Dr. Lisa Botshon

Keynote Title
“This Is Not My Father’s Literature Class: A Playbook for Change”

Keynote Abstract
My father was born in New York City in 1935, narrowly avoided being drafted into the Korean War, and at the age of 20 found himself at the University of Kansas with an initial intent to study architecture. He was to remain at the University of Kansas for seven years, at the end of which he obtained a master’s degree in English. Fortyish years later, when I began graduate work, my father and I compared notes on our studies. Unsurprisingly, the literary field had changed so radically that he was unfamiliar with most of the authors and texts in my orals exam. Together, we pored through the pages of his American literature anthology from college, which documented the work of primarily men who were primarily white. My father found it difficult to conceive of the possibility that other authors with other experiences and identities had been writing and publishing concomitant to this enduring group. If that had been so, he reasoned, why hadn’t they ended up in his anthology? The story of the literary canon and its transformation is hardly new to us. However, it is worth revisiting, especially as we reflect upon our own moment’s contestation of established boundaries in relation to ideas of otherness. Anthologies, by their very nature, fix an authoritative group of works in a particular era, both illuminating and helping shape literary taste. Even contemporary anthologies that deliberately address inclusivity or bring focus to previously marginalized groups also automatically create “others” – those authors, works, genres, regions, etc. that don’t make it into the collections. This talk will consider the value and limitation of anthologies and similar materials with which we have organized, catalogued, written about and taught literature. In so doing, I will examine how globalization and digitalization have impacted these tools and processes as we continue to grapple with the idea of otherness. What I teach now is hardly my father’s literature class, but perhaps there are aspects that he would seize upon as essential to moving forward.


Brief bio: Lisa Botshon is a Professor of English at the University of Maine at Augusta in the U.S., where she regularly teaches American literature, Postcolonial Studies, Graphic Storytelling, and Women’s and Gender Studies. Her publications focus on gender, race, and popular culture; most recently, she’s written about a legacy of Maine women homesteading memoirists. She’s been the recipient of two Fulbright Fellowships, including one to the University of Ljubljana in 2009-2010. In 2019 she won a $100,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create a series of public events on mid-20th century Maine culture.

University of Maine at Augusta, US