VoE_Renker Podcast
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Elizabeth Renker: In my view, my experience as a teacher, you need to be in these person to person, one on one discussions where you have a community of inquiry, and this is the biggest picture here of all: the job of a teacher is not to deliver information. That is not the job of a teacher. The job of a teacher is to train a student to acquire knowledge. Those are completely different things. So, that's been the core of my teaching, too. Training the students in the methods to acquire knowledge and what it means to acquire knowledge. Anybody can find information. 

Jen Farmer: From the heart of The Ohio State University on the Oval, this is Voices of Excellence from the College of Arts and Sciences, with your host David Staley. Voices focuses on the innovative work of Arts and Sciences faculty and staff with departments as wide ranging as art, astronomy, chemistry and biochemistry, physics, emergent materials and mathematics and languages, among many others. The college always has something exciting happening. Join us to find out what's new, now.

David Staley: Joining me today in the ASC Marketing and Communication Studio is Elizabeth Renker, Professor of English at The Ohio State University College of the Arts and Sciences. Dr. Renker, welcome to Voices. 

Elizabeth Renker: Thank you. Thank you for having me. 

David Staley: And we talked recently about your podcast, Discovering Sarah Piatt, and we're going to spend some time talking about her. Let's start first reminding us who Sarah Piatt was. 

Elizabeth Renker: Well, first of all, I'd like everyone to realize they should feel no guilt about not recognizing her name. When people ask me what I'm writing on and I tell them, they usually default to apologizing. Oh, I've never heard of her. I'm sorry. 

David Staley: And I fall in that category. I've never heard of her before. 

Elizabeth Renker: So she falls more broadly in the category of what we sometimes call the recovered woman writer or the rediscovered woman writer. We live in a moment where people are very interested in people who have been left out of the historical record or the literary canon, and Sarah is one of these people. She was a celebrity poet in her own lifetime. 

David Staley: And when was that, roughly? 

Elizabeth Renker: 1836 to 1919. And she had a publishing career of half a century. 

David Staley: Hmm. 

Elizabeth Renker: Many hundreds of poems, very well known. Published transatlantically. She was a celebrity as a teenager. So this is a woman who was very well known in her time, which is not to say that many unknown figures are not interesting and worthy of recovery, but that she gives us a particular case of a very famous woman who also didn't survive into the 20th century histories. 

David Staley: Why is that? What explains that? And understanding she's hardly the only one that's fallen into this.

Yes, 

Elizabeth Renker: exactly. And my answer to this question also pertains to a lot of other women writers in particular. If you look in the big picture, you will see that, around the 19 teens, the time when what we call Modernism as a movement in the arts across Europe and the United States is surging into public attention, there is a very dramatic re-evaluation of what works of art are worth thinking about.

So there is a correlation between writers who are famous before this period and writers who are enshrined after. That was a moment when there was a big shift in what we now call the canon. That term wasn't being used then. But it's also true in the 19 teens, you can see it in the records, that a lot of the discussion about recovering literary writers and seeing them as valuable people who had not been valued previously or new writers on the modernist scene. It's also very clearly tied to some issues of gender, as well as issues of taste. So one of the things it's very easy to show is that there were hundreds of female poets in the 19th century who were very well known and beloved, culturally beloved.

That was a time when poetry was an exceptionally popular genre. Everybody knew poems and poets and they loved them. These women vanished. Now, I paused there a minute for a dramatic effect because if you, go back and you look at the canon that emerged around that time, and now I'm talking specifically about the American canon, by which I mean American writers. There are no women. They all vanished. None of them made it into the new list. The first one who would make it in to the American canon is Dickinson, and even that took a while. So Sarah and many of her peer poets were all expunged at that time. And they were expunged in part when people talked about them for qualities that were described in feminine terms.

Often they were too sentimental. They wrote about motherhood. Another example that I use with my students that hits very hard is you can see in the early decades when people talk about women writers, they make fun of poems about infants who die and children who die. And, you know, you can tell this story in the classroom and it really lands.

