husband (Ben) and me, it really is "the last best place." In Montana there's still an exit from the infinite self-referential loop: People still are overcome, people still escape, people still get lost or wild. But saying that partly contradicts what I meant by "The dream of the West was real even if the West was not." With that line I was thinking about how we all keep living lives we hate (or only tolerate) because there's an Out-There where things are different. Heaven, Florida, the Wild-Wild West, whatever--believing means we can delay forever our own real being. To me that's a problem. But at the same time, it shows we keep holding on to something more than this, or maybe, holding on to something more in this.
2. More than one review of the book has asserted that the characters are not likeable. What's your response?
I dislike the characters of Nothing just as much as the next guy. They are cliquey poseurs and haters; they manipulate each other and themselves for twisted self-interest. I started Nothing thinking: This world is hurtling toward catastrophe, but we're all keeping on as if it isn't. How can we stand it? I suppose it's because we all have fantasies that keep life sensible and justify each of our particular little lives but are completely insufficient for dealing with the age of the hand-held device, the war on terror, global economic crises, climate change. So even if I dislike Ruth, James, and Bridget, I partly identify with them since I am insufficient and struggling in this world too, and sometimes that means I do the things I hate about them too.
3. Tao Lin's comment in The New York Times about your characters was you didn't "seem interested in totally maintaining the illusion that Ruth and James are people." True?
Tao Lin was right: I didn't aim for the reader to forget that Ruth and James are characters that I made up. I might've made my disbelief in them more explicit, but I am afflicted with excessive subtlety. What I was thinking, basically, is that Ruth and James are working with what they get given--language, trendy colors, certain ideas of what's possible to do in life, etc. Some of what they're given controls and limits them, so they can't break out of those pesky insufficient fantasies. In early drafts I was trying for a conspiracy--a system of interests far beyond what the characters can understand that reveals itself only fleetingly. I think its remnants serve to undermine their authenticity. (But somewhere in there I did think of them as people too, since I believe in people: in hatred, love, lust, suicide.) This relates to your next question. . . .
4. Ruth and James' constant feeling that they are being watched is so fascinating--because, given NSA cel phone tracking and youth marketing, they are. They're also part of generation raised to display themselves via social media: you're not real if you're not seen. So it's a desperate paranoia (please let someone be watching) at the same time it's a justified paranoia (the real watchers are taking notes to better manipulate them via products and propaganda). In representing 21st-century "disaffected youth" did you see it differing in severity or kind from its antecedents?
As exemplified by NSA surveillance, I think we're living in a moment of particularly unsettling fleeting glimpses of the system of interests far beyond what we can understand. I think you suggested better than I can the conflicted nature of technology and surveillance today, and how the very definition of humanity is tied up in it. So, yes, I do think our moment is unique in its redefinition of the human, and in the level of development and expansion of capitalism. I think that the characters in Nothing worry about these things too, and their worry cripples them, brings them to nothing, which may be the only place from which they can start again.
5. What made you want to earn a PhD? What drew you to English at Minnesota?
I chose to pursue my PhD because I want to spend my life reading and writing books and because I love college students, but also because I was a pregnant waitress and I needed a real job; I needed to show my daughter what's possible, especially for women. I chose to pursue my PhD to read philosophy and literature systematically and with guidance, to think about how literature works, and to try and understand its relationship to society.... I couldn't understand the world around me and wanted to step back and think about it. And last but not least, I chose to pursue my PhD because I wanted to "do the right thing" and make my parents and my grandparents proud, of course! Once I made this decision I was only interested in studying at Minnesota. The faculty is excellent, as are my classmates. I went to Macalester for college and am happy to be back. I love Minneapolis.
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Spring e-Quarterly Out Now

What is our new Assistant Professor Amit Yahav reading (besides the 18th century)? What new books are out from faculty, students, and alums? How is English participating in Northrop Auditorium's Grand Reopening? Find out in the new issue of our alumnae/i newsletter, e-Quarterly.

