CLA Publicationstag:blog.lib.umn.edu,2011-06-02:/cla/discoveries//83152013-05-02T21:21:00ZA blog for the College of Liberal Arts.Movable Type Enterprise 4.31-enCLA recognizes Alumni of Notable Achievement for 2013tag:blog.lib.umn.edu,2013:/cla/discoveries//8315.3908912013-04-04T16:41:16Z2013-05-02T21:21:00ZOn March 28, 2013, the College honored 17 alumni who have made remarkable contributions or attained significant achievements in their fields....laume007
On March 28, 2013, the College honored 17 alumni who have made remarkable contributions or attained significant achievements in their fields.
Back row, L to R: Wy L. Spano, Stephanie Odegard, Scott D. Meyer, Tina M. Karelson, Greg A. Brown; Chris G. Cardozo, Jim A. Stolpestad, Dr. Scott D. Augustine, Dr. Don L. Winkelmann, Dr. Kurt D. Winkelmann
Front row, L to R: Ray W. Foley, Tom H. DuPont, Jackie M. Jodl, Mimi G. Pizzi, Ellen A. Boschwitz, Gloria L. Goetzke, Tom E. Ramsay
The CLA Alumni of Notable Achievement (ANA) program was created in 1994 as part of CLA's 125th anniversary to celebrate and honor the significant achievements and contributions of college alumni. All ANA honorees have been nominated by CLA alumni, faculty, and staff.
Of the college's 120,000 living graduates, approximately 1,300 have been selected as recipients. By honoring its alumni, CLA recognizes and celebrates not only their singular accomplishments but also the collective depth and breadth of their interests, talents, career paths and achievements in all sectors of society.
See a list of all CLA Alumni of Notable Achievement.
Dr. Scott D. Augustine (M.D. '79; B.E.S., '75), internationally successful inventor, entrepreneur, and doctor
Ellen A. Boschwitz(B.A. '77, English), admired public servant, business owner, and community volunteer
Greg A. Brown (B.A. '87, Russian area studies), esteemed U.S. military officer and defense policy leader
Christopher G. Cardozo (J.D. '77; B.F.A. '72, studio art; B.A. '72, art history), eminent artist, collector and community volunteer
Thomas H. DuPont (B.A. '67, journalism), innovative communications and branding specialist
Raymond W. Foley (B.A. '48), exemplar of advertising, public relations, corporate and community leadership
Gloria L. Goetzke (B.A. '64, sociology), veteran social worker, instructor, and devoted community volunteer
Jacqueline M. Jodl (B.A. '85, political science), admired business leader and tireless community volunteer
Tina M. Karelson (M.A. '95, English, B.A '85, English and journalism), recognized advertising leader, writer, and valued community member
Scott D. Meyer (B.A. '04, journalism), esteemed public relations expert and corporate leader
Stephanie Odegard (B.A. '69, humanities), successful international entrepreneur and volunteer leader
Maybeth G. Pizzi (B.A. '80, speech communication), 6-time Daytime Emmy winner, television production; writer and talent sleuth
Thomas E. Ramsay (B.A. '68, psychology), innovative filmmaker, teacher, and dedicated conservationist
Wyman Spano (B.A. '60, political science), respected teacher, author, and Minnesota politics expert
James A. Stolpestad (J.D. '67; B.A. '64, history), venerable Twin Cities attorney, real estate investor, and developer
Dr. Donald L. Winkelmann (PhD '63, economics), esteemed scholar in economics and agricultural practices
Dr. Kurt D. Winkelmann (PhD '87, economics; M.A. '82, economics), leading expert in global investment banking and research analysis
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Nuruddin Farah and Colum McCanntag:blog.lib.umn.edu,2012:/cla/discoveries//8315.3783502012-12-01T23:28:04Z2012-12-03T16:39:14ZThe Department of English presents events with novelist and playwright Nuruddin Farah and novelist Colum McCann. All English events are free and open to the public....Teresa Sutton
events are free and open to the public. ]]>
Friday and Saturday, December 7-8, 2012
Staged Reading of Nuruddin Farah's A Stone Thrown at the Guilty
7:30 pm, Stoll Thrust Theatre, Rarig Center
British theater director Irina Brown will direct a free public staged reading of the Somalia-set play A Stone Thrown at the Guilty by award-winning Somali novelist Nuruddin Farah. Twin Cities actors Sonja Parks and Bruce Young will be joined by four young Somali readers. The reading will be followed by a discussion led by Farah and Brown, presenting a rare opportunity to watch a world-class theater director develop a work of drama with an esteemed international writer. A Stone Thrown at the Guilty is a play about colonialism and its impact on the colonized, but it also refers to current events in Somalia. It is inspired by two well-known mid-20th century uprisings in Somalia under British rule. Raised in Russia, Brown has directed numerous plays in the UK, including two at the London National Theatre. Farah has authored 11 novels, including his latest, Crossbones, as well as several plays.