You can see it in the criticism. It is mockery of what they sometimes call a dead baby poem. And it was a very popular type of poem because it was something people experienced routinely. And, of course, they still do not in nearly the same kinds of numbers, but women, and often men as well, poets recorded these events in poems and it became a convention. And so that's a good example of one of the things that fell out of the canon. So, people like Sarah have been coming back to attention since about the late 70s. when women's studies is first coming to attention. So Sarah is the particular woman writer I've been working on for a long time.

David Staley: In addition to the podcast, you're working on a project, the Sarah Piatt Recovery Project? 

Elizabeth Renker: Yes. 

David Staley: I'm curious to know more about this. 

Elizabeth Renker: Yes. Now, the Sarah Piatt Recovery Project is a public digital humanities site, and it's free. One of the things about the Recovery Project that I'm proudest of is that we have been able to make primary documents available free to the public that they would have to pay for elsewhere.

Things like rare newspapers that you can find if you are lucky enough to be able to access a university database and so on. The Recovery Project as a public humanity site collects works by and about Sarah Piatt and makes them, as I said a minute ago, free to the public. It was important for me as a scholar working on recovering Sarah to deliver this information in this particular way and a couple of reasons for that.

First of all, I want it to have the widest audience possible. Second of all, we live in a time when academic publishing will no longer support certain types of scholarly projects that used to be standard. It used to be the case in another era that you would want a published volume hardcover, the complete works of so and so, the complete letters of so and so, the collected this and. that, It's not a time for that now. So, it was very important for me to start doing that work, but to do it in digital form, and again, make it free and public. So, it's an ongoing project. It has collected a lot of important things, but we continue to add to it. 

David Staley: What sorts of things? You've mentioned a couple of them. What sorts of things could we find here? 

Elizabeth Renker: Okay, a couple of good examples. I mentioned earlier that Sarah was a celebrity poet dating back to her teens, so mid 1850s. She's a teenager in antebellum Kentucky, living in a very small town. She is preternaturally gifted as a poet. The stuff that she is writing at that age really is remarkable.

And she is fortunate enough to start getting published in very, very well known newspapers. The Louisville Daily Journal, most important newspaper of the West, and the New York Ledger, one of the most popular newspapers of the time, they're both publishing her regularly. Those poems are not reprinted anywhere.

Hundreds of poems. And again, it would be very hard to convince an academic press to publish those in hard hardcover. 

David Staley: For economic reasons? 

Elizabeth Renker: For economic reasons, right. So, what you will find on the recovery project in part is every known, poem. And I say that very, very deliberately because there are certainly, I can say as her biographer, certainly many poems she wrote that we have not found yet.

I found one just a couple weeks ago. One of my graduate students found one earlier this summer. I mean, they're out there. 

David Staley: Found where? 

Elizabeth Renker: Well, Good question, and this speaks to digital culture and why it's important for the Recovery Project to have this kind of life. What that has collected so far is every known poem by Sarah published in the New York Ledger.

But, the New York Ledger is not a newspaper that you can find a full run of anywhere. However, the databases get better and better, as you know. So every single year, I can find more issues of these newspapers online and therefore look for more poems with keyword searching. so the same thing is true of Louisville Daily Journal.

The databases get better and better. So we have a page that collects all her known poems so far in the New York Ledger. We have collected all her known poems and in fact an entire run of a very rare Washington D. C. Reconstruction era newspaper called The Capital. She was frequently published in that newspaper.

That newspaper is extraordinarily hard to find. We borrowed copies from the family. One of the few places you could find a full run. We digitized it. It's free online. You can now find it on Readex, which involves a steep charge. 

David Staley: What was the subject of her poetry? 

Elizabeth Renker: Hmm, good question. Okay because there are so many hundreds of poems, I'm going to give you a very big picture.

Okay, so one important thing to say about her is that when she was writing back in Kentucky, again, first poems are coming out in the 1850s, she got married just as the Civil War was breaking out. She got married in the spring of 1861 and moved away to Washington, D. C., the crucible of the war. But her poems before she got married, when she was living in Kentucky, and her poems after the war, are very different.

