Into the COLAverse – Episode 1: Elizabeth “Liz” Scala

[00:00:00] Intro: Welcome to Into the Colaverse, a podcast that takes us on the unique journeys of faculty in the College of Liberal Arts at UT Austin. Join me your host, Frederick Luis Aldama as we learn of the many ways that our faculty and their cutting edge work is transforming the world today.

[00:00:22] Frederick: I am so honored and excited to have Elizabeth, Liz Scala, who is Ellen Clayton Garwood centennial, professor of English and my goodness, wearing so many caps. Graduate advisor, medieval studies, director of English Honors program. Um, welcome.

[00:00:44] Liz: Hi. It’s great to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me.

[00:00:49] Frederick: So Liz, um, before we get into, you know, your con your moment, um, right now, I wanna, I’d love for you to share, um, you know, what was it about, I don’t know, what was in the water you were drinking as a kid that led you.

[00:01:06] Frederick: I mean beautifully to Wellesley and then Harvard, but more specifically, uh, this very deep interest in medieval literature. And not just medieval literature, but medieval studies and what you call or others have called post medieval studies, how this stuff is a live today. So, Take us on your journey. Sure.

[00:01:30] Liz: Um, I was a, I was a lonely, lonely child and I read a lot of books, um, and was really interested in, um, the middle Ages, uh, you know, as a backdrop for, uh, romances and, and various stories and really loved children’s books that were illustrated with, um, that kind of. Medieval design. So a little stained glass, a little like, um, I don’t know, uh, illuminated borders with flowers and birds and whatnot in it.

[00:02:04] Liz: That’s like how I got into the medieval stuff, I mean, but really just the love of old books. So spent a lot of time in the library. Uh, read a lot of Girl series books. Was really into Nancy Drew. That was like the big thing. I remember when I was really young, my mom tried to get me into romance. You know, romance.

[00:02:27] Liz: Romance didn’t really work. Um, but I, I really liked. Historical fiction. And so, um, I backed into being a literary scholar in a weird way. I was definitely gonna medical school as a, um, as a college student and as a, and a high school student. I was big into math and science. Always loved reading, thought it was really easy thought English class was really easy.

[00:02:49] Liz: It was a little boring because it wasn’t very difficult. Um, and then I took a medieval lit class my freshman year of college for fun, and I thought it would be our Surian romance. And it turned out it was literature and middle English, which was difficult to read and kind of cool to listen to an older form of our language, sort of like Shakespeare, but different, and that very difficulty got me.

[00:03:14] Liz: Hooked on it, and I kept taking it for fun as my side hustle while I was switching my major around from bio to math to you know, whatever, to try to. Sort of stay a pre-med student, um, and make my parents happy. And then, you know, somewhere in the beginning of my senior year, I just freaked out and thought I cannot, I, I gave up medical school way before that, but I, I kind of told them I would go to law school instead.

[00:03:43] Liz: And then I realized I didn’t wanna do that either. I really wanted to try to do graduate work in medieval literature. Didn’t tell them. And I just applied to grad to a couple of places for graduate school and got really lucky. Got into a good one that I, and I wanted to work with somebody there. So that’s how I, I got into that stuff.

[00:04:02] Frederick: Wow. I love it. So, uh, I mean, my goodness, Harvard was there. Um, Who was the faculty or who was the faculty unit up, um, being most working with there?

[00:04:14] Liz: Yeah. Okay. So, you know, that’s a story because I feel very fortunate to have gone to Harvard. Um, and it is really, it’s very personal for me. I, uh, You know, it’s, it was dumb luck.

[00:04:28] Liz: It was really, really dumb luck. Right? Wellesley is 12 miles away from, uh, Cambridge, Mass, where Harvard is located, and I was, uh, walking around frustrated my senior year, uh, because I didn’t have GRE scores. This was way back before they were online and you had to take them on paper and mails him in and, uh, you know, like Johns Hopkins wasn’t gonna forward my application to the English department because I didn’t have GRE scores.

[00:04:52] Liz: And so I, I walked into one of my classes. Where, uh, Dante Scholar was teaching and she said, Liz, what’s wrong? You look upset. And I told her what was wrong and she said, Do you wanna go to Johns Hopkins? And I said, No. And she said, Where do you wanna go to school? And I said, I wanna go to Harvard to work with this guy named Derek Pol, who was a British scholar who was visiting for a couple of years there.

