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IN ENGLISH
Occasional Newsletter of the Whittier College Department
of English Language and Literature
Volume 5, #1, October 2004
dAvid pAddy, Editor
Reading/Events Schedule Update
The best way to keep up to date on the happenings in English
and related subjects is to check the English Department
Website regularly, a new and improved version of which is
now up and running courtesy of 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.
For the calendar of events, go to this website:
http://web.whittier.edu/academic/facultymasters/johnsonhouse/calendar.htm
You can capture everything from that page and its subpages.
2004-2005 English Department Courses
Below is supplemental information from the faculty about
some of the courses taught by English faculty members to aid
in registration for the year. 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.
January
English 365, Hemingway and Eliot (Bill Geiger). Back after a
year, this January course compares selected works by two
important modern writers whose world views aptly
counterpoint each other.
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 Fellowhip 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), several
chapters of The Silmarillion, 1 chapter of the Unfinished
Tales, and selections from The Adventures of Tom Bombadil.
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”; Shakespeare’s
Macbeth; 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. “All you
have to do is decide what to do with the time that is given
you.” See you in January. “Forth, Eorlingas!”
Spring
English 120: Introduction to Literature: Section 1, “Love
and Justice” (Wendy Furman-Adams)
This section will consider the recurring--and sometimes
interlinked--themes of love and justice in a variety of
literature--poetry, drama, and fiction. Plays will include
Antigone, King Lear, and Bertolt Brecht's The Caucasian
Chalk Circle. The course will end with Charles Johnson's
wonderful philosophical novel Dreamer--based on the last
years of the life of Dr. Martin Luther King. 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.
ENG 120: Introduction to Literature: Section 2 (Anne Kiley):
My colleagues are way ahead of me here. Except for the usual
poetry anthology, I haven't the slightest idea what I'll
teach next semester in this course, though there may well be
something connected with my recent travels.
English 120: Introduction to Literature: Section 3, “Heroes
and Heroines” (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 Merchant of Venice, 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!
ENG 120: Introduction to Literature: Section 4, “Aesthetics
and Intertextuality” (dAvid pAddy):
This course serves as an introduction to the aesthetics and
critical reading of literature. The primary goal of this
class is to help you become a better reader of literature
with an enhanced ability to analyze, discuss, and write
about literary texts. Think of it as an introduction to how
literary authors, theorists, and critics see the world. Our
guiding text will be Peter Barry’s English in Practice. This
will help lay out some of the central issues and concerns
for the course. After working through a variety of short
stories, poems, and plays, we will focus on the critical
concept of intertextuality, the way literary works build on
and refer to other literary works. To illustrate this
principle we will read three novels: Charlotte Bronte’s Jane
Eyre, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, and Jasper Fforde’s The
Eyre Affair.
Prerequisite: INTD 100
English 221, Major British and American Writers, Bill
Geiger. This will be a new course for Bill, and he is
thinking about basing it on Henry James's theme of the
contrast between European and American cultural
expectations.
English 222, Literature of the Bible (Wendy Furman-Adams)
Along with Greek and Roman texts, the Bible is one of the
two great well-springs of European music, literature, and
art. Biblical narratives have been given color and form by
countless Jewish artists, as well as by Christian artists as
diverse as Giotto, Fra Angelico, Botticelli, Michelangelo,
Rembrandt, and Bernini; as well as "secular" modern artists
like Mark Rothko and Paul Klee. Literary works ranging from
Milton's Paradise Lost to Toni Morrison's Beloved are best
understood in a biblical light.
Moreover, the Bible is itself a work of art: a compendium or
anthology of literary texts of incredible richness and
variety. Within its covers we will find cosmology, epic,
heroic and domestic tales, tragedy, lyric, and wisdom
literature; narrative, parable, epistle, and apocalypse.
Thus we will be looking at biblical narrative and images
through two complementary lenses. Primarily, we'll look
closely at the biblical texts themselves--a large and
representative sampling from both the Hebrew Bible and the
Christian New Testament--placing them in as full an
historical context as possible. But at various points
throughout the course, we also will be looking at literary
reflections of those texts, and/or at images created in
response to those texts by musical or visual artists. In
doing so, we will be grappling with several questions: What
are the points of similarity and contrast between visual and
verbal ways of "seeing" divine (or any) reality? How have
familiar biblical stories been understood at different
points in history and in different countries--and how have
those different understandings produced different works of
art? What biblical texts have seemed most important and
revelatory to artists at different points in art and
literary history? And how have visual and verbal traditions
influenced and affected each other, as artists in both have
sought to convey their experience of an eternal, invisible
God who has acted, visibly, within the ever-changing stream
of human time?
