IN ENGLISH Occasional Newsletter of the Whittier College Department of English Language and Literature Volume 15, #1, November, 2014 Charles S. Adams, Editor
On-Line Presence Some of you may be aware that the Whittier College English Department has a Facebook page. Librarian and information guru Mike Garabedian, and Professor Andrea Rehn have been managing it, and they ask that those of you who are into such things “like” it. And we think there is a lot to like. Your editor finds that sometimes the links work and sometimes they do not. Most of you know how to find the stuff without them. https://www.facebook.com/WhittierCollegeEnglishDepartment Last year, as part of our outreach to alums and friends, we created a small, possibly temporary site managed by our colleagues in the alumni/advancement offices. It is now out of date, but still exists. It has a number of bits of amusement not found elsewhere: http://poetsforpoets.wordpress.com/ And our regular 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.
The English Department Writing Awards (This Means Money and Everlasting Glory) Every year we offer a set of prizes for the best work submitted by students in the areas of poetry, fiction, and scholarly writing. Be sure to stay tuned for the announcements asking for submissions for next year’s awards—the deadlines will be fairly early in Spring Semester. You cannot win if you do not enter. All Whittier students are eligible to enter. The submission dates are always in early spring semester. The prizes are cash (well, checks actually). You could win more than some of your professors have made
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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. Any student can submit
Faculty News dAvid pAddy: “At the start of this semester I received an invitation to act as advisor for a volume on Imperialism and Short Fiction for the Gale Cengage research series, Short Story Criticism. This has been a unique project for me, and I am just finishing a major stage in helping identify a number of critical articles for the volume. In the rare moments to pause and think about things that are not class or committee related, I have begun plotting my next major research project, which will bring me back to my interest in all things Celtic. After working on the Ballard and Tintin projects that focused on worldliness and anti-parochial views, I am wanting to address the matter from another side and examine the notion of small nation nationalism in the British context. The recent Scottish referendum revealed a complex picture of the call for national independence today, something I will definitely want to explore, though my starting point will most likely be the strange case of Cornwall and Cornish literature. Stay tuned.” Jonathan Burton: “Over the summer I took up stand-up paddle boarding down in Alamitos Bay. Surfing is fun, but stand-up-paddle boarding is easy! If you can stand on a boat, you can stand on a paddle board. We also took our daughter to see her first arena concert, Demi Lovato at the Staples Center. Demi might not have been my first choice, but I’ll give her this: she does know how to put on a show for girls ages 7-22. In more academic pursuits, I published an article entitled “Christopher Sly’s Arabian Night” exploring the shared lineage of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew and the Arabian Nights tale, “The Sleeper and the Waker.” The piece makes a call for moving away from categorizing literature according to national traditions (e.g., English Literature, American Literature, etc.) and considering instead the multiple and intersecting pathways traveled by story types and genres.” Wendy Furman-Adams: “Last June I had the wonderful good luck of chairing a session at a conference held at Penshurst Place, the Sidney family estate in Kent. This remarkably unaltered fourteenth-century house is an English geek's paradise. Built in 1347 and home of the Sidney family since 1552, the house was eulogized by Ben Jonson in a famous country house poem and was the home of Lady Mary Wroth, where she fell in love with her cousin William Herbert (Amphilanthus) and wrote the first comedy written in England by a woman (Love's Victory, ca. 1618). Our group was made up of our hosts, the Sidney d' Lile family (including the current Philip Sidney, a new Cambridge Ph.D. in modern literature), and about fifty academics from England, Canada and the U.S. After two days of stimulating papers on the Sidney circle--all in an ancient stone room with Tudor windows--we witnessed the second-ever production of Wroth's play in the 1300s great hall where it was first produced, probably under Wroth's own direction. It was also a thrill to stroll Penshurst's gardens--through the
