Kelly Chuang is a third-year English and Rhetoric double major and a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow. She has a strong interest in speculative fiction, the uncanny, and narratology, and she jokes that she can connect almost anything she reads back to cyborgs, Carl Sagan’s Contact, or sci-fi.
Kelly chose English because of her long-standing love of literature and the teachers who encouraged it. She added Rhetoric after discovering how much she enjoyed the department’s interdisciplinary approach and the energy of its faculty.
Firstly, I would love to hear you introduce yourself! What is your major, and why were you drawn to this field of interest?
My name is Kelly Chuang; I’m a third year English and Rhetoric major. I have a deep love for speculative fiction, the uncanny, and narratology. I’ve developed a hammer and nails dynamic where everything I read can be linked to cyborgs, Carl Sagan’s Contact, sci-fi, or speculative fiction. Blessing and a curse.
In terms of why I picked English and Rhetoric, I knew it was going to be English because I always really enjoyed my literature classes in high school and middle school. My English teachers have a very special place in my heart. As I was applying to college, a lot of people were telling me that my major wouldn’t necessarily be my career path or tell me something substantive about where I’d end up, so I should go and do what I want for four years. I knew that Berkeley has a fantastic English program, and that it would be a missed opportunity if I didn’t go for English. I knew that for at least four years of my life, and hopefully more, I wanted to do a lot of reading, learn from the professors here, and put myself in a thoughtful and literary space.
In terms of Rhetoric, my high school prepared me very well for my English degree. I think they were trying to get us to go to UCs, so I had a lot of requirements already completed by the time my high school transcript was processed. The choice, then, was either to graduate early or double-major. With an English bachelor’s, there wasn’t a point to me graduating early, especially because I want to pursue graduate study, so I decided to choose another major. It was originally going to be English and Philosophy. I sat in on a couple of guest lectures and a couple classes, but philosophy wasn’t exactly the right shoe for me. Then I took Rhetoric 116 in my freshman spring with Nathan Atkinson. That was my first Rhetoric class. Atkinson is such a fantastic lecturer – he knows how to read a room really well and get people engaged. He is so amazing at what he does; I’m not sure if he knows, but he brought me into the Rhetoric major.
In both Rhetoric and English, you can find deep care and passion lying about rather easily. No one really knows what Rhetoric is — the professors don’t, the students don’t — which I think is quite fun. There is no definition of Rhetoric in our department at Berkeley and everyone will give you a different answer. It’s amazing to learn from professors who are trained in so many different fields. There are a lot of converging and overlapping ideas in Rhetoric, and I deeply appreciate and love it.
As a double major in English and Rhetoric, what are some of the main differences and similarities you have seen between the two majors? How do you see the two majors interacting in your thinking?
I think about this often, because in 116, there were a couple of readings that included subtle jabs at the discipline of English, and that trend has since occasionally reared its head in subsequent Rhetoric courses. There might be unspoken disciplinary beef between English and Rhetoric, and I think that’s normal between humanities disciplines, which I think is sweet. But I actually think that the two work really well in conversation. Literature is a fantastic way to read, and re-read, the world. Some might argue literature practices things in a vacuum, but it’s also deeply related to the way you are going to interact with people when you close your text. Literature is very much on the pulse of how we live and how we understand things, if not the blood itself.
Rhetoric makes it more blatantly real-world; it’s quite often more tangible. But plenty of theory is found in literature, and vice versa. I’ve found over time that my English and Rhetoric classes speak to each other really well. Last spring I was taking 172, Rhetoric of Social Theory, with Atkinson; at the same time, I was taking an English 100 seminar with Rebecca Rainof, called The Body Electric, about cyborgs, robots, the uncanny. Because 172 was about social theory, and about the ways in which the subject comes into being and interpellation, it superimposed quite well with the books we were reading in 100, like Klara and the Sun
Now I’m taking 103A, Ancient Rhetoric, with Mario Teló. It is, pleasantly and unexpectedly, in step with my DeCal about space. Pretty much every DeCal section, I bring up things Teló lectured about. He made a point in the first weeks about how Homeric heroes always fall in death — they always drop to their knees — because the ancient Greeks believed that the knees hold the essence of life. That, in order to be a subject, you have to stand; homo erectus and such. In office hours I asked him what happens in outer space when there is no ‘ground,’ when there is no gravity (like there is on Earth). He told me that — in following the beliefs of the ancient Greeks — if there is no ground pushing against you and if you are not pushing against the ground, the idea of the subject dissolves; there can be no subject in outer space. We were reading The Employees in my DeCal, the entirety of which takes place on The Six Thousand Ship and deals intensely with the subject, identity, what it means to be real, and what it means to be real in a meaningful way – in a way that others will recognize and that you, yourself, will recognize.
