From the Inside Out

After my PhD, I might have been an expert on the one author on whom I wrote my dissertation: Claudio Rodríguez. Since he wasn't yet considered a major author, I was a specialist in a very minor-seeming thing. After some more articles and my second, book, I was maybe an expert on modern and contemporary Spanish poetry. Still maybe a specialized sub-field, but a little broader and to this date my principal professional identity.

My aim for a long time has been to expand my areas of expertise from the inside out. The Lorca book gave me specialist credentials in contemporary American poetry and Comp Lit, maybe on translation theory... Now I'm moving more in the direction of intellectual history, and also writing a chapter in my coming book on Latin American poetry. I'm teaching a course on jazz.... All of a sudden (in other words, over the course of 30 years) I have gone from being very narrow to being relatively broad. Of course, some of these things are long standing interests. It just took a while to write about all the things I was interested in.

There's a lesson here. Be a specialist first and then expand the area in which you're a specialist in a coherent way. Go from being a narrow specialist to being a broad specialist, one who knows a lot about a significant chunk of something. I still don't see the point in being a generalist instead of a specialist, because a good specialist will eventually acquire a lot of knowledge as sh/e expands the terrain of specialization.