This story was originally published on September 16, 2020. It has been republished with the news that METS was awarded the from the American Web Marketing Association. The award recognizes the success of the METS website rebuild both in terms of its coherence and innovation, and its accessibility and versatility for users.

Teachers and students of medieval literature long faced a problem that people studying other literary periods did not: the scant availability of texts.

That’s not because there wasn’t plenty of literature produced in the Middle Ages or because not much survived. The problem was access.

Publishing medieval texts isn’t like offering editions of literary works created after the advent of the printing press. “Everything was copied by hand in the Middle Ages, and so every medieval copy is different. And we almost never have the copy that was written by the author. We just have copies of copies of copies,” says , director of the Ģ����ý’s and .

Each copy introduces difference. The scribes made mistakes or repeated words as they carried out the grueling work of copying. When working in languages they did not know, they sometimes introduced misspellings or substituted one word for another. Words, sentences, and even paragraphs might be omitted from a particular copy.

Scholars of medieval literature have traditionally had to travel to different archives to compare copies—and, if publishing an edition, decide which of the copies is most authoritative and create the notes and context that explain the differences between the various manuscript copies. German scholars took on a lot of this work 200 years ago.

“The German editions, they were made for experts by experts. They’re often from the 19th century. They’re hard to use and hard to find,” says Siebach-Larsen. As a result, undergraduates studying medieval literature were largely confined to the texts—frequently, just excerpts—available in anthologies. The narrow slice of medieval literature that achieved canonical status shut out “many of the widely circulated texts and authors that medieval people actually read and shared,” she says.

It left students—and anyone else interested in medieval literature but outside the scholarly community or without access to a world-class library—high and dry.

‘Changing the study of Middle English literature’

, for more than 50 years a Rochester faculty member and now a professor emeritus of English, knew there had to be a better way. In 1990, working with the Teaching Association for Medieval Studies (TEAMS, of which he is a founding member), he established the . It offers free digital and affordable print editions of a wide range of medieval writing.

“It completely changed the study of Middle English literature,” says Peck, the general editor for the series, as he looks back over 30 years of work.

Siebach-Larsen, who holds a PhD in medieval studies from Notre Dame, used METS texts herself as a student. “METS democratizes access,” she says. “It puts the literature out there for everybody.” And by offering a more complete view of the literary period, the series has helped “transform our understanding and study of medieval culture,” she adds.

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) recently awarded the project a three-year grant to support its mission of offering the broadest possible readership—from specialists to undergraduates and high school students to people simply curious about the Middle Ages—access to the full range of literary output from medieval England. The latest award extends a long history of support for the project from the NEH.

“METS takes as its mission the creation of affordable editions that would pass scrutiny from the most demanding expert, yet would prove comprehensible, and even enticing, to someone who had never read Middle English before,” the team wrote in its application for support from the NEH.

Tools of the trade

Each volume in the series offers both the scholarly apparatus demanded by researchers and the tools that help a novice understand the text: glosses and facing-page translations, textual and explanatory notes, contexts and background.

—a professor of English, the consulting editor to METS, and the principal investigator for the NEH grant—says the series “offers the richest portal into the Middle Ages to the largest number of people with the widest range of interests and expertise of anything that exists out there.”

Among the many titles METS has published are William Caxton’s The Game and Playe of the Chesse, a chessboard-inspired allegory about contributions to the common good; Prik of Conscience, among the most popular medieval English poems; and the Complete Harley 2235 Manuscript—one of the most important literary books to survive from the Middle Ages, it’s a rich collection, in three languages, of lyric poetry, satire, comedies, collected sayings, and more.

METS is a partnership between TEAMS, scholars in the field, Rochester’s , and the River Campus Libraries, in particular, the Robbins Library—the University’s medieval studies library—and the Information Discovery Team, along with the Digital Scholarship Lab and other library metadata and IT experts.

Individual volume editors are scholars from around the world, supported by METS’s own editorial team, which includes Rochester graduate students and undergraduates. The students hone their skills in paleography—the study of handwriting—and copy-editing, and acquire a wide range of digital humanities skills. The project is a “source for both intellectual rigor and growth and marketable, career-driven skills,” says Hahn.

A ‘lifeline’ for scholarship and teaching

Ninety-five volumes have been published online and in print, offering today’s readers more than a thousand texts. The series includes prose, poetry, drama, travel writing, devotional literature, autobiography, and other forms—all from the British Isles between the 12th and 16th centuries. The online texts, hosted on the River Campus Libraries’ website, generate about half a million hits per year. Online readers are predominantly from the US and the UK but also come from about 135 countries and a wide variety of language groups around the world.

