The Oberlin Review
<< Front page News September 30, 2005

Off the Cuff: Len Podis
 
 

Leonard Podis has been a faculty member at Oberlin College for over 30 years. He is currently the head of the newly created rhetoric and composition department, which previously was a program supervised by the English department.

Why did it take so long to come into department-hood?
The history of it is that it actually split off from the English department. It was spun off when the writing requirement was created in Oberlin in 1984, and it also had some connections to the student support services (LAS). Writing requirements were being filled both in English and LAS, and then a separate writing department was launched. That was roughly 20 years ago and the way it was set up with its own mission, it was made a program. It took many years to get a stable staff — initially it only had one faculty member that was permanent — and we kept trying to build the program and do our job well and apply for more permanent staffing. We reached a certain longevity and stability and size and we decided that we were mature enough to govern ourselves. (A program has an advisory oversight committee, and a department is self-governing; so that’s a big advantage.) We came of age, so to speak.

We still don’t have a major, which is unusual [for a] department, but we feel that our resources are best used helping students at the introductory level to prepare for their writing careers at Oberlin.

You are supervising/coordinating the Writing Center this semester. Are we going to be seeing any changes?
Well, we’re trying to buy a fan this year — just kidding. We held a meeting at the library and we’re hoping for closer collaboration between reference librarians and the writing tutors. We are persuing this because the writing center has always been in Mudd but in a way it’s only used that space; it hasn’t been connected much to library resources. So we are talking to Cynthia Comer about trying to establish stronger ties so that tutors could refer students regularly to reference resources, and so that the Library would also promote and refer students to the center.

Tell me about your book Neither a Dark Night of Savagery nor a Technicolor Idyll: Ongoing Dialogues in Modern African Literature
I’m working on that with Yakubu Saaka. We’ve succeeded in completing the first chapter, which sets out a general vision of the way that dialogues unfold in African Literature. We figured as long as we had a chapter finished we could send it out as an article, and it’s actually been accepted by a scholarly journal, the name of the journal is The Litarary Griot, which is a refereed publication. We’re still working on the other chapters; it will probably be a while before it’s finished.

You’re also teaching a FYSP on Coming of Age in African Literature. How did you get interested in African Literature?
I got into African Literature through my friendship with Mr. Saaka. We decided it would be good to do an interdisciplinary course for the Oberlin-in-London Program, which has since been suspended. Mr. Saaka’s specialty is African politics and cosmology and I had a lot of training in literature, so we decided to explore African Lit. I was instantly fascinated by the way in which the literature was concerned with issues crucially involved with societies involved and their political fortunes struck a cord with me. As a reader of a lot of Western literature it appealed to me as something quite different. The intensity of its focus on issues of immediate concern for the well being of cultures for which the literature was being written had a vitality, an urgency of purpose that went beyond more typical concerns for aesthetics and philosophy. No one should take this to mean that I am in any way denigrating aesthetics, philosophy or contemporary Western literature, which I think are wonderful.

Have you committed any acts of heroism lately?
Last summer my wife and I were walking our poodle, Trixie, and a Rottweiler with murderous intent loosely tied to a nearby tree spotted our dog. It grabbed her and threw her on the ground, she couldn’t get away because of her leash and Mrs. Podis was screaming in the middle of the street. The dog had [Trixie] by the throat and I took a deep breath and threw myself on the dog’s back; it was, like I said, a large dog but I managed to wrestle it off of Trixie. It wasn’t something I thought I’d have to do in placid suburbia, get in a wrestling match with a dog, but I managed to pacify the animal until the owner came out. We took [Trixie] to the emergency clinic and she’s OK now.
 
 

   


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