Into the COLAverse – Episode 3: Deborah Beck

[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.

[00:00:24] Frederick: I am so excited to have Deborah Beck, associate professor in the Department of Classics with me today. Welcome, Deborah.

[00:00:33] Deborah: Thank you. I really appreciate the invitation. I’m looking forward to, uh, learning more about my own work, which is what I find usually happens when a terrific interviewer ask me questions that I haven’t thought about before.

[00:00:44] Deborah: I find out something new just from finding out what I think is the answer to those question.

[00:00:50] Frederick: Well, I hope you’ve set the bar high for me now, Deborah. So let’s, let’s hope this, uh, is a terrific interview. Let’s start with my goodness. So, um, something in the water you were drinking, uh, as a, as a child, as a kid.

[00:01:05] Frederick: And excited about things like Greek myth. Um, yeah. And then it led you to, uh, finally getting a PhD, but I know there was a moment when you were thinking maybe biology as an undergrad. Yeah. But let’s hear about your journey and then where you’re at with your work today.

[00:01:24] Deborah: Sure. So, um, I don’t remember before I knew how to read, I taught myself to read when I was three.

[00:01:31] Deborah: Um, and my mother basically for. 15 years, just constantly threw books at me to try to, you know, keep me entertained. Um, and uh, one of the early books that she offered me that I loved were children’s Books of Mythology, and I had one that was about. Greek mythology and another one that was about Norris mythology.

[00:01:55] Deborah: So I could have ended up as a scholar of Norwegian saga, which didn’t happen. Um, and you know, the same kind of thing happens now because I get tons and tons of students in my mythology class who, who are interested in the material because they have devoured and adored for c Jackson. So I think that Greek myths have an enduring fascination for children, but at the same time, kind of the depths of the stories are something that you can return to again and again as an adult.

[00:02:21] Deborah: So as a kid, I wasn’t thinking about any of that. I just thought the stories were cool. Um, and I was fortunate to live in a town that had, um, good language instruction in the public schools. So I started taking Latin when I was in ninth grade. Um, and then, um, the 10th grade Latin teacher was really not very good.

[00:02:40] Deborah: and I didn’t disliked it enormously. At the end of the year, I was like, Well, I’m gonna sign up for Latin three, because the Latin three and four teacher was one of those, you know, famous teachers, that’s like the most significant teacher in the life of everyone who ever steps, sets foot in their class. I was like, All right, look, I’ll try it, and he’s boring and I don’t like it.

[00:02:58] Deborah: I can just drop. And of course he was amazing. And, um, the rest is history in retrospect, thinking about where I ended up, that must have been an amazingly terrible teacher that I had in land too. If I make, well, I wasn’t interested in the. Anyway. Um, I also had, you know, wonderful teachers in many other subjects and like many, um, you know, young people who were just like to learn.

[00:03:21] Deborah: I was interested in pretty much everything that I encountered in school. And so, um, when I went to college I thought, well, maybe I wanted to major in biology and maybe I wanted to major in classic. Uh, and I took a class relevant to each of those options when I was a freshman, and I liked the, the classics course a lot more.

[00:03:36] Deborah: So I majored in classics, um, with the intention, well, intention I had, like, it wasn’t even on my radar screen to be a professor when I was an undergraduate. I didn’t know any professors. I barely even knew what that meant. Other than just like the people in front of me in my classrooms, I had no idea how you got to be such a person or why you might be interested in that.

[00:03:56] Deborah: Um, I come from a family, um, that is very committed to public service and both my parents had worked in the public sector for their whole lives and I was like, Okay, so I’m gonna, you know, do something in the public sector and I don’t know yet what that is and maybe I’ll get a master’s in public health or I don’t know, something.

[00:04:11] Deborah: Um, But then I wrote a senior, uh, let’s essay that about the iea. That was an absolutely wonderful experience. Um, and I want a prize for it that I shared with a graduate student for their dissertation. Um, and to me that was, that made the price prize even more amazing. I was like, Wow. They thought my work was Ville grad student.

[00:04:30] Deborah: That is super cool. I, I found out afterwards that the grad students thought it was, That, that, that, um, that should be an undergraduate prize and that they shouldn’t have done that, and I thought it was awesome, was fine with me. Anyway, the experience of this sort of long form research into something that I really cared about really was sort of eye opening.

[00:04:50] Deborah: Not because I suddenly said, Oh, now I wanna go to graduate school. I didn’t, I went off to do other things for three years. But because that kind of planted a seed of a little bit of a sense of what it might mean. Um, to do this as a regular activity that basically, you know, lay dormant for a couple years while I was in, working in Washington, um, doing various jobs related to child welfare services.

[00:05:13] Deborah: But then I went to visit a friend of mine who had just started teaching at Swarthmore and he introduced me to a friend of his. Who taught classics, who is another absolutely amazing teacher, and who had this very probing conversation with me about my own interests and, and so forth. At the time I had this conversation, I had really no interest in becoming a professor, but during the course of the conversation, he said to me, You’re answering my questions, like, like a teacher.

[00:05:38] Deborah: And that really sort of flipped a switch in my, in my brain. And, and three months after that I applied to graduate school. Um, and then I went, and here I.

