Seventeen years and hundreds of failed job applications after finishing his Ph.D., Edward Brunner got a full-time teaching post this year.
He teaches modern American poetry at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Because he had already published two books, he was appointed as an associate professor and may apply for tenure early.
The odd jobs, the years working as a railroad dispatcher, a payroll clerk, and a county auditor, are behind him now. Reading poetry during his coffee breaks is a thing of the past. He is a scholar and teacher, full time. “Suddenly, all the work I’d been doing in the corners of my life is my life,” he said.
Mr. Brunner, who is 46 years old, was a card-carrying member of academe’s “lost generation,” the humanities scholars who got degrees in the 1960’s and early 1970’s and never found steady academic work. Since finishing his doctorate at the University of Iowa in 1974, he had steadily tried to get an academic job, with no success (The Chronicle, May 23, 1990).
His fortunes changed in fall 1990, when he spotted a teaching opening in 20th-century literature in the Modern Language Association’s job listings. He interviewed at the annual meeting in Chicago that December.
Only once before was Mr. Brunner invited to interviews at the MLA conference. That year, he couldn’t get the time off from his Iowa City auditor’s job to go.
Chicago was close enough for Mr. Brunner to sneak away. Later, he visited the Carbondale campus, and discussed his research with faculty members and students. The university made an offer, and Mr. Brunner made the move.
He is something of an academic Rip Van Winkle, waking up in a new scholarly world. But he has been an active scholar all along. Since finishing graduate school, he has published several journal articles and books on the poets Hart Crane and W.S. Merwin.
He wrote much of the Crane book while working for the Rock Island Railroad. The book won a 1986 MLA award for best scholarly work by an independent researcher.
Mr. Brunner has had to catch up with recent literary theories and the new interest in multiculturalism. He teaches Indian captivity narratives in an American literature survey course, and said he noticed that more scholars are interested in Melville’s Civil War poetry than he remembers from his days in graduate school. Gone, he said, are the poetry of Sidney Lanier and the journal writings of John Woolman.
The professor believes that Southern Illinois hired him when so many other universities didn’t because the campus attracts students who have been away from higher education for a while. “Everyone is sort of used to people whose careers have been interrupted,” he said.
The long stretches on his resume without academic employment didn’t hurt, said Richard F. Peterson, chairman of the English department. “We thought we were lucky that someone so articulate and who had done so much scholarship was available,” Mr. Peterson said. Mr. Brunner is one of nine professors hired by the department this year to replace faculty members who retired, left, or died.
Mr. Brunner has begun work on a third book, about the academic poetry of the 1950’s, work that now receives less attention than that of the Beat poets. Next year, Mr. Brunner will teach his first graduate course -- on the poets John Berryman, Robert Lowell, and Elizabeth Bishop.
“I wouldn’t have thought it would have worked out quite so nicely,” he said.
“It’s a happy ending in Ed’s case,” Mr. Peterson added. “I just worry about all the others.”