2008 Woodie Awards
Fresh Faces
Issue date: 9/4/07 Section: Features
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Dr. Adam Zachary Newton is the newly appointed Distinguished University Professor, with endowed chair to be named Chair, Department of English
The Commentator: Where were you educated?
AN: I received my undergraduate degree in music composition and theory from Haverford College, and did graduate research in literature and philosophy at Harvard University. At the University of Texas at Austin, I held positions in the Department of English, Committee for Comparative Literature, and Program in Jewish Studies where I taught courses in 20th c. American and 19th c. British literature, European Fiction, theory and criticism, modern Jewish poetry and prose, popular culture, and hermeneutics.
TC: What was the topic (brief description) of your dissertation?
AN: Narrative Ethics: The Çlaim of Fiction (1992)--which became my first book (minus colon and subtitle)--was composed at a moment when ethics was cresting as a newly relevant category for literary study, and did a couple of interesting things. First, it sought a bridge between the disciplines of ethical philosophy and literary studies by proposing a new way to think about the moral realms of risk and responsibility as problems of reading. The book's title encapsulates its burden: that narrative-in this case prose fiction by 19th and 20th century British and American authors-not only entails or exemplifies ethical situations, but, more dramatically, performs, enacts them through the vicissitudes of telling, transmitting, listening and being made witness to, acts of story. Another significant feature of the book is its braiding of the ethical/aesthetic philosophies of Mikhail Bakhtin, Stanley Cavell, and Emmanuel Levinas, a triangulation I revisit in my work in progress, "To Make the Hands Impure": Art and Ethical Adventure, The Difficult and the Sacred.
TC: What will you be teaching at Yeshiva College?
AN: Odd as it may seem, I have never taught a course specifically on "ethics and literature" even though that particular linkage has informed both my scholarly work and pedagogy from the very start. However, it feels like exactly the right note on which to begin my career at YU, as my role here may lend itself to a number of "bridging" possibilities: between the College and the Graduate Schools, English and its departmental siblings, YU and other NY universities, and last but not least (dare I say), Torah and Madda. Actually, a team-taught course I have in mind for a later date would be precisely on the topic of "Torah u-Madda" in terms of competing/complementary textual traditions and secular/religious criticisms in dialogue.
The Commentator: Where were you educated?
AN: I received my undergraduate degree in music composition and theory from Haverford College, and did graduate research in literature and philosophy at Harvard University. At the University of Texas at Austin, I held positions in the Department of English, Committee for Comparative Literature, and Program in Jewish Studies where I taught courses in 20th c. American and 19th c. British literature, European Fiction, theory and criticism, modern Jewish poetry and prose, popular culture, and hermeneutics.
TC: What was the topic (brief description) of your dissertation?
AN: Narrative Ethics: The Çlaim of Fiction (1992)--which became my first book (minus colon and subtitle)--was composed at a moment when ethics was cresting as a newly relevant category for literary study, and did a couple of interesting things. First, it sought a bridge between the disciplines of ethical philosophy and literary studies by proposing a new way to think about the moral realms of risk and responsibility as problems of reading. The book's title encapsulates its burden: that narrative-in this case prose fiction by 19th and 20th century British and American authors-not only entails or exemplifies ethical situations, but, more dramatically, performs, enacts them through the vicissitudes of telling, transmitting, listening and being made witness to, acts of story. Another significant feature of the book is its braiding of the ethical/aesthetic philosophies of Mikhail Bakhtin, Stanley Cavell, and Emmanuel Levinas, a triangulation I revisit in my work in progress, "To Make the Hands Impure": Art and Ethical Adventure, The Difficult and the Sacred.
TC: What will you be teaching at Yeshiva College?
AN: Odd as it may seem, I have never taught a course specifically on "ethics and literature" even though that particular linkage has informed both my scholarly work and pedagogy from the very start. However, it feels like exactly the right note on which to begin my career at YU, as my role here may lend itself to a number of "bridging" possibilities: between the College and the Graduate Schools, English and its departmental siblings, YU and other NY universities, and last but not least (dare I say), Torah and Madda. Actually, a team-taught course I have in mind for a later date would be precisely on the topic of "Torah u-Madda" in terms of competing/complementary textual traditions and secular/religious criticisms in dialogue.
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