Because a biblical background is so important to the study
of literature, this course is ideal for students in the
second year and above. No prerequisites except INTD 100.
ENG 302: Advanced Fiction Writing (Tony Barnstone)
The advanced fiction workshop is a rare opportunity--it
isn't offered every year. The workshop will focus on short
story writing, and will be visited by professional fiction
writer/screenwriters, such as David Benioff and Dan Weiss.
Tony Barnstone, who is teaching the class, mainly writes
poetry, but has published short stories and is currently at
work on a novel.
English 311, The History of the English Language (Sean
Morris)
This is your language 1000 years ago: “Hwæt! We gardena in
geardagum þeodcyninga þrym gefrunon, hu þa æþelingas ellen
fremmedon.” What happened?!?! How did we get here from
there? And while we’re at it, why don’t “police” and “ice”
rhyme, but “knight” and “bite” do? And why can you have two
dogs, but not two sheeps or oxes? And why do they talk funny
in other states, and why do some people call “soda” “pop”?
Why? I will tell you why, if first you sojourn with me
through… the History of the English Language. Welcome to
H-E-L!
Note: This course will be paired with ECON 315, The History
of Economic Thought."
English 330, British Literature 1640-1789 (Wendy
Furman-Adams)
Compared to some courses, the period covered in this course
is not a long one: just under 150 years. Yet the period is a
fascinating one because it leads directly to our own
civilization (or the one just ending)--from the Renaissance
to the "modern world." The later seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries have been called many things: the Age of Reason,
the Enlightenment, the "Age of Exuberance" (by my late great
former teacher Donald Greene), and, perhaps most aptly of
all, the Age of Revolution.
Our period literally began with one revolution (the English
Puritan Revolution) and ended with another (the French
Revolution). But the period was revolutionary in every way
imaginable. Politically--during this age of Locke, Rousseau,
and the American founding fathers--the Divine Right of Kings
gave way to the radical idea (so obvious, at least in
hindsight, to Americans!) of the "social compact." Socially,
the middle class (i.e. most of us) came into being as an
active social force--giving rise, with their new mobility,
to reform movements such as temperance and the abolition of
slavery. Economically, an agrarian society gave way to
unprecedented urbanization and to the rise of capitalism,
with all its new opportunities and dangers. Educationally,
opportunity both expanded and changed--giving rise to a
"reading public" that for the first time included people of
all classes, and women as well as men.
Religiously, the relative unity and stability of the middle
ages continued to fragment, giving rise to a relatively
secular society, in which "the pursuit of happiness" came to
mean not the search for ultimate reality (God), but personal
happiness on this earth, in our lifetimes. Philosophically,
the emphasis on authority that had been the hallmark of
learning over more than a millennium gave way to a new
empiricism--a new and urgent interest in discovering the
foundations of knowledge itself, not so much in "reason" as
in "experience."
And in literature--under the stress of these revolutionary
changes--writers used classical forms (like epic, ode,
epistle, and satire) to express revolutionary new subjects
and ideas. Women gained an unprecedented power as both
readers and writers (a power not to be matched until the
twentieth century). And the age gave rise, as well, to whole
new genres--most importantly the newspaper, the magazine,
the traveler's tale, and the novel (the name of which means,
simply, new!).
This course will be paired with Modern Philosophy. It is
open to sophomores and above, but most appropriate for
students who have already taken English 220. Preference also
given to those enrolling in the pair.
ENG 355: Contemporary Drama (dAvid pAddy):
Welcome to a strange world of rants, flailing bodies,
obsessive monologues, drag, activism, the grotesque, and the
ineffable. In this course we will examine developments in
the dramatic arts since the 1960s, with special attention
given to the rise of performance art. What we will
read—plays, monologues, performance texts, and essays—will
be strange, beautiful, and disturbing, and will demand
radically new ways of thinking about audience, space,
identity, representation, and the body. Readings will
feature the likes of Samuel Beckett, Antonin Artaud, Harold
Pinter, Sarah Kane, Suzan-Lori Parks, and such movements as
Fluxus and Vienna Actionism. Instructor permission required.
Prerequisites: INTD 100 and ENG 120.
NOTE: This class is paired with sal johnston’s SOC 385
Sociology of Gender. This pair is essentially taught as one
continuous course; therefore, if you wish to enroll in this
course, you must enroll in both courses.
