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  • Editor's Notes

I thought it would be informative to EAL's readership to have some insight into the history and personal interests of members of the editorial board. Philip Gould of the Department of English at Brown University was bold enough to volunteer the first testimony.

Confessions of an Early Americanist Philip Gould

I went to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison because the bar where I was working at the time became too rough. Newly arrived from New England, I was naïve enough about the Midwest to fantasize that its decency and domesticity extended well into the pubs aligning State Street between Bascom Hill and the state capitol building. The proprietors of The Plaza Tavern and Grill told me that, besides my duties tending bar (for which I had no experience), I would check identification cards or driver's licenses (that's "IDs" in the trade) to make sure all patrons were of the legal drinking age. My second week there—this was September 1986—someone to whom I refused entry because of the lack identification waited for me out back after the Plaza had closed at 1 A.M. and tried to whack me with a pool cue (I think) while I was dumping out the nightly garbage. The next day when I awoke around noon, I got dressed, made my way to the English Department in Helen C. White Hall, and managed to find a catalogue of graduate programs in English in the US and UK. This was in the days before the internet.

The next year I began the master's program in English at Madison. I matriculated there for a number of reasons: the reputation of the university, my affinity as an eastern expatriate for "Mad-town" and the Midwest in general, the fact that my girlfriend (who is now my wife) was a medical student there, and, finally, the financial consideration of reduced tuition (since my year's employment in Wisconsin qualified me now as an in-state resident). [End Page 211]

When I began taking classes there, I planned on studying James Joyce and literary modernism. My first class in Joyce and literary modernism did not go as well as I'd hoped—indeed not very well at all—and so I began to consider pursuing another field. Since that time, I've heard on a couple of occasions professors reminisce about graduate study and claim that your field picks you as much as you pick your field. I imagine there is much truth in that. Certainly, we tend to gravitate to those professors whom we respect and admire—and those who importantly provide some measure of validation. It's not really vanity at work here. Graduate study—at least as it was formulated at the UW-Madison—was a far more humiliating experience to allow for that kind of presumption.

I use these two terms because, for me, the field in which I became immediately interested was early American literature, and, back then, the field was dominated by Puritan studies. In retrospect, I can't help but see graduate work there in light of the Puritan morphology of conversion, and my six-year pilgrimage (1987–1993) was characterized by that constant yet unstable balance between presumption and humility, which would ensure the student's everlasting rest. What was the initial moment of conversion? While I was failing at seeing or saying anything new about the symbolic patterns of the "Circe" episode of Ulysses, I was also taking English 608 (Early American Literature) with Sargent Bush. I found Sarge's self-effacing dignity and compendious knowledge irresistible. Even to a 27-year-old ex-bartender, his readings of the Bay Psalm Book were immediately engaging. So were his explications of typology (and his caveats about oversimplifying it). Sarge stood as gravitas. I was an electron who'd finally found intellectual pull.

What has changed in the field of early American studies? That would take far too long to summarize (Read the latest issue of Early American Literature and then scan the contents of one from the 1970s or 1980s). Perhaps what's more interesting, or at least not talked...

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