Application for Presidential Student-Faculty Research Grant

Application for Presidential Student-Faculty Research Grant

Rob Kendrick and Justin Feit (Spring 2013)

This Presidential Faculty-Student Collaboration Grant proposal grew out of the independent study Justin Feit undertook with me in Fall 2012. Justin wanted to investigate the HBO series The Wire as an example of modern tragedy, a project which appealed to me, too. We quickly realized, however, that a semester-long independent study would not be adequate for such a project, so that we decided to devote this coming summer to completing our analysis of the series’ five seasons and a manuscript of an article. During the fall term, we managed to screen and analyze the first two seasons, while also reading widely in published scholarship on the series and on theoretical explanations of the genre tragedy. Ourindependent study culminated in a nineteen-page draft titled “Call It a Crisis of Leadership”: Bureaucracy and Greek Tragedy in The Wire” which we are including with this application (pp. 9-27 below). The Presidential Grant will allow me and Justin to complete this work by producing a publishable manuscript for conference presentation and for publication. The benefits of this project for us are manifold. For me, this work is an exploration of what faculty-student collaboration can look like in the field of literary/film studies and the best practices in mentoring student-initiated research. For Justin, the project gives him a taste of the rigors and expectations of humanities research, training him for graduate work in the field; of equal significance, such a project will make Justin’s applications to graduate programs in the humanities that much more noticeable than his peers’, a key advantage considering the diminishing opportunities for humanities graduate work.

However, this collaborative project’s benefits extend beyond me and Justin, I believe. The English Department has initiated a new Senior Seminar that gives our students a lot of freedom in choosing their capstone projects. Our project will act as an example, we hope, for what senior projects in English can be. This project will also be an attractive marketing tool as the English faculty strives to continue increasing the number of our majors and minors, a goal we have been pursuing at least since my arrival on campus four years ago. One might also hope that this project could serve the Admissions Office as it seeks to increase our enrollments in these difficult times for liberal arts education.

Brief Description of Project

This project looks to the question of whether the HBO series The Wire is an updated version of ancient Greek tragedy, a claim made by series’ creator David Simon. Justin and I screened two of the series’ five seasons and analyzed many episodes collaboratively as Justin started the writing process; in addition, we used Aristotle’s description of ancient tragedy as our theoretical starting point and began reading in the growing field of The Wire criticism. During our ten-week summer project, we plan to finish screening and anlyzing the remaining three seasons, continue our reading in criticism on the show and on modern theories of tragedy and TV genres, complete the manuscript, and begin submitting proposals for conference presentation and publication.

Anticipated Outcomes

Justin and I hope to present and publish this paper as a substantial contribution to TV-film-literary studies and the growing critical literature on The Wire. However, the more significant outcome to my mind is the opportunity this grant will provide Justin to begin participating in academic research for conference presentation and publication and for both of us in terms of collaborative research. Justin is currently planning his post-baccalaureate career, including the probability of graduate work in the humanities; consequently, this project will provide Justin with first-hand experience with academic research in the humanities that will make him stand out from most other applicants to humanities graduate programs. And, to be sure, in this academic market, the more a graduate school applicant can make him/herself stand out, the better the possibility of admission to top schools.

Likely Conferences and Publications

The primary conference I want us to shoot for is the American Comparative Literature Association conference, which has been promoting undergraduate research over the past few years. I have presented at this conference frequently (please consult my vita, pp. 28-31 below). Moreover, the conference actively seeks to publish undergraduate research in its official publication, Comparative Literature. Other possible publication venues include Agora and the Critical Theory and Social Justice Undergraduate Journal.

Anticipated Completion Date

Justin and I will finish a manuscript of the article by Aug. 30, 2013. Our schedule of work over the summer follows:

6/10-7/5Complete screening and analysis of Seasons 3-5 of The Wire

7/8-8/17Complete survey of critical literature on The Wire and modern tragedy and completion of article “’Call It a Crisis of Leadership’”

Participant Details

My graduate training, teaching, and research have all prepared me for this kind of research. My graduate work focused on ancient through early modern literature in the West; in addition, my training in literary theory from ancient Greece through contemporary theory, including genre theory dealing with tragedy, is crucial to this work. My teaching draws closely on these interests; I teach early modern literature (ENG 321: Shakespeare, ENG 317: Renaissance Studies, ENG 115: British Literature I) and the history of literary theory (ENG 201: Art of Interpretation)primarily. All of these courses regularly investigate the nature of tragedy and how it has changed through history. My research, too, frequently explores questions of genre, whether the status of Homeric epic in early modern thought (“Lorenzo Valla’s Translation and the Roman Imperium”) to the function of the tragic in Renaissance drama (“Boy Nation: Henry V, Audience, and Subject Consciousness” and “Marlowe’s Dido and the Platonic Philosophy of Love”). My book manuscript “Borrowed Sovereignty: Elizabethan Translation, Imitation, and National Identity” further investigates the functions of genre in the formation of national consciousness during Queen Elizabeth I’s reign.

