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IN ENGLISH (ENGLISH DEPARTMENT NEWSLETTER) |
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IN ENGLISH Occasional Newsletter of the Whittier College Department of English Language and Literature Volume 4, #1, November 2003 Charles S. Adams, Editor Reading/Events Schedule Update The best way to keep up to date on the happenings in English and even related subjects is to regularly check the English Department Website, a new and improved version of which is now up and running courtesy some hard work by a number of individuals. Some faculty have put a good deal of individual information there, and the rest of us are doing our best to catch up as soon as we can. That having been noted, keep your eyes out the remainder of this semester for readings by: Gary Young and John Marcus, November 4 Mark Turpin, November 18 Jim Natal and Jeanette Clough, November 11 Stanley Moss and Willis Barnstone, December 2 Tony Barnstone asks that all readers note that Johnson House tends to take a literary direction in its events, and that a look at his schedule there might be instructive. First Notice on Writing Contests There are a number of ways in which students can both win prizes for and publish their writing at the College. All of these are listed on the website at the following address: (http://web.whittier.edu/academic/english/NCWA.htm Here is early warning on one such contest: The Newsom Awards in Poetry and Fiction: The Newsom Awards in Poetry and Fiction are given for the best student work in each genre. These are currently financed through a fund named for Roy Newsom, a former president of the College. The deadline for entries will be February 20th, 2004. All current students are eligible, and guidelines for submission are given below and are available in the English Department office. Please consider submitting your work! Contact Tony Barnstone or the new English Department secretary (as soon as that person is hired!) with questions. Rules for the Newsom Awards in Poetry and Fiction "The Newsom Awards in Poetry and Fiction": The English Department is pleased to announce the annual Newsom Awards in Poetry and Fiction, and invite all interested Whittier students to submit their poetry and/or fiction for consideration by the judges. 1. Only Whittier students currently enrolled may enter the contest. 2. Students may not re-submit work that has previously been awarded the Newsom Award. 3. Students wishing to enter the contest should submit their entry (or entries) to the secretary of the English Department by the deadline of Friday, February 20. 2004. 4. For the fiction contest, students should submit no more than one short story of no more than 15 pages, double-spaced 5. The poetry contest, students should submit an entry of between one and three poems, and the entry should be no more than five pages in length altogether. 6. The same student may enter both the fiction contest and the poetry contest. 7. Students may not enter more than one entry per genre. 8. All contest entries should be anonymous (the author's name should not appear on any of the pages). 9. For each entry, the student should fill out a 3 x 5 card listing their name, box number, email address, phone number, and the title of the short story, or the title(s) of the poem(s). Then, the departmental secretary will assign a number to the entry, which will be marked both on the card and on the entry. 10. The winning entries will be published in the Literary Review. 11. The judge of each contest will have three hundred dollars to disburse to prize-winners, and may divide that amount in any way that they like, though the usual method is to award $150 to the first prize winner, $100 to the second prize winner, $50 to the third prize winner. 12. Contest winners will be announced on Monday, March 8. The Scholarly Writing Prize in English: also February 20, 2004 submission deadline. Guidelines are the same as those for the Newsom Awards, with the exceptions that scholarly essays written for Whittier courses are invited, and no length limit applies. Faculty News Tony Barnstone reports that he has just sent off the final manuscript of The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry, an anthology of Chinese poetry that covers the entire 2000 years tradition. He co-edited the book with Chou Ping, and translated most of the poems in the book. Wendy Furman-Adams has been very active lately in Milton Studies. Her essay (co-authored with Virginia James Tufte), "The Choreography of Passion: Henry Fuseli's Milton Gallery, 1799/1988," recently appeared in Reassembling Truth: Twenty-first Century Milton, edited by Charles Durham