The multilingual dimension of METS is now central. The series has broadened its focus to include many of the languages in use in medieval Britain, including all the dialects of English, Older Scots, Welsh, Anglo-Irish, Anglo-Norman, and Continental French.

Among the tasks ahead for the creators of the series is an overhaul of its digital editions—an effort already well underway—to improve sustainability as well as access and possibilities for future users. The age of COVID-19 has demonstrated how critical such multimodal, user-friendly interfaces are.

“This pandemic has only made more clear how important METS’s dedication to open access is,” says Siebach-Larsen. “We have heard from researchers and instructors around the world that METS’s digital editions have been a lifeline for their scholarship and teaching.”

March 26 is the anniversary of the death of Walt Whitman, one of the most influential voices in American—and world—literature.

Ed Folsom ’76 (PhD), the Roy J. Carver Professor of English at the University of Iowa, has devoted his professional life to understanding Whitman’s work. He’s the author of 10 books, including Song of Myself: With a Complete Commentary (University of Iowa Press, 2016), coedited with Christopher Merrill. He also coedits the , a resource for scholars and students around the world.

Walt Whitman poems, letters, and early editions are also available in the ’s libraries.

What is Walt Whitman’s most enduring legacy?

Folsom: His impact on American literature over the past century and a half is incalculable. Virtually every American poet has at some point engaged Walt Whitman directly, often in a poem, as Hart Crane did in “The Bridge” or Allen Ginsberg in “A Supermarket in California.”

Whitman always addressed his poems to readers in the future, and American poets have talked back to him continually—arguing with him, praising him, questioning him about the diverse and democratic American future he promised. The list of American poets who have carried on this non-stop debate with him is endless: from Langston Hughes and Muriel Rukeyser to William Carlos Willams and Robert Creeley, from June Jordan to Yusef Komunyakaa to Marín Espada. American poets have viewed Whitman’s radical poetics as essentially intertwined with the national character, a kind of distinct and distinctive American voice.

This Whitmanian voice is heard throughout the broader culture as well—in films including Now, Voyager; Dead Poets Society; Sophie’s Choice; Bull Durham; The Notebook; Down by Law, and many more; in television series such as Breaking Bad, where Walter White’s name indicates the Walt Whitman connection, and where Whitman’s work plays a recurring central role; and in many recent ads, including those for iPad, Levi’s, and, most recently, Audi. Whitman has been set to music by over 500 composers, including Charles Ives and Ned Rorem, and his presence is felt in art installations everywhere, including Jenny Holzer’s recent New York City Aids Memorial, which features excerpts from “Song of Myself.”

What about his influence globally?

Folsom: Another poetic dialogue has been taking place outside of the country’s borders for the past 150 years, one that involves talking back to Whitman by an international group of writers—from Federico García Lorca to Jorge Luis Borges and Pablo Neruda, from Cesare Pavese to Czeslaw Milosz, from Fernando Pessoa to Artur Lundkvist, from Hermann Hesse to Thomas Mann, from Amin Rihani to Adonis, from Guo Moruo to Ai Qing, from D.H. Lawrence to Charles Tomlinson—as his influence has extended far and wide, not only across race and social class and ethnicity and poetic style, but across nationalities, languages, and continents. As the writer Michael Cunningham—whose book of novellas called Specimen Days focuses on Whitman—has noted, Whitman is now more like a public utility than a writer. His works and influence are so pervasive that artists in any medium view him as a source of power and sustenance that can be tapped into endlessly.

How did Walt Whitman become a poet?

Folsom: Whitman was an autodidact; he was done with his formal schooling by the time he was 12, and he learned by reading books he took out of lending libraries and by visiting museums and by walking the streets of New York and Brooklyn. He learned typesetting as a teenager and published his first newspaper articles in his mid-teens.

As he grew into the newspaper business, he developed a style of directly addressing his readers, something he would carry over with him to his radical new kind of poetry. That poetry drew from his journalism and from hearing orators speaking around the city. Whitman dreamed of becoming an orator himself and made notes for many speeches about America and democracy. He reshaped his journalistic voice and oratorical voice into a new kind of poetry that has traits of both journalism—an attentiveness to detail, an obsession with close observation of the world around him—and oratory—long lines that often have the cadence of a speech. It’s as if we’re hearing a spoken voice on the page, directly addressing the “you”—that slippery English pronoun that can mean a single intimate reader or a world of strangers.

Where do you suggest someone begin when reading Walt Whitman?