This project also has pushed me to expand my areas of expertise to include film analysis, an important acquisition given the impetus of literary studies to now include visual analysis as part of English’s purview. The work Justin and I have collaborated in has introduced me to the vocabulary of film studies and enriched the lenses through which I can teach a given work. For example, my Renaissance Studies course this semester, Queen Elizabeth at the Movies, interweaves early modern texts like Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and recent film depictions of Elizabeth like Sally Potter’s film version of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Derek Jarman’s film Jubilee. The inclusion of film and film analysis greatly increased the attraction of this course, traditionally a difficult sell to our students; this version of Renaissance Studies boasts twenty students, a notable increase of enrollment from earlier versions of this course.

Because this is a liberal arts college, the coursework Justin has completed over the last two and a half years has enriched his knowledge in myriad fields. In the fall of 2012, he engaged in an independent study of the television series The Wire, analyzing it with the tools acquired in coursework at Gustavus. In preparation for expanding research of the series, he has taken a number of classes that focus on theory, film analysis, and argumentation, all from various perspectives. With these classes, he has developed—and will continue to develop—the necessary skills to take on a project of this magnitude.

The majority of the classes that have fundamentally shaped him into the student that he is today combine theory, film analysis, and argumentation. The first, Art of Interpretation, introduced the basic schools and concepts of literary theory. Applying these ideas to literature, media, and film, Art of Interpretation offered the basis of theoretical analysis, an integral part of this project. Second, Film Art & History tackles the basic history and technique in the film industry. Through a comprehensive study of the visual nature of film and genre, Justin was able to critically digest the sights and sounds of the medium effectively. His knowledge in this field is currently being deepened in a class this semester, Film Theory. This class will allow Justin to combine some of the theory of Art of Interpretation with the concepts of Film Art & History, with a special emphasis on the crime genre, making it especially important for analyzing The Wire.

Several other classes he has taken here have supplemented the aforementioned classes in developing a greater frame of reference in the analysis of The Wire. In particular, American Novel was particularly valuable because The Wire, although a television series, is in many ways a visual novel due to its format. Many critics have called the series a “Dickensian” approach to portraying the plight of urban America. American Novel, along with American Literature II and America since the Civil War, has taught Justin abouttraditional themes and issues raised in American culture and literature, such as theProtestant Work Ethic and the American Dream, especially important given the sociopolitical and literary themes contained within The Wire. In sum, classes ranging from film, literature, and history have provided Justin with a solid foundation of theory, film analysis, and argumentation skills to appropriately study this television series. And I can affirm that Justin’s earlier literary and film training has indeed bolstered his work so far on The Wire.

Presidential Faculty/Student Collaboration and Publication Grant

Deadline Monday, February 18th

Please use this checklist and budget. Include with your completed application. For more information about Presidential Faculty/Student Collaboration and Publication grants, please see

Faculty Information______

1

Name: Rob Kendrick

Dept: English

Email:

Rank: Assistant Professor

1

StudentInformation______

1

Name: Justin Feit

Major: English

Email:

Year: Junior

1

Checklist______

Project Details

X□ Brief description of the proposed project including its collaborative nature

X□Clear statement of anticipated outcomes

X□Likely placement for publication or performances

X□ Anticipated research completion date

Participant Details

X□ Names and brief biographies of all participants

X□ Explanation of how this project fits into the career of the faculty

X□ Explanation of how this project fits into the educational trajectory of the student

(include year of graduation; student eligibility is limited to full-time returning students)

X□ Presidential Budget Proposal Form

X□ If successful, my proposal can be used as an example to assist future applications. Check to give permission. This decision will not influence the application evaluation.

Submission Instructions______

Electronic — Submit a single document containing the entire application to .

Paper — Submit one (1) copy of completed application to the John S. Kendall Center for Engaged Learning (Beck Hall, Room 103).