and Kristin Pruitt. Their “Saying it with Flowers: Jane Giraud’s Eco-Feminist Paradise Lost, 1848,” should appear early next year in a new book from Cambridge University Press: Milton's Gendered Subjects: Women, Marriage, and Divorce in the Major Poems and Prose, edited by Catherine Gimelli Martin. Meanwhile, Wendy spent the summer working on three entries for the new Milton Encyclopedia, forthcoming from Yale University Press--two with Professor Tufte, and one with father-in-law (and Blake scholar) Hazard Adams. And in October she presented a paper at the Conference on John Milton in Murfreesboro, TN: "The Uses of Enchantment: Artists Re-staging Milton's Mask." In Summer 2004, she'll join the faculty of an NEH-sponsored Institute on John Milton--a five-week intensive course for nationally selected high school teachers at the University of Arizona. Anne Kiley will be teaching in the “Semester at Sea “ program for her spring sabbatical. She says, “I'll be teaching three courses aboard the S.S. Explorer. We sail from Nassau and head east till we get to Seattle, calling at Havana; San Salvador, Brazil; Capetown; Mombassa, Kenya; Madras (they call it Chennai now, but I refuse); Ho Chi Minh City; Hong Kong; Pusan; and Kyoto. Possible field experience include a meeting with Fidel, a trip up the Amazon, several safaris, Taj Mahal and Varanesi; Ankgor Wat, and Beijing and the Great Wall. Among other things.” David Paddy will be traveling to England and Wales during his sabbatical. Most of his trip will be spent in Aberystwyth at the National Library of Wales researching postwar Welsh literature. While in England he plans to interview author J. G. Ballard. The research done during the sabbatical is going toward a manuscript on the construction of national identity in contemporary British literature. Susanne Weil would love to be a fly on the wall when dAve interviews J.G. Ballard--can a room contain both JGB and dp at once, or would the combined energy level spark some kind of spontaneous combustion? Susanne taught her "Women Writing the Wild" literature class cum backpack for the Yosemite Association last July and had entirely too much fun. She spent much of the summer tracking Mary Austin's racially-based theory of "genius" through a startling series of Austin's articles and developing a new course on American women writers. She'll present what she found out about Austin at the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association conference on November 7 in a session titled "New Women and the White Nation." 2003-04 is turning out to be a year of conference pilgrimage for SW. December: San Diego to speak at MLA on how T.C. Boyle romances environmental disaster. (News flash to T.C. Boyle fans--Robin Williams is starring in the film version of Tortilla Curtain! . . .) March, San Antonio--to chair a session at the College Conference on Composition and Communication (4Cs) on how creative writing assignments inspire better essay-writing. May: back to Twain and San Francisco for the American Literature Association. Topic--how Samuel Colt's entrepreneurial adventures with new weapons technologies influenced Twain's creation of Hank Morgan in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court for a special session on Twain and the marketplace. Suffice to say that Susanne is having what Twain would have called "an intellectual lark," one she hopes to extend into a 2004-05 sabbatical to work on her book on Twain's business, bankruptcy, and later writings. Some January and Spring 2004 English Department Courses Below is supplemental information from the faculty about some of our courses to aid in registration for the coming January session and Spring semester. The details are always subject to change, but we hope this will help. Please see or e-mail the instructors for answers to questions these descriptions might raise. One note again: both Anne Kiley and David Paddy will be on sabbatical leave this spring, so the reason they are not listed is that they will not actually be here. January Session English 390, The Lord of the Rings: J.R.R. Tolkien and His Sources (Sean Morris). “All those long years… you knew this day would come.” You’ve seen the movies. You’ve read the books. You may even have dressed up in the costumes. And now you have a chance to sit in a room with 30 people and talk about it. Tolkien was recently voted the most important author of the twentieth century, and in this course we will try to find out why, through discussion of his major works and their significance, and also through an investigation of the vast array of medieval sources on which he drew. We will also consider and evaluate the recent film