New Faculty Interview: Shu-han Luo Joins Berkeley English

Shu-han Luo is a scholar of medieval English literature, specializing in Old English and with broader interests in poetics, literary form, and the relationship between aesthetics and instruction. Her work is interested also in the ways disciplinary history can offer fresh tools for literary inquiry, and in new comparative methodologies for close reading through and beyond disciplinary bounds. Her current book project interweaves the formal strategies of Old English didactic poetry with Tang Chinese verse and later imperial commentary, to deepen the questions we can ask about learning and aesthetic experience in early medieval England. She received her Master’s degree in Medieval English Literature from the University of Oxford, and her PhD in English from Yale.

First of all, welcome to UC Berkeley and to the department! Could you talk a little bit generally about your own research interests, writing, and scholarship? What has inspired the work you’re doing now?

I have always enjoyed learning languages, and in college was rather torn between majoring in other languages vs. in English literature. Old English was a way to do both. More specifically, my current project began in a moment when I realized that an elementary “didactic” poem that I had learned as a child has an ending that actually doesn’t quite work. That moment of readerly disappointment was unexpectedly exciting, because it opened into questions about how formal constraints or failure direct our sense of a text’s meaning, and about the choice of poetry as a medium for instruction. I’m exploring these questions in a group of Old English poems that have traditionally been considered pedantic and subliterary, to suggest that reading them in this way misconstrues both their lessons and their ingenuity.

I noticed you were teaching Introduction to Old English this semester. Are you excited to start teaching at UC Berkeley? What is it like introducing students to such a wonderful body of work in its original language?

I was first drawn to Old English because it slowed me down as a reader. It takes time to parse the grammar and figure out how the pieces of a line fit, and even then I could still be befuddled by multiple possible translations and interpretations. I was fortunate then, and in my studies after, to have had wonderful teachers who could really bring out the joy of being in that space of uncertainty and attention. I feel very lucky to get to step into that role now. And of course, reading is never one-sided: the ways our lives and experiences as readers become relevant to the scholarship that we do is full of surprises, and I’m especially excited to see these old texts anew with students and all that they bring to the classroom.

In reading your article “At the Limits of Knowledge: the Iron Poetics of Old English Verse in the Nineteenth Century,” I came across so many fascinating things, one of which is just the general idea that our imaginative understanding of poetic style is mediated by the metaphors we use to describe it, and that the metaphor of “iron” has conventionally evoked a hypermasculine primitivity that is worth critiquing.  Could you say a little bit about the importance of metaphor to understanding Old English verse? Is this area of study still currently a part of your research?

My work on this started originally just as a footnote about how the metaphors used to explain Old English poetry are overwhelmingly rough, weighty, invested in a certain kind of image of the past. The more I took note of the historical span of metaphors used though, the more interested I became in where the metaphors appeared and the kinds of problems they were mobilized to solve. Old English verse follows rules and stylistic etiquettes very different from later English poetry, and early English poets did not write an ars poetica explaining for our benefit what those rules were. Far from being mere rhetorical ornaments, the metaphors in later scholarship often functioned structurally and conceptually, as part of a range of responses seeking to make sense of the poetry’s rules and its relation to the present. They bring into focus pressure points where a problem was felt, and I continue to find them really valuable for thinking through cruxes in the poetry and in our disciplinary history.

How has the Bay Area been so far? Are there things outside of UC Berkeley or in the wider geographic area that you’re enjoying or looking forward to exploring?

I’m new to the West Coast altogether, and arriving in the Bay Area has been a lovely experience. The sunlight feels different, the flora is mesmerizing. I have not yet been to Muir Woods, but once I get into the groove of the semester a little, I hope to have the chance. I love long hikes with family and with friends – it’s in those walks that I often get to have the best conversations.

What are three books would you recommend?

Anne Carson’s Economy of the Unlost, Shigehisa Kuriyama’s The Expressiveness of the Body, and Vincent Scully’s Architecture: The Natural and the Manmade. I came to these works at very different moments in my life, but they each made me think about form and language in revelatory and moving ways.