English Department News

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The English Major: Embracing Wonder and “Why?”

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As our resident medievalist,  Dr. Cara Hersh  helps animate older texts for newer audiences, persuading contemporary students to take a closer look at the simultaneously age-old and currently relevant insights distilled in some of her favorite works. She enables thought expansion and rhetorical rabbit holes through her job, and opts for an English department mindset while outside of the classroom. 

Hersh’s keynote speech from the Sigma Tau Delta induction ceremony this past Monday, March 25th, urges English students and faculty to use our reading brains to the best of our abilities, believing our skills help us see the world in an empathetic state of wonder. No, this isn’t a plug for the hit OPB radio show, but a call to arms for the disenchanted. Her brand of teaching and seeing the world rests in a commitment to details and consideration; it functions as a tool for learning across space and time. She shows her students how to pause and ask more profound questions, even if they begin with a simple “Why?.” Dr. Hersh dignifies the power of language in a contagious way. I genuinely enjoyed charting sentences in her “Otherness” class, and cannot recall another time when I was shown how to appreciate the sum of a work’s parts in conjunction with its wholeness. In effort to wholly approach the world, Hersh asks us to remember how literature captivates us and sharpens our abilities to look at things from left-field. Read her keynote speech below for a dose of inspiration and that contagious magic she brings to her courses. 

The Wonder of Wonder 

Dr. Cara Hersh 

Most of you, at some point in your college career, have probably had to answer to the now cliched question—why did you want to become an English major?  And—what are you going to do with an English major?   As the sole humanist in a scientifically minded family and as a Jewish humanist who spends her time studying medieval Catholic texts I have gotten my fair share of questions over the years. It’s taken me awhile to answer these questions with substance, and I don’t have just one satisfying answer to them.  Today, though, I’d like to try to respond to these questions and share with you all one answer that has felt particularly compelling to me in recent years.  To those who wonder about my ostensibly esoteric career path commit I reply:  I immerse myself in this pursuit, and take immense pleasure in doing so, because of wonder itself.   

In the last five years or so I have come to really appreciate how wonder, for me, is one answer to the  question “what’s so great about literature?”  We might assume that wonder is a trans-historical affect—haven’t all humans wondered about something in their world?  Wondering about wonder from the perspectives of both a parent and a medievalist have led me, however, to realize that wonder is historical.  It seems to me that wonder is not some timeless emotion like love, jealousy, or anger, that supposedly transcends all time periods.  Instead, wonder diminishes over time and it must, I suggest, be reinvigorated through deliberate strategies that involve fiction—in our own lives, in our reading, and when we learn from one another in our literature classrooms. 

I became hyper-aware of wonder when my son turned four and I was answering a lot of “why?” questions. I loved these moments of wonder and wrote down a lot of them:  why can’t dogs go to restaurants?  Why don’t flashlights flash?  Why are there boys and girls?  Why doesn’t food go down your airtube (and I’ll add that approximately 99 percent of the questions I answered at that point involved the gastrointestinal track)?  Constantly answering questions such as these (often times thanks to the assistance of Google) made me extremely aware of the strength of wonder in the young—I once wrote down all the “why” questions my son asked me over one fifteen-minute breakfast and had about two pages worth of questions. 

It also made me cognizant of how little we all wonder as we get older.  I am guilty of this decrease in curiosity, as are we all.  I want to ask as many “why”questions as my son does, but I don’t.  In class, I want my students to bombard with me with “why” questions, but that doesn’t always happen.  William Wordsworth speaks to this diminishment in the poem, “My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold A Rainbow in the Sky” as he points out the universal decline in geeking out about phenomena such as rainbows in our adult years. 

So, here’s where my medievalist perspective comes in.  Just as we are more apt to wonder as children, so too, I argue, were medieval subjects more prone to wonder than we are.  Just as adults wonder less, so, too does the modern world.  The Middle Ages more emphatically embraced phenomena that compel wonder—think about the medieval belief in miracles, marvels, and monsters, for example.  We tend today to look negatively on these magical moments of wonder and, according to the modern narrative of disenchantment, the Middle Ages was a time of superstition and ignorance (of “enchantment” in pejorative sense). These crazy beliefs, we tell ourselves today, were replaced during the Enlightenment with rationality, secularism, and individualism, which disenchanted the world (in a positive sense).  As Max Weber states of the disenchanted period in which we now live “one can, in principle master all things by calculation”—we tell ourselves that we can understand the world around us better because of disenchantment. 

Of course, the Enlightenment brought about many amazing things and rationality is an incredibly productive impulse in our modern world.  Science, engineering, and mathematics have benefited and will continue to benefit so many of our lives.  But so can wonder.  We need to cultivate wonder in our collective and individual histories.  

So what can we, and do we, wonder about it?  How is wonder still available to us?  One thing that has stayed consistent since the medieval period is the types of events and phenomena that provoke us to wonder.  We wonder, I suggest, at things that we can’t quite incorporate or encompass in our preset mental categories of how the world is ordered.  We wonder at mystery, at paradox, at hybridity.  In the Catholic medieval tradition this would have included the hybridity of god and man, of mother and virgin, etc. What do you wonder about?  When I have asked students like you to share what causes them to stop and wonder they point to similar moments of hybridity or paradox.  They wonder at recent research that shows that trees can communicate with each other, that machines can do all the amazing things they can do (think Artificial Intelligence), or about the complexity and mysteries of our own human minds.   

