And then she was a beautiful letter-writer and journal writer. And she moved in and out of different forms-you know, the novels, and the short stories, and the amazing long and short essays about current events and culture. She wrote about literary history as a sort of aesthetic thinker and cultural thinker.
People come to her from all different sorts of approaches, because in her long career, she wrote about pretty much everything from some angle, in terms of fundamental philosophical questions, charged political questions. But, she wants to get at the hard questions about how people matter over time. She’s able to do things with English that are just really graceful. She’s a beautiful writer, just stylistically. She’s very brave in thinking about how people add up into a self that endures or doesn’t endure, and how we relate to one another across the chasm of those different life stories. She is willing to go into really weird lines of thought about what makes a self, what makes a human person human, or let me try to put that better. What do you feel is the reason that people are constantly coming back to her and grappling with her? Virginia Woolf, I feel like, is a writer that-she’s everywhere, in so many of the conversations we have. What else are you teaching this semester? So, you’re teaching that class on magical realism. So, it’s an episodic, really playful, very inventive and original short novel. It’s for my class Magical Realism, and it’s a really original blend of folktales, like oral storytelling traditions, and the novel form, so it’s this narrator, the protagonist, at the age of ten years old, he realizes his best work, like the thing he can do best in the world, is drink palm-wine, and he’s an expert at drinking palm-wine, and that’s the work he wants to do for his life, and he lives in a house where his parents can afford the best palm-wine tapster, tapping the palm trees to get the palm-wine, but the tapster dies, so the narrator has to go to the Land of the Deads to find his palm-wine tapster, because he needs as much palm-wine as possible. This week I’m reading Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard, and this is a 1952 Nigerian novel. Does it count if it’s for a class I’m teaching? What are you reading right now, or what is something maybe that you’ve read really recently? The relationships that came out of it were really fun, but I actually had to stop eventually because it was just so many late nights playing with the editing software, and I’m not an expert at that. It was really time-consuming to edit and publish the podcasts. I really liked being on the other side of it, getting people to talk about their work, and people talked about topics that could interest anybody, and it was just about trying people to think about books who aren’t in academia in slightly more theoretical ways. English professors have so much to offer readers around the world, but our research as we publish it doesn’t speak to them, so I’m concerned about the disconnect between academic scholarship and the huge world of readers, and the podcast was an attempt to open a conversation. So, for a few years, I went around interviewing other English professors, in the Boston area mostly, or wherever I could find them, and researched their work and asked them questions, and I just wanted to get their work out there. We are in Rabb right now, in Professor Sherman’s office, and I first wanted to ask, I know that-thank you for being a guest on our podcast today-I know that in the past, you have some experience being on the other side of the table in podcasting. I’m really lucky today to be talking to Professor David Sherman. Hi, you are listening to OpenBook, a podcast by the UDRs for English and Creative Writing in which we are getting to know members of the faculty a little bit better.
#VERY LITTLE THEATRE DAVID SHERMAN PROFESSIONAL#
Graduate Professional Studies (Online Programs) Rabb School: Graduate Professional Studies Heller School for Social Policy and Management
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