Faculty Directory
Clement Hawes
Professor of English
Contact:
213 Burrowes Building
University Park, PA 16802
Office Phone: 814-863-2767
cch10@psu.edu
Office Hours:
Tuesday 9:30-11 and Wednesday 10:30-12
Educational History:
Ph.D. Yale University
B.A. Hendrix College
Research Interests:
Eighteenth-century British and Anglo-Irish literature (special interest in Christopher Smart, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, and Laurence Sterne); postcolonial theory and literature; historiography and periodization; enthusiasm and rhetorics of madness
Awards:
College of Liberal Arts Teacher of the Year, Southern Illinois University, 1996
Major Publications:
The British Eighteenth Century and Global Critique (Palgrave, 2005)
Gulliver's Travels and Other Writings by Jonathan Swift (Houghton Mifflin, 2003)
Christopher Smart and the Enlightenment (St. Martin's Press, 1999)
Mania and Literary Style: The Rhetoric of Enthusiasm from the Ranters to Christopher Smart (Cambridge University Press, 1996)
National Professional Service:
Board member of the Bucknell University Press Series in Eighteenth Century Literature and Culture
Recently evaluated manuscripts for Cambridge University Press; SUNY Press; Stanford University Press; St. Martin's Press; Eighteenth-Century Life; University of Delaware Press; Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture; Genre; Gender and History; and Comparative Literature Studies
Teaching Statement:
I have found teaching mostly to be a never-ending process of refining one's practice: adjusting the timing of a particular assignment, fine-tuning the intellectual pitch of a given discussion, rethinking a particular mix of lecturing and discussion, and so on. I am keenly aware, when I teach, of the magic that can occur when a feeling of community emerges in the classroom; but I am also aware that I, as the person setting the agenda and presiding over grades, have to be respected before I can be liked. I cannot now conceive of good teaching, moreover, in which students are not made to write a great deal. All of these insights have come through a long process of trial and error. Although I try not to make the same mistake twice, teaching continues, in every semester, to present me with unforeseen and sometimes bemusing situations.
It is perhaps when constructing syllabi that I most engage with concerns that are more philosophical than pragmatic. I belong to the camp of syllabi makers who prefer architectonic design to spontaneity. There is a real sense in which very little that I do in the classroom--including the most apparently spontaneous jokes, digressions, and so on--is entirely unplanned. The rationale for this degree of design is my commitment to making each of my courses present, with a certain stark clarity and plenty of redundance, some sort of larger conceptual framework that the students can take in, and begin to use, even before it is fully fleshed out. Usually my list of chosen texts re-tells a larger historical narrative. I very much want my courses to engage self-consciously with the various "Grand Narratives"--about such topics as, say, the Renaissance or the Enlightenment--that students will be encountering elsewhere in the university and in their intellectual lives more generally.
Like many of my colleagues in the profession, I negotiate constantly with issues of social and political inclusion when I design my syllabi. I am, however, less iconoclastic than has become fashionable in some quarters; and indeed, I believe it is misguided to ascribe an overly monolithic social, political, or ideological voice to the "canon." A great deal depends on how, rather than merely what one teaches. I have found myself increasingly drawn, both as a teacher and a researcher, to borderline figures who complicate the certainties of exclusive cultural histories and the categories (national, ethnic, racial, etc.) that invariably found those histories.
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