[00:05:12] Liz: And he had just decided to take the permanent position they offered him. And she said, You know, you should go there and visit. You know, my friend so and so who happens to be the, uh, graduate. Advisor and I did and she told, she asked me what I wanted to do and I told her and she said, You should go to his office hours.

[00:05:30] Liz: And I did. And it turned out he was on graduate admissions that year. And I met him and he remembered me. And the rest is history. That’s how I got it. Was like I, it was like the only school I got into. I got into, uh, uva, huge admissions, right? They weed down a huge admissions class and I. And I got a scholarship to go to Harvard, and so I had my dream come true through, uh, the personal collections of a, uh, connections of a small liberal arts women’s college and like dumb

[00:06:03] Frederick: luck.

[00:06:06] Frederick: Dumb luck. Well, I don’t know about dumb luck, but, um, really, um, , I mean, there’s so many, so many cool lessons to take away from this and ones that we share with our students all the time, which is, you know, don’t be afraid to kind of step out and reach out and make those connections. And anyway, I love it. I also love, by the way, You know, I mean, Nancy Drew is a kind of formative text for you and you know, cuz what is Nancy Drew doing?

[00:06:34] Frederick: She is like sleuthing out and figuring it out, this stuff and yeah. Kind of tough kid. I, I love, I love Nancy Drew, um, and my good friend that I would read Nancy Drew with, um, yeah, I mean, we couldn’t get enough of Nancy Drew. Also just your like, ever inquisitive, ever kind of thirsty, hungry. Mind you, you got a, a certificate from the McCombs School of Business.

[00:07:00] Frederick: You went out to Paris as a profess. , My goodness, Liz. Um, so much cool stuff. Can I be you ?

[00:07:10] Liz: Yeah, sure. I’ll trade with you. You, we can trade, play the, That’ll be fun. I would love to be Professor Latinx and teach, um, teach comic books that I think that would be cool. I would be up for that.

[00:07:21] Frederick: Well, speaking of comic books, so, you know, I, I will admit, yes.

[00:07:26] Frederick: Um, like many of us who took literature, um, seriously and continue to take literature seriously, um, today as professionals, you know, as an undergrad, I definitely, you know, had my fun with Canterbury Tales and of course, um, Shakespeare and that was, these were all at, at Berkeley, and I had Carolyn Den Shaw, um, doing all of her kind of crazy awesome, like, you know, I mean, I’m not talking desire.

[00:07:53] Frederick: I’m talking like, you know, let’s read Canterbury Tales through the lens of s and m kind of bondage stuff and what have you. Yeah. Um, but anyway, my, my question is, um, how does. This stuff can, you know, live on, not just in maybe comics or, you know mm-hmm. , the sort of the sex pot that he, uh, Heath Ledger was, um, and, um, at Knight’s Tale.

[00:08:19] Frederick: But we can talk about those, but we could also just talk about your, your own work in this space, which is so important and critical.

[00:08:26] Liz: Yeah, I think so. I’m trying to think if I really, I mean, I, I have written on, um, a Knight the Film and Knight’s Tale and it’s paired with Shakespeare and Love and I’m trying to think about, um, the difference between the way Shakespeare and TRS are thought about in, uh, popular culture.

[00:08:45] Liz: Cuz I think Shakespeare’s thought about a lot in popular culture. TRS are much less so Right. As a, as a figure. When I, I know exactly what you’re talking about. Um, in terms of reading, like the bio that I have up online about my interests a night, um, I think part of the, this is the. Traditional part of what I do.

[00:09:05] Liz: When I think about, uh, my interest in the post, post medieval, um, existence, or the way in which these medieval texts still exist in the modern world, I’m definitely thinking through illustrated books. So a lot of times what I’m really thinking about are manuscripts that have survived the. Uh, set of Renaissance imprints of chaser’s work.

[00:09:27] Liz: Lots of, Well, I mean, like, what I used to tell my students and I wanted them to do is blow the dust off old books. So I like to send them to the Dewey Decimal part of the, um, PCL where they need to, um, pull out a Victorian edition or, or early 20th century edition of the Canterbury Tales and look at the way that text was.

