Contact Information
Michael Bogucki
SLE Lecturer
mbogucki@stanford.edu
Biography:
Michael Bogucki is in his second year as a Lecturer in Stanford University’s Program in Structured Liberal Education (SLE). He received his M.A. and Ph.D. in English literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, specializing in modern British and Irish literature, philosophical skepticism, and the history and theory of theatrical performance. Before SLE, his teaching ranged from Charles Darwin’s strange analogies to J.M. Coetzee’s menagerie of disgraced animals. In his research and writing, he is particularly interested in asking questions about what Nietzsche borrowed from (and didn’t always give back to) Darwin and Emerson and where Samuel Beckett’s tramps turn up in postcolonial art and fiction.
Michael is currently completing a book project called Echo Sign which attempts to recover the complexity—and global perspective—of naturalist genres in modern Ireland. He is also writing a series of entries on Australasian art and literature for the forthcoming Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism.
Michael began thinking about theatricality as a politically loaded aesthetic concept while an undergraduate at the University of Delaware, where he majored in History and English and wrote a thesis on the theological contexts of a mid-twelfth century Latin passion play. In graduate school, Shakespeare’s reimagining of purgatory and Joyce’s infernal odyssey gradually tilted him toward modernity, modernism, and Wittgenstein’s “Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough,” where he found the following:
The historical explanation, the explanation as an hypothesis of development, is only one way of assembling the data—of their synopsis. It is just as possible to see the data in their relation to one another and to embrace them in a general picture without putting it in the form of an hypothesis about temporal development.
It may not be as unforgettable as some of Wittgenstein’s other formulas (i.e. “To imagine a language means to imagine a form of life”), but, perhaps ironically, it grows on you.
Since the redwood groves in California are so much vaster than the pine forests of North Carolina, and the young Santa Cruz and High Sierra mountains promise heights the Appalachians gave up millennia ago, there’s a better than even chance Michael will be reading his Sappho, Diderot, and Origin of Species out under the stars as often as possible. And when not, he hopes to cajole as many people as he can into reading and rehearsing Beckett’s late fictions and theatrical fragments: “A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine.”
