An Interview with Phillip Brian Harper
- An Interview with Phillip Brian Harper
This interview was conducted on August 6, 1999, by telephone between Charlottesville, Virginia, and New York City.
How did you arrive at your different projects? Please speak autobiographically without reservations, and talk about the kind of work you wanted to do when you were preparing for the profession of English language and literature, as we used to call it. Did the work of the preceding generation of scholars in African-American literary and cultural studies make a serious impact on you? In production of texts, your generation seems to be surpassing that of the earlier generation. Of course, your generation had, as the expression goes, to stand on their shoulders in order to prepare yourself to speak.
Yes, and they were actually incredibly productive, as far as my purposes are concerned, in that they gave me remarkably solid shoulders to stand on! This was especially important, considering that I came to this whole enterprise in a state of profound ignorance as to what was entailed in academic literary study. I began by thinking of myself—certainly through college and the beginning of my graduate career—as a poet. That’s how I came to professional work in literature. I entered college at the University of Michigan in 1978 with the express purpose of honing my skills as a poet, and I was very intensively studying creative writing in that period without having a particularly clear sense as to how I was going to make a living, needless to say. It seemed most feasible to me to pursue a career in college or university teaching, and consequently I thought, well, if I want to do that, then I will at least have to get a master’s degree in creative writing. That was the extent of my understanding about what I would have to do. So I applied to MFA programs in creative writing. I did that for a couple of years before I actually decided to attend one. And in that intervening two years when I was applying to programs and not actually attending them, I had this revelation—that if I was really serious about wanting to pursue a teaching career in higher education, then I really needed to get a PhD. And so the second round of applications that I completed for graduate schools I decided to orient both to master’s level creative writing programs and to PhD programs in literature. This was in 1982. By some great good fortune I was accepted to Cornell, which was ideal for me because at Cornell you could pursue jointly and simultaneously both an MFA in creative writing and a PhD in English Literature. So that’s what I did—again, without any full understanding of exactly what that would entail. [End Page 855] I still thought of myself as primarily a poet—certainly through the first year or year and a half that I was at Cornell. And, in fact, the courses in literary history and literary criticism that I was taking for the sake of the PhD program were quite eye-opening to me. This was primarily because Cornell’s PhD program was extremely sophisticated theoretically whereas I had not had a very extensive education in literary theory at all as an undergraduate. So for the first year or so in those courses I felt relatively at sea—intrigued but at the same time befuddled by the sorts of discussions that were going on and, on the other hand, intensely engaged in my verse writing. But about the third semester that I was at Cornell, I wouldn’t say that I had an epiphany but something clicked. I finally felt that I was getting a handle on the critical conversations that were happening in my classes for the PhD program.
You were becoming more at ease with the theoretical discourse.
Yes. And when I say that Cornell’s program was quite theoretically sophisticated, what I mean in particular was that, during the early 1980s, it was the site of a great deal of high-level work in post-structuralism and deconstruction, as well as psychoanalysis...