[00:05:49] Frederick: Amazing. Yeah. And also testament to the significance of that one or two, you know, um, those people in our lives that, um, kind of shifted the direction of our, our train.

[00:06:04] Frederick: Right. Um, absolutely. Yeah, really significant and important. Um, tell me though, so at Harvard you are studying, you know, classics mm-hmm. and you become deeply interested in understanding how these. Homer, others are shaping their stories, their epic poems in ways that connect with us emotionally,

[00:06:41] Deborah: right? So, um, uh, my senior essay was also about that.

[00:06:44] Deborah: My senior essay was about, um, the tension between, uh, how characters in the IEA are devoted to their families and how they’re devoted to fighting and how those come into. And how the poem treats that kind of conflict between those two solemn supreme obligations and values as, as really one of the sort of pivot points of the whole story.

[00:07:06] Deborah: Um, and basically that’s what I went to graduate school to do more of is just to think about sort of what makes the feelings of these characters tick. Because this sort of light bulb moment for me as a senior in college. Um, I read the last book of the ID in Greek, um, with, uh, a very, um, really a very interesting teacher in the sense that I like learned an enormous amount from some of the choices he made because I liked them, for example, asking us to read the last book of the id, and then there were other choices he made that I just thought were very misguided.

[00:07:42] Deborah: and that was one of the things I said to this professor at Swarthmore that’s made him tell me that I was thinking like a teacher. I said, I don’t understand why he assigned this particular thing, that if I were try and give somebody an overview of Author X, that is not what I would’ve done anyway. Um, Reading book 24 of the of the iea, the last book of the poem in which Achilles, who’s been, um, who has killed Hector, the Prince of Troy, and then refused to surrender the body for burial and instead keeps it in his camp and continues to mistreat it in various ways that are so disgraceful and inappropriate that even the gods are disgusted and send a messenger to him to say, Excuse me, this is not okay.

[00:08:24] Deborah: You may not do this. Um, and they also send her. To accompany the old father of Hector Pram to the Greek camp, to, um, ransom the corpse from Achilles so that they can bury it properly at Troy. Um, and I was reading this as a college senior and I was just dumbfounded that this Greek poem in Greek about Greeks, the Greeks win the Trojan War.

[00:08:51] Deborah: Nevertheless, the way the story is told and shaped completely fails if you. Buy into the grief of pram over the death of his child. An elderly Trojan who’s on the other side who’s not fighting is important because he’s a father. Even though he’s all these other things that you might imagine, make him not sympathetic, not important, whatever.

[00:09:16] Deborah: And I just was amazed by that way of thinking about your story. One of the ways that I talk a lot about it when I teach the iea, um, in my, in my undergraduate classes is there’s a different version of the Trojan War in which the Trojans are essentially storm troopers in the Star Wars movies. They’re all faceless, they’re all the same.

[00:09:35] Deborah: We don’t care about them, They’re just those other guys. Um, and the IEA is completely the opposite of that. The IDD is very, uh, focused on the equally. Sympathetic sorrow and bereavement and suffering of the Greeks and the Trojans. And, and a lot of my research since that senior essay has been about trying to understand how the poems tell a story that is shaped by emotion, that evoke, that arouses the emotions of the audience.

[00:10:08] Deborah: Um, And, and then part, I’m interested in that because these are such sort of large scale poems that it, it might seem sort of counterintuitive that one of the most important features of their storytelling is this very immediate human appeal to individual people’s feelings. Um, and, and partly because that’s what makes them sort of enduringly appealing is everybody can relate to feelings about being a parent.

[00:10:36] Deborah: Even if you’re not a parent, you have a. Or you miss having a parent cuz you never had one. But that’s a sort of universal human experience as being a child or being a parent and having feelings about that so that even if we don’t recognize. From personal experience, the specific details that happened to a particular parent or particular child, the way that those feelings are central, both for our reaction to characters on the Greek side and characters on the Trojan side, um, seemed to me to be a very significant choice that the poem had made.

[00:11:08] Deborah: And also one of the things that makes the poem continue to be accessible and important and appealing for later, for later readers

[00:11:17] Frederick: speech. Direct speech, direct quotation, non-direct modes has become a real fo focus point for you. And I imagine that, I don’t know, um, you know, this obviously was something that was understudied, but yet a key element in that emotion

[00:11:38] Deborah: engagement.

[00:11:40] Deborah: Yeah. So starting with Plato actually, who has a lot of really perceptive and interesting things to say about Homer. Um, One of the distinctive features of the Humira poems is the enormous proportion of them that consists of characters talking, where essentially the main narrator hands over the voice of the poem to a character.

[00:12:01] Deborah: So rather than the narrator saying, you know, once upon a time Joe and Schmo did whatever they did speech hands over the story to Joe, who then says to schmo, Hey, let’s go to the whatever. And so, Basically since the beginning of literary criticism, uh, and appreciation of the Humer columns, they have been recognized and appreciated and kind of explored in part through the enor an unusually large amount of direct speech they have in comparison to other epics.

[00:12:32] Deborah: So just by way of comparison, Um, the, the ID and the Odyssey have somewhere around two thirds or three quarters of their narrative consists of direct speech and Virgil’s a need, which is heavily influenced by the Hum America Epic. It’s more like a third. So it’s a really big difference. Um, and, and, and ancient critics were very interested in that.

