Eric Naiman is a Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. He is the author of the books Sex in Public (Princeton University Press, 1997) and Nabokov, Perversely (Cornell University Press, 2010). His teaching mainly focuses on 19th and 20th-century Russian literature, as well as early Soviet culture. Dr. Naiman received his JD from Yale Law School, and his PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of California, Berkeley.
Firstly, can you introduce yourself and speak about your research focuses within Comparative Literature and Slavic Languages and Literature?
I’ve been at Berkeley since I was a graduate student here in the ‘80s, and then I came back and started teaching in Slavic and Comparative Literature. I work mostly on 19th and 20th century Russian literature; although I’m also very interested in Vladimir Nabokov – who of course was a Russian-American author – in Proust, in English Modernism. The nice thing about comparative literature is that it’s been a chance to teach things that I wouldn’t ordinarily have a chance to teach, and things that aren’t related to my research.
Would you be able to speak about your recent projects or past projects?
My first book came out of my dissertation, and it was on the discourse of sexuality in the Soviet Union in the 1920s – analyzing it as a kind of literary text. This is a period when the Bolshevik government reintroduced some forms of private enterprise into the failing Soviet economy, and as a result people became very anxious about the return of the capitalist past, about having lost some of the Communist dream. That produced very interesting anxieties in literature. That’s what that book focused on: reading both purely literary texts, and also political texts that were inflected by literary discourse and literary tropes. It was almost more of a history project than a literary project, although the methodology was definitely that of a literary scholar.
I had two frustrations there. One was that the things I was reading and writing generally were not translated, so I couldn’t incorporate them in my undergraduate teaching. And then I had a friend in the History department who wrote about the same period, and he kept saying, “Why don’t you spend your time working on better texts?” So I turned to more traditionally literary texts and went back to the 19th century, but also became interested in Nabokov. Since that period, I’ve been teaching a lot of author-centric courses, focusing more on literature than questions of history and culture.
What is the difference between focusing on a text from a literary standpoint versus from a historical or sociological perspective?
A literary standpoint involves paying attention to language, paying attention to rhetoric, paying attention to form and how ideas fit together, paying attention, not only to isolated utterances that you can extract, but to the way that the the way the utterances in a text interact with each other.
When I started working on my first book, I remember hearing two historians talk. They were grad students, and this was when I was a grad student as well. One of them said, “Well it’s a good thing that you’re writing about alcoholism in the Soviet Union after 1925, because I’m writing about it before 1925.” It struck me that nobody would ever say, “It’s a good thing that you’re writing about Pnin because I’m writing about Lolita.” There’s just so much room for interpretation. Historians working on the Soviet Union, at least at that time, were more bound up than I was with the consequences for the current moment — ideologically and politically — of a specific reading of the 1920s. When I read a literary text, I don’t think primarily about its political relevance today. I know a lot of people do, and some of that we can’t entirely switch off. But we have to take it as a text on its own terms initially.
The University recently announced they will be providing Gemini to students beginning this fall. How has the widespread use of Artificial Intelligence affected departments of literature, and how have you already seen it affecting the work of your students?
Terribly. First of all, I do want to say that I’ve seen an increase in really good writing among some of our students, and the pandemic strangely contributed to that. A lot of kids in high school sort of stepped back socially and fell into books. Recently in my classes I’ve had freshmen and sophomores who have been amazing writers. I hadn’t encountered that to this degree before.
But there’s also a significant chunk of each class which is using AI, often out of pure laziness. Towards the end of the semester they get too busy, and it’s just there and available. You can deal with that by seriously talking to students at the beginning of the semester about why AI is pernicious. There are a number of reasons that it is. Of course, some students will use it entirely for producing a paper, but that’s a very small minority. Others use it for brainstorming at the beginning, but that’s where the most original thinking about a text can occur. If you’re using AI to give you a list of topics or suggestions for how to approach a topic, you lose the element of surprise. You get a lot of papers by AI that don’t say anything, or don’t have an argument. AI can do close-reading at this point, but it doesn’t really know how to use the close-reading in the structuring of an essay. First of all, there’s brainstorming. It’s really important to do that on your own. Then there is handing in your draft to AI in order to smooth out what you’ve written. That results in papers that are much better grammatically, but which all sound the same. They don’t have any original voice to them. I find it really disturbing that a University that still — despite all the pressure from Washington — insists on the importance of diversity is providing a tool to students that will make them all sound the same.
