Office Hours: Joseph Rosenberg on great books, jazz, and tea cozies

The Program of Liberal Studies is known as the University of Notre Dame’s great books major. And Joseph Rosenberg has never taken the time to count just how many books line the wall of his O’Shaughnessy Hall office.

“I think the answer is between just enough and too much,” he said. “There’s a saying, ‘How many books do you need? Just one more.’”

This feature is part of a College of Arts & Letters story series called “Office Hours,” which provides a glimpse into the personal and professional lives of Arts & Letters faculty through their workspaces around campus. This installment highlights Rosenberg, an associate professor in the Program of Liberal Studies (PLS) and a literary critic interested in researching and pushing the boundaries of literature.

In this interview, Rosenberg discusses important mementos in his office that inspire him, are relevant to his work, and remind him of the relationships he’s developed with students.

Rosenberg’s answers have been edited for clarity and conciseness.

Q: Your office wall is full of so many books, ranging in size and color. Where do you go to find the next great book?

A: I try to get them from independent bookstores, but it’s so hard these days. While I try to get them secondhand, I’m very interested in contemporary poetry, which can be a lot harder to find because it’s mostly put out by very tiny presses. Some of these are quite boutique and letterpress, but some are even produced on someone’s photocopier.

I find these mostly through word of mouth or through reviews in journals or even blogs. But even then, I’ll often discover that a poet I’m interested in produced a volume three years ago that I never ever heard of. I like keeping a few pamphlets out for students to see. The titles alone – like “Kazoo Dreamboats,” say, or “Wild Ascending Lisp” – seem like tickets to a secret world.

Q: What are some pieces that continuously inspire you?

A: I keep a picture on my desk that belonged to my dad, by the artist Stan Washburn. It’s from his “Moral Alphabet of Vice and Folly.” It depicts a philosopher holding a skull, seemingly in deep contemplation. The caption reads, “A philosopher concluded that man’s pretensions are absurd, and that worldly endeavor is without purpose. So assiduous were his ruminations on this insight that he neglected to publish, and in due course, he perished. Moral: publish.”

I keep it on my desk as a reminder to keep writing, but also to not take it so seriously.

I also have a poster of Henry James in tribute to my mother, who is also a literary scholar and has spent her career working on James.

My earliest work was on James, but I’m now more focused on later literary developments. In my scholarship, I’m interested in extremes of language and representation. Some of the books I work on push language as far as one can with it still being — or at least vaguely resembling — literature.

I also keep a guitar in my office. I’m an amateur jazz musician — a passion I shared with my dad — and I play to decompress. But music can also act as a writing tool. If I’m stuck on a really thorny paragraph and need to think it through, it can be nice to pick a guitar up and do something that uses an entirely different part of my brain, and then get back to my work refreshed.

Q: Having previously served as the PLS director of undergraduate studies (DUS), how would you explain the program to someone who doesn’t know anything about it?

A: I think the program, once students hear about it, more or less sells itself.

But when students initially just see those initials, “PLS,” they wonder, “Is it poli sci? Is it philosophy?” Well, yes, it is, but also so much more.

The hardest part of being DUS, but also the most pleasurable, was simply explaining to students what it is that we do. In PLS, we study works spanning from ancient Greece to this century, and across a variety of disciplines – literature, philosophy, theology, science, and music. Our classes are small and discussion-based, and the sheer wealth of material students read allows them to see and understand the world from the widest range of perspectives. And seeing the similar range of students we get in the program has been a great pleasure.

There’s something in PLS for everyone, but I think our greatest strength is that we have students read works that they might not otherwise encounter, indeed that they might initially think might not interest them, whether that’s a work of ancient philosophy or contemporary poetry. PLS asks students to be curious about everything.

When I was DUS, I would often tell interested students, “Well, you know that Arts & Letters slogan, ‘Study everything. Do anything.’? We’re the department that actually does that.”

Q: What are some tokens you have from your students?

A: One of my students made this amazing modernism conspiracy board, which takes various avant-garde art movements — surrealism, dadaism, vorticism — and tries to connect them. But the attempt to make sense of them all ends up just looking like a paranoid delusion.

Another piece, also a student’s final project from a class I teach on modernism, is this deceptively chintzy tea cozy. It has a swan on it in tribute to the French poet Charles Baudelaire. It reads in French, “I’m catching the taxi to death.” The student’s explanation was that he wanted the tea cozy to be an example of how even the most transgressive art will eventually be transformed into consumer culture.

A year or two ago, I offered a directed reading on the works of Samuel Beckett, and my student painted this very Picasso-blue-period-esque portrait of Beckett. While I, of course, still ask students to write essays, I want to give them an opportunity to do something more creative.

Q: Your first book, Wastepaper Modernism: Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Ruins of Print (Oxford University Press, 2021), examines how famous modernist writers responded to new media, which at that time was cinema. How do you apply that to today’s world with the evolution of artificial intelligence and its influence on writing?

A: Looking back 120 years ago, when things like the cinema and the radio were the new kids on the block, writers got extremely anxious. But, as I argue in Wastepaper Modernism, out of this anxiety came a new kind of literature. So with AI, it’s tricky, right? Because part of me wants to say, “Well, we’ve been through this before, and literature has been just fine.” But at the same time, AI — and large language models, in particular — work in literature’s own medium of language, which perhaps makes it more of a threat to writing.

I take heart, though, that one of the things that AI can’t do well, yet, is write poetry. The literature that it produces tends to be very predictable, moralistic, and just really, really dull. The sorts of things that I value in literature — formal experimentation, newness, novelty — are the very things that AI can’t do. AI draws on and reproduces everything that’s already been done, but it cannot, as of yet, produce anything truly different or original.

Anecdotally, I’ve noticed my students gravitating more towards older media. Some of my students even want to handwrite their papers. Maybe they think of handwriting as the ultimate proof that they didn’t use AI to write their paper, or maybe they just want to make something with their hands. In any case, I think it shows that the matter of writing still matters.

Q: What do you hope people feel when they come into your office?

A: I want it to feel welcoming. With all the books, it would seem to have a weight of seriousness that I hope is somewhat lightened by tea cozies and modernism conspiracy boards.

I want an office space that puts students at ease, and that puts me at ease as well. Sometimes my classes can be back-to-back. But even with 10-15 minutes in between, I can come in here, close the door, take a breath, have a coffee, and then go back to the classroom refreshed.

The espresso machine is probably the one thing students will never get to use. I did once have a student very cheekily ask during office hours, “Hey, can you make me a coffee?” My answer was, “There’s a Starbucks over in LaFortune.” Hospitality has to have its limits!