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HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES Elisa New Weaves Literary Strands into One Web By Andrea Shen
Professor of English Elisa New is a sailer in the air, a weaver of disparate things together. "I like moving in between," she says. "Throughout my career, I’ve tried to put together things that are different, teach things that are different next to each other." The trees and waterspouts among which she weaves connections are Puritan literature, American poetry, and Jewish-American literature and culture. She has written about Calvinism in the work of the 20th-century poet Elizabeth Bishop, and "Hebraism and Hellenisim" in Moby-Dick. But she has also taught Jewish-American and African-American literature in one course. And in a memoir she’s writing about her great-grandfather, she connects 19th-century Lithuania to the garment industry in Baltimore. "She’s not afraid to be idiosyncratic at all," says Professor Wy Steiner, a former colleague of New’s at the University of Pennsylvania. "There’s something artistic about the ways she goes about scholarship." New received her B.A. in English from Brandeis and her Ph.D. from Columbia. At the University of Pennsylvania, "her rise was meteoric," says John Richetti, chair of the English department there. "She was a terrific, energetic, charismatic teacher. She went from assistant to full professor in 10 years." As chair of the undergraduate program, New overhauled the major. She was only the second English professor in 15 years to receive the university-wide Watkins Assistant Professorship in the Humanities. Lawrence Buell, Chair of Harvard’s English department, calls New "the leading figure of her generation in American poetry studies." In The Regenerate Lyric, New contests the widely held view that free-wheeling form and grand self-assertion are quintessentially American. "On the contrary, she argues that the acceptance of the discipline of constrained forms, and limits placed on individuality of style and vision are extremely central to the American poetic practice," says Buell. In The Line’s Eye, New again takes a contrarian stance. "Far from accepting the idea that the poet achieves conquest over landscape or whatever is the subject of the poetic gaze," Buell says, "she argues that the poetic result comes from submission to the conditions in which the writer finds himself or herself." She is a rule-breaker, then, who reveres the idea of discipline. But she’s also a seeker of pleasure. According to James Dawes, a student of New’s at Penn and now a Junior Fellow in Harvard’s Society of Fellows, "The pleasure she takes in language is one of the great gifts she gives her students. She enables them to experience its beauty, to see spirit and drama in the play of sound, phrase, and idea." Dawes calls New "fantastically inspiring" as a teacher. New herself describes in almost sensual terms the origins of her interest in religious themes in literature. She was not particularly devout growing up in Washington, D.C. "I was one of those tormented Jewish girls who hated Hebrew school – who loves the traditions but hates the rules," she jokes. But when she read Rilke or Hass or Milosz as a teenager, or when she wrote her own poetry in college and graduate school, New felt absorbed and ecstatic – feelings akin to those of the early American religious writers. "The pleasure one can have in a poem feels like the pleasure Edwards describes observing a spider in sunlight," she says. Reading poetry and reading the world require a state of openness, New says. Now New is writing a book about Puritan pleasure. At the same time, she is working on Hebrew School, a book of essays about Jewish literature, film, and culture. In one essay on Holocaust film, she spins intricate webs among "Jews and Christians and women and clothes," as she puts it. In another essay, she explores the literal spanning of two worlds by the fictive Jewish boy who travels from his mother’s Brooklyn kitchen to the New York Public Library in Manhattan. "The tradition of Jewish-American literature is so self-consciously bookish and self-consciously cerebral, so conscious of the imperative of learning and the tensions between learning and any other kind of life, that it speaks to me," New says. New says she was drawn to the "unbelievably superb group of Americanists and the unbelievably superb group of people working in poetry" at Harvard. "It just seemed like an intellectual smorgasbord I couldn’t refuse."
Copyright 1999 President and Fellows of Harvard College |
