We will greatly miss Professor David Bosworth, who is retiring this year! Professor Bosworth received his B.A from Brown University in English and American Literature in 1969, and joined the faculty at UW English department faculty in 1984. Throughout his long career, Professor Bosworth has published in a wide range of forms, from short fiction, to the novel, to poetry, to the critical essay.
Prior to his arrival at the UW, his book of short fiction, The Death of Descartes (1981), won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize and was also the recipient of a Special Citation from PEN and the Ernest Hemingway Foundation. Professor Bosworth is also the author of the novel, From My Father, Singing(1986), which was the winner of Editor’s Book Award. More recent work includes The Demise of Virtue in Virtual America: The Moral Origins of the Great Recession (2014), a work of cultural criticism, and Conscientious Thinking: Making Sense in an Age of Idiot Savants (2017). Over the years, Professor Bosworth has established himself as a cultural producer, cultural critic, public intellectual, and university teacher with a strong commitment to the literary arts.
Before retiring, David answered some questions posed to him about his career by the English Matters editorial team. This interview has been edited for brevity.
You describe yourself in 2017's Conscientious Thinking as “the author of two books of fiction, who, after long supporting his writing habit through blue-collar work, won some literary prizes and reentered the academy.” Tell us about your writing life before and upon entering UW. How was the transition from blue-collar work to a “life of the mind”?
Though the life of the mind is made easier in a university whose mission is centered on the creation and transmission of knowledge, it can be pursued by anyone with access to a good library who has the requisite burning “need to know” and the self-discipline to keep after it. Initially, as someone with financial responsibilities who entered the job market in the midst of a recession, my turn to blue-collar work was less a thoughtful choice than an economic necessity. I ended up working in a small factory for a few years, and though I began writing then, the work was too noisy, exhausting, and robotically dehumanizing to sustain a writing life long-term. So I leapt at the chance to become the super of a thirty-six unit apartment building, which included a free apartment with a study and sufficient, if often interrupted, free time to read and write. I kept that job for over ten years and it was there that I became a real author.
The abrupt shift from being a glorified janitor with no graduate school experience to a junior faculty member was disorienting. I’ve never quite felt at home in the professorial “tribe,” its rituals, lingo, and emphasis on rank alien to my background. But then it’s a writer’s duty to have one foot outside his social or professional circle, and unlike some who came of age inside academia, I’ve never lost my appreciation of and gratitude for the job: the freedom it grants to read, write, and teach what most engages me, the access to knowledgeable colleagues and talented students eager to learn. My blue-collar path had its advantages, primarily independence of mind and a grounded sense of what life was like for less privileged Americans. But I had no contact then with inspiring teachers who could have hastened my development—a loss I didn’t recognize until I was striving to become an effective college-level teacher myself.
You have engaged in both cultural production and cultural criticism across your writing career. Your graduate class, “The Creative Writer as Critical Reader,” encouraged students to develop a “‘bifocal’ reading intelligence—intuitively apt and analytically sharp, hands-on and heads up—so that the artist and the critic might cohabit fruitfully in the same mind.” What has helped you develop this ‘bifocal reading intelligence’ as a writer of fiction, essays, and cultural criticism?
In a way, that approach has been a natural expression of my inclinations as a thinker from the start. As a kid, I liked to read encyclopedias as well as fiction for fun. As an undergraduate, I began as a would-be philosophy major, briefly considered psychology, then moved on to my first “impractical” love, literature, writing stories in workshops and analyzing novels and poems. Though it’s true that excessive self-consciousness can cripple creativity, intuition and analysis should be complementary allies in the arts and humanities. Reading widely in different disciplines, with an appreciation for the advantages and limitations of each of them, enriches the imagination and expands your natural vocabulary of expression.
Or, as phrased through aphorisms I admire . . . James Richardson: “There are two kinds of people in this world, and who among us is not both of them.” (To that I might add “two kinds of writing, two ways of thinking.”) Or, even more succinctly, from that philosopher-clown Yogi Berra, whose malapropisms somehow manage to be both hilarious and profound: “If you come to a fork in the road . . . take it.” I’ve tried to. I still do.
