Tributes to Retiring Faculty 2014
Dianne Chisholm
Not every English Professor would have been just as happy being a bush pilot. Few have successfully made physical adventure a necessary correlative to the practice of scholarly reading. No-one else has attained alpine heights in places like the Cordillera Real in Bolivia, the Fitzroy-Cerro Torre Group in Argentina, the Altai Tavn Bogd Range in Mongolia, the Rolwaling Himal in Nepal – to name just a few – and also reached the apex of disciplinary achievement in literary critical scholarship. Sixty years ago, an over-achieving Oxonian English Professor noted: “it’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your own front door.” J.R.R. Tolkien was in fact foreshadowing the career of another over-achieving English Professor and Oxonian, grounded to the book, but bound nevertheless to travel dangerously: our own Dianne Chisholm.
Dianne hit the job market with professional credentials that would have taken her anywhere, but in dramatic foreshadowing of her later scholarly work on ecological sustainability in the Canadian West and North, Dianne took her scholarly career back home to Edmonton. The 1989 hiring year was made famous by the failed attempt of a spectacularly under-achieving collection of Faculty of Arts men – dead to the irony in this, they called themselves the “Merit Only” group – to call down the Department of English for hiring five profoundly talented, already critically celebrated, academic women. What were the odds, those men asked meaningfully, of pulling five consecutive “pink marbles” out of a jar containing “equal numbers of pink and blue marbles”? Dianne stayed anyway, and from that moment, she has reoriented us all in the Department towards a wider – and wilder – cognitive world. Part of this power comes from her obvious intellectual candle-power – which is what you’d expect from a colleague who has served as the consultant editor on a book called Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary, edited a special scholarly issue on Deleuze and Guattari’s EcoPhilosophy, and written staggeringly aspirational theoretical monographs on topics such as H.D.’s Freudian Poetics: Psychoanalysis in Translation (1992) or Queer Constellations: Subcultural Space in the Wake of the City (2005). Just as much of it comes from Dianne’s extraordinary capacity to attend to the critical moment, and to engage meaningfully with the scholarship of others. We’ve all sat in flabbergasted witness to “the Dianne question” at an academic session – that extemporaneous summation that captures in one long breath the entirety of a speaker’s argument, goes on to probe at some unseen difficulty, some unexamined application, and in the process takes the project out of itself, towards greater productivity. No-one has challenged us more, as we’ve proceeded. And yet I have never once heard Dianne make an unhelpful or bitter comment at Department Council, never a belittling observation at a scholarly paper, never a moment of vainglory, never a surrender to pretention. She has attempted to find a sustainable ecology not just for the land and its creatures, but also for the practice of academic professionalism.
Still, staying here in Edmonton has not always been easy for Dianne. She is equally at ease in the cosmopolitan centres of New York and London as she is on Baffin Island, the Mojave Desert, or the Mount Edziza Plateau in British Columbia. She travels, even as she attends. A colleague once peeked at the notes she was taking during the lecture of a visiting speaker – Dianne was writing them in Greek. Quite an achievement from a colleague who, in a moment of inattention, confessed that when she was an undergraduate, she thought the name of that famous Greek philosopher under discussion was actually pronounced “So-Focals”.
Modernism. Queer poetics. The city. “Climbing like a Girl.” Foucault, Derrida, Benjamin, Butler. Ecocinema. Nomadology. Geophilosophy. Most recently, the “anthropocene.” Dianne has changed the subject of English Studies. She has changed the way we talk to each other in the Department. She has reoriented our ethical, and our linguistic, compass.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines retirement (inter alia) as “the action of returning to a place visited habitually.” In Dianne’s case, that could mean Canmore, where – with her partner, colleague, and fellow traveller Kate Binhammer – she now keeps a second home. But given Dianne’s unparalleled capacity for being at home everywhere, and for friendship, I am betting that her future place of habitual return will continue to embrace the whole wide world. And that it will also – radically, and as always – passionately include us.
Stephen Slemon
Department of English and Film Studies
University of Alberta