To have a sit-down conversation with Dr. Hannah LeClair is to be transported across centuries and continents. Though we never physically left her fourth-floor office in Sanford Hall, our conversation took us from the New York City of her childhood to the France of her adulthood just as she embarked on her career in studying and teaching. Her academic interests in Victorian and Romantic European literature are broad but can be summarized as an exploration of how landscapes propel a story forward and explain the characters within them.
The cozy–almost antique–atmosphere of her very 21st-century office encouraged our discussion of Charli XCX’s upcoming soundtrack for Wuthering Heights, (which I recommend you check out immediately!) Dorothy Wordsworth, writing for the Paris Review, and much more. Check out this absorbing interview with one of the English Department’s newest (and coolest) faculty.
Meredith Pruitt (MP): What’s a place that shaped you that most people wouldn’t expect? How does it show up in your teaching?
Hannah LeClair (HL): So, when I was a young child, my family lived in a New York City neighborhood that was close to this part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art called Cloisters, and it's a medieval abbey that was moved stone by stone from France to the banks of the Hudson River. It’s a museum of medieval art and architecture. My mom’s an architect, and when I was very small, like in a stroller, she took me there all the time. So, I grew up with access to these anachronistic surroundings and with this weird sense of being able to time travel by looking at art and historical artifacts, and I think that that informed my interest in art and literary history. And now that I’m a scholar of the Victorian period, I’m super interested in the way that 19th century writers and thinkers and artists were inspired by the past.
MP: Okay, so you study the Victorian era?
HL: I actually work on the long 19th century, so I teach courses in the literature of the Romantic period through the Victorian period.
M: Oh, okay. So, going back to your childhood, what did you want to be when you were ten, and what would that version of yourself think about who you became?
HL: Oh, that’s a really great question. I think when I was ten, I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to write stories. And I think…I don’t know. I’m not sure if my ten-year-old self would be surprised or not about what’s happened. I’m not a writer, I don’t write fiction or poetry. Although, of course, when I was in college, I was still really interested in that and I tried. I think…I don’t think my ten-year-old self would be too surprised, since I’ve just been exploring stories in a different way.
MP: What’s something you learned outside of the classroom that changed how you see your field?
HL: I think what’s really shaped the way that I think about the field is everything that I’ve learned about social movements and environmental activism. It’s changed the way that I think about Victorian literature in relation to nature and the environment, and that’s a big part of what I do in my research. I’m very interested in the ways that 19th century writers and artists thought about spaces, picturesque landscapes, and the way that nature is culturally constructed. So, when I look out at the local landscape and the mountains, I often find myself thinking through these lenses and wondering about how our ways of seeing these surroundings have been shaped by our culture, over time. And this is also part of the reason why finding myself at App State, an institution that’s so invested in environmental resilience, has been so exciting to me. So many of my students are interested in environmental policy, climate science, and sustainability, and it’s wonderful when they can bring those interests and that knowledge into the literature classroom too.
MP: What’s a subject you’re terrible at, and why does this matter for your teaching?
HL: Oh, I’m really terrible at math. And I guess it doesn’t really impact my teaching on a day-to-day basis, but it reminds me of what it felt like to struggle as a student, because the way I feel about math, some of my students feel about literature. So, it’s good to remember what you grappled with when you were in school and to remember that everybody was struggling in their own way.
MP: Yeah, I think that’s informative as a student as well.
HL: Yeah. So, like, for example, we were reading something kind of difficult in one of my graduate seminars. A couple of my students are English education majors or masters students, so the way that I sort of invited everyone to break it down was like, okay, I know you don’t grasp the idea yet, but, what advice would you give one of your students if they were trying to figure something out? And suddenly we were able to have a more“meta” pedagogical discussion. You know, how do we deal with it when we’re trying to tell someone how to do something brand new to them? And that conversation actually fed back into our discussion about the text we were examining together, and helped us work out this really complicated idea we were trying to discuss.
MP: What’s the most unconventional thing about your path to this job?
HL: Oh, let me see…So, I think my path has actually been very conventional, in that I majored in languages and literature in undergraduate, and then after a few years I went into a PhD program and kind of just traveled straight through. But, during those years I did a whole bunch of different things for work. I taught high schoolers, I led creative writing classes, I interned at a magazine in New York called The Paris Review, and I worked for a small publishing company called Chelsea Green Publishing in Vermont. There was also a period of time when I lived in France teaching English to students at the collège and lycée levels, the equivalent of middle and high school in the U.S. I was living in a small city in Limousin, in the middle of a rural area, smack dab in the middle of the country. It was actually very similar to this region in that there are hills and farms…. Navigating a totally new place and a new language like that was a really formative experience for me.
MP: Do you speak French, as well?
