Psyche’s imperative: recollections of Leland Roloff the teacher

ABSTRACT

This personal essay explores Leland Roloff’s influence on the author, who was an undergraduate advisee near the end of Roloff’s teaching career. For a student intent on becoming both an academic and a writer, Roloff modeled conscious address to these sometimes divergent projects. His teaching methods called on students to exercise both intellectual and artistic skills, and to reflect in their work on the conjunction and disjunction of those spheres. The essay explores three sites of influence: (1) Roloff’s Archetypal and Psychological Approaches to Literature, in which his presentation of the Greek god Hephaistos had a deep and enduring impact on the author’s personal insight, academic work, and literary-performative work; (2) the significance of Roloff’s guidance through Goethe’s Faust as a meditation on teachers, students, and academic inquiry; and (3) the author’s encounter with Roloff’s own articulation of himself as a teacher through the papers held in the Northwestern University Archive. In every area, the essay draws on primary source material, including the author’s student course notes and personal journal, written responses from Roloff on academic work and in later correspondence, and material from the Leland Roloff Papers. The essay reflects on the nature of these textual sources, their embodied presence, and the performativity of their interleaving. Finally, the essay closes on the author’s first and most enduring impression of Leland Roloff: his treatment of students as artists, not student-artists or aspirants, but as already-responsible artists.

KEYWORDS:

• Leland Roloff
• performance studies
• Faust
• Hephaistos
• disability studies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Performance Script for Actual Lives Austin, ALLGO Theatre, 2003. Terry Galloway, theatrical director. Terry is also deaf and familiar with the booth; the author thanks her for wise and humorous direction with this piece.

2 It was a re-reading for me; I had taken a course on the Faust legend two years before with the great Erich Heller. Yes, I got to read Faust with Heller and then re-read it with Roloff, and young-I had no clue how fortunate she was to do so.

3 The break-off is mostly likely a place where I did not hear the rest of the sentence. My college notes are full of such lacunae.

4 “Intensive Greek,” Able Muse, vol. 4 (May 2001) http://www.ablemuse.com/v4/rraphael-intensive.htm.

5 The author thanks Janet C. Olsen, Assistant University Archivist, Northwestern University Libraries, for her assistance in preparation and on site.