English and Rhetoric speak to each other quite often, and I don’t think many would be surprised to hear that. They don’t always say the same things though, or speak in the same language. I have a deep love for both of them.
Can you speak about the research you’ve done as an undergraduate?
I’m a first-year Mellon Mays fellow, so my project is still getting her legs. Where it currently stands, or maybe wobbles, is a Venn diagram of speculative fiction, narratology, and psychoanalysis. I’m interested in how an unreliable narrator comes about through problems of vision — literal, ocular vision as well as prophetic, authorial, and narratological vision. What does it mean to see, what does it mean to know, and what is the visual nature of knowing and believing? It’s perhaps comically coincidental, because the UC Berkeley motto is Fiat lux, ‘Let there be light,’ and our seal has the open book with the light shining down on it; it’s a sort of glass pane that I’m looking through (ha ha) when it comes to my project. Is seeing believing? Is seeing knowing? Why must we see in order to know? Who can see, and who is unable to see?
I’m also interested in the gravity of calling a narrator unreliable and what it means, as a reader, to be the one doing that kind of interpellative work. I think this becomes particularly complicated in speculative texts, when it’s unclear to what degree the fictive world differs from our reality. In Klara and the Sun, for example, cell phones are exclusively called ‘oblongs.’ You pick up that detail as you go through the book, that ‘oblongs’ are just part of the verisimilitude, but then you start wondering what else is just three inches to the left in the world of Klara. So in works like that, where you don’t really have poles of normativity and reliability clearly established, how are you, as the reader, then going to step in and say this narrator is misunderstanding the world they are inhabiting, and the only world they’ve ever known? Do you think they’re lying, misremembering, or otherwise not in line with the story that is meant to be told? What is that story that is ‘meant to be told’?
The idea first started in senior year of high school when we were reading The Handmaid’s Tale in my AP Literature class. It was quite odd to be in the room when someone started slinging around the term “unreliable narrator,” because Offred goes through quite a bit in that story, and it makes sense that she would forget and misremember things. I wouldn’t expect myself or anyone else in her position to take on a completely accurate and objective reporting role. Ever since then, it nags at me when I’m in seminar and someone starts aiming “unreliable narrator” at whatever text we’re reading, and they just leave it there and don’t elaborate on why it’s important to identify and tease out the unreliability. What exactly is making them unreliable, and why should the story be told reliably? If unreliability means you are missing elements of the ‘real’ narrative, what do we lose when we tell that ‘real’ narrative?
When someone does drop the “unreliable narrator” label in seminar and just leaves it there on the table, it’s kind of this fizzling little piece of paper — at some point, the whole table is going to catch on fire. The question of reliability and trustworthiness has been (and is) often weaponized, and of course against certain and specific demographics, for quite literally all time. I think the thing that bothers me most when people bring it up and just leave it is the dismissive connotations. Trust can very easily and often be leveraged as a tool of power — why is unreliably ostensibly a bad thing? What are the poles of good and bad, and where does unreliability sit on that spectrum? Because there is a value judgement in the word ‘unreliable,’ but not everybody unpacks that.
Can you tell me more about the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship? How did you hear about this program, and what are some of the opportunities you’ve had through the program?
I got notified about it through the English newsletter. I saw it and thought it looked cool, but I was on the fence about applying. Professor Atkinson actually emailed me separately and told me that the department wanted professors to reach out to students they thought would fit the program well. I went to his office hours and he told me that I might as well try for it and throw my hat in the ring. I’m very grateful that I did. It’s really great to be in a room every week and talk with the other Mellons – I think it’s hilarious that we’re called Mellons — to talk about what we’re doing. We had our Western Regional Conference at Stanford in early November, where all the universities in the Western region converge for second-year fellow panels, first-year posters, and talking circles. We get to see people’s research, network a little bit, eat together, and explore whichever campus we’re on. It was a good time.
