Franny Condou writes to Wendy: “I wanted to let you know that I got a job as the Director of Communications at the Whittier Chamber.  It's a fancy title saying that I write, layout, and put together their monthly newspaper.  I also wanted to see how you and Milton were doing, any new developments in the everlasting quest for Milton trivia?  As of right now I am fully intending to attend CSUF in the Spring of 06 for my Masters.”

2005-2006 English Department Courses

(All subject to change)

Below is supplemental information from the faculty about the courses scheduled to be offered in the department next year.  The details are, again, 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.  SENIORS-TO-BE TAKE NOTE:  We are offering our usual two Senior Seminars for you to meet that major requirement.  But you will note that one of the two is a January course.  There is no Senior Seminar in Spring semester.  Plan accordingly with your advisor—you will need permission signatures for that class and for Critical Procedures (offered Fall and Spring).

Fall

English 120, Introduction to Literature, Section 1, “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! (Linked with INTD 100)

English 120, Introduction to Literature, Section 2 (Tony Barnstone)

English 120, Introduction to Literature, Section 3, “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.  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.  We will also read Steve Lynn’s Texts and Contexts to help us work through some of the tricky terrains of literary theories.

English 120, Introduction to Literature, Section 4 (Staff)

English 201, Introduction to Journalism (John Mitchell)

English 202, Writing Short Fiction (dAvid pAddy)

In this course I hope to offer you the chance to learn the basics of the craft of writing fiction, generate ideas for stories, have others read your works in progress, analyze published stories from a creative writer’s perspective, and learn about the creative necessity of revision.  I want to experiment with some new books this time, and I am currently looking at Mark Baechtel’s Shaping the Story and, for an anthology of diverse stories, Robin Hemley and Michael Martone’s Extreme Fiction: Fabulists and Formalists.

English 220, Major British Writers to 1789, (Wendy Furman-Adams)  The very ambitious purpose of this partially team-taught course (required for all English majors) is to introduce you to the major themes and writers in British literature from its beginnings, in the seventh century, until about 1785--in sequence and, insofar as time allows, in context.  We'll begin with Beowulf and selections from The Canterbury Tales, the two most important (and utterly contrasting) works of the English Middle Ages, moving on to selected texts from the Renaissance, Restoration, and Eighteenth Century--ending with Samuel Johnson on the threshold of the Romantic Age.  We will attempt to define some of the continuities and discontinuities in British literature, as well as to develop a clear sense of the movements and ideas that shaped its first 1000 years.  In the second semester of the sequence--English 221--you will become acquainted with the second half of the story: British and American literature from about 1789 to the present.  By the time you have completed the sequence, you will be ready for the study in depth provided by our 300-level courses, and should have some idea of the areas you will want to explore most fully.  All majors or prospective majors should take the sequence during their sophomore year.

English 303, Advanced Poetry Writing OR English 364, Modern American Poetry (Tony Barnstone)

I am trying a new thing with these classes. They are co-enrolled (you take one or the other), and what that means in essence is that the students have a choice of taking either a critical path or a creative path in the class. The creative path will involve writing many poems in imitation of the great masters of modernist poetry and a final essay on esthetics.  The critical path will entail writing a few poems imitating the modernists and several critical papers.  In each case, there will be a blend of literary criticism and creative writing, a hybrid approach to literature.

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.

ENGL 310, Linguistics (Sean Morris).

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

Lewis Carroll invented half the words in “Jabberwocky” himself, yet you still know how to say, correctly, “That mimsy rath loves to see a gimbling tove,” even if you don’t know what you mean. How is this possible? And how can we understand people who say, “This man is a tiger,” or “That course is a bear”? While we’re at it, where do different languages come from in the first place? And why is it so hard to learn a new one when you didn’t have any trouble learning the first? Does someone who speaks another language think differently? And what’s with English spelling? How come “knight” and “bite” rhyme, but “police” and “ice” don’t? Want to know? Tune in to English 310 and find out!

