Photo courtesy of John Krapp

For many, college is a place to learn and grow both as a student and a person. For John Krapp, associate professor and chair of the Department of Comparative Literature, Languages and Linguistics, this certainly rings true. As a Hofstra alumnus himself, being at the university has been an enriching experience.

“When I went to [Hofstra], I wasn’t planning on being a professor; I was planning on being a lawyer,” Krapp said, detailing his days as an undergraduate student. “I came in as a sophomore, and I went to a part of the University that no longer exists. It was a place called New College, which was a small, separate liberal arts unit of the University where they were trying to create an environment where you could design your own interdisciplinary curriculum. What they wanted to do was emphasize how knowledge is connected rather than compartmentalized,” he said. “We read ‘The Oresteia’ by Aeschylus, and that’s when I realized that what matters most in a court of law is who makes the better argument.” Despite his love for philosophy, Krapp ended up back in literature, falling in love with the room for interpretation it allowed. “No matter what you know about a piece of literature, somebody else is always going to have a different take, whether they are a student or a professor,” he said.

Literature has taken Krapp to amazing places, beyond just what can be found in the pages. “When I was leaving undergraduate school, I had to make a decision about what I wanted to do for graduate school. I decided as a junior in undergraduate school that I wanted to go to Oxford University, and so I went,” he said. “I studied romantic poetry with Johnathan Wordsworth, who is the great-great-great nephew of William Wordsworth, arguably one of the greatest romantic poets of all time. At some point, a number of us decided we were going to go on a pilgrimage to Tinturn Abbey, and the Lake District, and Grassmere and all the places where Wordsworth and Coleridge strolled around, thought about and wrote about poetry. Being in the Lake District, where these people were, studying romantic poetry at twenty years old, was a profound experience.”

Early on in his career, Krapp found himself surrounded by familiar faces from his time as a student. “When I got hired at [Hofstra], back in ‘92, most of the people who taught me at New College were still there. One of my colleagues who retired a few years ago said, ‘We remembered what you were like as a student but we hired you anyway.’ He’s a dear friend of mine who lives in Spain now.”

Many colleagues whom Dr. Krapp worked with have also had a profound impact on him outside the classroom. “One of them was a guy named Ignacio Götz, who became a mentor and a friend,” Krapp noted. “When my wife Lisa and I got married, he had been a Jesuit so he married us, and he has been a very important person over the years. I don’t think I’ve come across a faculty member on campus whose time with them I didn’t enjoy. I’ve just been very lucky in that way. The University has done a really good job of picking faculty that want to work with undergraduates, so they’re happy on campus. When you’re happy with your job, you tend to become someone people enjoy spending time with.”

Krapp has read many books since he first set foot on campus, but there is one that that he feels the most strongly about. “The Brothers Karamazov,” by Fyodor Dostoevsky, is the book that challenged his preconceived notions the most. It allowed him to question the world and his place in it. “It’s one of the greatest philosophical novels of all time, because it deals with age old questions to which there aren’t really any answers,” he said. “There are three brothers that try to work their way through these problems in conversation with each other, and it’s about what each one learns along the way about these really important answers to these really important questions. So what’s interesting about that book for me, is that the three characters each represent a different approach to life. Each of the brothers have elements of the other brothers in their personality,” he explained. At different points in his life, Krapp has found himself relating to each of the three brothers. “I’ve always known the direction in which I want to head, but it took me a long time to get there. There was a stretch where I read it once a year, every January.”

Although Krapp holds a deep fondness for the works he teaches, the most important part of his career is his students. He is often amazed at the connections they make to the readings. “I’ve had students turn [to] books that I would never imagine them to, and there were times I was almost shaken by those reactions. I wouldn’t expect something so casual in a book to resonate with them that much.” To Krapp, anyone could walk into an empty room and begin to lecture. The key ingredient in a class, he feels, are the seats with students in them. He believes that with literature, you have to do a lot less lecturing. “All you have to do is ask the right questions, and then that will get the conversation going,” he said.

Krapp’s deep passion for philosophy is reflected in his approach in the classroom. “What I try to do is focus my teachings on the idea that all human beings are trying to express their agency and selfhood into the world. In order to do that, they need to negotiate ideological tension with the environment around them. The sources of these tensions come from family, religion, politics, media, the economy etc., and there are so many nuanced approaches. The literature that I use will demonstrate how writers try to negotiate these ideological tensions. What I try to do is strip these down to basic human desires, interests and tensions, and once I find these common denominators, I try to make them more complicated and based on specific things such as class, gender, sexuality, race and things like that. From there, I try to base it on the experience of the student. We all have different passions, desires and appetites, which can be informed by how and where we are raised,” he explained.

Although the COVID-19 pandemic has drastically altered the university experience for Krapp, like so many others, he remains optimistic. “The nice thing that’s happening right now in education is that we have this really strong and unified sense of including voices that were at one time not part of the conversation,” he said. “They are now a vital part of the conversation. If we don’t keep this conversation going now, with the voices that are in it, these conversations are going to stagnate and die. It’s a really great time to be on a college campus. And what I’m looking forward to is having these conversations in person.”