[00:12:52] Deborah: I’m interested in it. The way characters talk, particularly in Homer because the narrator tends to be fairly retiring and not wanna tell you explicitly what you’re supposed to think about things or feel about them. So characters in, in, in comparison to the narrator, characters tend to be much more upfront about how they feel.

[00:13:13] Deborah: And, um, they use much more sort of explicitly judgemental, uh, language. Like, you know, they call each other names or, um, you know, they say, Oh, this is terrible. I’m so sad about this, whatever. So a lot of the explicit emotion in the poem happens through the characters. And for a long time people thought that that’s all the emotion that there was and that the, that the humer narrator, because they don’t explicitly.

[00:13:38] Deborah: Talk about themselves or talk about how they think the, uh, audience should react to things. That there is no information from the main narrator about those things. In fact, that’s not true at all. Um, and there’s a lot of information. It’s just implicit from the main narrator about sort of emotional feelings about shaping, about, uh, subjective responses both by the characters and by the reader to what’s happening.

[00:13:59] Deborah: And that’s actually what my most recent book is about. So, um, one of the also very distinctive features of the epic genre more generally, starting with Homer, but continuing, um, for all the way through to, you know, Dante, the first epic that was written in a vernacular language rather than Latin. Um, to John Milton’s very famous paradise loss that melds together Christian and classical ways of, uh, talking about the world.

[00:14:25] Deborah: Anyway, through all, throughout all of these epic, one of the distinguishing features that kind of puts a little sign on the poem’s head that says Hello I’m an epic, um, is what’s called the epic simile, which is a kind of a little story of the form A is like B So Achilles is, you know, fighting and he’s very fierce and it.

[00:14:44] Deborah: Just as the ocean wave towers over the terrified fish and then falls on them in the same way Achilles, you know, attack the Trojans or something like that. And so these superficially unrelated stories appear regularly in these narrative sims, and those have an enormous amount of information of all many different kind.

[00:15:07] Deborah: That guides shapes, arouses the emotions of the audience. Um, and so my first couple of books, I was interested in thinking about the emotional texture of Homer poetry as it’s created by speech, which is something that’s been of interest to, for, to readers of Homer, uh, for a long time. In my most recent book, I kind of pivoted not only to a.

[00:15:31] Deborah: Narrative technique that helps to portray and aroused emotion, but also to a broader canvas in terms of the book itself. So there are, it’s about, partly about Homer, but then it’s also about Virgil, Uh, his ania. It’s about, ah, it’s metamorphosis, which is kind of this mythological grab bag that clearly wants, at the same time to be an epic in the tradition of home or in virtual, but also to be doing very untraditional and, and kind of surprising things with the epic genre.

[00:15:58] Deborah: Um, and then also Alon is Jason and the Argonauts, which. Mythological story that people have heard of, but an author in a poem that is largely unknown outside of, um, professional classics circles. So the book is about, um, uh, how SIM’s work in all of these different, in different poems, How they, not only how they create emotions, but also what kinds of emotions those are, which vary from poem to poem, depending on the specific themes and interests that are distinctive to each poem that, you know is reflected in the kinds of scenes and emotions that the simes tend to.

[00:16:31] Frederick: Yeah, really fascinating. Do you, in your research for this latest book, the stories of sim, um, I don’t know if this is a fair question or not, but, uh, was there anything, you know, advances in other areas like the cognitive sciences for instance, that, um, deepened an understanding of why we might engage more, um, in and through the sh the shaping of a story that’s using sim?

[00:16:59] Deborah: Yes, absolutely. Um, so, um, one of, I, the book was informed substantially by sort of a, kind of a cluster of interdisciplinary approaches. Called Embodied Cognition, which is work by literary theorists, by cognitive psychologists, by psycho linguistics people, by, um, Neurobiologists doing, uh, fm r scans on people, um, people from many different John, uh, disciplines who are working in their respective field to explore the idea that where.

[00:17:38] Deborah: You know, for a long time, for most of you know, intellectual history, at least in, um, you know, in the West, people had taken, um, the physical body and the process of mind as two different things and perhaps even as two really opposite or different. Very, not just different, but. Contrasting things. Um, and these different fields are showing that in fact, the bo, the mind and the body are very deeply intertwined, and it’s probably not even really sensible to talk about them as being different.

[00:18:12] Deborah: And just to take one example, um, the neurobiologists with their fm r i machines have shown that, um, there are neurons in the brain. that if you’re reading a story about somebody running fire in the same way as if you’re actually running. So there are lots of features of storytelling that essentially create a, you are here kind of feeling, which are known collectively as immersive storytelling features.

[00:18:36] Deborah: Um, and so this is a, it’s a very powerful insight that is being developed from many different, uh, perspectives in the, in the academic world. And one of the things that I found out in my book is that similes are these like bullion cubes of immersive storytelling. They’re full of these features that cause that you are here feeling, whether it’s describing the space in which something happens, you know, the thing is high, the thing is low, the thing is next to this or behind that.

