University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

Published: December 4, 2003

Maureen Jameson is associate professor of French and interim chair of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Several years ago, the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures became the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. Why the name change?
We changed our name to signal our focus on literatures and cultures based in the languages that evolved from Latin. "Romance," from a Late Latin word meaning "in the Roman language," refers to the popular dialects blending Latin and indigenous languages that evolved towards the end of the Roman Empire. The most successful of these dialects gradually became the modern-day languages we know as Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese. It is not unusual for them to be grouped together in a department and known by the name "Romance," which is a reminder of their common historical origin (as is an enormous base of shared vocabulary). Today, the range of our scholarship and teaching extends across the regions where modern-day Romance languages are spoken. We were able to define our focus in this way because of enrollment-driven administrative decisions to transfer other language programs (Germanic, Slavic and Asian) to the Department of Linguistics. The move left many of us ambivalent: On the one hand, we are now less dispersed and can more easily define our distinctive teaching and research missions. On the other hand, we hoped that the university would invest in rebuilding and maintaining strong literature and culture programs in these other languages, and we felt that we were relinquishing our last chance to influence policy in that direction. To the credit of our Germanist colleagues, the German language program has fared well since the move. An endowment funded by Michael and Erika Metzger, emeritus professors, has enabled faculty in Linguistics, History, Comp Lit, and RLL to sustain an active colloquium series in German and Austrian cultural studies. But students can no longer take a concentration in German literature or study Russian or Polish literature at all, and that's a loss.

What is the focus of the department?
As is often the case in humanities departments, faculty research is wide-ranging and our closest intellectual collaborators tend to be outside the institution. Current work focuses on Caribbean aesthetics and racial difference, the emergence of theatre and theatricality in early modern Europe, Latin American women dramatists, a history of the mind-body connection in modern Spanish novels, a philosophical treatment of the question of origin, a study of semantic roles and an exploration of the use of khipu, or knotted strings, as narrative media in ancient Peruvian civilizations. Our teaching mission is to train students to be fluent in at least one Romance language; knowledgeable about its literature, culture and linguistic structures; skillful at "reading" the culture and distinguishing "cultural" from "natural" phenomena, and increasingly aware of American culture and the English language. We strenuously encourage study abroad, not only to promote mastery of the target language, but also to uproot students from the terrain of the familiar and make the familiar strange to them. Reverse culture shock is the awakening of an enlightened citizen.

The Modern Language Association just released a survey of U.S. institutions of higher education that found that more students are studying foreign languages than ever before and that the variety of languages being taught is greater than ever before. How does UB fare in those regards?
The trend documented by the MLA survey is good news. But even if it continues, we will still be a nation in which only a small proportion of the native-born population can even passively comprehend any language other than English. Despite rising awareness of the cost of our insularity, I doubt that the political will or the resources can be mustered to make an adequate investment in language study. Sadly, UB's language enrollments declined steeply once we implemented the new SUNY-wide general education curriculum—the one that "raised standards." Our implementation of the mandate requires one year of college-level language, i.e. 101 and 102, or a one-semester, 104 intensive review course that is scarcely more than Regents training. I don't think that UB students would be receptive to a more rigorous language requirement unless they believed that their training would lead to real competence. Nevertheless, by lowering the bar, we took the wind out of the sails of high school teachers who maintain upper-level courses by arguing that students need high-order language skills to meet college requirements. So SUNY's curriculum is a step backwards insofar as languages are concerned.

Why should students study a foreign language?
Learning a language is a tremendous investment of concentration and time, not to mention resources. Here are some of the rewards that compel that expenditure. Mastery of a second language gives students access to the myriad features of other cultures that defy translation. Familiarity with a second culture affords students a place to stand from which they can begin to observe their own culture and better understand it, and discover how the culture looks to those outside it and why it looks that way. Acquisition of a second language improves mastery of one's first language. Study abroad is, in my opinion, the single most important feature of a college education. Students who immerse themselves in another culture will have to-and want to-adapt to the society they're in. That process of developing an identity for another society is empowering. You find out who you are by experimenting with being someone else. Ultimately, the point of study abroad is that you begin to see exactly what is essential and deep and real about your own country, and which parts are conventional and superficial. I don't think you can know the United States, much less love and fight for the United States, without having some idea of what the country is and what its values are. And this is what you start to get by studying abroad.

