Welcome to Office Hours, a series brought to you by the Features section! In these articles, Argus writers speak to faculty, staff, and members of the administration about their interests, classes, and lives on and off campus.
As an undergraduate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Associate Professor of Letters and Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies Gabrielle Ponce-Hegenauer studied rhetoric while focusing on creative writing. After spending time in South America, she went on to receive an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Johns Hopkins University before discovering her fascination with Miguel de Cervantes’ “Don Quixote.” She pursued this further in a dissertation, in addition to earning a Ph.D. in German and romance languages and literatures. The Argus sat down with Ponce to discuss her lifelong interest in literature and her journey to becoming a professor and publishing her first book, “Cervantes the Poet: The Don Quijote, Poetic Practice and the Conception of the First Modern Novel.”
The Argus: How and when did you become interested in literature?
Gabrielle Ponce-Hegenauer: I think forever. I used to write poems for my grandmother. I always read as a kid. I can’t remember not being interested in it.
A: Do you think there was a turning point when you realized that this was what you wanted to do for the rest of your life?
GPH: I always wanted to write, but I definitely thought about other things in addition to that, like journalism and international relations in high school and the beginning of college. I took a poetry class my freshman year of college, and after it was very clear that that’s what I wanted to do. I also painted, so they kind of worked together. And my parents were, of course, really worried that that’s what I was doing. Poets tend not to survive easily on their own. But one thing led to another, and I just kept reading.
A: Could you tell me about your time at University of Illinois and then Johns Hopkins? What are some of your favorite or most formative memories?
GPH: At Illinois, I took a creative writing class probably in my sophomore year. I thought I was going to write fiction. My intention was to write short stories and novels. I had a poetry professor, who was a really great mentor for me. I discovered that writing poetry was something that I could do, [even though at the time] it still felt very mysterious. I was writing poems, but I felt like I didn’t know what they were or what poetry was. I feel like I’m still trying to figure that out. I just kept reading and kept writing and having conversations with other people.
Then I lived abroad for a couple of years after undergrad. I’m half South American—my dad’s originally from Lima, [Peru]—and I had studied abroad in Sicily. I found it really instructive to read and write in English, especially authors who had a really strong grasp of the language in terms of vocabulary and syntax, but I also found it conceptually creative to be thinking in other languages and other cultures. Sometimes, for me, American literature, even English literature, was too insular. There was this constant project of going outside of one’s own paradigm.
I was living in Lima, and that was amazing, but I began to miss intellectual life, as opposed to professional life. So, I applied to Johns Hopkins as a poet, for the Master of Fine Arts. I thought, “Well, if they take me, then I’ll go back, and I’ll be a poet. And if they don’t take me, I’ll stay here.” And they took me, so I went. That was really amazing, because there are five poets and five fiction writers every year, and it’s a two-year program. So at any given time, there are 10 poets and 10 fiction writers. This is a very close cohort, all with the same project of producing writing that could meet our expectations for ourselves. That was incredible. I would say that it’s really special to have that kind of community.
In my first year, I realized that I still didn’t know what poetry was, and I needed to read more and keep learning. I decided to do a Ph.D. I thought I was going to do modernista poetry, like transatlantic poetry between France and South America in the 20th century. I read “Don Quixote” in my first semester, and I got super curious about that text, Cervantes, and early modern poetics.
A: What drew you to becoming a professor, and to working at Wesleyan in particular?
GPH: In terms of being a professor, I think I learn when I teach. I learn when I have to figure out how to speak about things, or how to explain things, when it’s not just my own interior thoughts or research. And I learn from my students, their insights and observations, and questions that people in the field or specialists wouldn’t think to ask. I really love that dynamic, and that keeps a kind of intellectual life alive.
And then at Wesleyan, it was the College of Letters in particular. There are very few programs where you can really do literature and philosophy and history simultaneously and in multiple different time periods. I was, by the end of graduate school, a little bit worried about being so specialized that I would only work on one thing, or one period, or one language for the rest of my career and for the rest of my life. When I saw the College of Letters and that there was a position open, I immediately wanted to come. It was the goal, the ideal.
A: What do you enjoy most about Wesleyan, other than the College of Letters? And is there anything you would change if you could?
