Winter 2003
Thomas Augst: Bridging Lives and Literature
Photo by Leo Kim
THOMAS AUGST
Assistant Professor
English
Ph.D., A.M., Harvard University; B.A., Yale University, literature and history
On literature for the common person:
"Oprah's book club is a good example of how texts create community. Here's a large audience of people reading, looking to texts for guidance, for values, for emotional intelligence. Literature is not for an elite audience and shouldn't be. That attitude has no place in a democracy."
On the academy and the real world:
"There's a perception that the academy breeds subversive efforts. That's why academics need to write for a larger audience, and the profession needs to reward that. We should teach academics to be public intellectuals."
On heroes:
"My heroes tend to be professors--like Carlos Ginsberg, a Renaissance scholar at the University of Pisa who writes about ordinary people of the 16th century."
In Tom Augst's ground-floor Lind Hall office, you'll find the classics that line the shelves of any American literature prof: Moby Dick, the Norton Anthology of American Literature, a copy of William Andrews's To Tell a Free Story. His has the look of, well, a scholar's office.
One of five English-department faculty members hired in 1998 from among some 1,300 applicants, Augst is a Harvard Ph.D., a specialist in 18th- and 19th-century American literature and culture who clearly knows his way around the works of Herman Melville and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Yet he is not what you'd call your conventional literature professor.
What Augst prefers is to study these authors' more obscure contemporaries. Augst is a fan of common folk; his research passion is to understand how ordinary people's lives are informed by what they read and write.
"My interest is in making the liberal arts relevant to the lives of citizens," he says--in connecting the academic to the ordinary. So the questions he tackles pursue those connections: How does writing a diary help us see ourselves and the world? How are literary works a source of community? Why should we read literature? How can literature help us figure out how to live?
Augst wasn't always pointed in this direction. In fact, he recalls, he didn't want to be a scholar. "My dad was a professor, so that's what I didn't want," he laughs. "I wanted to be a playwright."
But after working for a while as a corporate consultant following his graduation from Yale, Augst was struck by what he calls the "disconnect" between the life of the mind and the for-profit world of commerce in which he worked.
"Understanding this disconnect became my explicit reason for going to graduate school," he says.
So it was that at Harvard he developed an award-winning dissertation that examined the significance of reading in the lives of ordinary people--in that case, 19th-century urban mercantile clerks.
"I wanted to see how ordinary people used and understood reading, writing, and speaking to address their lives," he says. "We know what role literature can play in the lives of scholars, but not in the lives of working people. In the 19th century, reading books was a privilege. But literature is not for an elite audience and shouldn't be."
Augst expands on that theme in a book expected to be published by the University of Chicago Press next year. Called The Business of Living: Character, Manhood, and Literary Practices in Nineteenth Century America, the book explores the relationship between literature and moral life by looking at the unpublished diaries of young men of the day as they "moved through space--in lecture halls, the library, the office, the parlor. These are the stories of clerks, about the moral significance of clerks who are writing," Augst says.
Augst has picked up a number of awards and honors in his career to date, but considers winning the U's McKnight Land-Grant Professorship two years ago "a peak moment." Awarded to promising junior faculty, the McKnight includes an endowed chair for two years and a $25,000 research grant in each of those years.
"The McKnight was a humbling experience, a luxury to have this commitment from the University, to know that they'd trust me to do this work," says Augst, who is using the professorship to research the lives and writings of 19th- century men in relation to the temperance movement.
Tracing their stories through newspapers, lectures, and the propaganda of the reform movement, Augst wants to see how the rhetoric of temperance and drinking informed men about how to act as citizens.
"The language of drinking is part of a larger question," Augst says, "and that is, ‘How do we learn to act as free persons?'
"I'm interested in seeing how tangible literature can be. I think to a great extent literary studies have been insulated from real life and have lost touch with the world. I want to be a bridge."