Folsom: His poetry is about a celebration of the single, separate individual and, at the same time, the celebration of the “en-masse,” the wild diversity of a nation that manages to stay unified while “containing multitudes.” Nowhere is this fluctuation between self and cosmos, individual and nation, better seen than in his longest and best poem, “Song of Myself,” a work that every American owes it to herself or himself to read.

The new book I wrote with Chris Merrill is an attempt to help readers do just that: Chris and I talk about each of the 52 sections of the poem, so that readers can read the poem, then read our comments and begin joining in the give-and-take with Whitman that is the whole purpose of his work. Whitman demands that the reader actively talk back to the poetry and not accept it passively, and Chris’s and my commentaries set out to initiate that dialogue.

What do you make of Walt Whitman’s newly discovered novel, Life and Adventures of Jack Engle?

Folsom: The of Jack Engle is extremely important because, for the first time, we have fiction written and published by Whitman after he had started writing the poems that would be included in his first edition of Leaves of Grass. Before this discovery, the latest known fiction by Whitman was published in 1848, and that always made it easy to assume that Whitman gave up fiction and took up poetry, since we had a convenient seven-year break between the last known fiction and the radical new poetry. Jack Engle was published in 1852, Leaves of Grass in 1855. Whitman had begun publishing his new free-form radical poetry in newspapers in 1850, so we now know that the poetry and fiction were mingling in ways we had never before known.

This makes us rethink everything we thought we knew about Whitman’s early writing career. Scholars and critics will be working on the implications of this for many years to come. We can now see that Whitman in the early 1850s was still unsure about what form his life’s work would take.

Is there any relationship between the novel and Leaves of Grass?

Folsom: The place in Jack Engle where we can see the themes of Leaves of Grass emerging is chapter 19, where the plot of the novel comes to a dead stop as Jack wanders through the cemetery at Trinity Church in Manhattan and contemplates the various grave plots around him. He begins to think about how all “plots” end in these grave plots, where inscriptions on gravestones give us only the bare outlines of a life.

Jack begins listening to the ongoing sea of life just outside the cemetery walls, and he realizes that life always flows past the places of death—it may be a different throng of people wandering past, but that flow of life is ever-changing and always ongoing. It’s here, at this moment, that we can feel Whitman losing interest in fictional plots—those things that begin, follow a trajectory, and have an ending—and beginning to become entranced with how to celebrate and focus on that ever-changing flow of life—that thing that has no beginning and no end and that transfers endlessly among shifting forms of matter.

The nature of democracy is under discussion around the world right now—and it’s a subject with which Whitman himself was deeply concerned. What could people learn from reading his work?

Folsom: When Walt Whitman first began making notes toward the poem that would become “Song of Myself,” he jotted down “I am the poet of slaves and the masters of slaves.” He was trying to assume a voice, in other words, that was capacious enough to speak for the entire range of people in the nation—from the most powerless to the most powerful, from those with no possessions to those who possessed others. If he could imagine such a unifying voice, he believed, he could help Americans begin to speak the language of democracy, because if slaves could begin to see that they contained within themselves the potential to be slavemasters, just as slavemasters contained within themselves the potential to be slaves, then slavery would cease to exist, because people of the nation would begin to understand that everyone is potentially everyone else, that the key to American identity is a vast empathy with all the “others” in the culture.

In “Song of Myself,” Whitman says “I am large, / I contain multitudes,” and this voice that is vast enough and indiscriminate enough to find within itself all the possibilities of American identity would become the great democratic voice, a voice for the citizens of the country to aspire to. Today, the nation is so divided in political and social and economic and racial ways that it has become impossible to imagine a single unifying voice that speaks for America. Every voice that claims to speak for the “American people” today is in fact a divisive voice, alienating as many Americans as it unifies. So Whitman seems more important now than ever.

It’s hard work to make the imaginative leap to a fully democratic voice, one that celebrates diversity and finds strength and unity in the wild variety that defines this nation. Whitman knew it would be difficult, perhaps impossible. During his lifetime, Whitman experienced a massive civil war, an entire generation of American men destroyed, when the union could not contain its multitudes and came apart at the seams. I think he would sense a similar danger today.

Editor’s note: This story was originally published on March 23, 2017. It has been republished to mark the 130th anniversary of Walt Whitman’s death.��

Poet Hyam Plutzik joined the at the Ģ����ý as an instructor following his discharge from the Army after World War II. He remained at the University for the rest of his too-brief life, organizing poetry workshops, giving readings on campus, and in 1961, accepting the title of Deane Professor of Rhetoric and Poetry, just one year before his death.

A three-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry—for Aspects of Proteus (1949), Apples from Shinar (1959), and Horatio (1961)—Plutzik is finding new readers almost 60 years after his death with a new bilingual edition of his work. (Suburbano Ediciones, 2021) offers a selection of his work in Spanish and the original English.

