English Department News

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Spring 2019 Course Preview

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By Tayler Bradley

Happy Fall Bibliophiles!

While I hope you’re spending your time admiring autumnal leaves and cozying up with a good book and warm beverage, registration season is upon us. Spring course registration begins November 5th and, if you’re new to registering for classes at UP, the rolling registration schedule can be found here. Curious about which courses the English Department is offering next semester? Don’t know which ones to take? Have no fear! I reached out to all our wonderful faculty to gain a little more insight into their upcoming upper-division courses.

 

Intro to Literary Studies – Dr. Joshua Swidzinski

Summary of your course:
I think of ENG 225 in terms of “tools” and “lenses.” On the one hand, it aims to familiarize students with a wide array of interpretive “tools” with which to unpack their experience of literature. These tools range from the traditional and familiar (e.g. ‘close reading’) to newer techniques (e.g. digital tools for analyzing and visualizing texts). On the other hand, the course aims to teach students how to use a variety of “lenses” or theories (e.g. historicism, feminism, post-colonialism, etc.) to re-contextualize and enrich their reading experience.

Which book is your favorite to teach and/or is most important to the course content?
We’re going to read widely across a number of genres and centuries. The work I most look forward to reading is Shakespeare’s great, late masterpiece about celebrity, gossip, love, lust, and empire – Antony and Cleopatra.

 

British Literature Survey II – Dr. Genevieve Brassard

Summary of your course:
Because of our curriculum changes, this will be my first time teaching a course that spans 200+ years of British Literature here at UP (previously, I covered only the 20th Century, and had the leisure of two separate courses to do so). I have, however, thought a version of that British Lit II survey in graduate school, so I have a rough template in mind to tackle a wealth of reading material. There is so much to choose from, so my task will be to balance depth and breadth without overwhelming students with too much reading! The course covers authors and texts from the Romantic, Victorian, and Modern eras, with special attention paid to key artistic movements (Romanticism and Modernism), and historical events and trends (Imperialism, suffrage movement, World War I, and World War II). Students who enroll in English 302 can expect to read Austen, Blake, Keats, Wordsworth, Arnold, Browning, Rossetti, Shaw, Forster, war poets like Wilfrid Owen, Woolf, Selvon, and Stoppard. All major literary genres (poetry, prose, and drama) will be included. Assignments will include short papers, exams, and historical research.

Which book is your favorite to teach and/or is most important to the course content?
The reading list includes 3 of my top 10 books of all time, but the one closest to my heart is Howards End, by E.M. Forster (1910). The novel’s motto, ‘Only connect…’ applied to the importance of empathy at a time of still-sharp class divisions in a rapidly modernizing England, and still resonates today in our very divided times. It features a smart, sensitive, and well-meaning female protagonist, Margaret Schlegel, who was played to perfection by Emma Thompson in the 1992 film adaptation of the novel.

 

Studies in Non-Fiction – Fr. Pat Hannon

Summary of your course:
Nonfiction writers look at the world (us human beings, nature, structures, memories, obsessions, you name it) and see stories.  Interesting, compelling, funny, sad, ennobling, outrageous, true stories. Every human person, a little universe. A ubiquitous, ordinary object (an orange, for instance), a living, breathing metaphor.  This penchant for story-hunting might help to explain why memoirists, journalists, essayists, etc., are willing to go to dark, unfamiliar places (out there and in their own thinking): That’s where the best stories are hiding. This course will help us to look at these true stories in creative and critical ways.

Which book is your favorite to teach and/or is most important to the course content?
Gretel Ehrlich’s The Solace of Open Spaces. Ehrlich, a journalist, spends a year on a Wyoming sheep ranch and writes a series of loosely connected essays that explore some pretty wild ideas about love, death, time, memory.  Beautiful and hauntingly lovely writing.