You write that “meaning-making through storytelling is not just the privilege of professionals but our common gift and constant need.” Reflecting on your own career, what scenes or stories help you make sense of your time at UW?
In literature as in love and friendship, “readiness is all.” Within the context of your evolving life, some books find you when you need them the most: they resonate in ways they might not have in an earlier phase. For that reason, my list of consequential works isn’t likely to match yours. Five years into my commitment to writing fiction, I reread a poetry collection by Theodore Roethke. I vaguely recalled admiring the work when assigned it back in college. But only after spending so many hours trying to craft an artful prose style were my mind and ear sufficiently attuned to appreciate those poems, and I absorbed from them a set of musical standards that I still strive to adhere to.
A few years later, my brother sent me a copy of Wendell Berry’s essay collection Standing By Words. Though a prolific poet and fiction writer, Berry was also a farmer and a passionate economic reformer. The holistic nature of his life’s work was an implicit rejection of Yeats’s well-known claim: “The intellect of man is forced to choose / perfection of the life, or of the work.” For Berry, literary ambition was not incompatible with but inseparable from a commitment to good citizenship. As the father then of two young boys and newly charged with teaching in a public university, I was ready to receive that message. I mark the beginning of my commitment to cultural criticism in the quest for a better America to the timely gift of those essays.
You described yourself in Conscientious Thinking as “avidly, one might even say promiscuously, curious.” What are you curious about these days? Where do you see your curiosity taking you in your next act?
There’s no shortage of topics that continue to intrigue me. On the broader subject of “story-telling as meaning-making,” I’ve long been interested in probing the power of populist myths: those foundational stories that, for good and for ill, work to unite the diverse populations of nation-states. Currently, I’m well into completing the first draft of a nonfiction book on the rise and demise of America’s lonesome hero, tracing that mythic figure’s many and subtly changing iterations from Cooper’s frontier scout to John Ford’s cinematic cowboys to Raymond Chandler’s urban private eye. On the other, more intuitive side of the aisle, I have two novel manuscripts in the works, both devoted to exploring the remnants of spiritual experience (and their narrative forms) in our secular age. And I remain urgently engaged in topics I explored in The Demise of Virtue in Virtual America and Conscientious Thinking, including the invasiveness of strictly economic values and the destructive delusions of technoptimism.
To revise an oft-repeated slogan about books: so many topics, so little time. A glance at the calendar reminds me I have only so many years left. Best to get back to work, then.
Any last thoughts on a long and impactful professional life?
Although the time is right for me personally, I hate to be retiring at a moment when the mission of higher education, and of its arts programs in particular, are under an existential threat from a federal administration that holds learning and art in contempt. The public university system has been not only one of the great achievements of our democracy but its protector, empowering millions of Americans in their perennial “pursuit of happiness.” Surviving this challenge will require intense self-discipline. It’s imperative that our current leaders neither cave to the bully-boys now in power, nor, in opposing them, adopt a mirror-image form of intolerance. And in the current budget crisis, they should recall the gross inequities in funding that already exist here.
The arts aren’t merely a decorative addition to the curriculum but a profound way of reckoning the world, without which we can lose our way. In the warning words of Robert Frost: “Unless you are at home in metaphor . . . you are not safe anywhere. . . . You are not safe with science; you are not safe in history.” For years this country and this university have bowed to and helped fund the promises of our digital era’s corporate technocrats. But rather than the democratic utopia they guaranteed, their products have sowed digital addiction, social anomie, and economic inequality, creating a climate of rancor and resentment that now threatens the very survival of our democracy.
A little last advice, then, to our deans and provost from someone who has studied that threat for twenty-five years. Before you start slashing the budgets for the few small arts programs that exist here, pause to take a careful look around you: how “safe” do you feel now?