In English Volume 19 #2

IN ENGLISH Occasional Newsletter of the Whittier College Department of English Language and Literature Volume 19, #2, April, 2019 Dr. Charles S. Adams, Editor Professor, English

On-Line Presence Some of you may be aware that the Whittier College English Department has a Facebook page. Alum 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. https://www.facebook.com/WhittierCollegeEnglishDepartment And our college-based site is: http://www.whittier.edu/Academics/EnglishLanguageAndLiterature/ This Newsletter will be up on that site and will be updated as more information comes in and your editor gets around to it.

REMAINING LITERARY EVENTS! POETRY, PROSE, FAMOUS PEOPLE! EVEN JOB SKILLS! April 15: Dean Kuipers, Alan Mac Donnell, and Iris Berry Joe Donnelly and The Whittier English Department will be hosting three great writers in the library April 15. The working theme is "outsider lit." These writers did not follow conventional paths--they were autodidacts, outsiders, outlaws, punk rockers, societal antagonists and nobody's All-Americans, and yet they've managed to fashion lives from their colorful pasts journalists, creative writers, editors and publishers.

Dean Kuipers, author of Burning Rainbow Farm, Operation Bite Back, I Am Bullet and more will read from his new memoir, Deer Camp.

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Alan MacDonnell is the legendary former editor of Hustler and the author of Prisoner of X, Punk Elegies and his new, fictional memoir, Now That I’m Gone.

Iris Berry, is the iconic L.A. performance artist and punk poet, who founded Punk Hostage Press and is the author of the collections, Daughters of Bastards and Two Blocks East of Vine (both of which Joe says he adores).

Joe says, “I think these three will help humanize/make relatable what it means to be a WRITER. Please let your classes know, especially students interested in a writing life.”

April 22: Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Lois Jones. 12:30-1:30 p.m. Lunch

provided. Wardman Library.

Shirley Geok-Lin Lim is a Professor in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She received her Ph.D. from Brandeis University in 1973, and has also taught at internationally, at the National University of Singapore, NIE of Nanyang Technological University, and most recently as Chair Professor at the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include Asian-American and post-colonial cultural productions and ethnic and feminist writing. She is the author of five books of poems; three books of short stories; two books of criticism: Nationalism and Literature (1993) and Writing South/East Asia in English: Against the Grain(1994); a book of memoirs, Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian-American Memoir of Homelands(1996), and a novel, Joss and Gold (2001). She has served as editor/co-editor of numerous scholarly works, including The Forbidden Stitch (1989), Approaches to Teaching Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1991), and Transnational Asia Pacific (1999). http://lim.english.ucsb.edu Lois P. Jones’ awards include the Lascaux Poetry Prize in 2018, the Bristol Poetry Prize in 2017 and the Tiferet Poetry Prize in 2012, with work shortlisted for the Bridport Prize in poetry in 2016 and 2017. Jones has work published or forthcoming in anthologies including New Voices: Contemporary Writers Confronting the Holocaust (Vallentine Mitchell of London – 2019); The Poet’s Quest for God (Eyewear Publishing), and Wide Awake: Poetry of Los Angeles and Beyond (The Pacific Coast Poetry Series). Other publications include Narrative, American Poetry Journal, One, Tupelo Quarterly, The Warwick Review, Cider Press Review and Tinderbox Poetry Journal. Jones’ first collection of poems, Night Ladder, one Glass Lyre Press’s Editor’s Choice Award and listed for the Julie Suk Award. She hosts KPFK’s Poets Café in Los Angeles, is the poetry editor of Kyoto Journal and cohosts the long running Moonday Poetry Series at the Flintridge Bookstorehttps://www.loispjones.com/poetry/

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May 1, Spatial Storytelling: An Introduction to GIS, 4:30-6pm, SLC 507 Come to this workshop to learn about the basics of the Esri Story Maps - a dynamic mapping and storytelling platform that can be used to tell the "story of where". This workshop will provide an overview of the story map technology and give attendees an opportunity to build their own Story Map. Sample data will be provided, or bring a sample of your own location-based data to transform it to a Story Map. (Data should be in tabular format and include either an address or XY coordinates for each location.

Photos or videos are encouraged.) All are welcome - no knowledge of GIS or story maps are needed to attend the workshop. All you need is a laptop (not a tablet). Bring your own, or check one out from Wardman Library. This workshop is sponsored by the Digital Liberal Arts Program, diglbarts.whittier.edu Esri ArcGIS is a powerful data analysis and story-telling tool heavily used by governments, businesses, and researchers of all kinds. Making Esri Story Maps allows you to create web-based stories without knowing how to code or program. Email arehn@whittier.edu for more information.

Bio: Shannon Julius is the GIS Analyst for the City of Whittier. Before Whittier, she worked for the City of Lakewood and interned with Los Angeles County. She has a B.A. in Environmental Analysis from Pitzer College and an M.S. in Geographic Information Science from CSU Long Beach. Shannon is a Certified GISP, UAS (Drone) Operator, and Yoga Teacher.

May 7: Publication Celebration of Republic of Apples, Democracy of Oranges: New Eco-Poetry from China and the United States, edited by Frank Stewart, Ming Di and Tony Barnstone. 12:30-1:30 p.m. Lunch provided. Wardman Library.

This is a group reading of California writers, including Whittier students and professors, whose work is included in Nature in the World: Chinese and American Ecopoetry, which will be published this spring as a special issue of the literary magazine Manoa, and released later as a book from the University of Hawaii Press. This book is one of the fruits nourished by the Luce Foundation grant (LIASE) directed by Dr. Jake Carbine. Among the Whittier students published are Natalie Fenaroli, Brianna Lyn Sahagian-Limas, and Trent Beauchamp-Sanchez. Among the faculty and staff published are Michelle Chihara, Scott Creley, Denise Wong Velasco, and Tony Barnstone. California writers expected to attend and read include Chad Sweeney, Sandra Alcosser, Elena Karina Byrne and Mark Irwin. https://manoa.hawaii.edu/manoajournal/about-mÄ noa

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The English Department Writing Awards (Keep your work!)

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 the next 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 thank lots of donors, alumni, faculty, friends, and students, for help funding these prizes and the Review.

The 2018-2019 Awaredees!

Poetry

1st“ Survival of the Fittest,” Rebecca Mei Mei Liu 2nd “Exodus,” Gabriel Perez 3rd “Multitasking on Mar Vista,” Alexandra Roggero

Prose

1st “Rhapsody in Gray,” Ariel Horton 2nd “Tommy,” CJ Esparza 3rd “How to Become Your Father,” Gabriel Perez

Scholarly Writing

1st “The Misunderstanding of Emma’s Masculinity,” Lauren Blazey 2nd “A Man More Sinned Against than Sinning,” Rebecca Mei Mei Liu 3rd “Jane Austen’s Narrator and Dialogue in Emma: The Great Duo,” Connie Morales

What Have We Been Up to Lately?

Bethany Wong: Teaching five days a week, I am constantly delighted at how diverse backgrounds and experiences lend to new and exciting perspectives on literature. When I am not teaching, reading or grading, I study the history of the novel through the lens of theater and performance history. This spring, I will be presenting a paper about a recycled prop I found in at the Houghton Library at the annual meeting for the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in Denver. This prop was used by British actress, Sarah Siddons, who made herself synonymous with tragedy by embodying the Tragic Muse, her niece, Fanny Kemble, who eventually became a powerful voice for abolition in America, and the American actress Charlotte Cushman who maintained a virtuous reputation while 4

playing male characters like Hamlet and strong female characters like Lady Macbeth. My argument recovers the ways that professional and domestic women claimed a gendered virtue that was compatible with theater and performance. I am also making final touches to a journal article about how the eighteenth-century writer, Frances Burney, shaped her notion of authorship based on the celebrity actresses of her time.

Andrea Rehn: One exciting thing for me! I've been appointed to the Modern Languages Association (MLA) Program Committee for a 3 year term.

The MLA is a professional association of over 25,000 scholars and teachers of languages and literatures. Members collaborate on sessions at the MLA Annual Convention, share their work on MLA Commons, publish in MLA books and journals, and provide leadership on professional issues through MLA committees. In addition to hosting an annual convention and sustaining one of the finest publishing programs in the humanities, the MLA is a leading advocate for the study and teaching of languages and literatures and serves as a clearinghouse for professional resources for teachers and scholars. The Program Committee advises the Executive Council on planning for the annual convention; exercises general supervision over forums; assists the executive director with planning or approving plenaries and other special events at the convention. (this paragraph from the website) https://www.mla.org/About-Us/Governance/Committees/CommitteeListings/Governance-and-Conventions/Program-Committee Jonathan Burton: I recently published a piece on culturally sustaining Shakespeare pedagogy in the English Journal and a chapter on “Race” in A Cultural History of Western Empires in the Renaissance. But I’m most excited about a project that I’m currently working on with students in my Shakespeare in American Life Class. It is called “The Qualities of Mercy Project,” after a climactic moment in The Merchant of Venice. The project involves fourteen college and university classes across the United States, each producing a short video based on a unique portion of Shakespeare’s play.