 

City Life in American Literature – Dr. Lars Larson

Summary of your course:
Even though many of us come from rural backgrounds, the urban is now a part of us (given our current location) and will continue to influence us in the future, now that over half of our human species lives in cities.  This is both good news and bad news; we’ll explore why.  The course is a blend of American history, sociology, linguistic ferment, and wicked good storytelling.
We’ll cover American writers from the past two centuries during a time when the nation went from rural to radically urban.  The best writers invented a vocabulary to articulate those cultural changes: short works by Walt Whitman, Ed Poe, Nate Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Anzia Yezierska, Frank Norris, Dorothy Parker, John Cheever, and Nathanael West usually fill the first half of the semester.  Then a number of larger, more contemporary works put us in dialogue with our own times.  Haven’t decided on those yet, but in past years we’ve read such works as Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Jeffrey Eugenides Middlesex, Anna Deveare Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin, etc.  Throughout, a number of theoretical texts will provide concepts to help bridge the primary works. 

Which book is your favorite to teach and/or is most important to the course content?
A favorite text – surely among my all-time top five – is Colum McCann’s panoramic novel Let the Great World Spin.  This is a story of New York City in 1974 – the moment when a tightrope walker made an illegal walk across the just-born World Trade Center Towers (true story!).  McCann weaves a series of fictional stories (told by 11 narrators) around this moment of attention and wonder, as it unites a vast and eclectic set of urbanites below.
I am overjoyed that UP has chosen this text as the 2019 ReadUP/Schoenfeldt selection (in which the campus buys and distributes 700 copies free to our community in November).  The Irish/American writer will be joining our campus in February for a series of talks and encounters, including a visit to our City Life class!  Order your free book this month, then plan on experiencing a thrilling spring semester of learning from the literature of cities.

 

African-American Literature – Dr. Molly Hiro

Summary of your course:
African American literature is my favorite class to teach at UP. This is in part because the syllabus is full of awesome books, but also because the preoccupations of African American writers are so compelling. From the writings of enslaved people that get at questions of what it means to be seen as human and to be free, to twentieth century debates about whether black writers need to be explicitly political in their writings or can “just” pursue aesthetics—these are vital issues that are meaningful to all Americans. Indeed, it’s often said that African American literature IS American literature which is a way of *centering* this literature rather than seeing it as some marginal “minority” area. I love too how reading the rich narratives and visions of black American writers can help us think more deeply and historically about contemporary movements like #Blacklivesmatter.

Which book is your favorite to teach and/or is most important to the course content?
A text I’m excited to teach for the second time is Claudia Rankine’s acclaimed 2014 collection, Citizen. From its haunting cover (of an empty black hoodie) to its moody prose poems, the book animates what it’s like to be a black American in our contemporary moment as it probes concepts of microaggression and white fragility. It’s pretty gripping.

 

Seminar in British Literature I: Otherness in Early British Lit. – Dr. Cara Hersh

Summary of your course:
This course explores representations of “otherness” in medieval literature. Many people incorrectly assume that medieval literature is populated only by blonde damsels in distress and white knights in shining armor, but the texts that we will read together will prove otherwise as we investigate poetry, prose, and plays that include provocative representations of gender, Islam, Judaism, race, and homoerotocism. We’ll tackle questions such as: what is the connection between the monster and “the other” in medieval literature? what did medieval women have to say about their own literary representations? what can we learn about posthumanism from studying a pre-humanist era? what can these texts teach us about our own enduring struggles with issues of difference?

