UWP Lecturers sharon tyler

[Steven Axelrod]

 Thanks Deborah and John for relaying this sad and shocking news about
Sharon Tyler.

There was no one like her. I have vivid memories of Sharon in my
undergraduate American Renaissance class in 1976. She was a new graduate
student fulfilling what were then perceived as "deficiencies," which the
Graduate Committee distributed like confetti to incoming graduate students.
One new grad student, I recall, was given a deficiency in every field there
was. Sharon had only one, in nineteenth-century American literature, so
there she was in my course, brilliant and self-confident. She got a string
of A's for papers on Emerson, Melville, Thoreau, and Rebecca Harding Davis,
and an A in the course. A fellow student was Virginia Ettinger, now Virginia
Phillips, the Federal judge who recently ruled DADT unconstitutional. There
were other extraordinary students in that class, and I still remember it
vividly.

A year or two later, our colleague Ruth apRoberts distributed a devilishly
hard riddle composed by Thomas Macaulay, challenging the faculty and grad
students to solve it. The winner would be acknowledged at the annual
department party. I couldn't solve it myself. I wasn't surprised when Sharon
Tyler was announced as the only department member to come up with the right
answer.

I observed several of Sharon's composition classes over the years and
thought they were good and sometimes amazing. She ran a well-organized,
humane classroom. When the students "got" her, she could help them transform
their writing. But they had to "get" her for the magic to work.

Sharon was a remarkable, unaccountable person--stunningly intelligent and
knowledgeable, insistent on going her own way, kind to cats, good (I was
told) at predicting the outcomes of horse races. Perhaps not surprisingly,
she wrote the most distinguished essay on Thoreau in my course. They had
things in common.

She will be missed.

Affectionate regards to all,

Steve
-- 
Steven Gould Axelrod
President, The Robert Lowell Society
Author, Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words; Robert Lowell: Life
and Art
Co-editor, The New Anthology of American Poetry, Vols. 1-3
Professor of English

University of California
Riverside, CA 92521


  On Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 5:00 PM, Deborah Willis <deborah.willis at ucr.edu>wrote:

> Dear Colleagues:  I have received sad news from John Briggs about the death
> of Sharon Tyler, for many years a senior lecturer in our writing program
> and, before that, a graduate student who received her Ph.D. from our
> department in 1987.   She specialized in Renaissance drama (especially
> Shakespeare's history plays) and was a frequent contributor to the "Themes
> in Drama" conference held annually at UCR for many years.  More recently,
> she gave papers at UCR conferences on C.S. Lewis's Narnia series and on
> "Pottermania."   Here is John's eloquent message:
>
>
> I am sorry to report that today we heard that our friend and longstanding
> UWP faculty member, Sharon Tyler, has passed away.  It is difficult to
> accept the loss of someone who for these last thirty years has been a unique
> contributor to the writing program as TA, Lecturer, proctor, grader, and as
> one who lived the memories of events long ago and colleagues now gone.
> Thousands of students endured or thrived under her stubbornly rigorous ways,
> and the great majority became better writers as a result.  Her classes often
> passed the old exit examination at rates surpassing others.  Sharon was, not
> incidentally, a protector of the campus’s feral (but to her friendly) cat
> population.  Many of us knew her as a fount of esoterica, a lover of horses
> and horse-racing, an entertaining travel companion and conversationalist at
> the annual readings in Berkeley, and a faithful contributor to the
> program.   She maintained many a vigil as an examination proctor in remote
> classrooms on campus.  As I write this, it is hard not to think of her
> insistently offering to refine (she would say “to correct”) my phrasing.  I
> will miss counting on her.
>
> Sharon is survived by a brother who lives in San Diego.  As I receive more
> information I will share it with you.
>
>  John
>
> Deborah Willis, Chair
> Dept. of English
> University of California
> Riverside, CA 92521
>
> office phone: 951-827-1458
> email: dwill at ucr.edu
>






-- 
Steven Gould Axelrod
President, The Robert Lowell Society
Author, Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words; Robert Lowell: Life
and Art
Co-editor, The New Anthology of American Poetry, Vols. 1-3
Professor of English
University of California
Riverside, CA 92521
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