Literature departments should be about literature. There. I’ve said it. My radical response to the current crisis is out and on the table. It won’t solve the problem tomorrow or even the day after. But in time, making English departments about literature—about novels, poems, plays, and the rest—could begin to deliver them from their impending dissolution.
So while online platforms cannot replicate physical intimacy, they must serve – for this duration – as champions of our methodologies. I realise that visiting people of a certain generation is not possible or safe at the moment, despite how time-bound the collection of their stories remains. It has taken me a while to understand this and reconfigure my own research to fit the parameters of the pandemic. My hope is that during this time, the quality we inherit is that of conversation and empathy within our families – something quintessential to Oral History and something that often gets lost in the busyness of everyday life.
Patience is required in number theory, where the questions are often easy to state but difficult to solve. “You have to think about the problem, maybe for a long while, and care about it,” Nielsen said. “We are making progress. We’re chipping away at the mountain. And the hope is that if you keep chipping away, you might eventually find a diamond.”
It’s hard to convey the breadth and brilliance of this work. Exploiting his skills as playwright and essayist as well as novelist, Akhtar depicts an immigrant family’s experience of the American dream through a son’s relationship with his father, and dissects the erosion of truth, decency and hope in a nation shaped by debt and money.
And yet, in the final analysis, Schalansky’s core message remains true: in looking for lost things, we necessarily reorient ourselves. Remembering isn’t inherently heroic, but forgetting our own responsibility to the present is tragic. Indeed, our task is to engage in politically motivated, thoughtful memory projects.
From youth I was taught that fresh meant alive
until the moment you buy it My mother