5 X Friday: Assistant Professor Amit Yahav

Assistant Professor Amit Yahav joined the English faculty this spring semester, after teaching at the University of Haifa and Johns Hopkins. A scholar of 18th-century literature, she graduated from Tel-Aviv University and earned her PhD in English Literature at Johns Hopkins University. When she's not immersed in the 18th century, she can be found reading picture books to "very short people with an even shorter attention span"--and also checking out contemporary fiction (she recommends Chinghiz Aitmatov's The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years). Read more to find out about her current research and what she misses about her hometown, Tel Aviv.


1. Could you briefly describe your current research focus?
I'm writing a book on duration in 18th-century novels and culture. The 18th century is well known for having developed abstract, disciplinary, mechanical, quantitative time--the paradigm of time is money, punctuality, order; or the notion that time is not much more than its conventional, abstract, notations. And yet the 18th century is also the age of sensibility, a culture that highlights sensing, feeling, subjectivity. I'm interested in the temporal conceptions developed by writers of sensibility to explain durations that are intensely personal, or that seem to us to have special qualities that clocks and calendars cannot get at. Philosophers of the 20th century have called such durations qualitative or experiential. My research has led me to think that 18th-century novelists and philosophers do a great job of defining such qualitative time, and of thinking up ways for representing it--how it can be abstracted into writing and print while maintaining its experiential quality. Moreover, 18th-century writers of sensibility explore qualitative time in ways that not only anticipate 20th-century accounts, but also significantly differ from these more recent discussions.
 
2. What led you to this research topic? Was there a certain class, workshop, conference, or mentor?
I had a good friend who insisted that he has his own time, which is different from my time. I didn't believe him. I thought that clocks and schedules were the only meaningful way of thinking about duration. We argued about it for years until he convinced me, and then "my time" became a fascinating intellectual problem. What can a duration be if it cannot be measured chronometrically? How can we talk about it, share it, coordinate it? At this point I started seeing non-chronometric time and special qualitative durations everywhere in the books I was reading for work. The most evocative scenes in Defoe's Moll Flanders involve difficulties of coordinating desires in time; Richardson calls his signature novelistic technique "writing to the moment" (rather than to the minute, hour, or second), Tristram Shandy notoriously cannot match the schedules of representation with the durations of experience, Ann Radcliffe arrests her plots to a standstill thus dilating the duration of our reading with lengthy accounts of the aesthetic pleasures of her heroines, etc.
 
3. What is your favorite work to teach?
My all-time favorite is Robinson Crusoe. I haven't yet met the student--or for that matter any reader--who didn't connect to this novel in some way. You can do with it what Crusoe does with his bible--randomly open the book and tease out meaningfulness from any passage. It is not simply that Crusoe yields itself to many different approaches--liberal, Marxist, psychological, post-colonial, formalist, linguistic. The novel, in and of itself, theorizes to some extent all these perspectives, so that you can learn from it key principles without prior knowledge of the theories. You need not have read Marx to notice how Defoe values production and use; you need not have read Locke to understand what is at stake for Defoe in individualism and rationality; or Freud to see how he explores analysis as the salutary path from despondency to well-being, or Coetzee to notice both the appeal and the implausibility of the imperialist masculine prototype. So it's fun to teach because students can do a lot with it on their own, as well as relatively easily learn to see dimensions beyond their immediate interests and existing knowledge.
 
4. Where did you grow up? Is there anything--food, geography, feeling--you miss?
I grew up in Israel, in the Tel Aviv area. Since arriving in Minneapolis I miss the outdoors--walking or biking everywhere, picnicking or reading in the park or on the beach, sitting outside in cafes. I'm told that Minneapolis is a great place to do all these things once the snow melts. We're eagerly awaiting spring....
 
5. What are you most excited about in joining the English faculty at Minnesota?
The intellectual community. There are many colleagues in the department and in the college whose work I admire, PhD students who study the 18th century, reading groups in my period and in theory, programs and institutes that support research and scholarly exchange. I'm sure these opportunities will significantly impact my research.

Prospective Student Visit

The Department of English welcomes admitted prospective graduate students March 13-14. Events scheduled include a reading by MFA alum authors, a discussion with current PhD students,class visits, and dinner with graduate students and faculty. We look forward to meeting you!