{"id":2981,"date":"2019-11-10T09:36:31","date_gmt":"2019-11-10T14:36:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artsci.case.edu\/magazine\/?p=2981"},"modified":"2019-11-12T10:16:58","modified_gmt":"2019-11-12T15:16:58","slug":"exploring-ideas-from-two-sides","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artsci.case.edu\/magazine\/2019\/exploring-ideas-from-two-sides\/","title":{"rendered":"Exploring Ideas From Two Sides"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Michael Clune, who will spend his year as a Guggenheim Fellow completing his fifth book, has won acclaim both for his creative prose and for his academic writing. Photo by Lauren Clune.<\/p><\/div>\n

Lo<\/span>ng before he ever thought of becoming an English professor, Michael Clune<\/b> was a lonely adolescent who hung out at the public library, roaming the stacks and reading whatever appealed to him. A turning point in his education occurred when, at age 15, he came across translations of Japanese haiku by the British scholar R. H. Blyth. To this day, he remembers the look of the pages in Blyth\u2019s edition, where each poem was embedded in an extensive commentary. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe writing I found in Blyth had no parallel in my experience,\u201d Clune recalls. \u201cI was astonished at how, immersed in his prose, these fragile poems revealed depths, new angles of surface, seemingly endless relations with more writing, art, philosophy than I\u2019d imagined existed.\u201d This discovery, he says, was a major reason he \u201cfell in love\u201d with literary criticism.<\/p>\n

Clune, who was born in Ireland but grew up in Evanston, Ill., eventually earned a bachelor\u2019s degree in English at Oberlin College, followed by a doctorate from Johns Hopkins University. In 2010, he joined the faculty at Case Western Reserve, where he is now the Samuel B. and Virginia C. Knight Professor of the Humanities. The author of two academic books and two memoirs, Clune was recently named a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow\u2014an honor conferred on scholars, writers and artists on the basis of their \u201cprior achievement and exceptional promise.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

Although three decades have passed since his early encounter with that volume of haiku, Clune\u2019s devotion to the critical enterprise remains undiminished. As we think about art of any kind, he says, it grows \u201cricher, stranger, funnier and more mysterious.\u201d It\u2019s a belief reflected in both his writing and his teaching.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe word \u2018passionate\u2019 comes to mind, but not in a clich\u00e9, Dead Poets Society <\/span>way,\u201d says English graduate student Camila Ring<\/b>, who took Clune\u2019s seminar in 19th-century American literature last spring. \u201cIf you could see my thought bubbles during class, they would be filled with exclamation marks.\u201d<\/p>\n

A Narrow Escape<\/span><\/h3>\n

Clune\u2019s passage into the ranks of endowed professors and Guggenheim Fellows was not as inevitable as it might seem, however. During those teenage years when he was reading in the library, he was also developing a dependency on drugs and alcohol that would worsen in college. After graduating from Oberlin, he tried working as a manual laborer but got fired by six employers in a row. In the spring of 1998, when he learned he\u2019d been accepted into the graduate program at Johns Hopkins, he had a job repossessing lawn mowers. \u201cMy joy in immersing myself in literary study,\u201d he says, \u201cwas shadowed by the working world I\u2019d so narrowly escaped.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Despite his determination to pursue an academic career, Clune continued to struggle with addiction. During a trip home to Evanston, where he\u2019d gone to try to get clean, he was arrested in a Chicago housing project for felony possession of heroin. The arrest, Clune says, saved his life. His subsequent court-mandated treatment not only helped him quit drugs; it also gave him the clarity and focus he needed to dedicate himself fully to his intellectual work.<\/p>\n

After the arrest and a successful stint in rehab, Clune spent nine months living in his father\u2019s basement, paying off debts and dealing with legal issues. In addition, he was writing every day.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I got clean, I was like, \u2018Wow, this stuff in my dissertation is really interesting,\u2019\u201d he says. Working proved to be a self-reinforcing habit. \u201cA problem that besets many writers and academics is procrastination,\u201d Clune says. \u201cRecovery taught me that instead of waiting until I felt like writing or doing research, I should do it, and I\u2019ll feel like it once I\u2019ve started. Anything I\u2019ve been able to achieve is because of that discipline.\u201d<\/p>\n

