English News Vol 18, #1 November 2017

IN ENGLISH Occasional Newsletter of the Whittier College Department of English Language and Literature Volume 18, #1, November, 2017 Charles S. Adams, Editor

On-Line Presence Some of you may be aware that the Whittier College English Department has a Facebook page. Librarian and information guru Mike Garabedian, and Professor Andrea Rehn have been managing it, and they ask that those of you who are into such things “like” it.

And we think there is a lot to like. Your editor finds that sometimes the links below work and sometimes they do not. Most of you know how to find the stuff without them.

A few years ago, as part of our outreach to alums and friends, we created a small, possibly temporary site managed by our colleagues in the alumni/advancement offices. It is now out of date, but still exists. It has a number of bits of amusement not found elsewhere.

And there’s also our regular college-based site.

This Newsletter will be up on that site and will be updated as more information comes in and your editor gets around to it.

The English Department Writing Awards Every year we offer a set of prizes for the best work submitted by students in the areas of poetry, creative prose, and scholarly writing. Be sure to stay tuned for the announcements asking for submissions for this academic year’s awards—the deadlines are always fairly early in Spring Semester. You cannot win if you do not enter. All Whittier students are eligible to enter. The prizes are cash (well, checks actually). You could win more than some of your professors have made on their books and articles! In addition, look at the same time for notices of the deadlines for submissions to the Literary Review, which publishes work in all genres by Whittier students. Again, any student can submit. We need to thanks lots of donors, alumni, faculty, friends, and students, for help funding these prizes and the Review.

What Have We Been Up to Lately?

Charles S. Adams: I suppose it it worth a note that I will enter our program to phase out to retirement, starting in fall. So, next semester will be my last here full time. I will be teaching three classes a year for the next three years, if all goes as planned. I had not

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really intended to retuire early, which this is, but, as most know I have had Parkinson’s symptoms for quite some time and am at the point where it is best to dial back. But, I will be here for a good while, just not as much.

My main scholarly interests continue to be in all things baseball, especially the literature baseball generates, and my plan is to devote my time to that part of my scholarly life and finish things long incomplete. As most of you know, the Institute for Baseball Studies (IBS) is up and running at Whittier College with a now huge library/archive of many kinds of things. I have been part of starting and developing that, following the leadership of Joe Price and Terry Cannon, our artner who runs The Baseball Reliquary, an organization well woth joining on its own if you are serious about all this. The Facebook page is the best way to keep up. If you decide to “like,” you will get something almost every day related to the study of baseball and culture. We do not do the numbers stuff much, if that is your thing. Join the Society for Baseball Research (SABR) for that.

And here is the latest television news story on the IBS (with yet another TV crew on is way as we send this).

Joe Donnelly: I've been finishing up writing short introductions to the pieces collected for LA. Man: Profiles from a Big City and a Small World, which is being published by Rarebird Lit in the spring. It's a collection of profiles I've written over the past 20 years on everyone from Sean Penn to Drew Barrymore, to founding member of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love... a wolf, Christian Bale, Wes Anderson, Werner Herzog, my dad, Lou Reed and others. Good bathroom read, I hope. I'm also writing a long feature piece for Surfer's Journal on Danny Kwock, the punk-rock surfer who helped turn Quiksilver into a couple billion-dollar business and is suffering from PTSD as a result, as well as some other smaller pieces.

Recently, one of my short stories was staged in Denver as part of Stories on Stage, the same weekend I happened to be invited to Denver University to present a takedown of their campus-wide read, Hillbilly Elegy, that I'd written for the Los Angeles Review of Books, and which DU adopted as their campus wide read this year. Followed up with classroom visit the following day. For a weekend, at least, DU feared the Poet Wendy Furman-Adams: I recently returned from the Conference on John Milton, a biennial conference that I've attended since 1992, always at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro. This year the conference moved to the University of Alabama, Birmingham. As usual there were countless wonderful presentations (although choosing among four parallel sessions, when all addressed Milton's work, was more than a little painful). Especially noteworthy was Professor John Rumrich's keynote address on a sumptuous opera Milton attended in Rome during Carnivale 1639: a triumph of literary sleuthing that added humor and nuance to our traditional understanding of Milton's supposed "Puritan" outlook. My own paper, "Erotic and Romantic Eve: Paradise Lost and the Drama of Sex, 1749-1799," added one more piece to my in-progress history of illustrators from 1688 to the present.

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Almost better than the conference itself was the chance to visit Birmingham for the very first time. On the evening of my arrival, I had dinner with Jennifer Young, who graduated from Whittier College in 1993 and now teaches at the university. I hadn't seen her in 24 years, and didn't even realize she was there! Jennifer also attended my session, and couldn't stop talking about her wonderful years at Whittier--how transformative her experience here had been.

