English Professor William Spengemann:
"When I am standing in front of a class is the only time I feel fully alive. "
LIKE THE SALTIEST OF FIFTEENTH- AND sixteenth-century explorers, English Professor William Spengemann is not afraid to leave the familiar. With the same care that a sailor uses to lay in provisions for a long voyage, Spengemann prepares a detailed outline for ever)" lecture he gives. But at the lectern, he says, he neither looks at the outline nor sticks to what is on it; a different kind of creativity washes over him. "When I am standing in front of a class is the only time I feel fully alive," he says.
While academics are used to charting the unknown, Spengemann seems to prefer navigating high seas rather than skimming the: surface of more predictable waters. For example, after completing graduate school at Stanford, he opted for something completely different: a year of teaching at the University of Hawaii. Then another departure: five years at the University of Connecticut, followed by 17 years at Claremont Graduate School back in California. Then, he says, he needed a real change. So he measured the distance between Claremont and Hanover and between Seatde and Key West, and chose the greater. That is how he
He had another reason: Dartmouth's undergraduate emphasis was as far from Claremont's all-graduatestudent environment as any institution could be. "Teaching graduate students is easy," Spengemann says. "Teaching undergraduates is the challenge." You don't have to interest grad students in the subject, he explains; you can just talk about whatever you want. At Dartmouth "you can't teach as if students were protograduate students. You have to show them how they and this subject happen to be here at the same time. You have to give them a sense of what it is they're doing; for example, how reading Dickens on assignment differs from reading it a chapter a week, as it was meant to be read." The ultimate aim, Spengemann says, is to teach students "to think about what they think, not just think."
Since the 1980s Spengemann, who teaches literature in English by British and American writers, has been thinking abcrat what is thought about Columbus. Assembling a file of English writings on Columbus, Spengemann noticed that the number of such documents grew slowly during the sixteenth century, more rapidly after the founding of Jamestown, and virtually exploded after the American revolution. While surveying this archive for a book on early American literature, he asked himself, "What is all this stuff about? None of these writers knew Columbus, and no explorer of the Indies ever bore that name. Columbus is a person in name only, a character constructed of words." And, revisionist historians take note: "Consisting wholly of words, Columbus can be made to mean anything the words will allow."
