Faculty News

Sydney Blair’s review of James Wood’s book How Fiction Works (picked up by Powell.com's Review-A-Day) is in the fall 2008 issue of The Virginia Quarterly Review.

Hoyt Duggan notes that “The sixth volume in the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive, a documentary / color facsimile edition of Huntington Library's MS 128 (Hm) will be published in early November by Boydell and Brewer, Ltd., for The Medieval Academy of America and SEENET. I have co-edited this volume with UVa former graduate student Michael Calabrese, now Professor of English at California State University in Los Angeles, and Professor Thorlac Turville-Petre of the University of Nottingham.

“I’ve just returned from Saskatoon, Canada, after being a keynote speaker for the 2008 CaSTA Conference (The Canadian Symposium on Text Analysis), held at the University of Saskatchewan 16-18 October. And I’m off to Chicago for a conference at Loyola University Chicago on 8 November on “Medieval Texts and Textual Meaning.”

Mark Edmundson (University Professor and Professor of English) has a number of essays recently published and soon forthcoming. They include a piece on rap and classical literature (for The Common Review); an essay on the uncoolness of good teachers (New York Times Magazine); one on bores (for The American Scholar); one on global teaching and learning (Chronicle of Higher Education); an essay on the “Mono-Culture” (The Massachusetts Review); and a reported piece on Vietnam, which he visited in the Spring of 2008 (Raritan). He is at work on a book provisionally titled “The Fine Wisdom and Perfect Teachings of the Kings of Rock and Roll” (to be published by HarperCollins) and a study of epic and religious writings (“Violence and Compassion”).

Jeb Livingood co-edited (with Mark Strand) Best New Poets 2008: 50 New Poems from Emerging Writers. 

Jeb observes: “Putting together an annual anthology is a tremendous amount of work, and you always upset a few people with the final choices. But the payoff is getting to know fifty new poets each year, most of whom you soon see in print again. Take Paula Bohince, for example, who was in our 2005 edition and whose 'Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods’ just came out from Sarabande Books. ‘Incident’ is a stunning first collection, and I was thrilled to have played even a small role in helping it happen.”

Victor Luftig notes that “English Department faculty continue to offer programs to Virginia’s high school teachers through the Center for the Liberal Arts, which is dedicated to fostering K-12 teachers’ knowledge about the subjects that they teach. Professors Sydney Blair and Marlon Ross traveled to Virginia Beach last summer to teach courses for teachers there, and Alison Booth and Elizabeth Fowler have in recent months taught in Saturday morning workshops (on Jane Austen and Chaucer, respectively) at U.Va. The Center’s operations are supported by the Office of the Provost, but its programs for teachers depend on grant funding and on schools’ professional development funds, which have been hard hit by recent budget cuts.” For more information on the Center, contact its director, Professor Victor Luftig.

Professor Luftig and Professor Elizabeth Fowler will also lead U.Va. students to Ireland during the 2009 January mini-term (dubbed “J-Term). For the fourth consecutive year, they will take a group to Galway and Dublin each year to meet with poets, musicians, and scholars, and to travel to important literary sites. Pictured below: U.Va.’s “Literature in Ireland” study abroad group at Clonmacnois, January 2008.