Wednesday, April 10, 2013
Colum McCann Talk and Reading
7:30 pm, Coffman Union Theater
Colum McCann is the author of five novels, the last of which, Let the Great World Spin (2009), won the National Book Award for Fiction and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. He's published two short story collections. The New York Times Book Review called Let the Great World Spin "[o]ne of the most electric, profound novels . . . in years" and "an emotional tour de force." McCann has also written essays and opinion for numerous newspapers and periodicals, including The New York Times, The Times (UK), Atlantic Monthly, GQ, and Granta. Born and raised in Dublin, he earned a BA from the University of Texas. He is currently Professor of Fiction at CUNY Hunter College's Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing.]]>
Support When It Counts: Graduate Fellowshipstag:blog.lib.umn.edu,2012:/cla/discoveries//8315.3781902012-11-30T18:58:19Z2012-12-03T18:30:34ZProfiles of three fellowships and the donors who made them possible....Teresa Sutton
Profiles of three fellowships and the donors who made them possible.
Mary Sue Comfort Fellowship in English
When Mary Sue Comfort (BA '53, MA '80) entered the University as a freshman in 1949, English was hitting its stride as one of the foremost departments in the country. Professor and Chair Joseph Beach had attracted a diverse and accomplished faculty, including Robert Penn Warren, who in 1945 won the Pulitzer for his bestselling novel All the King's Men. Mainstream critics such as Samuel Holt Monk nodded in the hallways to New Critics Leonard Unger and Allen Tate and left-leaning Americanists Leo Marx and Henry Nash Smith.
Comfort grew up within hailing distance of the University and had often traipsed across campus, but taking classes and studying here was an entirely different thing. "It was an exciting new time," she recalls.
"The wonderful English department faculty, giving us the benefit of their own scholarship, thought, and experience, inspired us to discover, analyze, and write about the ideas in literature, and to carry those skills forward with us--skills we would value in pursuing any career--or in living our lives."
More than 20 years later, Comfort would remember that excitement and decide to return to the Department of English for an MA in literature. The department by that time was transforming, influenced by new hires and the establishment of University programs on Afro-American, American Indian Studies, and Women's Studies. Comfort again found her literature study enormously stimulating--so much so than when the liberal arts began to be overlooked in larger conversations about higher education, she was motivated to step forward with support.
"When it had become a nationwide aim to promote the study of math, science, and technology, I had a different goal," she declares, "to help the next generation of scholars who, in turn, through their research and teaching, would keep their tradition flourishing and would inspire the new students of literature."
Endowed in 2003, the Mary Sue Comfort Fellowship continues to meet that goal. Laura Zebuhr (PhD '10) received the fellowship in spring 2009, the year before she defended her PhD dissertation. "Even when you love teaching like I do it's so important to have time off to focus on a big writing project like the dissertation," she notes. "During that semester I was able to draft a chapter on friendship in the writing of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs. I also began research in 19th-century friendship albums, which led me to travel to Philadelphia over the summer to conduct archival research at the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania."
That research led to another dissertation chapter, as well as a presentation at the C19: Society for Nineteenth-Century Americanists Conference. Zebuhr's dissertation, "The New Work of Friendship: Antebellum American Literature, Democracy, Impossibility" (adviser: Qadri Ismail), helped her win a postgraduate Teaching Fellowship for two years at the University of King's College in Halifax. This year Zebuhr accepted a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor of American Literature at St. Francis University, in Illinois.
For Comfort these types of success stories are the best kind of thanks. "It has been a joy to meet the fellowship's recipients and to hear about their origins, their hopes, their projects," she says, "and, partly through them, to keep in touch with the department and the college."