GPH: I would say generally, interdisciplinarity, not just within the College of Letters, but also across departments. All the conversations that I have with faculty, in other disciplines as well. The potential for collaboration. We have a constant practice in the College of Letters that we co-teach, but it’s also possible to collaborate with faculty from outside of the department. Sometimes, egoism can enter into any profession, but I think Wesleyan is really good at cultivating exchange. An atmosphere that is striving for excellence, but without pitting people against one another in a competitive way. That’s extraordinarily positive, and more productive because one’s energies are more focused, creative, and intellectual.
What would I change? I think it would be cool if there were more cafes. There are pretty good vegan options—I would have said that, but they’re already pretty good.
A: What is your favorite class you have taught or currently teach here? Or it could also be your top three.
GPH: I’ve never taught the “Don Quixote” in its entirety, and I’m going to do that this spring in a course [“‘Real’ Love: Subjects of Unreason” (CHUM373)], which is a combination of two different courses on love and two different courses on madness. Typically in modernity, we think of the rational actor as the ethical actor, but there’s a 16th-century philosopher, [Judah bin Isaac] Abarbanel, who speaks about ordinary reason and extraordinary reason, and extraordinary reason sometimes looks like unreason. This course is going to be particularly focused on love in “Don Quixote” and on Cervantes’ last work, which was prose romance and epic romance, where there are two main characters instead of one main character. I’m very excited to teach that, but I don’t know if it would be my favorite. I don’t know if I have a favorite. Every semester feels amazing, but always new.
A: Could you tell me a little bit about the book you published recently and your process with writing and publishing?
GPH: I was learning my process as I went. I think the next book will be easier. I read “Don Quixote” my first semester as a graduate student and became immediately curious about it. In the third week, I knew that I wanted to write about it and I completely shifted my focus from the 20th century to the 16th century. I just had so many questions. Cervantes publishes almost everything he puts into print in the last 11 years of his life. Whenever he’s written about, it’s typically about the years between 1605 and 1616. He’s already in his 60s when that happens. He actually started writing when he was about 20, in the court of Isabel de Valois as a poet, not as the modern novelist that he comes to be known as. I wanted to know what happened in that 40-year span between when he wrote his first sonnet and when the first part of “Don Quixote” went to print.
I was kind of naive because I hadn’t come out of a literature background or a Spanish literature background; I had come out of a creative writing background. It’s not the case that no one has ever talked about it—there are great scholars—but these are kind of small articles, and nobody goes back and reads them. I didn’t have a thesis when I started, I had only questions: What was he writing? Who was he talking to? What was the literary culture that he was participating in?
I thought that I was writing about the invention of the modern novel. I didn’t know that I was going to write about Cervantes as a poet. The more I dug, the more I read, it turned out that I was writing about this culture of poets in the second half of the 16th century. What I ended up discussing in that book is how the modern novel actually grows out of the practice of lyric poetry in the second half of the 16th century. I didn’t know I was going to find that, so it was kind of a surprise to come full circle: to start as a poet and think that I was writing about the modern novel, and to come back and see how the modern novel actually grows out of lyric poetry. It was a long and labyrinthian process.
A: Do you think you’ll ever publish poetry or fiction?
GPH: I published a couple of poems when I was in the MFA, and I still write prose and poetry. I feel like I still don’t know what poetry is exactly. Maybe [I will publish] when I have sorted that out to my satisfaction.
A: What is your most unexpected hobby or interest?
GPH: I like electronic music. I feel like that always surprises people.
A: If you could give yourself as a college student one or two pieces of advice, what would they be?
GPH: Read widely and curiously as much as possible. Read in a way that you’re always outside of your comfort zone and find pleasure in that uncertainty and curiosity. Dialogue, conversation, exchange with peers—find people with whom you can cultivate that kind of exchange. They’re both principles of difference, encountering differences in your reading but also encountering differences in perspectives. Stay healthy, I think that would be the third thing.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Vasilia Yordanova can be reached at vyordanova@wesleyan.edu.
Correction: This article has been updated to include the full name of the 16th-century philosopher, Judah bin Isaac Abarbanel.