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Return to topIn 1977, fresh out of SUNY-Buffalo with his Ph.D., Professor of English Geoffrey Green found himself headed for California, but not without some initial reservations. Green, who had been hired by the University of Southern California to teach literature, entertained a certain degree of ambivalence about the move. "As a New Yorker, I held deep, largely bizarre, unwarranted feelings about California. Annie Hall had just come out, and I kept picturing this absurd white light pouring down on L.A."
Now in his twenty-second year on the West Coast, Green acknowledges, "Obviously, all of my prior ideas, myths, and deep-rooted suspicions about California life were not entirely based on reality."
After having spent six years at USC, Green began thinking about relocating. "The vast majority of students at USC were from similar backgrounds, and they held similar ideas about life," Green explains. Thus, seeking more diversity of opinion, he set his sights on SF State. "I liked the idea of working for a public university, an institution committed to helping students obtain knowledge and pursue their own ideas of fulfillment."
He was not disappointed. "I liked the department faculty right away," he says. He was also impressed by the students. "One of the most delightful things about San Francisco State is the body of uniquely inquisitive students we have here who are filled with a sense of their own identity," Green says.
In 1997, the English Department asked him to develop a course on Cultural Criticism, one that would include works of popular culture and classic works of literature as a means of examining various media that influence cultural themes. "My goal was to build a course that would stimulate or modify certain attitudes students had on how arts relate," Green explains: "To do so, we look at aesthetic texts as objects of culture and as products of culture at a particular time. For example, Othello, Shake speare's play, is an aesthetic object and therefore an object of culture. The different interpretive versions of that text can be examined as products of culture at a specific period in time. Questions of love, envy, betrayal, race, power, and patriarchy are engraved in the play, but particular interpretive versions have opted to focus on one theme more than another. For instance, Olivier's filmed stage version means to construct a fictive representation of race that tells us as much about Olivier and his time period as it does about Shakespeare. Additionally, Orson Welles' film focuses less on essentialist conceptions of race and explores instead the tragedy of trust betrayed and self-loathing projected outward." Both versions of the play provide significant insight into the respective cultures that produced them.
At the heart of the course are questions of how educators decide what should be taught in the classroom. Green has structured his syllabus so that these questions are always in the minds of his students. "We begin with readings that examine aspects of the canon and questions of what it means to acquire interdisciplinary knowledge in the humanities. Are we truly interested in a meaningful inquiry that helps us understand who we are as a people and reminds us of what is human and decent about all people o ver time, or are we simply 'fetishizing' particular disciplines?"
Such questions prepare his students for the various art and communicative forms they will study throughout the semester. Literature, film, drama, advertisements, media, and even the blues are studied "as narratives from which we can derive cultural knowledge as significantly as we can from any other art form."
This interdisciplinary approach kindles in his students an appreciation for a variety of art forms, a familiarity with a variety of voices. It is this sort of interest in the work of others that Green appreciates in the faculty and students in his department. As he points out, "The most intellectually exciting people at SFSU are open to and are interested in each other's work. There is a fruitful kind of interaction taking place."
--Sarah Fidelibus
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