UB’s Lynch Named Fellow Of National Humanities Center

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Deidre Shauna Lynch, an award-winning associate professor of English at the University at Buffalo who is widely regarded as an innovative literary scholar, has been named a fellow of the National Humanities Center (NHC), one of the greatest distinctions in the humanities field.

Lynch is one of 41 international fellows named by the center this year. She will work at NHC, based in the Research Triangle in Raleigh-Durham, N.C., from September through May 2001 on a new book that will explore the cultural history of what it means to love -- rather than be instructed or moved by -- literature.

Lynch says this topic is particularly illuminating today, when our historically strong identification with works of literature seems to be reversing itself and giving way -- over much protest -- to the cultural study of how literature defines and is defined by prevailing value systems and cultural categories like gender, race and ethnicity.

She notes that prior to the mid-18th century, when the level of literacy here and in England was relatively low, the term "literature" embraced virtually the entire body of written work from novels and poetry to pamphlets and political or religious tracts.

"In the mid-1700s, a transitional period between the rationalism of the Enlightenment and the Romantic period, literacy increased," says Lynch, "and the modern category of 'literature' came into being to refer to a special canon of work considered particularly valuable or imaginative.

"Love of literature -- and of particular kinds of literature -- became an indication of moral character, class and caste. Readers began to identify with and develop strong personal affection for individual authors or fictional characters to whom they would be as 'faithful' to as another person. The entire process became very personal.

"Today, when some of us are moving away from literary studies and toward cultural studies, we often hear that we don't love literature anymore -- a value judgment expressed in terms that date back to the 18th century.

"Those who continue to identify with literature in this way -- particularly literary scholars -- are upset by the impersonality of this new cultural-studies approach, which examines literature not only as a work of art, but as a tool for cultural stasis or change."

At the same time, Lynch says, traditional literature lovers often express antipathy toward those who "go over the edge" with their love of literature. To traditionalists, she says, this represents another deviation from the scholarly mean, albeit toward the other end of the spectrum.

"This traditionalism is represented today, she says, "in the academy's attitude toward the contemporary phenomenon of the Janeites, societies of Jane Austen lovers. They are devoted to her work, dress up in period costume, take quizzes on her novels, organize balls like those described in her novels. Most of the Austen movies of late are sort of a Janeite phenomenon."

Lynch is, in fact, editing a collection of essays titled "Janeites: Austen's Disciples and Devotees" that will be published this year by Princeton University Press.

"So the message of the literary culture that developed out of the Enlightenment," she explains, "is that it is valuable to love literature to the extent that a differentiation is made between 'it' and writing of lower status. It is less acceptable to become personally involved with the vision of an author or to identify with the values and sensibilities of individual characters or writers. Instead, the focus of our attention should be on work itself and its paradigms or the canon and its patterns.

"To go further 'overboard' and become obsessive about an author, point of view or work is excessive and is disdained," she says. "On the other hand, to turn instead to the examination of literature as a cultural tool is likewise disdained as a devaluation of literature itself.

"It's a great debate," she says, adding that she hopes her new book will throw some light on the history of this identification process.

Lynch joined the UB English faculty in 1990. In December 1999, she received the sixth annual Prize for a First Book by the Modern Languages Association for "The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture and the Business of Inner Meaning." The prize is a notable accomplishment for an emerging scholar and one of the most distinctive in the field.

She previously had won the Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities and the Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities.

Lynch, a native of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, is one of two members of the UB faculty to be named a fellow of the NHC for the coming year. The second is her husband, Thomas Keirstead, professor of history, who will study how and why the Japanese culture developed a sense of a national and European-like "medieval" historical period long after the years that embraced such an era had passed.