When The Fifth Floor invited us to write about Steve Carr, who is retiring this year, we had a long conversation about all of the things we could do. As those conversations often go, we generated more ideas than we
could use. We wanted to incorporate the story of how we met (—at Lafayette College, in the early 2000s, in Bianca’s Literary history course, which was very much grounded in her work with both Steve and Jean Ferguson Carr. After graduating from Lafayette, Danielle went on to graduate school at Pitt and ended up working with Steve and Jean). And we wanted to talk about the ways in which Steve’s work on textual production and the circulation of ideas has informed our own research and teaching. In the end, we settled on a format consisting of a series of juxtaposed rememberings and experiences, a kind of conversation about some of the ideas, influences, and ways of knowing we share as a result of our work with Steve. In order to distinguish our two voices, we’ve italicized Danielle’s words. We are very grateful to Steph Ceraso, Melanie Dawson, Hannah Gerrard, and Donna Dunbar-Odom, graduate alumnae who kindly shared some of their best memories of working with Steve. Their words also appear here, interspersed among our own.
—Bianca Falbo and Danielle Koupf
I signed up for a class with Steve called Institutions of Literature my first semester at Pitt. On day one, Steve introduced himself as “SCARR” (his email address). Having just finished college, I was intimidated by Steve and the more advanced grad students at the seminar table. In class we talked about how literacy education historically intersects with works of literature. We explored many online databases and collections, including Google Books and the Nineteenth-Century Schoolbooks Collection at Pitt, and I remember feeling lost but intrigued. One day I came across a footnote referencing the Encyclopedia Britannica in an eighteenth-century grammar book, and I was a bit surprised by this mention, probably because scholars today don’t often reference encyclopedias. I asked a question about it in class, and Steve happily encouraged me to research the reference a bit. That encouragement led me down a rabbit hole of research into eighteenth-century encyclopedias, including the first edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which I learned was heavily copied and pasted by a compiler named William Smellie. I basically haven’t stopped thinking about compilation since then, as that initial research, and encouragement from Steve, led gradually to my PhD project, exams, dissertation, and publications on rewriting and tinkering.
Danielle and I both have memories of a Steve class that altered the course of our careers. Mine was Steve’s Romantics course. At the first class meeting, we spent the whole class looking at one poem—“I wandered lonely as a cloud,” by William Wordsworth. Steve told us that the more we looked the more we would see. And it was true. This was a poem I’d seen hundreds of times, but never “got.” Listening to Steve respond to my classmates’ ideas and question the pre-understandings they brought to the text wasn’t only about learning to read this poem. It was also an introduction to how Romantic lyrics position readers to do a particular kind of interpretive work. Thinking about that question was central to my dissertation and trying to understand the cultural work of Romantic discourse. Around the time I was taking Steve’s Romantics course, I also took Jean’s Book History course. Those two courses together changed forever my understanding of basically everything I thought I knew about reading, writing, and studying literature.
One thing I always shared with Steve is a love for unconventional texts: compilations, revisions, lists, adaptations, erasure poetry, collages, word maps, collections of aphorisms, and especially uncategorizable texts. Sometimes when I would visit him in his office, he would share with delight the unconventional projects he asked his undergraduates to complete. These were collages, posterboard creations, and other non-essays. One semester while I was teaching a section of Introduction to Literature, Steve observed me on a day when we were discussing the poem “Directory” by Robert Fitterman. This poem consists of a repetitive, dull, and numbing list of stores you would encounter at the mall. My students played along while acknowledging the weirdness of this text, but Steve got excited. I think now that such a class session was emblematic of the kind of work Steve encouraged: a non-hermeneutic approach to reading texts of any kind, an appreciation for the strange or surprising, and a curiosity following initial confusion.
For homework in the Romantics course, Steve gave us a black-and-white copy of the title page from Blake’s Songs of Innocence and told us to color it in. I thought he was joking. He wasn’t. We returned with our pages the following week, and he asked us about the decisions we made as we colored it in. What did we learn? What struck us as interesting, weird, or peculiar? The latter was a signature Steve question, and one I continue to use with my own students. When I met Danielle about 10 years later, she was an undergraduate in my Literary History class at Lafayette. We read the Songs of Innocence because, as I had learned from Steve, it’s one of the best texts for talking about the work of reading. I still had my class notes from the Romantics seminar. Looking at examples of my students' illuminated title pages, I asked them, "As you colored in the page, what struck you as interesting, weird, or peculiar? What would you like to hear more discussion about?"
When sharing their memories of working with Steve, our fellow Pitt graduate alum often drew attention to Steve’s challenging but supportive commentary on our writing. Steph Ceraso wrote, “One of the things I appreciated most about Steve as a mentor was his feedback on my writing. He always pushed me to think more critically and expansively but in the kindest way possible.” Hannah Gerrard added, “As chair of my dissertation committee, Steve was always so encouraging and such a rigorous and generous reader—not afraid of an idiosyncratic project! I always admired his ability to reframe and thus suddenly untangle and illuminate any topic, and his irreverent, wise, kind-hearted way of steering his students through the discipline and the academy. As a teacher I still catch myself echoing him, or trying to! I also fondly recall Jean and Steve as wonderful hosts of reading groups, parties, and a Thanksgiving.”