[00:09:51] Liz: Sometimes abbreviated, sometimes translated, sometimes extricated. So the dirty bits were taken out of, but also illustrated, decorated, um, you know, presented to a then modern reader. So I’m. I, I do probably less work thinking about the 21st century, although that’s not completely outside of the purview of what I do.

[00:10:14] Liz: Like I do like to think about the way the Canterbury Tales are troped in modern novels. So I have this like unwritten essay that I really have to get to about. The Handmaid’s Tale, right? A Knight’s Tale like how many books and novels and films play on that. An old wives tale, right? Pretending kind of to be a Canterbury Tale because I, um, the argument of that essay, I’m just gonna give it away on the podcast, right?

[00:10:42] Liz: The argument of that essay is that, um, we think of the Canterbury Tales as being canonical. Canonical literature, the traditional literature of the man that we are looking to escape from. But the Canterbury tales were radical in the, um, in the day that they were produced, not simply for being written in English at a time when, uh, serious poetry was really still being written in French and Latin, but um, because they were stories in some sense that should never have been told.

[00:11:09] Liz: They are stories from people that don’t have the authority to speak, which is how all of those modern TROs. Of the Handmaid’s Tale. It’s like the secret story of the handmaid. No one should really know about that is what the Canterbury Tales originally were. So there’s a kind of continuous interpretive action going on in using the idea of, uh, uh, whatever tale or whatever’s tale, um, in that, in that way.

[00:11:39] Frederick: Yeah. I mean that resonates so much with even the work that I’m so focused on more, right? I mean, you know, these are all the others tales that are finally making, kind of becoming, um, having, having their day in and having their space. Um, yeah, so we’re blowing the dust awful books. We’re also in your, your work.

[00:11:59] Frederick: Um, of course, very importantly, um, correcting some. You know the egregious mistakes or translations that have taken away so much joy. In the Canada Tales. Right. And I know that your very important, significant, the Canterbury Tales handbook, uh, that you published with Norton is really, you know, focused on, aimed at bringing students to the cho, you know, to chaser’s tales and, you know, through language and genres, historical background, critical theory.

[00:12:35] Frederick: Um, yeah. I mean is it’s such a shame that. Well, first of all, I mean mid that this is a language that is at once familiar, but also very, you know, foreign or different uhhuh, that we lose the kind of beauty too, of the craft of the tales, um, in the translations.

[00:13:00] Liz: Yeah, I mean, I, it’s really funny, right? We’re only in the very, very beginning of this semester, so I have, uh, I’ve been going slow with my students in my chaser class, which, um, I teach back to back with the Taylor Swift.

[00:13:13] Liz: And, um, having them, you know, work on their language skills and their ability to read. And it is slow going, right? Like they’re better at home when they can look at the translation, which I tell them to use. And then when they come in and they just look at middle English, like they’re struggling with it, but every day it is a lesson in.

[00:13:29] Liz: Why you cannot read the Canterbury Tales in Translation, right? All of the jokes and the verbal slide of hand, the double meanings that are alive in middle English do not work in a translation. It just becomes. This literal, literal thump, um, at the end of the line. So chaser sounds like he’s often leveling stark criticism at a particular pilgrim because the translator is kind of making blunt what chaser makes playful and subtle through this naive general prologue narrator who kind of like, Doesn’t really know who he’s meeting and what might be, you know, wrong with, with what he’s saying about them.

[00:14:10] Liz: Cuz he’s so enthusiastic about everybody. So, um, you know, even this early in the second week of class, my students are already figuring out, even though they’re struggling. Oh wow. Like this guy is really interesting. If you spend the time to read him in his, in the form of English, he’s writing and he seems kind of like either a moralist or.

[00:14:32] Liz: A sadist or something a little more, um, I don’t know, like stayed and rigid. If you, if you read him in translation, it like becomes all content and no, um, subtlety of the form that is in his poetry.

[00:14:49] Frederick: Yeah, I c I can believe it. Of course you are much closer and you’re the expert on this. Um, but yeah, uh, just thinking back to my time in the classroom with Chaser, I can completely see that.

