David Anthony
Graduate Student, University of Michigan
I have just concluded the fifth year of the PhD program in English at the University of Michigan, and I hope to soon finish my dissertation. Prior to this I received an MA in English from UNC-Chapel Hill. I'm originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, and I consider my time in Michigan and North Carolina as something of an odyssey which, given the uncertainties of the university job market, I fear may not be ending any time soon.
My disseration is a study of the ways in which various forms of Gothic sensationalism produced in mid-nineteenth-century America acted as the space in which a newly entrepreneurial, "white-collar" masculinity was being represented and negotiated as it emerged in America for the first time. Moving between more canonical material such as novels by Hawthorne and Melville and more popular forms of sensationalism such as the coverage of murder trials by the penny press tabloids coming into prominence in the mid-1830s and 1840s, I'm trying to understand how the crises of masculinity reflected in these texts was paralleled by a like crisis in distinctions between "high" and "low" or "mass" forms of cultural production. To date I've had some initial success publishing material related to the project, but my main focus is on finishing my dissertation, a task which often seems impossible, mainly because I'm often overwhelmed by the organizational and conceptual nightmare I've created for myself.
I've been able to teach a range of classes at both Michigan and Chapel Hill, usually fo classes which I myself design, advertise, and teach. These are often "composition" and "rhetoric" classes, but they are sometimes literature classes for mid- and upper-level students. The literature classes I have taught in the past few years have for the most part been related to the themes I'm working on in my dissertation. Focusing on the "Gothic" as the representational space for working out issues of emotion, class, gender, sexuality, aesthetic culture and race, we move through early-ish American and British authors such as Charles Brockden-Brown, Mary Shelly, and the Brontes, up to present day Gothics represented in texts such as Silence of the Lambs or Beloved. I have also taught classes oriented around the issues of nationhood and citizenship in American literature, in which I use authors such as Faulkner and Cisneros, and on sentimentalism and gender, in which use authors such as Samuel Richardson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Harriet Jacobs.
Whatever the exact topic, the greatest challenge I face in the classroom is learning how to teach students to think in complex ways about their own relation to the culture which has produced the texts they're reading and writing about. To this end I try to do a lot of comparison between issues as represented in the text we're discussing (race, gender, etc.) and present day representations of these issues within popular culture. This is often quite successful, especially when I have students doing in-depth research projects as part of their papers. Perhaps not surprisingly, this approach is sometimes difficult and even unsuccessful when dealing with issues of race (a topic which has begun to play an increasingly central role in my own work). I think this is in part because at both Michigan and North Carolina I have dealt primarily with white, middle- to upper-middle-class students who are for the most part unused to including themselves in equations of race or class, and who are often resistant (sometimes even hostile!) to such considerations.
But I also think the problems here have to do with my own approach to them, the way I contextualize them, etc. I try to spend a lot of time on my teaching, but the sad truth is that the emphasis in my program (as with most PhD programs) is on individual research, which means that I'm often reminded in frustrating ways (bad classes or bad papers) of how difficult it is to grow and develop as a teacher. The main goal I have for participating in this seminar is a better sense of how to coordinate the "interesting" syllabi I put together with daily assignments and discussions which will help students make the connections I want them to make, and to see their own relationship to the stories we as a culture are telling ourselves about ourselves.
Email: davidant@umich.edu
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