In terms of other opportunities, the fellowship has been a good vehicle to secure mentorship. You have to go out and find your own mentors, but I am very grateful to have the opportunity to have a faculty and a GSI mentor. There’s also a wide network of Mellons across the country that I’m looking forward to tapping into. And, generally having the time to focus on my research and prepare for graduate school is really a saving breath. It’s a lot of time, resources, and connections that I would have a much harder time gaining otherwise, if I didn’t have the fellowship.
In what ways has studying a discipline in the Arts and Humanities been beneficial to you? Why would you recommend non-majors take classes through our division?
I was thinking about this question quite a bit. Berkeley has a very strong Arts and Humanities division, so I think it’s good to take advantage of those resources while you’re here — even if that’s auditing a class or showing up in someone’s lecture once. I think, as with anything, how much you get out of it is how much you put into it. If you want to engage in that strain of thinking or discourse, there is no reason not to; but if it doesn’t appeal to you and there’s no shot that it would, then you shouldn’t force yourself to just because. I know you can also find much of the same passion across the way in STEM or in any other of the umbrella disciplines. I’m very glad, and lucky, that my DeCal has a good mix of humanities and non-humanities people; people make the fight between humanities and non-humanities much bigger than it actually is. Especially with the emergence of AI, it’s hard to marry the two sides together, but it's good to have a wide range of ways to think and interact with the world. Burrowing yourself too deep into STEM or too deep into the humanities would be a disservice to yourself and the people around you. Trying a little bit of everything is beautiful, and if it’s not for you, that’s totally okay. I don’t like it when STEM people rag on humanities, and I don’t like it when humanities people rag on STEM. I think everyone has really grand things to contribute and grand things to say, and I think it’s a shame to not try to listen. You can see brighter in the sun.
Can you tell me a bit more about your DeCal?
My DeCal is “There’s Something So Romantic About Space.” It started out as an idea for a blog post, and then I realized I had nothing to say because all I had was a compilation of ideas. Teaching a DeCal was on my Berkeley bingo card, so I decided this would be it. It’s mostly very digestible readings. We read one small novel, The Employees, and we’ve done some space poems by Tracy K. Smith; we did a short story by Ted Chiang; there’s a couple movies in there – we did Wall-E, there’s Passengers, and a Black Mirror episode. We ask quite often why something is set in space, why it can’t happen on Earth, and why being in space makes things so different, tragic, horrific, comedic, et cetera. During The Employees, people brought up very astute points I’m very glad to have witnessed. Someone had mentioned that The Six Thousand Ship would be their own personal hell, and I had asked why hell would be in space; that’s not typically where or how you would imagine Hell. They made the point that space is, at the same time, too little and too much. I think space is a great place where binaries have to collapse and you’re forced to reckon with a lot of different things — the extremities in space are just so interesting. Why is there such a mysticism about space and such a reluctance to explore it, but also such a drive to be in, conquer it, and inhabit it? I think about outer space being an insatiable driving force, when at the same time, there’s nothing there for us. So many of the things we’ve sent up look back down at us or send information back to us on the ground; we rarely interact with outer space without extracting something from it or reflecting our image back to us. I really love my DeCal, and I’m very lucky that people are engaging. Everyone should do a DeCal.
What book would you recommend to everyone reading this interview?
I have many that I want to recommend. I’ve been talking about it throughout this interview; the most important recommendation is The Employees by Olga Ravn. It’s originally written in Danish and translated by Martin Aitken. It’s about a crew on The Six Thousand Ship, sent out to space to collect some extraterrestrial samples. Shocker, things begin to go awry. It’s a beautifully written and wrenching book, and I recommend it to everyone.
There’s also Lincoln and the Bardo by George Saunders which I read for Rhetoric 121 with Michael Mascuch. It’s a fictional, historical meta-narrative about the night Abraham Lincoln’s son, Willie, gets buried. There are historical accounts of Abraham Lincoln going into the cemetery, but the line between history and Saunders blurs from then on.
There’s also Carl Sagan’s Contact. That’s been a really formative piece for me – especially what he writes about circles. There’s something about circles that makes me so crazy, and that makes me sound crazy when I talk about them. My DeCal students can attest to this. The concept of space travel, time travel, the physics of that book, and the meaning of it I think is a great collapsing of the ‘humanities versus STEM fight.’ It’s such a fantastic book and brings up so much about reliability and unreliability, which also ties in with my research well. It’s a grand book, and I think about it all the time.