Fourteen translators have provided the translations, and the volume is edited by George Henson, an assistant professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. Richard Blanco, the inaugural poet for President Barack Obama’s first inauguration, provides the foreword.

Writes Blanco: “Plutzik and I meet at the junction of this irony and our respective obsessions: he finds home in his longing to transcend, whereas I find transcendence in my longing for home. Through the timeless grace and art of poetry, my 1968 Miami merges with Plutzik’s 1911 Brooklyn, our parents become immigrants from the same country, and our languages blend as one, ‘in the one, shadowed sea where all things melt’.”

Plutzik’s legacy also lives on at Rochester, most notably in the , which was established in 1962.

Guest readers have included James Baldwin, Rita Dove, Allen Ginsberg, and Adrienne Rich, as well as Rochester’s own Jennifer Grotz, Anthony Hecht, and James Longenbach. University Libraries are home to the Plutzik Library for Contemporary Writing, opened in 2000, and his collected papers are held in the Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation.

Read more

Thoughts on Hyam Plutzik, Letter from a Young Poet
In the posthumously published memoir Letter from a Young Poet, University poet Hyam Plutzik, describes early aspects of his efforts to become a poet.

Poet James Longenbach explores the ever-current ‘now’ of lyric poetry
Writers and musicians from Marianne Moore to Patti Smith are the subject of Longenbach’s book The Lyric Now.

Jennifer Grotz receives Guggenheim fellowship for poetry
The author of four volumes of poetry, Grotz joins 20 other current Rochester faculty who have received Guggenheim Fellowships, which are among the most coveted academic awards.

People widely describe architecture as a meeting of science and art, says associate professor of art history Peter Christensen at the Ģ����ý. But his latest project, still in the early phases of research, aims to look at that characterization in detail. He’s using the measure of patents and patentability in the history of architecture to tease apart the distinctions people have made between technology and art—and to see how architectural “authorship” has functioned.

The project has just earned Christensen a Guggenheim fellowship for the 2021–22 academic year, as well as a residency at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he will be associated with the School of Historical Studies.

His book manuscript is tentatively titled “The Architectural Patent: Inventing Modernity” and spans the period from the English Patents Reform in 1852 to the World Intellectual Property Organization Copyright Treaty of 1996 to explore four phases of the relationship between patents and the pursuit of invention: definition, protection, commercialization, and democratization. 

The term invention entered the architectural lexicon in the 19th century. “It’s entirely tied to the Industrial Revolution,” says Christensen. “You have the birth of the factory, the birth of mass production, and as a result, you have all of these issues come up with how architecture fits into that equation.”

An assembly line for houses?

Christensen’s curiosity about architecture and mass production was piqued when he was a curatorial assistant at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. There he helped organize “Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling,” a major exhibition on prefabricated housing. “Architects like Frank Lloyd Wright and Buckminster Fuller, and even non-architects like Thomas Edison, were imagining throughout the 19th and 20th centuries ways to mass produce houses, in the way that cars are produced,” he says.

Architects have dabbled with mass production over the last 250 years, with some measure of success, but architectural mass production has never really become fully established. Patent culture—providing economic and cultural benefits based on exclusive intellectual property rights—has an uneasy relationship with the architectural world, Christensen contends. That’s because architecture is also rooted in the less tangible issues of formal expression and artistic influence 

Nevertheless, with the Industrial Revolution the figure of the architect as the author of replicable and industrialized architecture brought the profession ever closer to what Christensen terms the “invention industry.”

He offers a general example: “The style of a building, in the technological sense that a patent is supposed to measure, is not an invention, even though we understand it to be an artistic invention. Flat roofs as opposed to pitched roofs is not an invention—unless there’s something about it which enhances the collection of water, for example, or the amount of daylight that the house gets.”

Christensen calls the “marriage” of architectural invention and intellectual property rights a “momentous and deeply understudied” change in 19th- and 20th-century architectural culture. Ultimately, he argues, that marriage fundamentally altered the ways in which buildings have been not only conceived but designed, engineered, constructed, and promoted.

Taking a ‘horizontal’ look at art history

“The Architectural Patent” will be Christensen’s third sole-authored book, following on Germany and the Ottoman Railways: Art, Empire, and Infrastructure (Yale University Press, 2017) and “Materialized: German Steel in Global Ecology” (currently in production at Penn State Press). 

When the pandemic lifts and he can travel safely again, he plans to visit major European archives, including the European Patent Office in Munich, the National Archives in the UK and the National Archives in Paris, to carry out some of his research. 

