• CLA Discoveries
• About CLA
• Faculty, Teaching & Research
• Students
• In the Community
• Departments & Majors
• Alumni & Friends
• News & Events
  • CLA Events Calendar
  • For the Media
  • Reach Magazine
  • RSS Feeds
  • Publications & Social Media
• Giving to CLA

Home > News & Events > CLA Today Archive > Spring 2006 : Minding the gaps

Minding the gaps

by Andi McDaniel

You won’t find The Great Gatsby on the innovative literary Web site Voices from the Gaps. Nothing against Nick Carraway—but this acclaimed site, sponsored by the English and American Studies departments, is devoted to those literary voices that haven’t exactly been echoing in your head since freshman English class.

Relying on scholarly contributors from around the world, Voices from the Gaps publishes literary criticism and selected works of talented female artists of color, artists like the poet Ai, whose ethnic heritage—Japanese, Choctaw, Cheyenne, African American, Dutch, and Scots-Irish—is practically impossible to categorize.

Thanks to UROP, English major Tara Smith ’06 devoted a portion of her senior year to developing a Web page for Ai on the Voices site. Under the guidance of English professor Paula Rabinowitz, Smith delved into Ai's work with a depth that's difficult to achieve within the traditional academic schedule. At first, she was uneasy with Ai's bold, graphic, and rather unnerving poetry.

“I had to start thinking about [Ai's work] in a different way,” Smith recalls. “Not as something I should turn my attention away from, but something that I should turn my attention towards, because those uncomfortable feelings are exactly what she wants the reader to have.” Ai's critically acclaimed poetry collections, with names such as Sin, Cruelty, and Dread, focus on the “huge system of vice” that Ai believes underlies current affairs, particularly in the United States.

Perhaps even more challenging than analyzing Ai's work was determining how to position her in the context of a site honoring minority women writers. Generally, the site organizes into “axes of affiliation,” or ethnicities with which the artists most closely identify—but Ai renounces cultural categories. “She doesn’t want to be labeled by any sort of race or ethnicity or anything,” says Smith.

It's just possible that Ai's rejection of labels reflects a trend. “Perhaps the literary canon is expanding to a point where those tags aren’t as important as they once were,” Smith explains. “In many ways, Voices is revolutionary, expanding the canon but also dealing with tough issues [such as race].”

In Rabinowitz's view, Voices is a sort of creative laboratory. “It's a kind of collaborative research situation…You have graduate students among alumnae, and professors among undergraduates—different people working at different skill levels—but they’re all part of this team, and we need each of them.” (Other members of the Voices team include graduate students Dieter Bohn, Lauren Curtright, Carla Johnson, and Masha Zavialova).

As a full-time student who also works full time, Smith has appreciated the opportunity to develop stronger connections with her department. In particular, working with Rabinowitz has helped her maintain a sense of the greater value of her work.

“Paula gives me advice not only on what I should be doing, not just assignments, but the bigger picture, like encouraging me to think more critically about things, consider different options, and go beyond what I even think is possible for myself.”

The culmination of Smith's efforts, a Web page featuring Ai's biography and critical essays on her work is now live on the site.