Ruth Drake Dissertation Fellowship
As an undergraduate, Ruth Drake (BA '31) was an active participant in University clubs and activities. When a nucleus formed of equally committed organizers, one of their boyfriends drawled, "You women are just like a pack of rats running around." Rats! The women laughed--and gleefully adopted the name. The boyfriend became a husband, and the women stayed friends through 70-plus years, proud to be the Rats.
Recognized as a CLA Alumna of Notable Achievement, Drake remained involved with the University as well. She and her husband Everett A. Drake (JD '33) could reliably be found in the football stands for home games, remembers their son William Drake, in a phone call from his home in San Francisco. William also graduated from the University of Minnesota Law School, as did his grandfather, making three generations of alumni. Everett had a long career at Faegre & Benson, in downtown Minneapolis, as Ruth cared for William and a daughter, Carolyn, in St. Louis Park. The couple lived in Edina after the children left home, and, in 1980, they shocked their friends, William notes, by buying one of the first downtown condos. Everett could then walk to work and Ruth to their church, Westminster Presbyterian.
Ruth continued through her life to volunteer and support community activities, nonprofit groups, and charities. "It was the era [the 1930s to the 1950s] when women didn't work outside the home," her son recalls. "It's unfortunate, because she would've made one hell of a business person. She was a people person, very organized and well-informed. I think she would have been happier had she worked."
When Everett died in 1995 at age 86, Ruth set up a scholarship in his name at the Law School, William reports. "Then she said, 'Well, wait a minute. I've done this for the law school and my husband: I'm going to do it for myself as well. I'll do something for the English department.'" And so she worked with English to endow the Ruth Drake Dissertation Fellowship, which supports doctoral students at the crucial stage of the culminating dissertation project.
"The Ruth Drake Dissertation Fellowship made a critical difference for me," stresses the first recipient, Penelope Kelsey (PhD '02), now Associate Professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. "It allowed me to focus efforts on revising my dissertation in 2001-2002. This respite from teaching also allowed me to interview for multiple jobs, accept a tenure-line position, and successfully defend in June, 2002. The dissertation was the basis for my first book, Tribal Theory in Native American Literature: Dakota and Haudenosaunee Writing and Worldviews (University of Nebraska Press, 2008)."
Since 2001, ten dissertation projects have been supported by the Ruth Drake Fellowship, and nearly all the recipients have secured tenure track jobs. Including Kelsey, four have already published books based on their dissertations. Writes Alex Mueller (PhD '07), Assistant Professor of English, University of Massachusetts at Boston: "I am very grateful for the fellowship because it allowed me a teaching-free semester to finish and successfully defend my dissertation. That dissertation is the basis for my first book, Translating Troy: Provincial Politics in Alliterative Romance, which will be published this April with the Ohio State University Press."
Ruth's generosity to the University did not stop with supporting students. She collaborated with Professor Emeritus Vern Sutton, long-time opera theater director at the School of Music, to establish a fund to bring visiting musicians to campus. And she gave a major gift to the Pillsbury Hall Renovation Fund, which will help to create a permanent home for English this decade.
Ruth Drake died at age 94 on May 4, 2004, not the last "Rat," but the one English doctoral graduates will remember with gratitude years into the future. Professor Kelsey says it best: "Thank you, Ruth Drake!"
Martin B. Ruud Fellowship
When Professor Martin B. Ruud passed away, in 1941, a young professor at the University of Michigan sent a mournful letter to English chair Joseph Warren Beach. "Professor Ruud had a much greater influence on graduate students and young scholars than the number of his published works might indicate," wrote Karl Litzenberg, then an associate professor at Michigan. His words were more prophetic then he knew: graduate students 70 years later are still being supported and inspired by Ruud, though they never knew him.
"Thanks to the generous Martin B. Ruud fellowship," notes current student Amanda Niedfeldt, "I was able to focus the first year of my graduate career on coursework and scholarship. While I look forward to teaching in the years to come, the fellowship enabled me to comfortably and successfully acclimate myself to the world of graduate education before I begin instructing and leading others in the University and the discipline of English."
Another student, Laura Scroggs, concurs, adding: "This fellowship year has allowed me to get to know the University more intimately as I am free to seek out collaborators across campus to enrich my own research."