English 325, Literature of the English Renaissance (William Geiger) 

As in past offerings, the course will stress close analysis of the assigned texts as interpreted in light of the artistic, philosophical, political, religious, and scientific contexts of 16^th-17^th century England.

English 350, Modern Drama (Staff)

English 352, Modern British Novel (dAvid pAddy)

In this course we will examine the rise of modernism in the British context.  The course will match aesthetic concerns—experiments with voice, narrative, and structure—with historical concerns—such as the British Empire, Irish Independence, and the Depression.  We will most likely read from the following: Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, Ford Madox Ford’s The Soul of London, James Joyce’s Dubliners, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London.  A primary theme will be the modern city and its effect on literary and artistic representation.

NOTE: This class is paired with HIST 362, The European City (Elizabeth Sage) and you will need to be enrolled in both courses.

English 361, American Romanticism (Charles S. Adams)

American romanticism actually has its own name, “Transcendentalism.”  Not all of the American writers who are classified as “romantics” would subscribe to this philosophy, but I am willing to say that even if they were extremely suspicious, they were still stuck with responding to the power of the movement’s ideas, thus they too are “romantics” at least for our purposes in this class.  This is the movement that claims to make American writing really American, and it launches the 19^th Century explosion of all sorts of new ideas and literary forms in this country.  So, for example, we have Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Whitman laying down some new ground rules, and Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and Dickinson thinking hard about why they are not necessarily comfortable with either the new ideas or forms, or using them to go in directions the transcendentalists had not contemplated (actually, what fascinated Poe was the idea of no rules at all and what that might let you contemplate).  But all are caught up in a powerful groundswell of idealism and intellectual ferment of the times, a great deal of which is brought about by social, economic, and political change.  That idealism is both political and philosophical and produces some of the greatest American literary work.  The course is not supposed to survey everything, and will not.  But we will try to get at crucial historical questions in this critical American literary period.  Those interested in any of the forms of American literary modernism will find here materials they will need to know.

English 373, The African-American Literary Tradition (Charles S. Adams)

We are all familiar with the ways in which race has been a fundamental source of difficulty in American culture.  On the other hand, it has also been the source of some of our richest traditions, especially in the arts.  African-Americans can claim a special place in terms of their importance and influence in American literature, with a long and complex history.  This course proposes, then, to start at the beginnings of what has become a tradition of literary production and influence.  It is a tradition that begins with writers for whom the very act of writing could bring the penalty of death, yet who did it anyway (Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass).  It continues with writers who use words to create freedom for themselves and others, and indeed use then to create “being” itself, when that had been denied at the most fundamental levels (Paul Lawrence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, Charles Chesnutt, W.E.B. DuBois).  And, as we look at the 20^th century and beyond, we see African-Americans creating forms of literary expression that are arguably the only forms that are truly American, having their origin here and using materials and experiences that only happen here (Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison).  The influence of such writing on our contemporary literature is profound, and African-American writers are some of our most important (Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, August Wilson).

English 381, Discourses of Desire: Plato—20^th Century (Wendy Furman-Adams)

This course takes a long historical look at the idea of romantic love, from its very beginnings through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, including works by both women and men.  Beginning with the biblical Song of Songs and Plato's Symposium, we will look at some of the many ways eros (desire) has been constructed in treatises (such as Andreas Capellanus' Art of Courtly Love and Castiglione's Courtier); in painting; in both secular and religious poetry; in epic and romance; in drama; and finally in Milan Kundera's novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Wim Wenders' film Wings of Desire.   The course involves the close reading of a number of primary texts, all of which are to some extent in dialogue with each other, allowing us to compare the experiences of men and women--and thus of the tension, never far from the surface, between love and power--as well as to discover some of the historical roots of our current, often unexamined ideas about love. Also counts toward the Gender and Women's Studies minor.