ENG 358: Postcolonial Novel (Anne Kiley)
People often think of the Empire in terms of how it affected
the various nations ruled by Britain, but it worked both
ways, and not just in terms of what Indian takeout places
have done for British eating. Writers connected with what
used to be the Empire have not merely been influenced by
literature in English; they've taken possession of it and
are writing some of the best novels being produced. Think of
V.S.Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Bharati Mukherjee, Michael
Oondatjie, people like Jumpha Lahiri.... There are plenty of
African and other writers too, but this course will
emphasize writers with origins in South Asia. It is paired
with Religion 313 Introduction to the Literatures of India,
a course on Hinduism which draws on traditional literatures,
but from a very different perspective from those employed in
the novel course.
English 360, “The Origins of American Literature,” Charles
Adams. This course examines texts that are at the foundation
of American literary culture. This is the course to start
with if you really want to understand American literary
history—and it starts our “sequence” in that subject. It
will give you a sense of where it all begins and how the
early American writers set the agenda for all of those who
come after (and explains why things later on take the shape
they do, to some considerable extent). I am still thinking a
bit about exactly what the readings will be. As the catalog
notes, we will almost certainly examine Bradford,
Bradstreet, Wheatley, Edwards, Franklin, Brown, Irving, and
Cooper. Perhaps it will suffice to say that there are texts
that are religious, texts that are political, texts that are
personal, texts that are funny, texts that are full of
mayhem and violence, texts that reveal early concerns with
the natural environment, and even more. We will try to find
out what early Americans really were thinking about and
doing in literature, as opposed to the myths our culture has
about them, and understand the ways in which American
literature today is formed on those foundations.
English 377, “Autobiography and American Culture,” Charles
Adams. In the last few decades autobiography has been
increasingly recognized as a literary form of considerable
significance. Arguably, it is the hottest literary “genre”
going. It has been around a long time, but we have only
really just started to try and understand it. This course
starts from the premise that autobiography has been
particularly important in American literary culture. We will
start by examining some recent literary theory concerning
autobiographical writing. We will then read a variety of
texts from writers with very different conceptions of how
one should approach writing one’s own life history in
America—with some emphasis on a number of questions emerging
from American multiculturalism. I know we will take a look
at Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography (the American
autobiography that influences all others in a most profound
way), Frank Conroy’s Stop-Time, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why
the Caged Bird Sings, Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior,
Richard Rodriguez’ Hunger of Memory, and Harvey Pekar’s
graphic work American Splendor. We may look at some other
items as well, taking note of what is going on in
cyberspace, for instance, and students should expect to do
reading beyond that listed above. This should suggest the
wide array of interesting things one can find in the
American version of the genre.
ENG 400: Critical Procedures in Language and Literature (dAvid
pAddy):
Reading a novel, poem, or play may seem a fairly fundamental
skill for you by the time you’re a senior English major. But
how do you go about making an interpretation of a literary
text? What kind of questions should you be asking? How do
you find meaning? How do you know if your interpretation has
any validity? Throughout this course you will encounter a
vast array of critical essays by literary theorists who have
raised difficult questions and offered compelling ideas as
to what or how a literary text means. Many of these theories
are difficult if not mind-boggling, but they will all help
you become a more thoughtful reader, careful critic, and,
perhaps, sophisticated teacher of literature. Our main text
will be Rivkin and Ryan’s Literary Theory: An Anthology.
Instructor permission required.
English 410, “Senior Seminar: Whitman and Melville,” Charles
Adams. The premise of the course is that here are two
writers living and working at almost exactly the same time
and place who find themselves responding to the ideas around
them in quite striking and important ways. Their responses
take different forms, and head in different directions. But
they have had a most profound cultural and literary impact,
leading to many of the literary movements of the 20th
Century. A full examination of either writer requires
attention to detail and takes some time, which we do not
have enough of, even if we did just one of the two. As a
result, we will not attempt a survey of all of their work,
but will instead engage in a close examination of signal
texts concerning important ideas—I am more interested in
questions of intellectual and literary history than in a
survey. We will look principally at Moby-Dick and specific
sections of Leaves of Grass. In both cases we will use the
Norton Critical Editions of these works so that we can talk
about a good deal of background together. Students in the
class will be required to have the most current Norton
Critical editions of the two specific texts. There will be
additional primary and secondary reading, to be determined
individually.
