Great Minds 2: Lara Varpio

This is the second post in my Great Minds series, a set of interviews with writers and thinkers who have inspired me. My academic work has introduced me to numerous professors doing fascinating work on literature, cognition, and social action. Lara Varpio is my second great mind.

Assistant Professor in a Faculty of Medicine is not the first place one would expect to find an English PhD graduate, but that is just where University of Waterloo Department of English Language and Literature PhD alumnus Dr. Lara Varpio finds herself at the University of Ottawa. Lara is a recent PhD graduate with a job, and that should be an inspiration for current and potential PhD students alike. I hope this interview with Lara provides as many valuable insights for my peers as it did for me.

A: How did you end up in the English PhD program at UW?

L: I should start by saying that the work I do now is fairly removed from standard department of English training. I am originally from Sudbury. I did my BA in English at MacMaster. I soon realized that I wouldn’t get too far with a Bachelor of Arts. The Master of Arts professional writing stream at UW interested me. But my work was not related to medicine at all.

A: Could you discuss your experiences as a grad student?

L: After completing my MA, I moved to Sweden for 3 years. I was a professor and I taught Business Communication. After one year, I was bored intellectually. So I contacted Catherine Schryer to find out about doing my PHD from abroad. I talked to the department chair at the time, Neil Randall, and, despite the fact that nobody had ever done a PhD from abroad, the department let me in. So I started my PhD while living in Sweden . . . I remember for a course with Professor Michael MacDonald, I submitted my class presentation on a CD-ROM. I found a video camera and one of my students in Sweden videotape my presentation. I completed two terms of coursework abroad. For the third term I came back to Canada for the residency requirement and then I realized how homesick I was. I completed my work in Canada.

I didn’t want to waste time on a dissertation that didn’t engage me. I approached Catherine Schryer and told her that I probably would not complete a PhD if I didn’t find something intellectually engaging. She introduced me to Lorelei Lingard, who introduced me to the medical education community at the Wilson Centre [for Research in Education] at the University of Toronto. We joke that I went there for a 3 day visit and stayed for 3 years. I brought my experience with Actor Network Theory and Rhetoric to the table, and I was the first PhD student that the Wilson Centre co-sponsored.

A: What advice do you have for current graduate students?

L: It’s so important to find a project that engages you. Aside from that, think outside the box when it comes to funding. So often English graduate students think about OGS and SSHRC. I was the first Arts student at Waterloo to get CIHR funding. So I got medicine to fund me and OGS as well. But I couldn’t get my SSHRC application past the department . . . Also, your supervisors are key. The importance of your supervisor to your later success cannot be underestimated. I am also a big believer in mentorship. You need people to offer guidance. I was lucky to find mentors in Catherine Schryer, Lorelei Lingard, and at the Wilson Centre. Academia is changing and you need mentors and you need people to help you walk down the new academic corridors. Also, complete your PhD studies with the end in mind. Decide on your dream job. It doesn’t have to be tenure-track in a department of English. There are different kinds of PhDs, some are theoretical, some are practical. You can make your PhD the tool you want it to be for where you want to go. You can teach or you can be a researcher.

There will be a dark night of the soul. If you’re doing graduate work, there will be a night where you feel like you can’t do it anymore. It’s important to take those experiences seriously, but it’s also important to look at those moments in the overall picture. Think of those moments in context. Sometimes you will want to give up, and maybe you should; but don’t be too hasty.

A: Do you have any career advice for current PhD candidates?

L: I have found my dream job. I can take all the theories and skills from my graduate work and apply them in a different context. Medical Education is my sandbox and my training in the Humanities is my shovel and pail. Every day I am excited to go to work. I have total control over what I do and how I do it . . . When it comes to finding a job, I can’t stress the importance of networking enough. A lot of jobs will never get posted, and you will never find them if you’re waiting for postings to appear online. I recommend PhD students go to conferences, especially if there is someone giving a talk who they admire. Prepare for the talk by thinking of one good question. One intelligent question—and you can underline intelligent. If you can ask that question, you can start a conversation. If you do it right, you should end up with their business card in you hand. I always did that and I still do. I find the people by attending their presentation, I ask an intelligent question, I ask about a recent article. Build connections with people you want to work with.

I can’t emphasize enough the importance of networking and the importance of being a good networker. You don’t want to be sucking up; you have to look like someone who is interesting and who is doing exciting work.