English 400, Critical Procedures in Language and Literature (William Geiger)  Although I have tried to choose a different text for each offering, I am very pleased with the second edition of Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan’s Literary Theory: An Anthology and will use it again this fall.

English 410, Senior Seminar: Charles Dickens (Anne Kiley)

English 420, Preceptorship:  Teaching Literature (various instructors, each semester)

This is a course for advanced students of literature (not necessarily English majors) who are interested in assisting a faculty member in the teaching of a lower-division English course, learning a bit more about literature (albeit from a different perspective than that of a student), and practicing some skills in instruction and evaluation along the way.  Interested students should contact the professor they are interested in working with.

January

ENGL 390, Robin Hood through the Ages (Sean Morris) 

How have successive generations adapted Robin Hood to address their own concerns, and why do these stories continue to fascinate us after more than 600 years? We'll read the original medieval ballads, plays, and chronicles; Renaissance versions such as Ben Jonson's The Sad Shepherd and Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona and As You Like It; Walter Scott's Ivanhoe; Tennyson's The Foresters; and works by Keats and Dryden, among others. Along the way we'll dip into tales of other outlaws medieval and modern, including films like The Adventures of Robin Hood and perhaps Zorro.  Some readings in Middle English. Permission of instructor required, so don your caps, heft your bows, and sojourn over to Hoover 209 for your signature. ‘Welcome to Sherwood…’

English 410, Senior Seminar (William Geiger)

Professor Geiger will be offering a Senior Seminar next January and is thinking of two possible topics: (1) literature and the history of ideas, and (2) literature and religion.  The first course would be in the interdisciplinary tradition begun by Arthur Lovejoy.  The history of ideas approach looks at core ideas and words as they change their meaning over the centuries, as, for example, `nature’ in 18^th and 19^th century British literature.  The second course would look at the expression of ethical and religious ideas drawn from several traditions.  He is thinking of choosing texts that imaginatively present concepts from Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism.  Other traditions are possible as the basis for research papers done for the class.

Spring

English 120, Introduction to Literature, Section 1, “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), Beowulf, Marie de France’s Lanval, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, The 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! (Linked with PHYS 090, Intro Astronomy.)

English 120, Introduction to Literature: Section 2, “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 3 (Anne Kiley)

English 120, Introduction to Literature, Sections 4 and 5 (Staff)

English 203, Writing Poetry (Tony Barnstone)

English 221, Major British and American Writers from 1789 (dAvid pAddy)

This course continues the survey of literature begun in ENGL 220.  Moving back and forth between British and American literature, we will examine Romanticism, the Victorian Age, Realism, Modernism, and conclude with some directions taken in contemporary literature.  As we investigate the intellectual ideas and aesthetic premises that guide each era, we will also address such issues as the rise and fall of the British Empire, the building of the American nation, the historical importance of revolution and industrialization, and the roles of race, class, and gender.  As we consider shifting notions of aesthetics, we will also consistently ask: What is the relationship between national identity and literature. 

English 275, Chicano Literature (Rafael Chabran)

English 320, Literature of Medieval Europe (Wendy Furman-Adams)

The period of European history running from about 500 to 1500 is one of incredible diversity--not to mention upheaval and violence.  Yet somewhat paradoxically, medieval architects, philosophers, painters, and writers managed by about 1300 to bring the entire cosmos into a hard-won but comprehensive system of thought in which unity and diversity, faith and reason, center and circumference come together, as Dante puts it, into a "single volume bound by love."

     This course is paired with Professor David Hunt's course in Medieval Philosophy, and 

the literature we read will vividly illustrate the development traced in the philosophy course, as we move (1) from early Christian lyrics to the Old English and early French epic (Beowulf and Roland), while focusing on the first classic of Christian philosophy: Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy; (2) to the new courtly elegance of the Troubadours and Gottfried von Strassburg, as well as to the Gothic synthesis of Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), inspired above all by the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas; (3) to the new trends reflected at the end of the period by Petrarch, Boccaccio and Chaucer (1340-1400).  (The middle stage in this development, the rise of "courtly love," will also present a fine opportunity to explore gender issues in literature.) Enrollment in the pair strongly recommended.