Which book is your favorite to teach and/or is most important to the course content?
One of my favorite things about this class is that we get to apply rich modern lenses such as feminist theory, queer theory, race theory, and posthumanism to these pre-modern texts; this allows us to not only to see how 21st-century conceptions of otherness are radically different from those of the medieval period, but also illustrates how these conceptions have developed from such early models. Our readings will cover terrain such as werewolf stories, violent descriptions of the Crusades, incidents of cannibalism, and even one or two radical feminist damsels in distress. Texts may include The Song of Roland, selections from the Lais of Marie de France, The Siege of Jerusalem, The Croxton Play of the Sacrament, and selections from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

 

Seminar in American Literature I: American Romanticism – Dr. John Orr

Summary of your course:
We will be looking at representative works from the first flowering of a distinct American literature covering roughly the years 1836 through 1865. A part of the course will focus on questions of identity: What does it mean to be an American? What are the implications of a radical sense of individuality? How does the experience of being American diverge among different minority groups in contract to the dominant group? How do we come to understand who we are? How do these motifs play out in current American culture?

Which book is your favorite to teach and/or is most important to the course content?
Moby-Dick!!! That book tasks me and heaps me, and if I had time, I would reread it every year. I worship Melville and want my students to find the joy of working through the book. Those who read it cover to cover receive a bookmark that I designed that is a talisman of achievement that they can carry through life.


Advanced Writing – Prof. John McDonald

Summary of your course:
Advanced Writing is a non-fiction essay writing workshop in which you work on various styles of non-fiction writing: including flash-nonfiction, braided essays, lyrical essays, and narratives. The workshop depends heavily upon your work with peers and your openness to sharing your writing. We also read a variety of non-fiction writers. The focus for your writing is style, substance, and voice.

 

Advanced Writing – Fr. Pat Hannon

Summary of your course:
In a writing workshop setting, we will be forming a community of writers who wish to explore a number of ways a writer can tell true stories. We will be reading and discussing the works of some outstanding writers as a way to inspire us to write at our very best and to see how our individual voices can be developed and celebrated.
Which piece is your favorite to teach and/or is most important to the course content?
Sunshine O’Donnell’s masterful essay, Consumption. It will blow you mind. ‘Nuff said.

An intriguing prompt that’s on your mind:
One I haven’t done in a while but plan on doing it soon: Think of a place you know very well, a place that is meaningful to you.  Now imagine it is dusk.  Now, write about it for 10 minutes. Do not stop writing and do notend the sentence. Only one period at the end. You may use all the various punctuation marks you need (commas and conjunctions, colons, parentheses, M-dashes, etc), but you may not use a semi-colon.

 

I hope these insights are helpful as we approach registration! More formal course information, including time slots and registration pins, are available on the Self-Serve Banner registration tab under “Look Up Classes”.

Now back to your regularly scheduled fall activities.

Leisure Reading Series: Fantasy with Tayler Bradley

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Tayler here, and welcome to the first installment Fantasy Leisure Reading, my (roughly) monthly look into the world fantasy novels! While I can in no way call myself an expert, my interest in this particular literary genre is personal. Not only am I a huge nerd, but I’m a huge nerd who wants to be a fantasy author, so I am coming at these posts as both an impassioned reader and an inspired writer.

Now, I don’t assume that everyone is a fan of fantasy so, as I was perusing my bookshelf for the first book to highlight, I was drawn to one that dips its toes into several genres.

I picked up Charlie Jane Anders’s All the Birds in the Sky on a whim during my trip to NYC this past summer, and it became one of my favorite summer reads. This 2016 debut novel follows the lives of two childhood friends, Patricia Delfine, a young witch developing unknown powers, and Laurence Armstead, a budding engineering genius, as they navigate their very different abilities while entering adulthood. After unexpectedly parting ways in high school, they both become prodigies of their own kind, Patricia to an ancient society of witches and Laurence to a hipster tech start-up in San Francisco. Meanwhile, the earth is threated by imminent environmental ruin, throwing nations into collapse, and the debate over how to save it falls into a bitter feud between science and magic. Patricia and Laurence are forced to take sides. However, their deep connection forged in childhood fates their lives to repeatedly collide.