[00:19:05] Deborah: Um, describing physical sensations of hunger or cold, uh, or water being wet. Um, emotions of love, fear. Pain, sorrow, Um, and they’re just, that’s what they are. These just like little moments where people are having these feelings and physical sensations that are not explicitly linked to the story beyond fairly sort of short and basic kinds of connections, and then it’s up to the reader to kind of figure out how do all of those feelings and experiences.

[00:19:36] Deborah: Um, help to tell the story affect my reaction to the story and my understanding of the story. So yes, I absolutely did. Um, I try to write not by centering the scholarship, that helps us to understand that, but rather to say, Okay, these are the people who talked about that. Process of understanding this scholarly insight.

[00:19:55] Deborah: So if you wanna read about the scholarly insight itself that go over and read these people, what I wanna do is apply that scholarly insight in a way that’s appealing and engaging for someone who’s interested in what that insight produces, but may or may not be interested in the process by which we understand what the scholarly framework itself looks like and how, how we got there.

[00:20:17] Deborah: So, you know, I provided sort of a scholarly app. For people who wanna know that, but that’s not really the main focus of the book. The main focus of the book is with that kind of framework. What do we see in SIM’s and Epic narrative that we didn’t see before?

[00:20:33] Frederick: Yeah. Really fascinating, um, kind of technologies of storytelling as kind of.

[00:20:39] Frederick: Yeah. Advanced as, um, you know, more deeply understood, and then through research on like the MUR neuron system and so on, right? Mm-hmm. . Yep. Exactly. Um, really amazing. Really amazing. Um, thank you. Absolutely. Uh, and in fact, you know, one of the challenges, um, at least for me in the classroom is to. Bringing my students around to form.

[00:21:08] Frederick: And I know that sounds kind of old fashioned, but um, it’s exactly the kinds of things that you’re excited and interested in that also excite us or me and others, you know, how do certain kinds of technologies of storytelling, if we’re gonna call ’em that, uh, you know, shape the narrative and, you know, the students, I think.

[00:21:32] Frederick: You know, tend to come to me really good at character and thematic analysis, but they’re not so good at the kind of, how are those, you know, shaped and, and why are we interested, even though we’ve seen this theme, this character a million times before. Right. Mm. Really interesting.

[00:21:56] Deborah: Um, yeah, I, I definitely talk to students a lot about form.

[00:21:59] Deborah: Um, I, I think they’re kind of being used. For example, when I tell my mythology students, If I assign them books one and three to read, I expect them to know like what percentage of the whole poem they read. And obviously book one is at the beginning, but where is book three in relation to the whole thing?

[00:22:15] Deborah: Um, one of the skills that I work with my students on in any class, whether we’re reading a text in the original Greek or we’re reading it in English translation, is it’s equally important what is being said and how it’s being said. And one of the things that’s important for how something is being said is the sequence in which something is said, and that simply placing two things next to each other affects the meaning.

[00:22:37] Deborah: And that is absolutely one of the ways that similes mean things is simply by placing two apparently unrelated things next to each other. You are inviting the reader to make that connection, but at the same time, you’re not really making it possible to say There’s definitely this one connection. That’s correct.

[00:22:52] Deborah: And there, there aren’t any other possible. Connections to be made, and that combination of kind of obviousness and indeterminacy is one of the things that. Similarly so distinctive and so memorable and so fun really. Um, I mean in, and there’s, there’s also a gigantic body of research in most of the same disciplines that I mentioned in connection with embodied cognition, uh, about the, uh, comprehension of simis and also the comprehension of metaphor.

[00:23:19] Deborah: So whereas as sim is something of the form A is like b it’s an explicit comparison of two things that are essentially equated, they’re parallel. No, neither one is, is subordinate to the other. A metaphor is an implied comparison where you say something like, you know, um, fear bloomed in his. Where you’re using a verb bloom that is normally used for flowers to talk about a feeling.

[00:23:47] Deborah: Um, and so then there’s this very sort of complex network of comparisons that underlie a metaphor like fear bloomed in his heart. Um, and because those are implicit, there was for a long time the idea that similes were easier because they were explicit. And one of the, my favorite things that I read was this very cogent statement of the fool hearts of confusing, explicit, with straightforward, um, that the sim terms are explicit, but they are by no means straightforward.

[00:24:20] Deborah: And so they present a pretty accessible invitation to the reader. And the process of accepting that invitation can be pretty much. Extensive and complicated as the abilities of the reader will accommodate. So, for example, the similes and vis in need, uh, are often extremely rich and subtle illusions to earlier Homeric sim And what a particular sim means in the context is not simply a comparison between the Simi story and the mythological story to which it’s been, uh, juxtaposed, but also.

[00:24:57] Deborah: A comparison of the Verian context with the Amer context that’s being alluded to. And you’re expected if your Virgil’s very knowledgeable and erudite original reader to know those illusions and to bring those into your interpretation. But at the same time, I think it’s a complete misunderstanding to imagine that if you can’t do that, you’re there for a failed reader of the idiot.

[00:25:18] Deborah: Um, and I I, I’ve been thinking a lot about this in recent years about this kind of spectrum of interpret. That applies to highly elusive forms of popular art. Um, not only Virgil in need, but also, um, some of the Greek tragedy that I work on. And, and, and I, I had a particularly entertaining experience of this in a very personal way because when I was working on a paper about, uh, an an Odyssey illusion in a, in a play of, of Escal, my husband and I went to see, um, the first of the rocky spinoffs that starred Michael B.

