Letter from the Chair

Dear Friends of the English Department,

Greetings to you from Oxford University, where I’m on a rainy research sabbatical this spring. As soon as I graduated from U.Va’s English Department, I headed for Oxford, so the dampness and the splendidly colorful flowers it brings are familiar. Oxford didn’t have a Starbucks in the early 1980s, nor had the Chunnel made the town’s “dreaming spires” available to busloads of French schoolchildren; but it’s in many ways the same as it was twenty five years ago and probably much longer, even if people seem to drink more coffee and less tea than they used to.

Like me, many of you went off to adventures during or after your English studies at Virginia — an increasing trend given the rising number of University students studying abroad, including at the superb Department-based summer program in London. In her essay below, alumna Peg Willingham notes that after she left Virginia, she went to Costa Rica, Saudi Arabia, and Columbia, partly equipped for her work as a foreign service officer by skills in writing and analysis that she developed as an English major. As other articles in this newsletter indicate, cultural globalization has made deepening inroads into the English Department’s curriculum. The piece on our most recently hired faculty member, Mrinalini Chakravorty, indicates the Department’s ongoing commitment to transnationalizing English literary studies.

As that article notes, some years ago the Department overhauled its required survey sequence, “History of English Literature,” ENGL 381 and 381, turning it into “History of Literatures in English,” ENGL 381, 382, and 383, to reflect the worldwide heterogeneity of literatures in English. When I took the survey in the late 1970s, it focused on British literature, from Beowulf, as introduced by a twinkle-eyed Robert Kellogg, to T. S. Eliot, as analyzed by a formidable Paul Cantor. I remember cameo appearances by a stellar cast that included my current colleagues Barbara Nolan, Jim Nohrnberg, and Gordon Braden — my wise predecessor as chair, who along with Paul Cantor still teaches in the survey.

Now the survey embraces both American and British literature, as well as other English-language literatures from former parts of the British Empire in the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, and elsewhere — literatures that have hybridized metropolitan and indigenous traditions. The especially transnational 382 and 383 are taught by pairs of lecturers, giving students the opportunity to trace vital exchanges and crosscurrents, differences and similarities across national and even hemispheric borders. Some of our most gifted and skilled lecturers teach in this popular survey, including two winners of this year’s teaching awards, as noted below, Clare Kinney and Steve Arata.

Like me, you may have used The Norton Anthology of English Literature in the English survey; you may still have your copies of this or a similar anthology on your bookshelves, the onion-thin paper no doubt a little ragged from repeated moves and rereading. As the article below on anthologies indicates, a surprisingly large number of the Department’s faculty — more even than the article discusses — have edited anthologies, demonstrating the Department’s commitment to translating cutting-edge scholarship into classroom knowledge. We value learned writing for a tight-knit community of scholars; we also value efforts to embody new insights in books that will help reshape and refresh the field for new generations of students. Katharine Maus and I were honored to be on the editorial team that produced the most recent Norton Anthology, which like other aspects of literary studies today has become increasingly global in its reach.

Teaching the discussion sections of the survey course are our outstanding graduate teaching assistants, who regularly win a disproportionate share of the University’s teaching awards, including this year’s Seven Society Teaching Award. Because we fell behind peer institutions in the funding packages we offered graduate students, we have been concerned about maintaining the quality of the teaching and research these graduate students deliver.  But having made a boost in these packages our top priority for the year, the Department this spring increased dramatically its funding levels for incoming students by cutting back on the size of its entering PhD class. The result of matching the national competition has been a significantly improved ratio of offers of admission to acceptances among our top applicants. It looks like the newly globalized “History of Literatures in English” will continue to be in the good hands of some of the world’s top young literary minds.

As the one-way homogenization of the world, globalization can seem unattractive. It’s easy to see a KFC in the center (or is it centre?) of Oxford and conclude that England, like the rest of the world, is being flattened, soon to be indistinguishable from any other city. But when you stay a little longer in a place like Oxford, or for that matter in other cities where multinational franchises have sprung up through Europe and Asia and beyond, you’re reminded that people’s tastes and values don’t change so quickly, and that intrusions from elsewhere are often absorbed and transformed according to local norms. Even McDonald’s has had to “glocalize” its products and services to suit tastes in new markets. As part of the deepening, accelerating, and widening enmeshment of cultures around the world, literary globalization has resulted in both standardization — the exporting of literary forms and styles — and diversification — the transformative localization of foreign influences. If you’ve been reading Salman Rushdie or Derek Walcott, Wole Soyinka or Arundati Roy, I hope you’ll agree that literature is a fascinating terrain on which to track the dialogic exchanges among cultures, sometimes resulting in new hybrid forms, geographies, and identities.

Making use of the global reach of the electronic media, John O’Brien, the department’s associate chair, prepared this second issue of our electronic newsletter, with help from our colleagues Alison Booth, who has valiantly served as interim department chair while I have been away this spring, and Christopher Krentz. Thank you for taking the time to read the newsletter. We’d be delighted to hear from you. Please send news, comments, and suggestions to .

With best wishes for a joyous — even if not globe-trotting — summer,

Jahan Ramazani