The Martin B. Ruud Fund emerged from the collective gifts of colleagues and former students, such as Litzenberg, compelled to do something in his name. At first a sum of $68.50 gathered, which the department decided to use to augment Ruud's book collection, which he bequeathed to the University. Then there was talk of publishing a festschrift, a volume of essays from various writers to honor Ruud. (One of Ruud's own books, Studies in English Philology: A Miscellany in Honor of Frederick Klaeber, was collected at the retirement of Ruud's department mentor and edited with colleague Kemp Malone.) Eventually, enthusiasm built to establish a fellowship and scholarship fund in Ruud's name.
Martin Bronn Ruud (1884-1941) was hired as a lecturer by the Department of Rhetoric and Public Speaking in the late teens and was promoted to assistant professor by the time that department was absorbed by English in 1921. Ruud, like Klaeber, was a scholar of medieval English literature and language. He published Thomas Chaucer (University of Minnesota, 1926) and was by Beach's account "almost amazingly" learned. "His interests were . . . austere," described James Gray in The University of Minnesota, 1851-1951, "and the most nearly frivolous thing he ever did was to evolve a theory which was later generally accepted of how the pronoun she had come into the language."
But his knowledge ranged beyond that field, with a special interest in Scandinavian culture. A translator, he also wrote essays for the journal Scandinavian Studies on Knut Hamsun and Ibsen and published two longer works on the history of Shakespeare in Norway and Denmark. With Theodore C. Blegen, he published the important collection Norwegian Emigrant Songs and Ballads. A supporter of the student Ibsen Club, he was responsible, Gray wrote, "for Minnesota's coming into possession of extensive collections of books in the field" of Scandinavian studies. These materials proved essential as the University in 1947 developed a program in Scandinavian studies, which state legislators had long called for as part of the University's responsibility as a land-grant institution.
According to archived department papers, Professor Ruud was humble and gracious in the classroom. A 1918 report concludes: "In manner Mr. Ruud is pleasant, subdued, and nervously hesitant. He is the typical university philologist in mind and manner." In 1920, Beach observed approvingly: "He is on good terms with the students."
By the time he died, 20 years later, Ruud had made himself indispensable. The Department of English sent a letter to his widow praising him for his "searching and disciplined mind, generous and loyal heart, and character of singular strength and integrity." The letter ends: "We would not leave unspoken the sense of loss we have for a colleague so much loved, so deeply respected and admired."
The establishment of the Ruud Fellowship underlined that sentiment--and now generations of students have learned Martin Ruud's name. First-year graduate student Marc Juberg represents yet another. "Coming straight out of undergrad, I knew the transition to graduate-level work would entail a fervent effort on my part to meet the rigorous expectations of Minnesota's accomplished faculty, as well as the high standard set by my brilliant cohort. Being allowed to devote more of my own time towards cultivating my research and writing skills is a privilege that would not have been possible without the Ruud Fellowship's support."
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Thanks Givingtag:blog.lib.umn.edu,2012:/cla/discoveries//8315.3781602012-11-30T17:01:14Z2012-12-01T01:18:13ZWe celebrate our our award-winning faculty, students, and alumni--and also the donors who support our students across generations....Teresa Sutton
We celebrate our our award-winning faculty, students, and alumni--and also the donors who support our students across generations.
Happy holidays! Welcome to another issue of English@Minnesota. As I celebrated Thanksgiving last month, I was thinking about the many reasons we have to give thanks to students, faculty, staff, donors, and friends of the department.
For the past three years, I have taught Introduction to Literary Theory and Literary Studies in the Modern University, a seminar required of all new PhD and MA students. Each year I have appreciated both their enthusiasm for literary studies and their creative ideas for how the department can better communicate what it offers to all of its students. In the fall 2011 seminar, a team of graduate students presented suggestions for making our website more lively and informative. I took their advice, forming a committee of faculty, graduate students, and staff that revamped several pages of the website in the following months; we've also started an online weekly interview series, 5 X Friday, to spotlight our accomplished students, alumni, and faculty.
I am thankful for our first-year fellowships, which attract the best graduate students to our literature program and provide them with the time, as one student said, to "take a few more classes, explore a few more ideas, engage in a few more conversations." Other fellowships support the students during the last year of dissertation writing, freeing them from teaching so that they can produce high-quality scholarship that can be turned into published articles and books.