The 14 videos will be sequenced into a YouTube playlist so that a viewer can go through the play and around the US, witnessing the various ways in which students in distinct cultural and geographic locations render Merchant local and harness it to the particular concerns of their own communities. If all goes as planned, the full project will be available on YouTube at the end of April.

Wendy Furman-Adams: Jan-term 2019 marked the sixth time I have taken Whittier students to Rome, Athens and the Peloponnesian Peninsula as part of INTD 290: Classical Greece and Rome. As usual, we had a wonderful group from a variety of disciplines. And, as is not always the case, we enjoyed bright sunshine and only moderate cold for most of our trip. Highlights in and around Rome included visits to the Roman Forum, Pantheon and Colosseum, Caesar Augustus’s Ara Pacis (Altar of Peace), and the tombs underneath St. Peter’s—as well as a daytrip to Pompeii. In Athens we visited the Acropolis--as well as the agora where Socrates walked and engaged as a “gadfly” in Athenian social life, and where he was executed in 399 B.C.E. We also visited other sites

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in Attica, such as the Temple of Poseidon at Sunion and Apollo’s Temple at Delphi, before moving on to the seaside town of Nafplion—where we learned to make traditional Greek cookies between visits to such ancient sites as Mycenae (the home of Agamemnon ca. 1250 B.C.E.) and Nemea (home, like Olympia, of the Panhellenic Games). We also ate copious amounts of pasta and gelato, as well as delicious Greek food—which we worked off on scenic hikes up Acro-Corinth (a Byzantine fortress above the GrecoRoman city) and the “999 steps” of Nafplion’s Palamidi Fortress.

I am very much hoping to spend Fall 2019 in Rome, with Whittier’s first-ever “Semester in Rome” program. (See flyers on campus and in Poets email—and contact Amber Chiapparini in the OIP for more information.)

Meanwhile, I’ve just returned from Toronto, where I delivered a paper at the annual conference of the Renaissance Society of America--in the company of over 2,000 attendees from all over the world. This year’s conference was an especially rich experience because my session was organized by two of Whittier’s 2011 Outstanding Graduates in English (Réme Bohlin and Mary Helen Truglia). Réme and Mary Helen are now both completing their own Ph.D.’s; and both gave stunning presentations for our session on gender and time in early modern literature. The conference also gave me an opportunity to spend time with Réme and Mary Helen—as well as a third 2011 graduate, Shannon Jaime, who drove north from Rochester, New York to join us. As I approach my own retirement, these “full-circle” experiences with once-and-forever mentees is an unmitigated joy. The future of literary studies is in gifted and capable hands.

Whittier Students In The Sybil’s Cave!

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dAvid pAddy: Work continues to develop from my research on Daphne du Maurier. An essay based on my latest research, "Home is Where the Dark is: A Literary Geography of Daphne du Maurier’s Disturbing Genres,” will appear in the book, Space(s) of the Fantastic. A 21st Century Manifesto, edited by David Punter and Bruna Mancini, and to be published by Routledge, perhaps in 2020. I am also working right now on a conference proposal on contemporary British literature’s emerging response to Brexit.

Kate Durbin: I've been working on a body of artwork related to the current political climate, paying particular attention to the ways contemporary mass media (social media, news media, and reality TV in particular) have shaped the political landscape. The short film I am working on right now is about the Kavanaugh hearing. I shared a three channel version of my film Unfriend Me Now, about political polarization and Facebook, at the Spring Break Art Show in LA a few weeks ago (with Transfer Gallery). Some stills from that piece are forthcoming in the Massachusetts Review, and my work will be on the cover of the journal. I am also working on an interview about my work for the Routledge Companion to Mobile Media Art and was recently interviewed about Unfriend Me Now and social media rage for the Feminist Internet podcast in London in partnernship with Sotheby House.

Michelle Chihara: I would like everyone to know that The Routledge Companion To Literature & Economics, co-edited (with an introduction and a chapter) by yours truly, is on order at Wardman Library! It should arrive shortly! Please check it out! I attended the annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association at Georgetown University this spring to present my continuing work on behavioral economics and contemporary narrative. I spoke there about my research on strategic communications and podcasts, including material about a reality television show in Somalia. As an editor, I will publish a few articles in the Economics & Finance section of The Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB) this Spring, and have been getting some indispensable help from my Whittier Scholars intern Lexi Valenzuela on building my database of writers. I will also visit the UC Irvine Culture & Capital group this April to speak about my work and about LARB. If all goes as planned, in August, I will fly to Australia to participate in a working group at the University of Sydney on The Asset Economy, and I will also present my work at the Univ. of Sydney's interdisciplinary Think Bench seminar. This should result in a publication in a special issue of The South Atlantic Quarterly.

Charles S. Adams: I am teaching a limited schedule as I phase to retirement. However, I will continue to be involved with The Institute for Baseball Studies at Whittier College (along with our partner, The Baseball Reliquary. The Facebook page for The Institute is: https://www.facebook.com/groups/347883628706532/about/ This resource continues to grow in every way. We focus on baseball as part of culture rather than on matters like statistics (though we have a lot of numbers stuff). Perhaps this is best demonstrated by the fact we now have over 4,500 books on aspects of baseball.

We also have many other materials (objects, artwork, memorabilia) including resources on the Negro Leagues, women in baseball, Mexican-American baseball, and other similar

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matters. Professor Emeritus Joe Price and I just returned from a conference in Tempe, AZ sponsored by the academic journal NINE, where all of that is part of the discussion.

The best thing at the conference was hearing Jane Leavy speak (see my notes on reading below).

Katy Simonian: I am currently exploring Kurt Vonnegut's Rabo Karabekian, the protagonist of Bluebeard who also makes an appearance in Breakfast of Champions. As an Armenian, I am interested in the depiction of this character, allusions to his family's back story and his interest in abstract expressionist art. The title and structure, a nod to Charles Perrault's original work, is also of interest to me, as I have taught Angela Carter's "The Bloody Chamber" for years - a story that also seeks to expand the possibilities of the fairy tale. So many connections, all of which span across centuries, cultures and carefully crafted characters. I am happy to be in the midst of my research and look forward to seeing where it will lead.

Tony Barnstone: In Spring 2019, I am giving a talk at the AWP Conference in Portland on co-translating the 18th century Urdu poet Ghalib, talking about how I learned techniques from the American blues tradition that opened up the ghazal form for me (call and response, caesura, repetition of the first line of the couplet to create anticipation of the second line which snaps the rhetoric shut, etc.) I also look forward to the May 7th publication celebration of Republic of Apples, Democracy of Oranges: New EcoPoetry from China and the United States, my new book, co-edited with Frank Stewart and Ming Di. It will take place at the library at 12:30 p.m. I recently completed my new manuscript of poetry, American Spoken Here, largely political poetry about the shredding of democratic norms and the erosion of civil rights in this era of creeping authoritarian and nationalist movements, and I am marketing it to publishers. I will also be editing a special issue of the international literary magazine Pratik (published in Nepal), focusing on California writers. Other than that, I am looking forward to summer, when I plan to finish of several of the children’s books that I am writing and illustrating.

Joe Donnelly: I will also be hosting Dean Kuipers for the launch of Deer Camp at Chevalier's Books in Larchmont Village on May 15.

I'm working as a contributing editor/consultant with Los Angeles magazine and I recently wrote this personal remembrance of Luke Perry for the LA Times https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/la-et-st-luke-perry-gen-x-beverly-hills-9021020190306-story.html?fbclid=IwAR3TTEDHOOxIMov9KdMLvh7mNjUaFLrtbd28x5Q_tyUz0exiPj9cZWtU7E Excerpt: “It’s hard, though, to overstate what a sensation Luke Perry was back in the day. He was beautiful enough to cause commotions in tabloids and in teenagers’ chests, but there was always more to Perry than a pinup. He seemed strong and decent. His eyes were full of mischief and kindness, and he said a lot with a little. In an era that’s bestowed tech disrupters, investment bros and chattering-class screamers with some sort of exalted holy status, Perry had the whiff of a more sacred American archetype about him. Maybe we were just proud of him.”

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Sean Morris: What have I been doing lately? Most of my time goes into commuting, either back and forth across the country to Rochester, NY (about 6 times a year), or on the freeways between Whittier and Woodland Hills a few times a week. I help shepherd my step-kids to karate lessons and birthday parties and school events, and read them to sleep most nights (by phone if I’m not there.) and I’ve been in court with my ex-wife for 10 years now, and with my wife’s ex for the last 3. On weekends I sometimes squeeze in a museum (Getty Villa, and the Pompeii exhibit at the Reagan Library most recently), or a movie with my wife. My time on the road doers allow for a lot of reading, via audiobooks—up to 2x speed now. (See “What are we reading?”)

