Stephan Cook

Professor Steve Cook began his full-time teaching career at Marquette University, then took a job at University of California, Santa Barbara–until Westmont called. “Dr.Cook” as his students call him, brought a diverse background to the study and teaching of literature. In addition to having been the C.E.O. of a retail chain, he set a national record in drag racing, and worked as a financial advisor for the nation’s largest securities brokerage house. Since then his literary interests have evolved from editing literary correspondence and teaching writing as well as a variety of courses in American literature, to developing his courses in American-Jewish Fiction, Ethnic Studies in American Literature, Film, and Literature of the Holocaust. While he is more passionate than ever about the work of John Steinbeck, and about developing Film and Ethnic Studies as programs of study at Westmont, he greatly enjoys contributing editorially to a variety of books on different subjects. His real passion in life, however, is his family: his son Ian and wife Terri.

Vita

Education

• Ph.D., Marquette University., 1978.
• M.A., Marquette University, 1972.
• B.A., Colorado State University., 1966.

Teaching Experience

• Westmont College, 1981-Present
• University of California, Santa Barbara 1978-81
• Marquette University, 1973-75
• Marquette University, Teaching Assistant, 1969-73.

Other Professional Experiences

• Cook’s and Skaggs’ Drugs Inc., C.E.O., 1967-69; Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, Financial Advisor, 1975-78.

Professional, University and College Activities

• Advisor, Westmont Newspaper, Horizon; Westmont Literary Publication, The Phoenix
• Contribution Acknowledged in Bruce Duncan, Cutwater. Contribution Acknowledged in Gene Edwards, The Divine Romance.
• Contribution Acknowledged in Audrey Elliott, ‘And Then There Was Penny.’
• Contribution Acknowledged in Brian Fagan, Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations
• Contribution Acknowledged in Brian Fagan, The Little Ice Age
• Contribution Acknowledged in Brian Fagan, Before California: An Archaeologist Looks at Our Earliest Inhabitants
• Contributions Acknowledged in Pat Leddy, ed., “The Santa Barbara Review”
• Contribution Acknowledged in Joseph Schwartz, Hart Crane, A Critical Bibliography Supplement
• Leader, Westmont College England Semesters, 1986, 1988, 1994, & 2002
• Session Moderator for Conferences on Christianity & Literature, Biola University, and Westmont College
• Member, College Communications Board, Faculty Council, Personnel Committee, Professional Development Committee
• Organizer, Chaim Potok Week in Santa Barbara
• Organizer, Visits and Talks by Holocaust Survivors Organizer, Lecture by Noah Ben Shea, Jewish Philosopher and Poet
• Participant, “Freeway Scholars,” The Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, University of California, Santa Barbara
• Supervisor, Graduate Teaching Assistants in English, University of California, Santa Barbara
• Vice-Chair Westmont College Faculty Council
• Writer/Editor, Faculty Handbook, Westmont College Viewbook, Westmont College Catalogue

Fellowship & Grants

• Faculty Development Grants, Westmont College, 1999, 1998, 1996, 1991, 1986
• Sabbatical Grants, Westmont College, 1989 Spring semester, 1994 Spring semester, 2003 Spring semester
• Phi Kappa Phi Honors Society Lecture, “’Purchasers of Heaven’: Painting, Photography and Poetry in Hart Crane,” Westmont College, 1986
• Appointed Fellow, South Coast Writing Project, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1982

Writings (Selected)*
(*Professor Cook wants it to be noted that his best “writings”are his students, and his poem about his son listed below.)

• Book: ‘Purchases of Heaven’: Art and Hart Crane. 2003. Unpublished
• Video Script: “Education as Living,” Santa Barbara City College Santa Barbara, CA., 1999.
• Book: The Correspondence between Hart Crane and Waldo Frank, Whitston Press, Troy, NY: 1998.
• Article: “Seeing as Saying: Art and Hart Crane,” _The Santa Barbara Review, 1996.
• Essay: “Peter Pan in Hell,” Faculty Dialogue, Spring/Summer, 1987.
• Poem: “Playing at the Father’s Art,” Santa Barbara Review, Fall/Winter, 1993.
• Journal Review: David Jasper, “Coleridge as Poet and Religious Thinker,” Christianity and Literature, Spring, 1986.

Presentations

• The Implications of Post-Modernist Critical Theory for New Believers, Gaucho Christian Fellowship, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2001
• “The Imaged Word It is,” Pairing Pictures and Words in Hart Crane,” Pop Culture Association, Las Vegas, 1996.
• A three-part “how-to” Series, From Object to Subject: Telling One’s Story, First Presbyterian Church, Santa Barbara, 1995
• A six-part Series on Jewish-Christian relationships, First Presbyterian Church, Santa Barbara, 1993
• On Chaim Potok’s My Name is Asher Lev, Plenary Address, Westmont College Freshman Orientation Dinner, 1991
• On Chaim Potok’s The Chosen, Plenary Address, Westmont College Freshman Orientation Dinner, 1990
• “The Mystagogical Imperative in Hart Crane,” American Congress of Social Psychiatry,” Santa Barbara, 1981.
• Two Workshops, Teaching Literature and Composition, English Graduate Students, University of California, Santa Barbara.1980

Selected Publications

• Article: “’Purchasers of Heaven’: Painters, Photographers, and Hart Crane,” The Santa Barbara Review, 1996.
• Book: The Correspondence of Hart Crane and Waldo Frank, Whitston Press, Troy, NY: 1998.
• Essay: “Peter Pan in Hell,” Faculty Dialogue, Spring/Summer, 1987.
• Poem: “Playing at the Father’s Art,” Santa Barbara Review, Fall/Winter, 1993.
• Review: David Jasper, “Coleridge as Poet and Religious Thinker,” Christianity and Literature, Spring, 1986.
• Video Script: “Education as Living,” Santa Barbara City College Office of Admissions, Santa Barbara, CA., 1999.