Christensen is excited that his newest work will take him in a new direction as a scholar. Rather than drilling down into a highly specialized topic, as he did in his first two books, Christensen sees his latest work, with his exploration of authorship as it pertains to architecture, as an opportunity to make a broader—or what he calls a more “horizontal”—contribution to the field of art history.

The language of a poem creates a repeatable event, the experience the poem offers reborn with every reading. How it does so is what , the Joseph Henry Gilmore Professor of English at the , calls “my preoccupation.”

In 2018, the poet and critic published (W. W. Norton), taking readers behind the scenes to explain how poets construct poetry. Poems, Longenbach says, are dramatic experiences of sound and time, the two intermixed as a poem gradually unspools. In How Poems Get Made, he carefully examines constituent elements of poems in the English language to show some of the ways poets make that happen.

Now Longenbach is back with a new book, (University of Chicago Press, 2020), a volume that casts a more historical eye on poetry. His focus is lyric poems, comparatively short poems that focus on a speaker’s emotions. The lyric poem “has strategies for staging its own immediacy, as if the poem were written in the time it takes to be read,” he writes.

He profiles the lives and work of 13 poets and musicians from the 20th and 21st centuries who wrote in pursuit of “newness.” Among them are Marianne Moore—whom he regards as arguably the finest poet of the 20th century—T. S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, Jorie Graham, Virgil Thomson, and Patti Smith.

“I think The Lyric Now is really the historical, rather than the how-to, version of How Poems Get Made,” Longenbach says. “The titles speak of the difference, which is important to me, but the similarity is that both books embody my conviction that poems are not static objects—that they are temporal, and that they ride on the rails of syntax, which is always moving forward.”

While the writers he treats were, or are, committed to “making it new” (in poet Ezra Pound’s phrase), the story of poetry isn’t one of obsolescence—with new poems superseding those that came before—but presence, Longenbach suggests. They inhabit an ever-present “now.”

He is fascinated by the paradox of truly great lyric poems: they will seem “seductively unpredictable” to the extent that they are “exquisitely constructed,” he writes. The conjury of a successful poem lies in its delicate, outwardly contradictory balances: strangeness with logic, freedom with forethought, constraint with expansiveness. With his new book, as in its predecessor, Longenbach invites the reader to see and hear the mechanics that, like the gears of a watch, drive a poem’s endlessly repeatable unpredictability.

Read more

How do you make a poem?
Speakers of a language rely on its words to carry out even the most mundane acts of communication. The same words are poets’ medium of creation. In How Poems Get Made, James Longenbach asks how poets turn bare utterance into art.

Poet James Longenbach unites spare and spooky in Earthling
This fifth collection of poetry from James Longenbach had its roots in a poem he wrote called “Pastoral,” which would set the collection’s tone of “feeling or spiritual development.”

Remembering John Ashbery
John Ashbery was memorialized as one of America’s premiere poets upon his passing earlier this month. James Longenbach reflects on a long friendship with Ashbery and his impact on poetry and literature.

Journalist is editor of nation’s longest-running journal of light verse.

, an adjunct instructor in the at the Ģ����ý, is the Humor Writer of the Month this December at the Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop at the University of Dayton.

Balmain edits Light, an online journal of light verse established in 1992. A journalist and poet, Balmain has published her humor in such venues as The New Yorker, the New York Times, �ѳ����ɱ��Ա��’s, The Satirist, the Washington Post, and many anthologies. Her poetry collection, Walking in on People (Able Muse Press), appeared in 2014. The workshop’s namesake, Bombeck was a popular mid-20th-century humor writer who published 12 books and a column, “At Wit’s End,” about her experiences as a suburban mother, that was syndicated in 900 newspapers.

But “we see little merit in the notion that love of country is something that can be taught through celebratory history,” and Charles Dorn write in an op-ed at RealClearEducation, a global education news and commentary website.

Curren, a professor of philosophy and of education, and chair of Rochester’s , is an ethicist who works across the boundaries of moral, political, legal, environmental, and educational philosophy. His books include Living Well Now and in the Future: Why Sustainability Matters (MIT Press, 2017) and Aristotle on the Necessity of Public Education (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000). He and Dorn, a professor and chair of education at Bowdoin College, are coauthors of Patriotic Education in a Global Age (University of Chicago Press, 2018).

• Read the .

When American poet Louise Glück for 2020, she expressed astonishment—and even a note of ambivalence. As she , it “seemed to be extremely unlikely that I would ever have this particular event to deal with in my life.”

The complexities of the prize are nothing new to , a professor of at the Ģ����ý. In fact, they’re the basis of a course she’s created—ENG 380: Nobel Prize Literature—as well as the subject of her current research.

