|
 Dr. Frank W. Brevik
Assistant Professor of English
Education:
Ph.D. English Literature, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, 2001-2006
Ped. Cert. Agder University College, Norway, 2000-2001
M.A. University of Manchester, 1999-2001
B.Sc. Troy State University, 1997-1998
Ex. Phil. Agder University College, 1997
Engelsk mellomfag, Agder University College, 1996
Engelsk grunnfag, Agder University College, 1995-1996
Background and personal interests:
I was born in Christianssand, on the south coast of Norway, in 1974, and grew up in a safe and uncomplicated Northern-European working-class environment that was down-to-earth and modest about worldly wealth and success but passionate about family, friends, and sports. Since my father was a sailor—as were indeed all the men in my family—I grew up with an almost desperate yearning to travel to faraway and exotic places, and could spend hours poring over an atlas or a globe. I still do, actually—it's relaxing and exciting at the same time, and much cheaper than psycho-therapy besides.
When, as a teenager, I wistfully came to the brutal realization that 1) I would most likely never achieve my rather desperately unrealistic goal of becoming a European football star, and that 2) the Norwegian shipping industry had stopped hiring its native sons for reasons of outsourcing, I had to reinvent myself and my own plans for the future in order to be able to live an exciting life that involved lots of travelling and that would let me make use of my talents as well.
Since I have always been mad about languages, I figured (when it was well-nigh too late) that I should start taking school seriously so as to be able to see the world, and matriculated into my local college in Norway to read English in 1995.
Up until that point I had spent my upper secondary school days as an utterly unmotivated and laughably lazy student of electronics at a polytechnic college, and would instead use most of my waking hours ploughing through novels by Norwegian writers like Ingvar Ambjørnsen, Knut Hamsun, and Jens Bjørneboe, and many, many more.
Ever since my mother gave me a subscription to a book club when I was a boy, reading has always been something I have always cherished as a luxury, a contemplative and almost sacred act.
It occurred to me rather late that one could make a living by reading and discussing books—indeed, the idea that I do this for a living now still seems difficult to get used to for some members of my family. But even though this is good and exciting work, it is also hard work.
Professors typically teach, read, write, discuss at conferences, and tend to harbour a great fear that there might be some new books or ideas out there they have not heard about. It is a privileged life, but one that also consumes a lot of one's time and attention.
I decided to become a college professor of languages and literature because I wanted to make a living out of one my greatest amateur passions and interests. I can honestly say that it is a career choice I have never regretted—after all, in what other jobs does one get paid to sit in one's garden, reading a good book?
I am passionate about teaching books. In the classroom I always hope to persuade my students to see the beauty in literature, to feel the pleasure of reading, and to understand and appreciate the profound joys we can derive from the social and academic setting that lets us come together to discuss these works of magnificent wisdom and beauty. It is a true privilege—I beg of you not to let it go to waste.
Academic interests:
My favourite author is Shakespeare. No English or foreign writer of considerable genius—not Alexander Pope, not Oscar Wilde, not even John Milton or Geoffrey Chaucer—comes close to that intellectual behemoth, that mountain of wisdom that is William Shakespeare.
To read him is to reflect upon one's own shallowness, to feel truly humbled and dwarfed in an intellectual and emotional sense—and to enjoy this feeling as a great learning experience. To read Shakespeare is to be in the presence of greatness. Shakespeare's plays and poems inspire the greatest intellectual awe, just as the Grand Canyon or the Niagara Falls fill tourists with a different, more physical sense of awe.
Harold Bloom is exaggerating only a little when he claims (a tad outrageously, it has to be said) that Shakespeare has invented us as humans, and that we see the world through the ubiquitous cultural prism that Shakespeare's works constitute. Bloom is perhaps given to hyperbole, but the point is that Shakespeare writes about the human emotions that a virtually unchangeable human nature dictates that we feel---and that he writes so profoundly well that we can be forgiven for mistaking Shakespeare's works for the real human nature, the way human nature should have been like.
After having read The Tempest and Michel de Montaigne's "Of the cannibals" during my undergraduate studies at Troy State University, I was convinced that I should pursue a tentative thesis I had developed, namely that of the interstices of the play's text, the possibility of Montaigne's intertextual influence, the colonial-historical moment that informed the creative process of writing the play, and the New-World "feel" with which the play is vested as a result.
Although I originally started to read the play with an eye to politics, I have now come to see how the much larger and more unconstrained utopian elements of the text intertwine with The Tempest's strangely non-specific island setting. This new angle is indeed one that I explored further whilst writing my dissertation, and I hope to research this and other related angles further in the future.
At the heart of most of my research interests lies a trans-Atlantic impulse that has always been with me, but which has of course been vigorously stimulated by my studies in Alabama and Louisiana.
The finest thing about being a European outsider in America is the fact that one comes to appreciate the thousand really small differences that exist between us. These are differences that are most easily discerned the first three or four days—people talk differently, the food is different, the taste in clothes and music is "off," and big cars that seat one little grandmother take the place of small and cramped busses that seat fifty passengers.
Sometimes these many tiny differences can in sum become uncomfortable or unheimlich, as Freud might say, but most of the time they are genuinely funny and even charming. Americans who have travelled to foreign places like Europe, Mexico, or the Caribbean will be able to testify to how real this feeling is.
I would be grateful and honoured to work with all types of student—those who have already travelled and those who plan to do so later. The most important thing is that we learn from our trans-Atlantic and cross-cultural encounters, and in that spirit I would encourage you to stop by my office for a quick talk about enrolling in one of our English courses.
Nowhere is our shared language, civilization, and values more present than in English and American literature, and therefore the study of English provides us with the best possible means of understanding one another—and to enjoy a good giggle at each other's expense while we're at it.
|
