Memories of Dennis

During the break in our critical theory survey class in the basement of Stansbury Hall, I had a conversation with Dennis and a graduate student about memory. I mentioned a party trick -- to recall that moment in detail in any future decade of their choosing. I ran the image through my head a few times and then again later that week, and a few more times after that -- a long-term memory hack. It worked, but I have countless other vivid memories of Dennis Allen beyond that one. The first time I encountered Dennis, we didn't meet. I was a student in the Economics department, working in my basement office in the WVU Regional Research Institute, when I wandered over to the WVU/Carnegie Mellon English Graduate Student Colloquium. The first paper I attended analyzed scopophilia and Tomb Raider players – how players could identify as Lara Croft while simultaneously fetishizing her/themselves. I was unfamiliar enough with the subject matter that at first, I couldn’t tell if the presenter was saying male gays or male gaze. Dennis asked the first question, which got a lot of laughs, and put the speaker at ease. I can’t do the delivery justice, but the gist was that Dennis wondered if given the analysis, did playing the game cause players to momentarily occupy a lesbian identity. I left Economics and joined English not too long after that. I’m grateful Dennis and I stayed in touch over the years, especially during the pandemic. I wanted to hear his take on the new Queer Eye, since his writing about the first Queer Eye was so enjoyable. Publishing academic essays that were not only insightful, but also funny, was another of his rare gifts. He said he would think about watching it, but ultimately, he didn’t cave. I miss being able to talk to him. I never asked Dennis if he remembered the memory trick I promised. There was no need. I’ve come to realize that the unique level of engagement he evoked in his classes, besides making them a pleasure to be in, had many other benefits. When I page through my Literary Theory or Film Theory and Criticism anthologies, our class discussions, my classmates, and Dennis’s lectures come back to me in detail because they were not only stimulating, they are also fond memories. As a result, a consequential portion of what Dennis taught, and the teaching he modeled, became foundational for my academic work and my own teaching -- and continues to meaningfully influence them. --Kom Kunyosying

Since hearing of Dennis's passing I've been trying to put some thoughts together, and New Year's Day, 2022, seems the right time to do it. Dennis was for me the embodiment of life, liveliness, living. I first met him a few years before I moved to WVU at a conference at Arizona State--one of those gatherings of high-powered theoreticians and their acolytes (neither Dennis nor I being among these). I remember spotting a man with a crinkled, wry look about him sitting alone and immediately thought, "there's a friend in this matrix of abstractions." The wry look turned into the largest smile I had ever seen and heartiest laugh I had ever heard as we discussed the perils of conferencing and the folly of mankind in general. I didn't know then that my newly found conference friend would become a colleague in the English Department at WVU when I moved there in 1989. We renewed our friendship immediately, and dubbed ourselves Spike, Sr. (me) and Spike, Jr. (Dennis)--aka Big Spike and Little Spike, Dennis's inspiration of course--as an affectionate sendup of academic power differentials and honorifics. I shared many good times with Dennis, whose fish-out-of-water outlook served as the perfect guide to the environs and whose laughter unfailingly brought cheer to the darkest winter day. We both had offices on either end of Stansbury Hall, where you could hear the basketballs bouncing against the far wall (the legend was that some dean, disgusted with the English Department, sent it down to the river's edge in the renovated building, half of it still serving as a gymnasium), and I'm sure we exasperated many colleagues attempting to have a quiet moment with our laughter and callouts up and down the corridors of the office wing. I often miss those days, and miss my colleagues at WVU, but above all I miss Dennis who, as was true for everyone who knew him, brought with him empathy, wit, and that slight sardonic edge that in the end makes for wisdom. --Pat O'Donnell

My Favorite APBP Memory Dennis Allen One of the things that I’ve learned in my four years as a volunteer at APBP is that a key value of books for people in prison is that they allow them to dream, to imagine other worlds and other lives. This is obviously true of books like novels and histories, of course, but books also allow them to imagine other lives and futures for themselves: becoming a carpenter or starting their own business or even having a self-sustaining farm on a quarter of an acre. My favorite APBP memory is a perfect example of this. A couple of years ago we would regularly receive requests from Kevin, who went by the nickname Hillbilly, and his long, chatty letters soon made him a staff favorite. In one letter, Hillbilly confessed his passion for ham radio and asked if we could send him any books on the topic. Since we didn’t have any and it seemed unlikely that we’d get such a specialized book as a regular donation, I put out a call on our Facebook page to see if anyone could help us fulfill Hillbilly’s request. We immediately received three different ham radio books from three different donors. Very grateful for their help, we sent them off to him. In addition, one of our founding members, whose father had been a ham radio enthusiast, gave Kevin a gift subscription to a ham radio magazine in memory of her dad. Because the subscription address was hers but the delivery address was Hillbilly’s, the only problem was she had no way of knowing if he was receiving it. And then one day, about nine months later, she got a letter from the magazine saying that they had received the article that Hillbilly had submitted and were considering it for publication. It was at that moment that we knew that we were still helping Hillbilly to dream.