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 (Anne Kiley)

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 334, Romantic Poetry (Charles S. Adams)

“Charles Adams teaching something non-American?” you query?  Yes, it is true.  One closely guarded secret is that I really like all the romantic stuff, even the Brits.  My main interests are, as usual, historical, philosophical, and ideological.  The core trio of early romantics, Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, are inspired by the French Revolution to rethink English poetry, and they take a pretty good shot at it.  They inspire the most significant of the second generation of English romantics, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, (who all fulfill the famous movie line “live fast, die young, and leave a good looking corpse”), and they all were read carefully by a bunch of other folks, especially all my favorite American romantic writers.  These folks get into all sorts of stuff—visionary mysticism, social and political agitation, sexual, social, and political satire (Byron is a riot), mind-altering experiences, autobiography, and much else.  Yet they are also very conservative at times, using many traditional poetic strategies to get at their idea of “the new.” The goals are always ambitious and the personalities outsized:  Shelley felt that the poets of all times (but his especially), were, “The unacknowledged legislators of mankind.”  And it was famously said of Byron that he was, “Mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”  Aspirations for us all.  I think.  

English 362, American Realism and Naturalism (Charles S. Adams)

This course will examine American literature of the period roughly between the Civil War and World War I.  The title comes from two related American literary movements that many of the writers of this period take a special interest in.  We find writers taking a new look at social, philosophical, and aesthetic issues in the light of the experiences of the war, the development of the frontier, industrialization, and the increasing voice of women and African Americans.  Among a variety of possibilities, we will probably consider Jackson, Crane, Chesnutt, Twain, James, Gilman, Norris, Chopin, and Wharton.  You will note that these writers (and any others we might do) wrote mostly fiction.  Indeed, the fiction is what we will read, and the reading load will be pretty substantial—these are the American “Victorians,” so (setting aside some important ideological and cultural concerns) if you know something about the traditions of fiction in the U.K. of the period, you know something about those in America, at least as far as word count is concerned.

English 363, Modern American Novel (Staff)

English 386, Satire (William Geiger) 

Professor Geiger hasn’t chosen the texts yet, but there is a strong likelihood that Aristophanes, Moliere, Swift, and Voltaire will figure in this course offering.

English 387, Science Fiction (dAvid pAddy)

Science fiction (SF) has been deemed the quintessential literary and cultural form of the twentieth century at the same time that it has been derided as trash for social misfits and simple-minded children.  Is SF a lesser form of literature, or is it, as Samuel R. Delany claims, a paraliterature, a wholly different form of literary practice, parallel but in opposition to mainstream realism?  We will examine this and other issues as we survey a range of literature from H. G. Wells and Ray Bradbury to M. John Harrison and Ursula K. Le Guin.  In addition, much of the course will attend to the way SF has dealt with the scientific notions of uncertainty.

NOTE:  This course is paired with PHYS 290, Chaos and Quantum Uncertainty (Seamus Lagan) and you will need to be enrolled in both courses.

English 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.

Department/Faculty News

The word on the street is true:  Anne Kiley has decided to take early retirement and will leave the department at the end of this academic year.  That having been said, Anne will not actually be “gone.”  She will be teaching three courses for us next year.  We are thinking now about how to celebrate with Anne, in spite of any of her wishes. 

We will search for Anne’s full-time replacement next year, with that person to start (we hope) in Fall 2006.

Tony Barnstone’s book of 115 sonnets, Sad Jazz, will be published in October, 2005 by the Sheep Meadow Press in New York.  His other forthcoming books include The Pleasures of Poetry (an introduction to poetry textbook) and World Literature (a six-volume monster textbook that he co-edited).  Both books will be published by Prentice Hall Publishers in 2006. 

