Ave Maria University |
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Dr. Lylas Rommel
 | Associate professor
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Lylas Dayton Rommel came to Ave Maria after more than six years of teaching ancient and medieval humanities, Latin, literature, and composition classes, as well as the history of ballet, at Palm Beach Atlantic University in West Palm Beach, Florida. Her dissertation is entitled A Poetics of Shame and the Meaning of Kenosis in Feodor Dostoevsky and William Faulkner. Recent papers include: “Medieval Imagination and The Southern Student,” at Emory University; “Master and Commander: The Challenge of Nature,” at Liverpool John Moores University; and “Paul Mariani’s Poetry as an Introduction to Hellenism,” at Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, Greece. A generalist, Dr. Rommel focuses on student engagement with the liberal arts tradition and the importance of imagination and its formation in understanding the structure of the soul.
Recent Courses
Literary Tradition I & II
American Literature
The Novel
Russian Novel
The Angelus • February 2006: Rommel Joins AMU Literature Dept
Lylas Dayton Rommel, Ph.D. joined AMU's literature department with the start of the spring 2006 semester. She spoke with The Angelus about her many years of teaching experience and her wide spectrum of intellectual interests.
What would you identify as your primary area of specialty?
I don't specialize-I'm a generalist. I have a master's degree in Greek, so I'm pretty strong on the Ancients. But then I did my master's thesis on Flannery O'Connor and I did my Ph.D. on Dostoyevsky. So mine really is a generalist background. I've taught a variety of different things, but I've done more teaching in Ancients and Medievals than I have in Moderns.
What made you decide to study literature?
I got hooked in college. My background was in ballet, but when I went to college I really started making connections between what I was doing as a dancer and what you do in your head when you're constructing a story. At first it was frustrating, because I didn't really understand literature, so I decided I was going to stick with it until I understood it. That's why I took Greek-I figured I had to start at the beginning, and Greek is the foundation of Western literature. As an undergraduate I wasn't very serious, but once I graduated I realized, "I'm just not going to be happy until I figure this out." So I pursued Greek and got my master's in it, only to realize that I really didn't want to be a Greek scholar, that I really wanted to understand literature. I went to the University of Kentucky because I really liked the way they were doing literature. After a while, though, I had to ask myself, "Do I really want to do this or not?" At that point I tried really hard to get out of teaching-I actually got a paralegal certificate in litigation because I wanted to see if I wanted to go to law school. That was good because I discovered halfway through it that I really didn't want to be a lawyer. I ended up teaching again part-time. That led to a full-time job which in time connected me with the University of Dallas. As soon as I heard about that school, it seemed to me that they were the only ones thinking about literature the way I thought about it.
What do you like most about teaching?
For me, getting kids to discover the power of their own imaginations and to see what art-mainly literary art, but all kinds of art-does and can do is really fantastic. As a generalist, I try to show them the big picture-the development of art, different artistic manifestations and expressions of timeless questions. Of course they need to know the context of individual works, but that understanding of how it all fits together through some aspect of the art-that's what it is all about, for me.
You have taught composition in addition to literature-have you enjoyed that?
I learned how to teach writing at the University of Kentucky. That's when I really started making connections-teaching composition is so much like teaching dance. Both are primarily about coaching someone to master a skill, to change a behavior, to perform, to make choices. That discovery was just incredible for me.
Do you have a favorite book?
Maybe the "Aeneid"...probably the "Odyssey." I think the "Odyssey" is so fundamental. It asks those most basic, really important questions. What is life about? What does experience mean? Particularly it asks, "What is a man?" Implied in that of course is the question, "What is a woman?" Those questions were important to Homer and to his audience. And obviously they're still really important to us today.