adaptations, and take a brief look both at those languages that inspired Tolkien and at those he created himself. Required coursework includes daily readings and reading quizzes, an oral presentation, and two papers. The reading list for this course is very substantial, and I strongly advise getting a head start. The Fellowship of the Ring, at least, must be finished before the first day of class. Works by Tolkien: The Fellowship of the Rings, The Two Towers, The Return of the King (plus some of the Appendix material), The Hobbit, “Farmer Giles of Ham” (in The Tolkien Reader), 1 chapter of The Silmarillion, and 1 chapter of the Unfinished Tales. Works by other authors: Humphrey Carpenter’s J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Sir Orfeo; Beowulf; Chaucer’s “The Pardoner’s Tale”; Snorri Sturluson’s Edda (some 100 pages); The Kalevala (a few chapters); The Volsungasaga (less than 100 pages); and “Fafnismal” (less than 10 pages). A preliminary syllabus is posted on my office door, and I have a sign-up sheet in my office, Hoover 209, where you’ll need to come have your card signed, as instructor permission is required. Don’t despair! The readings are long, but also fun. The course will fill up fast, but it will be offered again next year. “All you have to do is decide what to do with the time that is given you.” See you in January: “Forth, Eorlingas!” SPRING 2004 English 120, Introduction to Literature: Sections 1 and 2, “Heroes and Heroines” Susanne Weil and Sean Morris are focusing their Intro courses on the same theme with some overlapping texts--and some shared adventures. Dive into Reader's Theater, Movie Nights, Poetry Walks, and more! Section 1 (Susanne Weil) "Heroes, Heroines, and the Wilderness Plot." Why are we drawn to alternative worlds? How do they change us? What allure do wild places have, in particular, and how do they make us heroic--or not? We'll read poems, plays, novels, and short stories about these questions--as well as some non-fiction narratives on wilderness. Core texts will include Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, Sam Shepard's Curse of the Starving Class, Barbara Kingsolver's Animal Dreams, and Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn--plus, she hopes, work with the new CD-Rom of Twain's recently discovered original manuscript so that students can explore his creative process by looking at how he changed key scenes in the novel. Twain's writing process may spark considerable discussion of students' writing processes in the essays we'll write in this writing-intensive class! Section 2 (Sean Morris). What makes a hero or heroine, why are we so drawn to them, and how have conceptions of what is heroic changed over time? In this course we will explore these questions as we also explore the basic methods for approaching literary texts, and the “Big Three” genres of English literature—poetry, drama, and fiction. The tentative reading list includes: short, lyric poems (not necessarily about heroes), Homer’s Odyssey, Beowulf, Marie de France’s Lanval, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, 1001 Nights, Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, and, for dessert, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Muggles welcome! English 120, Introduction to Literature: Section 3, “Lightness and Weight” (Wendy Furman-Adams). This section will consider the recurring theme of Lightness and Weight in a variety of literature--poetry, drama, and fiction. Plays will include Oedipus the King, Hamlet, and Bertolt Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle; the course will end with Milan Kundera's wonderful philosophical novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Because the purpose of the course is to develop appreciation of the arts in the widest sense, it will require attendance at, and reviews of, on-campus plays and literary readings. English 120, Introduction to Literature: Section 4 (Charles Adams) I have not yet determined whether I will have a general theme or not, though it is likely. I encourage students who sign up for the section to drop by a little later in the semester and get a reading list. It will not hurt to get started early. As with all sections of “Introduction to Literature,” you can be assured that we will do poetry, fiction, and drama, and that Shakespeare will be part of the deal. We will probably look at Paul Auster’s novel City of Glass. I am thinking as well about Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Stay tuned for more. English 305, Screenwriting (Sean Morris). You know you’ve always wanted to write your own movie, and here’s your chance! This course will give you the tools