One of the things I was saying in my commencement speech last spring is that American culture and American literature are built on an influx of different voices and different accents, and we’re going to lose that. We’re all going to sound alike. In addition, there’s something profoundly democratic about each of us being able to speak for ourselves. When you echo what you get from AI, you are handing over part of your freedom of speech – part of your right to free speech. At Berkeley that would be particularly sad, since we have such a tradition of respecting and valuing the freedom of expression.. I see the value of AI in the sciences, but it’s going to be extremely detrimental to critical thinking and to the ability of our students to formulate an argument. Another thing that really worries me is the loss of independence and a loss of standing up for yourself and your own ideas by doing what’s easy and handing things over to a machine. So I worry about AI, and I worry about the University – not only our University, of course – being overwhelmed by the money that can be made in collaboration with AI, and, in that vein, sort of rolling over and saying that everything is permissible.
AI companies are marketing themselves to teachers. They say that they can make good lesson plans, or grade papers. The New York Times had a great article about a student in Boston who sued the University because her professor was using AI. Her professor was an adjunct professor, and was probably being paid very little to teach many students, so I can definitely understand that. These AI companies are saying things like, “We’ll do the grading for you, we’ll do the lesson planning for you, so that you can get down to the real business of teaching.” What is the real business of teaching? I try to write a lot of comments on my students’ papers because I want to show them that I take their writing very seriously, and I want to show them how they might’ve looked at something differently, or how they might have structured something differently. If we don’t take the time to read our students’ papers, then it’s hard for us to demand that our students take the time to write them. Another thing is that the University’s focus on increasing class size will inevitably mean that faculty have less time to read students’ papers and to think about them. Reading a student’s paper, if you really do a good job with it, probably takes at least an hour. Do we stop assigning them, do we have them write them in class? In that case, we’re losing valuable class time and we have to read their handwriting.
Basically, any amount of AI-use seems to be permissible according to the University’s standards, and each member of the faculty has a right to set his or her own parameters. It’s going to be hard for students to deal with the idea that they can use AI in one class but not another. Maybe eventually we’ll get to the point where we put the AI policy on the course description, so students will be aware of the expectations before they enroll or see a syllabus. I’m going to start doing that. The other danger I worry about – especially if AI is incorporated in high school curricula, which is already happening – is that students will start writing like AI, even if they don’t use AI. We’re going to get to a point where part of the writing of the paper is unconsciously imitating what AI would write.
What is your advice to students who might feel compelled to use AI when writing their essays?
I would say to give yourself more time to write your papers. Don’t get yourself into a time crunch. A lot of students are working to support themselves outside of class, and a lot of students are taking on a lot of extracurricular activities. I had a Dostoyevsky class a couple years ago where about a quarter of the students used AI on the final paper, even some of the students who had really been invested in the class before. One of the students said that they just ran out of time and it was the easiest thing to do, and they were extremely apologetic. I would say to students: ask for an incomplete. If you can’t finish a paper without using AI, ask your professor for an incomplete. Most professors in the humanities will give you that incomplete. The University has all of these reminders not to give them if we don’t have to — but if the University is furnishing the students with AI, which it is, and if I’m going to encourage my students not to use it, then I have to be ready to offer them an incomplete if they can’t finish.
Which classes do you regularly teach to undergraduates? For the classes about individual authors, what do you enjoy the most about teaching those authors?