When I have time to think about things, I’m still working on my big projects—the “Meaning of Life” dialogues, “Beowulf and Game Theory,” Aragorn’s ties to James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo, a fantasy screenplay. Among other new projects: I have a new pair of History of English with Business Law, and I’m developing a set of rules of thumb for success in life, inspired by the list Professor Gold gave out to his class.

I’m putting a lot of thought into ideas for the revision to Whittier’s curriculum, underway in faculty meetings this semester. As I see new movies, many of which are not as good as they could have been, I make notes about how to rewrite them—material for a book about screenwriting. I’m also collecting words for an article or perhaps book about vocabulary being created by gaming communities (like “brute farm”). I’m drawing connections between the idea of “attention residue” (that your brain keeps hanging on to unresolved thoughts even as you move to new tasks) and the way that music postpones resolving chords: Do we take interest in this form of music because of attention residue? I’ve also been putting a lot of thought into how “memes” evolve: Do ideas change in ways that parallel genes? I think this is especially important since limits on faster-than-light travel may mean that the future of the human race depends on our ability to translate ourselves into information (if that’s not what we already essentially are).

News From the College Writing Program Charlie Eastman, Director

We are in the final stages of judging for the First-Year Writing Contest. This year’s was another robust crop to pick from, and I am grateful as ever to those who spur their students to submit their work (and also to those who volunteer to read the entries).

We are also hiring Writing Associates for next fall’s First Year Writing seminars. To be considered for the Writing Associate position, a student must: * Have taken INTD 100 (or an equivalent course at an accredited institution as accepted by our Registrar) and earned a grade of A- or better; * Be on Good Academic Standing; * Have a clear disciplinary record with Student Life; * Have successfully passed (or be concurrently enrolled in) INTD 35 (formerly “Peer Learning Associate Training,” now “Writing Associate Training").

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Job Duties for Writing Associates * To model effective and appropriate student behavior; * To read course materials, attend class, and participate in discussions; * To hold office hours with freshman writers to work on developing and revising essays (as a supplement to, not a substitute for, faculty office hours); * To comment on student essays; * To meet regularly with the professor to discuss progress and needs of freshman writers; * To collaborate with the professor in developing a freshman-appropriate course (when such collaboration is possible); * To assist in the administration of surveys and evaluations; and, * To teach specific lessons, or, occasionally, entire class periods, with appropriate supervision from the faculty member teaching the writing seminar (such as reviewing a prospective lesson plan).

Please drop by Hoover 213 or write me at ceastman@whittier.edu to apply.

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?

Bethany Wong: Lately, I have been rereading lots of Gothic novels for class. I realize that every time we reread a book, we not only encounter the text again, but also encounter another version of ourselves. For instance, the last time I read Dracula, I only focused on the terror and fear of the supernatural. This time, I am struck by the novel’s multimedia focus where the promise of enlightenment stems from accurate reporting and instant dissemination of information. I am also reading When Romeo Was a Woman: Charlotte Cushman and Her Circle of Female Spectators by Lisa Merrill, a biography of the actress Charlotte Cushman. Cushman was remarkable for her ability to play male and female roles with equal skill and power. She played Romeo opposite her sister in Romeo and Juliet to great acclaim. Even more impressively, she alternated between playing Queen Katharine and Cardinal Wolsey in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. Cushman’s remarkable shapeshifting that never lost the audience’s love and respect testifies to the actress’ ability to fashion her celebrity while focusing on what she wanted to be personally and professionally.

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Jonathan Burton: Like most English professors, I’ve been reading more than it makes sense to list here so I’m going to identify a few favorites. But I’ll begin with saying that I’ve made an important change in my habits as a reader. I’ve allowed myself to stop reading works I’m not enjoying. If I’m 50 pages in and I’m not enjoying a novel, I’m no longer going to drag myself through the next 300. There are lots of great books out there.

Why waste your time on those you’re not enjoying? The books that I’ve enjoyed more than any others recently are Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility and Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black. Students in all of my classes have heard me talk about DiAngelo’s work and I can’t recommend it more highly. This is a book that makes visible the force of whiteness in American culture and spells out the hard work that white people need to do if they are truly interested in equity and inclusion. Esdi Edugyan’s novel begins with a glorious premise – a slave with a talent for scientific illustration escapes from a Caribbean plantation in a hot air balloon . I’m usually less interested in the story of an extraordinary individual than in the cultural forces that shape us all, but this is a beautifully written adventure story that reaches across American history to explore the possibilities of self-creation in spite of racial injustices.

Wendy Furman-Adams: In addition to keeping up as completely as possible with the Los Angeles and New York Times, I continue to spend a lot of time reading the invaluable commentary (and sometimes fiction) published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Harpers. Some weeks, alas, that just about accounts for the reading I manage to accomplish. But I also have several books in progress. A quick visit to Tunisia at the end of my Jan-term course was a revelation--piquing my utter fascination with this progressive, democratic Muslim republic. Tunisia was the first of several nations (including Egypt) to rise up against their dictators in the “Arab Spring” of 2011—and the only one that has made a successful transition to democracy. Tunisia: An Arab Anomaly,

by Safwan Masri, attempts to explain this phenomenon through a history of modern Tunisia and its very ancient and complex roots. The Tunisians--virtually all of whom speak Arabic and French with equal facility and almost no distinction--trace their “Punic” identity back to the Phoenician Dido, Queen of Carthage (whom many of us know only as Aeneas’s tragic love interest in The Aeneid), and are equally proud of their pre-Roman, Roman, Berber, and Islamic past (the last of which dates back “only” to ca. 700 A.D.).

Thus, although 99% of the population is Muslim, democratic norms (including women’s political and social equality) are as deeply embedded as the faith which rings out, in the call to prayer, five times a day over loudspeakers in every Tunisian city. Masri, a Jordanian Muslim himself, argues that Tunisia’s history and culture are completely atypical of the Islamic world as a whole and that its remarkable success probably cannot be read as a model for other countries. Meanwhile, I’ve embarked on a marathon reading of Jill Lepore’s These Truths, her magisterial 900-page history of the United States-while dipping, for literary refreshment, into City in Winter, a collection of stories by the Equadorian writer Abdón Ubidia. dAvid pAddy: A strong contender for my next twenty-first-century British fiction class is Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall, a slim, harrowing Brexit allegory on the danger in the desire to return to some notion of a purer past. I was far more mixed about Sally Rooney’s Normal People, which has been one of the biggest publishing phenomena in the UK and

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Ireland within the last few months. A novel about a long-standing relationship and growing up in the early 2010s, while I can see why some people might absolutely adore it, the longer I was away from it, the more I thought about how much I did not like it.

Love to have a conversation with anyone else who’s had a go at it.

Much more brilliant—to my reading eyes—is last year’s Booker winner, Milkman, by Anna Burns. It’s as if Samuel Beckett wrote a book about life during the end days of the Troubles, with a similar savagery and bleak comedy. A stunning read. The International Booker winner—Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights—was also revelatory in its exploratory forms and expansive interests; I look forward to reading more work by her. Other novels that I’ve enjoyed immensely in recent months are Máirtín O Cadhain’s Graveyard Clay, Hannu Rajaniemi’s Summerland and Ismail Kadare The Traitor’s Niche. Two of the best non-fiction books I’ve read recently are Kwame Anthony Appiah’s The Lies That Bind, a terrific deliberation on identity and its myths, and Guido Mazzoni’s Theory of the Novel, a good old fashioned big, big, big book on the history and nature of the novel and the best I’ve of its kind that I have come across in a long time.

Kate Durbin: I've been lucky to read several really excellent books recently. The first is The Door by Magda Szabo. It's a Hungarian novel from 1987 and it's about the relationship between an eccentric housekeeper and a writer she works for. It's one of those books that is wonderful not because of what it's about, but because of how it is written. I also loved Otessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation, which is also a hard novel to describe. The protagonist spends a year of her life sleeping, basically, in order to change herself. I promise it's not boring. For some pop, I just finished Gillian Flynn's Sharp Objects and Dark Places. I'm glad I gave them a chance as I didn't like Gone Girl, but her first two novels are darker and more interesting. Lastly, I read Heike Geissler's wonderful Seasonal Associate, a memoir/novel about a German worker who spends a season working in an Amazon warehouse in Leipzig. It's about precarious labor and globalization and dehumanization. I am currently interviewing Heike about the book, which was published by Semiotext(e), for The Los Angeles Review of Books.

Michelle Chihara: I’m reading a book in French called Foucault, Bourdieu and the Neoliberal Question, by Christian Laval, that I find truly illuminating, but I will tell you, I read slowly in French. Other critical work I’m into right now is Rachel Greenwald Smith’s Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism and I am looking again at Sara Ahmed’s brilliant work. I have also really been enjoying reading about Buddhist philosophy and consciousness in work by Mark Epstein, he has a few books but right now I’m reading Thoughts Without A Thinker. I’m loving Prageeta Sharma’s poems in Undergloom. I’m reading my daughter’s copy of The Hate You Give. And I am also thrilled to be tearing through the soon-to-be-published manuscript of my friend and increasingly-famous author Leigh Bardugo’s forthcoming Ninth House. I am sworn to secrecy about it, but I can tell you, it’s gripping!