So when you say, what are her poems about, I'm going to generalize a little bit. When she was a young woman in Kentucky, she wrote poems that were very lush. And what I mean by that is poems full of very rich imagery, long lines. She's often writing in iambic pentameter. She is very familiar with the British Romantic poets, and the poet most important to her is Lord Byron.

And if you know anything about Lord Byron, you know he was a social satirist. He was famous for various kinds of scandal. It was a little bit scandalous of this young teenage girl to like Byron so much. People warned her away from it. But in many ways she writes in a Byronic style. She even picks up some of his characters. The doomed handsome man, for example. The exile. The heartbroken person. And basically, just to give you a preview of what's happening in the biography, all these poems are her coded way of criticizing what's happening in her social world. She turns it into a fan, a Byronic fantasy world, but she's really criticizing and she's saying things in her poems she can't say out loud.

So that would be my summary of the early poems. After she gets married, she's out of Kentucky. She's in a different social situation. She decides she's going to change her style. This is a part of the biography I'm working on right now. But the poems look very different. I mentioned those lush images and the long lines.

That's all gone. She strips down her style. And she starts writing more concertedly as a realist. And what I mean by that, lots of poems about what it's like being a married woman, a mother to children, and a woman in a patriarchal society. So, that gives you a sense of two of the big kinds of topics she tackles.

David Staley: Did she write anything else or just poetry? Did she write novels or short stories or? 

Elizabeth Renker: Great question. So, first of all, let's go back to what I said a minute ago. We still have many things to discover about her, okay? We do know that she wrote some prose- they're often called sketches in the 19th century like today, sort of what you'd call an essay. We know she wrote some of those. They're wonderful. She's a great writer, and she's also very funny. She's funny and she's witty by turns, but those are terrific. A few years back, someone turned up a short story she wrote. We hadn't known she did that. Again, this was as a very young woman.

So, there are a few things still turning up that tell us, I recently found just this summer a newspaper article by her. That was the first of those. We would know about the newspaper poems. So, my answer to your question is she wrote other things. We found some of them, and there are probably still a lot of other things out there.

David Staley: Did these discoveries change the way you thought about her as a writer? 

Elizabeth Renker: Well, I knew about the sketches, the other discoveries, yes. They keep changing how I think about her. I also recently turned up a poem that I am 99 percent sure is hers and it was written under a pseudonym. So, yes, every single thing that turns up that is discovered either by myself or by many other people who are interested in her and are out there researching, it always adds to how I think about what she was doing.

David Staley: You had mentioned a moment ago that you're writing a biography of Sarah Piatt. I'd like to hear a little bit about what you're uncovering, what your argument is. And I have

a question also about biography as a whole, but what can we expect to read in this biography? 

Elizabeth Renker: Well one of the things that's really challenging and fun for me about it is it is the first biography. So what I mean by that is because Sarah was so famous, you will find in her lifetime people writing reviews of her books or her poems. Usually they know a little bit about her because there's celebrity buzz about her out there in the media sphere. There are some journalistic features on her in magazines and newspapers.

So information comes up in those sources. When I say I'm writing the first biography, it means the first full account of her entire life and when you are doing the first one, it's a very different challenge from, for example, if I were to write a biography about Herman Melville. There are scores of biographies about him.

David Staley: Sure. 

Elizabeth Renker: So, if you're trying to publish a biography, for example, and you want to write one about Herman Melville or Shakespeare or something like that, your challenge is you have to turn up either a new archive of stuff, look, new letters by Shakespeare, or you have to have a completely new angle. So a very recent biography, for example, of Robert E. Lee, very much takes the stance previous biographies have said these things, I am taking this stance, and one of the stances is this man was a traitor. There is nothing about him to admire, and anyone who's familiar with the historical image of Robert E. Lee knows that is something that has changed radically over time.

So when you're writing a first biography, really, my challenge is to, what I usually say, find the stuff. I mean, things that have not been found before. Simple details, like, where exactly was she born? 

