An Interview with Lucy Cavendish alumna Pritika Pradhan, lecturer of nineteenth-century literature.
Tell us about your current job, career, or area of research. What did you study and how did that lead into what you're doing now?
I am currently a Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature, and Convenor of the MA in Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of York, having joined in August 2023. My path has been at once straightforward and circuitous: I have always wanted to study English literature and become a writer and academic, and pursuing this goal took me across three continents! While growing up in India, I read and loved the “classic” Victorian novelists – George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, the Brontë sisters – whose study is a legacy of colonial rule. Wanting to specialise in Victorian literature, I completed an undergraduate degree in English at Lady Shri Ram College, the University of Delhi, in India, my home country. Then I was fortunate to receive the Gates Cambridge Scholarship to study for a second BA degree in English at Lucy Cavendish College in 2009-2011 (Indian graduates at Cambridge are usually required to complete a second, or affiliated, BA degree in two years). At Cambridge, I continued my study of the Victorians, expanding my interest in the novel to the minute, meticulous and yet virtuosic representations of everyday life in nineteenth-century prose and painting more generally. I completed my PhD in English at Rutgers University, New Jersey, writing my dissertation on details in Victorian writers John Ruskin, George Eliot, Robert Browning, and Oscar Wilde. After my PhD, I went in for an MFA in creative writing (fiction) at Minnesota State University, Mankato. I completed my MFA and (luckily!) received my job offer at York in spring 2023. I am extremely fortunate to be in a position that enables me to pursue research as well as creative writing, which I view as related and mutually enriching forms of literary activity.
My research interests span nineteenth-century literature to contemporary fiction, in particular writers who interrogate and expand nineteenth-century cultural legacies. My work on John Ruskin’s aesthetics has appeared in the journal ELH; another article, on George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch, is forthcoming in the journal Nineteenth-Century Literature. My chapter on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Americanah was published in Post45 Vs. The World (Vernon Press). My short stories and public writing have appeared in The Mays Anthology, Electric Literature, Literary Hub, and Emerald City, among other publications.
I am currently at work on my first academic monograph and my first novel, based respectively on my PhD dissertation and my MFA thesis. My monograph, titled Modernity’s Marks: Details in Victorian Literature and Modernist Aesthetics, explores the relation between details and modern subjectivity in the work of a range of Victorian and Modernist writers, from Ruskin to Wilde to Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, and TS Eliot. While nineteenth-century literary details are generally viewed as aesthetically insignificant entities that signify objectivity, I show how details – and their associated formal irregularities – indicated the advent of a liberated and democratic modern subjectivity that perceives and charges seemingly irrelevant particulars with significance. My novel in progress, The Transient, also engages with wayward forms – that is, the non-linear patterns of migration and the intellectual coming of age of an immigrant woman whose literary ambitions and disappointments take her across different countries. I plan to continue my creative and critical work as a writer and a professor of literature and creative writing, and to eventually establish a centre of writing where students can pursue both forms together, so that creative writing can benefit from research and discipline, and critical writing be expanded and renewed through contact with creative rhythms and freedoms.
What inspired you to pursue this career? What are your key motivations? What are you ultimately trying to achieve?
I do not recall making a conscious decision at any moment to pursue a career in literature – it would be more accurate to say that I never seriously considered pursuing anything else. Stories were the first thing I loved: since I was a child, I loved disappearing into a book, and immersing myself in the silent and solitary scrutiny of created worlds that were similar to and yet different from my own. This was made easier by the fact that I grew up in a home without cable television, a computer, or even a telephone, so there was nothing left to do but read! I was fortunate to have supportive parents who provided me with plenty of books: not only “classic” works by canonical Victorian writers, but also contemporary Indian writers such as Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy, who reconfigured traditional literary forms to render the transformations of modern Indian identity. Initially I was drawn to the vivid social worlds and memorable characters in Victorian and contemporary Indian fiction. As I grew older, I came to appreciate the beautiful shapes of words, and the silent music of their arrangements on the page, through which literature not only embodies intellectual and social discourses but also presses against their limits to create new modes of thought and perception.
At Cambridge I discovered the rigorous yet indulgent discipline of close reading, where you delve into the layers of meaning contained in a single word or sentence (my chief memory is spending half an hour on six words from James Joyce’s Ulysses, under the guidance of my practical criticism tutor, Dr. Michael Hrebeniak). This approach also suited my interest in details in Victorian literature and aesthetics, and my propensity for getting happily lost in a detail – a hand in a Pre-Raphaelite painting, or a carved grotesque figure in a Gothic cathedral. However, on moving to America, where literary theory features more prominently in literary studies, I realised the importance of maintaining a balance between parts and wholes – examining how details form part of broader discourses, even as these are embodied and complicated by details. This dual approach enriched my interest in irregular literary forms that violate classical ideals of beauty with their proliferation of details, as well as global patterns of movement that do not adhere to conventional linear models. While writing my dissertation on details in Victorian literature and aesthetics, I also began work on my novel, The Transient, which traces the journey of an Indian woman across three countries – her homeland of India, the former colonial mother country of Britain, and the new aspirational metropolis, the United States – even as the respective designations of these countries are in flux in the contemporary era, resulting in her homeland ironically becoming her eventual destination.
