Polysensuum

In the years since his installation at Duke, University President Richard Brodhead has come under fire for many things, including but not limited to driving his Audi to a posh Allen Building-adjacent parking spot less than a mile from his personal residence. But through all these challenges, Brodhead has remained level-headed. In his familiar, Muppet-like voice, the University’s president has delivered many a rousing convocation address, charging each new class with a mission to step forth into the halls of post-secondary education and do their best to emulate the brighter Elis up north.

But in a recently discovered microfilm from over 30 years ago, we find a different, headier iteration of Brodhead. Published before he had earned his right to be dubbed a teacher of philosophy—or to the Romans, “philosophae doctor”—we find a Brodhead who has traded in his neo-colonial impulses for those of a budding professor.

Weighing in at a hefty 468 pages, Brodhead’s 1972 text Polysensuum: Hawthorne, Melville, and the Form of the Novel postulates the aforementioned authors’ work between 1850 and 1852 was “a mixed media.” The text examines the way “human imagination moves to give shape and to make sense of its experiences.”

Brodhead employs a number of techniques to explore this, all far too involved for this limited bit of space. And, in fact, immaterial, as I intend not to examine this work on its own but in comparison to his later work.

The end result of Polysensuum is indeed disheartening. After leafing through this tome, I felt no desire to be engaged. No rush to grab the yoke of higher education and change the world. No. This early Brodhead indeed lacked the rush of his more recent works.

But it was not in vain. Nay, I set down this tome ready to revisit the white whale, my approach freshened by this text worthy of the title ‘Doctor.’