From the 'U' to the 'H'

I have come to Harvard after logging 24 years of teaching at the University of Minnesota. At that institution the Department of French was one of 45 departments in the College of Liberal Arts. Forty-nine thousand students ambulated over a space that occupied the two sides of the Mississippi River and that, as a commuter campus, turned into a alien zone every evening. The campus is bordered by I-94, the east-west highway that goes from Chicago to Seattle. Around the University were erected--I recall from the center field of countless softball games in the local summer leagues that played on diamonds squinched between warehouses and railway tracks--great grain elevators, bearing different emblems--Cargill, General Mills, Ceresota--recalling the cathedral-church of Albi in Southern France.

We called the space where we worked the "U", partially because it was the largest single industry in the state, partially because, as a land-grant institution, it was grounded in a populist tradition (it was for "U" and everyone, the football stadium was in the shape of a "U", the instruction was crafted to appeal to any and everyone, just for "U"). In the years I taught there, classes sometimes enrolled 200 students. Financial conditions did not allow teaching assistants to help grade papers. Everything was done catch-as-catch-can, on a thumb and limb, but with an incredible good will and generosity on the part of everyone.

Students in the day school generally worked anywhere from 20 to 40 hours a week in order to finance their studies. Those who came in the evening were reconstructing their lives or merely finding refuge from the monotony of officework or their personal lives.

Now that I have completed a year in Cambridge, it would not be wrong to say that it was easy to teach with a modicum of effectiveness: Everyone expected little and somehow collaborated to create whatever could be done with whatever got assembled in a classroom.

At Harvard the impression, at least after one year, is quite different: Everyone expects a great deal, everyone is prepared to work hard and well, and everyone sets standards that at Minnesota were the measure of a happy few, generally students who had to be in the Twin Cities, who could not afford top schools or who found teachers and peers--as in the flagship units of the Liberal Arts, Political Science, Psychology and Economics Departments--who could mentor their work without flaw.

It is no joke to say that it is difficult to teach well at this institution. Positive results are not immediately evident. The classes are sites of intense dialogue, even contestation, that bring the participants to their physical and intellectual limits.

Yet, in that I come here as a mongrel, perhaps an avatar of one of the two dogs in Cervantes' great tale, El colloquio de los perros, there is something incredibly thrilling about a variation that is now developing from the experience that I had known at the "U". When I arrived there in 1971, French was on the wane. Those of us who had learned the discipline in the old style, following the principle of immortal authors and timeless masterpieces, were subjecting what we read and saw to the force of theory that we pretended to practice. (Nineteen-sixty-eight came to Minnesota several years late; after all, it was under the benevolent leadership of a drugstore liberal, Hubert Humphrey.) The discipline needed to bolster its enrollments or face drastic retrenchment.

Despite being trained in early modern literature according to the traditional models of analysis that continue to bear my respect, and feeling myself qualified as a cinephile for familial reasons (my father, a self-educated individual had such an abiding love for silent film that my childhood was spent in front of 16-millimeter films) it seemed propitious to launch a course on French cinema. It began with an enrollment of 120, soon split into two sections ("realism" and "new wave"), and then ramified into seminar-topics ("auteur" theory, structural cinema, cinema of cruelty...). The course became something of a machine, what Gilles Deleuze would have called a "spiritual automaton" that engulfed its students and teachers. It quickly happened that for practical reasons my department asked me to keep working in film and, despite a commitment to the work of the great writers of the Renaissance, to put cinema close to the center of my pedagogical mission.

There developed, then, a kind of schizoid world in which I sought to explain how and why research was in two different areas. Concepts, like time, won over: the indistinction of things legible and visible in both film and early modern writing. The book as a creation of what Walter Ong called the "local motion" of printed characters. Cinema as an operation that analyzes culture differentially because it establishes multiple "tracks" and thus complicates deixis in ways familiar to medieval authors. Cartographic writing and the relation of space on early maps to literary and political artifacts.

It became clear that the one could serve the end of the other, and vice-versa. I believe that this kind of movement between homologous modes of creation is at the basis of my pedagogical labors at Harvard. I would like to continue in the line of close and extended analysis of texts of all ages and, at the same time, of cinematic and visual forms. If there is an "eternal return" of the same, or if the spectre of the experience of one place begins to mark that of another, the "H", the axe of Harvard, is not far from the horseshoe of the "U".

Here I find a freedom given to anyone willing to develop in myriad directions, especially along horizontal, collectivizing itineraries, that embrace both literature of the early medieval and early modern ages and cinema. Here I have taught Rabelais with a few good Pantagruelists, am on the verge of teaching film with a larger student body, and things cartographic and Baroque with a scattered few. If the students of film become what Susan Sontag and Jean-Luc Godard call passionate cinephiles, they will be no less stalwart, no less engaged, and no less given over to the endless pleasure and thrill of what, at Boylston Hall, is now extending outward, in new directions and about all continents, through the practice and invention of Romance Studies.

Thomas C. Conley is professor of romance languages and literatures and is currently teaching Foreign Cultures 21: "Cinema et culture francais, de 1923 a nos jours."