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Julia Watson, professor of comparative studies

Posted on | October 21, 2009 | 1,057 views |

Julia Watson is associate dean for admissions and undergraduate affairs in arts and humanities and professor of comparative studies.

What are your five favorite books and why?

Essays by Michel de Montaigne
The book I would take to a desert island, my secular Bible. I wrote my dissertation on this vast collection of reflections by the 16th-century “inventor” of the essay, though I haven’t written on them in many years. No matter — Montaigne lives in my head as a speaking voice ruminating about intellectual questions, a physical presence with all its infirmities and quirks, a non-judgmental ethical force and a teacher, companion and ami (friend).Visiting the tower near Bordeaux a few years ago where he composed the essays was a thrill. Would that our accelerated 21st-century world still allowed such a life of retreat and contemplation!

The Odyssey by Homer
I didn’t read this until I began teaching, but its complex journeys and fable of quest deferred and pursued have stayed with me as a template for understanding life as an open-ended, creative and often mysterious journey toward the (ever-receding) horizon of wisdom. The challenges, seductions and dilemmas encountered by Odysseus, and in different ways — over his 20-year absence — by his son Telemachus in search of a father, and wife Penelope confronting unwanted suitors and surviving on her own — offer insights into interpreting experience that remain fresh.

The Red and the Black by Stendhal
The novel that, for me, pulls the hunger for love and learning together with the desire for a kind of justice that political arrangements rarely allow. Julien Sorel, like his female counterpart Mathilde, is a self-ironizing, passionate, yet half-blind and stirring figure who both embodies and undoes the notion of heroism in modernity.

Sula by Toni Morrison
My favorite of all the books by women writers I love and admire. While I’ve taught this short, intense novel perhaps a dozen times, I’m repeatedly astonished by its story of casual cruelty, bitter social inequities and moments of fierce attachment and abiding affection in adversity. The ferocity and truth in its passages of ecstasy and recognition move me to tears.

The Trial by Franz Kafka
Kafka characterized books as “an axe for the frozen sea inside us.” And his, from brief parables to The Trial, have that effect. But the “sea” that needed charting in my own experience was the vast ignorance I grew up in about the experience of people of color. The slave narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs were stirring, and the cool way Malcolm X tells his story of multiple conversions is unforgettable. But the stories that taught me about the structural injustices of colonialism and new ways writers are engaging with history and humanity are by African writers such as Mariana Ba in So Long a Letter and Ousmane Sembene.

To nominate an Ohio State faculty or staff person for a future BookTalk column, e-mail harris.587@osu.edu.

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