[00:15:01] Frederick: Let me ask while we’re on this topic and then we’re gonna move back to Language and Taylor Swift. But, um, you are, you are in your new book doing a lot to connect those. Renaissance editions of Cho are two Shakespeare. Mm-hmm. And can you, can you just, I’m just really curious about that. I mean, I’m also really excited about what you are discovering here.

[00:15:25] Frederick: That

[00:15:26] Liz: is such an interesting question because that book has been derailed so much over the last, I hate to say it. Six years. Not that everybody hasn’t been derailed by the pandemic, right? But, um, that book was literally derailed because Norton needed the handbook to come out co coincidentally, with the new Norton Chaser.

[00:15:48] Liz: So I literally had to stop writing the Shakespeare book. I was at the, um, Folger Shakespeare library in DC for a month. And I would in the mornings look at the additions of truer that they had. Um, and then in the afternoons when I got really tired, I would just kind of like close all the books and pull out my computer.

[00:16:06] Liz: And I started writing the, the Canterbury Tales Handbook out of my head, right, without an addition of ser in front of me. I just sort of composed it as I would speak to my, as I would speak to my students because. Taught the Canterbury Tales, you know, for 20 years it was really easy to just, um, know how everything was going.

[00:16:22] Liz: So it got derailed for that reason. Um, and then it got derailed, uh, a little bit because I started working on the transmission of Li and his history of Rome in the, um, 14th century. We have like evidence that Livy is somewhat being read in some form. We’re not really sure. And. That grows out. Uh, but we don’t have any manuscripts of Livie really circulating in the 14th century.

[00:16:49] Liz: We have an old French translation of Livie. People think it’s slavish and not very important, and I think clearly it might be being used. So I started working on that. It emerges out of, um, Uh, the chapter on the Physician’s Tale, which is a retelling of the story of Virginia being, um, sacrificed by her father to avoid rape.

[00:17:12] Liz: Um, that’s in that comes from Livy, um, in my book that came out in 2015. Desire in the Canterbury Tales, and that is like kind of mushrooms into this. Project that I’m doing with David Holt at Berkeley and Noah Gwen at uc Davis. So we’re editing and translating and I’m writing the introduction on this old French translation of these couple of parts of Li uh, dealing with Virginia and Lucretia.

[00:17:40] Liz: Um, so that’s kind of put the Shakespeare book on hold and then this Taylor Swiss thing has kind of taken off and is now making me think a lot about. Um, girl girlhood, the intention of girlhood and girl culture in the, um, since 1989. I mean, it’s no accident, right? I have two daughters, one born in 97 and one born in 99, so that they are the, you know, like OG Taylor fans and I was just in the periphery of that and then kind.

[00:18:15] Liz: Got on the train late, uh, you know, by c by whatever circumstance, but like got my head lit up so that Charles and Shakespeare book has really been on hold for a, a good, long time. And I’m waiting for, I, I think I need maybe help rebooting that project. I have an essay that came out from it in ts. Um, but it’s really, uh, that book is gonna be really about why I think Shakespeare is obsessed with chaser is knight’s.

[00:18:43] Liz: Because I see it in so many of his plays. And because, uh, if you go and look at the six editions of chaser published in the Renaissance, the trappings of this knighthood in nightly aristocratic identity get attached to cha or in the um, Preparatory materials, the Parex that keep get, that keep accruing to that book.

[00:19:07] Liz: And so I’m gonna think about how truer gets presented to Shakespeare visually as more of a knight in an aristocrat than he really. Was, but through those para texts. And then why Shakespeare is possibly alluding to, um, the Knight’s Tale, right? Which is a story of two nights in love with one woman in, um, two gentlemen of Verona, his fir, one of his first plays, and then literally rewrites it with Fletcher as t Noble kinsman at the very end of his career as one of his last plays.

[00:19:41] Liz: But I see it in Romeo, it’s in Midsummer Night Stream. Like it’s just all over the place.

[00:19:48] Frederick: Wow. Yeah. Well, I can’t wait, and I, I completely know that kind of derailing or the having to put things on the shelf. Um, and, but then of course waking up every morning thinking, Oh my God, I’ve, Yeah. You know, Another month has gone, another year’s gone.

