There are moments of clarity that Virginia Woolf captures especially well, when everything suddenly comes into crystalline focus. Paula Moya had such a glimpse last December, at the annual conference of the Modern Language Association. The associate professor was preparing to interview a young scholar for an assistant professorship in the English department. All Moya knew about him was what he had published—his “textual identity.”
“Then he came in, and one of my colleagues asked some pretty tough questions—and he responded in a way that was impressive,” Moya recalls. “You want that because you need somebody who can stand on his feet and respond to anything that a very bright undergraduate or graduate student will ask.”
English chair Ramón Saldívar seconds Moya’s enthusiasm for Saikat Majumdar, a specialist in English-language literature outside of Britain and the United States. “What makes someone exciting is that you can see the intellectual spark happening in front of your eyes. You can see somebody being pushed to the edge, and not falling back on a tried-and-true answer or something predictable. You look for evidence of the intellectual boldness that will have to carry the day in a seminar situation.”
At a time of transition for the humanities, when historians and philosophers are asking what is missing from the canon, faculty in the English department have been pondering the future of the department and of their discipline. The newly formed Creative Planning Committee, chaired by Moya, is looking at coming retirements as well as new directions in scholarship in the context of making new hires. After reading more than 120 applications and even more manuscript chapters, department members interviewed candidates for two junior positions and selected Majumdar and Stephen Sohn, a specialist in Asian-American literature. Searches continue for two senior, tenured professors—in poetry and poetics, and in rhetorical studies.
“The most important decisions a department makes are the hiring and promotion of faculty,” says Saldívar, who is finishing his second year as chair. “I think a strong, healthy department should be searching every year, and given the demographics of this department, we’ll have retirements of major figures over the next 10 years.” When Saldívar arrived in 1991, the department had 40 tenured or tenure-line faculty; today, that number is 32. “We’re still below where we need to be.”
Added to critical questions about which billets, or positions, to fill, and with what kind of scholars, is the broader question of where the study of literature is headed. From the mid-1970s through the end of the 20th century, theory galvanized scholars. “But now theory doesn’t have quite the glitter it had even 10 years ago,” Saldívar says. “So all of us have been asking, ‘What’s next? What defines the new cutting edge of scholarship?’ ”
At their core, the humanistic disciplines always will be concerned with history, philosophy and religion of the past. But, Saldívar asks, “When you focus on the classical traditions of great literature and philosophy, what do you leave out? Obviously, it’s the tremendous social and political revolutions of the 20th century, and the populations that in the past didn’t have a dramatic presence in a social and cultural sense—women, for one, and ethnic minorities and the literatures outside of Europe. So we’re reconsidering what constitutes a classical body of knowledge.”
Moya’s committee is charged with helping to frame the questions and discussions that will determine the profile of the department in 2015. On one level, faculty look for colleagues who write extraordinarily well, who are gifted teachers, who can engage students. At professional conferences and in conversations with peers from other institutions, Moya and fellow committee members also have been trying to identify emerging themes in scholarship. “A good deal of literature is being written by people in places that don’t neatly correspond to British or American [literature],” Moya notes. “So we’re also thinking about how to reconfigure our disciplinary boundaries.”
For that reason, the search committee that recommended Majumdar started out by interviewing candidates who specialized in South African literature, and in Israeli-Palestinian literature. “The candidate we ended up with, although he is himself Indian, is not a specialist in Indian literature,” Moya says. “His area is what we might call Commonwealth or world literature, and he writes about authors from New Zealand, South Africa and Ireland.”
Majumdar, an assistant professor at McMaster University in Ontario, also has written a novel, Season of Spectres, due out in the fall from HarperCollins India. He was interviewed by six other institutions at the MLA, and said by e-mail from Calcutta that he was drawn to Stanford by the “uninhibited intellectual adventurousness” of the faculty he met. One professor, he added, “had a really offbeat way of asking challenging questions that made me think in whole new directions, right on the spot.” The questioning was “stressful and enjoyable, but I think more enjoyable than stressful.” Any highlights? “I really enjoyed being pushed.”
In similar ways, Stephen Sohn met the department’s expanded expectations for a specialist in Asian-American literature. Ten years ago, Saldívar says, “We might have been content with somebody who did just the Asian-American model.” But that has changed. “Today, we’re asking our candidates to do more global thinking. We’re asking, ‘What do you know about the historical development of your specialty? What’s happening in allied genres? If you’re working on fiction, what’s happening in theater? What about other ethnic writers?’”
The department is considering such big questions that when Sohn was asked to talk about the tradition of city literatures and melancholia at the conclusion of his campus job talk in February, he stepped back from the lectern and almost gasped: “That’s a [kind of] monster question I’ve been fearing.” After the understanding laughter died down, Sohn went on to address each point of the query in exhaustive detail—and he, too, got the job. The interviews, he adds, were “really great,” and the questions fair. “They’re also very hard to answer, so you just hold on for dear life, and try.”
