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December 12, 2003|Volume 32, Number 14|Five-Week Issue



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Annabel Patterson



DeVane Lectures to investigate
meanings of keywords

Words with broad and shifting meanings -- "evil," "innocence," "crime and punishment," "democracy," "success" and "death" -- will be scrutinized from a variety of disciplinary perspectives in the spring semester DeVane Lectures, to be presented by Annabel Patterson, Sterling Professor of English and this year's William Clyde DeVane Professor.

Titled "Rusty Keywords: Ruling Concepts," the DeVane Lectures are offered as part of a for-credit course for undergraduates as well as a series of lectures open to the public. The lectures will take place on Wednesdays, 4-5:15 p.m., beginning on Jan. 14 in Rm. 102 of Linsly-Chittenden Hall, 63 High St. Students enrolled in the course will also participate in weekly discussion groups.

Patterson, who had the freedom to select her own topic for the lectures, says she chose her subject with the goal of "living up to the original mandate of the DeVane Lectures, which is for senior faculty to speak on a subject outside their field of expertise." She has also had a long-term interest, she says, in "the work words do in the world."

The DeVane Professorship was established in 1969 with a grant from the Old Dominion Foundation and is named for a former Yale College dean. It honors his memory by addressing his concern that undergraduate education not become excessively narrow and departmentalized. An invitation to deliver the DeVane Lectures is considered a major honor for Yale faculty.

After an introduction to the theory of keywords, Patterson will devote two lectures to each keyword, although "democracy" absorbed three and "success" rated only one. Patterson describes her keywords as those contemporary American society uses unthinkingly or, conversely, with an intent to persuade. "I am taking on words central to American culture, and will investigate their history -- the way they were used in the past -- and the way they are used today," explains Patterson. For example, "death," she notes, is "a highly contested term with competing clinical, ethical and philosophical definitions, complicated by the late 20th-century concept of 'brain death.'"

To be interdisciplinary meant developing a reading list for the course that may seem "a little eccentric," according to Patterson. Among the recommended and required readings include Milton's "Paradise Lost," Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses," Dostoevesky's "Crime and Punishment," Sister Helen Prejean's "Dead Man Walking," Alexis de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America," W.G. Sebald's "Austerlitz," Tolstoy's "Death of Ivan Ilych," attorney Barry Scheck's "Actual Innocence," and Joan Didion's political essays. Other writers featured include Pierre Bayle, Emmanuel Kant, Cesare Beccaria, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Adams, Andrew Carnegie, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Elizabeth Khubler-Ross and Emile Zola. Patterson will also incorporate slides and film clips into the lectures.

Though a Yale English professor, Patterson has had some experience transgressing academic boundaries. Her previous work has merged early modern British literature with history, politics and law, most noticeably and most recently in "Early Modern Liberalism" (1997) and "Nobody's Perfect: A New Whig Interpretation of History" (2000). She says she has been a "closet classicist" for years, writing on Hermogenes, Aesop and the reception of Virgil's "Ecologues." She is the editor-in-chief of the just-published Yale edition of the "Prose Works of Andrew Marvell," which focuses on ecclesiastical history and political history.

Born in England, Patterson emigrated to Canada alone at the age of 20, though, she says, she really always wanted to go to America, and managed to get there 20 years later. She earned her B.A. at the University of Toronto, and returned to London for her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees. Before coming to Yale as the Karl Young Professor of English in 1994, she taught at the University of Toronto, York University in Toronto, the University of Maryland and Duke University. She was named Sterling Professor at Yale in 2001.

Patterson was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000. She has been on the editorial board of PMLA, and has been president of the Spenser Society and president and Honored Scholar of the Milton Society. Two of her books have won prizes.

Patterson spent about a year preparing the DeVane Lectures, and says she appreciates the stimulus the assignment afforded her to learn new things. "I feel completely invigorated by moving into these other fields, which, of course, I haven't been able to fully master," she says, adding that she has unexpectedly found real connections between the topics and the texts.

"Finding a topic that is fresh and original has been both a challenge and a huge amount of fun, and I will certainly try to make it fun for my audience as well," Patterson concluded.

The complete syllabus for the DeVane Lectures is available at http://classes.yale.edu/devane.


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