For the individual author classes, I love the opportunity to sink into a single mind, and show how that mind changes. With Nabokov it’s wonderful because he translated and rewrote a lot of his earlier work. A writer like Nabokov, if you do it the right way, kind of teaches itself. Anna Karenina is also notoriously a book that “teaches itself.” Part of the challenge with a book like that is getting students to slow down – to read something twice, to think about how Tolstoy pulls this off.
I teach a ComLit 100 called “University Fictions” about novels set in the university. Most of the more famous of these novels are written by Professors, and they have Professors as the heroes. I discovered early on that students like reading books more about students. There are loads: some are bad, but bad in a really fascinating way. In this class – and this is a way of getting around AI as well – I’ve incorporated some creative writing in the assignments. One of the books we read in that class is Elif Batuman’s The Possessed, which is about her time as a comparative literature graduate student at Stanford. The wonderful thing that she does is that she takes a text and analyzes it, but as she does it, she tells a story about herself. The main work for that class is the writing of a Batuman project. The last couple years, I’ve been able to get Elif Batuman to Zoom in, which has been fabulous. She’s a wonderful person as well as an excellent writer, and she’s very responsive to students’ ideas.
In the Anna Karenina class, I had students write chapters on parts that they hadn’t read yet, or I had them re-write a chapter. The rule was that you can’t change any dialogue, and you can’t change any events, but you can change point of view. It makes you understand why Tolstoy wrote it the way he did, and see what other ways there might have been. You could use AI for a creative assignment, but it wouldn't be you, so students are typically less likely to do that.
You had mentioned that the University Fictions class is a Comparative Literature 100, which is often the first class students take in the major. What aspects of writing and analysis do you typically see students struggle with the most, and what is your advice to students who are just beginning with majors in literature?
Students who take ComLit 100, or who are thinking about the major, already are pretty committed to literature and to writing. They’re a self-selecting group, and most of them can write pretty well already at that level. In that sense, the class has been a joy to teach. That’s true of the upper division Slavic classes, particularly the ones that are cross-listed with English. Students who decide to take a class on Nabokov have usually already read him in the past, and so they’re already at a certain level.
Some of my colleagues might not agree with this, but one of the things I found when I came to Berkeley and started teaching classes — particularly ComLit 100 — is I thought, “I’ve got to do a lot of literary theory in this class.” That was a disaster. In my experience, students don’t typically choose comparative literature as an undergraduate major because they’re interested in literary theory. Some do. But most chose it because they love reading fiction, and because they like writing. I really dialed down the amount of theory we read, particularly in ComLit 100 — we read more in 190. You can get across a lot of theory by talking about it, or by reading one or two articles. One thing that’s wonderful about Batuman’s Either/Or, which we also read in my 100, is that she is reading literature and thinking about literary theory together. A lot of that class is thinking about close-reading, thinking about perspective, thinking about different ways you can analyze a text — without assigning a lot of literary theory.
What book would you recommend to everyone reading this?
A book that I really love is Hélène Berr’s journal. It was originally written in French, but in my University Fictions class most of the students read it in English. Berr was a young Jewish woman in Paris during the Nazi occupation, and she was kicked out of her English graduate program. She was very interested in what we would now call comparative literature. As she’s going through this terrible experience of the world crashing to a close — and eventually she is deported and she dies in a concentration camp — she is able to stay interested in art and literature, particularly her work on John Keats, even in the most dire conditions. People say to her, “how can you be interested in these things when you’re putting your head in the sand?” She’s aware of that tension. At one point she discovers Winnie the Pooh, and she just falls in love with the spirit of this children’s book. She’s explaining it to people around her, and they can’t react. Her journal is about the power of literature, and the limitations of literature, and the way that literature speaks to individual people. Some of the books that she absolutely adores are books that would not speak to everyone, but I find this fascination with and commitment to literature, and the awareness of what literature can do and what it can’t, extraordinarily moving. And, for those interested in relevance, compelling reading for today.