While at face value Anders’s novel seems to be simply an eclectic mixture of fantasy and science fiction, its veins run much deeper. It asks questions about human connection, about how two people from opposing fields can come together in crisis. Patricia and Laurence’s relationship is equal parts humorous and heartbreaking, fated and forced apart. The solution lies between them, yet their counterparts refuse to see the middle ground they create. Anders also sets her novel against the backdrop of a catastrophic natural disaster in the modern United States and examines how differing schools of thought react to an event of that scale. Both the magical and scientific solutions recognize their inability to save everyone, so the question becomes which few should be saved and for what reasons.

This quirky piece of fiction stole my heart and mind, made me laugh and cry, and called out to be shared. It has many elements of magical realism that accompany its main fantasy and sci-fi themes which makes it a great gateway into those major worlds. I highly recommend All the Birds in the Sky to anyone who wants a fun read that remains rooted in the problems of modern life.

Future Female in Fantasy signing off.

(Cover art by Will Staehle)

NUCL is moving to Seattle: What You Need to Know

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By Emily Nelson

Founded in 2004, the Northwest Undergraduate Conference on Literature, aka NUCL, has been a cornerstone event for the UP English Department each year. NUCL has offered countless English majors and literature enthusiasts from undergrad programs around the region a chance to share their work, engage in critical conversations, and connect with other lovers of writing. For UP students, the conference has also offered the unique opportunity to serve in a year-long internship position, working alongside professors to coordinate the conference, read and select essay submissions, and welcome visitors to campus. This year, NUCL co-chairs Dr. Brassard and Dr. Swidzinski announced that in a departure from years past, this year’s NUCL will be held on Seattle University’s campus. I asked Dr. Swidzinski for more details, and he explained what the location change would mean for this year’s conference, and how English majors can be involved:

For those who haven’t heard of it before, what is NUCL?
The Northwest Undergraduate Conference on Literature (NUCL) is a one-day gathering that draws 100+ attendees from the Pacific Northwest and beyond. Founded at UP in 2004, it offers college students (as well as some advanced high-school students) the opportunity to present their critical and creative work on literature (scholarly essays, creative non-fiction, and poetry) to a friendly audience of their peers.  

Why is NUCL changing locations this year?
Over the past sixteen years, NUCL has grown remarkably and has evolved into a genuinely regional conference that regularly draws students and faculty members from across the country. It has been a joy to host the conference here at UP during that time. However, part of the joy of attending an academic conference is that it changes location every year, exposing participants to new cities, peoples, and contexts! In that spirit, we’ve agreed to share the conference this year with our friends at Seattle University (who have been very loyal NUCL participants throughout its history). Don’t worry – NUCL will return to UP in 2020. 

What does this mean for how the conference will operate?
The conference will take place at the Seattle University campus on Saturday, March 23rd,
2019. Seattle’s English department and community have kindly agreed to shoulder the hosting duties. Meanwhile, we’ll organize a trip for participating UP students, who will get to experience traveling to a new city to attend an academic conference.   

What will the role of the intern be for this year’s NUCL?
This is an entirely new venture for us and our friends at Seattle University, so there remains a lot of coordinating to do. This year’s NUCL intern will help us publicize the conference, read and evaluate submissions, organize travel plans, serve as a liaison with students here and at Seattle U., and (inevitably) troubleshoot. It should be fun!  

What are you looking for in a potential NUCL intern?
A supremely reliable, detail-oriented, enthusiastic problem-solver who also happens to love literature.

If students are interested in applying to be interns and/or submitting papers, whom should they contact?
Those interested in applying for the internship should e-mail me at swidzins@up.edu;by Monday, Sept. 24th to discuss their interest in the position. Those interested in submitting something to the conference should expect a mid-January deadline and stay tuned for details! 

 

(Photo by Calvin Marquess [CC BY-SA 3.0 ], from Wikimedia Commons)

Educated by Detours and Emotion: Dr. Brassard on Coming Full Circle

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Dr. Genevieve Brassard has garnered the title of resident Anglophile in the cozy nook of the English department. During her lectures and office hours students are imbued with her love for 20th century British literature, which seems to run deeper than the roots of her favorite authors. She always takes the time to appreciate the complex and universal range of emotions Woolf, Hardy, and Austen force readers to wade through. She views British authors as teachers for life, not just literature, and instills this virtue of emotional language in her students.