Insofar as I have a specific aim in my writings, it is the probing of complexity – what Alice Munro calls “the endless complexity of things – the things within things… [where] nothing is easy, nothing is simple.” Literature enables probing this complexity, by attending to the singularity of individual persons and objects while also examining how they are embedded in, and transform, larger social, political, and cultural contexts and discourses. In my work, I seek to approach this complexity by bringing together ideas and discourses that might appear dissimilar, even opposed, and using them to illuminate each other’s contradictions. In my literary criticism, I am currently examining how the scrupulous attention to seemingly unimportant details in nineteenth-century art and literature is aligned not only with objectivity but with the advent of a new mode of liberated modern subjectivity. In my creative writing, I hope to bring the depth of nineteenth-century Bildungsroman (coming of age novel) and Künstlerroman (the artist’s coming of age novel) to the diversity of twenty-first century immigrant experiences, including my own. I am inspired by what Gustav Flaubert said about the nature of prose – that it is “never finished; there is always something to be done.” But this perpetually unfinished nature of prose – and literature in general – enables exploring, or rather creating different ways of seeing, without favouring one over the other. Goethe talks about how the novel is a “subjective epic,” where it only remains for the writer to develop “a particular manner [Weise]… to treat the world in his own particular way.” In my own work, I hope to create new subjectivities that give form the ever-expanding diversity of identity and aspiration in the twenty-first century.
What would be your advice to students who wanted to pursue a similar career?
My advice to students who wish to also pursue a career in academia would be to not give up – while also being open to the possibilities created by unexpected developments, even apparent setbacks. Persistence and courage are indispensable if you seek a career in academia, especially in the current job market; it was four years after my PhD (in 2019) that I received a permanent job offer. In this scenario, it can be helpful to develop a creative approach, by pursuing a related area – such as creative, writing, editing, publishing, or curatorship – that can set you apart and show the breath of your interests. And these apparent detours can yield unexpected benefits for your research: certainly my MFA in creative writing helped me become a better researcher, by providing a measure of freedom, creativity, and connective thought that I sometimes do not find in the relatively structured and reified modes of academic writing. At the same time, creative writing also requires research and discipline that you learn in academia.
More generally, I would advise anyone to keep returning to your first principle, as it were – your passion for your chosen vocation, which was sparked when you opened a book, or viewed a painting or film, and saw the world in a new light, or at a different angle. Amid the turmoil and drudgery of the job market, it is easy to get worn down and lose sight of what led you to this path in the first place. During such times, it helps to keep something by your side to delve into, for the sheer pleasure of it. During my job market search, I found myself rereading passages from George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch (1871-72) where she describes just such a moment of discovery of an “intellectual passion” that, like romantic passion, sometimes leads to “the glorious marriage, sometimes frustration and final parting.” It was rather alarming to read one’s fears and doubts articulated on the page – and yet heartening to read them articulated so well that they lead you to discover new perspectives and shades of emotion. Such moments reminded me of the singularity and complexity of literature – where it is possible to encounter a paradoxically successful and brilliant account of frustration and failure – and helped reaffirm my decision to pursue a career in literature. I hope future literature students will deliver similar complex pleasures and comforts from their reading. More importantly, such encounters remind you to focus on the work itself – the job, or the award or fellowship, is only the external recognition (though an important one!) for an inner process of recognition and discovery that has already taken place.
Why did you choose Lucy? What was and is the best thing about being part of the Lucy community?
In a sense, Lucy chose me! I was fortunate to have my application selected by Lucy Cavendish College from the application pool. I was also lucky to receive a Gates Scholarship with full funding; as a middle-class student from India, I would not have been able to attend Cambridge otherwise. When I arrived at Lucy in September 2009, it was not only my first time at Cambridge, but also the first time I had travelled out of India. I was fortunate to be part of an incredibly warm and supportive community of women at Lucy Cavendish. I am particularly indebted to Dr. Isobel Maddison, who was my Director of Studies at Lucy, for making me comfortable and introducing me to academic life at Cambridge. I was also warmly welcomed by other College members, from the then President, Professor Janet Todd, to Dr. Jane Greatorex, who helped me settle at Lucy. And above all I cherish my memories of my fellow Lucy ladies – inspiring women from across Britain and the world, come to study a first degree or to take up the thread of an interrupted education, whose passion, support, and advice continues to guide me years after my departure.
Being at Lucy has been a profoundly educational and inspiring experience. As a Lucy student, I felt part of a tradition of women’s education in Britain of which Lucy Cavendish is a key institution. Shortly after my arrival in 2009, I helped with the “A Room of Our Own” exhibition at Lucy Cavendish, showing visitors around exhibits that ranged from the first printing of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman to Victorian cartoons in Punch that both teased and commemorated the achievement of women scholars and “Spinsters of Arts.” At the same time, Lucy remains a relatively young college, a haven at Cambridge for women who might not fit the conventional academic mould, or come from conventional backgrounds. Its story is still being written, and I am glad to contribute in a small way to expanding the definition of what it means to be a Cambridge student, a writer, and an academic.