Binghamton Research Magazine - Spring/Summer 2012 - (Page 5)

BRIEFS

Kafka scholar links teaching, research
Neil Christian Pages does more than encourage his undergraduates to engage in research. He gives them the tools they need to demystify the literary academy. A figurine made of thread — a student’s representation of the character Odradek from Franz Kafka’s The Cares of the Father of the Family — hangs in Pages’ office. It’s material proof of the way his students engage with Kafka in the classroom and beyond. “I’m astounded by the extent to which they are able to bring to bear critical approaches to representation based on their readings,” he says. “They are inspired by the texts in such a way as to understand how the texts have inspired others.” With support from the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as Binghamton’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Pages recently had time to consider his work at the intersection of teaching and research. “As Paul de Man once said, ‘All scholarship has to be eminently teachable in order to be scholarship,’” Pages says. “The two have to be intertwined. Good teaching comes from research.” Pages is interested in Kafka’s continuing influence not only on literary scholarship but on musicians, artists, writers and others. He helps undergraduates see how critics construct arguments and understand the background that scholars such as Harold Bloom and Jacques Derrida bring to Kafka’s work. Even those who read Kafka in English seem excited by what they find. “That’s one of the interesting things about Kafka,” Pages says. “An American audience feels it has access to him without going through a translator, even though he is translated.”
Binghamton University • BINGHAMTON RESEARCH • Spring/Summer 2012

Training a critical eye on a British ideal
Praseeda Gopinath critiques what she calls the “English gentleman ideal.” She has studied his roots in the British Empire for years and is interested in how the ideal transforms in modern-day Great Britain. “My research is about what happens to the ideal as the Empire declines because it is so tied to the Empire,” says Gopinath, an assistant professor of English. “What happens to that ideal, which was an embodiment of the imperial nation, in the second half of the 20th century?” It’s a question she answers in her book Scarecrows of Chivalry: The Literature of English Masculinities after Empire, to be published later this year. Gopinath is interested in the idea of the well-mannered, leadership-driven “good Englishman” who was turned out by boarding schools with a certain set of traits to be used to rule the country and the Empire. These traits, she notes, only emerged in hierarchical relation to those considered inferior: the colonized, the working class and women. The subject attracted her attention when she read P.G. Wodehouse novels as a teenager. “They were comedic, entertaining novels about the upper crust of England, full of style and wit,” she says. “But still, no one talked about the Empire, or how and where Wodehouse’s silly, rich gentlemen were getting their money or how they got away with being such idiots.” Gopinath has written on diverse topics, from James Bond to George Orwell. She has also covered case studies of modern-day representations of the “likeable” Englishman, like Hugh Grant in his many romantic comedies. In her next project, she will examine the relationship between the BBC and the British Empire.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Binghamton Research Magazine - Spring/Summer 2012

Binghamton Research Magazine - Spring/Summer 2012
Contents
About Binghamton Research
Welcome
Briefs
Digital defenders
Jockeying for genetic advantage
The unfiltered truth
Spring awakening
Wall Street watchdog
Principles of the universe demand principled engineers
Engineering and Science Building
Graduate research
Undergraduate research
A piece of the puzzle
Crossword puzzle

Binghamton Research Magazine - Spring/Summer 2012