[00:25:51] Deborah: Jordan. Because we love Michael B. Jordan from Friday Night Lights, and we were like, Oh, yay. Let’s go see this. We knew nothing whatsoever about Rocky at all, so we missed all the rocky illusions in the movie. Of course, there were a bazillion of those. We didn’t know what any of them were, you know, when we were Googling everything in the car on the way home, but we loved the movie anyway.

[00:26:11] Deborah: We didn’t care that we didn’t know what any of the illusions. Um, and that was a really good, you know, sort of personal experience of being a bad audience member. Bad in the sense of not informed of the illusions that the ideal, well, one version of a, of the audience was expected to have. We didn’t have that and we didn’t care at all.

[00:26:30] Deborah: And I’m fairly certain that a similar kind of, you know, different kinds of audiences are fine, would also have worked. Um, for these highly elusive post hoer ethics that assume as part of their, um, interpretive apparatus that the reader knows something about the earlier ethics, uh, to which they allude you.

[00:26:52] Deborah: It’s definitely more fun if you know about those earlier illusions. But are you gonna completely miss the point of the poem if you don’t know about those solutions? No. You’re not at.

[00:27:01] Frederick: Wow. Yeah, no, absolutely. It’s the kind of the ideal audience reader and then the multiple kind of, you know, further. Ideal audiences, right?

[00:27:14] Frederick: That the, that the story also includes or invites, um, really amazing. In your intro to classical mythology, you explicitly state, Look, I’m gonna be, you know, we’re gonna be looking at how different authors tell their myths and stories and how genre affects the way a story is told, Um, in different media cultures, time periods are there.

[00:27:40] Frederick: Um, some examples of, um, you know, some of these maybe, um, in contemporary times or I’ll, I’ll let you kind of take this question wherever you’d like to go with it.

[00:27:51] Deborah: So, um, different how different genres affect. Okay. So, um, let me, one of the things that I, I fantasize about doing in the ideal universe in which I have enough time to teach whatever I wanna teach, which doesn’t exist at all.

[00:28:05] Deborah: Um, My department is a little bit understaffed, and so by the time we teach all of our required courses that we need in order to run our syllabus, there’s very little leftover for people to teach fun things that they think of. Um, but one of the classes I’d love to teach sometime or other is a course on the Trojan War, just so the Trojan War.

[00:28:24] Deborah: I do have a colleague who teaches a class about the Trojan War is a first year so year seminar. But I would like to teach one as like an upper level class, um, where we read different stories about the Trojan War from different from Greeks and from Romans. Epic and from tragedy. Um, so just to take some sort of basic.

[00:28:41] Deborah: Differences between Epic and Tragedy, which are the two genres that I, I work with the most. Epic has a, an OmniGen third person narrator who sort of tells you the story and then brings forward different characters who say things and whatever. But it’s the narrator who tells you about the sims. The characters don’t actually know, For example, Kelly doesn’t know that he’s being compared to an ocean wave.

[00:29:03] Deborah: That’s only something between the narrator and the audience, and the characters don’t know anything about this. Now, occasionally characters put them in their own speeches. But for the most part, similes are a feature of the narrator telling a story to you, the audience. And they’re not something that the characters as they’re having these experiences know anything about.

[00:29:21] Deborah: There is no person like that in tragedy. Tragedy is only characters talking. So there is no kind of overarching voice that’s organizing the story and telling you even implicitly like what to think about what’s going on. You just have to kind of take the different perspectives of the people telling you things.

[00:29:39] Deborah: And, and just integrate them in your own way into, you know, your understanding of what happened to the people and so forth. So, um, you know, some things remain the same no matter what the genre is, like who is given the opportunity to speak? Has a huge effect on how the story looks. So the ID for example, ends with the laments of three Trojan women over the corpse of Hector, and there’s been a lot of interest and a lot of scholarship in how that foreground the experience of non-com combattants at foreground, the experience of the defeated at the moment when the story is coming to an.

[00:30:17] Deborah: UES achieves a somewhat comparable effect in writing plays that are exclusively populated by Trojan women while they’re, you know, sort of Greeks who wander onto the stage to enslave people or whatever. But basically Uip writes plays in which the Trojan women are lamenting their fate. Um, but the absence of a narrator kind of tying all that together.

[00:30:43] Deborah: Changes the story. You’re left with just the kind of bald misery of the characters on experiences and there’s no presence in the story to kind of put those together into some kind of. Unity, that’s your job as a member of the audience, which is not to say that it’s not your job if you’re, if you’re reading an epic, it is, but you have some help from the narrator in the way that you don’t if you’re reading, uh, if you’re reading a tragedy.

[00:31:10] Deborah: Um, so I’m not sure, did that answer your question or not really?

[00:31:14] Frederick: No, that was amazing. Beautiful. Uh, makes absolutely sense to me. Um, and yeah, that we have to be mindful of choices and, you know, choices of voice and perspective because it does, it does impact or it does shift the direction of possibility for the story itself.