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peach orchard celebrated by Jonson, through labyrinths like the one inspiring Wroth's crown of sonnets--in the place that, for me, most embodies the spirit of Elizabethan and Stuart England. This coming March (perhaps somewhat ironically) I'm off to Berlin, to chair a roundtable on "Early Modern Pain" at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America. And in July I'll be delivering a paper at the eleventh International Milton Symposium in Exeter, England. Then it's home to begin my sabbatical--during which I desperately hope to finish work on my long-gestating book on illustrators of Milton, Visualizing Paradise Lost.” Tess Taylor: “It’s been fun getting to know Whittier students this fall: We had a great reading series, busted some clichés wide open, and studied different ways of approaching poems. Right now I’m looking forward to campus visits by poets David Tomas Martinez and Glyn Maxwell, and to our end of semester poetry reading and dinner at Hartley House. I’m also planning my classes for the spring so a great deal of my recent reading has to do with that. One of my classes will be about Sherlock Holmes, and another will be a class in long-form reporting! Come and figure out how to piece together clues and evidence in each one. I’m currently reading lots in my role on the National Book Critics Circle Board. One book that has me intrigued is some contemporary parables about and micro-examinations of race in America, called Citizen: An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine.” Charles S. Adams: “I spent a lot of the summer working with my father’s collection of books, intended mostly to come to the Whittier College Library. But it all needed documentation. Included are many, many books on Ireland and Irish literature (especially Yeats), a significant collection of modernist poetry (much of it collected by my grandfather who did a lot of buying in the 1920’s—of unknown people like Robert Frost), many books on British romantic poetry (especially Blake), and a huge number of books on literary theory and philosophy. What I have realized is that his and my grandfather’s interest has always been mostly in poetry, if the book collection has any single overarching theme. I have also been pat of the creation of the Whittier Institute for the Study of Baseball (in cooperation with an organization called The Baseball Reliquary). Joe Price is the director, and Mike McBride is also involved. I am hoping to shift my own attentions there more as I get the library project finished in some way.” Logan Esdale: In October an article, “Adorning Myself to Bestow Myself: Reading Leaves of Grass in 1860,” was published in Walt Whitman Among the Bohemians (U of Iowa P), and in January I’ll be up in Vancouver, Canada (my home city, basically, though I grew up about four hours northwest of Vancouver), at the MLA conference to give a couple of papers. One is on that other mid-19th-century game-changing poet, Emily Dickinson: I’m interested in the role that uninhabitable space played in her poetic and spiritual imagination. The other is the fiction of Percival Everett and more generally the diary in African-American literature. I’m also continuing work on two Gertrude Stein projects. The first I am co-editing with Deborah Mix at Ball State University, “Approaches to Teaching Gertrude Stein,” which is for the Modern 3
Language Association’s series on Approaches to Teaching World Literature. The second is a monograph, “Gertrude Stein in Letters,” which is on Stein’s use of letters as her career evolved. This will in part be a study of her archive at Yale, and to help me I have the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library’s Edith and Richard French Fellowship for the 2014-15 year. After the MLA conference I’ll be at Yale for three weeks. I may not rested at the start of the spring semester, but I should be buzzing from it all. Katy Simonian: “I have the great opportunity to co-teach a Jan Term class with Professor Mike McBride, entitled INTD 290- "Baseball in Literature and Film." Our course took a critical look at the history of baseball, the players and managers who changed the dynamic of the sport and the contextual, socio-political and cultural history that corresponds with the great changes within the sport that have transformed over time. We use a great deal of literature from Jackie Robinson's personal story and the history of the Black Sox scandal to the compelling rivalry of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig and the current clash between methods of scouting and sabermetrics. Our course compliments each literary source with films, from features to documentaries to bring the words on the page to life and allow students to see the faces of the many people who continue to transform America's favorite pastime. We plan to offer the course again and hope to welcome students to the class and to the Baseball Reliquary, a growing archive of the sport which may soon find its home at Whittier College. Fans of baseball, film, and/or literature, sign up and let's play ball!”
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.)
Alumni and Study Abroad News We get notes, phone calls, bricks through windows. From some of you. We see people, when they remember to stop by. Sometimes we hunt them down, when we know where to look. We are not printing any notes this time, however, as we have found that Google does include this letter, and some folks seem not to want to be found. If you want to send us information about yourself that you would like others to hear, please send it, but tell us specifically that you do not mind our printing it. Mary Helen Truglia, now in the graduate program at Indiana says: I'm excited to be able to tell you that I've just had a paper accepted for the Newberry Conference in January. I will be giving a paper on (Lyotardian) figurations of gender in Wroth's Pamphilia to Amphilanthus as part of a panel on gender in the Renaissance.
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Floyd Cheung, now an Associate Professor of English at Smith College, and founding chair of the Five College Asian/Pacific/American Studies Certificate Program, just published his latest book, this time a volume of his own poetry, Jazz at Manzanar from Finishing Line Press.
