Bringing out nuances in literature and the best in her students

Barbara Benedict

For department chairwoman and professor of English Barbara M. Benedict, the essential act of learning is deceptively simple: "paying attention." But when teachers pay attention to text and students, and students reciprocate, they create a powerful bond that transmits ideas in a circuit leading to sometimes surprising places. According to Benedict, a deeply published scholar of 18th-century English literature and culture, teaching is an "intellectual collaboration with students," and learning is not all in one direction. "  The intellectual adventurousness of my students has prompted me to think about things that I'd never thought about before and ask questions I'd never asked before." To round the circuit, those new ideas and questions of course come back into the classroom where they begin a new trek.

       Benedict's classes "are always fresh," according to Leslie T. Magraw '02, a student in Benedict's "The Transformation of Literature in the 18th Century."  "Professor Benedict is always bringing new things into class, and that makes students excited. She is a very vibrant teacher."  Andrew Baker '03 adds that this "amazing professor" is especially gifted in "bringing out the best ideas from the students in the class" while at the same time enriching their understanding of particular works by exploring the cultural history of the period. Interim president-designate and former chair of the English department Professor Ronald Thomas says Benedict is "one of the most energetic, disciplined, and well-prepared teachers I have ever seen. She inspires and provokes her students and succeeds in bringing a remarkable degree of focus and intensity to classroom discussion."

A Trinity native
    Born in Pennsylvania, Benedict soon became a world traveler as her family followed her father and his anthropological explorations for the London School of Economics. She spent the first three years of life in Mauritius, with sojourns in Seychelles and Kenya, and then lived in England until she returned to the States, first for high school in Berkeley, CA, then undergraduate studies at Harvard. She returned to Berkeley for her graduate studies. A self-described "Trinity native," Benedict took her first teaching appointment when she joined the English department in 1984.  She has, she says, "flourished" at Trinity.  "Trinity has been a very good place for me.  It has allowed me to develop original ideas and go in directions I had never predicted."

      Now the chairwoman of the department, Benedict, after asking allowance for departmental pride, describes it as "an absolutely wonderful department. The people are friends and colleagues and fellow idealists. Each of the professors has particular and deep strengths" and individual approaches to teaching. "But while we rarely agree on approach, we almost always agree on result. The faculty is intensely devoted to teaching. It is also a highly published department--producing excellent scholarship and exceptional literary art. Yet the amount of attention and care that goes into nurturing students as individuals is really impressive. There is an enormous amount of individual faculty-student contact, and that's where everyone flourishes."

"curiouser and curiouser!"
      Benedict's scholarship in 18th-century literature and culture scales an impressively varied range. Her first book, Framing Feeling: Sentiment and Style in English Prose Fiction, 1745-1800, is, in the words of one reviewer, "a sophisticated analysis" of "a complicated milieu" including, among others, Johnson, Sterne, Fielding, Richardson, Radcliffe, Goldsmith, and Jane Austen--the latter a central figure in much of Benedict's scholarship. Her second book, Making the Modern Reader: Cultural Mediation in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literary Anthologies, reaches back to the Renaissance and forward to the early 19th century while offering the first scholarly analysis of the anthology as a genre. Her latest book, Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry, explores not only 18th-century novels but also period travel narratives, trial transcripts of witches and ghosts, journalism, poetry, and pornography. Curiosity is Benedict's favorite, and it is the culmination of years of scholarship focused on how curiosity in art and literature--often a sign of both social transgression and heroic accomplishment--created the conditions for public exploration of "forbidden" topics like the occult, sexuality, gender, and the origin of power.

       A thread running through this complex terrain is Benedict's concern with reading--its power to transform lives, reveal the cultural contests of an era, engage readers in works of literary beauty. Her skillfully nuanced readings of texts have earned her considerable critical praise from scholarly reviewers. And she brings her passion for reading and an array of reading strategies to her courses. Melanie Brezniak '01, also taking the 18th-century literature course, says that Benedict's "enthusiasm for the subject is infectious. She makes us feel how vital these works still are."

       Clearly, Benedict reveres reading. She dates her intense love of literature to a moment in London's Kensington Garden, where her mother sat the eight-year-old Benedict on an iron bench and began reading aloud a scene from Austen's Pride and Prejudice. "It was Darcy's first proposal to Elizabeth, and that scene resounds in any little girl's heart. From that moment on, I read passionately as a child." Remarkably, Benedict is dyslexic, and reading was at first a struggle. But "once I was finally able to unscramble the words, reading opened a door into a wonder world."

       Now, Benedict leads her students into that wonder world. "When you're in a classroom with individuals looking attentively at the same material--reading it--and then speaking with one another, there's nothing more precious."  For Benedict, this is a crucial step to the educated self.  "Students learn their own voice, how to stand up for their ideas, how to listen to others, and how to have authority."  

                                                                                 -- Mark Warren McLaughlin