James Norhnberg combines news and advice as he observes: “Those in continuing pursuit of a literary-critical education may wish to consider recent counsel as found in A New Handbook of Literary Terms by David Mikics (Yale Univ. Press, 2007). In his preface Mikics writes: “An ideal bibliography should include older, respected works that continue to shape our sense of what criticism can to. Auerbach’s Mimesis, first published in Switzerland in 1946, is still the indispensable book on realism. Mimesis is referred to repeatedly here, as is Northrop Frye’s definitive Anatomy of Criticism (1957), the best treatment of genre. Frye, like Auerbach, opened up a whole new world for criticism with his book, which continues to be central to literary study fifty years after it was written. A student who wants a sure grounding in literary history, and at the same time an exhilarating experience of criticism at the height of his powers, would do well to read Mimesis and An Anatomy of Criticism—along with other synoptic and original works like James Nohrnberg’s The Analogy of the Faerie Queene, Harold Bloom’s The Visionary Company, Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel, Geoffrey Hartman’s Beyond Formalism, Martin Price’s To the Palace of Wisdom, Martha Nussbaum’s The Fragility of Goodness, Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era, Irving Howe’s Politics and the Novel, Ronald Paulson’s Satire and the Novel, Frank Kermode’s Romantic Image, and William Empson’s Some Versions of the Pastoral. Curtius’ European Literature the Latin Middle Ages remains the essential guide to the topoi that engage medieval and Renaissance literature. These fourteen books, some of them published as long ago as the 1930s (Empson), provide the background and assumptions for much later work. Some more recent volumes, like Margaret Doody’s The True Story of the Novel, share the ambitions and innovative character of those I have just listed. The Handbook takes care not to slight younger critics—there quite a few references from the new, twenty-first century—but I have emphasized those books that have already stood the test of time.”

The books of several U.Va. faculty members in the English Dept., present and former, are referenced in the topic entries and brief bibliographies in David Mikics’ ambitiously synoptic New Handbook of Literary Terms (Yale U.P., 2007), which ranges from “abject, abjection” to “zeugma.”

        Some past or present teachers employed at Virginia whom Mikics cites are: Gordon Braden (early modern), Peter Brooks (plot), Marshall Brown (sensibility), Helene Cixous (feminist theory), Ralph Cohen (ode), Stephen Cushman (poetry), Mark Edmundson (Gothic, perfectionism,* psychoanalytic criticism), Alastair Fowler (genre), Susan Fraiman (Bildungsroman), E.D. Hirsch (hermeneutics), Paul Hunter (sentiment), William Kerrigan (psychoanalytic criticism), Clare Kinney (narratology), V.A. Kolve (mystery play), Robert Langbaum (dramatic monologue), Michael Levenson (imagism, modernism, vorticism), Jerome McGann (Romanticism, sensibility), James Nohrnberg (epic,* epithet,* mythography, quest romance*), Jahan Ramazani (elegy), Richard Rorty (pragmatism), A.C. Spearing (dream vision), James Turner (country house poem), and Charles Wright (Black Mountain).

Professor Nohrnberg’s forthcoming publications include: “Eight Reflections of Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’”: in Victorian Poetry, Tennyson Memorial Issue, ed. Herbert F. Tucker, 2009; “A Tale of Two Tamars:  Internecine and Inter-Ethnic Violence, Gendered and Genealogical Anxiety in the Old Testament Narrative”: in Genre, Special Issue on Violence and the Bible, ed. Clifton Spargo and Kevin Dunn (2009), “Canto XXII: Beyond the Rungs of Saturn: Dante in Translation”: in Lectura Dantis: Paradiso, ed. Allen Mandelbaum, Anthony Oldcorn and Charles Ross (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: Univ. of California Press, 2009); and “On Two Cantos of Mutabilitie: Some Critical Supplementarity for Spenser’s Own Supplement”: in Jane Grogan, ed., Mutability Cantos 400th Anniversary Volume (provisional title); The Manchester Spenser Monograph Series, ed. Julian Lethbridge (Manchester Univ. Press, 2009).  He has started preparing an improved edition of The Analogy of ‘The Faerie Queene’ (Princeton Univ. Press, 1976, 1980). It is being planned so as to include his subsequent contributions to The Spenser Encyclopedia. 

Finally, he will be giving two papers at the upcoming Modern Language Association meeting in San Francisco, on Dec. 28th, 2008: “Before Babel, after Pentecost: The Function of Foreign Languages and Lingua Franca in the Commedia as Semiotic Motif in Dante’s Poetics of the Threshold,” and “Sir Thomas Browne the Prolific, and Likewise the Various: As His Own Theme.”

Greg Orr was the poet representing the United States at the “Third International Festival of the Languages of the Americas” held at the Centro Cultural Universitario at UNAM in Mexico City on October 9th. Greg notes that “It was an interesting event and as a poet you don't usually get an opportunity to read to an audience of 2500 people (more’s the pity; on the other hand, Plato would have banished us entirely).” In January, he will be conducting a workshop and reading at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. His tenth collection of poems, How Beautiful the Beloved, will appear in early February from Copper Canyon Press.

