Remembering Molly Hite, professor emerita of English

Molly Hite, professor emerita of English, died Feb. 10 in Bellingham, Wash. She was 77.

Hite taught at Cornell from 1982 until her retirement in 2013. Her scholarly projects dealt with Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group. She published on figures like Thomas Pynchon, as well as 20th and 21st century experimental fiction; British literature from 1880-1945 and U.S. experimental fiction after 1945.

Hite wrote two novels, “Class Porn” (Crossing Press, 1987) and “Breach of Immunity”(St. Martin’s Press, 1992) as well as two critical studies books, “The Other Side of the Story: Structures and Strategies of Contemporary Feminist Narratives” (Cornell University Press, 1989) and “Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon” (Ohio State University Press, 1983). 

“Molly Hite was a brilliant scholar of feminism and literary modernism,” said Jeremy Braddock, associate professor in the Department of Literatures in English. “As a young woman, she worked at the renowned radio station WBAI (New York City’s Pacifica affiliate), and was very helpful to me — even though she had retired and left Ithaca — as I was beginning my second book, which dealt with figures who moved through that station.” 

Hite directed a number of Ph.D. dissertations at Cornell and her students remember her fondly. She taught classes on modernism, postmodernism, experimental novels by women and Cornell writers. One new course she created, The Great American Cornell Novel, which focused on works by Cornell alumni and faculty Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Alison Lurie and Vladimir Nabokov, drew students from across campus.

“Molly’s laugh was infectious and intellectually provocative. From her I learned that critical analysis can and should be joyful,” said Caetlin Benson-Allott Ph.D. ‘08, professor of English and film & media studies at Georgetown University and director of Georgetown’s Film & Media Studies Program. Hite was an early advisor to Benson-Allott during her doctoral work. “We will miss her warmth and her investment in cultivating intellectual curiosity in her many students and mentees.” 

Hite served as chair of the Department of English (now the Department of Literatures in English) from 2006-2008. During that time, she wrote a piece for the Cornell Chronicle exploring why enrollment in Shakespeare courses was booming for Cornell undergrads. The current chair of Literatures in English, Shirley Samuels, describes her as a lively and engaging colleague.

“Molly Hite was a scholar of the first order—an incisive analyst of modernist and contemporary fiction and of feminism in idea and practice. She was also a profoundly inspiring and compassionate colleague,” said Doug Mao, the Russ Family Professor in the Humanities in the Department of English at Johns Hopkins University, who taught at Cornell from 2002-2007. “From the moment I arrived at Cornell in 2002, I knew that should I ever need to call upon someone, she would be there with help and counsel—and love. I suppose that’s what I think of most when I think of her: her wit; her elegant, bubbly way of resisting the stuffy and the staid; and how she radiated love.”

Hite received her undergraduate degree from Seattle University and her doctoral degree from the University of Washington. 

“Molly Hite’s course The Postmodern Novel was one of several courses at Cornell that fundamentally changed my thinking,” said Christopher Lupke Ph.D. ‘93, professor in the East Asian Studies Department at the University of Alberta. “Before I took it, I was basically in the universalist humanistic mindset. I had read a couple of the novels before the course and had been a Pynchon fanatic since early college days, but Molly's course changed my thinking about Pynchon and about contemporary fiction in general.”

Lupke said Hite was a friendly and welcoming teacher, especially for him as a scholar on the “margins” of the humanities in Chinese studies.

“She was curious about non-Western literature, and subsequently hosted some visiting scholars from time to time from China and would call me in to talk with them, hang out with them, and help her understand where they were coming from,” he said.

Hite’s family is working on details for a memorial service at a later date. Memorial donations can be sent to Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières.)