On the last evening of the conference, a banquet was held at Birmingham's justly famous Civil Rights Institute, which was open for several hours to our group alone. We were moved to tears walking through the epicenter of the Civil Rights Movement: a memorial park full of statues of heroes and martyrs, including the four little girls killed by a bomb in September 1963; the 16th Avenue Baptist Church across the street, which became one of the Movement's great centers, and where the bomb went off on that terrible Sunday morning; and the museum itself--with countless interactive exhibits, including a replica of the Freedom Riders' burned Greyhound bus. Everything we saw vividly articulated the horrors of segregation--and the extraordinary courage of otherwise ordinary people who stood up to Bull Connor, facing attack dogs and water cannons, in the cause of justice and equality for all.

dAvid pAddy: For the Spring of 2018, I will be on sabbatical. “Sabbatical or a sabbatical (from Latin: sabbaticus, from Greek: sabbatikos (σαββατικός), from Hebrew: shabbat (‫( )תבש‬i.e., Sabbath), literally a "ceasing") is a rest from work, or a break, often lasting from two months to a year.” While I might dream occasionally of a complete “ceasing” from work, I am too restless for that, so I’ll be using this as my opportunity to move forward on my next research project on small nation nationalism.

(Cue news headlines on Catalonia.) The vision for the project at this point is vast, but I am going to start a bit smaller by working on a chapter looking at depictions of Cornwall in literature and in the discourses of Cornish independence groups. There’s an obscure novel by Daphne du Maurier that has caught my eye and that may very well be the springboard for the rest. We’ll see where it all goes.

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Michelle Chihara: A few English majors joined me at the 2017 Lit Crawl event in North Hollywood for the Los Angeles Review of Books revolution-themed reading on Oct 25.

This was the first time I have read fiction to an audience in a long time, and it was a blast.

I continue to work as the section editor for Economics & Finance at The Los Angeles Review of Books, which remains a great source of intellectual and creative community for me. I'm going to the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present annual meeting this weekend in the Bay Area. There, I'll present some of my research on behavioral economics and narrative, specifically about TED talks. I'll also be part of a panel where we are thinking about the effect that magazines like The Los Angeles Review are having on publishing, and I will chair a panel on race and economics. Later in the fall, I'll again present research about neoliberalism and podcasts at the American Studies Association in Chicago. I'm also closing in on the final edits for The Routledge Companion to Literature and Economics, which has been a long and slow road, but which I'm hoping will finally come to a close this fall. I also managed to teach Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, which takes place at an NFL game, in the middle of the #TakeAKnee controversy this semester, in my incredibly enjoyable Contemporary American Fiction class, where we have been having some lively engaged discussions of contemporary America.

Andrea Rehn: In Fall 2017 I became the Director of the Whittier Scholars Program. For the next three years, my office has moved up to Wardman Hall 108. I hope you’ll climb the stairs and say hello! I’ve also been continuing to publish about Victorian Literature.

In fact, this September a new book Traumatic Tales: British Nationhood and National Trauma in Nineteenth-Century Literature, features a chapter I wrote on Kipling’s story “The Man who would be King.” Also coming soon from the journal Romantic Circles— hopefully by the end of October—is a new article about English 333: Jane Austen in Context from 2013. The article features work by a number of recent Whittier College graduates, including Elizabeth Sanchéz, Erica Clifford, Nikolai Barkats, Sara Koffi, and Terri Shephard. In addition, I will be giving a joint talk this coming January with Professor Bill Kronholm (Math) and senior Ty Lopez (editor of the Quaker Campus) on a joint digital project the three of us developed together over the past year.

Kate Durbin: My multimedia poetry project, ABRA, won the “Turn on Literature Prize for Electronic Literature” this year, selected by librarians across the EU. I was selected for a Digital Studies fellowship with Camden-Rutgers, for my project UNFRIEND ME NOW, which is a multimedia performance that deals with social media rage and its influence on the 2016 election.

Jonathan Burton: I am on sabbatical this year, and while I miss regular contact with students (and lunches with my friends at the CI), I’ve been enjoying all of the opportunities—scholarly, leisurely and gustatory—that a sabbatical affords. I’ve finished up a chapter on “Race and Empire” for Bloomsbury’s Cultural History of Empire in the Renaissance and I’m now writing a conference talk on Paul Griffith’s novel, let me tell you – a brilliant prequel to Hamlet narrated by Ophelia and written using only the words used by Ophelia in Shakespeare’s play. I’m volunteering on a weekly basis at my

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daughter’s middle school. I’m also busy observing instruction in eight high schools across Los Angeles County as part of my research for a book project entitled High School Shakespeare. This work takes me to schools in Crenshaw, Cerritos, Beverly Hills, Long Beach, Huntington Park, Palos Verdes, and Pico Rivera (where I’ve observed Jason Jenkins ’07). If you have a story about your own high school Shakespeare experience, I’d love to hear it. Sabbatical also means that I’m spending lots of time cooking, with particular successes on recipes by Melissa Clarke, Yottam Ottolenghi and José Garces.

And finally (finally!) I’m also studying Spanish this year. Mejor tarde que nunca!

Tyler Dean: I am currently moving out of my comfort zone in Victorian fiction to put together next semester's British modernism course (which will be focused on writing and processing trauma) and postcolonial literature course. In addition to rereading many of the novels and short stories for those classes, I have been returning to Dracula in the hopes of putting together an article on how the novel manages to focus most of its pages on work--especially administrative and transcription-based work.

Sean Morris: When I’m not running around keeping up with my now four kids (!) (two of my own and two step-children), I’ve been developing a new course called “The Meaning of Life” that would do for the whole college what Survey (220-221) does for English majors: essentially a “last lecture” series in the Shannon Center from different faculty members every week, with framing talks to anchor them. I’m also continuing to look into connections between Beowulf and Game Theory, as well as connections between the heroic archetype and fundamentals of leadership. Also, I’m beginning to explore with my wife (she’s a psychologist) ways to use the heroic archetype for identity building exercises in clinical therapy. (Anyone remember, “Let me tell you a story…”?)