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: Joshua Batts, Kaylee Carrington, Justin D'Angona,
Adam Ekbom, Andrea Garcia, Justin Goldberg, Eric Mattys,
Chris McKeon, Vani Neelakantan, Andrew Negin, Sarah
Rohrenbach, Shannon Stroh, and Jason Yun
(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.)
Department News
Charles Adams is on sabbatical for the Fall and January
terms. He will be back in the Spring. He adds that advisees
can see any English Dept. member for advice and signatures.
Two members of our department set off for other pastures
this past year: Susanne Weil and Kate Will. Susanne accepted
a position at Centralia College in Washington, while Kate
took a job at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania. Susanne
was also married this summer and is apparently enjoying her
new Thoreauean life in the Northwest.
Some Faculty News
Charles Adams: The most interesting thing I did over the
summer was to go to Washington D.C. to review and make
recommendations to the National Endowment for the Humanities
for grants in American Literature. Otherwise I am at work on
my book on baseball and American literature and on a small
side project on Henry Adams and Don DeLillo.
Tony Barnstone has had his second book of poems, a book of
sonnets, He Kills His Darlings, accepted for publication by
Sheep Meadow Press. His new book of Chinese translations,
The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry (co-authored with Chou
Ping) will appear in February , ’05. He has also finished
two textbooks, The Pleasures of Poetry (co-authored with
Steve Kowit) and The Literatures of the World (6 volumes,
co-edited with James Hurt, Brian Wilkie and Willis
Barnstone), which are forthcoming with Prentice Hall
Publishers.
Wendy Furman-Adams spent much of her summer at the
University of Arizona--teaching Paradise Lost in its
seventeenth-century contexts to thirty high school teachers
chosen from all over the U.S. Daily classes and discussions
placed this endlessly relevant poem into a variety of
contexts: those of Milton's biography; of politics and
theology--in which Milton was a flaming radical; of
gender--an area of much heated discussion; and the visual
arts--the area of Wendy's expertise as a Milton scholar.
Wendy also completed several articles--one on using the
visual arts in the Milton classroom, which will soon appear
in a volume on teaching Milton published by the Modern
Language Association; another on the biblical Samson, as
represented by Milton and by about 100 artists; and a third
on Milton's "ecofeminist" illustrators. While in Arizona,
she had dinner with Whittier English alumnae Kristine Welter
and Shefali Desai; a great dinner with Dan Duran (also at
the University to teach a course) and his wife Alicia; and a
visit from English alumna Dawn Finley. So, 110-degree
temperatures and monsoon rains notwithstanding, it was a
pretty great summer.
Anne Kiley has returned from Semester at Sea. We sailed from
the Bahamas and went east till we reached Seattle. I've seen
the sunrise at Angkor Wat and set over the Taj Mahal, I've
walked on the Great Wall of China, and I've even been to
Zanzibar. I'm very glad I went, but I'm glad to be back too.
The travel writing course I taught was great fun, and I got
some really fine work from some of my students, but I missed
my Whittier students. Experiencing a South African township
or Japan in cherry blossom time with students is wonderful,
and so were some of them, but there's something not quite
satisfying about a teacher-student relationship or one
between colleagues that you know will be over in just one
semester. Roots are good.
David Paddy: I was on sabbatical this past spring, and I
spent a good amount of time doing research on contemporary
Welsh literature at the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth (neu yng Nghymraeg, y Llyfrgell Genedlaethol
Cymru yn Aberystwyth). Outside the books, there was much
trekking across Welsh mountainscapes, exploring of castles,
and practicing of Welsh. I have also submitted a book
proposal entitled Dreaming Isles: Essays by British Authors
on Literature and Nation, 1955-2001 and I am currently
finishing an article on the postimperial dimensions of J. G.
Ballard’s work.
Some Alumni News
From Anne Kiley: We've been to a marvelous party! The
twenty-year reunion for Sigma Tau Delta, the English honor
society, happened on Homecoming Saturday and it was a joy to
see so many of our alums (and a more surprising joy to
discover that I actually remembered everyone's name, though
I may not remember now who all was there). Those attending
included at least three former Sigma Tau presidents:
Jennifer Nestegaard Blazey, Janet Wheeler, and
Janice
Akiyama Gewirtzman. Dawn Finley, in the middle of her
Master's program in Arts administration at USC, Ryan
Bradley, in the middle of his Master's program in Spiritual
Theology (and something else I don't remember) at Biola, Sal
Plascencia, in his doctoral program at USC --lots of you
seem to prove that this education business can be addictive.