We know the place, but I figured out, I went to Kentucky and tracked old maps and found the family farms down there. I mean, it's that type of searching and searching on the ground in the example of the old maps and the farms, but also just pouring through the archives, trying to figure out basic details. And this takes us back to another issue related to recovered women.

There's a term now in scholarship people are using a lot: the term is archival silences, and what this gets at is what was saved in libraries and elsewhere and why, and we know now how many voices were not preserved, and this is often the case with women writers. Now, it's also true in Sarah's case, that she made some choices. Sarah, over the course of her life, gave birth to eight children. And yet, she managed to write no fewer than 600 poems. Okay, so you imagine what a day looks like in her life. One of the things that she chose to do, and now I'm able to say this not as a matter of my interpretation, but because I have it in a letter by her husband.

She made a choice. Poems over letters. She was going to take the time she had to write poems, and consequently he handled most of the family correspondence. So I have a ton of letters by her husband, but not too many by her. So it creates a situation where, in many cases, I have to say, she's a little bit of a silent partner sometimes.

Big things going on, and I can hear his voice, and I have her poems, but she hasn't given me a direct commentary. It's also the case that many of her papers and his were lost, first to theft of a trunk while they were traveling, a whole trunk of literary property was stolen, and later in a house fire.

So this is the kind of thing a biographer just thinks about. It's probably like Henry James's famous story about this, the Aspern Papers, the lost manuscripts, the things that burned apparently included , all her diaries. 

David Staley: Oh, daggers in the heart. 

Elizabeth Renker: Yes, exactly. So, so writing a biography, biographers know there are cases where you have the hard fact right there, the letter. But there are other cases where you have to deduce things. 

David Staley: Had you written a biography before? 

Elizabeth Renker: No. This is my first biography. 

David Staley: How is writing or researching a biography different from other kinds of research? You mentioned being in the archives, for instance. 

Elizabeth Renker: Yes, yes, yes. 

David Staley: Everyone does this. Is biography somehow different from other kinds of research?

Elizabeth Renker: It is very different, and I have to say one of the reasons I decided to do it was because I wanted this new genre challenge. I've published an awful lot of literary criticism, and I wanted to have the experience of writing this biography, but I've had to learn a lot, and it's fun doing it. It's a very different way of thinking, and partly because of what I said a minute ago, academic writing which, you know, in our general culture, there's an image that I think is largely correct. Academic writing is usually written by academics for other academics. We speak our own language. We cherish, for very good reasons, things like the footnote. The footnote is one of my favorite genres. I love the footnotes. I get my students excited about footnotes, and I always think it's fun when we can commune about the fact that sometimes they're the best part of something because they speak to where you found something.

How on earth did you get yourself to the point in your knowledge where you are able to make a claim? That involves a lot of research and hunting. Anyway, writing for a more general audience is a whole different matter. In a biography, it's not driven by constantly foregrounding what the research is ,what arguments you have you are contesting, or you are accepting.

Instead, you have to move into a storytelling mode. And yet, the story has to be fully grounded in precise research. 

So that's the thing that makes it different. No one who publishes a biography wants to see footnotes. They don't want to see constant flagging of other arguments. They don't want to see your disagreements with this or that person.

All that has to be minimized. It can't even go into footnotes because they don't want too many footnotes. So it's, a very different way of writing. And it raises a question I know that also interests you, David, which is how do you integrate into the writing of something that is fundamentally historical acts of imagination?

Because you do have to make those deductions. 

David Staley: So, you have to say a little more about that, because, as you know, I am interested in the role of imagination in historical writing. 

Elizabeth Renker: All right. I will give you a great example of something I am thinking about right now, and I think our audience will find this an interesting example.

I have very hard evidence that Sarah's husband, whose name was J. J. Piatt, John James Piatt, was an abolitionist. And this goes in the category of discovery, okay. It's not something that's out there in any of the publications about the PIATs. It's the kind of thing that people don't know. People might have hoped it was true, but you need to find the evidence.

