Faculty Profile: Michael Faletra
Michel Faletra is looking to the horizon.
The new chair of the English department has been on the faculty since 2001, where he now specializes in British medieval literature. But he was drawn to the Middle Ages in search of something greater. About a frame from a comic he saw as a child, Faletra said “In the foreground the frame showed… medieval-looking people aboard a ship. But it was the background that really grabbed me: high seas, choppy azure waves, a clear horizon.” Faletra said that the horizon always called to him, “but somehow those medieval figures… represented the way in.”
In pursuit of that path, Michael studied at Boston University and later Boston College before coming to Reed. “In the process I’ve discovered not merely the Middle Ages but a multitude of different Middle Ages.” Through Medieval Literature, Faletra argues, we not only read books, but commune with the dead in “a vital corrective against all manner of modern chauvinisms: the myth of progress, the so-called “triumph of reason,” materialist metaphysics, [and] the idea of the buffered or autonomous ego.” Faletra argues more broadly that we look to the past to “help us realize that the way we do things is not inevitable or even “natural,” and that, although we moderns think we’re right about everything, we are probably not any more right than any other age.”
Despite working a job where “They pay me to talk about good books with intelligent people,” Faletra admits that he doesn’t have a lot of patience for faculty governance, which to him is “a great opportunity and a great privilege, and at least partially makes Reed what it is” but also “many hours of service work and a lot of patience with people one doesn’t agree with.” Still, Faletra loves the interactions with students, “I am continually impressed by the curiosity and engagement that Reed students bring to practically any book you throw at them, no matter how old or how (seemingly) dry.”
In the future (though only as far ahead as winter break) Michael frets about a current personal challenge with a daunting bibliography of Bach: “We’ll see who wins,” he said. On the note of winter breaks, Faletra recommended André Gide’s Symphonie Pastorale for “the cold empty days after Christmas.”Faletra summarizes his work by saying “I’ve spent my life trying to peer over the unknown edge, and in the process I’ve discovered not merely the Middle Ages but a multitude of different Middle Ages. In my teaching and scholarship (and pleasure reading) I love moving from the chaotic neutral bravado of the Old Irish Táin Bó Cúailnge to the enigmatic melancholy of the Welsh Mabinogion, from the wry humor of Chaucer to the desperate, tragic ethos of Beowulf or Malory, from the stately architecture of Dante’s Commedia to the shifting sands of identity in the lais of Marie de France.”