A number of you are involved in the more-or-less paying side
of it too: Janet is teaching in Seattle and was here partly
for the reunion and partly to visit a former student who is
now a Whittier freshman; Janis is teaching in an adult
education program in the Whittier area, and Susie Benson
made it quite clear that her seventh graders' Midsummer
Night's Dream project was based on Elizabethan English, not
some dumbed-down for junior high modernization. We would
have expected nothing less of you, Susie.
Course work aside, Sal has had a novel accepted, and Tony
immediately snagged him for a reading on campus this spring,
so come hear him. And Adam Pava, who has finished his
graduate program, is actually making a living as a screen
writer. (The surprise there is at anyone's doing so, not, of
course, at Adam's being one who does.) And Christina
Purcell, after seven years in New York, plans to shift her
acting career to Los Angeles, so we hope to see a lot more
of her.
Sigma Tau members who were not majors also appeared: Liz Nestegaard
teaches history at Rio Hondo and Cypress
colleges, and Pamela Hill Park, who is director of an
umbrella organization co-ordinating a number of charities,
snagged some frequent flyer miles and came all the way from
London to join us. Didem Cakmakli, who is teaching English
as a Second Language in Istanbul and hoping to enter the
program in international relations at Johns Hopkins which
accepted her last year in the fall, had dropped in to see me
earlier in the week, but did not make it to the party. So
glad I got a chance to see her too--indeed we are all very
glad to see our alums, and very proud of you all.
Undergraduates, don't forget to come back to visit once
you've graduated.
Lakisha Dubar writes to say that she is “residing in Boston
and teaching Special Education. I really enjoy teaching.
Although, I am physically and emotionally drained at the end
of the day, I still wake up anxious to go to work because it
is such a fulfilling job. I have 18 male students. They all
have multiple mental and physical handicaps like down's
syndrome, autism, psychosis, PDD, physical disfigurations,
etc. The majority of my students are non-verbal so I have
learned sign language extremely fast. I have also learned to
communicate in many other effective ways for the students
who are unable to comprehend signs and language. I never
thought that I would be so attached to my students. I feel
like I have 18 babies!” She also notes that she is “still
looking for other opportunities in Education” and is “also
planning to take a couple graduate courses in the Spring.”
Mark Barrett reports that he has a “permanent job at a
marketing company called Chrisad. I am a graphic designer in
their brochure,” and that he is applying to Teach for
America and JET Programme, and has “been looking at graduate
schools and trying to decide what I would like to do in
terms of a Masters and maybe a PhD in the future.”
What (Else) Have We Been Reading?
Charles Adams: Here is what I can remember of what I have
been reading aside from stuff related to school. I have been
reading a lot of non fiction I guess:
In the Wake of the Plague: The Black death and the World It
Made, by Norman Cantor. The title pretty much tells the tale
on this one.
Toast, by Nigel Slater. This is a memoir centered around the
memory of food. his mother could not make toast without
burning the bread.
Salt: A World History, by Mark Kurlansky. Everything you
could want to know about the subject. Argues (like other
books on narrow subjects tend to do for their topic) that
the title subject is at the root of everything important
that has ever happened in human history.
Benjamin Franklin, by Edmund Morgan. The shortest and most
accessible of the new spate of Franklin books.
Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, by Al Franken. What
can one say?
21, by Patrick O'Brian. Just published; the last, unfinished
volume of his Aubrey/Maturin series.
Finally, I finished Dorothy Dunnett's 14 volume sequence of
very long and dense historical novels by reading the last
one this summer. The two related series that comprise this
sequence are titled The House of Niccolo and The Lymond
Chronicles. Dunnett, who died recently, is sometimes
described as the best contemporary writer of historical
fiction (though O'Brian is cited as such just as often). Her
books are actually quite a challenge to read as they require
a reader who knows a lot more about many things than most of
us do--I am certainly defeated at several points. But there
is considerable reward for the effort on a whole variety of
counts. The setting is early renaissance Europe, mostly
Scotland and Italy.
Tony Barnstone: Tony Barnstone has been reading Middlesex by
Jeffrey Eugenides, and books of poetry by Thomas Lux, Marie
Howe, Billy Collins, Bob Hicok, Ron Koertge, and Kim
Addonizio. He highly recommends any book by Russell Edson, a
writer of truly strange prose-poems.