Last but not least, I’m working on research connecting Lord of the Rings to the works of James Fennimore Cooper (yes, The Last of the Mohicans guy: think Aragorn’s woodcraft…), as well as a couple screenplays.

Tony Barnstone: I have been writing towards a projected book of political and environmental poems, but it is coming slowly because I am so busy. My book of children’s poetry has generated a number of spinoffs. At this point I am writing and illustrating an animal ABC, a children’s novel, a board book about a wild child, and two books of illustrated children’s poetry. My book of translations of the Urdu poet Ghalib is off to the presses and I’m hoping for an acceptance. I am also co-editing an special issue of the literary magazine Manoa, focused on American and Chinese ecopoetry. The issue will then be published as a book by the University of Hawaii Press. Another editing project: I am working for a small press in England on a selected poems by the experimental concrete poet Mary Ellen Solt, which should be in print in another year or so. I’ve also been traveling to conferences, giving poetry readings, and publishing in literary journals, but the most exciting recent event was a talk on ekphrastic poetry I gave at the University of Canberra, Australia, in September. Here are a couple of pages from my animal alphabet:

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Sigma Tau Delta Congratulations to all of you who qualified/will qualify this year to be members of the Whittier (Jessamyn West) chapter of Sigma Tau Delta, the national honorary society in English! Well done! (Note: you’re not really a member until you get initiated. And the national folks say you are not really in until you have paid a membership! See Professor Furman-Adams, Professor Morris, or Angela Olivas in the department office if you have questions.)

What Have We Been Reading Lately?

Joe Donnelly: American Wolf, A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West By Nate Bakeslee, which attempts to tell the dramatic story of bringing wolves back to the West, and the threats to that hard-won victory, through the eyes of iconic Yellowstone Wolf, 0-Six. I've written quite a bit, and care a lot about, the subject, so it hit close to home. I also recently read Pen/Hemingway winner Ottessa Moshfegh's noirish, comingof-age thriller, Eileen. dAvid pAddy: This time around I can report a mixture of authors that I’ve been trying for the first time and others that I’m returning to by digging deeper into their back catalogue.

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Those who were new for me: Miklós Bánffy They Were Counted, Alain Mabanckou Black Moses, W. G. Sebald The Rings of Saturn and Ali Smith Autumn. Sebald is such a major contemporary figure but I hadn’t gotten around to reading him yet (do you know how that goes?). So glad I’ve now had my first glimpse of his unique mode of dark reflective landscape-driven history/memoir (a hard label to place in a bookstore) and I look forward to more. Same with Ali Smith, who’s a biggie in the contemporary British scene. I’ll be teaching Autumn in a few weeks—the first novel to respond, in part, to Brexit. Definitely need to catch up on her many other books. Mabanckou’s Congolese coming-of-age novel was a Booker long-lister that was quite compelling. Finally, Bánffy’s novel from 1937 is a Hungarian masterpiece on the collapse of the AustroHungarian empire. It’s been compared with the likes of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and I wouldn’t disagree. It’s the first of a trilogy and I’m eager to finish off the sequence.

Much longer is the list of people I’ve loved and have come back for more of: Patrick Hamilton Hangover Square; Stefan Zweig Fear and Confusion; Karl Ove Knausgaard My Struggle Book 4; Antal Szerb Love in a Bottle (short stories by the writer of the brilliant Journey by Moonlight); Alejandro Zambra My Documents (unsettling short stories in and around Pinochet’s Chile); Anthony Burgess Napoleon Symphony (a sadly neglected Joycean opus that take on the emperor using Beethoven’s music cues as a structuring device); and Cynan Jones Cove (a contemporary Welsh master of minimalism and uncanny landscapes). Of these I really can’t stop singing the praises of Hamilton, Zweig and Knausgaard. Go read them already.

Also in the mix have been Edmund Gordon’s tremendous and long-needed biography, The Invention of Angela Carter, Zadie Smith’s latest, Swing Time, which may appear in some class down the line, the compelling polemic that is Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique, Mark Fisher’s thought-provoking The Weird and the Eerie, and some cool bits of graphic fun: Evie Wyld Everything is Teeth, E. O. Plauen Father and Son and William Gibson Archangel.

And during sabbatical, I just get to read even more. Ah, bliss.

Charles S. Adams: I have been thinking about how little I actually read fiction and why I think I have only one thing here in that category, Cornelia Nixon’s latest book, The Use of Fame. I do recommend it, especially for those who like books about troubled relationships. Cornelia is a terrific observer, and I know her (she is married to my father, and that is not the relationship in question!). I read fiction for work, but oddly am in a dry spell on the elective stuff in that area. Maybe the best baseball book of the summer that I got to is Rob Garratt’s Home Team, about the social and economic effects of the Giant’s move to San Francisco. I note that Rob is a retired James Joyce specialist, also a friend. If I know you, I will read your book! I did do one reviewing job, Thomas Kidd’s new Benjamin Franklin: The Religious Life of a Founding Father. This is a significant new biography,and does what the title say is terms of focus. I doubt we will ever know more about Franklin’s religious views than Kidd gives us.

