Kamila Kinyon
Comparative Literature PhD

Where did you get your undergraduate degree? What was your major? Where did you get your MA and PhD and what was each in? Why did you choose DU?
I received a BA in English from the University of Utah and an MA in Linguistics/TESOL, also from the University of Utah. My doctorate, from the University of Chicago, is in Comparative Literature. After completing my doctorate, I taught composition and literature as a lecturer at Indiana University South Bend. Coming to DU was an exciting prospect because of the chance to be part of a new program, with a curriculum I could help design. The program has given me the opportunity to draw on my previous background while also branching out into the new teaching directions of rhetoric as well as qualitative and quantitative research.

Describe what your writing process is like:
In writing papers in literary criticism, I usually start out with reading a primary text and thinking about it. I write down some ideas, making connections with theoretical frameworks. If I have an insight about the text, than the writing can be quite quick. For example, when reading Milan Kunderas novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, certain passages reminded me of Foucaults notion of panopticonism. This turned out to be a good connection because Kundera was an immigrant writer living in Paris and aware of French theory. I looked through the text for relevant passages, wrote the paper, threw in a few secondary sources afterwards, and sent the paper to the literary journal Critique, which accepted the paper for publication within a week. By contrast, I went through a very slow writing process when writing a philosophy of literature article about Karel Capeks robot play R.U.R. After addressing the philosophy of individuation as it relates to one character, Damon, I wrote a conference paper which I later sent to Science Fiction Studies. The referees liked it but found it narrow and insisted on a larger contextualization. I found a network of philosophical frameworks in the text, from Kantian and Hegelian to Pragmatist. After a lot of work, including the reading of Capeks doctoral dissertation on American Pragmatism, I was happy with the paper but got stuck on the introduction, which took a long time to write. I was relieved when the paper was finally published and was pleased when several years later it was put in a literary criticism anthology. So my writing process is very context specific. As we tell our students in composition classes, how you write depends on the rhetorical context and the intended audience.

What do you enjoy most about writing?
I enjoy the initial stages of invention, the realization of having found an original reading about a text and then supporting that insight with passages of the text. Its exciting to find out that the insight really works and that there are more interesting examples to back it up. I hate the later stages of preparing a text for publication, or preparing a dissertation for its acceptable format. For example, I wasted piles of paper (and probably demolished entire forests) trying to get my footnotes to line up correctly in my dissertation. The University of Chicago is very strict about details of formatting.

Briefly, how would you describe your teaching philosophy?
I believe that writing courses should be courses in critical thinking. I want students to develop technical proficiency in different genres, but I also want them to find a sense of their own voice in writing. When using reading as an impetus to writing, I want students to challenge the writing of experts, finding their own position. In teaching Writing 1122, I strive to introduce students to a variety of popular and scholarly genres as a way to learn to engage the Aristotelian rhetorical frameworks of logos, pathos, and ethos. Contrasting this with Burkean notions of identification and difference has been another area of focus. In teaching Writing 1133, I give students many choices in the subjects for their writing, and I emphasize empirical research, so they can collect meaningful data for themselves.

What drew you to become a writing teacher?
I enjoy teaching in general, whether writing, literature, or English as a Second Language. I like getting students to explore new ideas, whether through class discussion or through writing. Teaching is also a chance for me to continually learn new things, through constructing new curriculum as well as from students. In teaching writing classes specifically, I became very interested in how students do revision and in the major changes that can take place from one draft to the next. I like the idea of a writing class as a community of thinkers and writers, where feedback comes both from the instructor and from other students in a way that encourages students to gain a sense of ownership over their writing. When students find a topic that particularly interests them and find ways to develop their ideas in depth, it is always rewarding to read those papers.

What do you enjoy most about teaching writing?
I enjoy classroom discussions and, later, seeing how discussed ideas translate into written texts. The translation from spoken ideas to written ideas in the context of writing classes has always intrigued me. Sometimes the most articulate speakers have trouble putting their thoughts into writing and vice versa. Teaching how to best articulate ideas in written texts is both challenging and enjoyable.

What are your hobbies and outside interests, or guilty pleasures?
I like to be in the mountains and take my children on hikes several times a week. Another hobby is traveling. I started traveling when I was a child because my parents were so eager to see the world after all the years of not being able to cross borders in Communist Czechoslovakia. We would often travel around Europe in the summers. Nowadays, traveling in Europe should be classified as a guilty pleasure for me, since there is no justification for spending so much money as the dollar keeps falling in value.

Name an unusual or little-known fact about yourself.
When I was three years old, my family fled from Czechoslovakia following the Soviet Invasion. My mother had three hours to pack when my father found out that the border to Austria was still open. From Vienna we flew to New York City, and then we lived in Princeton, where my father was a physicist. Before getting American citizenship, returning to Prague would have meant imprisonment for my parents, since they illegally stayed out of the country with a child who was never able to experience the joys of communism. I have traveled back to Prague many times, both before the fall of communism and after. This summer Im looking forward to being in Prague again and doing research there on the work of Karel Capek best known in the US today for his invention of the word robot in his 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossums Universal Robots).

Home