Charles Adams returned from sabbatical for the spring semester, though he never really went anywhere.  Fell free to ask him what he has been up to.  You had better want to hear about baseball though.  Also, Charles and Joe Price (Religious Studies professor but with suspicious ties to literary studies) have cooked up a two-semester, interdisciplinary, team-taught course for first-year students only, called American Intellectual and Cultural History, that they will try out for the first time next year. 

Last January Bill Geiger read a paper, “Interacting Domains: Metaphor Analysis in the Classroom,” at the Hawaii International Conference on Arts and Humanities.  The paper was the outgrowth of research into the burgeoning study of metaphor, primarily in the interdisciplinary field of cognitive studies.  In addition to participating in the conference, he particularly enjoyed Honolulu, including visiting the Honolulu Museum of Fine Arts and having breakfast while looking at Waikiki Beach and Diamond Head.  He is also working on two articles: Ogden’s system of Basic English and cognitive studies, and Ogden’s system of Basic English and Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon. 

dAve pAddy reports that “I just presented a paper at the Pacific Coast British Studies Conference called, “Tu Hwnt y Gymraeg (Beyond the Welsh Language): Imagining Wales in Contemporary Welsh Literature.”  It was a more focused variation of the talks I gave at Hartley House and for the alumni.  Over the summer, I hope to put it into better journal article shape.  I am also continuing to revise my article on the postimperial dimensions of J. G. Ballard’s writing.

Wendy Furman-Adams says that she is presenting two papers in Grenoble this June at the International Milton Symposium, one on Rembrandt's five images of Samson; one on the 20^th century wood engravings of Robert Gibbings.  She has just completed an article called "'Earth Felt the Wound': Gendered Ecological Consciousness in Two Nineteenth-

Century Illustrators of Paradise Lost" for a festschrift in honor of eco-feminist Milton

scholar Diane Kelsy McColley.  She notes that all this work continues her long-time collaboration with Professor Virginia Tufte.

Please welcome our new English/History departmental assistant, Marilyn Chavez.  Marilyn comes to us with lots of experience in the school system and libraries.  She knows many things about Whittier College, some we wish she probably did not know.  Ask her how.

What Have We Been Reading Lately?

Tony Barnstone is doing a historical project titled “The World in Pieces: The Pacific War from Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima,” in which he writes dramatic monologues based upon WW II oral histories.  Most of his recent reading, therefore, has been nonfiction.  Among the books he is reading are:

Thomas B. Allen, Remember Pearl Harbor: American and Japanese Survivors Tell Their Stories

Studs Terkel, “The Good War”: An Oral History of World War Two

John T. Mason, Jr., The Pacific War Remembered; An Oral History Collection

John Tateshi, And Justice for All: An Oral History of the Japanese American Detention Camps

E.T. Wooldridge, Carrier Warfare in the Pacific: An Oral History Collection

Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation

Patrick K. O’Donnell, Into the Rising Sun: In Their Own Words, World War II’s Pacific Veterans Reveal the Heart of Combat

Robert S. La Forte, Ronald E. Marcello, Richard L. Himmel, With Only the Will to Live: Accounts of Americans in Japanese Prison Camps, 1941-1945

Gerald Astor, Crisis in the Pacific: The Battles for the Philippine Islands by the Men Who Fought Them

Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore F. Cook, Japan at War: An Oral History

Lester I. Tenney, My Hitch in Hell: The Bataan Death March

Summer Cloud: The A-Bomb Experience of a Girl’s School in Hiroshima

Hiroko Nakamoto, My Japan: 1930-1951

Yoichi Fukushima, Children of Hiroshima

Paul Boyer, By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age

Richard H. Minear, Hiroshima: Three Witnesses

Michihiko Hachiya, Hiroshima Diary

Sean Morris reports, “It's been an especially good few months for non-work-related reading. I recommend everything on the list (subject to caveats about your genre preferences). Apart from books for school, I'm reading:

Interesting non-fiction:

David Salo, A Gateway to Sindarin

Henry Hobhouse, Seeds of Change: Five Plants that Transformed Mankind

Simon Winchester, The Map that Changed the World

Carlo Cipolla, Before the Industrial Revolution: European Society and Economy 1000-1700 (ok, this is for my pair, but it's a great book)

Fun fiction:

Jasper Fforde, The Well of Lost Plots

Alexander McCall Smith, The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency

For fantasy-genre fun:

Piers Anthony, Bearing an Hourglass

Rober Asprin, Another Fine Myth

Science fiction:

Dan Simmons, Hyperion

For some really old-fashioned juvenile sci-fi fun, try:

Lester Del Rey, Mutiny on the Moon

Andre Norton, The Stars Are Ours!

For science-y fun and interest:

I'm re-reading parts of Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life and Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea, two of my all-time favorites.

Also, I particularly enjoyed re-reading The Silmarillion for my Jan-Term class, and strongly recommend it, but only after you've read and enjoyed The Lord of the Rings. When you do get to it, if it doesn't grab you right away, skip ahead to the “Beren” and “Luthien” and “Turin Turambar” chapters.

And, last but not least, two works that just continue to get better every time I read them: Beowulf (even in translation, it improves with age, though there's nothing like the original), and the Canterbury Tales (in Middle English).”

dAve pAddy reports, “I just finished Ian McEwan’s Saturday, and though I think Atonement is still his major achievement, the new novel is tremendous.  An update of sorts of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, it examines one day in the life of a London neurosurgeon, that day being the date of the largest anti-war protest.  It’s about science, poetry, and materialist ethics; what isn’t there to love about that?  Over January I read D. B. C. Pierre’s Vernon God Little, a Booker Prize winner that was once described as Huckleberry Finn for the Eminem age.  It’s actually a devastating satire about a Columbine-like school shooting that takes on American violence and hypocritical moral stances.  Curtis White’s latest America’s Magic Mountain is a typically surreal take on alcoholism, cults, and commodity consumption.  I found Martin Amis’s most recent novel Yellow Dog initially spectacular, but ultimately disappointing.  His friend McEwan has definitely surpassed him on Britain’s literary track.  I should also mention that I finally got around to reading the first half of Richie Unterberger’s two-volume history of the folk rock movement, which I simply loved, and it’s helped me belatedly, begrudgingly finally come around to an admiration of Bob Dylan.”

Bill Geiger is “currently reading three books that might be of interest to English majors.  The first is Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.  Diamond is a contemporary universal man.  The author of the acclaimed Guns, Germs, and Steel, he is also a professor of geography at UCLA, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, and is a poet.  Diamond holds that there are several factors that each society must take into account if it is to sustain itself or to thrive.  Four of the chief factors are squandering resources, ignoring environmental signals, reproducing too fast, and having unstable trading partners.  The second book is Willard Sterne Randall’s Alexander Hamilton.  Randall engagingly presents Hamilton’s life, ambitions, and ideas in a sound historical context.  Although there are better biographies of Hamilton, this is a good one for the general reader.  The third is John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge’s The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America.  Micklethwait and Wooldridge are two British citizens who are the United States editor for The Economist and the magazine’s Washington correspondent, respectively.  Their analysis of the rise of the conservatives in recent American politics is presented with intelligence, wit, and the perspective that being citizens of another nation yields.”

Anne Kiley says, “Right now, of course, my reading is pretty much for my classes, but I did read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell before the term began. The advertising touted it as an adult's Harry Potter, which it's not, but the basic premise is the revival of real magic in a realistic late eighteenth century England.  The England does feel quite real and has more depth than the sitcom local color of the Harry Potter world.   It's well-plotted and engaging, but rather longer than it really needs to be --and anyone who's taken one of my novel courses will probably find that statement significant.”

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, Marilyn Chavez (x4253 or see e-mail list below) in the department office know

To Contact 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

Marilyn Chavez: mchavez@whittier.edu