Reporter Volume 25, No.21 March 17, 1994

By MARK WALLACE
Reporter Staff

The way Robert Daly sees it, literature is about life, and when you
teach people how to interpret literature, you're also teaching them
how to better interpret their lives.
	"People try to make sense out of their lives, and literature
gives them the opportunity to read the words of someone who is making
sense," says Daly, who has been in the UB Department of English since
1973. "Interpretation is done by everyone, every day," Daly says.
"Literature helps expand our interpretive skillsQthe strategies of
recognizing and responding to things that people do all the time."
	The desire to teach interpretation to everybody, not just to
students training to become experts in literature, is one of the main
reasons that Daly has become involved with the National Endowment for
the Humanities Summer Seminars for School Teachers program. In the
program, experts in a variety of fields receive grants to develop and
conduct seminars in which they share their knowledge with high school
teachers from around the country and college teachers from other
countries. Daly's seminar, "Nathaniel Hawthorne: In Detail and In
Context," which runs from July 4 to Aug. 5, is the fourth such seminar
for which he has received an NEH grant.
	"The participants in the seminars take the information back to
their own classes in very direct ways," Daly says. "Saying how they're
going to use that information is part of the application process."
	Daly has always loved reading, he says, and credits his
parents, as well as a particular librarian in his home town, with
encouraging him to read. But it wasn't until he went to college that
he decided to devote his life to the study of literature, he says.
	Daly was born in Doylestown, Ohio, population 1800, a town, he
says, "that had more cattle than people. But my parents were great
book lovers, and we made weekly trips to the library," he says.
	His childhood reading was eclectic, he says, not the classics
as much as anything he could get his hands on. "I soon moved past all
the books for my age category," he says. "But Miss Brouse, the
librarian, could get a copy of any book in the whole library system.
Any book I heard of and asked about, she located and got for me. Even
though I was in a small town, I had a sense of the larger world."
	In high school, Daly was known more for his mathematical
ability than anything else, he says. In college, at the University of
Akron, he majored in engineering and physics until his junior year.
"That year, I went to see some people who were actually working in
military engineering, and I realized that I didn't want to do that
with my life," Daly says. "I talked with an adviser, Charles Sumner,
who had taken a Ph.D. in chemistry before he realized that he hated
chemistry. He told me that I had to think about all the subjects
taught in college, and decide which I found most interesting. So I
decided to go into literature, because I realized that I'd never come
to the end, that there would always be more to teach."
	Daly received his Ph.D. from Cornell in 1972. He has published
numerous articles, and the book God's Altar: The World and the Flesh
in Puritan Poetry. He has received several teaching awards including
the Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching, and has been the
recipient of numerous grants, including the four NEH grants to direct
summer seminars.
	Along with various undergraduate courses, Daly regularly
teaches a graduate course on the Puritans, and another graduate course
called "Definitions of America" that, he says, attempts to deal with
the tradition of American literature as a series of "reoccurences of
habits of mind.
	"One of the great things about the UB Department of English is
that it's pluralistic in every way," Daly says. "The department is
open to almost anything, as long as you can defend what you do. So if
you're interested in more than one thing, you have room here to do
that, but are also subject to critique."
	Daly's graduate teaching, and other work in the Department of
English, is very different from what he does in the NEH Summer
Seminars, he says. "In those seminars, I don't teach contemporary
theoretical jargon, but I do teach all the issues that propel literary
theory, so that information can get to students," Daly says.
	"High school students ask the same questions about literature
that college professors doQwhat's the use of thinking about it?" Daly
says. "Younger students are just beginning to wonder if the United
States has a culture, and if it does, what difference that makes."
	According to Daly, the mix of American high school teachers
and college teachers from overseas really improves the discussion in
the NEH seminars. "In the past, we've had teachers from Russia, Spain,
Chile, Poland, Surinam, and other countries," Daly says. "Having them
in the seminars is wonderfulQthey know that the United States has an
identifiable culture."
	Another benefit of the seminars is that the intellectual
friendships formed there often last long after the course itself is
over, Daly says. "Many of the seminar participants have stayed in
contact with me, and with each other," he says. "Their careers can
become revitalized by that contact. A seminar, as a whole, is smarter
than any particular individual in it. There can be a tremendous ripple
effect if you start these ideas percolating in all kinds of literature
classes.
	"I teach Hawthorne as an example of someone who's awfully good
at interpreting American life from inside the culture," Daly says.
"Years ago, a local high school teacher invited me to talk to her
class about Hawthorne's novel The Scarlet Letter. I asked the students
why Hawthorne called the novel that, and they came up with subtle and
useful notions about labeling and naming, and what you can do about
the labels that other people put on you. In Hawthorne's work, people
who change the categories that they're put in can continue with their
lives, while people who don't, often come to harm.
	"Theory makes a difference only when it's put into practice,"
Daly says. "The NEH Summer Seminars let me talk about what I've
learned and say what difference it makes in the lives of people who do
not study literature for a living. Teaching without jargon helps me
when I write about these ideas and why they matter. The seminars
workQthe teachers are happier for having taken them, and the students
feel that they're being taught better than ever before."