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Wendy Furman-Adams: It's the time of year again when I find myself reading mostly for my classes. But I've also spent a lot of time catching up on The New Yorker, Harper's, and The Atlantic (especially Ta-Nahisi Coates's brilliant series of essays on the Obama presidency and its aftermath), as well as the L.A. and New York Times. I'm also just starting Stephen Greenblatt's exciting new book, which seems to have been written especially for me: The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve. This thick but lively book traces the Genesis narrative through Jewish and Christian tradition--including, of course, big chapters on Augustine and Milton. Having devoured Will in the World and, more recently, The Swerve, I'm tucking into this tome with considerable relish. It's a special copy too: personally signed by Professor Greenblatt when he appeared a few weeks ago at the Los Angeles Public Library. My thanks to Professors Burton and Adams for alerting me to his coming appearance.

Michelle Chihara: I have been reading a feminist critic named Donna Haraway, who I really should have read before, but I'm feeling very inspired and energized by her work.

I've also been reading some "for fun" novels when I have insomnia, which have helped me reconnect with my reading-for-pleasure muscles, and I've especially liked Celeste Ng's Little Fires Everywhere and Lianne Moriarty's Big Little Lies, which was the inspiration for the HBO series (and I'm always interested in how novels relate to cable television). A friend and colleague's book about contemporary American culture and finance has also been a recent source of inspiration, Annie McClanahan's Dead Pledges is an insightful and trenchant view of contemporary American culture around the latest financial crisis.

Andrea Rehn: As usual, by this point in the semester, my reading is largely student writing and books I assign in my courses. However, one form I’ve been “reading” a lot these days is podcasts, so I thought I’d share a few of my favorites. (Students interested in these might want to sign up for Michelle Chihara’s Podcasting course in Spring 2018.)

In addition to long-standing favorites like This American Life, and the New Yorker podcast series in which authors read their favorite short stories written by someone else, I’ve been loving “S-Town”. “S-Town” is a long-form podcast, following on the huge success of Serial, that tells one complex story through a series of hour-long episodes.

Experiencing it is like reading a great nineteenth-century novel: there are dozens of fascinating characters, sometimes the plot pauses to focus on a seemingly trivial but unexpectedly interesting detail, and the whole thing comes together in the end as far more than the sum of its parts. Another podcast I’ve been loving is “Pod Save America,” which features compelling analyses of contemporary political happenings, but manages not to be too dark. I am currently catching up on “Homecoming”, a podcast featuring one of my favorite actresses Catherine Keener, along with a great cast, in a psychological thriller.

Excellent listening for long traffic commutes.

Tyler Dean: While my pleasure reading has been put on hold for the time being, I am eager to get back to Sarah Perry's The Essex Serpent, a novel that, thus far has managed to satisfy my desire for serious literature about tragically incompatible philosophies of love and also my love of cryptids. Hopefully this Winter break will see me able to do so with a cat on my lap and my choice of tea returned to the un-caffeinated variety.

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Jonathan Burton: Being on sabbatical means that I’m reading ravenously and widely, and there is far too much to discuss here. I’ll just note a slice of my reading and elaborate on an even thinner slice that I’m particularly eager to recommend. I’ve recently enjoyed novels by Margaret Atwood (Hag Seed), Octavia Butler (Parable of the Sower), George Saunders (Lincoln in the Bardo), Laila Lalami (The Moor’s Account) as well as a rereading of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, this time the annotated edition. I’ve read poetry by David Hernandez and Patricia Lockwood and I’ve enjoyed plays by Ayad Akhtar (Disgraced, and The Who and the What), Lynn Nottage (Ruined), Quiara Alegria Hudes (Water by the Spoonful, and The Happiest Song Plays Last), and Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins (Appropriate). I found riveting and disturbing Peter Gadjics’ memoir, The Inheritance of Shame, detailing the experience of a man subjected to conversion therapy, ironically with the encouragement of his parents who were concentration camp survivors. More fun was Nathan Hill’s 614-page page-turner of a novel, The Nix, that shuttles between moments of civil disobedience 1968 and 2011 and had me laughing out loud everywhere I read it.

At the moment, I’m enjoying the historian Paul Freedman’s book Out of the East, a book that illustrates, with 500 year-old recipes the ways in which Asian and African spices shaped life in medieval Europe. This is a book that really brings to life the banquet at the opening of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Imagine a recipe for haddock (white fish) including, cloves, mace, pepper, cinnamon, saffron, currants, white grape juice, red wine and ginger. I’m starting to ruminate on a class on early British literature and cooking. . . .

Sean Morris: I have another eclectic assortment I’ve been reading lately. Some things are works for class, both re-readings and works for new pairs: lots of leadership books such asAct Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader, and many Harvard Business School case studies. Others are science books like Spooky Action at a Distance (a great read about the almost magical behaviors of very small things like light waves). Even better is Life’s Ratchet: How Molecular Machines Extract Order from Chaos, which everyone should put on the “must-read” list because of the profound way it may alter your paradigms of reality, and show you a simple and fundamental way that order arises from chaos. Other non-fiction books I’ve been reading include Simon Winchester’s Pacific (Winchester makes everything interesting), The Willpower Instinct(readable, smart, and motivational), The Greatest Story Ever Told So Far (science lens for looking at the world—meh), Who’s in Charge: Free Will and the Science of the Brain (okay survey of neuroscience), Ben Sasse’s The Vanishing American Adult (important arguments for not segregating age groups), The Ten-Cent Plague (history of comic book controversy in the 1950s), The Borgias, The Zero Marginal Cost Society, Algorithms To Live By, The Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future (a bit sensationalist and overstated—one hopes), Forensics, and The Inkblots (interesting bio of Rorschach—the intro is a mustread about the uses of the Rorschach Test). These are some Teaching Company Lecture series I’ve been listening too (all excellent as usual): The Conservative Tradition, Daily Life in the Ancient World, Pompeii, Superstring Theory, The Entrepreneur’s Toolkit, History’s Greatest Military Blunders, The Medieval World, Foundations of Economic Prosperity, and Great Battles of the Ancient World. Round it off with some fiction: Billy Budd, The Lightning Thief, Up from Slavery, The Man in the High Castle, works of Poe, Captain to Captain: Star Trek Legacies Book 1, Ubik, and The Mysterious Island.

