Professor Dan Gunn Tackles Big Projects and Builds Connection
For AUP students of literature and creative writing, the chance to work with Professor Daniel Gunn means the possibility of gaining rare insight into the lives of the writers who may have inspired them—and of building a personal connection with them.
With his colleague Daniel Medin, Gunn runs AUP’s Center for Writers & Translators, which he founded in 2007 and which publishes the Cahier Series. Originally a specialist of Marcel Proust and Samuel Beckett, for the past four years he has been preparing a two-volume edition of The Letters of Muriel Spark, the first volume of which, covering the years 1944-1963, will be published by Virago next summer. He does not tackle this project alone; students play an invaluable role. Being encouraged to contribute to the scientific community at this stage in their academic careers, and getting to know what archival work consists in, is a rare opportunity that Gunn considers one of the unique features of studying literature and creative writing at AUP. Through direct exposure to research and editorial practice, they gain critical skills that will serve them in their future careers in the fields of creative writing and translation.
Gunn explains: “Students are a big part of my archival work; they do real detective work that may well find its way into a published book, and they are all recognized when that is the case. This is what happened when for more than 20 years I worked on the letters of Samuel Beckett, now published in four volumes by Cambridge University Press, and translated into French, Italian, German and Chinese. Students managed many important tasks, from going into archives to proof-reading the final texts before submission. In the case of the Beckett letters, 60 students were involved!”
The Center for Writers & Translators’ Cahier Series makes available new explorations in writing, translation and the connections between the two. It also provides to students another chance to do real editorial work. Published in the chapbooks are some little-known writers and artists, and others who are among the most renowned alive today: most recently, Jumpa Lahiri (# 41), Michael Finke (# 40), Marina Warner (# 39) and Rachel Cusk (# 38). “The MFA will give the Cahier Series a further raison d’être,” says Gunn, “ offering Creative Writing students a chance to work on this signature project—reading blind submissions, writing reviews for journals and online magazines, managing logistics when writers visit.”
The Cahier Series is just one instance of the wealth of activity in literature and the arts that is created and facilitated at AUP by Gunn, Daniel Medin, and their colleagues in the Department of Comparative Literature and English. Authors who publish in the series are invited to give talks and meet students on campus. Writers and translators such as Muriel Spark, Lydia Davis and Richard Pevear, Nobel and Man Booker Prize winners such as Gao Xingjian, J. M. Coetzee, László Krasznahorkai and Han Kang have all met and talked to the AUP community. “We seem to anticipate up-and-coming writers,” says Gunn. “With the high caliber of the faculty, and everyone’s international networks, it’s not surprising. Our alumni go on to really great things,” he adds, citing the examples of Jan Steyn (’08 & G ’10), author of Translation: Crafts, Contexts, Consequences and Director of the MFA in Literary Translation at the University of Iowa, and prolific translator and winner of the Albertine Award, Emma Ramadan (G ’14).
“The close attention, one-on-one with professors, and the real relationships we develop within our close-knit community make this Creative Writing MFA unique,” Gunn says, describing the AUP community as “warm and personal, and an effective gateway to the Paris literary world.” True to AUP’s commitment to experiential learning, Gunn and his colleagues take students out into the city: to the Musée Carnavalet, for example, to visit Proust’s bedroom, or to the Père-Lachaise cemetery to see his grave. “Virtually all our classes have a creative and interdisciplinary aspect,” he explains, “and students on the MFA will find that whatever their particular literary interest, there will be someone here who is keen to nourish it.”