English Professor Brings Author into Class Where Works are Being Taught

Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Egan will be visiting with students who have a vested interest in her work — they’ve been studying the writer’s body of work this semester as part of Dr. Anna Battigelli’ s ENG 389 class.

The professor in the SUNY Plattsburgh Department of English herself has been a fan of Egan’s work, which includes novels “Manhattan Beach,” “The Invisible Circus, “Look at Me” “A Visit from the Goon Squad” and her newest novel, “The Candy House.”

“I have been a fan of Egan’s fiction for years,” Battigelli said. “Colleagues suggested that her blend of narrative experimentation and treatment of American image culture and digital fixation would interest students. They were right.”

By the time of the Nov. 13 Zoom, which will give students the chance to interview the author at length, Battigelli said they’ll have read three of her books and will have started “Goon Squad.”

“Class discussions have probed her dazzling use of twins, doublings, split identities and her examination of wired culture’s influence on selfhood,” Battigelli said. “We have examined her focus on the irregular; we have (also) begun to look at the readerly imagination’s role in something like redemption.”

Times Magazine Work

A journalist who has written for the New York Times Magazine, Egan’s 2002 cover story on homeless children received the Carroll Kowal Journalism Award, and “The Bipolar Kid” received the 2009 NAMI Outstanding Medal Award for Science and Health Reporting from the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

Her year-long reporting on street homelessness and supportive housing in New York City was published in the New Yorker September 2023.

Battigelli reached out to Egan to see if the author would be open to connecting with her students.

“She immediately responded and agreed to the interview,” Battigelli said. “She is one of the most public-spirited novelists out there, and she is committed to devoting time to students and readers everywhere.”

Battigelli called her “a splendid contradiction,” quoting critic Daniel Olson as saying, “in person, Egan is witty, humble, graceful and hear-stoppingly lovely, (but) in her art, she wears spikes.”

“We feel the force in that paradox throughout her breathtaking narratives,” she said.

First time Teaching Whole Egan Class

Egan has served as president of PEN America — an organization that promotes freedom of expression for all writers regardless of race, religion or national origin or political system under which they live — and twice as artist-in-residence in the English department at the University of Pennsylvania, where she has taught courses in 19th- and 20th-century literature.

Battigelli has regularly taught Egan’s gothic novel, “The Keep,” but said, “This is the first time I have taught a class on Egan alone.”

For their part, students have “responded with enthusiasm and deep insight,” Battigelli said. “We are all challenged by her brilliant edginess, but that’s the fun of it.

“Students are looking forward to connecting with her about works they’ve read,” she said. “Hearing authors discuss their work is often mesmerizing, and Egan is one of the best interviewees out there. She’s articulate, honest and remarkably transparent when discuss the writing process in all its stages.”

The Jennifer Egan Zoom interview, which Battigelli has opened to the public, will be held 7 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 13. For more information and for a Zoom link, contact Battigelli at 518-564-2429 or email [email protected].

— By Associate Director of Communications Gerianne Downs

— Photo by Pieter M Van Hattem