[00:31:38] Deborah: Um, no, it absolutely does. And just a sort of silly note on. General subject. Uh, I use a lot more similes in my own speech and writing since I’ve been writing this book than I did before. And one of my colleagues, I was in a seminar a few years ago on narrative across the disciplines at ut, which was just fantastic.

[00:31:56] Deborah: You know, just a bunch of colleagues who were doing various kinds of scholarly work that had to do somehow with narrative. Um, and one of my colleagues said to me, uh, after I gave my presentation, she said, Deborah, you use a lot of sims. And I think I maybe hadn’t noticed up until that point that I did, but it’s definitely true.

[00:32:14] Deborah: Um, I, I do use a lot of similes because, you know, having studied them, I feel like I’ve gained a huge appreciation for. What they bring to language, and one of the reasons that I was interested in them is that even though in epic poetry, they appear in the very elaborate form where they’re telling a little story, you know, a small assimilate of the form A is like B, you know, the rising sun burns me like a hot.

[00:32:39] Deborah: Curling iron or whatever. Those are just a very normal feature of people’s conversations. And so when you’re studying Sims in an epic poem, you also can then link that as a communication act with hugely varied uh, other things where, you know, people study sims in, for example, political speeches who just ordinary conversation.

[00:33:00] Deborah: And those all have sort of a basic kinship where. You’re using a sim to offer an interpretation to involve the audience. They have this very sort of, you know, consistent set. Qualities and functions across a dizzyingly broad variety of speech and communication context. And that’s one of the things that I liked about it, is that one of the things that I really wanna try to do in both my research and my teaching is to demystify this literature so that people don’t feel like you have to have a PhD to read Homer or to read Virgil or to understand what they’re talking about.

[00:33:36] Deborah: I mean, that’s part of the reason, for example, that I’m interested. Um, de throwing this ideal reader is the only possible reader. You know, I talk to my students about that a lot. It’s fine if you don’t understand everything. The goal is in odd to understand everything. And one of the ways I think to sort of normalize and as a word domesticate, make accessible these very.

[00:33:56] Deborah: Wordy and sometimes intimidating poems from these earlier cultures is to link the way they tell their stories with the things normal people do all the time, when they wanna make a point in a certain way. Um, and, and so that was absolutely one of the reasons that I, I’m interested both in direct speech, which cuz of course, telling somebody what somebody else said is something everybody does all the.

[00:34:18] Deborah: Um, but similes the same. These are just things that people do and there are sort of elaborate stylized versions of them in these poems, but they’re not at all, you know, sort of unrecognizable things. They’re just normal things that people do when they talk to each other that are used in these, you know, stylized ways in, in poetry.

[00:34:36] Deborah: So thinking of poetry as stylized speech. Can make it a little bit less upsetting for people to try to imagine themselves reading it. Um, and, and I think it really does help a lot to, to make people less upset about how challenging it is to just also to, to validate that, to just say this is very unfamiliar.

[00:34:55] Deborah: Um, especially at a time when people don’t read as much as they used to. I mean, some people do, but a lot of people don’t. This is gonna feel forbid at first, you know, and over and over again. When I, when I teach my mythology class, which has a lot of reading of primary sources, And for many of the students in the class is the only course they’re ever gonna take in the humanities at all.

[00:35:15] Deborah: So for them, the kinds of expectations of humanities reading, they’re just like, What is this? And what are you doing to me? Um, and I’ve been teaching the course since 2011, and every year, every year in my course evaluations, the students say I was intimidated by the reading list at first, But Professor Beck was very helpful in kind of helping me not to mind that.

[00:35:35] Deborah: And by the end, I really felt like I could do it and I understood what I was doing, and I enjoyed it. So, you know, I feel like part of my job is exactly that, is to kind of break down these barriers that people feel between themselves and these very, um, you know, sort of superficially intimidating, but enormously relevant stories from classical antiquity.

[00:35:56] Deborah: That’s another thing my students say all the time is. I thought these were just gonna be fun stories. And it turned out they were so meaningful and relevant and I learned so much about just how to be a person living in the world from these stories, because the characters encounter the same kinds of problems that people encounter all the time.

[00:36:11] Deborah: How do we live together in groups with people with whom we disagree? Um, what do we do when we have conflicting obligations to our families and to our communities? And there’s no way to discharge all of those obligations. How do we decide what not to do? Um, and uh, I think students really are drawn in by the combination of sort of entertainment, cuz the stories are certainly, you know, a lot more entertaining than our own personal experience of conflicts between personal obligations and, and community obligations.

[00:36:45] Deborah: But, um, they’re, they’re very entertaining and they’re much sort of their larger scale than the experiences we have in our own daily lives. But the basic human experiences and dilemma. That characters experience and mythology, including Gods not just mortal characters, are very much the same kinds of things.

[00:37:03] Deborah: Not only that ancient characters encounter, but that modern people encounter. So that if I can help with those students get past their initial anxiety about the amount of reading I’m asking them to do a difficulty of the vocabulary, the unfamiliarity of the forms and so forth, and I just give them the support to say, The goal is not to understand everything right away.

[00:37:24] Deborah: Just stick with it and you will get. Really, most, almost everyone does stick with it, does get it, and gets to the end of the class and says, Wow, I didn’t think I could do this when I started, but I actually did it and I learned a lot and I’m so glad I stuck with it. So, you know, I hope that, that my re my research is also, you know, doing that, um, to a more sort of specialist audience.