Charles S. Adams: The best book I have read in along time is The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created, by Jane Leavy. I think it is a masterpiece of cultural history. It argues that Babe Ruth and the people around him virtually invent our culture of celebrity.

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I buy her argument. Leavy herself is important as one of the first women to cover professional sports (especially baseball) for major news outlets like The Washington Post.. That is not what the book is about, but it is part of our cultural history too.

Katy Simonian: Storytelling is an art that comes in many forms and art can change the world. No artist exemplifies this statement more than Leo Politi. Appropriately known as "The Artist of the City of Angels," Leo Politi's life and legacy continues to make an impact. As an Author-Illustrator of more than thirty books including Song of the Swallows, Pedro: The Angel of Olvera Street and Moy Moy, Leo Politi combines his love for children and commitment to diversity with a desire to preserve our city's historical landmarks, most notably the homes of Bunker Hill. As an artist and activist, he was ahead of his time in speaking out against racism and injustice. Politi lived his life with the kind, selfless, inclusive spirit showcased within his work. He believed art had the power to inspire and promote peace. A concept that is more relevant now than ever. In 1977, Politi completed "The Blessing of the Animals" mural at El Pueblo de Los Angeles which continues to grace the iconic Olvera Street. His work captures the beautiful, complex, multicultural tapestry of Los Angeles. Check out his exhibit, "Leo Politi's Los Angeles: Works of Love and Protest" at the Italian American Museum of Los Angeles (IAMLA), where one of his many paintings remains on permanent display, just steps away from his beautiful mural at his beloved Olvera Street.

Tony Barnstone: I’ve been reading a lot of political poetry, and am especially loving a new book by Kevin Prufer, How He Loved Them, but am a little pissed off at him because he has several love/hate poems to America in the book, and I happen to have poems with the same premise in my new manuscript. Darn him! But I can’t be too mad at him. He’s just too good. I’ve been reading a lot for classes, and really enjoying getting to know poets like the Baroness Elsa von Freitag-Lorenhoven and Dorothy Parker, whose work I’d only had a glancing knowledge of before. It’s been lovely also to reread Jorge Luis Borges, and Federico Garcia Lorca, and Constantine Cavafy. During a busy semester, it is hard for me to do much pleasure reading. I do torture myself with a lot of obsessive reading of that devastating and distressing genre we call the “news.”

Charlie Eastman: Lots of contractor’s proposals, for one, as well as a deluge of applications for Visiting Instructor positions. But in addition, there was Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive to remind me that a book's potential to disappoint is directly proportional to the eagerness with which one awaits its publication.

But hey, I got to reread--as apparently I must over every spring break--Under the Volcano. I am now rereading Francine Prose's Blue Angel as I mull a writing seminar with the theme "Professors Behaving Badly."

Sean Morris: Some of the things I’ve been reading (the best are starred*): *Douglas Preston, The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story (archaeology and exploration in Central America: very fun and informative read); *Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (extremely useful and important advice); *Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living (I find this a big help whenever I read it); *Kelly McGonigal, The Willpower

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Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It (energetic, thoughtful, readable and potentially life-changing advice); *Ben Sasse, Them (not a political work—a very important reflection about how our personal devices, among other things, have helped the divide in the country and our difficulty to talk to one another); *Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Door through Space (strikingly imaginative, even better than I thought it would be); *Michael Witwer, Empire of Imagination: Gary Gygax and the Birth of Dungeons and Dragons (excellent); David Ewalt, Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and the People who Play It; *George Washington’s Journal on his Journey into the Ohio River Valley (just cool); Alec NevalaLee, Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction (well written and very informative, but the sordid details of most of these authors’ actual lives is depressing in comparison with the optimistic, heroic worlds and characters they created; I had to stop reading and just go back to the novels themselves); *Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (excellent and an important read, at least for most sections); Ajay Agrawal, Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence; Admiral William McRaven, Make Your Bed (viral commencement speech turned book); Andy Weir, Artemis (big disappointment after The Martian; shallow characters, shallow motivations, and not much science); *Andy Crouch, The Tech-Wise Family (advice for helping kids and families navigate technology and use it with intention); Jordan Peterson, 12 Rules for Life (interesting, digressive thought essays); G.J. Meyer, The Borgias; Val McDermid, Forensics (excellent, but more disturbing in real life than in detective stories; I actually had to stop near the end—people really did these awful things to other people); Clay Scroggins and Andy Stanley, How to Lead When You’re not in Charge: Leveraging Influence When You Lack Authority; William Peter Blatty, The Exorcist; Richard Matheson, Hell House; *Dennis Praeger, Still the Best Hope; Tim Hanley, Wonder Woman Unbound; Philip Roth, American Pastoral; James E. Ryan, Wait, What?; Brent Gleeson and Mark Owen, Taking Point: A Navy Seal’s 10 Fail Safe Principles for Leading through Change; Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, Extreme Ownership: How US Navy Seals Lead and Win; *Terry Pratchet re-reads: The Truth, Thud, and The Fifth Elephant (one of my all-time favorite books); James A. Corey, Leviathan Wakes; Ryan Holiday, Ego Is the Enemy; *Kristen Britain, Green Rider (pretty good fantasy); *The Epigenetics Revolution; Timothy Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek (not nearly as useful as you would hope); Elon Musk bio (great promise, but turned out kind of crazy and a jerk, alas); The Triumph of William McKinley (kind of interesting, but more about election mechanics than people and events, maybe better for poli-sci majors?); Stephen R Donaldson, Seventh Decimate (not nearly as engaging as I remember the Thomas Covenant books being); The Rise of the Robots (about AI and jobs); *Paul Levitz: The Bronze Age of DC Comics (truly outstanding, like his Golden Age book); *D&D 5e books (Player’s Handbooks and most or all of 5e campaign books, all excellent, including The Lost Mines of Phandalin intro adventure, and The Princes of the Apocalypse full book); also re-read the best of the original AD&D modules: The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh, Castle Ravenloft, and the mind-boggling Egg of the Phoenix; and lots of Narnia, Scooby-Doo, and Dr. Seuss books.

Teaching Company Courses (highly recommended, very well-crafted lectures on a huge

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range of topics; * indicates the very best ones of this batch): *Crashes and Crises; Life Lessons from the Great Books; Thermodynamics: Four Laws that Move the Universe (excellent, but hard to follow in audio format, especially at double speed); Classics of American Literature; Transformational Leadership: How Leaders Change Teams, Companies, and Organizations (solid and thoughtful but also forgettable—not so much that isn’t intuitive); The Science of Meditation; *Ancient Civilizations of North America; The Aging Brain (very good but depressing); An Economic History of the World Since 1400 (too influenced by academic fads—ideology tends to drown out facts and thinking); SciPhi (philosophy in science fiction; also very good but too influenced by ideological fads in academia); *The American West: History, Myth, and Legacy; The Conservative Tradition; American Military History; Turning Points in American History; *The Other Side of History: Daily Life in the Ancient World; *The American Mind (wow); Brain Myths Exploded; *The Black Death: The World’s Most Devastating Plague; The Art of Investing; *The Medieval World; The Entrepreneur’s Toolkit; *Outsmart Yourself: Brain-Based Strategies for a Better You.

English Department Courses for the 2019-2020 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 remainder of this 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, Jonathan Burton, for answers to 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 are 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 higher numbered courses require ENGL 110 or 120 or their equivalent as a pre-requisite for enrollment. Some courses requires permission from the instructor. 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.

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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.

ENGL 290 and 390 note: These numbers are for courses that are new ideas or perhaps not intended to be offered on a regular basis. The numbers can be repeated. There are a fair number of 290s this year, for instance. As space may be limited, you do not want to be shut out of the course you intended to take by mistakenly signing up for something else. In all cases, be sure to sign up for the correct section. At the time of this publication, section numbers were in flux and are all designated with the placeholder “x.”

Fall 2019 ENGL 110, Section x, Exploring Literature: Waking Dreams (Bethany Wong) How do writers of fiction make a case for the importance of literature in our everyday lives? What strategies do authors use to highlight the problems in society as failures of sympathy and imagination? Attending to form, style, and voice in a variety of genres (including poetry, drama, and novels), we will examine how authors from the 16th century to the present seek to persuade their readers that engaging closely with literature helps construct creative and productive individuals. For the authors on the syllabus, finding an artistic voice requires translating and adapting the past for the present so be ready to learn some new words and new ways of communicating from hundreds of years ago. Throughout the term, we will analyze how fiction justifies its existence, contending that the ability to read and write well is also the power to change hearts and minds about social issues that continue to puzzle, plague, and inspire our current times.