What Have We Been Reading Lately? dAvid pAddy: “A trip to Scotland this past summer had me reading a great deal of Robert Louis Stevenson. A wonderful coincidence was that we stayed in a B&B in Ballachulish, which sat just next to the “murder cairn” marking the site of the Appin murder that’s central to Stevenson’s Kidnapped. While in England I picked up Naomi Alderman’s The Liar’s Gospel. I discovered Alderman while teaching the Granta volume on best new young British novelists in Contemporary British Literature last semester. The Alderman piece was a class favorite, and The Liar’s Gospel certainly lived up to expectations: A fascinating historical novel that examines the lives around Jesus. Highly recommended. I also picked up Deborah Levy’s response to Orwell’s “Why I Write,” Things I Don’t Want to Know, which is one of the smartest and most beautiful books I’ve read about writing in some time. This made me finally come back to Levy’s jaw-droppingly good novella Swimming Home. A must read. Over the summer I learned about the contemporary Icelandic novelist Sjón, who A. S. Byatt has recently gone all giddy over. I read The Whispering Muse and The Blue Fox. These are strange and mesmerizing works. Hard to describe, but certainly worth exploring. Kevin Birmingham’s The Most Dangerous Book examines the trials James Joyce went through to write Ulysses and get it published, as well as the literal court trials that led to the book’s banning and eventual freedom from censorship. Eminently readable and an amazing book about literature and the law. Recently I have been on a bit of a Georges Perec binge, giving myself a chance to catch up on some newly translated works: I Remember, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, La boutique obscure and Three by Perec. And what am I actually reading right now? Ronald Hutton’s epic history, Pagan Britain, which allows me to indulge in my fantasies of being an amateur archaeologist, the first volume of the Library of Wales anthology of Welsh short fiction, and back in for a re-reading of Philip K Dick’s A Maze of Death. As always, there prove to be more books than time.” Charles S. Adams: “I am going to go small here and mention just one book in particular, Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark. That Peter is a friend is part of it, but it is a wonderful work on the history of the Pacific Northwest community of Astoria, at the mouth of the Columbia River, still very much alive. It is named after John Jacob Astor, the Bill Gates of the fur trade, and lies near Lewis and Clark’s encampment, so you have conjunctions of all sorts of threads of American history. Quite a tale. As always, I guess I read more about books than books themselves. The New York Review of Books, TLS, and The London Review of Books pile up each week in overwhelming ways, but each has great stuff.” Jonathan Burton: “In an effort to learn a bit about Southern California, I finally read Mike Davis’s City of Quartz, a study of the economic development of Los Angeles. 5
Where Davis’s story is fascinating, it doesn’t devote adequate attention to Latino culture, so I turned to David Reyes and Tom Waldman’s Land of a Thousand Dances: Chicano Rock ‘n’ Roll from Southern California. Here you’ll find, among other things, a terrific history of Whittier Boulevard in music. My favorite poetry reading has been in Out of Sequence, a collection of remixed Shakespearean sonnets edited by D. Gilson. Also quite fabulous is The Forage House by our own Tess Taylor. In my novel reading, I returned to some favorites and explored some new authors. Because I absolutely adored David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, I went back to his first novel, Ghostwritten. Here you’ll find Mitchell developing his trademark interlocked stories. This wasn’t quite as mind-blowing as Cloud Atlas, but it has me excited for Mitchell’s brand new novel, The Bone Clocks. I also read Hilary Mantel’s Bring up the Bodies, her Booker Prize winning sequel to the Booker Prize winning Wolf Hall. Does Mantel deserve all this praise? Absolutely. Her prose is utterly intoxicating and the sixteenthcentury scene that she depicts is at once historically accurate and stunningly contemporary. Also recommended is Meg Wollitzer’s The Interestings, a novel that oscillates temporally through the life stories of a group of talented and privileged white kids.” Wendy Furman-Adams: “As usual at this time of year, summer seems like eons ago-the last time I found time to read much of anything (besides the Times and New Yorker) not immediately connected with classes and, when I'm really lucky, my current research. But summer is a reading bonanza, and it's interesting to look back on that glorious time of leisure to see what still sticks in the mind. I read a number of novels last summer, but three of them truly stand out: two gorgeously elegiac and heartbreakingly elegant, one a fantastic mash-up of mad-cap cultural fun. The first (and my very favorite) is John Williams' Stoner, a quietly tragic academic novel that was first published in the mid-sixties but has recently become a belated sensation in Europe and the U.S. On the advice of The New York Times, I made it my first summer read, became addicted--reading late into the night--and cried when it ended, both because the ending is sad and because I was sad to leave its protagonist behind. One jacket blurb said Stoner had replaced Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Soldier as the reviewer's favorite book of all time. The comparison is striking. Although told in the third person, this novel too takes us deep within an intelligent and very reflective character--a Midwestern college English professor--whose life, from the 1890s through post-WWII, careens inexorably out of his control. His only heroism comes in enduring to the end without lasting bitterness, remaining true to his own values in a world that crushes them. Some readers don't see what's so great about the novel, and find William Stoner so hopelessly ineffectual that they lose patience with his suffering. I think loving this novel may be a bit like loving literature: in a world increasingly about market share, Stoner is achingly idealistic, in tune with a kind of beauty not visible to those whose lives are about power and success. It's a good thing I enjoy a certain amount of summer melancholy, since I followed my reading of Stoner with Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping: an achingly poetic novel about how difficult it can be for human beings to hold their lives together--materially, 6
emotionally, socially, spiritually. By the time I finished, I was definitely ready for something entirely different: Zadie Smith's brilliantly crazy first novel, White Teeth--a multi-racial, multi-religious family saga set in 70s-90s London, in which--against all odds--people keep on surviving all the madness of postmodern urban life.� Katy Simonian: “At the end of last year, I read Salmon Rushdie's Joseph Anton: A Memoir, an autobiographical account of the ten years he spent under the guard of the British Secret service in the wake of the fatwa that was issued for his life by the Ayatollah Khomeini in response to The Satanic Verses. I also re-read a favorite by Ian McEwan, called Amsterdam, which I am convinced will and should be adapted for film. I am currently reading a series of short stories by William Saroyan, called My Name is Aram, which offers an imaginative, at times childlike perspective of a young child living California who describes life within his Armenian family who live outside their motherland, having immigrated to America after the Armenian Genocide of 1915. His work is always a pleasure to read and I find I am able to appreciate its complexity more since I first became aware of his writing when I was a child. I am also considering weaving his work as well as the works of other Diasporan authors into my course on postcolonial short fiction as a way to showcases different experiences of exile, faith and self discovery that occur within multiculturalism and the creation of such stories which speak to us all. On another note, I am conducting research on life of Hedy Lamarr, the famous Hollywood Star and inventor whose compelling story is unknown by many, and a passion project for me as her accomplishments are quite wonderful."