you need to write for the silver screen—including plot structure, character development, scene building, dialogue, and screenplay format. Our methods and assignments will include short writing exercises, outlining, discussions, workshops, readings, and a weekly film lab (time and day to be fixed when the course begins). For your major project, you will submit a detailed outline for a feature-length film, and a complete first act (30 pages in screenplay format). Readings will include Robert McKee’s Story, Denny Martin Flinn’s How Not To Write a Screenplay, Syd Field’s, Screenplay, professional scripts, and your fellow students’ drafts. Instructor permission is required, so walk, run, or hop a limo to Hoover 209 today. English 324, Chaucer (Sean Morris). You'll get all your favorite Canterbury Tales in this class—the Miller, the Wife of Bath, the Pardoner, the Nun's Priest—and many, many more. Who knew life was so much fun in 1398? But wait! If you order now, you’ll also get Troilus and Criseyde and a dream vision or two. Add your own pilgrim to the gang, learn to read Middle English, battle for the Canterbury dolls, and find out why Chaucer is to blame for all the Valentine’s Day hullabaloo. (Yes, he really is.) Need I say more? Be there, or be “wood”! (It rhymes with “load.”) All readings will be in Middle English—but don't worry! I’ll show you how. Permission of instructor required, so grab your palmers’ staves and make the pilgrimage to Hoover 209 for your signature today! English 328, Shakespeare (Susanne Weil). You should probably get Kinesthetic Performance credit for this English course! Shakespeare's not simply a great (perhaps our greatest--pace, Sean and Wendy!) writer in English--he was also a playwright, so be prepared to play Kenneth Branagh and invent your own interpretation of your favorite play on our syllabus. Performance groups will pick their scene, interpretation, etc., and perform so that the rest of the class sees what they are trying to do with it: then, each group will lead discussion to explain, perhaps debate, their "spin." Exciting props encouraged. O, for a muse of fire! So what will we read, you ask? Get ready to party with Prince Hal and Falstaff, then "cry God for Harry, England, and St. George" on the fields of France while Hal remakes himself as King Henry. Cheer on Viola's quest for love and help Sir Toby Belch play tricks on Malvolio on Twelfth Night. Didn't get to go abroad? Journey from Venice to Belmont, Venice to Cyprus, Rome to Egypt, and the court to the heath as we travel with Shakespeare's comic and tragic heroes and heroines in The Merchant of Venice, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, and King Lear. Discover how conflicts that bring together individuals in comedy and tear them apart in tragedy find resolution in romance--or not--in The Winter's Tale and The Tempest. (News Flash: Susanne's favorite writer is NOT Mark Twain, but William Shakespeare.) English 329, Milton (Wendy Furman-Adams). This course will consider the poetry and major prose of John Milton (1608-1674). Second only to Shakespeare in the scholarship he inspires each year, Milton was a major actor on the political stage of his own day--a radical whose views on religious, political, and domestic liberty still generate endless controversy. Paradise Lost has inspired more artists than any work except the Bible, and has become a part of the mental furniture even of those who have not read it. To read Milton is to enter an entire world of thought about good and evil; about the right uses of nature; about men and women; about friendship, sexuality, and marriage; about politics and freedom; and about what the world might be like if we took the poem's moral imperatives seriously--seeking, as Milton suggested, "a paradise within." About half way through the semester Milton students (and any others who are interested) will have the opportunity to join with Milton lovers around the world in a "Milton Marathon" reading of Paradise Lost. English 362, American Realism and Naturalism (Charles Adams) This time out the course will, as usual, cover a number of major writers from the period of roughly the Civil War until World War I. Following the agony of the Civil War, many American writers turn away from “romantic” ideas and argue to some extent that their art must engage the immediate problems they see around them in a way that the romantics may not have (at least seem not to have). We will be concentrating on fiction, and exploring a number of full-length works. An added feature and possibly something of a warning is that this version of the course will be paired with History 316, “Urban Encounters: the City