ENGL 110, Section x, Exploring Literature: Waking Dreams (Bethany Wong) See description for Section 1 above.

ENGL 120, Section x, Why Read? (dAvid pAddy) Reading, done properly, is every bit as tough as writing—I really believe that. As for those people who align reading with the essentially passive experience of watching television, they only wish to debase reading and readers. The more accurate analogy is that of the amateur musician placing her sheet music on the stand and preparing to play.

She must use her own, hard-won, skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift she gives the composer and the composer gives her—Zadie Smith “Fail Better” In the essay quoted above, novelist Zadie Smith speaks of the “talented reader.”

What might she mean by such a thing? Surely, once one has learned to read, one is a 16

reader. So, what might it mean to be a talented reader? We must assume that rather than being a skill one has or does not have, reading is a life-long practice that requires skill, work, and practice that may help bring a written work to life in more nuanced and layered ways. The question this course asks, Why Read?, is not, then, as simple as it might seem, especially when we extend the question to ask, “Why read literature?”

We will confront these dilemmas head on so that we may begin thinking about the purpose of literature today, particularly as we think about the role of literature in the liberal arts. Mark Edmundson, whose book inspired the course title, urges teachers to use literature to help students think about some of the great matters of life, and we will read a great variety of texts that have us contemplating one of the biggest questions of all, “What does it mean to be human?”

In this way, this class will serve as an introduction to the aesthetics and critical reading of literature. (Our introductory survey courses, ENG 220 and 221, provide you with the opportunity to study literature from a historical perspective). The primary goal of this course 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. By the end of the course, you will have hopefully garnered new skills or intensified old ones to help you appreciate the joy and complexity of literature.

Readings may include the following and more: Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau, Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There, Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman, Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange and Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black.

ENGL 120, Section x, Why Read?: Changing Fictions (Bethany Wong) See description for ENGL 110 Sections 1 and 2. While the themes are the same, course goals and audience are somewhat different. See discussion prefacing this section on the differences between ENGL 110 and 120.

ENGL 201, Introduction to Journalism (Joe Donnelly) A free press and the practice of journalism are pillars of any open, informed, participatory society. As such, it is the job of the journalist to provide citizens with the information, knowledge and insight they need to make the best possible decisions about their individual and civic lives. Of course, they won’t always do that—you can lead a horse to water, etc.—but it generally holds true that functioning democracies have a thriving free press, easy access to information, news, opinions, ideas and an informed body politic.

Closed, regressive societies generally do not. It wasn’t a fluke that Jefferson and the Founding Fathers wrote freedom of the press into the Bill of Rights.

The practice of journalism, however, is under attack by powerful interests who don’t want a watchdog press keeping them in check. They call it the “enemy of the people” and work to undermine confidence in the practice and the institution. At the same time, more and more Americans don’t actually know what real journalism is and have trouble separating information from disinformation.

This class will literally introduce you to journalism, its place in our culture and our civics and how we practice journalism in a changing, conflicted media landscape.

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ENGL 203, Writing Poetry (Tony Barnstone) This is the entry-level workshop in writing poetry. Though an interest in poetry is requisite, students are not expected to have deep knowledge of poetry and have mastered poetic skills prior to the start of the semester. Those skills will be taught in the workshop. However, students should be aware that this is a poetry boot camp. They will work hard, read a lot, write nonstop. It is not a sprint and it is not a marathon. It is a marathon-length sprint. The reward of this hard work will be the ability to write poems in a variety of forms and ways and a deeper understanding of and appreciation of poetry. The class is repeatable for credit and does not require instructor permission.

ENGL 220, Major British Writers to 1785 (Sean Morris) The very ambitious purpose of this partially team-taught course (and of the two-semester sequence to which it belongs) is to introduce you to the major themes and writers in British literature from its beginnings into the 18th century. We’ll survey nearly a millennium of terrific literature (mostly poetry, for historical reasons) in sequence and, insofar as time allows, in context. This is intended to give you a clearer sense of what came after what, and who inspired or influence whom. We will also turn periodically to contemporary works that challenge, sustain or otherwise mark the continuing influences of early British literature. Combining our work with the spring semester’s course on British and American Literature from about 1700 to the present, you’ll get a sense of the flow and ruptures of the English and American Literary traditions, or the big picture.

ENGL 270, Transcultural Literature (Jonathan Burton) Under what heading would you place a book by a Nigerian woman who lives in the United States and writes about Africans who live in America, Britain and Nigeria? Is this American literature? British Literature? African Literature? Is her protagonist an African American, an American-African, or something else entirely? Our conventional categories simply do not do justice to transcultural complexities of contemporary literature. Designed in response to student interest in works by non-Anglo-American authors, this class examines literature in an increasingly interconnected world where geographic and national boundaries have become inadequate to categorize literary works.

Topics will include globalization, mobility, cosmopolitanism and flexible citizenship in the works of award-winning contemporary authors including Salman Rushdie, Andrea Levy, Orhan Pamuk, Joseph O’Neill and Chimamanda Adichie. This course fulfills the CUL 6 (Crosscultural) requirement of the LIBED program and is paired with REL 236 (Islam, The Middle East and the West) with co-enrollment required.

ENGL 308, Screenwriting: The T.V. Pilot (Michellle Chihara) This class will introduce students to the basic concepts necessary to create an original television pilot, or the first episode of an original television series. We will work on pitches, loglines, outlines, breaking story and finally writing an entire pilot. We will cover acts, structure and other conventions of the industry. Students will be expected to write and polish either a half-hour comedy or a one-hour drama script, with a focus on creating pilots that function as first episodes in a longer narrative arc (story engine).

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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!

Paired with PSYC 352, Social Psychology! (And no, you don’t have to be in the pair to take Linguistics.)

ENGL 328, Shakespeare (Jonathan Burton) Have you ever noticed that the various portraits of Shakespeare don’t really look like the same guy? There’s the fellow with the sunken eyes and bulbous forehead; there’s the dapper one with the fancy silk collar; and let’s not forget the dude with the earring. In this introduction to Shakespeare studies, we will acknowledge multiple visions of Shakespeare by approaching his works with three interanimating methodologies. We will first examine the language of the poetry, familiarizing ourselves with Shakespeare’s idiom before engaging in close readings of the plays’ rich, figurative language. Next we will consider the plays in their historical contexts, concentrating on issues of gender, power, and English nationhood. Finally, we will approach the plays as performancescripts, confronting various dilemmas of theatrical production raised by Shakespeare's plays from the 16th through the 21st centuries. Assignments will combine expository and creative writing as well as student performances and possibly a trip to a local production.

ENGL 352, The Modern British Novel (dAvid pAddy) This semester we will explore some of the dramatic developments the British novel underwent at the end of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. Much of our attention will be given to the set of artistic movements that have come to be known as modernism. Modernism constituted a radical shift in the production and perception of art, and it spawned numerous new approaches to writing with its innovations in the use of perspective, time, consciousness, memory, human character, form and symbol. Overall, modernism was an artistic response to a rapidly changing world for which the previously dominant form of realism no longer seemed suitable.

Rather than move in a strictly chronological order, we will examine the development of the modern British novel through a set of organizing themes. First, concentrating on the work of Robert Louis Stevenson (Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde) and Ford Madox Ford (The Good Soldier), we will explore how writers investigated the nature of

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the self and raised questions about knowledge and perspective. Second, we will look at the impact of the modern city in works by Joseph Conrad (The Secret Agent) and James Joyce (Dubliners). Third, by reading E. M. Forster (A Passage to India) and others we will see how nationality and the impact of the British Empire were being investigated.

Finally, we will focus on the British collective known as the Bloomsbury Group, using Virginia Woolf’s radically exploratory work (The Waves) to examine how modernism foregrounded aesthetic matters. In addition to a set of major novels, we will also read a series of shorter texts, artistic statements, manifestoes and short stories that will help to demonstrate the diversity of ideas that characterize the aesthetic and ideational terrain of British modernism.

ENGL 335, Victorian Poetry (Bethany Wong) Ask someone about what first comes to mind when they think about the Victorian Period and chances are they will conjure Queen Victoria dressed in black with a pinched face primly saying “we are not amused.” In truth, it is debatable whether or not the Queen ever said this. With films like The Young Victoria and television series like ITV’s Victoria, the Victorians are experiencing a makeover starting with the Queen herself. In this class, we will be deciding for ourselves how amusing or proper the Victorians actually were. We will be reading the poetic testimonies of murderous madmen from Robert Browning, poetic accounts of a female Christ from Christina Rossetti, and poetic reimaginings of Arthurian legend from Alfred, Lord Tennyson among other Victorian poets such as Matthew Arnold, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

In a period that critics like Michel Foucault characterize as “repressed,” we will be imagining and considering all kinds of minds in Victorian Poetry to realize that release and repression can often be two sides of the same coin.

