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In Praise of Panic | The Sewanee Review

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During graduate school, one of my professors periodically fell asleep at his desk. He also took calls mid-lecture and excused himself to the hallway to have conversations with his fiancée about their upcoming travel. He was annoyed when a student wanted to talk about racism in Absalom, Absalom!, and after making us read Swann’s Way, the first volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, we spent a total of twenty minutes talking about it. Still, in spite of his erratic tendencies, the reading list was worth the price of admission. His class on “Shadow Narration”—a study of parallelism, repetition, and story development outside of traditional plot—introduced me to Kojo Laing, César Aira, Thomas Bernhard. It ended up being the most important course I took in my MFA for two reasons. First, he had us read William Gass’s “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” and then, in the style of that magnificent story, had us do a writing exercise, which became the beginning of my first novel. The s

During graduate school, one of my professors periodically fell asleep at his desk. He also took calls mid-lecture and excused himself to the hallway to have conversations with his fiancée about their upcoming travel. He was annoyed when a student wanted to talk about racism in Absalom, Absalom! , and after making us read Swann’s Way , the first volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time , we spent a total of twenty minutes talking about it. Still, in spite of his erratic tendencies, the reading list was worth the price of admission. His class on “Shadow Narration”—a study of parallelism, repeti

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