in the United States taught by Professor Laura McEnaney. Quite naturally, we will focus our readings to a large extent on works that considers the important change in American culture of the post-war period from an agricultural society to an increasingly urban and industrial one. To that end we will take a look at the recent film The Gangs of New York and read works like Ramona (Helen Hunt Jackson), McTeague (Frank Norris), The Rise of Silas Lapham (William Dean Howells), Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (Stephen Crane), Life in the Iron Mills (Rebecca Harding Davis), The Awakening (Kate Chopin), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (Mark Twain), and some others. Yes, I mean it, all of those and more. Consider carefully how much time you have available. English 363, Modern American Novel (Charles Adams) This course will take up the topic of modernism, as American fiction writers involve themselves in it from about World War I to the 1950’s. I am not entirely certain of the readings just yet, but am inclined to include the following writers: Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, Jean Toomer, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Dashiell Hammett, and Jack Kerouac. Additional candidates for inclusion are F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Steinbeck. But life is short and we can only get to so much. I will be posting a list on my office door soon of which books I intend to choose, but invite prospective students to express opinions to me as soon as they can. I am happy to adjust our readings toward your interests if at all possible. Please drop by and chat about it or at least enable yourself to get a head start. As with the course above, note the reading obligation. Yes, I have to do it all too. English 410, Senior Seminar: “Writing Renaissance Women” (Wendy Furman-Adams). The title of this course is ambiguous--even slightly "punny"--in that it refers to two things at once. Most obviously, this is a course about women writers working in England between about 1550 and 1700. But a number of important male writers also are represented because even when writing for others of their own sex, women have had to write in response to male images of female identity. The Renaissance was a period of enormous change and upheaval, in which men (at least an elite of outstanding and privileged men) were involved actively in a reconstruction of identity, a reconstruction critic Stephen Greenblatt has called "Renaissance self-fashioning." Women, too, were engaged in this "self-fashioning" enterprise; but they did so under the jealous eye of a patriarchal society that saw them, essentially, as passive members--valued above all, as historian Suzanne Hull has noted, for chastity, obedience, and silence. Even as they wrote, they were also "being written"--both by male writers and by the social conventions that shaped both male and female roles. Thus we'll consider the context of the literature we read: the social conditions under which it was produced. We will also read a number of texts--closely and with open minds--in order to see the extent to which Renaissance writers, male and female, were "written" by the context in which they wrote; and to see, conversely, the extent to which they managed to "re-write," or "refashion" themselves and one another. The aim is to participate in a fresh and quickly developing field of inquiry within Renaissance Studies: how women were written in the Renaissance--and how they in turn rewrote it. Instructor's permission required. English 420, Preceptorship: Teaching Literature (Adams, Furman-Adams, Morris, Weil). This course is designed for advanced students who desire an opportunity to get some experience working with a professor in the teaching of literature. Students who enroll will work with an instructor of a section of “Introduction to Literature,” participating in the teaching of the course in a variety of ways. Enrollment requires an application to the instructor. You must be able to attend the section of Intro. you would be the preceptor for. Last Minute Notes From Bill Geiger: This spring Bill will be teaching the second semester of Intd. 101-102 ("The Western Mind") with Jack de Vries of the Theatre and Communication Arts Department and English 400 ("Critical Procedures"). In Intd. 102 Bill and Jack will conduct students from the Renaissance to the twentieth century in their survey of European intellectual history. Bill is still thinking about how to construct this year's offering of CritPro, and he is thinking of either examining the major critical approaches approach by approach or through the lens of cognitive