Things I’ve Learned with Professor Amanda Anderson: Literary criticism

Amanda Anderson, the Caroline Donavan professor of English literature, is known for her analysis of 19th century British literature and her study of literary criticism.

Anderson grew up in Bethesda, Md. and majored in English at Dartmouth University. She worked for the Houghton Mifflin publishing company in Boston before deciding that she wanted to get an advanced degree in English. She got her Ph.D. from Cornell University and then taught as an assistant professor in the University of Illinois directly afterwards. She joined the Hopkins staff in 1999, and was the chair of the department from 2003-2009. She is currently the acting chair. Anderson is also the director of the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University.

Anderson sat down with The News-Letter to discuss the classes she teaches at Hopkins and the books on literary criticism that she has written.

 

News-Letter (N-L): When did you first become interested in English?

Amanda Anderson (AA): I majored in English as an undergrad. When I entered college, however, I was pre-med. I took a number of English courses and just became really interested in the field.

I didn’t decide to pursue an advanced degree until a few years after college. First, I worked in publishing [at Houghton Mifflin], and then I decided that I wanted to go to graduate school to get a Ph.D. and then teach.

 

N-L: What made you decide to come to Hopkins?

AA: I taught at the University of Illinois for about 10 years, and the chance to come to Hopkins was a wonderful opportunity to come to one of the most esteemed English departments in the country, and to work with really talented students at the undergraduate and graduate level.

I’m also from the East Coast, and was very happy to move back and be on the Northeastern Amtrak line!

 

N-L: What interests you the most about literary criticism?

AA: I’m extremely interested in the way that thinking about literature allows us to consider not only forms of artistic expression, but also larger questions dealing with philosophy, morality and psychology. I would say that I’m most interested in viewing literary art in its broadest dimensions. Many writers are trying to give shape and form to a comprehensive view of life or existence, and that makes engaging with those works particularly rewarding.

 

N-L: What’s your favorite class to teach at Hopkins?

AA: I love doing the 19th century [British novel] lecture course. I’ve enjoyed teaching almost every course that I’ve taught here, and that has a lot to do with the size of classes here, the seminars being so intensive, but also the quality of the students. I’m teaching a seminar on George Eliot in the fall, and I absolutely love teaching George Eliot.

 

N-L: How is teaching English here different than at other schools?

AA: I don’t think that it’s actually terribly different. I think that individuals tend to teach the way they teach, wherever they are teaching. But I do think the care with which Hopkins has protected seminar size makes for an extraordinarily fruitful pedagogical experience. One really gets to know the students, and it’s not possible to hide. There’s no equivalent of the back row.

 

N-L: How do you choose the books for your classes?

AA: Because I’m a scholar of the 19th century, length is a huge consideration. There are many great 900-page novels and one can’t exclusively choose those. I try to select books that are unlikely to have been read in high school. I try to combine selections of well known canonical writers with books that are lesser known but tell us very interesting things about the culture we are studying. I don’t expect students to love every novel, but I do hope that they will gain insight from each selection.

 

N-L: What advice would you give to your students to do well in English classes?

AA: One of the most wonderful things about the field of literary criticism is that there’s always something new to say about the language of any given literary work. What I would recommend to students is to focus on trying to develop their own individual readings of specific passages and works, and to realize that even though there may be a great deal of criticism on a specific work, one can always make one’s mark by the particular details of one’s analysis and close textual detail. That is what makes students stand out, when they use a certain kind of distinctive analysis, even of a short passage within a text. The short version is, pay attention to literary detail.

 

N-L: Could you describe the books that you have written?

AA: The first book that I wrote, which grew out of my dissertation, is Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture. It’s the study of the role played by the figure of the fallen woman in Victorian literature. One thing that I noticed in graduate school was the ubiquity of the fallen woman as a figure across a whole range of literary texts, and in some ways it seemed to be a certain convention, even a stereotype. I began to explore the symbolic function and eventually came to the view that there were actually some urgent philosophical questions surrounding the nature of selfhood and action that were being focused on.

My second book was The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Culture of Detatchment. In that book, I explored 19th century understandings of internationalism and cosmopolitanism, and also linked those concepts to broader principles and methods associated with trying to achieve some distance from one’s community or from traditional ways of thinking and being. There has been a considerable amount of work exposing 19th century British writers as participating in empire and forms of imperialistic thinking, and my book was an attempt to explore the ways in which many Victorians had an open-minded relation to other cultures.

My third book is The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory, and it’s actually not about the 19th century at all. It’s about forms of argument in literary criticism and humanities disciplines generally. It explores some of the key debates that have emerged over the past couple of decades, and in particular is interested in exploring the ethical dimensions of various theories in the humanities. It also [explores] the ways in which academics argue, trying to identify compelling methods of argument as well as forms of fallacy.

Now I’m writing a book on the history of liberalism as a political philosophy, but [in it I’m] also exploring the ways in which literature has engaged thinking about politics and democracy from the 19th century to the present.

 

N-L: How do you come up with the ideas for these books?

AA: It may not sound this way, but all of the books have grown out of each other. There’s a connection, and I would say that across all the books there’s a couple of informing interests. One is an attempt to think seriously about the positive and productive aspects of Enlightenment thought. The second would be an attempt to explore the forms by which individuals actively reflect on their experiences. Another way to [understand the connection is] that there’s always some piece of unfinished business. The argument book ended with a chapter on liberalism, but I hadn’t explored it to the extent that I’d wished to.

 

N-L: What exactly is the school of criticism and theory?

AA: I direct the school of Criticism and Theory. It’s an international humanities summer institute which brings in participants from all over the country and world; graduate students and junior professors, to take seminars with leading scholars. It’s a very exciting and thrilling institute. It combines a kind of summer camp experience with the life of the mind.

 

N-L: Have you ever written any fiction?

AA: I have written fiction. I took creative writing classes in college and did write short stories for some years.

 

N-L: What is your favorite book?

AA: Middlemarch, by George Eliot. It’s so good.