The Daily Bulletin Archive

David Ben-Merre, assistant professor of English, will share his research as part of the Emerging Scholar series on Friday, April 20, from noon to 1:00 p.m. in E. H. Butler Library 210. This series of presentations provides early-career faculty with an opportunity to share their intellectual work with the rest of the campus.

The poet Hilda Doolittle (H. D.) liked mixing and matching letters, as though they were chemicals to be played with in the great lab of life, as though she could "feel / the meaning that words hide." But even amid her faith in the capacity of letters to find their homes, she could not shake her doubts that her wartime collection Trilogy would ever come together in a meaningful way. At issue was whether the spell of language—whatever it may be—was "there" or whether she was selfishly projecting her own desires during the destructive un-meaning of the war. Rather than answer this question, H. D. embraced the uncertainty of retroactive understanding, unapologetically subsuming the external world to the vagaries of her mind. Uneasy with his own approaches toward H. D., Ben-Merre brings the poet alongside two other great intellectual self-doubters: the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who could work honestly but mistakenly with anagrams, and Sigmund Freud, who could invent the great fiction of the "Wolf Man."