English Department Courses January and Spring 2015 (All subject to some change) Below is supplemental information from most of the faculty about the departmental courses scheduled for the 2014-2015 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, the department office, or our department chair, Wendy Furman-Adams for answers to questions these descriptions might raise. We note as well that some instructors may be teaching courses in the Interdisciplinary (INTD) category or are based in other departments, and their descriptions may not all appear here. Students should consult the Whittier College Catalog concerning prerequisites for all courses. In particular, many courses require ENGL 110 or 120 or their equivalent as a pre-requisite for enrollment. Some courses taught as part of pairs require co-enrollment in the paired course. See the instructors if you have questions.
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ENGL 110 note (only offered in Fall): This course is designed for first-semester, firstyear students with a strong background and continuing interest in the study and writing of literature. While it counts toward the requirements of the English major (as an alternative to ENGL 120), it does not fulfill the COM 2 (writing intensive) requirement as ENGL 120 does. But do not despair—we have worked to designate many of our other courses to fulfill this requirement, which should be reflected in the schedule of courses. ENGL 120 note: Many sections of “Why Read?” are available. Instructors will organize the course around specific themes of their own devising, though all sections have the same goals. All of them count for the COM 2 Lib Ed requirement and will enable a student to then take upper-level English courses. Where there is no extended description, the instructor is still thinking about it. It is always possible that if a particular section does not draw enough students in preregistration it could be cancelled. If this happens, students should see their advisors, the registrar’s office, or any member of the English Department and we will do our best to find an open spot in another section.
January 2015 ENGL 204: Playwriting Workshop (Lisa Grissom) This course introduces students to the basics of writing for the stage including character, structure, dialogue and action. The course will include reading and critiquing plays as well as in-class writing exercises and sharing of work. Students will each write a ten-minute play which will be workshopped and shared with the class. Plays we will study include Death of a Salesman (Arthur Miller), How I Learned To Drive (Paula Vogel), August: Osage County (Tracy Letts) and All In The Timing (David Ives) among others.
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 30 people and talk about it. Tolkien was recently voted the most important author of the twentieth century, and in this course we will try to find out why, through discussion of his major works and their significance, and also through an investigation of the vast array of medieval sources on which he drew. We will also consider and evaluate the recent film adaptations, and take a brief look both at those languages that inspired Tolkien and at those he created himself. Required coursework includes daily readings and reading quizzes, an oral presentation, and two papers. The reading list for this course is very substantial, and I strongly advise getting a head start. The Fellowship of the Ring, at least, must be finished before the first day of class. Works by Tolkien: The Fellowship of the Rings, The Two Towers, The Return of the King (plus some of the Appendix material), The Hobbit, “Farmer Giles of Ham” (in The Tolkien Reader), several chapters of The Silmarillion, 1 chapter of the Unfinished Tales, and selections from The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. Works by other authors:
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Humphrey Carpenter’s J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Sir Orfeo; Beowulf; Chaucer’s “The Pardoner’s Tale”; Shakespeare’s Macbeth; Snorri Sturluson’s Edda (some 100 pages); The Kalevala (a few chapters); The Volsungasaga (less than 100 pages); and “Fafnismal” (less than 10 pages). A preliminary syllabus is posted on my office door, and I have a sign-up sheet in my office, Hoover 209, where you’ll need to come have your card signed, as instructor permission is required. Don’t despair! The readings are long, but also fun. “All you have to do is decide what to do with the time that is given you.” See you in January. “Forth, Eorlingas!” ENGL 290: Try Not to Scream: Horror and the Human Condition (Kate Durbin) ENGL 390: Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy (Scott Creley)
Spring 2015 See note above for a discussion of the ins and outs of 120 registration. ENGL 120: Why Read? Section 1 (Scott Creley) “Life During Wartime” “Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt” – Kurt Vonnegut This class will explore why we read by studying texts that expose the surprising tenderness with which we humans behave during even our darkest hours. The texts selected for this semester are all stories people at war who are struggling to survive and craft meaning during the most difficult eras of recent human history. The texts we'll study include Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner, and David Benioff's City of Thieves. These novels give vast, sweeping events in American history a ground-level, personal perspective. They help the reader become involved in the moral struggles that define human beings and create meaningful lives. The assignments for this class will focus on the big ethical questions and philosophical ideas embedded in the texts. These wellloved novels will make this class a fun but intellectually stimulating endeavor, and even those who don't think of themselves as “readers” will find a new love for literature in these novels. ENGL 120: Why Read? Section 2 (Scott Creley) See above, Section 1, for description. ENGL 120: Why Read? Section 3 (Kate Durbin) “Exquisite Terror: Fairy Tales and Horror Stories.” Many historical folk and fairy tales can be read as precursors to today¹s modern horror narratives, stories that have something important to teach us about cultural fears, needs, taboos, and desires. While contemporary fairy tales are often lighthearted, and centered on contrived happy endings, in this course, we will
