Winter 2001-2002
Sprengnether: SCHOLAR MEETS Storyteller
Photo by Diana Watters
MADELON SPRENGNETHER
Education
Ph.D., M.A., Yale U
Institut d'Etudes Françaises d'Avignon
A.B., Bryn Mawr College
Professional history
1971-present: faculty, English & creative writing, U of M
Selected honors & awards
McKnight Research Award
Edda Poetry Chapbook Award
CLA Scholar of the College
National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship
Bush Foundation Fellowship
Selected publications
"Reading Freud's Life." Reprinted in Freud 2000. Ed. Anthony Elliott, (1st ed. American Imago, 1994).
Shakespearean Tragedy and Gender. Co-edited with Shirley Garner. Indiana U Press, 1996.
The Spectral Mother: Freud, Feminism and Psychoanalysis. Cornell U Press, 1990.
Teaching philosophy
"My aim is to help students discover the material that has the most meaning for them."
For decades, Madelon ("Mimi") Sprengnether was unable to express her grief over witnessing her father's drowning when she was nine. Not, that is, until she watched the first part of the classic Apu Trilogy by Indian film director Satyajit Ray.
Not until several years and many films later did Sprengnether, professor of English and chair of the Creative Writing Program, fully understand the relationship between her present, her past, and the catalytic and cathartic cinematic worlds that bridged the two. Her recently published memoir, Crying at the Movies, is in part an account of the evolution of that understanding.
For Sprengnether, who last year was named the Fesler-Lampert Chair in Humanities, publication of a memoir is only the most recent highlight in a long and remarkable career that has taken her from conventional literary scholarship through groundbreaking feminist insights into Shakespeare and Freud to the deeply personal revelations of poetry and memoir.
"I've been lucky," she says, "to be at a university, in a department, and in a particular moment of time when I could follow my interests. Nobody has ever said, 'You can't write about [that] because that's not in your contract.'"
Sprengnether arrived at the U in 1971 as an instructor in English Renaissance literature, a year before receiving her Ph.D. in English from Yale. Over the years, as her personal interests have changed so has the focus of her research and teaching. She considers that flexibility one of the high points of what she calls her "way of life."
The variety of Sprengnether's writings would dizzy a less versatile sensibility than her own. In Crying at the Movies, she combines what she calls "invisible scholarship" with a deeply subjective literary form in order to investigate her own emotional history through the prism of her responses to cinema. On one level, the book is an exploration of the films that have moved her to tears and enabled a long-postponed catharsis of childhood grief and trauma. On another, it is an examination of film as a reflection and shaper of culture and identity.
Where her writing has led, students have followed. And they have taught her as well. Of her class "The Cinematics of Loss"--an outgrowth of her work on the book-- she says, "I like the stimulation of hearing what my students think. I'm creating a framework that we can use to talk about things that are of interest to all of us. The class has changed on the basis of what students have revealed to me."
The first time Sprengnether taught the class, one of her students gave a digital video presentation of a poem projected against animated images representing the creator's grief at the death of her grandmother. Says Sprengnether, "I'm still showing that video poem to succeeding classes. And I still want to learn how to do that [technique]."
With published works that include a book of poetry, The Normal Heart, and an anthology of women's travel writing, The House on Via Gombito, Sprengnether acknowledges a certain tension between the creative and the scholarly sides of her writing. "Some writers can do both," she says, "but I can't do them simultaneously. I need to put my primary energies in one place."
Nonetheless, she seems to have done just that. Although she's always written personal essays, Sprengnether says her decision to shift her focus to memoir came in 1991, after publication of The Spectral Mother, a scholarly investigation of Freud's "difficulty thinking about mothers. I was at a crossroads," she recalls. "I had leftover thoughts on Freud, but I wanted to resume creative writing." She was, in other words, perfectly positioned to embark on the psychological exploration of her own past that became Crying at the Movies, a memoir grounded in both personal history and scholarly insight.
Although her next project is less personal, it has a "memoir component," says Sprengnether. That project is a book about the changes that have come to the St. Louis neighborhood of her childhood following the mid-1960s construction of an interstate highway that cut a swath through the center of the community. "I use the interstate [as a metaphor]," she says, "because it's such a visual, tangible symbol of the division of the community."
Asked for the unifying thread that ties her long body of work together, Sprengnether answers simply, "My interests are intensely psychological, and they always have been. I've always wanted to tell the truth."