John Parker is a winner of the Rome Prize in Medieval Studies from the American Academy in Rome for 2008-9. His review of  Kenneth Gross, Shylock is Shakespeare and The Dream of the Moving Statue appeared in Shakespeare Studies this fall.

Brad Pasanek (profiled in this issue) gave two papers this fall. At the Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science, he gave a talk with his collaborator (D. Sculley, Google, Inc.) on parody. Our paper is titled, “A Study of Parody: Literary Criticism and Machine Learning.” He also gave a talk at the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies annual meeting in Philadelphia: “Personhood, Personal Identity, and Personification.”

Jahan Ramazani tried out some of his current research on poetry and transnationalism in recent invited lectures at the University of Wisconsin, Madison; the University of Toronto; Princeton University; the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica; Grinnell College; and Harvard University. Asked to deliver a talk in the “Last Lecture Series” in the Rotunda, he spoke on poetry, teaching, and debate. You can view it (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RzDe2brrCE&feature=user).

Lisa Russ Spaar’s new book of poems, Satin Cash, was officially published by Persea Books in August 2009. 

Chip Tucker reports a variety of activities. He gave papers at adjacent conferences in Britain last summer, speaking on imperial epic, Hardy’s poetry and epic prosody in Elizabeth Barrett Browning and William Morris. He is also a fellow this year in the Teaching + Technology Initiative where with lots of good expert help he intends this year to build at least the working pilot for an online, open-source tutorial that will let students teach themselves how to scan traditionally-metered verse. He has articles in press on Tennyson, on the Brownings, and on Victorian epic writing. And, finally, Blackwell has reprinted his edited collection, A Companion to Victorian Literature & Culture.

Cynthia Wall’s Norton Critical Edition of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progess has just been released. 

Lisa Woolfork’s book, Embodying American Slavery in Contemporary Culture will be published this month by the University of Illinois Press. The Press notes that “This study explores contemporary novels, films, performances, and reenactments that depict American slavery and its traumatic effects by invoking a time-travel paradigm to produce a representational strategy of “bodily epistemology.” Disrupting the prevailing view of traumatic knowledge that claims that traumatic events are irretrievable and accessible only through oblique reference, these novels and films circumvent the notion of indirect reference by depicting a replaying of the past, forcing present-day protagonists to witness and participate in traumatic histories that for them are neither dead nor past. Further, live performances and reenactments of slavery also rely on the time-travel motif (and the requisite suspension of disbelief) as a strategy to confront contemporary audiences with such spectacles as slave ship captivity, slave auctions, or a slave’s decision to escape to freedom.

“As Lisa Woolfork cogently reveals, these cultural expressions indicate a concern that the traumatic meanings and consequences of American slavery have been lost to those living in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Woolfork analyzes how these works deploy a representational strategy that challenges the divide between past and present, imparting to their re-creations of American slavery a physical and emotional energy to counter America's apathetic or amnesiac attitude about the trauma of the slave past.”

Charles Wright served as the guest editor for The Best American Poetry 2008. Here’s what the publisher has to say about this volume: “The Best American Poetry series is a beloved mainstay of American poetry. This year's edition was edited by one of the most admired and acclaimed poets of his generation, Charles Wright. Known for his meditative and beautiful observations of landscape, change, and time, Wright brings his particular sensibility to this year's anthology, which contains an ecumenical slant that is unprecedented for the series. He has gathered an astonishing selection of work that includes new poems by Carolyn Forché, Jorie Graham, Louise Glück, Frank Bidart, Frederick Seidel, Patti Smith, and Kevin Young and showcases a dazzling array of rising stars like Joshua Beckman, Erica Dawson, and Alex Lemon.

With captivating and revelatory notes from the poets on their works and sage and erudite introductory essays by Wright and series editor David Lehman, The Best American Poetry 2008 will be read, discussed, debated, and prized for years to come.”