Vaughn Rasberry
In my courses, the pleasure of the reading experience remains a priority; as a teacher, I try to graft my students� emotional and intellectual responses to the text onto relevant historical, aesthetic, philosophical, and political concerns. My courses also emphasize the practice of close reading, which I find an indispensable tool for all theoretical approaches: Marxism, historicism, reader-response, psychoanalysis, and so on. As a teacher and scholar, I feel that one of my strengths is the ability to distill the history of ideas�in a digestible and hopefully interesting way�for my students. Therefore it is not unusual for me to take lengthy detours into literary and intellectual history when appropriate, or to integrate personal observation and anecdotes into a discussion when I feel this will complement the material. For instance, I�m likely to describe my own experience growing up or attending college in order to illuminate the vexed issue of skin color and intra-racial prejudice in a conversation about Gwendolyn Brooks� novel Maud Martha or W.E.B. Du Bois�s Dark Princess. In the course of a discussion about, say, Harriet Jacobs�s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, I�m equally prone to survey theories of slavery in figures such as Aristotle, Rousseau, or Hegel, or to synopsize ideas emerging from the European Enlightenment while analyzing Olaudah Equiano�s The Interesting Narrative. My interests are eclectic, and I hope to inculcate in my students a similar eclecticism and unquenchable curiosity, as well as to cultivate in them what Du Bois has termed �broad sympathy� about the world we inhabit. Finally, my pedagogy and research are informed by the (ever contested) relation between the literary text and �the world� described by Edward Said: rather than reading literature in purely aestheticist or universalist terms, my teaching aims to �affirm the connection between texts and the existential actualities of human life, politics, societies, events.�
Interests
Twentieth-century American Fiction; African American Literature; The Enlightenment and its Critics; Philosophical Theories of Modernity; Postcolonial Theory