Her not-so-recent keynote speech for Sigma Tau Delta’s induction ceremony charges us students to sit in our present emotions and situations, no matter how far off they are from the so-called normal. Her own circuitous journey serves as an antidote for those who feel they need to have it all figured out before taking the next step.

Like the comforting conversation of your wisest, kindest relative, Dr. Brassard urges us to know ourselves, assuring all types of students that taking the long way will always serve them better in the long run. Today she teaches a version of her favorite undergraduate class– talk about living proof. 

 

 

“Living with the Imposter Syndrome, or, Snapshots of a Life in Books, Places, and People”

-Dr. Genevieve Brassard

            When Caroline invited me to offer remarks to you for this lovely occasion, my first response was “please ask someone else!” Public speaking, even in a relatively intimate setting like this one, is not really my thing, and I thought other colleagues would be more poised and assured candidates to address you. But then I thought, I do have a few stories to tell, and narrative is my preferred literary genre, so perhaps I could come up with anecdotes to illustrate my lifelong passion for books and stories. So, as Dr. Larson described my proposed topic as being ‘raised by books’ (a fairly accurate phrase), and a few days after our very own Sasha’s evocatively titled capstone presentation “Reading into Personhood” on Founders’ Day (I’m kind of stealing/borrowing from the best here!), I offer to you some of the key books and people that raised me in some way.

            As many of you know, I grew up in Quebec City, and the culture that formed my early passions was hybrid in the best sense, with a mix of French singers and films, American TV shows and movies, gossip about the British royal family, and some homegrown artists thrown into the mix as well (Celine Dion, anyone?!). I was exposed to both French and British literary traditions, and an avid consumer and researcher of the histories of both nations (perhaps because Canadian history as taught at the time was pretty boring…), and yet when it came to literature, I quickly went down the British path and have never really kept up with French authors. For that choice I blame Jane Eyre; I read it in French translation at age 11, and it left a deep impression I reconnect with every rereading. At a simple level, as an only child of divorced parents busy with their own lives, I surely related to the poor misunderstood girl (although of course our circumstances were obviously quite different!). On another level, I probably recognized and appreciated her fiery desire to forge her own path and her arguably proto-feminist stance. The book of course also led me to biographies of the Bronte sisters, and later to a pilgrimage to the parsonage in Yorkshire where they crafted their works, and where the setting itself goes a long way toward explaining much of the tensions between wilderness and culture their novels explore. Ultimately, Jane Eyre established my lifelong bond to British writers, and perhaps inevitably, because I did not encounter this and other texts in the original, language was not the main hook for me: the emotional trajectories of the characters were the most significant factor, and continue to be to this day, even though I grew to appreciate language and form as my English skills developed and I began to read my favorites (Austen and Woolf, primarily), in their native tongues.

           When I first attended college in Quebec, I signed up for my first literature class in English. Again, one text in particular blew my mind and not only introduced a new favorite author to discover and cherish, but more significantly how much psychological and cultural work a deceptively simple short story can perform on its readers. The story was “Roman Fever,” by Edith Wharton; I won’t ruin the twist for those of you who may not have read it, but I think I was able for the first time to recognize the artistry and knowledge of human psychology that goes into the craft of fiction through the subtle way Wharton builds conflict between two seemingly sophisticated matrons whose youthful passions and secrets eventually break the smooth surface of their good manners, and of the narrative. Wharton taught me that literature could reveal and expose deep and dark truths about human nature, and I still seek and crave those effects in much of the literature I read and teach.