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Tony Barnstone: I am mainly reading for classes right now, and to design or revise my courses for January and Spring, so lots of The Norton Anthology of _____ (Fill in the Blank). I’m rereading dozens of books of poetry to put together a reader for my new course on poetry and the body (Writing Workshop: The Flesh and Bones of Poetry), especially by authors such as Rainer Marie Rilke, Kim Addonizio, Sharon Olds, and Terrance Hayes. The books that I have piled up ready to be read for fun are Miss Burma by Charmaine Craig, a novelization of the life of her mother, who was Miss Burma, got married to a revolutionary General of the Karin tribe in Burma, saw her husband murdered during a peace conference with the Burmese dictatorship, and ended up taking over as the leader of the revolutionary army. I am starting to dip back into Gaston Bachelard’s classic work of literary criticism, The Poetics of Space. I am also partway through Mary Fleener’s The Life of The Party, an autobiographical graphic anthology depicted in her particular style of American Cubismo (see illustration below):

English Department Courses for Fall, January, and Spring 2017-2018 Academic Year (All Subject to at Least Some Change) Below is supplemental information from most of the faculty about the departmental courses scheduled for the 2017-2018 academic year. It is in the nature of our subjects that a course description in the catalog rarely says exactly what any given offering will cover. There are always big choices faculty members have to make, and these change over time. The details are, again, always subject to change, but we hope this will help.

As we acquire more information and make changes, we hope to adjust the on-line versions of this document. Please see or e-mail the instructors, Angela Olivas in the department office, or our current department chair, dAvid pAddy, for answers to

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questions these descriptions might raise. We note as well that some instructors may be teaching courses in the INTD, GCS, WSP, THEA, and GWS (love those acronyms!). It is entirely possible that there are courses taught in other departments that good for ENGL credit that your editors and schedulers missed. Students should consult the Whittier College Catalog concerning prerequisites for all courses. In particular, most courses require ENGL 110 or 120 or their equivalent as a pre-requisite for enrollment. Some courses taught as part of pairs require co-enrollment in the paired course. See the instructors if you have questions.

ENGL 110 note (only offered in Fall): This course is designed for first-semester, firstyear students with a strong background and continuing interest in the study and writing of literature. While it counts toward the requirements of the English major (as an alternative to ENGL 120), it does not fulfill the COM 2 (writing intensive) requirement as ENGL 120 does. But do not despair—we have worked to designate many of our other courses to fulfill this requirement, which should be reflected in the schedule of courses.

ENGL 120 note: As with “Exploring Literature,” individual instructors will organize the course around specific themes of their own devising, though all sections have the same goals. All of them count for the COM 2 Lib Ed requirement and will enable a student to then take upper-level English courses. Where there is no extended description, the instructor is still thinking about it. It is always possible that if a particular section does not draw enough students in preregistration it could be cancelled. If this happens, students should see their advisors, the registrar’s office, or any member of the English Department and we will do our best to find an open spot in another section.

January 2018 ENGL 290: Profile Writing (Joe Donnelly) Writing about people is art form just like painting a portrait is. We'll learn how to write great profiles of interesting people.

ENGL 303: Advanced Poetry Writing (Tony Barnstone) This class is an advanced workshop for those who have learned the basics of poetry writing. You are expected to enter the class with a strong understanding of what makes for a powerful free verse poem, how to craft the amazing image, how to take a poem through rhetorical and conceptual "turns," how to create exciting line breaks that create interesting tensions with the sentence rhythm, and of course how to revise a poem to make it better and better. In this class, you will learn the essentials of metrics, from accentual meter to syllabics to accentual-syllabic meter, and you will write in those meters, often in fixed forms, such as the haiku, the pantoum, the sestina, the quatrain, the villanelle, the sonnet, terza rima, blank verse, and such other meters as Chinese regulated verse and the Persian ghazal.

ENGL 389: The Lord of the Rings: J.R.R. Tolkien and his Sources (Sean Morris) “All those long years… you knew this day would come.”

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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 25 people and talk about it for three weeks.

In the year 2000 J.R.R. Tolkien was 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 sources (many but not all of them medieval) on which he drew—the “leaf mold of the mind,” as he called it. 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 readings and quizzes, an oral presentation, and two papers.

The reading list for this course is very substantial, and I advise getting a head start. If you can read the main works (The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit) before Jan Terms starts, the rest of the reading load will be pretty light. The Fellowship of the Ring, at least, must be finished before the first day of class, so we can launch into our explorations right away.