studies. Sigma Tau Delta Congratulations to the following students who most recently qualified for membership in our chapter (the Jessamyn West chapter) of the national English honorary society, Sigma Tau Delta. To qualify for membership, students must demonstrate significant accomplishment over time in English courses. You do not need to be an English major to qualify. The most recently inducted members are Gabriela Simeonova, Amber Hollingsworth, KaeLee Hudgins, and Ivy Worsham. Congratulations again to them for outstanding work and real accomplishment! Some Alumni News Mike Garabedian recently cleaned up on “Jeopardy,” with over $40,000 in winnings. Mike had been attending graduate school in English at Northwestern University, but the latest reports have him studying Library science at U.C.L.A. By the way, while Mike's "Jeopardy" installments aired, he and his dad were climbing Mt. Whitney. Dawn Finley has started the M.A. program in Arts Administration at U.S.C. Floyd Cheung has a new book out, an edition of And China has Hands by H.T. Tsiang. He continues as an erstwhile professor of English at Smith College. Nilanga Jayasinghe got her Master's in journalism from U.C. Berkeley in June. Veronica Meneses and Jason Fish report the birth of their first child, as do Tom Manley and Katie Givler. Jennifer Nestegard Blazey is playing Lucy in a benefit dinner theatre performance of You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown (for the Boys and Girls Club of Buena Park). Avtar Singh has a book out—for a report see Anne Kiley below. Erin Whittemore is finishing her M.A. at Cal State Long Beach and is presenting a paper on The Winter's Tale at the Pacific Ancient and Modern Languages Association's conference at Scripps, Nov. 7-9. Unconfirmed reports have it that Andrea Barber is back from England with an M.A. in Women’s Studies from the University of York. We're hoping to have some of our alumni/ae return for some Johnson House gatherings to talk to current students about life after Whittier. Are you now working in journalism, in creative writing, in literary graduate programs, or in one the myriad endeavors English majors turn their hands to after graduation? If you see this newsletter online and have stories to share, please contact department chair Susanne Weil (contact info below). What did we Read Over the Summer? Charles Adams—A couple more of the historical novels in the “Niccolo Chronicles” series by Dorothy Dunnett, which I am slowly working my way through; John Adams (see Anne Kiley as well; Harry Potter (see everyone). The new novel by Paul Auster called The Book of Illusions. Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential and A Cook’s Tour. Only one baseball book, Jim Morris’ The Oldest Rookie. Also about a year’s worth of The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books though I am far from caught up. Reread The Lord of the Rings for what I think is the 15th time. Would have read anything more by Patrick O’Brian, but he died before he finished his Aubrey/Maturin series. I will see the movie. Tony Barnstone--has been reading the poetry of Thomas Lux, Stephen Dobyns, Marvin Bell, Alan Michael Parker, Tony Hoagland, and Barbara Hamby, plus the essays of Pablo Neruda and Jorge Luis Borges. Wendy Furman-Adams--Over the summer, daughter Jacqueline and I worked our way through Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (which took a while at read-aloud speed--mostly lounging on the beanbag chairs in Jackie's new "teen-age retreat"). On my own, I very much enjoyed reading Richard Rodriguez's Brown, Michael Cunningham's The Hours (even richer than the film), and Paul Auster's newest novel Book of Illusions. Best of all, responding to a suggestion by dAve Paddy, I read Ian McEwan's Atonement--a breathtaking novel of betrayal and anguish set in World War II England and France. I'm currently taking another literary/philosophical thrill ride: The Discovery of Heaven by Dutch novelist Harry Mulisch. My friend Pam, who lives in The Hague, gave me this massive, marvelously Miltonic novel of ideas, and I've had a hard time putting it aside for even the most pleasurable distractions. It begins with a conversation in Heaven, as an immortal being reports his work directing the lives of humans living between World War I and the 1980s. The narrative moves from '60's Amsterdam to Auschwitz, to Castro's Cuba and back to The Hague--leading up to the somewhat miraculous birth and growth of a mysterious child. Funny and heartbreaking by turns, this meditation on music, language, astronomy, architecture, politics, society, theology, sex, and ethics moves us into the lives of some unforgettable characters. A