English Department Then and Now

I received in the mail the quarterly magazine from the English Department where I was a grad student and TA many years ago. This issue included a tribute to a professor I remember with fond respect: Samuel Monk. He was an 18th-century scholar best known for his book on the sublime, but in person he was charming and down-to-earth. I took a seminar with him the last year I had classes; it was quite demanding, with hefty readings and frequent papers, but I loved it. We met in a small conference room, just big enough for the six or eight students plus Professor Monk. Once we met in his apartment, an occasion when he served sherry, as I recall. He referred to himself as "an old toper" that day. In pointing to his extensive library, he noted that Samuel Johnson was once described as "buffeting his books." Professor Monk allowed as how he could not conceive of buffeting his own books, only of quietly "rearranging" them.

Anyway, in the magazine one of his colleagues, now retired, wrote about his first meeting with Sam Monk. "It quickly became apparent that Monk "had read the collected works of everybody," this professor noted. That tribute struck me with some force, because it seemed so dated. What came to matter was not how widely a candidate had read, but whether he or she saw everything through the correct prisms of race, class, and gender. Reading about the current doings of the department faculty bear this notion out. One professor, for example, was exploring how democracy wasn't all that great an idea.

Posted by Finn MacCool