And I have a friend, fellow Piatt researcher named Sean Andres. And Sean Andres some years ago sent me a newspaper article he found. Again, this is like the dusty archives of newspapers. com. He found an article that he knew would interest me that mentioned J. J. Piatt as part of an abolitionist group. So, I have been wondering about that for a long time.

And as I've been writing the biography these past few months, I went after that particular article Sean found, and I was able to find a lot more information validating the fact that in Washington, D. C. during the Civil War, J. J. Piatt was one of the founders of an abolitionist group. Okay? Anyway, that was just the beginning of something I was able to build.

It's incontrovertible. I have so much evidence. Okay, creating suspense. What does this imply about his wife? 

David Staley: Ah. 

Elizabeth Renker: You see what I'm saying? Yes. Now, there were many poems by Sarah where you could deduce a sympathy for an anti slavery position, but we do not have a single document, at least at the present time, where Sarah says, quote, I am an abolitionist.

So, in a biography, this is a good question, right? What can you deduce? What can you reasonably deduce? So I think that's an example that people will recognize is very important and an interesting challenge. 

David Staley: Will you make that argument that she had abolitionist sympathies? 

Elizabeth Renker: I will make that argument. And I'll talk a little bit more about why I feel I'm able to do that.

And you will all have to stay tuned for when the biography appears in case I turn up anything else. In the meantime, but we do have a record of Sarah saying in public print that she was a Republican. Now let me give people a little bit of historical context on this. The political parties were different during the Civil War.

The Republican Party is the party of anti slavery. It's the party of Lincoln. J. J. Piatt also was a Republican. And as I said, I know he was an abolitionist. He was part of this group. For a woman from Kentucky... Lincoln was born in Kentucky and got almost no votes in the presidential election. For a woman from Kentucky to say she was a Republican is a loud signal.

But you see, again, I don't have her saying, quote, I am an abolitionist. So, what I have is pieces of things like that about Sarah, but my belief at the present time is once you put those in the context of a very close, intimate marriage, she had a very positive marriage, with an abolitionist, you say, the preponderance of the evidence is there.

David Staley: Well, I look forward to reading this biography. I'd like to ask about an earlier book that you've written, The Origins of American Literature Studies: An Institutional History. And, well, I'll just start by asking this question: Why are there departments of English in American universities? 

Elizabeth Renker: Okay, good question.

So, in the big picture, we want to say, first of all, that Departments in American universities do not come into existence under that name until the 1890s. So one of the things that it's important for people to understand is that the disciplines we've inherited, the ideas we have today, like a department or like a university, these are all historical phenomena.

They're not timeless, permanent features of daily life. So there is a tremendous change in education in the United States, especially after the Civil War. What had previously been the traditional college curriculum was founded in the classics. It was called the classical curriculum. You studied Greek and Latin.

After the war, American society is changing fast, changing really fast. And one of the things that starts to change is education. A number of leaders at various in various places wanted to found new universities that would adapt to modern conditions. Now this term modern is very important. Remember I said earlier the canon changed in the 19 teens because of modernism.

Modernism saw itself as rejecting obsolete models and doing something new. Every age thinks it's modern. Okay? Every age thinks it's modern. So, after the Civil War, education says we have to keep up with the modern world. Nobody really needs Latin and Greek. That was true in the days when you didn't have this surging world of engineering and, business and, and life wasn't moving so fast.

You didn't have people building cities. We need new things. We need new ways of training people for modern life. So what we're going to do is we're going to modernize the curriculum. English made it into the new universities because it was a modern language. It had nothing to do with literature. It had nothing to do with literary interpretation.

That's what people think now. That's true, well, that's crumbling too, but originally English got there because it was a modern language along with French and German and Spanish and all that meant was it's not Latin and Greek. The debate was ancient world versus modern world. That's how English got there.

And then the story of English, of course, just evolves over time to get us where we are today. 

David Staley: Given the current climate in American higher education, do you think the English department, and I put that in scare quotes, does the English department have a future? 

