INQUIRY

New York University • College of Arts and Science
FACULTY PERSPECTIVE
Bridging Gaps and Discovering Questions:
Research across the Disciplines
Professor Patrick Deer
Thank you to Professor Marisa Carrasco-Queijeiro for that kind
introduction, and my sincere thanks to Dean Gabi Starr, Dean Richard
Kalb, and to the generous donors to the Undergraduate Research
Conference. There are many different ways to do research, as you
have all demonstrated so superbly here today. As my title suggests,
I’ve always been drawn to gaps and silences, by the desire to discover
my research questions that might bridge those gaps and break those
silences. I began my own life in research by following my passions:
at first I didn’t consider studying literature because reading was
something I saved for pleasure. In England you have to choose your
undergraduate major even before you’ve finished high school, and I was
going to study history. Then I realized that I could combine historical
research with the close analysis of the ways writers used language to
move their audiences, to express the inexpressible and push the limits
of representation. As an undergraduate at Oxford, I studied English
literature from start to finish, as well as critical theory, and arrived at
Columbia as a medievalist ready to write a dissertation on the work
of Geoffrey Chaucer. Or so I thought. But I also came to work with
Edward Said, author of Orientalism and later Culture and Imperialism,
who became my Professor. I had this crazy idea that I could seek out
an expert in the field and learn from him or directly. And it worked
out. Why? Because experts and academics mostly love to communicate
their ideas, and they very often sit peacefully in their offices or office
hours hours because people think they must be too busy to talk to them.
Don’t stalk them—that would be creepy. But seek them out. Find the
confidence to figure out who knows what you need to know and go
and ask them politely.
My best teachers taught me another lesson, and here I think as
much of my high school teachers in England as my Oxford University
tutors and Columbia professors. At NYU I’ve also learned by listening
to my students’ and colleagues’ questions. You couldn’t just stay within
the boundaries of established knowledge. You had a responsibility to
your knowledge, to take that knowledge and apply it to the world. And
the beauty of research is that it can allow you to reinvent yourself.
In graduate school studying medieval literature I discovered a
century long gap in literary history, the 15 th Century, between Chaucer
and the Renaissance and Shakespeare. Here was the germ of a PhD
topic, I thought. Then I asked my Professor, a Dante specialist, who
else had worked in the field. He named the author of a very good book
I’d found in the Library stacks—sitting on the shelf. Where was she
now, I asked? Oh, she’s working in finance on Wall Street, he said. My
instincts told me, like the subway at Union Square: mind the gap! You
have to listen to your instincts.
Instead I discovered another unknown period in literary history,
right under my nose: the 1940s and WWII literature during which most
critics assumed nothing very good was written because there was a war
on. But, joining a new generation of like-minded critics, I discovered
otherwise in writings of Churchill, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell,
Henry Green, Graham Greene, Elizabeth Bowen, and Alexander
Baron. Why had all these voices been forgotten, left out of the canon
of modern literature? My project was also inspired by the legends and
the silences of my family history. Here, I will share a short war story.
Lieutenant Gerard Borg of the 144 th Royal Armoured Corps of
the British Army had a very brief war. Trained as a tank commander,
my grandfather was part of the vast force that invaded Normandy in
June 1944. His unit crossed Gold Beach a week after D Day, moved
inland through the Bocage countryside of lanes, open fields and thick,
almost fortified hedges, towards the bitterly contested city of Caen. He
was killed in action on the morning of July 16 th near a sunken lane in
the hamlet of Queudeville, on the first day of an attack poetically codenamed
Operation Pomegranate. But the facts of battle, I discovered,
were prosaic. The tank and infantry assault lasted for two inconclusive
days, a diversionary attack for the British 2 nd Army’s huge armoured
assault on July 18th, Operation Goodwood, which successfully pinned
down German forces south of Caen and allowed the Americans to break
out of the Normandy beach head.
I discovered all this reading the War Diaries for my grandfather’s
unit in the National Archive while I was doing research for my dissertation.
Holding these yellowing documents, typed up in the heat of
battle, I was breathless. Now I would learn what actually happened to
my grandfather. What I discovered, of course, is that the closer people
are to intense action or events, in this case infantry combat in Northern
France after D Day, the less time they have to write about it, and the
more fragmented the archival records are. At this point, someone else
typically steps in to tell people’s story for them: the novelist, the historian,
the geographer, the scientist, even the lowly graduate student,
all have a responsibility to reconstruct the big picture. But I’ve learned
that we must also remain faithful to the silences, gaps in knowledge,
to what we don’t and perhaps will never know.
I did learn a few new things, though. According to a report
compiled by his Commanding Officer from the unit’s War Diaries,
after crossing the Start Line at 05.30 hours Lt. Borg’s 3 Troop tanks
hit a British minefield and “lost direction” in the early morning mist
and thick dust stirred up by tank and infantry battle. The War Diary
entry for another unit involved in the Battle, ends for that day, “The
plan must be good and the rest is hope.” But the plan went awry. The
infantry was supposed to mark paths for the tanks that night through
the British minefield. But they didn’t. My grandfather’s tanks hit the
Patrick Deer is an Associate Professor of English, where he focuses on war
culture and war literature. His first book Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire and
Modern British Literature (Oxford, 2009) explores the emergence of modern war
culture in the first half of the 20th century. His next book Deep England: Forging
British Culture after Empire (in progress) focuses on the second half of the twentieth
century and explores tropes of violence, consumption, secrecy, dissent and nostalgia
in a national literature and culture. He is also currently working on a book project on
contemporary U.S. and British war culture, whose working title is Surge and Silence:
Understanding America’s Cultures of War. He is guest editor of The Ends of War, a
special issue of Social Text, and co-editor of Reflections on the Work of Edward Said,
a special issue of Social Text. His published work also includes, “The Dogs of War:
Myths of British Anti-Americanism,” and “Defusing the English Patient,” an essay
on the film adaptation of Michael Ondaatje’s novel commissioned for A Companion
to Literature and Film.
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