Prof. Robert Barsky is the professor-in-residence of the Vanderbilt-in-France program. He is also a professor of English, French and Italian. He is Director of Graduate Studies and the editor of Ameriquests, a journal that discusses issues of migration, settlement and multiculturalism throughout the Americas. He will be teaching a Maymester in Montreal at the end of the semester.
Jennifer Bennett, Versus magazine: What drew you towards the world of academia?
Robert Barksy: I had no intention of being an academic. I suppose that I landed up there in part because of a chance meeting with Lord Byron in a bookstore in Trieste, in the course of my bicycling across Europe after trying to pursue a career as a professional skier. I figured that since he had saved me from nights of loneliness in my little migrating tent, I owed him, so I decided to postpone my law school intentions in favor of an M.A. in English. In the course of writing my thesis, I worked for a refugee transcription agency to pay my rent. It started, though, as my leaking to the Canadian press a document describing the horrors of the refugee determination system, which led to my getting into some trouble, but led as well to some amazing people, including a man who eventually directed my PhD thesis on Convention refugee hearings. This also turned into my first book, a research position (ironically enough working for a quasi-governmental research organization) and, eventually, a place in the academy (4 years after my completing my PhD).
RB: I'm an Anglophone Montrealer of immigrant parents, Irish-English-Austrian (mostly) Protestant on one side (via Hudson Bay, Saskatchewan) and Russian-Ukrainian-Jewish Orthodox (via Winnipeg, Manitoba) on the other, with my parents virtually disowned by both sides and therefore married in New York City by the Jewish anti-Bolshevik Marxist relatives on my father's side.
My schooling was in the English Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal, which basically meant it was secular. This was a public school, which quite literally had a railway track running through it to help us all distinguish between the lower income housing projects and the lower middle class areas, which contributed students in roughly equal amounts.
We all studied French; our teachers were from France, so we read Camus and Sartre, not Hubert Aquin, Anne H?©bert, ?âmile Nelligan, or Michel Tremblay, [who are Canadian writers]. Throughout our studies we learned pronunciation that was appropriate to the streets of Paris or Brussels, not Pierrefonds, Montreal or, Chicoutimi.
When we Anglo-Montrealers came to feel the inevitable draw of the "French Canadian" or "Qu?©b?©cois(e)", particularly of the opposite sex, we found ourselves doubly alienated, culturally and linguistically. By the time I started dating, I had never read a single poem, play or novel by a Qu?©b?©cois author in school. But I stayed, learned the "language" and the "culture" of Quebec, raised my children primarily in French, and even taught for several years, in French, at the Universit?© du Qu?©bec ?†Montr?©al.
And typical of Montrealers of that sort, I resented Ontario, and Toronto in particular, with its self-satisfied Anglo-American culture, its flat and monotonous geography, and what seemed to us at that time to be its self-satisfied US-like quest for head offices and non-descript tall office towers. Now of course Toronto is a virtual Carrefour of cultural diversity, the world's most multicultural city, a place whose very identity is shaped by the shifts of languages and identities from one vibrant streetcorner to the next.
JB: How has your past influenced you to become the "Faculebrity" you are now?
RB: I've always followed the pathway that seemed most inspiring, most passionate and most appropriate, which has at many times led me into trouble. That I managed to turn my getting into trouble into a career is a tribute to the Academy.
JB: Name one of your funniest moments as a professor.
RB: I was a visiting fellow at Yale University a few years back, but I had to travel on a weekly basis to London, Ontario. As such, US Air consumed whatever financial freedom I may have had to the tune of six flights per week. For this reason, I slept in the Comparative Literature library, on Old Campus, for almost a year, which was a situation ripe with hilarity and insanity. I once gave a very well-attended talk there to some wonderful scholars and as I spoke I realized that many in the audience were sitting on my "bed," better known as the couch, or were leaning on my luggage, which they thought to be a coffee table.
JB: What has your status as a "hotshot" professor at Vandy allowed you to do?
RB: I actually never noticed that this was my status; in fact, I have much more truck with prison guards, people in motorcycle bars, immigrants and the kids in my neighborhood than with the professorial world, whatever that is.
JB: To quote the band Cake, how do you like driving your "bad Motoguzzi"?
RB: I adore that motorcycle. It has led me all around the south of France. My Honda VTX also leads me, often with [my girlfriend] Marsha, through the back roads and worlds of Tennessee.
To read the rest of the interview, please pick up a copy of the February 2007 issue of Versus Magazine, on stands this week.