London has taught the course for 11 years, introducing it when Rochester launched its programs in literary translation. “I thought it would be an excellent way to introduce students to outstanding but often unfamiliar literature from around the world, but I was also interested in the politics of prizes and the institutional structures that support them,” she says.

The literature prize’s suspension in 2018—in response to the Swedish Academy’s handling of sexual abuse allegations—was only the latest incident in a long history of controversy surrounding the prize. Some of the debates over prize winners involve friction between ideas of national literature and what London calls the “potentially homogenizing concept of international literature.”

Less than 5 percent of the literature published in the United States each year is literature in translation—and for many US readers, Nobel Prize–winning authors provide their primary exposure to literature from around the world. “The Nobel Prize, with its visibility and prestige, is one of the major ways that international literature gets publicized and made available to large audiences that might not otherwise read it,” she says.

The prize’s renown belies its conceptual unwieldiness. It’s unlimited by nation, genre, language, or year of publication. In his will, Alfred Nobel stipulated only that the award should go to the author who has “bestowed the greatest benefit on mankind” and created “the most outstanding work of an idealistic tendency.” As often as not, the prize functions as a kind of lifetime achievement award, says London, a specialist in 19th- and 20th-century British literature whose research and teaching is oriented toward issues of authorship.

The capaciousness of the Nobel Prize in Literature is part of what makes it, like the Nobel Peace Prize, sometimes a source of contention. There’s a kind of public investment in both the literature and the peace prizes, and the accessibility of the accomplishments they recognize—in contrast to physics research, for example—can add to popular second-guessing of the academy’s selections.

London helps her students look at the Nobel Prize in Literature with a critical eye, considering how winning writers’ works are viewed in their own country versus the authors’ international reputations; what sorts of writers are chosen for the award and those who are never considered; and how to assess works that a reader might be able to read only in translation.

The sheer variety of nations, languages, literary traditions, cultural contexts, and genres—ranging from novels and poetry to journalistic oral histories (as in the case of the 2015 winner, Belarussian author Svetlana Alexievich) and songwriting (when Bob Dylan received the prize in 2016, for “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”)—makes it impossible for any person to be an expert in the works that receive the prize, London says.

She transforms that conundrum into an opportunity for her students.

“All of us,” she tells them, “will be learners together.”

On the syllabus

ENG 380: Nobel Prize Literature
Professor: Bette London, professor of English

Required Texts (for fall 2020)

• José Saramago, Blindness
• Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
• Toni Morrison, Beloved
• Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red
• J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace

Additional books are selected by the class. London says students are quick to note the paucity of women winners and typically choose to add at least one woman writer to the syllabus. This fall, students chose Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, who won the Nobel Prize in 1996.

Contextual readings include

• , “What Our Contagion Fables Are Really URochester,”��The New Yorker, March 30, 2020
• Selections from ,��The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value��(Harvard UP, 2005)
• ,��“Toni Morrison: Solo Flight through Literature into History,”��World Literature Today 68:1 (Winter 1994)
• , “My Name is Re(a)d: Authoring Translation, Translating Authority,”��Translation Review��68:1 (2012)

Key questions for students

• What role does the prize play in creating and promoting international literature
• How can literature speak to both local and global audiences?
• What is the nature of literary prizes, and what impulses govern their administration?

When the novel coronavirus went from epidemic to pandemic early this year, John Barry ’69 (MA) found himself in rather familiar territory. Barry is the author of The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History. When the book was first published, in 2004, the National Academy of Sciences named it the outstanding book of the year on science and medicine. In 2020, Barry’s book has returned to bestseller status.

In The Great Influenza, he considers what became known as the Spanish flu—so called because the press in Spain, which stayed neutral in World War I, had not clamped down on coverage in the name of morale—from a broad range of angles: scientists’ quest to understand a new pathogen, officials’ efforts (or lack thereof) to contain the spread of infection, and communities’ and families’ horrifying experiences of a disease so contagious and lethal that it infected about a quarter of the US population and killed between 50 and 100 million people around the world, the equivalent of 220 to 440 million today.

Anchoring The Great Influenza is Barry’s consideration of leadership, science, and society. Trust, he argues, is crucial, because without trust in information people have no reliable knowledge of what is happening. In 1918, when leaders gave wartime morale priority over public health communication, terror overran society, so much so that some flu victims starved to death because others were too frightened to bring them food.

The fundamental lesson of the 1918 pandemic, Barry writes, is this: “Those in authority must retain the public’s trust. The way to do that is to distort nothing, to put the best face on nothing, to try to manipulate no one.”

