Kevin Dettmar of Pomona College will present “Dead Poets Society and the Corpus That Talks Back” Thursday, Feb. 19, at 7 p.m. in Austin Reading Room in Nicholson Library at Linfield College.
Dettmar, W.M. Keck Professor of English and department chair at Pomona College, will discuss the film “Dead Poets Society” as the best known example in American culture of what humanities teaching should look like at the college level − and what a very bad model it provides. In the film, Mr. Keating (played by Robin Williams) exploits the prep school’s cult of personality, making the lessons more about himself than about poetry.
“Worse, he’s a terrible reader of poetry,” said Dettmar. “Every poem is reduced to a life lesson and seems to teach him nothing he didn’t know already. Poetry, at its best, has the power to disturb, but Mr. Keating is never disturbed. He’s never met a poem he doesn’t like, which suggests he’s not reading the right poetry.”
Dettmar holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Davis; a postgraduate diploma from Trinity College; and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles. With a Ph.D. in modern British literature from UCLA, Dettmar taught at Loyola Marymount University, Clemson University, Columbia University, and Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, before coming to Pomona in 2008.
A scholar of literary modernism by vocation, he has published widely on 20th century and contemporary British and Irish fiction. His first book, “The Illicit Joyce of Postmodernism: Reading Against the Grain,” was published in 1996. He has edited three volumes of critical essays on modernism and currently serves as general editor for the “Longman Anthology of British Literature,” a classroom text, and as series editor, with Mark Wollaeger, of the Oxford University Press series Modernist Literature & Culture. He is past president of the Modernist Studies Association and the Midwest Modern Language Association. With William S. Brockman and Robert Spoo, he is currently compiling a three-volume edition of the nearly 2,000 unpublished letters of James Joyce for Oxford University Press.
While a literary scholar by training, Dettmar has become a popular music critic by avocation. In 1999, he edited “Reading Rock & Roll: Authenticity, Appropriation, Aesthetics” with William Richey. “Is Rock Dead?” followed in 2006; he also edited the “Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan” (2009). He has served on the executive committee of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, U.S. Branch, and served a term as the editor-in-chief of the Association’s “Journal of Popular Music Studies.” His most recent book, a volume in the Continuum/Bloomsbury series 33⅓, is on Gang of Four’s 1979 debut album, Entertainment!
The lecture is sponsored by PLACE (Program for Liberal Arts and Community Engagement), exploring this year’s theme “How Do We Know? Paths to Wisdom.” The lecture is free and open to the public. For more information, contact Jesus Ilundain at jilunda@linfield.edu, 503-883-2362.