Today, Clune meditates and exercises, goes to Narcotics Anonymous meetings and counsels recovering addicts. At the same time, he strives to convey the life-changing power of literature to his students. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMichael cares about seeing what literature is, what it does and why it\u2019s valuable,\u201d says Catherine Forsa<\/b> (GRS \u201816), a former graduate student of Clune\u2019s who is now an assistant professor of writing and rhetoric at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island. In class, he is open about his history of substance abuse.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s really personable and vulnerable in terms of his experience with addiction,\u201d Ring says. \u201cYou can tell his personal experiences have informed how he is now, and help him savor meaningful things like literature.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eternally New<\/span><\/h3>\n

Clune\u2019s openness about his experience extends to his writing. As an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan from 2005 to 2007, he started work on a memoir about his addiction. In the process, Clune arrived at an insight that he quickly applied to the seemingly separate realm of literary studies.<\/span><\/p>\n

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In 2013, Michael Clune published a memoir about addiction and a work of literary criticism. In different ways, both books explore the idea of eternal newness.<\/p><\/div>\n

The fatal allure of heroin, he now realized, lay in the fact that the thrill of getting high never lost its intensity. \u201cDope never gets old for addicts,\u201d he wrote. \u201cIt never looks old. It never looks like something I\u2019ve seen before. It always looks like nothing I\u2019ve ever seen.\u201d Soon, Clune became fascinated by writers who sought to achieve that same quality of eternal newness in their work, countering the dulling effects of familiarity.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor evolutionary reasons, our brain regulates our perception of familiar objects to preserve space to notice something new,\u201d Clune says. \u201cOur experience of the world tends to dim. One of art\u2019s functions is to renew our sense of the freshness of the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Clune began writing an academic book on this theme, integrating literary criticism with recent findings in neuroscience. Because he was completing his memoir at the same time, he found himself exploring a single idea from two sides: one personal, one analytical. <\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"“My voice in creative prose is very distinct from my academic writing,\u201d Clune says. \u201cI work a couple of months on a creative project, then get to a place where I need a break. It\u2019s a change of pace to go into critical work.\u201d When a publisher wanted to issue his two manuscripts in a single volume, Clune resisted. Instead, they appeared in 2013 as separate books: White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin<\/span> <\/em>and Writing Against Time<\/span><\/em>.<\/p>\n

White Out<\/span><\/em> is a visceral and lyrical account of Clune\u2019s addiction. He recalls, for instance, discussing philosophy with a drug dealer who had a needle in his neck (a sight that seemed perfectly normal to Clune at the time). Even though the memoir was published by the tiny Hazelden Press (part of an addiction recovery center in Minnesota), it was a hit, making National Public Radio\u2019s and <\/span>The New Yorker<\/span>\u2019s lists of best books for the year.\u00a0Meanwhile, <\/span>Writing Against Time<\/span><\/em> confirmed Clune\u2019s reputation as a literary critic who draws on and contributes to other academic fields. The book even inspired composer Christopher Trapani,\u00a0 <\/span>another 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, to write a piece of chamber music with the same title. The piece, Trapani explained before the premiere in 2014, is about \u201cthe sensation of suspension in an enveloping present, prolonging the wonder and enchantment of a new aesthetic discovery.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Clune\u2019s next book, Gamelife<\/span><\/em>, was another memoir, this one about his youthful devotion to computer games. Straddling the line between art and technology, the games provided Clune with a perfect means of examining his aesthetic development.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was interested in my own childhood and the role technology played in my life,\u201d he says. \u201cI was also interested in how artworks operate in our lives. Computer games were a manageable way of exploring that because there is so little tradition around them, whereas if I was going to write about my formation as a reader, it would be hard to get a fresh take.\u201d He organized each chapter around a different game from the 1980s, when the technology was nascent and users typed commands to navigate avatars through imaginary worlds.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"