What is LiTgloss?
LiTgloss is a Web-based collection of texts from the world's literatures, presented in their original languages, expertly annotated so that they can be read by English-speaking students, and presented with images, sound files and contextual information. The project was initially funded by a faculty development grant from the Provost's Office awarded under the iConnect@UB campaign, which was launched to bring teaching and learning into line with contemporary technologies. LiTgloss (http://wings.buffalo.edu/ litgloss) is aimed at students whose mastery is not quite up to the task of reading complex literary works in the languages they're studying, but who will go blind if they have to spend another hour reading "See Spot Run!" stories. Reading materials in language classes have to be at the same intellectual level as what the students are reading down the hall in their history, philosophy, psychology, and English classes. The point has to be to give students a glimpse of the intellectual and cultural wealth to which fluency in the language will give them access. LiTgloss is a work in progress; we have more than 100 texts in nearly 20 languages, and last month, we had just under a quarter of a million hits to the site. We're being reviewed for federal funding by two agencies, and grateful for provostal and decanal infusions that have kept us going.

How did you end up becoming a French professor?
As I would explain it now, it was a convergence of two distinct interests. I had a tremendous curiosity for languages from my earliest childhood. When I was 10, Avis Car Rental launched the slogan "We try harder." The company produced white lapel buttons featuring that slogan translated into the world's languages. I was enthralled. I would plead to be taken to the airport, glide discreetly over to the Avis desk, inquire suavely about daily rates while rummaging around in the bowl for a language I didn't have yet. Once safely back in the station wagon, I'd show off the new acquisition and we'd all marvel about places where people use such strange words to say "We try harder" ("Taimid ag deanamh an-iarracht," in Irish, was a big hit). In grade school, I kept a notebook filled with English words that had come from Latin, which I was picking up from the Mass and the hymns we sang in the choir at Mass every morning. Learning French and Latin in high school, finding cognates with English and discovering etymologies and morphological patterns—that was exhilarating. I visited France one summer when I was 16 and was overwhelmed by the beauty of the country and by the constant stimulation of being in an unfamiliar place. I grew up in Nashville in an era that both focused intently on, and yet evaded, questions of morality and ethics. Segregation was widespread, and although southern Catholics were sincere in denouncing it, Catholic society was not integrated. Questions of guilt and innocence and responsibility seemed to hinge predominantly on intentions: So long as we harbored no conscious racism, we were innocent of the evils around us which, after all, we had not created. But are our "intentions" reliably accessible to our consciousness? Shouldn't we infer our "intentions" from the patterns of our behavior, rather than assert the purity of our intentions to exculpate ourselves? Could there really be unintended consequences, or might we be promoting outcomes and sustaining a status quo while hiding our own motivations from ourselves? Troubled by these questions (or some version of them), I emerged from adolescence deeply suspicious of my own motives and my ability to discern them clearly. I was eager to study the human mind. I announced that I would study psychology and set off for college. After the introductory class, intended majors were funneled into a course seductively entitled "experimental design" which proved to be stultifying. I cared nothing for standard deviations or rats on sedatives, and saw no path from the rats to the human enigma. Meanwhile, I discovered philosophy, to which I switched my major, and a semester later, the works of Marcel Proust, whose lucid understanding of human nature convinced me that the study of French literature offered me the best chance at enlightenment.

What question do you wish I had asked, and how would you have answered it?
I wish you had asked if I had any parting words for President Greiner, and if you had, here's what I would have said. When we go to have coffee at Starbucks, eat lunch at the Union, ride the Blue Bird, settle back in the Black Box, or wander over by the lake, the people next to us are as likely to be speaking Korean or Spanish or Arabic as they are English. Our classes are happily populated with students from Kenmore and Brooklyn and from Beijing and Hyderabad. This is the most diverse community in Western New York, and for that we have to thank many hard-working people in Admissions and International Education. But mainly, we have to thank the guy who set the tone and the priorities, and who indefatigably promoted diversity—not as a matter of dutiful tolerance, but as a matter of incomparable wealth. That's the legacy I'll remember and the contribution I value the most from President Greiner's tenure in office.