Fred Pfeil
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John Frederick Pfeil (1949-2005) was an American literary critic and novelist.
Pfeil (pronounced "file") was born September 21 in Port Allegany, Pennsylvania. He earned an undergraduate degree at Amherst College in 1971 and an M.A. at Stanford University in 1973.
He taught at Stanford, Stephens College, Oregon State University, and Trinity College (Connecticut).
Fred Pfeil wrote with an attention to detail and a distinctive ability to apply the lessons of high theory to the life worlds and extended landscape of cultures, subjects, genres and disciplines that inhabited his fiction and non fiction work. He used the relative freedom afforded to tenured professors for research and creative writing, but also for political activism. He lived in deep commitment to both local and far-reaching left-progressive political issues.
Fred's intellectual influences and references form a master list of high modernist and post-modernist thinking. He recrafted canonic and less marketed work into excellent, tightly drawn essays that reached a variety of audiences and addressed a continuum of identities. He was an idealist, driven by populist causes and a heartfelt but non-patronizing need to identify with and to nurture and to protect weaker protagonists -- or as Whitman called them, "the tired, the sick, and the poor".
Fred is perhaps most recalled for the way in which he united his intellectual dexterity with an equally powerful ability to engage an astonishingly varied array of friends, colleagues, and fellow travelers. He was as brilliant as Derrida, Foucault, Althusser, Bahktin, Beaudrillard, Butler, and the rest. Yet he lacked any trace of cynicism, choosing an enlightened sense of pragmatic social justice to displace endlessly-theorized-away and self-serving nihilism.
Fred was one of the small number of contemporary U.S. university or college professors to have earned tenure without a Ph.D. As a professor at the inception of American Studies at Trinity College, and as a creative writing teacher and cultural critic/historian, he worked tirelessly to construct interdisciplinary courses. These courses were in a way events. He would engage students by deftly shifting their attentions (or by playing on top of the beat of his students' own tendency for up-tempo changes) -- a genre shift here, a reverse-angle identity rearrangement there. Although tightly coordinated, his performances in class were neither stifling nor necessarily predictable. Much like a jazz quintet, you knew students, teacher, and text were going to trade fours, but you could still delight in the surprising variations within the pre-ordained structure of the exchange.
Fred wrote and spoke with a resonant, empathetic voice, lined with humor and compassion. He possessed a keen understanding of the many different people who looked to him for guidance or for a sympathetic ear. Fred exemplified the best and the brightest of the left-progressive generation that came of age in the 60s and professionalized themselves with their idealism and commitment not only intact but deepened and broadened by the mature if hip acceptance of the responsibility of their professional roles and personal standards.
Pfeil was diagnosed with melanoma in February 2005. He died in Hartford, Connecticut 29 November 2005.
[edit] Works
- Goodman 2020, novel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986)
- Shine On and Other Stories, short stories (Amherst: Lynx House Press, 1987)
- Another Tale to Tell: Politics and Narrative in Post-Modern Culture, nonfiction (New York: Verso, 1990)
- What They Tell You to Forget, a novella and short stories (Wainscott: Pushcart Press, 1996)
- White Guys: Studies in Post-Modern Domination and Difference, nonfiction (New York: Verso, 1995)
[edit] References
- Contemporary Authors Online. The Gale Group, 2006. PEN (Permanent Entry Number): 0000077933.