Presidential Faculty/Student Collaboration Grant

BUDGET INFORMATION

Faculty Stipend ($300 per week, up to $3,000for a maximum of 10 weeks)

Student Summer Stipend ($400 per week, up to $4,000for a maximum of 10 weeks)

Student Summer Campus Housing ($60 per week,for a maximum of 10 weeks)

Total Budget Maximum ($8,100 for all categories)

Have you applied for, or received funding from, another source to help support this project? NO

Funding Source:

Amount:

Please explain how the Presidential will be used in addition to the other funding.

“Call it a Crisis of Leadership”: Bureaucracy and Greek Tragedy in The Wire

“Call it a crisis of leadership.” – Prop Joe

With creator David Simon’s bold declaration that The Wire is a Greek tragedy, those involved with the “Dickensian” television series inevitably presented a case that The Wire was, in fact, a model of contemporary tragedy in urban America. By exploring five different aspects of a rust belt urban environment at the dawn of the twenty-first century (the drug trade on the streets, the death of the working class in the ports, the inner workings of police and government at city hall, the struggles faced in inner city schools, and the plight of dying newspapers), The Wire is able to introduce a myriad of characters that are all somehow inextricably linked by the series’ end. Through a careful construction of plot and character, The Wire reestablishes many of Aristotle’s components of classical tragedy as well as modifying them in order to adapt the ideas to a contemporary urban setting.

Given Simon’s identification of The Wire with ancient Greek tragedy, one ancient philosopher’s analysis of tragedy provides a useful analytical lens for The Wire itself. Written in 4th-century BC Greece and important as a foundation of modern conceptions of tragedy since the 16th century in Europe, Aristotle’s Poetics identifies the six major components of tragedy, plot, character, thought, diction, melody, and spectacle, and ranks them in that order of importance, with plot the most crucialconstituent of tragedy and spectacle, the purely imagistic, the least crucial. As Aristotle explains, “tragedy imitates life,” and The Wire’s biting realism falls into Aristotle’s simplest definition of tragedy. However, Aristotle’s ranking of tragedy’s components must be adjusted for The Wire’s fictional Baltimore. The Wire’s components order is as follows: plot, character, thought, diction, spectacle, and melody. As Poetics was written over 2000 years earlier than The Wire, the two are not a perfect match. Tragedy has had to change over the years in order to stay with the times. Therefore, some ideas from Aristotle must be manipulated to validate The Wire as a contemporary tragedy.

Aristotle describes plot as the most important component of tragedy—the “soul of a tragedy” (). Clearly, The Wire’s intricately woven plot fits Aristotle’s vision of tragedy’s most important component. Additionally, because Aristotle examines Greek tragedy’s form, The Wire manipulates the principles of Greek tragedy to fit into this contemporary environment. Although he writes, “Of all plots and actions the episodic are the worst” (). While The Wire is, in nature, “episodic,” Aristotle defines “episodic” as when “episodes or acts succeed one another without probable or necessary sequence” (). The validity of the episode has changed since Aristotle’s time as the episode is now required for the long term storytelling of television series. All of the episodes have a self-contained plot which is completed at the episode’s end. When these episodes are put together, the seasons as units make up smaller, self-contained parts of the series as a whole. The Wire’s straightforward narrative structure bodes well with Aristotle’s notions of plot. Character closely follows plot. However, The Wire adjusts how characters are supposed act in Aristotle’s view. Aristotle describes heroes as those who are good, appropriate, and consistent (). Moreover, he explains, “This very distinction separates tragedy from comedy: the latter tends to represent people inferior, the former superior to existing humans” (1448a 15-18). While appropriate and consistent, most Wire characters do not cleanly fit within the distinctions of “good,” “evil,” “superior,” or “inferior.” Most characters’ situations are far too complex to simply take the righteous road or villainous road. Overall, individual characters have multiple interests that motivate their actions. Although ruthless, even Marlo Stanfield has the desire to make a name for himself in an attempt to “justify” his actions.

Because tragedy ought to imitate life, thought is the third component. All of the characters need to have reason for their actions and desires. For example, Daniels’ past of taking money in his time in the Southeastern district before the series starts, costs him the position of Police Commissioner by series’ end. Fourth, diction, or “the expression of the meaning in words,” functions well in this fictional Baltimore. Both the dialects used, as well as the different styles of speech depending on location and group, appropriately match with the characters and situations. Spectacle refers to the visual element of tragedy. Because it was filmed on site in Baltimore, The Wire’s spectacle jumps melody as it further imitates the source setting. Finally, melody plays a small role, but an important one. The different variations of “Way Down in the Hole” during the different seasons’ credits and the music accompanying the montages at the end of each season change up the normal narrative style of the series.