Barry’s expertise drew him into public policy. In the year The Great Influenza was published, he began to collaborate with federal government entities and the National Academies on influenza preparedness and response. He was part of the original group that developed plans for public health measures in a pandemic before a vaccine is developed, and he contributed to pandemic preparedness and response efforts during the administrations of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

This conversation has been edited and condensed.

What are some of the important similarities between the 1918 flu virus and COVID-19?��

They’re both animal viruses that jumped to humans. So, they’re novel for the given population. The mode of transmission is identical: primarily droplets, some airborne, maybe some fomite [transmission from contact with objects]—nobody knows how much.

Number three, they’re both primarily respiratory viruses.

Number four is less well known, and that is that the 1918 virus infected practically every organ, much like COVID-19. There were notable neurological impacts and cardiovascular events—they were very common. It’s been noted that even the testes can be affected. That was true in 1918 as well. That’s very unusual and certainly not the case for other influenza viruses.

What are the differences?

��It’s hard to say what’s most important, but I guess the most important one is a different target demographic. In 1918, roughly 95 percent of the excess mortality was people under 65. Of course, that’s the opposite with COVID.

And number two is duration. This virus moves much more slowly than influenza, whether it’s the incubation period, how long you shed virus, or how long you’re sick.

It has put vastly more stress on the economy because of the duration. We tried to interrupt transmission and save people’s lives, which I think was the right thing to do. But it certainly caused an increase in economic stress.

The most obvious difference is virulence—the rapidity of the virus’s spread and its severity. In 1918, it was many times more virulent.��

You stress in the book that good science “exists on the frontier”—and uncertainty is a necessary part of that. What impact does uncertainty have on our public health response?

As a general rule, public health is pretty easy compared to the hard science. In the present case, obviously, the reversal on mask usage caused a lot of confusion, though I think right now there’s pretty widespread acceptance.

Normally, public health is not a frontier. You may refine your methods—and in this case, the main method has always been there. Social distancing is more important than anything else.

In the 1918 pandemic, fear was rampant. What does pervasive fear do to a society? Do you see that kind of fear at work in the present situation?

There was a lot more reason to be afraid in 1918. People saw death all around them—and in many cases, horrible deaths. There is fear out here now, but it’s not, in most cases, the same intensity.

I think fear is pretty clearly a much more important and driving motive—much more effective, let’s say—in getting people to act than the idea that you ought to protect some stranger you cross paths with somewhere.

So in terms of getting people to comply with the [public health] advice, I think if people are deeply concerned that they themselves are vulnerable and could be killed, that’s much more powerful than worrying, well, you know, maybe this person I’m having a drink with might go home and infect their grandmother—maybe.

You conclude the book, written in 2004, with the warning that in future pandemics, authorities must maintain the public’s trust. What do you think when you look at what’s happened in 2020?

A lot of countries did the right thing. They were extremely transparent. In those early meetings about nonpharmaceutical interventions [in the advisory groups that Barry joined in 2004], my message was to always tell the truth. And I didn’t get a lot of pushback. Every now and then somebody would say, “Well, we don’t really want to scare people.” Yeah, you do, actually. You don’t want to use fear as a tool, but you want them to be able to judge the risk themselves, truthfully. And to understand the risk. And be honest. And a lot of countries have done that—not because they read my book, but because it’s pretty clearly the best thing to do, whether it’s South Korea or Singapore or Germany or Austria or New Zealand. A lot of countries were totally transparent and have been pretty effective in containing the virus.

And as you know, the US is pretty close to dead last in the developed world in containing the virus.

There’s little trace of the 1918 flu pandemic in the culture at large. Why do you think that is? Any predictions about how the current crisis will be represented in the future—or if it will be?

I’ve never been able to come up with a good explanation as to why there’s so little written about the 1918 pandemic. There was quite a bit of pulp fiction written in the 1920s. I didn’t know that myself until somebody else who was interviewing me said they collected it. But not serious fiction. There were only a tiny handful [of writers who addressed it], such as William Maxwell and Katherine Anne Porter. John Dos Passos is one of my favorite writers. He got influenza on a troop ship, one of the worst places to get it, and he wrote about two lines in his entire body of work.

When I first started researching this book, which was quite a while ago now, I had an aunt who was then in her 90s. And when I mentioned it to her, she grabbed her chest and said, “Oh! It was the only time I saw my father cry.” It certainly was burned into her consciousness. And whenever I mentioned it to somebody old enough to have lived through it, I got a similar response. They certainly didn’t forget it, but why it didn’t register in our literature to a greater degree, I don’t know. I mean, it was brief—you’re talking about a period of weeks. It also occurred simultaneously with the war. But I have no good explanation.