[00:37:47] Deborah: But, you know, as in the last several years especially, I’ve really driven to write. , even though I’m writing about specialized scholarly subjects to write about it in a way that’s accessible and that’s interesting to people who aren’t specialists or aren’t scholars. So the most important of those for me is my undergraduate student.

[00:38:06] Deborah: Who, you know, are often rightfully disgusted and demoralized by how bad a lot of academic writing is as writing. You know, and I imagine my own undergraduate says the ideal audience for what I’m reading. And I, you know, if I look at something I’ve written and I think the student would be annoyed or disgusted or confused if I ask them to read this, then I did it wrong and I need to try again.

[00:38:27] Deborah: And I regularly give, um, advanced classes, um, and graduate classes, drafts of my work to. Partly to help them get a sense of what work in progress looks like, and also to, as a good sort of test opportunity for me to see that I’m writing in the accessible style that I wanna write. So, for example, I was teaching a class this spring on, um, app ones one of the authors in my, in my forthcoming book, I gave the class my draft chapter on Appals.

[00:38:52] Deborah: I said, Could you understand? And they said yes, we totally understood it and it made sense and we liked it. Yay. Everybody wins. Um, so, so, you know, I do a lot of things where the goal is to talk to people who aren’t specialists. Not only my teaching, but also the public facing opinion. Writing that I do mostly in Texas newspapers, but also sometimes in national publications.

[00:39:10] Deborah: And I really wanna do as much as I can to make the voice I use for my scholarly writing as close to that accessible, inviting, straightforward voice as I. Absolutely.

[00:39:21] Frederick: Yes. Um, your public facing writing, uh, your students, right. Um, especially kind of a focus of that. Not surprising given how much you are tuned in and, and, um, are involved in making sure that the students are, are learning and growing.

[00:39:39] Frederick: Um, tell me about this latest one, you grads, pandemic struggles offer valuable lessons on failure and this. Failing effectively. Mm-hmm. failing effectively.

[00:39:51] Deborah: Yeah. Um, so I think people treat failure as something avoidable or embarrassing or bad, and I think that’s nonsense. I mean, you can’t learn to do something new without failing at it some of the time.

[00:40:07] Deborah: Um, yeah. Just to take a one, a personal example. The first time I teach a new course, I always goof up a bunch of. And I make notes to myself about what went wrong and why I think it was bad and what should I do differently. Um, and I try to model with my students, you know, when I make mistakes, they correct me and I say thank you, and then I fix it and we go on.

[00:40:27] Deborah: Um, and I, I wanna, I wanna sort of create for them the idea that learning entails failure. We can’t learn without failing. And the question isn’t, am I going to fail? You are. But how am I gonna respond when I fail? Am I gonna be embarrassed? Am I gonna be defensive Or am I gonna say, okay, this is an opportunity for me to learn how to do this better.

[00:40:49] Deborah: Um, and, you know, in a sort of, It also tells us indirectly what it is that we care about. Cuz we never to say we failed at things we don’t care about. You know, we just say we didn’t do a good job, or I’m bad at this, or whatever. We only fail, which sounds like a very judgemental kind of thing to say and things where we really wanna do a good job.

[00:41:10] Deborah: So if you wanna, if you say that you failed at something, that tells you right there that you care about doing well at it. And that’s also important information. What is it that’s important to me? What should I be trying to do a good job at? And I think that’s one of the most important things that I do in the classroom is model effective failure for students.

[00:41:29] Deborah: Where, you know, making, sometimes failing is just being wrong. Um, you know, and I make a mistake and, and somebody says, Well, what about such and such? And, and then we have a, you know, I correct it or I say, I don’t know the answer. I’ll look it up and tell you tomorrow. Students don’t care if you’re wrong occasionally or if you don’t know things.

[00:41:48] Deborah: What they care about is that you’re a reliable source of information. And if you say to them, I don’t know, and you show them in the way you say that, that that’s a perfectly normal way to answer a question to which you don’t know the answer. And then you come back the next day and you say, Well, I looked it up in these different places and this is what I found out.

[00:42:07] Deborah: It’s gonna make a huge impression on them that you just were very forthright about saying you don’t know. And then, and then you show them what to do. Instead of just like, you know, being embarrassed or trying to pretend you do know something, what do you do when you don’t know something? How do you respond to that when something doesn’t go the way you want it?

[00:42:25] Deborah: How do you respond to that? So, I, you know, in my advanced classes, I, at the end of the class, I asked the students what, what went well here and what didn’t go so well? And then when I make adjustments based on what they didn’t like about it, I tell the next class who gets the benefit of that, that I made whatever, some specific change because the previous class told me that that was not working and asked me to do it differently.

[00:42:47] Deborah: So that I give them an example of someone who is responding to input, is changing their mind in response to new data, um, and is making mistakes and doing a bad job with a sense of authority. I think that’s one of the biggest concerns people have is that being wrong is, is gonna, is incompatible with having authority and that is absolutely not true.