 

Great Minds 1: Patrick Hogan

This is the first post in my Great Minds series, a set of interviews with writers who have inspired me. My academic work has introduced me to numerous professors doing fascinating work on literature, cognition, and social action. University of Connecticut English professor, Patrick Hogan, will be my first great mind.

I greatly admire Professor Hogan’s work, his expertise in comparative literature—the study of literature and art from across world cultures—allows him to present evidence of cross-cultural similarities in how humans use arts. Specifically, Dr Hogan is most well known for his work on literary universals, the similarities across all world cultures on the structure and function of narrative and poetic art. His excellent book on this subject is The Mind and Its Stories (2003).

Before entering his PhD studies, Dr Hogan studied under Marshall McLuhan, Northrop Frye, Walter Ong, Jim McCawley, Donald Davidson, and Paul Ricoeur. After completing his MA, and at the suggestion of Walter Ong, Dr Hogan applied to the doctoral program in English at SUNY/Buffalo, primarily because of Norm Holland’s center for the psychological study of the arts. The majority of his ‘literary’ studies there continued to be on philosophical and psychological topics.

Professor Hogan is a prolific author, publishing books and articles on cognitive science, post-colonial literature, and literary theory. He was also kind enough to allow me to publish this interview on his writing habits, his work on Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, and his work on literary universals.

1. How are you such a prolific writer? What is your writing schedule?

I don’t really have a schedule for writing. I’m not one of those people who writes every morning from 7 to 10 or something. I mostly write an article or a chapter when I feel ready to do so . . .

I am interested in a wide range of academic topics and, in keeping with that, I am usually working on many things at once—things that are different, but related. For example, over the next few days I have to revise an essay on grief in Hamlet, finish drafting something on guilt (by the way, I do sometimes write on cheerier topics than guilt and grief!), prepare for my class on Medieval Arabic literary theory, respond to your questions, and prepare for a seminar where participants will be discussing something I wrote on nationalism and war. (They have sent me an intimidating 3-page, single-spaced list of questions!) Suppose I only had to revise the grief essay. I simply didn’t feel like doing that now. If I had nothing else to do, I would have piddled around, putting off the revision. Since I have a range of things to do, I was able to choose something that I felt like doing.

On the writing itself, I’m pretty boring as a writer. I am always trying to read things on topics of interest to me. They usually overlap with several things I am working on (e.g., a book on collective guilt might relate to the guilt essay and the war/nationalism chapter). I take notes on what I am going to write about, usually for months beforehand. I then gather the notes, make an outline, and largely follow the outline—though, of course, the argument expands greatly during actual composition. I usually do a lot of focused secondary research after writing a first draft. I incorporate the research, then re-read and revise the essay one or two times on the computer, then several times in print-outs.

2. In my opinion, you’ve written the best analysis of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. Can you tell me about composing that piece? How long did it take? Was it frustrating dealing with such a complex text?

I’m very pleased that you know that article. People who know my cognitive work tend not to know my postcolonial work (and neither tend to know my political writings), though they are interrelated.

Well, here’s a sort of long version. I don’t really have any training in any literary period. I was hired at the University of Connecticut to teach literary theory. But that is only two courses a year (at most). So they had to have me teach something else. I had done some work on Irish literature, mostly Joyce, so they put me in the Modern British course. I soon noticed that postcolonial authors didn’t fit anywhere in our curriculum. I began teaching them in Modern British, eventually creating new undergraduate and graduate courses in “world literature in English.” (I had to teach myself a slew of new authors anyway, so why not African and Indian authors, who interested me more anyway?) I somewhat foolishly began teaching Midnight’s Children in those courses. I say “somewhat foolishly” because it is a complex book, which means that you either spend a lot of time on it in class or you cover it only in a cursory way.

Anyway, having taught the book several times, I knew it pretty well. I had also read some criticism about the work and largely felt that criticism to be misguided. You may remember my analysis of Gandhi’s death happening at the wrong time in Rushdie’s novel. The usual interpretation of this, which questioned the objectivity of historical events, seemed to me to miss the point entirely. This is just one example of the problems I felt were present in that body of criticism. This led me to wish to write on Rushdie’s book, if only to respond to some standard views that I felt really were not helpful to people trying to understand the novel.

