FACULTY
Luc Gilleman
Associate Professor of English Language and Literature
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Office: Wright 224 |  |
Phone: 585-3349 |
"Majesty, there are no Belgians." This was once said to a perplexed Belgian king by one of his recalcitrant subjects. Belgium is indeed a very artificial construct, founded in 1830 under pressure from Britain for a neutral buffer zone between France and Germany. Before then, and after the 16th-century, what's now Belgium had shifted hands from the Spanish to the Austrians and to the French. All left their mark on Belgium, often violently so, fighting their battles in the flat lands of the North known as Flanders, where I was born. Belgians, in other words, are "comparatists" by necessity.
I was born in Ostend, a Belgian port, intimately connected through its fishing and shipping industry with British towns such as Dover and Folkestone. At home, I spoke a local Flemish dialect that borrowed heavily from French and English. At school, I had to learn Dutch, as well as the other two languages spoken in Belgium: French and German. There is nothing abstract about linguistics for a Belgian. A linguistic dividing line may be the creek that runs through your backyard and is being fought over by Flemish and Walloon Nationalists. It is all immediately relevant—even absurdly so.
Perhaps because I came to the study of literature in a roundabout way (after abandoning studies in biology at the University of Louvain, becoming an engineer in maritime electronics, working for several years as a radio officer in the merchant marine, and only then going on to study Germanic philology, with a specialization in Dutch and English literature), I'm particularly interested in interdisciplinary approaches—in the relationship between politics and literature, for instance, or between literature and science. I also tend to ask technical questions of a text: how does it create a sense of plausibility or authenticity? Because of my interest in psychoanalysis, I look at texts as hoaxes, elaborate justifications or evasions built around a central, unbearable emptiness. This is the thrust behind my course The Play of Ideas: Visions of Violence, in which we study play texts by Büchner, Przybyszewska and Handke as violent eruptions around the unspeakable.
My research and the bulk of my teaching focus on modern drama, especially on postwar British and American plays. My book, Osborne: Vituperative Artist, was recently published by Routledge. I'm currently working on a second book project tentatively entitled Inside the Maze, in which I examine the relationship of playwrights to their texts, which is often a bewildering one. They start out with a sense of direction, lose their way, and then have to struggle to make sense of their own work. From this perspective, I hope to arrive at new readings of modern classics such as Arthur Miller's, Death of a Salesman and David Rabe's Hurlyburly. I'm also working on an English translation of the poetry of the Flemish author and Nobel Prize nominee Hugo Claus.
