Carolina Alumni Review - May/June 2009

Blame the English department. Shortly after Athas was hired by the legendary writing teacher Max Steele ’ 46 into a rather stodgy department that considered creative writing a frivolity, she was asked to teach stylistics (dictionary:“the study of the use of elements of language style”). Miss Penny from the high school had served it straight-up;Athas was told she could shape it as she wanted.

What evolved was a mushroom cloud of oddball exercises, a semester-long festival of rule-breaking that culminates in a performance that has become somewhat of a campus institution among the wordy set.

Originally known as “ Glossolalia” (dictionary: “talking in tongues”), 47W has adopted the name of the text Athas wrote for it, “Gram-o-Rama.” Those who have passed through the small, rambunctious class know how hard it is to describe (and a few have run screaming, unable to figure out where she was going with this).

Randall Kenan ’ 85, a decorated writer and associate professor in the department, tried in a published tribute to Athas: “English 47W, as Daphne chose to run it for years and years, so became somewhat controversial within certain Old Guard quarters, primarily because Daphne shunned the notion that learning should be perforce dry-as-dust, austere, proper, remote, apart. … In her hands, language revisited its funkiest roots, became juicy and ribald, dynamic and potent …”

Kenan also said: “I defy anybody to go through that and not understand sentence structure, word choice, sound. It really is a utilitarian course, as silly as it may seem at the end.”

“You have an agility with words after you come out of that class that serves you well in whatever you do,” said Mark Meares ’ 77, one of many students with whom Athas remains close. “She just keeps swirling around in her talking and her yapping, and it all comes together. It’s the opposite of didactic learning.”

Swirling and yapping. Now we’re getting somewhere. A conversation with Athas rarely follows a straight line — it slaloms and time-travels, leaving no bread crumbs

A conversation with Athas rarely follows a straight line — it slaloms
and time-travels, leaving no bread crumbs back to the starting point.
Sentences trail off into ‘blah-blah,’‘blither-blather’ and ‘hokery-pokery,’
as if she detests the idea of lingering too long on one thought.

DAN SEARS ’ 74

back to the starting point. Sentences trail off into “blah-blah,” “blither-blather” and “hokery-pokery,” as if she detests the idea of lingering too long on one thought.

A friend wrote of her, “She takes off; I hang on.” Another said, “She doesn’t do transitions.”

The music of spoken language sometimes seems more important to her than the subject matter, and that — music — is what some of the disciples insist she’s really been teaching.

“Stylistics was kind of like taking a bomb and — boom — exploding any tightness I might have felt into exuberance,” said Elizabeth Moose ’ 80, who teaches creative writing and other subjects at the N.C. School of Science and Mathematics.

The problem with a more traditional approach such as teaching grammar through great literature was, Athas says, the absence of context.

For instance, when Chief Justice John Roberts flubbed the oath of office, Athas

spotted a grammar moment (the whole split infinitive thing) that she shared on the “Gram-o-Rama” blog:

“Instead of the traditional words ‘I solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States, ‘Faithfully’ appears between the helping verb ‘will’ and the basic verb, ‘execute.’ Chief Justice John Roberts evidently disapproved. He tried to make Obama say: ‘I solemnly swear that I will execute the office of the president of the United States faithfully. …’”

“I wanted to teach them grammar, but I didn’t want to be in a fight with students about rules. I don’t think there’s a right and a wrong, but there’s a hearing. There’s only been reading for 400 centuries in the way we’ve done it, and now it’s going out because we’ve got TV, and we’ve got online. And people don’t hear it anymore. I always heard it. I did from verbs, nouns, the whole bit.