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study the scariest and most morally ambiguous of the fairy tales, from the terrifying torture chamber of Bluebeard to the cannibalistic witch of Hansel snd Gretel. We will look at these tales as windows into past cultural traumas. We will also trace the fairy tales traumatic legacy into modern horror novels from contemporaries of the horror genre such as Stephen King, Natsuo Kirino, Angela Carter, Shirley Jackson, Anne Rice, and others. In doing so, we will gain valuable insight into our current cultural condition. ENGL 120: Why Read? Section 4 (Kate Durbin) See above, Section 3, for description. ENGL 120: Why Read? Section 5 (Katy Simonian) “Can the Empire Write Back?” Critic and author V. S. Naipaul sees colonization as an overwhelming cultural experience that renders the colonized permanently disabled. By contrast, Salmon Rushdie claims that “those whom [the English] once colonized are carving out large territories within the language for themselves” (“The Empire Writes Back”). The title of this course, Why Read?, challenges us to appreciate the broader concerns of literature and the impact of language on the way in which we perceive, understand, and ultimately read the world. During the course of the semester, we will engage in the debate set up between the perspectives of Naipaul and Rushdie and identify where some selected works of fiction fall within the spectrum of critical interpretation set up in their work. The course is not meant to be a survey of twentieth century English literature, but rather a detailed look into varieties of postcolonial fiction from some of the different corners of the former Empire which dominated the literary world for the last century. By reading works of 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 language plays on identity in the context of the colonial experience and recognize the power of literature as a means of conveying an understanding of these issues to readers. ENGL 120: Why Read? Section 6 (Katy Simonian) See above, Section 5, for description. ENGL 120: Why Read? Section 7 (Logan Esdale) Why Read? Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose In this course we will consider not only what we read for as we read—an approach to reading that puts the reader nominally in charge of the meaning-making process—but also what reading does to us; the latter perspective helps us understand the need to adjust reading strategies according to the type of text in our hands. Our books will span a number of genres: poetry, fiction, drama, the essay, and graphic narrative. At the risk of simplifying, we might say that poetry is a spatial and social discourse, fiction is a moving around in time, drama creates the illusion that it’s all happening now, the essay is a direct address purporting to explain, and graphic narrative is both filmic in creating narratives out of juxtaposed static images and literary in its use of words, which represent internal consciousness. Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855), Nella 10
Larsen’s Passing (1929), Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929), Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938), and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006)—we’ll focus on how these books refuse the notion that words, ideas or human identities have only one meaning. Whitman redefines poetry, the reader, the body and America itself; Larsen unsettles the black-white dichotomy and the marriage bond; Wilder breaks the “fourth wall” that separates actors and audience; Woolf redefines the woman writer and the gender of genius; and Bechdel’s graphic narrative describes how socio-historical changes can redefine familial and sexual identities. ENGL 120: Why Read? Section 8 (Logan Esdale) See Section 7 above. ENGL 120: Why Read? Section 9 (dAve 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 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?” In this course, 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 title inspired this course, urges us to open literature so that we may think about some of the great matters of life, and we will build on his book by reading a great variety of texts that contemplate 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. ENGL 120: Why Read? Section 10 (Tess Taylor) “Imagining California” A look at Californian stories of place and displacement, arrival and belonging, homelessness and home. ENGL 221: Major British and American Writers From 1660 (Charles S. Adams) 11
This course continues the survey of literature begun in ENG 220 (Which is a prerequisite). One of the big differences in this course from ENGL 221 is that in addition to continuing our review of 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 consider the impact on literature of matters such as the rise and fall of the British Empire, the building of the American nation, the historical importance of revolution and industrialization, and 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?” Out of some necessity, we will focus on representative works rather than trying to do it all. ENGL 290: Writing Dramatic Monologues and Documentary Poetry (Tony Barnstone) This is a brand new course in poetry writing and I plan to spend part of my sabbatical trying to figure out how to teach it. The concept behind the course is to use translation, transformation and adaptation techniques in poetry writing, and we’ll be reading poets who have written work based on historical research into topics such as the Salem witch trials the history of slavery and racism in the South, working from oral histories, diaries, letters, interviews, trial transcripts, and so on. The course will be paired with THEA 392, Performing Nonfiction, taught by Jennifer Holmes, which uses similar research techniques to culminate in a one-person show. Note that co-enrollment with THEA 392 is a requirement for entry into the course and I don’t plan on being very flexible about that. Luckily, the creative writing offerings for the year are quite rich, so chances are you can take another kind of poetry workshop, even if you don’t get into this one. ENGL 302: Advanced Fiction Writing (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. I hope to approach the workshop as a working writers’ group, where we assume a love of language and a drive to write in 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 12