            A year later, at Concordia University in Montreal (incidentally Dr. Swidzinski’s alma mater…), I took a year-long course on the ‘Victorian Novel and Social Change,’ taught by dynamic and generous professor who not only turn me on to some favorite authors and texts, but also patiently guided me as I learned to write decent essays in a still hesitant English. Reading those thick books was no picnic, but two in particular made their mark, most likely because I labored over essays about them, and as we know, writing about a text attaches you to it forever. From Eliot’s Middlemarch and Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, I learned that the novel could be grand in scope yet precise and almost surgical in its close examination of human frailty, and that the aspirations of obscure inhabitants of small English towns not only deserve careful attention and respect, but also could resonate, somehow, with a young woman living a very different existence many years later. What I responded to most in these and other richly imagined fictional worlds was their emotional and intellectual truths, and I still crave the same kind of storytelling ‘kick’ in everything I read to this day.

            Flash forward a few years and many miles west, where I briefly pursued a dream of working in movies by moving to the dream factory itself, Los Angeles. My love of film may have briefly distracted me from my lifelong connection to books, but even there I gravitated toward literary settings. I managed a bookstore where film and TV stars were regular customers, and I also worked at the library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which housed countless newspaper clippings (remember those?!), photos, and film scripts. At the bookstore, a co-worker freshly graduated from Brown and slumming it in retail while working on the Great American Novel, remarked one day in passing that my literary judgments lacked rigor because I didn’t have a college degree. Sadly, his words still rang in my ears a few years later when I returned to school to complete my degree (I will show him!…). At the Academy library, I was surrounded by smart, under-employed people who all aspired to add more impressive titles to their resumes: screenwriter, film critic, director. Through sheer serendipity, another book caught my eye then and had such an effect on me that it precipitated my resolution to go back to school. Reading The Day of the Locust, by Nathaniel West, a sad tale of washed-out has-beens and never-have-beens, those left behind by an industry that celebrates the few and destroys the many, while surrounded by aspiring film artists who would most likely not succeed, snapped me back to reality and the need to shelve unrealistic dreams and move toward a more viable career path.

            I then returned to school as a first generation, non-traditional student, and in those two years I was blessed with a pair of professors who affirmed my desire to continue learning from books in the more formal setting of graduate school, however unlikely that goal seemed at the time. And again, the first step toward graduate research began with a book. Browsing in a used bookstore in LA (and let me say here that yes, LA at the time was filled with great bookstores and yes, browsing actual shelves in a physical store is a wondrous thing that Amazon can’t ever replace), as I was saying, I came across a slim volume. It was a biography of Vera Brittain, a young woman of privilege whose life was transformed by the First World War, a war that not only killed her brother and her fiancé, but also made her into a writer, one of many women who discovered their voice and bore witness to wartime horrors, both at home and at the front, in both physical and psychological forms. Why did I grab that particular book that day, apart from a general curiosity about the topic? I’ll never know, but it became the starting point of my doctoral research, years after that momentous encounter in a used bookstore.

            So now you know how a French-speaking introvert somehow ended up teaching literature in English many miles from home, after a few detours, many life-changing books, and great mentors along the way. Let me close with my attempt at a few bits of wisdom:

            Thank your good fortune, your own hard work, and your parents’ or relatives’ hard work, for being here, today, at this university, pursuing this major that you care about, students of words, plots, and ‘ink people,’ as Jonathan Gottschall puts it in The Storytelling Animal, and try not to take this good fortune for granted, even at the busiest and most tiresome parts of the semester. You never know what small moment or encounter (with a book or a person) will lead you to the next phase in your journey. No matter where you end up, your love of reading will stay with you, and enrich your life in ways you may not yet imagine. And if you do end up in academia, remember that everyone has a story, and most people never feel like they truly belong or deserving, if they are honest. Incidentally, that Brown graduate never wrote the Great American Novel, but after years of plying his trade on second-rate TV shows (thanks for the stalking resource, IMDB!), he is now the award-winning writer/producer of the Handmaid’s Tale adaptation on Hulu and yes, I’m happy for him, I really am. 🙂