ENGL 370 Contemporary American Literature & Culture (Michelle Chihara) Before the century began, W.E.B. Dubois said that the problem of the twentieth century was the problem of the color line. Dubois wrote for a diverse audience, in 1881. How can we think about his understanding of “double consciousness,” as his philosophy of consciousness, as the foundation for his theorization of the “color line” that might allow us all to understand each other better? How can we represent ourselves and each other in such a way that we strive for a better world in the 21st century? How do different genres in contemporary literature understand the present day? Is the problem of the 21st century the melting ice caps? How can we, and how should we, represent such overwhelming and interlocking issues?

Looking at novels like Percival Everett’s Erasure, Jessmyn Ward’s Salvage The Bones, poems from Claudia Rankine’sCitizen, horror-influenced stories like Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, science fiction like Octavia Butler’sParable of the Sower, and nonfiction essays from Eula Biss’s Notes from No Man’s Land, we will ask what different genres bring to the pressing issues of contemporary life in American society.

This course is paired with Prof. Jose-Guadalupe Ortega's history course on the Black Atlantic.

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ENGL 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, marked by the nearly unique experiences and heritage of slavery. This course proposes, then, to start at the beginning of what has become a strong 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, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass). It continues with writers who use words to create freedom for themselves and others, and indeed use literature 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 20th century, 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, Ricgard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, August Wilson). The influence of such writing on all our contemporary literature is profound, and African American writers are some of our most important. As should be apparent, this course focusses on the long history of the subject, and does not cover the contemporary moment. The prmise is that if you want o know the present, you have to know the past first. You cannot fully understand Kendrick Lamar without knowing Langston Hughes. To emphasize this point, this course will be paired with Professor Nat Zappia’s History 313, Early African-American History. ALL students must see both professors for permission and MUST register for both classes.

ENGL 400, Critical Procedures (dAvid pAddy) Reading a novel, poem, or play may seem a fairly fundamental skill for you by now. 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 we 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, Rivkin and Ryan’s Literary Theory: An Anthology, will allow us to read essays from a wide range of approaches—formalism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, gender studies, reader response, structuralism, poststructuralism, historicism, ethnic and postcolonial studies and cultural studies. Be ready for a difficult class, but one, as a senior capstone course, that should dramatically influence how you think about literature.

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ENGL 410, Senior Seminar The Hot Take: Critique, Call-out and Cancel in Contemporary American Cultural Production (michelle Chihara) On the one hand, the academy is tying itself into knots about what critique and literature are and are not. On the other hand, more and more contemporary American cultural products engage in criticism. The mainstream movie review is dying, but the “hot take,” on everything from Michelle Obama’s speaking tour to the latest Oscar for Best Picture, is alive and well. This year’s seminar will ask how contemporary American authors and cultural producers understand, depict and affect late capitalism by looking at critique as it is practiced “in the wild.” Who gets to critique whom? What does it mean to produce a podcast about novels? How do cultural products both resist and participate in the economic forces of our time? How do narratives, across multiple platforms, give voice to but also potentially suppress different people or groups of people? How can we represent and understand our own agency in systems that have been so thoroughly created by the profit motive? How can we demand representation and accountability from politicians in the era of mistrust, data analytics and “fake news”? If “the economy” is an abstraction, then what can metaphor and narrative help us understand about that abstraction? Reading a wide variety of contemporary nonfiction, we will look at a variety of forms of criticism from scholarly peer-reviewed journals, magazines in different media, blogs and Twitter threads. By asking what criticism is and what it can do, we will investigate and interrogate the role of representation in our reality.

ENGL 410, Section 2, Senior Seminar in English: Creative Writing (Tony Barnstone) This is a special version of the Senior Seminar that is designed for creative writing track English Majors. Students should have taken at least two of the three required creative writing workshops prior to taking this class, or be enrolled in the second workshop simultaneously. During the semester, students will write new work, study critical texts written by creative writers about their esthetics and techniques, and revise past work into final form. At the end of the term, this work will be collected into a final creative writing thesis, either in one genre or in multiple genres, with a critical introduction.

ENGL 420, Preceptorship: Teaching Literature (Various Instructors) 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.

Related Courses You Should Know About But Are Not Part of the Major INTD 140, Introduction to Comparative Media Studies (Geoffrey Long) Comparative Media Studies exists at the intersection of theory, practice, and history and materiality, and studies multiple media in comparison to – and relation to – one another, much as how ‘comparative literature’ generates insights by comparing multiple types of literature. Comparative Media Studies equips students with an understanding of what’s happening when communication in media happens, how that has changed and may further change over time and in and across multiple media, and how to put that learning into practice as media-makers, media critics, or simply better informed media consumers.

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This course will introduce students to the basics of Comparative Media Studies, including overviews of multiple leading schools of media theory (e.g., Marxist theory, gender theory, queer theory, etc.), overviews of the history of leading media forms and new emerging ones (e.g., print, film, TV, VR), and prompts for students to make media works themselves with the new insights they’ve gained. 3 credits, T-TH 3-4:20.

INTD 245, Storytelling for the World Wide Web (Geoffrey Long) Games, YouTube, webcomics, Kindle, Netflix, Facebook, Instagram – the Web is made of stories, but being a storyteller online has its own opportunities and challenges. In this class students will learn about the rise of new media, experience works from an emerging canon of digital stories, and learn about the innovative storytellers that created them.

They will become digital storytellers themselves, creating personal websites, videos for YouTube, interactive text adventure games, short stories for e-readers, webcomics, photo stories, and more, and learn the basics of how to make a living from their creations. 3 credits, T 7-9:50.

January 2020 ENGL 290, Section x, Try Not to Scream; Horror and the Human Condition (Kate Durbin) This course will explore contemporary horror novels as windows into the human condition and the state of the globe. Books include: John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Let Me In, William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist, Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho, and Natsuo Kirino's Out. Films include The Witch, The Cabin in the Woods, and Paranormal Activity. Students will also create their own horror narratives via the gaming platform Twine based on concepts gleaned in class, in collaboration with the Digital Lib Arts Lab. ENGL 290, Section x, Profile Writing (Joe Donnelly) This course focuses on the profile—the art of writing about people (and sometimes wolves). Profile writing is a staple of newspaper and magazine writing. It marries the journalist’s core skills—interviewing, researching, reporting, analyzing, synthesizing and a discipline of verification—to literary techniques such as scene writing, dialogue, anecdote, foreshadowing, character development, plotting and structure. It does this in order to paint indelible portraits of people we care about, whether we knew we cared or not. The best profiles illuminate the current culture, convey larger social issues, and place us firmly in the thick of the human condition.

ENGL 290/390, Sections xx, Writing Poetry in Mexico (Tony Barnstone) Students who take this class should have four poems already written at the start of the term, which they will submit to workshops in Mexico (I will work with students during the fall term to help them prepare these poems, and thus the extra unit credit for the course, 4 not 3).

This poetry writing workshop is a travel class that begins earlier than the normal Jan Term semester starts. Students will travel to Mexico on Jan 2nd, 2020 and stay there for about 10 days, after which the workshop will continue in Whittier. Students will travel with me and another faculty member to San Miguel de Allende where we will attend the 23

San Miguel Poetry Week. which will take place from Wednesday, January 3rd(travel on the 2nd) through the 8th in San Miguel Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico, followed by several days of activities. This is one of the oldest and most important poetry fests in Mexico, and students will attend many readings and give their own participant reading at the end of the week. All students will study not only with me but also with 3 other poets, and you can expect two of them to be some of the most famous poets in America and one to be a famous poet from England. We will also be meeting important writers from Mexico and hearing them read their work. After the week of the festival, students and faculty will remain in San Miguel for several days doing local activities, such as seeing local architecture, going to the botanical gardens, going to natural hot springs, travel to a local pyramid and horseback riding in Coyote Canyon and a visit to the mummies of Guanajuato, all the while writing poems about their experiences. San Miguel has extraordinary 16th and 17th century architecture, thermal baths, colorful markets, fourstar Mexican restaurants and Jazz bars and is known worldwide as one of Mexico's most charming places. This magical town has been a retreat for artists from all over the world.

Great poets such as Pablo Neruda lived here. Neal Cassidy died here. Mexican muralist, David Alfaro Siqueiros painted here. Today writers and artists flock to San Miguel seeking beauty along with a rich cultural scene. The class can be taken either as a beginning writing workshop (ENGL 290) or as an advanced writing workshop (ENGL 390). Students who take it as ENGL 390 will be expected to do more work than at the ENGL 290 level.

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

You’ve seen the movies. You’ve read the books. You may even have dressed up in the costumes. And now you have a chance to sit in a room with 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

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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!”