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 306: Creative Nonfiction (Tess Taylor) The Lyric Essay and the Long Form: A Nonfiction Workshop Calling all worldly observers: What does it mean to craft the truth? How do we report at length? How does a writer carve what he or she sees and reports into something artful but also revealing? How- using the forms of both reporting and the exploratory essay- can we learn to use the world around us to reveal our thinking to ourselves? We will look at work by writers like Lawrence Weschler, Eula Biss, Joan Didion, and Ted Conover- all masters of building literature out of reported truth. And we¹ll examine the traditions of the exploratory essay and of lyric reporting looking reporting by Charles Dickens, Walt Whitman and Ryszard Kapuscinski. In the process we¹ll look at innovative voices, structures, and points of view, as well as discussing reportorial technique. Examining how long-form reporting uses the formal tools of literary fiction to carve graceful narratives out of observed truth, we too will imitate the projects we find. In this class we¹ll embark on several critical essays- and also several reported projects of our own. ENGL 311: History of the English Language (Sean Morris) This is your language 1000 years ago: “Hwæt! We gardena in geardagum þeodcyninga þrym gefrunon, hu þa æþelingas ellen fremmedon.” What happened?!?! How did we get here from there? And while we’re at it, we still want to know why “police” and “ice” don’t rhyme, but “knight” and “bite” do. And why can you have two dogs, but not two sheeps or oxes? And why do they talk funny in other states, calling a “soda” a “pop” and other crazy things? Why? I will tell you why, if first you sojourn with me through… the History of the English Language. Welcome to H-E-L! ENGL 321: British Literature 700-1500 (Sean Morris) Monsters and heroes and saints, oh my! This course is part “Greatest Hits of Medieval England” and part “Secret, Shocking, Fun Texts of Medieval England.” We’ll read such classics as Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Morte d-Arthur, possibly some Canterbury Tales alongside lesser-known works like The Owl and the Nightingale, Havelok the Dane, William and the Werewolf, and even Anglo-Saxon handbooks on punishment. These texts will give you the usual modern understanding of the Middle Ages, and will also show you where this paradigm falls short. Some texts will be read in Middle English—don’t worry, we’ll get you through it! (Who thought “getting medieval” could be so fun?) ENGL 323: Dante (Wendy Furman-Adams) Even in our era of a vastly expanding canon, Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) is one of a handful of writers who make up the virtually undisputed "greats" of European literature. In a still-important twentiethcentury essay, T. S. Eliot exaggerated only slightly when he wrote, "Dante and
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Shakespeare divide the modern 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 in which most human beings are in some sense engaged. But if Dante's Commedia is (at least from an "essentialist" perspective) still powerfully "relevant" to our twenty-first-century lives, it is also the supreme literary reflection of a different, and very 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. ENGL 325: Literature of the English Renaissance (Wendy Furman-Adams) This course on the English Renaissance represents a kaleidoscope of perspectives and interpretations. Even the name Renaissance--invented in the nineteenth century--is itself an interpretation of what we now more often call the "early modern" period. The early modern period introduced such cultural phenomena as the rise of nation states; the development of a stable monarchy; the Protestant and Catholic Reformations; the rise of literacy, a money economy, and a vastly expanded middle class. This period, dated roughly 1400 to 1660, is also the "age of exploration"--and the first truly global era. The Renaissance is an intellectual movement that took place at the very same time: the rise of Neo-Platonic Humanism and the reform of education along humanist lines; the shift from a courtly to a Petrarchan model of romantic love; and a new interest in the natural world as a subject for study in and of itself. All of these perspectives will come into play, as we explore the works of such figures as Wyatt, Castiglione, the Sidney circle, Spenser, Marlowe, Raleigh, Shakespeare, Southwell, Jonson, Donne, Wroth, Philips, and Milton. ENGL 326: Topics in Shakespeare Studies: Shakespeare in American Life (Jonathan Burton) This course serves as an introduction to one of the most exciting areas of contemporary Shakespeare Studies in focusing on Shakespeare’s shifting place in American culture. We will read intensively seven of Shakespeare’s plays and examine the ways in which they have taken on new and sometimes troubling forms and meanings in American culture from the 18th century up to the present. Our exploration 14
of the American afterlives of Shakespearean drama will feature a range of contexts, including literary and political life, education, performance and popular culture. ENGL 336: The European Novel (dAve pAddy) This course is paired with Elizabeth Sage’s HIST 363 Socialism and Revolution in Modern Europe, and together we will explore some of the literature, art and history from the end of the 18th century through the end of the twentieth century, a period rife with revolutionary sentiments in Europe. Think of this as a set of classes in the relationship between art and revolution. My readings will have us think about the changing ways that literature in the modern period has attempted to represent or wrestle with ideas of social and cultural change. We will look at works that attempt to address revolutionary moments directly through content, as well as avant-garde works that make claims to the revolutionary nature of artistic forms in and of themselves. Readings will be heavy and exciting. [I do not know yet what I will use, but some of these are possibilities: Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, Emile Zola’s Germinal, Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, and Herta Müller’s The Appointment, as well as avant-garde manifestoes and political essays by Theodor Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Gyorgy Lukacs and Guy Debord.] Note: Students wishing to enroll in this course will be required to take the pair. Please contact me and Professor Sage for signatures. ENGL 355: Contemporary Drama (Jonathan Burton) Drama and theatre have always been anxious forms; writings from Aristotle, Plato, and Horace make claims about the impact of theatrical expression on the life, mind and morality of its practitioners and spectators. Theater, many argue, is dangerous. As a result, one of the areas of greatest interest in contemporary drama has been metadrama, plays interested in the possibilities and responsibilities of playwright, actor, and audience. In contemporary drama, we find find actors breaking through fourth walls, plotlines penetrating narrative frames, playwrights staging themselves and their audiences in powerful and compromised positions, and performers performing performance. If that last phrase seems dizzying, hang on to your hats, these are plays designed to unsettle you. This course is paired with Theater 340, Scenic Design. ENGL 363: Modern American Novel (Charles S. Adams) This course is designed to give some focus to what is happening in the American novel from about World War I into the 1950's, and the relation of those literary developments to cultural issues. It is a prolific period, filled with important work by many writers. The relationship of literature to ideas of nation, race, gender, aesthetics, morality and everything else are rethought once again. I am still considering the exact direction it will take this year as far as specific texts are concerned, though, as usual, my interests are pretty historical. Here is my thinking: in the past we have started with some Willa Cather and Gertrude Stein, so we will do them again. We will move on to some Ernest Hemingway, Zora Hurston, Jean Toomer, William Faulkner, John Dos Passos and Dashiell Hammett. I feel an obligation to F. Scott Fitzgerald, but time begins to be an issue, so he is out (along with a bunch of others). We will end up with like Jack Kerouac (actually a hint