[00:20:03] Frederick: I’ve gotta, I’ve gotta pull that off the shelf. I’ve gotta finish it. Yeah. Um, okay. So, At Swift D Prof. Um, yeah, you are, you are blowing it up. But let me, I wanna ask you, um, what, Okay. It’s not just, I mean, a lot of us, I mean, I teach comics. I, you know, I, you know, comic books and, um, comic book media and identities.

[00:20:31] Frederick: You know, a lot of us across the country and lit departments, you know, are teaching popular culture as a way to bring students to those tough, complex issues that we do with, um, say canonical literature, if you will. Mm-hmm. . But there’s something about your course that seems to be resonating beyond just a.

[00:20:58] Frederick: Way of making sexy what we already do. And I just wonder, like what, what is your sense of that? Taking a step back, I mean mm-hmm. , what is it beyond just people being like, Oh, there’s this really cool course and this cool professor who’s, you know, doing this course on Taylor Swift and, you know, um, early.

[00:21:21] Frederick: Canonical literature. What is it? What, I don’t know. What, what’s your sense of this? My,

[00:21:26] Liz: Okay, so like, you know, I think about this a lot cuz I keep getting asked really provocative and interesting questions by people, but also because, and the people, it’s not so much the interviewers. I mean those are interesting.

[00:21:37] Liz: So people ask, asking me questions on Instagram or emailing me right at my, um, university address. I think it’s, um, They want a kind of vindication of their interests. Stu, you know, people and especially students, want a vindication of their, of their interests and their passions. And so, um, they are hyper enthusiastic about this idea of Taylor Swift course because for them, that’s, that is poetry, right?

[00:22:06] Liz: For them. Music is that kind of writing is what they really, um, deeply care about. They wanna see somebody take it seriously and somebody take them, taking it. Take, take, take. Seriously taking it seriously. Right? So that’s where I think the P that power is coming from. I’m not really getting, you know, this sense of, Oh, I’d get to, I’d get an A in this class because I know all the lyrics.

[00:22:32] Liz: So I’m getting really interesting responses to the post that I’m doing from the. Course, which are kind of interesting, right? Like split screen, Christopher Marlow and Taylor Swift from the reputation era. Thinking about, um, I was, you know, I was thinking about, and it really kind of came to me in the middle of the week teaching ready for it, that, you know, that that is a kind of seduction poem.

[00:22:57] Liz: Um, it to many other things too. People wanna read this in terms of prob biography in terms. Right. Um, how she’s resisting this media image of herself, but it’s also looking at it in hindsight, right? That she’s thinking about starting a relationship with somebody who, you know, has to deal with what her reputation is in the media.

[00:23:16] Liz: We know this is the time of her light where she is meeting Joe Alwin. She makes this analogy between Burton and Taylor, right? Burton to this Taylor, a British actor. Kind of known for his traditional, um, power on the stage. So like a little more trans conservative. And then this kind of tempestuous, uh, tabloid larger than life American actress.

[00:23:40] Liz: It in hindsight, reading back through this, I’m like, this is not simply about her media, um, identity and resistance to her media identity, which you can say all of reputation is doing. This is the seduction poem. I’ll be, I’ll be the robber. You, you, you’re a killer. I’m a robber. They’re not just metaphors.

[00:24:00] Liz: That, and then that hit me to think about the passionate Christopher Marlow’s, passionate shepherd, Right? Where aristocrats are going out and playing it, being shepherds and shepherd. This is, and this is the pose of how you, you know, tell a woman that you, you know, want her is that you pretend to be a shepherd, you know, courting her and bringing her gifts from the natural world and.

[00:24:22] Liz: You know, I think that that’s gonna, that people are like kind of interested that I can do this, that I can bring these things together. I think it makes them happy to see her writing and the things that she’s doing in her writing taken seriously and their interest in her writing taken seriously. Right?

[00:24:40] Liz: It’s izing both of those and validating really both of those

[00:24:44] Frederick: things. Wow. Yeah. No, no. I, Oh, absolutely. My brain’s kind of doing all this popcorning right now. Um, with everything you’ve been sharing, what do you ex what, what’s in the ideal kind of world? Um, and maybe you’re already experiencing this with your students now that we’re going into, I think week three.

