An Interview with David Wagenknecht (Interview‪)‬

I first met David Wagenknecht on my arrival at Boston University as an assistant professor in the fall of 1979, fresh from UC Berkeley. Though he was only a decade older than I, David seemed even then an entire generation wiser. His shock of salt-and-pepper hair wasn't the only reason I thought so, nor was it my own Miranda-like wonder at the brave new world of faculty life in the City on a Hill. (I soon learned to leave my sandals at home.) In our first few substantive conversations, as in our many discussions of literary merit since that time, whether in job searches or joint evaluations of graduate student work or on those occasions when I was asked my opinion of a submission to Studies in Romanticism, I never ceased to be amazed by David's ability to get to the heart of even the most complex and recondite argument, or to retrieve a pearl of wisdom from the murkiest depths of terminological--and often grammatical--obscurity. While I would find myself distracted by an intransitive use of the verb "transform," David would remain open to transformation, listening, like a doctor with a stethoscope, for the idea beating softly, deeply beneath the surface. A more sympathetic and, at the same time, a more intellectually alert and scrupulous reader I have yet to meet in over thirty years of teaching and writing. It wasn't just his uncanny sense of what a writer whose reach exceeded his grasp had in mind, but his sharp eye for what was original and groundbreaking that set David apart as an editor. All of us who have read Studies in Romanticism over the three decades of his residence on the fifth floor of the BU English Department can recall, almost effortlessly, those essays that have turned our thinking around "as with the might of waters." He has read widely and with penetration, in and out of the field, and is himself a Lacanian with several challenging essays to his credit in that demanding theoretical discipline. And yet he remains to this day the most modest and unassuming scholar I know.