[00:43:12] Deborah: An authority figure who will admit that they’re wrong and apologize or fix it as appropriate. Um, and apologize. Not necessary. If all you did was be wrong. It is good to apologize if you needlessly inconvenience to other people because you were wrong, but that’s usually not the case. People are desperate for models of how to not be perfect.

[00:43:31] Deborah: and, and I try really hard to provide that, and especially in the pandemic when everyone is unavoidably so much less perfect than usual. And when teachers in particular failed over and over and over again in front of our students using unfamiliar technologies, overhauling our classes, and you know, at, on the, at the drop of, I had to try to deliver them in new formats that we didn’t really understand.

[00:43:57] Deborah: Inevitably, things didn’t go well. Our technology died in the middle of class. All kinds of things happened, and very clearly there, there was no option not to fail. Your option was, am I gonna make this a teachable moment? Am I gonna make this an opportunity for students to see that being wrong and feeling is not the end of the world, but it’s how we get better at things?

[00:44:18] Deborah: Or am I gonna be angry and defensive and make everybody uncom? Um, so, so that’s, that’s what I mean by failing effectively, learning from what didn’t go well, um, and, and taking it in your stride and figuring out what does the failure tell you about what you wanna do next. Uh,

[00:44:37] Frederick: an inspiration and yes, absolutely.

[00:44:41] Frederick: Um, going to take. Charge from that failing effectively, um, and live it myself. Let me ask you, as we wind this down, what is on the, you know, Deborah, on your proverbial nightstand for reading? Um, I know you like reading mystery novels. Yeah. I also know that you just submitted your, the stories of sims. Um, so I know there was a lot that was, you know, going into that.

[00:45:10] Frederick: But yeah, what are you, what are you reading? What’s exciting to you? Right.

[00:45:14] Deborah: Well, that’s a great question. It’s also a little bit embarrassing. Um, I am so exhausted from the demands of two years of pandemic teaching that my reading material is pretty low impact. Um, so I recently tore through, um, uh, mystery series written by a mother and, and son duo who go by the pin name of Charles Todd.

[00:45:39] Deborah: And their inspect, their, their detective is, is a British police inspector named Ian Rutledge, who is a severely uh, ptsd, um, uh, veteran of World War I. And he, uh, he hears voices belonging to one of his own soldiers whom he was forced to execute because he refused to obey a direct order on the battlefield.

[00:46:01] Deborah: And so he had. Court marchal him and, and execute him. And he’s so traumatized by that, that he hears the voice of this dead, uh, soldier in his head all through the series. Um, I, I was fascinated by the very detailed way that the books talk about the process of a traumatized country recovering from me CATA event, which was in this case, World War ii.

[00:46:23] Deborah: But as our country is trying to kind of write itself, um, as the pandemic enters a less. You know, sort of crisis feeling phase. I think there are some similarities of a country sort of reeling from years of just extreme, nonstop trauma and loss. Um, and for me also, and it was a little bit sort of sobering to realize this, I am so tired.

[00:46:51] Deborah: I am so drain. From the pastoral care of the students, I have taught, I taught 500 people during the pandemic, I would say at an conservative estimate. The third of them had some kind of unusual personal need or crisis or suffering because of the pandemic and the human imperative to respond to those student.

[00:47:13] Deborah: Has exhausted me so profoundly that I actually kind of identified with this PTSD veteran. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not saying I have PTSD at all, and I am not comparing my sufferings to those of, of either this particular fictional character or to the Nation of Britain in the years after World War I.

[00:47:31] Deborah: But the fact that that man’s suffering felt to me like a useful way to process. The experience of trying to care for these students during the pandemic was a very sobering realization for me. So I just babbled those all down partly cuz I, I love the sense of place and time, but partly because I really sort of deeply resonated with the way they portray, um, and exhausted and traumatized man in a traumatized society after this period of cataclysm and trying to figure out what comes.

[00:48:05] Frederick: Wow, Deborah, this has been quite a journey. I have myself learned so much and I am so, you know, this, so important for us to reach back and think carefully about, um, how. Authors shape their stories, um, and why genre matters, uh, in that. Um, also just a confession. I, my first undergraduate paper at Berkeley, my thesis statement, which earned me a d , um, was Achilles is the best war hero ever.

[00:48:46] Deborah: Oh wow. Good for you. Okay. Yeah, I can see that would’ve not really won you the undying admiration of your professor. Um, well, I mean part of the, I thank you so much for that kind summation. I think part of the reason I do what I do is that each one of us is the teller of our own story. And thinking about how professional storytellers do it can help us tell our own stories.

[00:49:06] Deborah: Just as people, and especially again, going back to the pandemic, one of the ways that we kind of reintegrate ourselves after these shattering couple of years is by telling our. And hearing other people’s and, and we’re part of a, telling a story is one of the most fundamental human imperatives that there is.

[00:49:23] Deborah: That’s what makes us human, is telling a story and hearing other people’s stories in turn. And I wanna help people be the best possible humans that they can by helping them to be good storytellers, good consumers of the stories of others, um, whether it’s in my research or my teaching or, or my public facing writing.

[00:49:39] Deborah: So, so thank you so much for this opportunity to talk about storytelling. . Um, and, and I hope some of your listeners will. Crack a book of some of the stories that we’ve been talking about. Thank you, Deborah. Thank you.

[00:49:49] 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.