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Jim Hicks is the director of the program and its spiritual leader. That means he does not only get to teach the mandatory AMS class, but also organizes the most memorable outdoor activities, and his apple pie is uncontested.
What's more, he is a truly generous, funny and unnervingly kind person. And as such people are generally pretty rare, the words to describe such people are even harder to come by. Nevertheless, Jannika (Class of '02) mastered the task admirably in this article, which was first published in The Sophian on October 5, 2001.
First of all, I should state officially that I’m just tickled pink about my recent appointment as Co-Director of the American Studies Diploma Program. (I say this because part of my new mission is helping all you internationals learn to love the countless weird, inexplicable idioms of American English.) Second, I should confess that my training, at least the official part, is in Comparative Literature rather the American Studies, or American History or even English. So let me begin by saying a bit about that.
I've been doing Comp Lit for longer than I can remember – ever since I learned to read, and no doubt before. In fact, I've never been able to keep myself from devouring every printed word I see, from the backs of cereal boxes at the breakfast table to the instructions on toiletries in the euphemism. (Words printed in languages I don't yet know are no exception.) My academic studies have followed similar lines: I set off early in all directions at once – sciences, arts, humanities and whatnot – only much later settling into a recognizable pattern. Hence my shortest definition of Comparative Literature: "the major for people who want to know everything." Years later (after a BA in English and a BS in Psychology from Michigan State), I went at Comp Lit officially, first in the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris (license), then at U Penn in Philadelphia (Ph.D). At the latter institution, I was trained in the arts of the ninja theorist: wear black, seek out revered ideas everywhere, and assassinate them. Here at Smith, I've taught literary theory for both the Comp Lit Program and the English Department; I've also taught Global Tempests and the Comp Lit senior seminar. In 1997, and again as a Fulbright professor in 1999-2000, I taught in the English Department at the University of Sarajevo. I've recently taught a new course on "War Stories," a study of representations, in text and image, of some of the worst moments in recent world history. And during the calendar year 2002, I participated in the Kahn Institute faculty and student seminar on "Europe's Others / Other Europes."
In my writing, too, I've set out an array of tangentially related work: on sentimentality in literary modernism, on narrative as theory, on nationalism in American literary history, on literature and science and, most recently, on the international community in Bosnia. Despite appearances, these various fields frequently collide, connect, and create real sparks. My first book (which appeared in all the best wastebaskets in publishing houses everywhere) is a re-reading of literary modernism as a partial repetition of eighteenth-century sentimentalism. In it, I argue for the social implications of literary representations. To be brief, I see the novel as a laboratory for the creation of new forms of subjectivity, much as actual laboratories create new forms of objects.
I continue to write on American literature and culture, partly because, since I was born here, it's the one national tradition I can't escape, but also because I see much of what the world characterizes as "American" as simply "modern." That is, I see American history as another sort of laboratory, one which, in all its glory and horror, is now going global--a view that brings me to my current study of the postwar situation in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which should result in a second book by the end of this year. Its working title is “Lessons from Sarajevo: Writing, Translating and Education for the International Community.” To avoid adding to the already long list of bad books on Bosnia, I plan to focus on something completely different: the one truly strange and exotic tribe to be found in that part of the world, i.e., those international nomads for whom places like Bosnia, East Timor, Kosovo and Afghanistan are preferred watering holes today.
That's surely more than anyone needs to know. If you have other questions, stop by for a visit!
Jim Hicks, Comparative Literature
146 Elm Street, Northampton, Massachussetts 01063 |