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at what follows modernism). So, we will be looking at perhaps nine books. Yes, it is true. ENGL 375: Chicano/Chicana Literature (Michelle Chihara) In recent decades, scholars in various academic disciplines have recognized the contributions made to the United States and American culture by Chican@ and Latino/ Latina authors, artists and performers. People who self-identify as Latinos in general and Chican@s 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 Chican@ literature, and an awareness of the significance of Chican@ 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 use a critical race approach to interrogate and complicate categories and concepts like "mixed race" and "undocumented." We will ask what it means to form a canon or set of literary works that are somehow connected to a particular cultural identity. What does a canon do? 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 Chican@ literature as a means of exploring the artistic, social, and political ramifications of this border—because borders affect everyone who lives within them. ENGL 382: History of Literary Criticism (Jonathan Burton) Have you ever noticed how rarely your professors talk about the beauty of literary works? How many times have you spent a class discussing how reading a particular text makes you a better person? Why do we ask some questions about texts more than others? Has this always been the case? What questions will we be asking about texts ten years from now? In this class, we will trace the history of scholarly inquiry into literary works, from Plato’s call to ban poets from his Republic, through Romantic concerns with originality and exploration, up to contemporary Ecofeminism and debates over editing digital editions. Students will measure the effects of changing methods and tools for analysis by considering how two or three short works have been (or might be) received in various historical moments. This course is highly recommended for students considering graduate study in English. ENGL 390: After the End: the Post-Apocalypse in Contemporary Film and Literature (Mike Garabedian) The class will first examine Cold War-era, postnuclear media from the 1960s and 1980s (including selected episodes from The Twilight Zone, the novel A Canticle for Leibowitz, and the British docudrama Threads) and then look to more recent, post-Millennium films like Ever Since the World Ended and The Book of Eli and books like The Dog Stars and California in order to better understand our current social-historical moment's seeming obsession with the end of civilization (and what may come after). The class is not intended to be a survey, but we will no doubt consider in an informal way other media including video games like The Last of Us and Fallout 3; TV series like Doomsday Preppers and Life After People; and the burgeoning photographic genre called "ruin porn" as we seek to explore 16
the how and why of after the end. ENGL 390: Elementary: A Study in Sherlock (Tess Taylor) Ever since the Scottish physician turned writer Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes and his physician sidekick Watson in 1887, Sherlock (and Watson) have fascinated readers alike. In this class we¹ll delve into Doyle¹s famous stories, examining what they can tell us about Victorian England, about the history of science, about popular fiction, about detectionand just possibly - what Sherlock Holmes and John Watson can tell us about our lives as readers. As well as reading a great many Sherlock stories, we¹ll examine a few precursors and also look at later reinventions of Sherlock itself. The class will include film screenings, several essays, and the chance to invent your very own mystery. ENGL 390: California Dreaming (Michelle Chihara) Joan Didion writes: "A good deal about California does not, on its own preferred terms, add up." The Golden State is home to the nation's dream factory in Hollywood, to Silicon Valley, to aerospace companies and massive farms in the Central Valley. Some of the nation's most breathtaking natural scenery graces California's national parks, while Californian industry and water consumption is also responsible for major ecological disasters and problems. It is a state of extremes: Extreme wealth and poverty, booms and busts. How do the stories we tell ourselves filter and refract these extremes? In this class, we will explore the layers of myth that blanket California, and will think about what it means to think about culture on a state by state basis. Do all states have a literary identity? How does this identity affect the way people who live here understand themselves? And if stories shape our identity, by what mechanisms does this identity affect the actual geography of the place? We will read authors like John Steinbeck and Wallace Stegner, as well as Anna Deavere Smith's play about the Los Angeles riots, Walter Mosely's noir mysteries, and rap songs that pit the West Coast against the East. ENGL 400: Critical Procedures (Andrea Rehn) “Question Reality.” This may be the only advanced literature course best described by a bumper sticker. As you know, writing about literature begins with asking questions. But how do we come up with our questions? What tends to go without question? How are our questions related to each other? How have questions changed over time? How do questions reflect on the questioner? In this course we will read “theory,” a body of texts from many disciplines that dispute common-sense explanations in favor of speculative analysis. Assignments will include fearless participation in course discussion, regular reading responses, and presentation to the department of your senior project, which you will develop over the course of the semester in consultation with me. Is the course difficult? Yes. Theory is notoriously challenging to read and write about. Mind-bending? Hopefully. Productive of fascinating senior presentations? Absolutely.