My wife is Kashmiri and I had been to Kashmir with her before the revolution began. For this reason, I had a particular interest in the Kashmir section. When working on postcolonial literature, I usually do a fair amount of scholarly research on culture and history before I begin writing. Given the fairly close historical emplotment of Rushdie’s novel, I knew that the Kashmir section would almost certainly be tightly interrelated with Kashmiri history. So I began reading about Kashmiri history. I was already partially familiar with the Islamic (specifically Qur’anic) backgrounds, but I checked those as well. As sometimes happens, I was (I believe) fortunate in what I found.

3. What has the response to your work on Literary Universals been like? What do your critics have to say?

My work on literary universals is by far the best known of anything I have done. It is what has led to invitations to write articles in various outlets and to speak in many places over the past several years. The idea excites people, and there have been some interesting and valuable developments of the idea (e.g., in the special issue of Consciousness, Literature, and the Arts 6.2 [August 2005]). But I must say that, when I go to give talks, I find that almost no one has any concrete idea of what I have said about literary universals, other than the actual person who invited me. When I submit articles or books, referees routinely ask me to explain and often ask me to defend the idea. This gives rise to a logistical problem of how to get the relevant information into the new work while still leaving room for whatever is new in that work.

But I don’t at all want to complain. I’m grateful that the work has gotten any attention at all. Moreover, there has been an enormous change from, say, ten years ago. When I first started submitting The Mind and Its Stories to presses, they wouldn’t even look at it. I remember putting the manuscript in the mail one Thursday and getting it back the following Tuesday. From what I could tell, the editor at the press simply saw the word “universals” in the title and sent it back. Indeed, when it was finally accepted, it was done in a psychology series, not a literary series. (An exception to this general literary aversion to universals was Bill Germano at Routledge, who commissioned Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts.)

For the most part, prominent mainstream literary theorists have not dealt with the issue of specific narrative universals. However, there is far more openness to the idea of universals, not only among editors at presses, but among mainstream theorists—in part because of some recent work by Judith Butler (very different from mine, of course, though we share some criticisms of identity politics).

I would say that the most hostility to my work has probably come, not from social constructionists (as one might  expect), but from critics drawing on Evolutionary Psychology (EP). Of course, some have been very supportive of my work. But the problem is that I have been very critical of the EP program. My contention about narrative universals is that they are not innate per se. Rather, only proto-emotion systems are innate as such. These emotion systems tend to develop in similar ways due to similar physical and caregiving environments. The caregiving environment is only in part the result of genetic predispositions. It also results from convergent development through group dynamics. Moreover, narrative structures themselves undoubtedly stabilize after periods of innovation, again with convergent results. Put differently, my contention is that there is only very limited and somewhat distant genetic determination of narrative universals. To a great extent, universals result from historical and cultural developments. However, my contention is that such historical and cultural developments may be convergent rather than divergent in some cases—perhaps even in many cases.

Finally, unlike most EP critics, I see literature as circulating a great deal of dominant ideology. So, I do not see literature as evidence for, say, gender differences. Insofar as research apparently reveals a consistent pattern of such differences in literary representations, my hypothesis would be that this shows converging patterns in patriarchal ideology, not some truth about men and women. Moreover, even apparent patterns of this sort may reflect the ideological orientations of the researchers (including coders who have been trained to produce matching results) more than unequivocal patterns in the texts themselves.

 

Volunteerism

Probably one of the most rewarding experiences of my life has been my experience as a volunteer for the Extra-Judicial Youth Measures and Sanctions Program form the John Howard Society of Kitchener/Waterloo. Founded on the belief that everyone deserves second chances, the John Howard Society provides counselling, support, and opportunities for people who have broken the law. In my role, I represent the Kitchener/Waterloo community and discuss the consequences and implications of crime with young offenders who have been diverted by the courts—this means that a judge or the police feel the offender deserves the opportunity to perform services in lieu of criminal charges.

Every two weeks, once around 7:00 and again around 8:00, I meet with a young offender and their parent or guardian. These young offenders have been charged with a variety of crimes, typically Theft Under $5000, Assault, or Possession of a Controlled Substance (almost always marijuana). Over the past year, I estimate I’ve met with 40 youth. But tonight, I met a really special young person. I can’t tell you anything about this individual. I can’t tell you their age, gender, appearance, or family background. That’s all confidential. What I can tell you is that this young person changed my life.

It’s funny how the world works: there are haves and there are have-nots. But I think it’s more important to focus on how the haves and have-nots behave in society. Tonight I realized how amazing it is that some people are born with every opportunity presented to them, and they’ll never amount to anything; others are born ‘doomed from the womb,’ but go on to positively change many lives.