Related Course You Should Know About But Not Part of the Major INTD 290, Transmedia Storytelling: from Mythology to Marvel (Geoffrey Long) How do you tell stories across multiple media, including those that don't exist yet? As students design their own transmedia storyworlds, they will learn the art, history and business of designing vast storyworlds like Star Wars or the Marvel Universe; the literary history of vast storyworlds including ancient mythology, Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, and literary “shared worlds” including H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulu mythos or George R. R. Martin’s Wild Cards; the fundamentals of writing for multiple media including comics, film, television, video games, augmented reality and virtual reality; and the art of designing experiences that connect these stories together and inspire audiences to tell stories of their own. 4 credits, M-F 10-1. Enrollment: 30.

Spring 2020 See head note at the start of this course listing section for a discussion of the ins and outs of ENGL 120, Why Read? registration.

ENGL 120, Sections xx: 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 xx, Why Read?: Can the Empire Write Back? (Katy Simonian) What is a homeland? Critic and author V. S. Naipaul suggests home exists within the mind of any inhabitant. By contrast, Salmon Rushdie claims that in a sense, homelands and borders are imaginary, subject to both creation and destruction. Rushdie’s “The Empire Writes Back” also posits the idea that postcolonial writers carve and claim large territories within the English language through literature. Other writers such as Jamaica 25

Kincaid, Brian Friel, James Joyce, Jean Rhys, and Chinua Achebe approach this seemingly simple question from the standpoint of language, ownership and cultural subjugation. 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 perceive, understand, and ultimately read the world. During the course of the semester, we will engage with topics such as language, culture, identity, various forms of discrimination and overcoming violent physical and political subjugation through the exploration of selected works of literature from the ever-developing postcolonial era. The course is not simply a survey of Twentieth Century English Literature, but rather a detailed look into varieties of postcolonial fiction from some of the different corners of the former British Empire which dominated the literary world for the last century. By reading literature, with an emphasis on short fiction, from Ireland, Africa, the Caribbean, and India, we can gain a stronger understanding of the complexities of language, which is the connective thread between each of these writers and their works. By the end of the course, we will ask ourselves the question of whether or not voices of the Empire can indeed write back, and in doing so examine the impact of literature on identity and the concept of “homeland” in the context of the colonial and postcolonial experience. To read is to recognize the power of literature as a means of conveying an understanding of ourselves and others. We will endeavor to embrace our power as readers throughout this course.

ENGL 120, Section x: Why Read?: Imprinting L.A. How Los Angeles Became Literature (Joe Donnelly) This class dips into some of the currents in the remarkable rive of literature that runs like blood through the City of Angels. Angeleno literature carries explorers from old worlds to new, from the past to the future and from despair to redemption. Thanks to its great literary tradition, Los Angeles exists as much in our imaginations as it does under our feet and, like the city itself, presents itself as one of the world’s great experiments in multiculturalism. Learn how our most dymamic city writes itself into the public consciousness.

ENGL 120, Section x, Why Read? Home (Away from Home) (Jonathan Burton) In this section of English 120, we will orient our explorations around the trope, or motif, of “Home and Away.” By doing so, we take seriously your current experience living away from home, or shuttling between home and college, and also more generally the ways in which ideas of home, homelessness or alienation shape so many literary experiences. The class will explore a wide range of literary genres including conventional and graphic novels, poetry, podcasts, short stories and electronic literature.

English 120, Section x, Why Read? “Heroes and Heroines” (Sean Morris) In a world where our time and attention are demanded by ever-increasing commitments and distractions, is it worth bothering to read? I don’t mean “read” in the sense of gathering information—reading street signs or application instructions—but the in-depth reading required by complex texts, like a literary novel or a Shakespeare play.

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It won’t surprise you that I think the answer is “yes,” that reading of this kind is inspiring, mind-opening, life-changing. But if there is one lesson you should take away from college, it is never just to accept someone else’s opinion. If I really believe in literature, it’s up to me to try to show you why—and up to you to weigh the evidence and reach your own conclusion.

There is a specific framework for the course: the heroic story, how it has changed (and not changed) over time, and why it might continue to fascinate people even after thousands of years. And as we go we’ll also address some practical goals: close reading skills, academic writing, thinking of literature in terms of its historical context and its genres (such as poetry, fiction, and drama). But ultimately details like these always lead to larger questions about life. We will embrace those larger ideas as well as many other details this semester, some that I suggest and some that you will think of as we go, all within an atmosphere of exploration, adventure, wonder, and fun. Readings will include Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, George Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man, Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

ENGL 221, Major British and American Writers From 1660 (dAvid pAddy) This course continues the survey of literature begun in ENG 220. One of the big differences from the previous course is that in addition to looking at the development of British literary history we will also consider the 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 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? We will read a wide range of poems, stories, essays, and excerpts, and we will read several full length works.

ENGL 290, Underground L<3vers: Digital Poetry and Online Performance Art (Kate Durbin) Digital Poetry and Online Performance Art is a course that explores digital literature and online performance art. Some questions we will consider are: how has the Internet changed our relationship to language and to art? In an era where we are frequently performing versions of ourselves online, what new venues and possibilities for performance have opened up in digital spaces? How are writers and performers using these spaces in creative ways, to reach and interact with audiences?

We will look at digital spaces like social media, chatrooms, YouTube, MMORPGs and more in order to produce experimental, creative works that respond to the specificity of these terrains. We will study digital performance artists who intervene in online spaces,

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such as Angela Washko’s feminist conversation interventions into World of Warcraft and Joe DeLappe’s “dead-in-iraq,” where he recited the names of soldiers killed in the Iraq war in US Army’s online recruiting game “American Army.” We will also explore contemporary poetry by poets who use language from the Internet in their work, such as Sophia LeFraga's "LITERALLYDEAD," which remixes grieving Facebook posts.

ENGL 290, Environmental Journalism (Joe Donnelly) I don’t think it’s extreme to say that the environment is biggest story going. Almost all narratives these days are in some way related to such issues as climate change, scarcity, resource allocation, sustainability and habitat. Covering the environment is a daunting task. It’s as deep as the oceans, as high as the ozone layer and as wide as the earth.

Inconvenient truths grapple with a popular distaste for science and fact. Conservation is often at odds with economic imperatives and entrenched interests. The environment is a tough and amorphous beat to cover. The good news, though, is that amid the seeming onslaught of dark tidings, there are rays of hope and signs of redemption.

During this course, we will strive to get a handle on what it means to be an environmental journalist and then put our understanding to good purpose.

ENGL 302, Advanced Creative Writing Workshop: Advanced Fiction (Michelle Chihara) This course is an advanced creative writing workshop. We will focus primarily on reading and critiquing each other’s work. We will also read a wide range of short stories and excerpts of other work, in order to expose ourselves to an array of idiosyncratic voices, creative approaches and techniques. The class assumes a serious commitment to writing fiction, and some experience with both the workshop format and the short story genre. The workshop is a working writers’ group, where we assume a love of language and a drive to write in ourselves and all of our peers, and focus on pushing each other to discover the strongest expression of our individual voices.

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 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

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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 319, Early Modern Drama (Jonathan Burton) The turn of the seventeenth-century is often considered the golden age of English drama. Would it be so without Shakespeare? This class suggests that Shakespeare was only one contributor to an era of playwriting rich in literary experimentation and radical politics. We will explore nine plays written by Shakespeare’s contemporaries. They cover the usual early modern (and perhaps modern) preoccupations: transvestism, fanaticism, adultery, murder, incest, Jews, Islam, money and world domination.

ENGL 323, Dante (Wendy Furman-Adams) Even with today’s vastly expanded canon, Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) remains one of the "greats" of world literature. In a still-important twentieth-century essay, T. S. Eliot exaggerated only slightly when he wrote, "Dante and Shakespeare divide the [Western] . . . world between them; there is no third. . . . The majority of poems one outgrows and outlives, as one outgrows and outlives the majority of human passions. Dante is one of those which one can only just hope to grow up to at the end of life" ("Dante," in Selected Essays [Faber and Faber, 1932]). Dante's epic journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise is most profoundly a journey inward --a journey that all human beings, in all places and times, must eventually undertake.

But if Dante's Commedia is (at least from an "essentialist" perspective) in some sense perpetually "relevant" to our lives, it is also the supreme literary reflection of a particular time and place: Florence, Italy, ca. 1300. Its huge cast of characters includes the popes, emperors, and nobles both of the past and of the poet's own day; and all three canticles are full of allusions to parties and debates, quarrels, schisms and battles that were of immediate importance to Dante himself. In the midst of nearly perpetual turmoil, Europe was undergoing a great cultural renaissance. And Dante was immersed not only in its politics, but also in its welter of secular and religious ideas.

The Commedia is a fourteenth-century poetic Summa Theologica, a love poem, and a political manifesto. It is also a poetic cathedral with a place for both gargoyles and rose windows; deep darkness and unfathomable light. All aspects of European civilization illuminate Dante's thought and work, and the Commedia demonstrates vividly what a brilliant fourteenth-century mind made of the political, intellectual and aesthetic data of his time and place. But we will also explore the poem's canticles as Dante explored Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise: as places on a journey into the remarkably familiar human mind and heart.