Melanie Dawson remembers consulting Steve about a manuscript that “wasn’t ready” and that she was struggling with:
He said a few things by way of offering advice, but the most memorable was "You might as well be shot for a goat as well as a sheep." Or at least that's how I remembered it, and I took it to mean that I might as well get to the point and write boldly, advance something deliberately, even brashly, as if I knew what I was about: that attempts at greater elegance and eloquence are no great benefit if one can't stand out from the flock. Or something like that. So I toughened myself right up and made myself into a less timid writer. And then, thereafter, I mentioned this advice to Jean, who said that no, Steve remembered the Biblical story incorrectly (and Jean can relate her own version of the tale). And this was only the beginning of the great sheep-goat debate that has raged in our household for 25 years. And are there lambs involved? Some think so. Some argue that the saying is about the ontology of the goat-sheep distinction. Others focus about the economic value. There have been a few cultural critics who have weighed in. Darker minds gravitate to tales of sacrifice. Theodore Dreiser has not one but two versions of the tale in his account of shady financial dealings in The Financier, I just discovered, but I'll spare you those details. Even if we've ranged into some living version of reader response theory, I know what Steve meant, and I benefitted immeasurably.
Donna Dunbar-Odom shared a favorite story about Steve:
In my first semester in the doctoral program, Steve was my advisor. It was our first meeting. By way of introduction, I launched into my tale of woe about the extraordinarily bad job I had left to start my PhD at what I saw as the ancient age of 36. I hadn't gotten far when he stopped me and said, "Everybody's got a story.
It took me a while to realize what he was saying because, at first, I just thought it was a way to say shut up—and, yes, I'm sure that was part of his point as well. But I realized that the more important message was that it's time to move on and not to let that particular story define you.
I used that line a zillion times as I, in turn, became a graduate advisor for students who also had stories but needed to move on. He's also the one who taught me this valuable lesson: It's the ones you give a break to who'll turn around and bite you in the ass. So true.
As I moved through grad school and eventually applied for fellowships and jobs, Steve acknowledged that my research was weird but in a good way (something that my other committee members, Jean Ferguson Carr and Don Bialostosky, happily admitted too). He encouraged me to be myself and flaunt my weird project even while the job market raised many doubts and uncertainties (as it tends to do). I am super thankful for that attitude because it’s kept me true to the kind of work I want to do as both a teacher and a writer, and has helped me find like-minded scholars beyond Pitt.
Mock interviews. They were legendary in Pitt’s English department, and not in a good way. Every December, faculty set up practice interviews for grad students headed to MLA. They were meant to be helpful, and they were brutal. I’ve blocked out most of what happened but remember how, afterwards, Steve and Jean set up a second practice interview at their house. I recall sitting at their dining room table, [their dog] Tchotchke resting nearby, [their daughters] Maggie and Julia coming and going, and me considerably more prepared but still struggling. We rehearsed answers to possible questions—short answers, longer answers, I-have-no-idea-what-you’re-asking me answers. It didn’t happen in a single afternoon—there were follow-up sessions—but eventually I learned how to talk about my research to people outside of Pitt’s English department.
As some of the above comments suggest, Steve’s mentorship has always extended beyond traditional instructional spaces. Melanie wrote:
I have many memories of Steve—and Jean, of course, who were both so generous with their time and their advice, which John and I appreciated— especially as we navigated the post-dissertation and early career stages. Every time we chatted or visited them, we felt we gained insights into the strange world of living as professors do. Alas, there were no houses like theirs for us to purchase in Williamsburg, but every time we've faced a daunting homeowner task, John has felt inspired by the sight of Steve, up a ladder, pulling vines off the side of a house. Many, many vines and in great heat. If Steve could do that, surely we could paint ceilings, strip varnish, plank a deck. Our home has benefited greatly from such inspiration.
And Steph contributed an anecdote about an extracurricular activity that generated a lot of excitement among the comp grad students.
I will also never forget when Steve joined the grad students' intramural basketball team (the “Bartholoballers”). We were terrible and didn't win a single game, but Steve always showed up ready to play—and his graceful breakaway layups will go down in Pitt intramural history to be sure.
We have focused here on our personal memories with Steve, but we would be remiss in not mentioning the many positions he has held at Pitt, which have included acting chair of the English department, director of the Literature program, acting director of the graduate program, and assistant/associate dean of graduate studies in the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences.
As Hannah noted, “It’s hard to imagine Steve retiring, but I hope it affords the odd moment to reflect with pride on a wonderful career that has supported so many of us.” We echo Hannah’s comments about the difficulty of imagining the English department without both Steve and Jean, and we wish them both the very happiest of retirements.
—Narrated, Gathered, and Composed by Bianca Falbo and Danielle Koupf
Danielle Koupf (PhD, Critical and Cultural Studies, 2014) is Assistant Teaching Professor in the Writing Program at Wake Forest University.
Steph Ceraso (PhD, Critical and Cultural Studies, 2013) is Associate Professor of Digital Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Virginia.
Hannah Gerrard (PhD, Critical and Cultural Studies, 2014) is Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities, Media, and Creative Communication at Massey University in New Zealand.
Bianca Falbo (PhD, Critical and Cultural Studies, 1997) is Associate Professor of English, Director of the First-Year Seminar Program, and Assistant Director of the College Writing Program at Lafayette College.
Melanie Dawson (PhD, Critical and Cultural Studies, 1997) is Professor of English at the College of William and Mary.
Donna Dunbar-Odom (PhD, Critical and Cultural Studies, 1993) is a retired Professor of English at Texas A&M-Commerce, where she also served as Director of FY Writing, Director of Graduate Studies, Head of Literature and Languages, and Head of Liberal Studies.