In addition to the Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and selections from The Silmarillion, we’ll read “Farmer Giles of Ham” (in The Tolkien Reader), a little from the Unfinished Tales, and selections from The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. Works by other authors will include Humphrey Carpenter’s excellent biography of Tolkien, and contextualizing works (Tolkien’s inspirations) like Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Sir Orfeo, Chaucer’s “The Pardoner’s Tale,” Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and Snorri Sturluson’s Edda—even such unlikely influences as Jane Austen (!! Yep) and James Fenimore Cooper (!!! Yes.) Don’t despair! The readings are long, but many are just excerpts, and they are 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!”

ENGL 390: Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy (Scott Creley) In this Science Fiction & Fantasy Workshop, students will learn to write and edit their own literary science fiction and fantasy stories through the study of the masters and by way of workshopping the writing of their fellow students. This class will study western science fiction and Fantasy from the late 1800s to the contemporary era, and draw writing exercises and inspiration from this deep field of work. Writers in this workshop will analyze the short fiction of authors such as E.M. Forster, Neil Gaiman, Octavia Butler, and Alice Sheldon (along with many others). Ultimately, this course will demonstrate that science fiction and fantasy represent the purest distillation of a society’s hopes and fears, and that these genres represent a unique window into the human experience that no other approach can truly match.

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Spring 2018 See head note at the start of the hiscourse listing section for a discussion of the ins and outs of ENGL 120, Why Read? registration.

ENGL 120, Section 1: Why Read?: What is Reality? (Charles S. Adams) The classical attack on literature (actually on all art), going back to Plato, is that it essentially “lies.” It is a representation of reality, not the thing itself, and thus deceptive, leading us into possibly dangerous errors. I propose to take on this question by complicating it. There is a considerable literature that is about, among other things, literature itself, about the use of telling stories. What is the use of the imagination? What claims can literature make to be about reality? What can art do to actually have a positive role in the affairs of the world, in spite of what Plato says? We will look at fiction, poetry, and some film.

ENGL 120, Sections 2, 8, and 9: Why Read?: Science Fiction (Kate Durbin) Surveillance, time travel, and dystopias: in this class, we will examine race and gender dynamics, environmental issues, global politics, and questions of technology, genetics, and ethics via the novels of Octavia Butler, Michel Faber, Suzanne Collins, and others, as well as the 2015 Jennifer Phang film Advantageous, the Netflix series Black Mirror, and more. We will ground each text in the political contexts from which they were written, examining each parallel world as a revealing mirror of our past, present, and possible futures.

ENGL 120, Sections, 3, 6, and 7: Why Read?: Can the Empire Write Back? (Katy Simonian) Critic and author V. S. Naipaul sees colonization as an overwhelming cultural experience that renders the colonized permanently disabled. By contrast, Salmon Rushdie claims that “those whom [the English] once colonized are carving out large territories within the language for themselves” (“The Empire Writes Back”). The title of this course, Why Read?, challenges us to appreciate the broader concerns of literature and the impact of language on the way in which we read, perceive, and understand the world. During the course of the semester, we will engage in the debate between the perspectives of Naipaul and Rushdie and identify where some selected works of fiction fall within the spectrum of critical interpretation set up in their work. The course is not meant to be a survey of Twentieth Century British Literature, but rather a detailed look into varieties of postcolonial texts from some of the different corners of the former Empire which continue to shine within the literary world. Reading works from Ireland, Africa, the Caribbean, and India, offers us a stronger understanding of the complexity of language, which is one of the connective threads between each of these writers and their works. We will consider the development of linguistic identity in relation to English, as it has the power to both perpetuate and subvert the notion of “The Other” in reference to formerly colonized individuals. By reading a series of short fiction along with a novel, play, essays and selections of poetry, we will explore issues of cultural identity, race, gender, socioeconomic status and linguistic imperialism through the experiences of those within the postcolonial Diaspora and independent former colonies. Can voices from within the former Empire indeed write back? The answers to this and many other questions will 13

lead us to a greater understanding of the impact of language on identity in the context of the colonial and postcolonial experience. Ultimately, we will gain perspective on the multiple lenses through which to engage with such works and recognize the power of literature as a means of conveying an understanding of these issues to readers.

ENGL 120, Sections 4 and 5: Why Read?: Life During Wartime (Scott Creley) War seems to be omnipresent in human history. From era to era it changes its clothing, and yet the same tragedies play out over and over across time and geography. Why is this? What causes conflict? Why does it seem so inevitable? This course examines great literature through the lens of individuals trying to live their lives during modern conflicts.

These conflicts serve as arenas to examine human nature at its best and worst. By adopting this viewpoint as we study texts we are able to examine our own lives with greater complexity. This course studies Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, David Benioff’s City of Thieves and war-themed poetry collections by Tony Barnstone (Tongues of War), and Brian Turner (Here, Bullet). This course will take the truths and philosophies present in these texts and apply them to the conflicts of today and yesterday in search of an understanding that might make our era a better place to live.

ENGL 120, Section 11: Why Read?: Imprinting L.A. How Los Angeles Became Literature (Joe Donnelly) Literary Journalism: How fact-based storytelling became literature.

ENGL 221: Major British and American Writers from 1785 (Tony Barnstone) This course continues the survey of literature in English begun in ENG 220 (Which is a pre-requisite). One of the big differences in this course from ENGL 220 is that in addition to continuing our review of the developments in and of British literary history we will have to consider the somewhat parallel trajectory of American literary history.

