by Annie Yulin Liao
Upon walking into Professor Duncan Chesney’s office, I was mesmerized by thousands of books taking up every bit of space, ranging from John Cage to Franco Moretti and including old books with their pages still uncut. You might think he had been occupying this room for quite some time to accumulate such a collection. But in fact he hasn’t even been here for a full semester yet. Duncan Chesney is the newest member of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures’ faculty. Although already notorious for his difficult midterms and his distinctive penmanship, Professor Chesney is described by students as energetic, fun, earnest, and practically a cartoon character. Even with such a powerful search tool like Google, students don’t really know much about him, except for his remarkable academic pedigree—Columbia, Cambridge, and Yale. So here we hope that this interview will help you get to know more about him or even help you decide whether to take his class come next semester. Vive la France! “I love France! I love French literature! I love French cheese and French food! I love French culture!” said Professor Chesney enthusiastically. His love for all things French started out when he got interested in French culture in high school and later flourished when he studied and lived in France during college and graduate school.“I’m kind of old school about this. My sense is that you study what you love, not study what someone tells you you ought to study because of your chances of getting a job. You study something because you are very passionate about it.” And later when he talked about NTU students, t he issue of passion came up again. “I find that students here do work hard. Compared to Turkey, where I used to teach, there’s no comparison. Students here work harder, their English is better, everything’s better here than in Turkey. That being said, it’s not clear that a lot of students here have any real passion for what they are studying. I don’t really understand why they are here. They still take it seriously and work hard but I don’t see anyone like I was in college who is in French literature class because he thinks French literature is the most important thing in the world.” “I showed up at college thinking of pursuing medicine because both my parents are medical doctors. But as soon as I took lab sciences I decided I didn’t like medicine. I also took a class on modern literature with Franco Moretti, a great Italian scholar, and I just fell in love with comparative literature because I was taking lab sciences I hated and a literature class I loved at the same time.” That passion-driven decision led him to where he is today. A Film Buff with 1,500 DVDs “I love classic Hollywood and I like gangster movies and noir movies and all movies!” “I would also happily teach French cinema or German cinema or Italian cinema or English cinema!” said Chesney, with the same enthusiasm as when he talked about France. Picking a favorite movie would certainly be too hard but he does have his top 10 list. Among them are The Leopard by Luchino Visconti, La règle du jeu by Jean Renoir, and Madame de… by Max Ophuls. “My friends would always say, ‘We want to watch a movie this weekend, let’s borrow one of your movies!’ But when they come and look at my movies they would say, ‘Oh, these are all arty movies from the 1960s or’70s and they’re not fun!’ You can see that he’s old school through and through. As a cinema and literature lover, what’s his take on the frequent merging of the two these days? “The problem with film adaptation is that it is an interpretation. If you are dealing with a complicated book like “King Lear” or “A la recherche du temps perdu,” these aren’t easy books to interpret. What if you are a 35 year old guy who’s never read anything but who makes movies? Or some producer who’s thinking about the audience but who’s not very smart and tries to dumb it down for them? All put together this usually doesn’t produce a very intelligent interpretation, much less an inspiring one.” “But this summer I was in America getting a health check up and I met a guy who only had a high school education, and when we started talking it somehow came up that I taught movies and he said, ‘Did you see that Beowulf movie? Oh Man! That movie was SO GOOD I think I’m gonna read the book!’ That was backwards, of course, but with film you can at least get people interested and draw them into literature.” “You don’t need to try to recreate all the complexity of Shakespeare but you also don’t want to turn it into some Hollywood superficiality. Hollywood is by definition superficial and Proust isn’t!” An Adventurous Gourmet and Traveler Having been to more than 50 countries, Duncan Chesney, a well-experienced traveler, still has some adjusting to do here in Taipei. Being from a different culture and having a different sense of space are both challenging for him. “I don’t know anyone in Taiwan and I don’t speak Chinese. So it’s difficult to meet people. There are different customs about how you meet people in Taiwan. In America you just say ‘hey’ and then you meet somebody but you don’t do that here. I just find I’m a bit isolated and it’s kind of hard to meet people.” And as for the student-teacher dynamics here, “Students seem at a distance, like the teacher is in a different world. I like the idea of respecting Professors, respecting knowledge, respecting learning but I also like it when your Professor can be a human being instead of a knowledge machine.” Although he had the chance to stick around Yale after finishing his PhD, Chesney decided to be adventurous and go to Turkey instead. In Ankara, besides teaching, he took trips to the Far East, China, Taiwan, Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia…and the main reason was food. Not only does he like to eat, he also loves to cook. “Italian and French primarily and I try to dabble into Indian but I certainly haven’t tried to deal with Chinese, that’s just too difficult.” However, here in Taiwan, not having a kitchen or eating companions, it’s really hard for him to enjoy good food. To my surprise, unlike most weird-food-phobic foreigners in Taiwan, Professor Chesney has already tried many local night market dishes such as pork pockets, steamed buns, and “that funny, snotty, gooey thing like egg and oyster with some other stuff.” I believe he was describing oyster omelette (蚵仔煎), and what do you know, he said “that’s really weird but I like it!” As for what will be the next destination for his life adventure? “I could be here in Taiwan for two years or I could be here for 25 years depending on how other things work out.” he said with an uncertain and coy tone. But after this interview, you and I can probably take a wild guess that “passion” will play a big part in any of his future endeavors! Profile Name: Duncan Donald McColl Chesney Highest Degree: PhD, Yale University (2003) in Comparative Literature Specialty/Research Field: Modernism, Comparative Literature, Film Studies Courses: European Literature, English Composition a
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The Taida Student Journal has been active since 1995 with an ever-changing roster of student journalists at NTU. Click the above link to read about the authors Archives
May 2024
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