As far as this pandemic, yes, I think there’s a very good chance that this will be a defining event for a generation, depending upon the effectiveness and speed with which we get a vaccine.

What worries you most as you look ahead?

In April, I said I didn’t expect summer to provide relief. I said I expected something akin to ocean swells rather than waves, depending on how we came out of various phases. I also said that there is a danger of a storm surge. It’s relatively easy at this point to predict the behavior of the virus, but you cannot predict human behavior. And you can’t predict the weather. If we have a really mild fall and people tend to be outside a lot, deep into the fall, that will have some impact on transmission. If the weather is rotten and people are forced inside earlier, that’s something else again.

The key is really behavior. And what worries me most is the real possibility of that storm surge.

And there’s still so much we don’t know about the virus, such as its long-term impact. We know a significant percentage of those who get sick show some kind of heart damage. Is that permanent? Does it heal? Even people who have no symptoms whatsoever on X-ray show what’s referred to as “ground glass opacity” in the lung. What is that damage? What does that mean long term?

The virus certainly affects blood vessels. What does that mean in terms of stroke and other cardiovascular problems years from now? In 1918, there were complications that didn’t surface at all until the 1920s. So, we just don’t know.

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For a decade, beginning in 1974, , outside Buffalo, was a hotbed of avant-garde art. The experimental program, then owned and operated by New York state, commissioned site-specific works from hundreds of artists and art collectives in the summers through 1984.

Among the participants were the collective Ant Farm, who went on to create the famous installation Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo, Texas; visual artist, film director, composer, and musician Laurie Anderson; environmental artist Agnes Denes, among whose later works was Wheatfield: A Confrontation, a two-acre wheatfield that she cultivated and harvested on a landfill near the World Trade Center; and the now renowned glass sculptor Dale Chihuly, creator of the blue and gold glass chandelier that’s the centerpiece of the Wolk Atrium at the URochester’s Eastman School of Music.

Artpark’s first decade was “really rich,” particularly because of the feminist artists who participated and their emphasis on “moving art out of the commercial realm and into the public realm,” says Rochester’s Allen Topolski, an associate professor of art. “Everything that had built up to institutionalize art was being questioned in the 1970s and early ’80s. These artists weren’t interested in being in New York City galleries when they started out—although they eventually ended up there.”

The residency program ended in the 1990s. Today, Artpark is a partnership between New York State Parks and the independent nonprofit Artpark & Company.

But ghostly traces of the residency program remain. The artists lived near the Niagara Gorge, in 11 cottages. The only remnants of the cottages are the concrete slabs on which they stood. Allen and his daughter, artist Aster Topolski, have created a temporary, site-specific artistic installation, titled , that evokes the residency in its heyday.

In their artwork, each cottage site features a single object associated with domesticity and a fabricated architectural remnant, suggesting a fragment of wall. The Topolskis anticipate that the objects and fragments will act as cues for viewers to construct a narrative of place as they move from slab to slab.

The work is part of this year’s , a platform for site-specific installations by contemporary artists. First created in 2018 by the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art and the collaboration Resource:Art, Play/Ground has been reimagined for 2020 as outdoor-only installations in Buffalo that can be experienced in observance of social distancing guidelines. The free, public event runs from September 11 to 20.

Allen Topolski’s work is concerned with nostalgia and memory in technologies of domesticity and convenience. “It’s metaphorically an attempt to bridge my domestic life and my creative life,” he says. He asked Aster to collaborate with him on the project because “I realized this site we were addressing was grounded in a history that parallels my relationship to her. I think about a passing down of information. Much of what we do conceptually has been allowed by many of the artists that we’re addressing in the installation.”

Aster, who will work begin work on an MFA at the California College of the Arts next year, returned from Miami to Rochester in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. She says the installation is, in part, “a representation of valuing the moment and the spaces we’ve created for ourselves and freezing it in time—freezing a moment we may not recognize the full value of until later.”

Says Allen: “What’s interesting about the work is how we continually find connections between things that we’ve done, and they’re substantiated somehow through the existence of the work of the artists who were there.

“We’re enjoying the intersections that occur: mine and hers, ours and theirs, then and now. That’s what site specificity is about. It’s about understanding where you are through understanding what was there before you.”

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It once stood as a school, where students walked the hallways, and learned the periodic tables inside its classrooms. Nearly a century after its construction, and decades since it has been a school, the old Medina High School became a playground of sorts.

Empty high school becomes a playground for artists exploring memory, nostalgia
An empty, Victorian-era building in Medina, New York, hosted a 2018 collaborative art project inspired by the fleetingness and permanence of memory.