Letter of Recommendation 1

April 20, 2000

Dear XXXXX,

This letter is a recommendation on behalf of my graduate student, XXXXX, in order that he be able to teach in Japan under your auspices.

I have known XXXXXX since he first came into our Master's in English Studies program, about three years ago. He was my student in a graduate level seminar in Poetics Indeterminacy, an interdisciplinary course that dealt with language and other symbolic indeterminacies in the literature, art, music, philosophy, science and social sciences of the pre-World War I era through the beginnings of the Socialist Movement in Germany in the thirties. It was during this seminar that XXXXX began to plan the Master's thesis he had just complete under my direction, called "The Waters of Indeterminacy: Chaos Theory and Water Imagery in Selected Poems of Holderlin, Coleridge and Rimbaud" ("Poetry, Water Imagery, Quantum Physics"  [E]) This thesis is one of the most interesting, challenging, and brilliantly executed that I, in thirty-five years of college teaching, have directed or read. Its breadth and complexity should alert you to the exploratory nature of XXXXX's mind, and its interdisciplinarity to the fact that XXXXXX is in no way provincial in his outlook or demeanor. He is well-nigh a surgical problem-solver: logical, multifaceted, acute and on the lookout for--to use a concept he borrowed from physics in order to get at particularly thorny issues in his thesis--complementarity. He will not miss the metaphoric potential and larger possibilities for self-growth in his move to Japan.

XXXXXX is polite, personable, and maintains a high level of professionalism in all that he does. He is a very good teacher who cares both about his students and the subject matter they must learn. He has an excellent facility with and knowledge of the English language in all its written and verbal forms, and he is highly competent to teach any aspects of English: all its written forms, from the basic sentence to the essay to the most difficult kinds of its poetry; and all its verbal forms, from elocution to conversation to persuasive argumentation or literary presentation. XXXXXX is a self-motivated, self-tracking person, and he seems well equipped to function well in cultures radically different from those he functions within now.

I am happy to give XXXXX my unqualified enthusiastic recommendation.

Sincerely Yours,


XXXXXXXXXXX,
University Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature
Editor, The Spoon River Poetry Review