(Dis)covering your bases
Apparently tireless (or at least always in motion), Rick Gray always seemed to shift effortlessly between multiple responsibilities: to his students (both undergrad and graduate), the department, teaching, and his own (staggeringly prolific) research. Rick inspired me as a thinker, a teacher, a writer and (above all) as a reader. His Kafka seminar may have been my favorite class in my graduate career, and I happily transposed what we learned in the very first session, two-plus hours spent entirely on a few lines from Die Verwandlung, onto pretty much every text I dealt with critically from that point forward. As my dissertation advisor, Rick pushed me to seek out and engage with the bigger issues, and he not only influenced how I approach literature, but also how I formulate (and discover) the guiding questions themselves. I also suspect that, as a rule, he not only reads the bibliography, but also everything in the bibliography, too. Rick always impressed me with how he balanced curiosity, thoroughness and intellectual rigor with a sly sense of humor, so I tried to come up with a catchy title for this (including parentheses-based wordplay, of course). I’m sure Rick will have some off-the-cuff suggestions, however, that will make me rethink everything entirely…