English

Dear Colleagues,

Welcome back from a summer that was, in a bewildering range of ways, eventful.

Some time ago now – back in the pandemic, remember that? – I wrote a little note to our grad students which was, it occurs to me now, mostly about bewilderment. As you’ll remember, it was a pretty flummoxing time, a day-to-day cocktail of confusion, uncertainty, dread. It wasn’t very easy to concentrate on much of anything, let alone the long novels in your literature seminar.

And yet: I thought then it was maybe the perfect time to devote great quantities of care and attention to things like novels and poems and essays and films and stories. Here’s what I wrote, back in April of 2020: “I often tell my students that literature is, among other things, the record of people caught inside historical moments for which their conceptual vocabularies are, in elemental ways, gaspingly inadequate – and trying to transform that vertiginous inadequacy into monuments of form, beauty, sorrow, compassion.” And you know what? I STILL think that is right – which is only part of what makes studying these things together as steadying, and heartening, and galvanizing as it is.

Which is just to say that we’re delighted everyone is back, and so grateful to get the chance to encounter these beautiful, rousing, mystifying objects – these books – in conversation with each of you.

Wishing everyone a great new year,

Peter Coviello
Professor and Head of English