Contributions acknowledged in:

• Joseph Schwartz, Hart Crane, A Critical Bibliography Supplement. Bruce Duncan, Cutwater.
• Gene Edwards, The Divine Romance.
• Audrey Elliott, ‘And Then There Was Penny.’ Brian Fagan, Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations and The Little Ice Age. Pat Leddy, ed., The Santa Barbara Review.

Awards

• President, Association of English Graduate Students
• Teacher of the Year, Westmont College, 1986
• Alumni-Faculty Development Grants, 1986, 91, 96, 98, 99.
• NEH Summer Workshop in Christianity and Literary Theory

Research Interests

After having finished but not published a study of the poet Hart Crane’s interests in Modernist artists as “purchasers of heaven,” Professor Cook’s attentions have turned to writing up a way of reading John Steinbeck’s work involving a concept in biology called “symbiogenesis.” The application of the concept occurred to him as a result of dialogue with students about Cannery Row and East of Eden while teaching a seminar on Steinbeck several years ago. The idea-and Steinbeck’s work-just keep coming back and tapping him on the shoulder until he pays attention.

Professor Cook would still like to see all of the American-Jewish novelist Chaim Potok’s public lectures in print. Several years before Rabbi Potok passed away, Professor Cook wrote him about the idea and Potok wrote back, giving him permission to go ahead. However, as so often happens with Professor Cook, teaching interests have intervened, especially in the exciting prospects afforded by developing a Minor or an emphasis in Film as Literature, and by attempting to contribute to diversity initiatives through courses on ethnic writers.

Courses

Professor Cook’s approach to teaching all of his courses is Socratic. It’s also, according to some of his students, “personal”; ie., he is often personally impacted by what he reads and wants his students to know it, to know they aren’t there to run a prescribed course of hurdles that have no relevance for them. He tries, very forcefully at times, to engage his students in the “so what” question. For example, he will push and cajole his students into asking what difference it makes to spend time reading about the death march of Hungarian Jews a half century ago in Poland. What does it have to do with safe and comfortable Christian students in the 21st century on an idyllic campus in Santa Barbara, California? Or, another example: why consciously “read” a film? What difference would it make in our experience whether we just passively looked at Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, or attempted to study just how the conscious use of film techniques helps shape, even determine a viewer’s experience?

Moshe the Beadle in Night, says that questions possess a power that do not lie in their answers. These kinds of questions, the kind that T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock avoids by asking instead, “Do I dare to eat a peach?” are the kinds of questions that liberate, that move us beyond the kind of thinking that is conditioned to wonder about no more than “…but will it be on the test?” Asking the “so what” questions helps us understand why we are doing what we are doing in and with an academic course.

Then again, Professor Cook says he also loves anomalies like “the imaged word it is/that holds hushed willows in its glow/the unbetrayable reply/that no one can know.” “How,” Cook says, “can this poet assert there is a reply that is unbetrayable and yet is unknowable at one and the same time?” Professor Cook went on to say that he had no idea what the poet meant, but that he bet he and some students could find out. Moreover it is that need to find out that keeps him passionate in his conviction that education was not merely preparation for life; it IS life.” As one of Professor Cook’s students said, “he pushes students to reach beyond the understanding they think they have in mind by re-examining what they have in hand.”

For some sense of the substance of each course, current and not-so current syllabi are on the college web site.

Courses Most Frequently Taught

• Film Studies, ENG 101
• Race and Ethnicity in American Literature, ENG 134
• Modern American-Jewish Fiction, ENG 136
• First Year Studies in Literature, ENG 06
• First Year Honors Seminar in Literature, ENG 06H

Not including the courses listed above, Professor Cook has also taught:
Modern American Women Writers, Modernism in Art and American Literature, Modern Grammar and Advanced Composition, Journalism, Creative Writing, Contemporary American Fiction, American Literature between Two World Wars, American Literature from 1850-1915, Literary Theory, Applied Critical Theory, Literary Analysis, Rhetorical Analysis, Holocaust Fiction, California Writers, English Romantic Writers, and the British Novel, and Composition. Seminars have included T.S.Eliot, Chaim Potok, and John Steinbeck.Recommended Reading List:

• Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev, Davita’s Harp
• John Steinbeck, Cannery Row
• William Faulkner, Go Down Moses
• Primo Levi, Survival at Auschwitz
• F.Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
• T.S.Eliot, “The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock,” “The Wasteland,” and “The Four Quartets.”
• Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
• Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist-fight in Heaven
• N.Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn
• Toni Morrison, Beloved
• Nathaniel West, Miss Lonelyhearts
• Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
• Elie Wiesel, Night
• James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
• Milton Steinberg, As A Driven Leaf