HL: Yes, but it was my first experience living for an extended period of time in a different country. When I came back to the states, I ended up teaching high school for a while as a paraeducator, and I hit this point where I asked myself, okay, do I want to teach high school or do I want to see what it would be like to go to grad school? I chose to go to graduate school and study Comparative Literature, but in the back of my mind, I always think, you know, I could have been really happy as a high school English teacher as well.
MP: What was your master’s thesis? Or, what did you write it on, what did you defend?
HL: So I wrote a short masters thesis on the poet Dorothy Wordsworth. But my doctoral thesis, which is the bigger project I completed in order to obtain my PhD, is about the realist novel and the representation of landscape in novels by George Eliot, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Hardy, among others. The goal of literary realism is to represent life as it is, and the rise of the realist novel was significant because it made ordinary people and events–rather than noblemen and women, or major historical events–seem worthy of literary representation. I study what I call the visual rhetorics of novelistic realism. I’m interested in how fiction gets us to picture what it describes, and the kinds of genre conventions that novelists use to strategically give us the impression that we’re reading about real life. And I’m particularly interested in how landscapes are represented in nineteenth-century prose, because landscape is typically understood as a background and we concentrate on narrative, or the interactions of characters. I’m interested in how novels (like Adam Bede by George Eliot, or even Bleak House by Charles Dickens) picture the spaces their characters inhabit, and how realist fiction calls on readers to picture those settings, because I think this can tell us a lot about the changing relationship British writers and readers had to place and landscape, especially rural landscapes, which were undergoing dramatic social, economic, and infrastructural changes in the nineteenth century.
MP: I don’t know why this popped into my head, but have you read Wuthering Heights?
HL: Oh, yes.
MP: How do you feel about the new adaptation that’s coming out?
HL: I haven’t seen the trailer, but I’ve seen some stills. I have the sense that people are not too happy about it because the costumes are not realistic or something.
MP: Yeah, and I think there was definitely some controversy over Heathcliff’s casting—isn’t he specifically written as a Person of Color in the book?
HL: Well, yes, many scholars and critics regard Heathcliff as a racialized figure. And other characters in the novel often call attention to Heathcliff’s racial ambiguity, sometimes in ways that might be complicated for modern readers to interpret in the novel’s nineteenth-century context. He’s an orphan adopted by Catherine Earnshaw’s father from a port city, Liverpool, I think. That connects him to both Britain’s global empire and Britain’s participation in the slave trade–connections that might not be readily apparent to readers who aren’t familiar with that historical context. I think it would be really cool to see a director pick up on some of those suggestions from the text and work with the world of the novel to draw out all of these histories that ultimately enlarge and complicate our understanding of the novel today. Because I think a good adaptation can really bring your attention to parts of a book or themes in a book that you might not have been able to access as seamlessly as a modern reader. So maybe there was a missed opportunity to explore that in this new adaptation. But I’ll still be curious to watch it!
MP: Sure. I mean, I think people are kind of dogging on it online. And, at first, I was with them, even though I haven’t read the book. But then, I saw someone else bring up the adaptation of Marie Antoinette…or, just, making fun of how modernized it seems…
HL: Yeah, I mean, there are so many different ways to update 19th century novels, right? Sometimes anachronism can be really interesting, playful, or revealing. I think there have been more than a dozen adaptations of Wuthering Heights since the 1920s or ‘30s. And Wuthering Heights has inspired so many modern romance novels that build their genre conventions on a reading of Heathcliff as a romantic anti-hero, a rake. Maybe this adaptation is more interested in those traditions.
MP: True.
HL: We’ll see. I guess the jury’s out on that one. We’ll have to see for ourselves.
MP: Yeah! Okay, let’s see…what do you hope students will forget from your classes, and what do you hope they’ll never forget?
HL: I hope that even more than what students read in my classes…what they’ll remember is the kinds of communities that have sprung up in my classroom, because I’m really interested in getting people to come together in conversation about works of literature. I mean, everyone can read on their own, many of us read for pleasure, but it’s really special to be able to convene in a group and talk about a text or work of art or a poem, and, you know, to just be able to sit and have that space for seventy-five minutes, twice a week. To me, it’s really special. So I hope students will remember that feeling of excitement that comes from talking with other people about art and culture and literature.
MP: What do you wish you could tell every first-year college student?
HL: Don’t be afraid if you don’t know what to say about something that is totally new to you. Like, I would just encourage students to remember that being in the classroom or being in a discussion-based seminar doesn’t mean needing to have something to say right away or knowing the answer. It means,figuring out how to be together in a space where you can experiment, where you can be confused, where you can ask questions, and where you can get other people to meet you where you’re at and figure things out together.
MP: If you had to defend your research to a skeptical eight-year-old, how would you do it?
HL: Oh my gosh, I’m not sure if I could, honestly. Have you met eight year olds?
Photo of Hannah LeClair
