Dot is right: this news is impossible. I am also a Berkeleyite, of the same generation as Dot and Heather, and if it weren't for Janet I would simply not have made it through. I don't recall Janet's ever saying explicitly it was one of her missions in life to make sure more women scholars got into the business, but she carried out that mission -- with kindness, with warmth, and with the example of her own extraordinary literary criticism.
Janet was also blessed with a magnetic teaching presence and one of the best voices on earth. Like a number of other Renaissancers, I am in Venice at the moment, for RSA. The sun is shining and the water is sparkling. I had not spoken to Janet for a couple of years, but as it happens, our last conversation was about Italy. She had recently spent some time in Rome and had become friends somehow with Sylvia Poggioli, the NPR correspondent. I teased her that it was certainly not allowable for two women with such amazing voices to be conversing in public -- it's just not fair to the rest of the ordinary-voiced world.
I will miss that voice.
Katherine
Katherine Eggert
Associate Professor and Chair
Department of English
University of Colorado
226 UCB
Boulder, CO 80309-0226
tel and Voicemail (303) 492-7382
fax (303) 492-8904
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---- Original message ----
>Date: Thu, 8 Apr 2010 01:40:04 -0500
>From: Sidney-Spenser Discussion List <[log in to unmask]> (on behalf of Dorothy Stephens <[log in to unmask]>)
>Subject: Re: Janet Adelman
>To: [log in to unmask]
>
>I sit here stunned. I had no idea Janet was ill. A world without her in
>it--how?
>
>She was second reader for my dissertation--though to look at the voluminous
>comments she made, one would have thought she was directing it. She had the
>inimitable ability to inspire awe and affection at the same time, and I
>swear her very presence in a room could heal wounds even while she was
>basically telling me that what I had just written was a load of crap.
>
>Her literary essays are models of clarity and insight that continue to
>inform my lectures. It will be strange and passing strange from now on to
>hear her voice as I lecture but know I can no longer talk to her directly.
>
>Dot
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Sidney-Spenser Discussion List [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
>On Behalf Of Heather James
>Sent: Wednesday, April 07, 2010 11:16 PM
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Janet Adelman
>
>Dear Colleagues,
>
>I write with great sadness to report that Janet Adelman - who might be
>called one of the great feminist readers of Shakespeare, or one of the great
>psychoanalytic readers of Shakespeare, but who would more rightly be called
>one of the truly great readers of her generation - died of lung cancer
>yesterday morning. I know many of you already have heard this sad news,
>which seems to me to suggest a gap in nature. But I know that those of you
>fortunate enough to have heard her talk on Book I of The Faerie Queene at
>the Spenser Luncheon a few short years ago know that the loss counts for all
>of us, not only those of us who count ourselves as Shakespeareans. (And on
>that score, is there any other name that appears in the suggested
>bibliographies with such frequency?)
>
>Janet was my thesis director, a scholar I had not met on the UC-Berkeley
>campus until after I had finished an astonishing amount of coursework (it
>doesn't do to remember just how many years of our youth was required by Comp
>Lit). I heard her give the Gayley lecture on Richard Crookback, and had for
>the first time a feeling that was often to have when I heard her speak
>afterwards: not, "that's brilliant," or "just great," which of course it
>was, but "Oh, that's _right_." Followed by, "I have to take a course from
>that woman." I wrote a dissertation with her guidance; and at no time did
>she urge me to be a "mini-me." She was generous, exacting, rigorous, and,
>always, right.
>
>She wrote a book called Suffocating Mothers. I don't believe she struggled
>even once to keep on her side of the professional bargain (and her avocation
>as a mother of real sons is legendary). My own mother is named Janet, and
>it never seemed relevant to dwell on it. No jokes about the reign of two
>Janets. My favorite moment came when I decided to hole up with a chapter,
>on Troilus and Cressida, and think of it as an awkward thing to have to
>write. I happened to run into Janet on the Berkeley campus after about six
>weeks, and the location was Sather Gate. She spotted me, floated from one
>side of the gate to the other, kissed one cheek and said, "Heather! Why
>don't you bring me a chapter?" She kissed the other cheek, and she floated
>off to Wheeler Hall. I went home and wrote the chapter. She kissed it out
>of me.
>
>Heather
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