Literature, is of course, the perfect instrument of wonder.  Think about poetry—poets, freed from the constraints of plot, can constantly surprise, delight, and invoke wonder by mashing incongruous ideas, words, and sounds together.  We can wonder at the miracle that the Beowulf poet—who wrote from a position of not being able to imagine in any way a 21st-century readership, can still communicate with us and provoke us. We can wonder at the magic of written language—essentially black squiggles on a page, communicating across time and space.  We can wonder at the magic of watching a play or a scary movie and being genuinely scared about something that we also know is not real. 

Ok, so what can wonder offer us—why wonder?  I propose that wonder offers us an ethical system—one that is incredibly compelling to me. First, wonder is non-appropriative.  When one wonders about something, one does not try to master it like one does when being rational, but rather is bowled over by its awesomeness, indecipherability, or paradoxical nature.  Some of my favorite descriptions of what wonder is includes Iris Murdoch’s claim that wonder promotes a “unselfing,” Simone Weil refers to the wonder response as a “radical decentering” and Elaine Scarry claims that wonder can make us a feel an “opiated adjacency”—in other words we are sidelined when we feel wonder but it is a pleasurable sidelining.  As the medieval writer Bernard of Clairveaux analogized, wonder is like a golden goblet filled with liquid—we can consume what is in the goblet and understand part of it, but we eventually give back the goblet itself—we can’t master all of it.  This ethos of ceding control, I argue, can be incredibly ethical as we may shift our relationship to nature, animals, and other humans. Instead of solely trying to control the world around us we should also passively wonder at its awesomeness.  

Second, and this is my favorite ethical argument about wonder— wonder is a system based on joy and this joy stimulates generosity.  For a long time, when people asked me why I spend my life studying literature I answered “ empathy.” I believed (and still believe, of course) that literature allows us to enter into the minds of others and invites us to avoid harm to others because we imagine what it would be like to be in their shoes. However, in some ways, this answer centers on a concept of suffering rather than joy.  Conversely, ethical arguments for wonder rest on the feeling of happiness.  Provocatively, the Latin words consistently used for wonder in the Renaissance period, admiratio, mirabilia, and miracula all “seem to have their roots in an Indo-European word for smile.”  Wondering at things excites us, invigorates us, makes us smile.  And as one scholar on this subject writes, “One must be enamored with existence and occasionally even enchanted in the face of it in order to be capable of donating some of one’s scarce mortal resources to the service of others.” Wonder makes us take joy in the world around us and then compels us to take better care of it.   

For all these reasons, I hope to reverse the timeline of our personal and world histories and advocate for emotional wonder alongside rationality and calculation both in my classrooms and my own life.  I invite you, too, to ask those childlike “why” questions and to embrace the mysterious, magical, enchanted and wonder-full qualities of books.  

 

Favorite Reads of 2018

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The turbulent year of 2018 is finally coming to a close!

As we journey into winter break, the English Department wants to offer a few book recommendations for you to peruse on the plane and curl up with on the couch. Get ready to update your Goodreads page!

Leisure Reading Series: Fantasy with Tayler Bradley

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Hey blog browsers! It’s Tayler, back with another installment of my Fantasy Leisure Reading series. Last month, I chose a title that walked the line between fantasy and realism in an attempt to ease in new fantasy readers, but this month I’m going all in. Full on fantasy. The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin, the first installment of the Broken Earth trilogy, was published in 2015 and won the Hugo Award for Best Novel the following year. In short, my praise means little compared to the honors this title has already been given, but I still want to give it a plug. I had this book on my reading list for over a year before I finally read it over this past summer and I was not disappointed. Jemisin’s novel captured my imagination. 

It’s set in a world that is ravaged by a history of devastating environmental catastrophes that both alter climate and drastically change social structures. The novel opens on the incitement of a new catastrophe, a rift that splits the earth under the capital of the Sanze empire, destroying the seat of power and sending a seismic wave through the entirety of the continent. This continent was once home to two species of humanoids, those with and without innate earth-bending abilities. Those with such magic, called orogenes, are ostracized by those without, confined to either live in secret or be taken to the capital and serve as tools and weapons for the non-magic leadership under the guise of magic education. With this world as a backdrop, the novel follows three timelines. The first is Essun, a hidden orogene woman who must embark on a quest in the post-catastrophic world to find her kidnapped daughter after her husband murders their infant son for showing signs of seismic magic. The second is Syenite, an orogene woman training at the Fulcrum, the “school” set up for captured orogenes in the capital, who is forced into sex service intended to breed powerful weapons for the non-magic empire. The final timeline is Damaya, a young orogene girl who is feared by her family and given over to the mercy of the Fulcrum.

While all this plot and world-building may be a little overwhelming for those new to the genre, I highly recommend this novel and its subsequent series. Jemisin creates an incredibly immersive fantasy experience while somehow maintaining links to our current social climate. The dynamic between orogenes and humans was most intriguing to me. The humans fear the power of the orogenes so they imprison them, harness their magic for their own gain, punish them for abilities they have no control over. The oppressors fear the power of those they oppress. Jemisin also places three complex female leads at the core of her novel, which, working in a genre that often leans on patriarchal kingdom structures, transcends what may be expected of her world and its characters. I’ve found a subversion of medieval social tropes to be a growing trend in fantasy literature, and, as a writer who seeks to continue that trend, I was inspired by Jemisin’s novel.

I love fantasy because it allows me to enter and traverse strange new worlds, but sometimes escapism comes full circle. Through entering the world of The Fifth Season, I was able to reflect on my own world and my place in it as a writer. If I’ve intrigued you with this title, which I hope I have, prepare for a journey.

Future Female in Fantasy signing off.

 

(Cover art by Lauren Panepinto)

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. 🙂