So this brings me back to central point of this post: do you volunteer? If you don’t, I really recommend that you do. Sure, it’s kind of a pain to ‘donate’ your time when you have a million other things to do. You work hard, study hard, raise your kids, etc. The last thing you want to do at the end of the day is offer your time to someone for free. Or maybe you’ve been meaning to volunteer for a while but haven’t gotten around to it yet?

I know the feeling: before every trip the John Howard Society, I can think of ten reasons to cancel. But you want to know what keeps me going? The feeling I get when I leave. It’s not relief, like when you finish writing an exam. It’s the feeling that I made a difference in someone’s life; or, like today, the feeling that someone made a difference in mine.

In my opinion, volunteering is the most important civic service an individual can offer their community, even more important than voting. So if you know a volunteer, shake their hand; and if you’re not a volunteer, think about it.

 

The Shock Doctrine and the Power of Extended Metaphor

I think one of the most beautifully rendered, extended allegories of 2008 was Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine. Beginning with an interesting study of the relation between early psychological shock therapy experiments conducted by Ewen Cameron, whose strategy for correcting madness theorized memory erasure and psychic rebuilding, Klein outlines how the CIA and capitalist pundits found Cameron’s work particularly useful. Funded by the CIA, Cameron headed Project MKUltra, a project aimed at understanding and developing strategies for mind-control:

Cameron believed that by inflicting an array of shocks to the human brain, he could unmake and erase faulty minds, then rebuild new personalities on that ever-elusive clean slate. (31-2)

Klein uses the tenants of MKUltra as an extended conceit for the deliberate deployment of corporatist, capitalist economic reforms across the world from the 60’s to the present. Klein’s analysis follows the spread of professors from Milton Freidman’s ‘Chicago School’ of economics across the world’s states, outlining the metaphorical relation between Cameron and Freidman that sets up the rest of the book:

Freidman’s mission, like Cameron’s [shock therapy research], rested on a dream of reaching back to a state of ‘natural’ health, when all was in balance, before human interference created distorting patterns. Where Cameron dreamed of returning the human mind to that pristine state, Freidman dreamed of de-patterning societies, of returning them to a state of pure capitalism, cleansed of all interruptions—government regulations, trade barriers and entrenched interests. Also like Cameron, Freidman believed that when the economy is highly distorcted, the only way to reach that pre-lapsarian state was to deliberately inflict painful shocks[.] (57)

While Cameron’s experiments required only a laboratory and patients on which to experiment; drastic means of crisis were required if entire nations were to be ‘shocked’ into new ideologies. “Like a prison interrogator,” Klien writes, globalizing agencies like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) used the “pain” of “crisis” to reduce “countries to total compliance” (334). Klein’s entire book, one of the best critical political histories of the world ever written, shows how research on the human mind broadly applies to research on society—what can work on one mind can also work on many; a fascinating perspective on the metaphor of the ‘body politic’.

Klein, like all great writers, is a master of the art of the metaphor. I share this particularly striking passage, about the deliberately instigated Asian economic crises of the late 90’s (a prime example of the dark side of globalizing “stabilization programs”), as an example of her beautiful style and an invitation to read this important book:

The truth is that Asia’s crisis is still not over, a decade later. When 24 million people lose their jobs in a span of two years, a new desperation takes root that no culture can easily absorb. It expresses itself in different forms across the region, from a significant rise in religious extremism in Indonesia and Thailand to the explosive growth of the child sex trade

Employment rates have still not reached pre-1997 levels in Indonesia, Malaysia, and South Korea. And it’s not just that workers who lost their jobs during the crisis never got them back. The layoffs have continued, with new foreign owners demanding ever-higher profits for their investments. The suicides have also continued: in South Korea, suicide is now the fourth most common cause of death, more than double the pre-crisis rate, with thirty-eight people taking their own lives every day.

That is the untold story of the policies that the IMF calls ‘stabilization programs,’ as if countries were ships being tossed around on the market’s high seas. They do, eventually, stabilize, but that new equilibrium is achieved by throwing millions of people overboard: public sector workers, small-business owners, subsistence farmers, trade unionists. The ugly secret of ‘stabilization’ is that the vast majority never climb back aboard. They end up in slums, now home to 1 billion people; they end up in brothels or in cargo ship containers. They are the disinherited, those described by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke as “ones to whom neither the past nor the future belongs.’ (332-3)