[00:25:06] Frederick: Yeah. Um, what do. Have you had any surprises already, you know, coming from the students and what do you hope they’ll kind of walk away with after this course?

[00:25:20] Liz: Well, I, yeah, I haven’t had that many, There hasn’t been enough time to be really surprised by them. Um, you know, I am surprised a little bit. They’re not all huge swifties.

[00:25:30] Liz: Like some of them are there, they’re kind of mildly interested in what’s going on, so they’re not, um, And none of them are mindless about it. Right. But they are. They are They, And they have definitely, Cause they’re all honors students. They’re from liberal arts honors. They’ve probably all done AP English or some version of it and studied literature at a high level.

[00:25:50] Liz: So at this point in the semester, it is really just getting traction on the depth of analysis between the song and then whatever else I bring in, because it’s. Uh, quite always, that’s thematic connection. Sometimes it’s really a connection through figures or the use of certain structures, and they have to be a little flexible.

[00:26:15] Liz: So you have to do what you’re gonna do to the Taylor Swift song and then be a little meta about it, right? In order to then go over to the unrelated other piece. Poetry and then do take, you know, take that meta thing and then realize how to do it to the other, the, um, the other work.

[00:26:35] Frederick: Liz, you talked about your.

[00:26:37] Frederick: Very early fascination with books that had kind of ornate illustration work with the Swifty, um, and early modern lit that you’re doing this, this course that you’re doing, this wonderful course that you’re doing. Um, are you also looking at kind of music video, um, and, you know, as kind of parex or as kind of illustrated, you know, book?

[00:27:03] Frederick: Mm-hmm. . Yeah.

[00:27:04] Liz: Yes, definitely we are gonna do that. Um, that comes up closer to the end of the semester. So, um, you know, right now I see like my, the order in which I’m doing things is a little fungible maybe. And I did a lot of, you know, right now, the first five or six weeks of class right, is all about close reading and thinking about how to read really closely, right?

[00:27:25] Liz: It’s a three 14, how to use the Oxford English dictionary. Why, what is etymology and language origin? What does that tell you? You know, it tells you more than at this point in the poem this is happening. Right. Like what? So I’m gonna try to teach them that toward the end of the semester, we are gonna deal with all too well, Right.

[00:27:44] Liz: And we’re gonna deal with that song in its five minute version. It’s. Um, Taylor’s version, the 10 minute Taylor’s version. And then, uh, we’re gonna look at a, a shorter music, just the music video, and then all too well the short film. And we’re gonna think about these modes of production and reproduction, the whole rerecording, um, phenomenon that’s going on.

[00:28:08] Liz: So I’m kind of saving some of the video stuff for the last. I would say it’s the two to three weeks before Thanksgiving when we’re going to, to get into that. Um, and we have some big longer novels to read. We’ll do a, so we’re gonna start, we start with poetry. We move to a Shakespeare play, We’ll read Romeo, Juliet, Uh, we will then move to a novel, uh, De Maiers, Rebecca.

[00:28:31] Liz: We’ll look at Hitchcock’s film version of Rebecca. And then from out of that, we’ll then move to visual forms, uh, with the music video and

[00:28:39] Frederick: such. Where can I sign up? . I want, I want this course. Um, Liz, you’re, you are, what can I say? Definitely blowing the dust off old books. Yeah. And, um, I wanna thank you.

[00:28:55] Frederick: This was really incredible and I know our listeners are gonna be really excited to, um, have listened to this and to have learned from you. I could see this, your course. Um, now, It’s future iterations, you know, as maybe another , another book that displaces the, the Shakespeare Tosser book. Mm-hmm. . But I could also see it as a.

[00:29:19] Frederick: You know, a wonderful opportunity, um, for a big class that might even, um, you know, we could put some resources into film so that those outside in the larger public could also, um, be invited into the space of learning that you’ve created so beautifully. So, yeah. Thank you Liz, for,

[00:29:36] Liz: for this. Thank you. I think that would all be much appreciated.

[00:29:39] Liz: So yeah, I would love to talk more about.

[00:29:45] Outro: Into The Colaverse is produced by the University of Texas at Austin’s College of Liberal Arts Sound Engineering by the Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services. You can find Into the Colaverse Podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. Thanks for listening and see you next time.