In his second memoir, Michael Clune examines the role that video games played in his aesthetic education.<\/p><\/div>\n

By the time Gamelife<\/span> <\/em>was published in 2015, Clune was a full professor at Case Western Reserve, teaching American literature and organizing a weekly colloquium whose guest speakers included poets, fiction writers, essayists and scholars. Colleagues recognized him as a galvanizing force in the department, and found Gamelife<\/span><\/em> a revealing view of another side of his personality.<\/p>\n

\u201cI admire the moments of vulnerability in Michael\u2019s writing,\u201d <\/span>says\u00a0Sarah Gridley<\/b>, associate professor in the Department of English. \u201cGamelife<\/span><\/em>\u00a0is a window into a lonely childhood, where we see him shaping and responding to alternative worlds.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The book also gave him a certain street cred with his students. Clune brings his passion for contemporary culture, including video games and gangster rap, into the classroom. \u201cMichael has this way of giving an example of a complex idea that makes it more relatable,\u201d Forsa says. \u201cHe\u2019ll compare it to something that is not literary.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Clune\u2019s approach illuminates for students the connections between the art they consume in their personal lives and what they study in class. \u201cYou see his students enthusiastic about Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson,\u201d says Gridley, a poet herself. \u201cI think that\u2019s hard to do with today\u2019s young people; they have so many stimuli, it\u2019s hard to have print on the page come alive for them. That\u2019s something that Michael really knows how to do as a teacher and writer.\u201d<\/p>\n

A Defense of Judgment<\/span><\/h3>\n

This isn\u2019t to say that Clune\u2019s students immediately embrace every writer he asks them to read. In fact, it was their resistance to a 20th-century poet that gave him the idea for his latest academic project. <\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"

Clockwise from left: Michael Clune\u2019s students and colleagues in the Department of English, including doctoral student Camila Ring and Associate Professor Sarah Gridley, praise his ability to inspire enthusiasm for literature. Photo by Lauren Clune.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cWe were reading Sylvia Plath, and a number of students hated it,\u201d Clune says. \u201cI was trying to explain to them why I thought it was great poetry, and I realized I didn\u2019t have a vocabulary for justifying what I was doing, which was putting poems in front of people and saying, \u2018Read this, it\u2019s great.\u2019 If they said, \u2018Why is it great? Why should I listen to you?\u2019 I didn\u2019t have answers for them.\u201d He is now writing a book, A Defense of Judgment<\/span><\/em>, under contract with the University of Chicago Press, that seeks to provide such answers.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe book\u2019s point of departure is, How do we judge artworks? How do we decide what works are better than others?\u201d Clune says. \u201cWe live in an age that\u2019s suspicious of experts. We want to believe everyone\u2019s opinion is equally valid. We also think whether one book is better than another book is a matter of subjective opinion. But I believe there\u2019s a very strong case to be made that when we are judging a work as trained professors, it is a method, not opinion. Practice gives professors the authority to say reading Henry James is a better way to spend your time than watching The Apprentice<\/span><\/em>. But people are very reluctant to make those claims.\u201d<\/p>\n

Clune knows this stance puts him in danger of being branded an elitist or a snob, but he believes that the opposite view, that all opinions are equally valid, is a false form of populism.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt feels egalitarian to say everyone gets to pick what\u2019s good, but what it really does is throw everything into the marketplace,\u201d he says. \u201cThe sole arbiter of value becomes capitalism and whatever advertisers can convince people to buy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Clune plans to finish the book during his Guggenheim Fellowship year. The prize has allowed him to take a sabbatical from teaching\u2014a prospect that made him slightly nervous at first.<\/p>\n

\u201cTeaching is very inspiring to me, which is why I\u2019ve never taken a sabbatical before,\u201d he explains. \u201cA lot of my best thinking happens when I\u2019m with students and we\u2019re thinking critically together. You\u2019ve heard a movie or song a million times, but when you show it to a friend, it becomes live again. That\u2019s what happens with teaching: The students renew the work for me with their freshness.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Jennie Yabroff is a writer and editor in New York City.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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