The course will in fact begin with some of the foundations of American literature.

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 predominant ideas and aesthetic premises in each era, we will also consider literature’s relationship to matters such as the rise and fall of the British Empire, the building of the American nation, the historical importance of revolution and industrialization, and matters 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, if any? What was/is the literary canon, and how should we think about it?” Out of some necessity, we will focus on representative works rather than trying to do it all. This course is foundational for the English major and will include guest appearances by departmental faculty, who will introduce their particular literary interests.

ENGL 290, Section 1: Environmental Journalism (Joe Donnelly) ENGL 290, Section 3: Quaker Campus Workshop (Joe Donnelly)

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ENGL 290, Section 4: Writing Workshop: Flesh and Bones of Poetry (Tony Barnstone) This course is one I will be designing over the summer, but the concept is that it will serve as an intro to poetry workshop that focuses on questions of incarnation, bodying forth, dance, breath, motion on the page, containing and spilling forms, and other carnal and sensory aspects of poetry and poetics. It will be paired with a course in Theater taught by Jennifer Holmes, THEA 220 - Voice & Movement for the Actor.

ENGL 302: Advanced Fiction Writing (Michelle Chihara) This is the advanced class in writing fiction. It is a workshop-based course focused primarily on writing short stories, although in this class it is possible to make space for students working on longer projects. We will write continuously throughout the semester, read published work, and share our work with the class.

ENGL 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, a few professional scripts, lots of film clips, and your fellow students’ drafts.

ENGL 326: Topics in Shakespeare: “The Other Shakespeares” (Sean Morris) Shakespeare’s greatness often overshadows the greatness of the other writers of the Elizabethan and Jacobian stage. But they were great; that time would have been the Golden Age of English theater even without Shakespeare. So in this course I want to look at Shakespeare in the context of these “other Shakespeares,” playwrights like Marlow, Webster, and Jonson, as well as some less often read contemporaries like Thomas Heywood (lady pirate plays, anyone?). I’ll match these up against Shakespeare plays that deal with similar plots or themes so that we’ll also be learning about the bard, perhaps things we would not otherwise see in a typical Shakespeare class.

ENGL 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

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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!). Prerequisite: English 110 or 120.

ENGL 334: British 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 (see next paragraph), 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 writers, especially all my favorite American romantics. Indeed, with this period we see the beginning of what poetry looks like today—it is arguably the birth of the “Modern.”

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.

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This time out the class is paired with History 390, “The Romantic Revolutions,” taught

by Professor Elizabeth Sage. The history course takes up the question of how and why what we call the romantic period in British literature was also a period of extraordinary revolutionary activity of all sorts in Europe. The French Revolution is an obvious starting point, but most European countries experienced something like revolution, with the outstanding exception of England. We hope to fully integrate the courses in the sense that everything we are doing in each class is related to the other. Students are required to sign up for both courses. Instructor Permission Required.

ENGL 352: Modern British Novel (Tyler Dean) This course will be focused on tales of trauma and will be exploring the roles that social upheaval, the first World War, and the disquieting re-ordering of the universe (in the forms of Einsteinian physics and Freudian psychoanalysis) played in the "breaking" of the established 19th century novel.

Readings are forthcoming, but it would be surprising if Woolf, Forrester, Conrad, and Barrie were not examined at length.

ENGL 358: Postcolonial Novel (Tyler Dean) This course will treat upon both the 19th century roots of colonialism and the 20th century triumphs of the postcolonial author. We will be reading fiction and criticism from a panoply of voices including Rushdie, Garcia Marquez, Allende, Alexie, and the seminal work of my grad school professor, Ngugi wa Thiong'o.

ENGL 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 19th 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 are using them to go in directions the transcendentalists had not contemplated (actually, what fascinated Poe was the idea of no rules at all—at least moral ones—and what that might let you consider). 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 later on will find here materials they will need to know.

ENGL 390: Podcasts -- New Media & Narrative (Michelle Chihara) This class will engage critically with narratives being told in new and emerging media. One of our overarching theoretical and critical questions will be to ask how the history of new and emerging genres interacts with new technologies. Our primary anayltic focus, however,

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will be contemporary media that is created and distributed in new media. We will begin with podcasts, and will analyze at least three subgenres of narratives as they are practiced in digital, on-demand audio: first-person storytelling, fictional and explanatory formats.

We will look at location-based narrative audio (like Detour), and other forms of immersive narrative which make use of GPS and other new technologies to govern the conventions of their forms. Each student will also choose one emerging form of new media narrative as the subject of a research paper. These subjects could include but are not limited to immersive video game narratives (like Pokémon), collective narrative art projects, and narratives for virtual reality. While we will investigate how these narratives are created, our goal will be to analyze how technology interacts with, changes and responds to the governing cultural assumptions behind new genres in new media.

ENGL 400: Critical Procedures (Michelle Chihara) This is the course in which senior English majors complete their “paper in the major” requirement, so a good deal of our time will be spent working on that, culminating in the “Senior Presentation,” where you go public. In addition, the agenda of this class is theoretical. Reading a novel, poem, or play may seem a fairly fundamental skill for you by the time you’re a senior English major. But most of us have not really encountered the reality that there are serious people who have serious disagreements about how to go about these fundamental tasks. We know it at heart, but most of us have not thought it through. So, what are the ways that contemporary literary theorists take on the job?

