Professor Geoff Gilbert : Reading, Writing, Experiencing (in) Paris
For AUP Professor Geoff Gilbert, literature and creative writing are investigative, experimental and embodied practices. The continuous renewal of his approaches to literature proves that longevity and consistency do not mean stagnation.
As a member of AUP’s faculty in Comparative Literature and English since 1999, Gilbert has long been a recognizable face on campus and a pillar in the department since he arrived in Paris from the University of Cambridge where he taught for five years.
Gilbert used to work mostly on modernism, publishing Before Modernism Was: Modern History and the Constituency of Writing (Language, Discourse, Society), which places the experimental literary movement of the early-twentieth century within the texture of history. Today, he is still very interested in the experimental and the experiment, but more as a means to engage with urgent contemporary economic and political realities.
Through an approach that does not reduce objects of study to commodities or products and does not seek to reinforce the authority of a text or author, but rather to emancipate readers, he broaches literature through its connections to cultures and identities in all their complexity. In Gilbert’s course Paris Attraction: Modernist Experiments in Migration, for example, he explores why writers who change countries have a different relationship to experimentation and language, and incites students to connect this phenomenon with their own experience as foreigners in France or abroad.
Rather than seeing literature as a canon, something we study from afar, Gilbert’s courses and research seek to untangle the richest aspects of using words in the world today, including what it means to be a subject in the city of Paris. “This is a city MFA,” says Gilbert of the MFA in Creative Writing offered at AUP. Reading and writing in the city, for him, means challenging expectations, seeking out the intricacy and nuance of its multilingual and multicultural spaces, which gives students the opportunity to observe and work through the complexity of their own backgrounds.
Through exposure to the diversity of Paris, the program aims to give students the confidence to rely on the other languages they speak for creative writing, even if it’s only the little bits of French they’ve picked up since being at AUP. The goal is always to help students connect with different ways of thinking, and ways of expressing that are different from a “monolingual, Anglophone way of being,” as he puts it.
Gilbert’s practice—as a professor and a creative writer himself—has led him to take an interest in topics as varied as economic and ecological questions, gender and sexuality, questions of class and inequality, and more generally, “how we feel connected up with the places that are distant from us, and how we find distance and foreignness in our immediate vicinity.” Translation is also an important lens through which to understand and creatively respond to the world, and is an integral part of AUP’s programs in literature and creative writing.
Students coming to the MFA program must be ready for experiences “other than the mainstream literary experience,” explains Gilbert.
Relying on their own Parisian and European contacts, Gilbert and other program faculty offer students real insights into life in Paris and the experience of marginalized communities. Gilbert cites the city’s many cultural centers as a great resource for on-site learning. When studying Beur writing in Paris, for example, it only makes sense to hold class in the Algerian Cultural Center and to meet with other visitors and staff there.
Alongside Gilbert, students will witness and hopefully be part of Parisian diversity. Alongside engagement with conventional literary and arts scenes, the slam poetry festival in Belleville and visits to alternative cultural spaces such as Le Centquatre are all part of the curriculum. “All of this complicates the relationship to the city, which is what we want,” he adds.
The idea is to enrich reading and writing experiences with insight from outside of the classroom, which, as Gilbert points out, often comes from our sensory experiences. The ways that sights, sounds, smells and tastes come out of a work of art or literature and may go into another is one of the aspects explored across disciplines, thanks to the informal meetings held by Gilbert and other faculty, which they have nicknamed “the Sense Lab.” While in French, “sens” refers both to “the senses” and to “meaning,” the group aims to encourage each other to dwell a little longer in the sensory before turning it into academic discourse, a skill that all readers and writers in the making can benefit from.
Similarly, Gilbert’s courses push students to consider what it means to be an embodied subject. “When we teach literature, there is a real interaction between reading and creative production. In all courses I teach, acts of creative response that come out of reading tend to be the best ways for people to really read seriously.”