Wendy Furman-Adams: While at the University of Arizona, I
sublet the beautiful and character-rich (but only
swamp-cooled!) house of writer Fenton Johnson. In addition
to copious Miltonic reading, I enjoyed reading Johnson's two
most recent books (lovingly displayed on the coffee table):
a memoir of Johnson's lover's tragic death from AIDS, and
Keeping Faith: A Skeptic's Journey, in which Johnson
recounts his journey--through a Buddhist and a Catholic
monastery--to a recovery (or discovery) of the eclectic and
personal faith that now sustains this very modern, in many
ways still skeptical, man. A moving and personal pair of
reads, made the more special by the privilege of reading
them curled in the author's own favorite chair! Since
returning home, I've been slowly making my way through Azar
Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran, a marvelous memoir of an
Iranian professor of English (now teaching in the U.S.), who
resisted the tyranny of an ever-more- repressive regime (and
helped a few determined students resist) through analysis of
the very books we treasure at Whittier: books by Nabokov,
Fitzgerald, James, and Jane Austen.
Bill Geiger: Two books he read this past summer are:
(1) Penelope Fitzgerald's The Knox Brothers. Fitzgerald, the
late highly regarded English novelist, wrote an interesting
biography about her father and his three brothers: Eddie
(the editor of Punch), Dilwyn (a classical scholar who
headed up the team that cracked the German Enigma code
during World War II), Wilfrid (a Church of England priest),
and Ronald (a Roman Catholic priest, mystery writer, eminent
preacher, and translator of the Bible), and
(2) Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr's A Life in the Twentieth
Century. Schlesinger, a significant historian and member of
the Kennedy administration, has written an interesting
autobiography. As usual, his insights and observations are
accurate, pointed, and deftly expressed.
He is currently reading Jeanne Fahnestock's Rhetorical
Figures in Science, a superb study of how figures of thought
and speech are important to scientific thinking.
Anne Kiley: As for what I'm reading, aside from Victorian
novels ...hmmm... Travel books; Paul Theroux's Dark Star
Safari, about a journey--primarily by rail and pretty
uncomfortably--from Egypt to South Africa does not present a
very encouraging prospect for the continent, but it was very
interesting, especially after having been so recently in
some of the countries he visits. And Pico Iyer's Global Soul
has a lot to say about the world we live in. Iyer himself is
of Indian origin, educated at Oxford, formerly resident in
Santa Barbara, and now living primarily in Nara, Japan,
which gives you some idea of what he's talking about.
dAvid pAddy: It should be no surprise that I have been
reading more than a sane share of Welsh writers. Some
favorites include Jasper Fforde, Malcolm Pryce, Caradog
Prichard, Gwyneth Lewis, Rhys Davies, Emyr Humphreys, Niall
Griffiths, Gillian Clarke, R. S. Thomas, and Tristan Hughes.
One of my favorite (non-Welsh) books of the year has been
Andrea Levy’s Small Island, an amazing story about the
Caribbean men who served in the RAF during World War Two and
their struggles in becoming part of British society after
the war. A biography of Anthony Burgess has got me returning
to some of his lesser known books, like The Doctor is Sick.
I re-read Philip Pullman’s remarkable His Dark Materials
trilogy. I also highly recommend Nicholas Mosley’s
collection of essays on literature, science, and religion,
The Uses of Slime Mould.
Why Did You Get This?
The purpose of this newsletter is to keep students, faculty,
and friends informed about the wide variety of activities
the Whittier College English Department is engaged in. If
there are events of a literary nature that could use a bit
of publicity through this vehicle, send information about
them to the English Department office. We cannot guarantee
when or if they will appear, but it never hurts to try! If
you get this and do not want it, or if you did not get it
but see a copy and want future issues, please let our
Department Secretary, Linda Kelley (x4253 or see e-mail list
below) in the department office know.
How to E-mail Us
Some of you have asked how to get us by e-mail, so here are
some addresses:
Charles Adams: cadams@whittier.edu
Tony Barnstone: tbarnstone@whittier.edu
Wendy Furman-Adams: wfurman@whittier.edu
Bill Geiger: bgeiger@whittier.edu
Anne Kiley: akiley@whittier.edu
Sean Morris: smorris@whittier.edu
David Paddy (Department Chair): dpaddy@whittier.edu
In Memoriam
We were deeply saddened to hear that Anna Neese Brown (’01)
passed away on October 19. Anna will always be fondly
remembered by all of us in the department for her kindness,
charm, energy, laughter, and intelligence. Our thoughts and
love are with her family.
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