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ENGL 326, Topics in Shakespeare: Rewriting Shakespeare (Joathan Burton) In this class we will use theories of adaptation to explore the ways in which contemporary playwrights have grappled with the legacies of Shakespeare’s plays. For each of Shakespeare’s plays that we read, we will also read one or more feminist, postcolonial, or queer adaptations. In addition to essays on adaptation, students will also complete a scholarly editing assignment and write a scene from their own adaptation of one of Shakespeare’s plays.

ENGL 330, British Literature 1640-1789 (Bethany Wong) This historical survey concentrates on literature of the long-eighteenth century through the thematic lens of “the world turned upside down” (made familiar by Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton). Beginning with the English Civil War and ending with the American and French Revolutions, we will be examining the new and diverse voices— crossing boundaries of class, gender and race—that emerge across genres when central authorities are questioned. What happens when we no longer make assumptions about who should be in power? Whose stories are worth telling? Framing our literary investigations with the concept of “revolution,” we will examine how eighteenth-century authors such as Aphra Behn, Anne Finch, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Richardson, Samuel Johnson and Jane Austen, imagined and wrote about the changes that they wanted to see in the world. We will read novels about royal slaves and teenage servants who rise above their circumstances. In the plays, we will reckon with rakes, fops and coquettes. Our poems will range from lofty ideas about the Great Chain of Being to scatological humor about highly-decorated chamber pots. Come prepared to make some literary friends and enemies, who will help you reflect on the parts of the current world that you want to turn upside down.

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 356, Twenty-First-Century British Fiction (dAvid pAddy) We are now twenty years into the 21st century. What does Britain and British literature look like today? What are the issues that define the place and time and that concern writers now?Who are the major voices that are sticking around and who are the emerging talents to keep our eyes open for? The“contemporary” is an ever-evolving phenomenon, which means this isa class that will undergo constant change.The class will take the last seventeen years or so as a distinct block of time, and we will take this opportunity to see what aesthetic and social concerns are shaping the literature coming out of Britain today. I foresee such prominent issues as the evolving shape of national identity, the concern with history and historical narrative, the omnipresence of trauma and the effects of technology. But we’ll really have to wait and see. Some possible contenders are: Zadie Smith’s Swing Time, Evie Wyld’s All the Birds, Singing, Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home, China Miéville’s Un Lun Dun, Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, Kate Tempest’s Hold Your Own, David Mitchell’s Slade House, Ali Smith’s Autumn and Sarah Moss Ghost Wall.

ENGL 366, Whitman and Melville (Charles S. Adams) Whitman and Melville lived at pretty much the same time, and both produced incredibly significant works at virtually the same literary moment, thinking about similar issues, but taking quite different views. Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Melville’s Moby-Dick are huge, epic, dense, profound, difficult, obtuse, spiritual, contradictory, offensive, erotic, glorious, insane, cosmic, and deeply rewarding (to mention just a few aspects). MobyDick is so important that I see some new reference to it every week (I have lost count of the number of references in the various Star Trek iterations). Apple and Volvo have been using Whitman in their ads, assuming we all rcognize his words, I guess. We will look at the writers closely and take our time to know all that we can about the books and the times that produced them. Yes, one book each, and half the semester on each. We are going to follow the whales to the deepest level we can. This is the good stuff, folks— the texts that changed everything, that try to do everything, that head us to the modern.

Not for the faint of heart or those who like to think small. But you will be a member of the few who have actually read the works. And we will try to do at least one field trip to go whale watching! NOTE: For ENGL minors, the course will count in the “major figure” category.

ENGL 371, Contemporary American Poetry (Tony Barnstone) This is a course in poetry of the postmodern tradition from the mid-twentieth century to the present day. Students will read such authors as Robert Lowell, Frank O'Hara, John

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Ashbery, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Allen Ginsberg, James Wright, Theodore Roethke, and Yusef Komunyakaa. Some international poets might be covered as well. In addition, students will read the work of living poets who will be visiting the college. Though this is a survey class, it is one in which students will become extensively familiar with a small, representative group of poets through whose work a portrait of the larger movements of postmodern poetry will be sketched.

ENGL 375, ChicanX Literature (Michelle Chihara) Who draws the boundaries between countries? Who gets to decide what they mean?

What could it mean to have a "border identity"?

In recent decades, scholars in various academic disciplines have recognized the contributions made to the United States and American culture by Chicano/a and Latino/a authors, artists and performers. People who self-identify as Latinos in general and Chicanos in particular make up an increasingly large section of the North Americanpopulation. In this course, students will gain an appreciation and understanding of the growing body of Chicano literature, and an awareness of the significance of Chicano cultural production to the field of American literature. We will approach the literature from an interdisciplinary perspective and will examine assigned texts within their larger historical, social, and political contexts.

The course will concentrate on concepts that have played a significant role in the focus and development of Chicana literary studies: race and racialization, gender and sexuality, labor and social class. The biographies of most Chicano writers reveal an experience within the United States in large part shaped by migration, economic necessity, racial and gendered forms of marginalization, and working-class struggles.

While the course presupposes a connection between history and literature, part of the objective for the class will be to assess and interrogate such connections. How does literature engage with the greater democratic dialogue? What are literature’s responsibilities? How do questions of personal identity interact and intersect with groups and social movements?

In Southern California, we live very close to the Mexican border. We will use Chicano literature as a means of exploring the artistic, social, and political ramifications of this border—because borders affect everyone who lives within them.

ENGL 385, Celtic Literature (dAvid pAddy) The Celts continue to hold an astonishing power over us to this day. You may find yourself strolling through a bookstore, music shop, New Age boutique, or even a stationary store, and you might find a strange variety of objects labeled “Celtic.” But what might this mean? What is Celtic? Who are the Celts? (Or should the question be reserved solely for the past tense?) This semester we will examine the history and legacy of the Celts. Covering an impossibly large span, we will begin by reading about the earliest archaeological records and move on through to the present day. How much connection there is between the original Celts of mainland Europe and the people now

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congregating at the fringes and extremities of Britain is still a source of scholarly debate, but, in this course, we will accept the term as it applies to the literature of Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Cornwall, the Isle of Man and Brittany. The course schedule will be divided in two halves. In the first, we will examine the origins of the Celts, and read samples of the earliest surviving literature of the British Isles, with a focus on the Irish Táin and the Welsh Mabinogion. In the second half, we will look at Celtic revivalism, from the novel uses made of the Celts by the Romantics to their appropriation by modernist and postmodernist writers. By the end of the semester, we may hope to have some sense of the complex set of concepts, histories and literatures that we have come to call Celtic.

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, Senior Seminar: 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 wrote 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.

Our lives, then, are 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 medieval world-view gave way to what would become the Enlightenment. It was a period in which men--at least an elite of outstanding and

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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 consider 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, Preceptorship: Teaching Literature (Various Faculty) See description in Fall listing.

Related Courses You Should Know About But Are Not Part of the Major INTD 290, Creating Storyworlds: Worldbuilding the Real World (Geoffrey Long) The art of worldbuilding is key to designing fictional worlds like Star Wars or the Marvel Universe, but it’s also an incredibly powerful tool for individuals, governments and corporations to influence real-world change. Students will learn the art of “non-fiction worldbuilding” or futurecasting – how to draw from current technological, cultural and political trends to collaboratively envision new futures for the real world, how to write design fictions with a human lens at the center, and craft plans for collaboratively making those visions into reality. (No prerequisite is required, but students who took INTD.246 Introduction to Game Design in the 2018 January term or spring semester or the 2019 January term INTD.290: Creating Storyworlds: Transmedia Storytelling from Mythology to Marvel course will find this to be a rewarding sequel.)

INTD 246, Introduction to Game Design (Geoffrey Long) Almost everyone enjoys playing games, but what do terms like "play" and "game" actually mean, and how do games really work? As they make multiple games of their own, students will learn the history, theory and fundamentals of game design, how to think critically about games, how games are used for simulation and education, and the art and business of fun and games. (No prerequisite is required, but students who took INTD.246 Introduction to Game Design in the 2018 January term or spring semester or the 2019 January term Transmedia Storytelling course will find this a rewarding sequel

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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, now.

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— 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 supports 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 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, Latinex 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 35

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 Professor; Associate Dean for and Director of the Whittier Scholars Program; Director, Digital Liberal Arts (19th Century British, Postcolonial Studies, Womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Studies, Travel, Literary Theory) Visiting Assistant Professors: Joseph Donnelly: jdonnel1@whittier.edu Geoffrey Long: glong@whittier.edu Bethany Wong: bwong2@whittier.edu Visiting Instructors: Kate Durbin: kdurbin@whittier.edu Katy Simonian: ksimonia@whittier.edu Director, College Writing Programs: Charlie Eastman: ceastman@whittier.edu English/History/Writing Program Departments Administrative Assistant: Angela Olivas: aolivas@whittier.edu

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