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Looking Backward—Fondly: Personal and Professional Texts/Contexts Derived from Knowing Lyman Tower Sargent for Forty Years
- Utopian Studies
- Penn State University Press
- Volume 31, Number 2, 2020
- pp. 287-293
- Article
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abstract:
Lyman Tower Sargent has had a personal and professional impact upon me. I cannot separate the effects of reading his work from engaging with him as a mentor—and more. Hence, this piece will focus on personal and professional texts and their contexts. I revisit Sargent's "An Ambiguous Legacy: The Role and Position of Women in the English Eutopia," an essay he contributed to my Future Females: A Critical Anthology (1981). I include passages from my novels Oy Pioneer! and Oy Feminist Planets: A Fake Memoir which describe protagonist Sondra Lear's relationship with Thurston Howell III, interactions stemming from my longstanding association with Sargent. I describe a prominent male scholar's positive—almost utopian—influence on what I am here calling a retrospective autobiographical portrait of the professor as a young woman. This piece emphasizes that a festschrift contribution is about reciprocity between author and honoree.