glorious example of European postmodern fiction--so far, at least. (On page 515, I'm still 200 pages from the end!) Bill Geiger--Apparently David McCullough's John Adams is the unofficial English Department reading book, because I am also reading it, alternating reading it and Northrop Frye's Words with Power at breakfast. This summer I read James Hynes' The Lecturer's Thumb (a wicked novel about modern critical theory), Joseph Kanon's The Good German, and Anthony Beevor's The Fall of Berlin 1945. (The last two books should be a hint that Janice and I spent almost a month this past summer in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and Prague.) I have been reading contemporary considerations of metaphor with an eye to bringing metaphor analysis as practiced at Whittier College a number of years ago in line with contemporary treatments of metaphor by such cognitive studies scholars as Mark Turner, Gilles Fauconnier, Mark Johnson, and Raymond Gibbs. In addition, I am trying to time aside from being the Chair of the Whittier College Faculty to continue writing my monograph about Ronald Knox (1888-1957). Anne Kiley--Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, of course --got very annoyed with Harry, and didn't mind the death at all. David McCullough's John Adams, which I'd had on my list for quite a while. Also, though I didn't really get to it till summer was over, Avtar Singh's The Beauty of These Present Things. Published by Penguin India, so not available in bookstores here, but Amazon.com can get it. Witty, and a promising first novel --the opening descriptions of Bombay show that he knows his Rushdie, which is very gratifying considering that he first read Rushdie in my class. Dave Paddy--Recently I finished Curtis White’s The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don’t Think For Themselves, a devastating critique of cultural studies that defends the importance of aesthetics (and the politics of aesthetics) while ravaging the vacuous arguments of Harold Bloom. I have been shoving this book into many people’s hands. Yann Martel’s Life of Pi is highly recommended, and Graham Swift’s The Light of Day isn’t up to Waterland or Last Orders but is still quite a good novel. My recent Welsh fetishism has led me to the stories of Rhys Davies, the poems of R. S. Thomas and Gillian Clarke, and novelist Niall Griffiths. Oes diddordeb ‘da chi mewn llenyddiaeth Cymru? Sean Morris--For work: books and articles on The Owl and the Nightingale. For fun: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (but not in one 40-hour sitting like most people I know!), and Robert Heinlein's "Space Cadet." For work and fun: The Lord of the Rings (again!) Susanne Weil--dAve turned me on to Fast Food Nation, which I'm going to team with Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed and Stud Terkel's Working for a new freshman writing seminar that will research contemporary labor conflicts in Los Angeles . . . I indulged my T.C. Boyle obsession with Riven Rock and Drop City, fascinating historical novels on (respectively) the sexual insanity of the heir to the McCormick Reaper fortune and hippies trying to start a commune in the backcountry of northern Alaska in the '60s. Aside from that, as noted above, I read a lot of Mary
Austin this summer, and for those interested in the
struggles of women artists in the early 20th century, I
highly recommend her eccentric autobiography, Earth Horizon,
written mostly in third person! I dived into what was
essentially my own private graduate seminar on American
women writers of the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries,
delving into "true womanhood," "new women," Native American
women writers. . . . Fascinating reading that I highly
recommend, both fiction and criticism, would include
Catherine Sedgewick's Hope Leslie and Lydia Maria Child's
Hobomok, concerning the possibilities for Native Americans
and early women of the American republic to find peaceful
means of coexistence and even intermarriage. Well, we know
how all that turned out, much represented in Mourning Dove's
Cogewea and Mary Austin's sketches in The Country of Lost
Borders and The Land of Journey's Ending. Some of these
writers get whacked, some praised in Richard Drinnon's
Facing West: Indian Hating and Empire Building; Elizabeth
Barnes' States of Sympathy, Shirley Samuels' Romances of the
Republic, and Elizabeth Ammons' Conflicting Stories. I also
delved into some fascinating ecofeminist criticism: The Lay
of the Land and The Land Before Her (Annette Kolodny). I
feel a new course coming on. . . . watch for it in 2005-06! |
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