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ENGL 410: Senior Seminar (dAve pAddy) Kazuo Ishiguro is one of the major figures of contemporary British literature. Most famous perhaps for The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro creates novels that are models of elegance, insight and restraint. He is a master at creating reticent characters who find themselves psychologically shipwrecked and oftentimes on the wrong side of history. As a writer who has explored a wide range of genres and forms, Ishiguro also raises important questions for the reader about topics as far ranging as ethics, memory, history, music, nation, identity and the struggle and mystery of being human. We will read all of his books, from his first novel A Pale View of the Hills up through his latest work, the collection of short stories Nocturnes, as well as a range of critical materials (some directly on Ishiguro’s work and others related to the issues found in his work). Instructor’s permission required. ENGL 420: Preceptorships (Various Faculty) This course is for advanced students who will act as assistants to faculty in some of the courses above. See individual faculty members concerning what might be involved. Instructor permission required.
Why Did You Get This? The purpose of this newsletter is to keep students, faculty, and friends informed about the wide variety of activities the Whittier College English Department is engaged in. If there are events of a literary nature that could use a bit of publicity through this vehicle, send information about them to the English Department office. We cannot guarantee when or if they will appear, but it never hurts to try! If you get this and do not want it, or if you did not get it but see a copy and want future issues, please let our Department Secretary, Angela Olivas (x4253 or see e-mail list below), in the department office know.
Ways to Help While we all live for art alone, other things do matter. There are lots of ways to help us, and we welcome conversations with anyone who wants one. We are all interested in collaborations with alums in various ways, just as a starting point. But money is always useful too. We have two funds that support English Department activities in particular—one for Student Prizes in Literature and the other called Poets for Poets. The first supports writing prize contests all students at Whittier can enter. We have been giving prizes for fiction, poetry, and prose. Most of the winning work has been published in our Literary Review, edited by our students. The Poets for Poets fund will support general activities of interest and importance to the department (we need it to grow a bit more to start using it in the best ways possible). If you are interested in making even very small gifts, “it is all good.” Just tell the office of Advancement (on line or in person) what you want to do.
The Whittier College Department of 18
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 Albert Upton Professor of English Language and Literature (Creative Writing--Poetry, Modern and Postmodern American Literature, Asian Literature, Translation) Jonathan Burton: jburton@whittier.edu Associate Professor (Shakespeare, Early Modern Studies, Music Writing, Comparative Literature) Michelle Chihara: mchihara@whittier.edu Assistant Professor (Creative Writing—Fiction and Non-Fiction, Chicano/a Literature, American Literature, American Studies) Wendy Furman-Adams: wfurman@whittier.edu (Department Chair) Albert Upton Professor of English Language and Literature (Milton, Early Modern Literature, 18th Century Literature, Women’s Studies, Literature and Visual Culture, The Bible, Classics) Sean Morris: smorris@whittier.edu Associate Professor (Linguistics and English Language, Medieval Literature, Creative Writing, Fun) dAvid pAddy: dpaddy@whittier.edu Professor (20th Century British, Modernism, Postmodernism, Welsh and other Celtic Literatures, Literary Theory, Creative Writing) Andrea Rehn: arehn@whittier.edu Associate Professor (19th Century British, Postcolonial Studies, Women’s Studies, Travel, Literary Theory) Visiting Assistant Professor (Through 2014-2015 academic year) Tess Taylor: ataylor2@whittier.edu
Adjunct and Visiting Faculty for 2014-2015: (These links may or may not be ones our adjunct and visiting faculty use most of the time. Please contact the department office if you cannot make contact using these) Scott Creley: screley@whittier.edu Kate Durbin: kdurbin@whittier.edu Logan Esdale: lesdale@whittier.edu Mike Garabedian: mgarabed@whittier.edu Lisa Grissom: lgrissom@whittier.edu Katy Simonian: ksimonia@whittier.edu Director, College Writing Programs: 19
Charlie Eastman ceastman@whittier.edu English/History/Writing Program Departments Secretary: Angela Olivas: aolivas@whittier.edu
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