What are people doing right now, arguing about? 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. Indeed, a common response from students after learning this material is something like, “I will never be able to read the same way again.” And, “Why didn’t I know this stuff far earlier in my career?” But maybe you did, and now can put a name to it—that is the point. Each of us has an approach to literature, but is there a name for what you do? The answer is yes. Maybe not exactly what you do, but probably close. Instructor Permission Required.

ENGL 410: Writing Renaissance Women (Wendy Furman-Adams) The title of this senior seminar refers to two things at once. Most obviously, this is a course about women writers working in Italy and England between about 1500 and 1700.

But a number of important male writers are represented as well because of their role in the way literature both reflected and, in turn, influenced--even re-invented--early modern life. Due in part to social factors, in part to the power of their vision, these male poets indelibly shaped the ways men imagined and represented women, as well as the ways female readers imagined and represented themselves. Thus, even when writing for others of their own sex, women had to write in response to male voices, male pens, male images of female identity.

Some recent critics have argued that if people write history, they are also "written" by it.

Each of our lives, then, is a kind of fiction, written in collaboration with the social forces that shape them. And, especially in the early modern period, those forces tended to privilege the male perspective. The Renaissance was a period of enormous change and upheaval, in which a relatively unified and stable medieval world-view gave way to what

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would become the Enlightenment. It was a period in which men--at least an elite of outstanding and privileged men--were involved actively in a reconstruction of identity, a reconstruction Stephen Greenblatt famously called "Renaissance self-fashioning."

Women, too, were engaged in this "self-fashioning" enterprise--but with a difference.

Less free to begin the inquiry "from scratch," they engaged in the process under the jealous eye of a patriarchal society that saw them, essentially, as passive members-valued above all, as Suzanne Hull has noted, for three traditional virtues: chastity, obedience, and silence. Even as they wrote, then (and many did write), they were also "being written"--by male writers, and yet more profoundly by the social conventions that shaped both male and female roles.

Thus, we will constantly considering the context of the literature we read, the social conditions under which it was produced. But we also read each text--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.

Students will produce a portfolio of writing, including several short papers and reviews and a much longer piece of original research, which may be written in combination with the Critical Procedures paper in the major.

ENGL 420: Preceptorships (Various Faculty) This course is for advanced students who will act as assistants to faculty in some of the courses above. See individual faculty members concerning what might be involved.

Instructor permission required.

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 Administrative Assistant, Angela Olivas (x4253 or see e-mail list below), in the department office, know.

Ways to Help While we all live for art alone, other things do matter. There are lots of ways to help us, and we welcome conversations with anyone who wants one. We are all interested in collaborations with alums in various ways, just as a starting point. But money is always useful too. We have two funds that support English Department activities in particular—

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one for Student Prizes in Literature and the other called Poets for Poets. The first supports writing prize contests all students at Whittier can enter. We have been giving prizes for fiction, poetry, and prose. Most of the winning work has been published in our Literary Review, edited by our students. The Poets for Poets fund will support general activities of interest and importance to the department (we need it to grow a bit more to start using it in the best ways possible). If you are interested in making even very small gifts, “it is all good.” Just tell the office of Advancement (on line or in person) what you want to do.

The Whittier College Department of English Language and Literature and Affiliates Charles S. Adams: cadams@whittier.edu Professor (American Literature, American Studies, Autobiography, Romanticism, Popular Culture, Literary Theory) Tony Barnstone: tbarnstone@whittier.edu (Spring 2018 Department Chair) Professor (Creative Writing--Poetry, Modern and Postmodern American Literature, Asian Literature, Translation) Jonathan Burton: jburton@whittier.edu Associate Professor (Shakespeare, Drama, Early Modern Studies, Music Writing, Comparative Literature, Literary Theory) Michelle Chihara: mchihara@whittier.edu Assistant Professor (Creative Writing—Fiction and Non-Fiction, Chicano/a Literature, American Literature, American Studies, Literary Theory) Wendy Furman-Adams: wfurman@whittier.edu Albert Upton Professor of English Language and Literature (Milton, Early Modern Literature, 18th Century Literature, Women’s Studies, Literature and Visual Culture, The Bible, Classics) Sean Morris: smorris@whittier.edu Associate Professor (Linguistics and English Language, Medieval Literature, Creative Writing, Fun) dAvid pAddy: dpaddy@whittier.edu Professor (20th Century British, Modernism, Postmodernism, Welsh and other Celtic Literatures, Literary Theory, Creative Writing) Andrea Rehn: arehn@whittier.edu Associate Professor (19th Century British, Postcolonial Studies, Women’s Studies, Travel, Literary Theory) Visiting, Lecturer, Adjunct, Staff, and Affiliated Faculty (These links may or may not be ones our adjunct and affiliated faculty use most of the time. Please contact the department office if you cannot make contact using these) Scott Creley: screley@whittier.edu

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Tyler Dean: tdean@whittier.edu Joe Donnelly: jdonnel1@whittier.edu Kate Durbin: kdurbin@whittier.edu Katy Simonian: ksimonia@whittier.edu Director, College Writing Programs Charlie Eastman: ceastman@whittier.edu Acting Head Librarian and Library Liaison to the English Department: Mike Garabedian: mgarabed@whittier.edu English/History/Writing Program Departments Administrative Assistant: Angela Olivas: aolivas@whittier.edu

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