Name<\/strong>: <\/strong>Katie Adkison<\/p>\n\n\n\n Title<\/strong>: <\/strong>Assistant Professor of English<\/p>\n\n\n\n Degrees from<\/strong>: University of California, Santa Barbara, Ph.D. in English; Colorado State University, M.A. in English literature, B.A. in English education<\/p>\n\n\n\n Her work<\/strong>: Adkison studies the role of an individual\u2019s spoken voice in early modern English literature \u2014 what the actual feeling of speaking means and conveys, especially in terms of power structures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Adkison\u2019s scholarship, voice becomes a \u201ckind of embodied sensation. Not literally a sixth sense, but something more akin to sensing knowledge than to just a tool of communication.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Her dissertation<\/strong>: \u201cThe Sense of Speech: Voice and Sovereignty in Early Modern Tragedy,\u201d describes the relationship between early modern theories of sovereignty and the phenomenology of the voice in Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For example<\/strong>: In the opening scene of King Lear<\/em>, the titular monarch decides to divide his kingdom based on how much his three daughters say they love him. His first two daughters make elaborate but insincere declarations of love. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Lear then turns to his third daughter, Cordelia, and asks, \u201cWhat can you say to draw a third more opulent than your sisters?\u201d Cordelia, who does truly love the king, responds, \u201cNothing, my Lord.\u201d She continues:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave<\/em> In referring to her own voice, Cordelia is trying to tell her father \u201csomething about politics and about love that his love test is failing to understand,” says Adkison. She’s saying that “love and politics are not mathematical equations. You can’t give more love through your voice the way that you can give more money or more of something tangible.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The opening scene is a kernel in the larger lesson of the play. Cordelia, in effect, is vocalizing the fact that her vocalization can\u2019t do what her father wants it to do \u2014 it can\u2019t be reduced to words. \u201cShe\u2019s saying, \u2018There’s more to love here, just as there’s more to language in the very voice I’m speaking through.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The scene sets the stage for the tragedy. \u201cLear wants words to equal inheritance, a kingdom, power.\u201d Cordelia wants no part of it. \u201cAnd so it ends, with death, tears, and so much pain,” says Adkison.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Iambic sortameter<\/strong>: In King Lear<\/em>\u2019s opening scene, Shakespeare uses a jarring version of iambic pentameter for some of Cordelia\u2019s lines. \u201cThe rhythm is off,\u201d says Adkison, noting that the Bard sometimes “uses an extra syllable, 11 instead of the usual 10 \u2014 or even a whole extra two-syllable iamb \u2014 in some lines.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Shakespeare did that often, she explains, usually to draw attention to something. \u201cIf the rhythm is off, you are supposed to feel it as an audience member.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n We can’t know the intentions<\/em> of the author now or 500 years later. But the meaning<\/em> is there, regardless. That’s magic to me.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Adkison recalls the moment that \u201csomething felt off in one of the lines. And so I started counting syllables, the way you’re supposed to when something feels off.\u201d The extra syllable \u201chad to be purposeful. It’s too perfect not to be.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Cordelia\u2019s 11-syllable lines, there is \u201csomething that literally can\u2019t be divided up. The rhythm of the lines is as out of step with her father\u2019s demands as her inability to speak her love is. She\u2019s really talking about vocal rhythm and the experience of voice to explain what\u2019s going on.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n A beautiful thing<\/strong>: \u201cThe beautiful thing about how literature thinks about language is that we can’t know the intentions<\/em> of the author now or 500 years later,” Adkison says. “But the meaning<\/em> is there, regardless. There’s always something new to be parsed and to be found. That’s magic to me.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Classroom magic<\/strong>: Sometimes, magical classroom moments happen when a teacher allows a discussion to go off the straight rails.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Last winter, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Adkison was teaching Thomas More’s Utopia<\/em>. A student asked, “Is anyone watching The Good Place<\/em>?” referring to the NBC fantasy comedy about a utopian, but problematic, afterlife.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rather than guide the discussion back to the 16th century, Adkison took a moment to connect the dots. She noted the etymology of the word \u201cutopia\u201d and how it \u201ccan mean \u2018the good place\u2019 or \u2018no place\u2019 or \u2018the good place that cannot exist\u2019 or something along those lines.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Eager for wordplay, Adkison\u2019s students jumped at the chance to connect More\u2019s Utopia <\/em>to The Good Place<\/em>, which led to a \u201cconversation about the way that the show uses and problematizes the notion of a utopia in such interesting ways.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then she guided the students back to how More imagined what a good life looked like in his Utopia. \u201cThe text is infamously sticky about how one constructs a good life, what it means to live the good life, and all the problems that are wrapped up in that text.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n And a course is born<\/strong>: All of that left Adkison \u201cwanting so badly to teach a class on utopia.\u201d And if you look at utopia, \u201cyou have to teach the second half of the class on dystopias because it seems to be true that a good place for some frequently comes to mean a bad place for others.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cCollege students are special because they will think with you \u2014 taking on the agency of research and thinking of their learning as their own.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n And, voil\u00e0! This spring, Adkison will teach such a course on utopian and dystopian fiction, from More\u2019s Utopia<\/em> and Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World<\/em> to George Orwell’s 1984<\/em> and the first of N.K. Jemisin\u2019s Broken Earth <\/em>trilogy. \u201cI’m hoping we’ll end with the first season of The Good Place<\/em> and try and end on a funny note \u2014 even if it’s not necessarily optimistic in all of the ways one wants it to be.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why Bates?<\/strong> \u201cI was so excited when I visited Bates to see how much collaboration happens between departments and between students and faculty. Collaborative research structures the idea of the undergraduate thesis that all students write here.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why college? <\/strong>\u201cCollege students are special because they will think with you \u2014 taking on the agency of research and thinking of their learning as their own.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Finding her path: \u201c<\/strong>At my core, I have always known I wanted to be a teacher,\u201d Adkison says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI thought I would be a high school English teacher for the rest of my life. But my path to graduate work was one I found late in the stages of my own bachelor’s degree, when I was taking education courses alongside literature courses. I realized I had more questions about the literature. I couldn’t be done.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In early modern English literature, the spoken voice becomes a sensation with considerable power, says Adkison, a new assistant professor of English. 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My heart into my mouth: I love your majesty<\/em>
According to my bond; nor more nor less….<\/em> (1.1.91-93)<\/p>\n\n\n\n