On the surface, Fulton Professor of Humanities and Director of Literary Studies Stephen Donadio seems to fit right into the academic archetype. He looks just as you would expect a person to look who has been a professor for four decades, serves as the founding director of the College's Literary Studies Program and is currently the editor of a prestigious literary magazine, the New England Review. He wears a wreath of white hair and dresses in the cardigans and tweeds of cold-weather university life. His sentences are elegant and deliberate, appearing unhurriedly and in perfect form as though Strunk and White themselves were composing them backstage.
In actuality, Donadio is a veritable cowboy of academia. He is probably the only professor on earth who instructs his students to ignore everything that has been written about "Ulysses" and pick it up as though they have found it in a hotel room. He does without the fanfare of critical literature, preferring "encounters that are without training wheels," in which "you don't have anything to rely on and you have to figure it out for yourself." This is literary study of the off-roading variety.
Perhaps one of the reasons Donadio will always be a bit of a rebel among academics is the unlikely place from which he hails. Raised in Dyker Heights, a working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn, N.Y., he didn't see college as a possibility until Brandeis offered him a scholarship. After this initial plunge, he would never really reemerge from the collegiate world - from Brandeis he went on to get a PhD at Columbia University, where he then taught for many years. It was there that he met his future wife, Emmie, now the chief curator of the College's Museum of Art. Donadio began teaching at the Bread Loaf School of English while still on the Columbia faculty. In 1977, he made the full-time transition to Middlebury College and created the Literary Studies Program, in which for the first time students could study global literary traditions at Middlebury.
Needless to say, Donadio's real education happened outside of the classroom. At Brandeis, he enjoyed the camaraderie of a handful of transplanted New York intellectuals like Phillip Rahv and Irving Howe, as well as the poet JV Cunningham. Later, he would say admiringly of his studies with Rahv, "intellectual argument was a kind of contact sport"- perhaps this was the inspiration for Donadio's unorthodox teaching style.
After Brandeis, the young Donadio won a Fulbright to France. He happily reported that he spent this time in its entirety attending the French cinémathèque. After returning to New York, he became very close with Lionel Trilling. Trilling virtually got Donadio through graduate school, for which he had little patience. Today, Donadio's position as editor of the New England Review puts him in constant contact with the goings on in the literary world beyond the ivory tower.
I sat down with Donadio for a talk about life, literature and really great jazz. After all, according to this professor, learning is all about having a conversation.
Middlebury Campus (MC): Were there any formative books or teachers that pointed you in the direction of literature?
Stephen Donadio (SD): I think that the first authors that I read that allowed me to conclude that literature was something that might occupy the attention of serious people were Joyce and Hemingway. They made me think that it wasn't just about being good in school. It was about addressing first things in some fundamental way. And that making literature wasn't just a sign of one's sensitivity - there was more at stake.
I had a range of teachers, but probably the teacher who influenced me the most was someone who had moved on to another high school, but still had a following of students. He arranged evenings at his house when he would invite high school students to have dinner with students who had gone on to college, and there would be a lot of arguing about books and reading and so on … it made the idea of going to college thinkable to me. There was actually some place to go, there were actually people who did it. He was a terrific reader, a prodigious reader, he read everything, so he always knew about what was going on and what was being published. A lot of great conversations. And he meant a lot to me.
MC: How did you first come in contact with authors like Joyce and Hemingway?
SD: By poking around in the library, following the scent. Not because they were taught. I wasn't taking any courses in high school in which those would be the authors taught. And I had a friend who had gotten to be keen on Hemingway. It was something we shared, a kind of keen sense. But it was precisely because these were outside of the curriculum that they mattered. The curriculum was the curriculum - that was what you did in school, but that didn't really make you a reader or someone who was interested in literature on a certain level. It was what you read outside, what you chose outside, what you found outside.
I would say that a lot of my education came from finding things in bookstores, just picking up things and finding out what existed, with one thing leading to another. When I started buying books, I bought a lot of books that were remaindered. If you want to know about my early education just find out what was remaindered in New York in those years, and that's the stuff that I read. I got a book of Wallace Stevens poems. I had no idea. I think I got it for about 59 cents, and I thought "this is interesting."
MC: Is teaching a calling for you?
SD: Teaching for me has always been a way of keeping alive possibilities of conversation. Those possibilities don't exist everywhere. They certainly don't exist in every institution. But I knew from very early on that I wanted to spend my life reading and thinking about literature and thinking about literature really requires talking to other people. That's the way you bring your sense of something into focus. Writing is a way of doing that too, but you can't write in isolation - it has to be part of a conversation.
MC: I've heard you talk about viewing literature outside of the academic context. It seems to be a theme of your teaching.
SD: It has always been important to me to think about literature as having some connection, not a simple connection, but some connection, to your life, and the deepest aspects of your experience. I've always resisted programmatic readings of literature, which I find very tedious and reductive - the isolation of particular themes and the endless harping on those themes I find boring beyond belief.
MC: If you could have tea with any thinker or author of the past, who would it be?
SD: Well, sometimes I think I'd like to be at the table with Henry James and Turgenev and Flaubert and Conrad, assuming that we could get them all together. I'd be interested in an argument between Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh - I'd like to be there for that. And I'd like to have an extended conversation with Norman Mailer-I spoke to him once or twice but not at any length - whose recent death is a source of great sadness for me.
MC: Which author would you choose as your bowling partner?
SD: I don't bowl.
Written by ASHLEY GAMELL