Elizabeth Renker: Well, here I am going to stand on the shoulders of a person I believe is one of our most important scholars on this topic, and this is John Guillory.

And because I'm so interested in the importance of teaching, I share that vision with John Guillory. I want to mention he was my undergraduate advisor starting my freshman year, and he and I have shared research interests over the years. He wrote a very, very important book in 1993 called Cultural Capital about the phenomenon of the literary canon.

And the role it places in society, why we have a canon, why it's important, why people care about it. But he published a book in 2022 called Professing Criticism. And this is his meditation on the status of English departments today. And he believes that the picture is bleak. And what he means by that is that remember I said English departments start out as departments of English language.

Literature comes later. John Guillory points out and I believe he's correct about this. It's certainly what my experience has been in this field for over 30 years. What used to be the core of the English department, which was literary history has been falling to the margins of English departments as they move, here we're back to that idea again, of the modern.

They move more and more in directions that our society has now defined as modern, like digital media, video game studies, okay? So literary history has been pushed to the margins, and other things are emerging as the new directions for English. One of John Guillory's arguments in that book, which I believe is correct, is that literary history's role in English will never resume the primacy it once had.

Instead, what English has to do, even though it's still called English, which is a very baggy, vague term, what English departments need to do, Guillory argues, is they need to integrate what they do with what he calls the media system. The full picture of what is happening in media, that is the future of English.

And I think he's right on that ground. The question is, will they retain the name English department? Or will they end up merging into departments of communications, departments of digital media, We have all these kinds of programs and departments now. So I think that's really the question. Is it going to remain the department of English? Especially as we have economic cutbacks, reductions in numbers of departments and scholars. 

David Staley: I could have, had I chose to, introduce you by noting all of your numerous teaching awards, but I wanted to get into our conversation rather than spending literally all of our time talking about your teaching awards.

You are an award-winning teacher. I'm curious to know, what's your secret? What are your pedagogical practices? What's made you an award -winning teacher?

Elizabeth Renker: Well, this topic for me in a way is going to dovetail back on what I've been saying about historical change because the 30 plus years I've been in this line of work, things have changed a lot, and everyone will understand what I mean when I say I was already a teacher before there was any such thing as the World Wide Web or e mail. So, things keep changing, right? Technology keeps changing what we do. The core of my teaching practice has always been Socratic method. 

David Staley: You might define that for our listeners. 

Elizabeth Renker: Okay, so basically what this means is it's a model of teaching in which the teacher guides each individual student through a process of asking questions.

Okay, that's been the core of it. And for me, that has also involved very careful listening. I've always focused less on talking than on listening. So you can hear from what I'm saying everything about the experience of teaching that I have found so valuable and so enriching is based on personal communication with students in a classroom.

And that means having small enough classes where I can get to know all of them. I did, manage over time, we, teach at a large university and we face economic constraints all the time. I did manage over time to get to the point where I could manage to know every student in a class of 45.

But you're hitting a boundary there. That's very hard. Very different from seminar size classes. But I did my best to adapt. Conditions now are such with course sizes growing with increasing pressures to teach online and to teach asynchronous classes where the idea of Socratic method has to change.

I do not think those modes of teaching are ideal by any means because of what I've just said about the necessity of personal contact. In my view, my experience as a teacher, you need to be in these person to person, one on one discussions where you have a community of inquiry and where you are not, this is the biggest picture here of all, the job of a teacher is not to deliver information. That is not the job of a teacher. The job of a teacher is to train a student to acquire knowledge. Those are completely different things. So, that's been the core of my teaching too. Training the students in the methods to acquire knowledge and what it means to acquire knowledge. Anybody can find information.

David Staley: Elizabeth Renker, thank you. 

Elizabeth Renker: Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure. 

Jen Farmer: Voices of Excellence is produced and recorded at The Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences Marketing and Communications Studio. More information about the podcast and our guests can be found at go.osu.edu/voices. Voices of Excellence is produced by Doug Dangler. I'm Jen Farmer.