[For this year’s annual Cville series, I wanted to highlight a handful of inspiring and impressive profs at my hometown school, the University of Virginia (beyond the UVA prof who will always come first in my heart). I’d love to hear about profs—teachers, advisors, mentors, colleagues, friends—you’d highlight in comments!]
[NOTE:
This post is from 2011, but I still mean every word of it, even more so a
decade later in fact, and wanted to make sure to include Rody in this week’s
series!]
Obviously
I have some very personal reasons for thinking that academic and scholarly
voices have something meaningful to contribute to our broader national
conversations and narratives; but while I do hope that my own voice and work
(present and future) can do so, I have also come to this perspective through
reading and engaging with lots of other scholars who seem to me to have at
least as much to offer to the non-academic world as they do within it. It’s
certainly fair to say that some academic work is intended mostly for academic
audiences and conversations, and I wouldn’t do what I do for a living if I
didn’t find such work (which I would admit includes my
first book pretty fully) valuable as well; but just as we AmericanStudiers
can learn about our culture from a variety of sources, academic and otherwise,
so too can our culture at large only gain from including scholarly voices in
its conversations more frequently and meaningfully.
Most
if not all of the scholars and works I’ve highlighted in my “Scholarly
Review” posts have fallen into that category, and that’s definitely true of
Professor Caroline
Rody, who teaches in the University of Virginia English Department (also home
for 45 years to Railton pére). Rody first came to my attention with the
publication of her first book, The
Daughter’s Return: African-American and Caribbean Women’s Fictions of History
(2001), a beautifully written and very engaging analysis of a number of
contemporary historical novels and their themes of family and heritage,
identity and community, past and future. Granted, that genre and those themes
are among my most consistent scholarly and personal obsessions, but I would
argue that they are also hugely significant for all 21st century
Americans, and Rody’s book made those stakes plain and compelling without
losing sight of the complex details of her chosen authors and texts. As this
blog hopefully attests, I think that there’s great value in highlighting and
analyzing works that we should all read as well as in framing and analyzing themes
and questions of national and human importance; a scholarly work that does
either of those things well is a success to me, and Rody’s first book did both.
Her
second book, The
Interethnic Imagination: Roots and Passages in Contemporary Asian American Fiction
(2009), extends many of those same focal points and conversations to a third
body of contemporary literature, and does so even more engagingly and readably.
Yet in it Rody also does very successfully what I strove to do in my
own second book—highlights the consistent and meaningful presence, not only
in her chosen works but throughout our culture and identity, of interethnic
encounters and exchanges, both in the intersections of individuals and
communities with one another and in the interplays that constitute any and
every individual identity and perspective within our culture. Rody’s book is
once again grounded very fully in her particular authors and texts, but never
loses sight of the value of her ideas and insights for our culture—and thus for
all interested and engaged American readers—more generally. In the Intro to
that second book I highlighted a group of scholarly projects that served as
models for me, not only in their ideas but also in their execution; I hadn’t
had a chance to read Rody’s book when I finalized my own, so consider this a
very worthy addition to that list.
One of the false
dichotomies that can plague narratives about the academy is that there’s the
stuff we focus on within its walls and the stuff that happens outside of it
(ie, in “the real world”); similarly, us literary scholars are sometimes seen
as reading and analyzing works that wouldn’t otherwise be read or engaged with.
But as Rody’s books entirely illustrate, the truth is quite the opposite—the
work done by the best scholars and the books most worth our scholarly attention
both represent voices we can and should include in our individual, communal,
and national conversations. I can’t wait to read her in-progress
third book! August Recap this weekend,
Ben
PS.
Professors you’d add to the weekend post?
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