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Tom Ribitzky

Tom RibitzkyTom Ribitzky earned his A.B in English at UGA in 2007 and his PhD in Comparative Literature from The Graduate Center (CUNY). He just published his first book, The Seduction of Pessimism in the Novel: Eros, Failure, and the Quarrel with Philosophy with Lexington Books, an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield / Bloomsbury. 

What inspired you to become an English major?

During my freshman and sophomore years of college, I felt rudderless. I started off majoring in Political Science while doing Pre-Med, and then I switched my major to International Affairs, but I didn't feel any particular affinity for what I was studying, and I was miserable in my Chemistry classes. On a whim, through the International Affairs department, I applied to the semester abroad program at Oxford University. I decided to take my first college English literature course there, because I thought it would be a waste to go to Oxford -- which is largely responsible for inventing the English major in the first place -- without taking a course in the discipline. I enrolled in Prof. David Bradshaw's seminar on late 19th-century English literature, and never turned back. I felt like I finally woke up and realized what moved me most deeply, what I really want to spend my time doing and thinking about. I then enrolled in his tutorial on Virginia Woolf -- a tour de force where we essentially read every Woolf novel in under two months, while also taking a Shakespeare tutorial. When I came back to UGA as a second-semester junior, I wanted to continue chasing that magic I felt at Oxford. Most of my new friends from the study abroad program were English majors, and some of the most fascinating course descriptions were in the English department. I thought it was too late to add a major, but with plenty of encouragement from my mom and my friends, I took the plunge and enrolled in as many English courses as I could, satisfying all the requirements for the major in a year and a half while still wrapping up my degree in International Affairs, as well. I was lucky enough to have taken legendary seminars from Andrew Cole on Chaucer and Hegel, Jed Rasula on modernism and the avant-garde, and also Hubert McAlexander's course on Faulkner (which still gives me nightmares to this day). On top of the intellectually stimulating coursework, the friends I made through the English department made the last two years of college as fulfilling as I wanted them to be. My only regret is not declaring the English major from day one. I could have spared myself so much agony from those Chemistry labs I found myself in!
 

How did the work you did as an English major prepare you for your career/life?

I just came out with a book, The Seduction of Pessimism in the Novel: Eros, Failure, and the Quarrel with Philosophy. So much of the material I cover in this book is deeply rooted in the coursework I did at Oxford and UGA. I have an entire chapter on Woolf, which draws from the notes that I took so breathlessly in Prof. Bradshaw's medieval office at Worcester College. I focus predominantly on the modern novel, which I couldn't have done without the groundwork that Jed Rasula gave me in his seminars. The work I did as an undergraduate English major continues to inform the kinds of research I'm still doing after my PhD, and it also fundamentally frames my worldview. Literary study gets to the core of how we make meaning in this world, and how we use language to convey that meaning, interrogate that meaning, and also come up with new layers of meaning. This kind of study cannot be reduced to simple didactic takeaways, but -- when done right -- moves in the opposite direction from didacticism, moralization, and the kind of facile sloganeering that is increasingly plaguing public life and even universities right now. Literary study forces us to make sense of nuance, ambiguity, and complexity, which is really where humanity lies -- not in the kind of reductive, self-satisfied, binary positions that political pundits across the spectrum are demanding that we adopt. Literary analysis is the bulwark against the worst and most dangerous small-mindedness, which is why I think it is both necessary and urgent. It is really the basis of civil society in that it allows us either to access experiences so far removed from our own, or otherwise so similar that they make us feel less alone. In the words of E.M. Forster, the imperative of literature is "Only connect!" The study of this art form allows me to connect with a world that is otherwise so distant and removed. It allows me to view Hamlet as the asshole that he is, while also learning something new from him that I end up carrying into my own life every time I read what he has to say. This has been one of the greatest life lessons for me. 
 

Can you tell us about The Seduction of Pessimism in the Novel: Eros, Failure, and the Quarrel with Philosophy?

The Seduction of Pessimism In the NovelThe Seduction of Pessimism in the Novel: Eros, Failure, and the Quarrel with Philosophy explores the novel as a response to the Platonic myth that narrates the rift at the core of our being. Eros is supposedly the consolation for this rift, but the history of the novel documents its expression as one of frustrated desires, neuroses, anxieties, and cosmic doom. As if repeating the trauma from that original split in Plato—a split that also divides philosophy from literature—the novel treats eros as a site of loss and grief, from the medieval romances to Goethe, Brontë, Proust, Mann, Woolf, Lawrence, and Nabokov. The pessimism that emerges from this eros tells us something fundamental about who we are, something that only the novel can say. At a time when both education and leisure are increasingly ignoring the novel’s imperative to sit with ambiguity, complexity, and contingency, and as we are hurtling toward a bleak future of climate catastrophe and political instability, the novel is one of the last bastions of humanity even as it is quickly being eroded.

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