This fall's English@Minnesota profiles fellowship funds, those gifted in recent years and those established many decades ago that have supported generations of graduate students. Only two of our many graduate funds, Klaeber and Ruud, produce sufficient income to provide full-year fellowships, which--with tuition, benefits, and a stipend--round out at $40,000 per student. Since our mission is to attract the "best and brightest" students to our Literature and Creative Writing Programs, we have made fundraising for graduate fellowships a priority. We'd love your help in building these funds.
I am thankful too for the comprehensive teaching opportunities that make our graduate students so attractive when they search for jobs. All new Literature and Creative Writing students attend an Orientation Program in August that includes sessions on teaching, take the one-semester Teaching Practicum in their first year, and throughout their studies attend Brown Bag lunches that focus on teaching issues. Meanwhile, they ease into more responsibility, generally starting out as Teaching Assistants for the large literature survey courses, then teaching their own courses in undergraduate writing, and finally offering "stand-alone" courses taken by undergraduates.
I celebrate as well our award-winning faculty, students, and alumni and share a few examples with you:
Last March at Britain's Cambridge University, Professor Nabil Matar was awarded the 2012 Building Bridges Award from the Association of Muslim Social Scientists for his pioneering scholarship on relations between Islamic civilization and Europe during the early modern period. Professor Matar is one of the very few scholars worldwide who can read ancient and modern Arabic texts which, as other scholars have noted, makes his work so richly insightful. Past recipients of the award include the Archbishop of Canterbury and the prime ministers of Spain, Malaysia, and Turkey.
Also in spring, Edelstein-Keller Professor of Creative Writing Charles Baxter won the 2011 Rea Award for the Short Story, given annually to a living American or Canadian writer whose published work has made a "significant contribution in the discipline of the short story as an art form." Baxter joined a list of acclaimed honorees including Alice Munro, Grace Paley, and John Updike.
This year several alums of our BA, MFA, and PhD programs received the following honors: Minnesota Book Award, American Book Award (two!), the Academy of American Poets' Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the Loft Minnesota Emerging Writers Grant (two!), the Poetry Society of America's Frost Medal, and numerous Minnesota State Arts Board Grants.
Books written by three alums--Amanda Coplin, Sam Kean, and Cheryl Strayed--catapulted onto The New York Times' bestsellers list. BA alumna Strayed's memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail topped the nonfiction list for three months and was chosen to kick off Oprah's Book Club 2.0. Write on!
Of 56 graduate and undergraduate students from all over the University who received the President's Student Leadership & Service Awards last spring, three came from English: majors Kari Eloranta and Echo Martin, and MFA student Claire Stanford.
Michael Lee, an English major, was honored as the 2011 Best Individual Poet at the national College Unions Poetry Slam.
Three graduate students, Aaron Apps, Feng Sun Chen and Katie Robison, published books this year, well before they were scheduled to graduate.
Ivory Tower, the literary arts magazine produced by undergraduate students during their two-semester magazine production course, won the Tony Diggs Innovation Award from the University's Student Activities Office. They were praised for encouraging daily doses of literature on campus by maintaining a Poet Tree and circulating writing notebooks.
Perhaps the best news in this bleak economic era, alums are winning jobs. Between 2007 and 2011, according to university data, 92% of Literature graduate students and 90% of Creative Writing graduates found employment, figures well above the rate at comparable institutions. As BA alumnus and landscape architect Bob Close says in this issue's interview, English is a "fabulous foundation" for a 21st century world of integrative problem-solving across the occupations.
In 2010-11, as many of you know, we conducted a search for an assistant professor of poetry that culminated in the hiring of Peter Campion, an award-winning writer of poetry and critical essays who was also a Guggenheim Fellow last year. This winter, we are conducting a search for two assistant professors who specialize in 18th- and/or 19th-Century British Literature and interdisciplinary topics. We look forward to the two new colleagues who will join us next fall.
I hope you enjoy the stories in this issue of English@Minnesota, and I encourage you to continue supporting our exceptional students and faculty by making a gift. Wishing you a happy and healthy New Year!
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Nuruddin Farah: Staging Groundtag:blog.lib.umn.edu,2012:/cla/discoveries//8315.3787362012-11-28T21:35:56Z2012-12-04T15:28:34ZSomali novelist Nuruddin Farah finishes up three autumns with English as the CLA Winton Chair....Teresa Sutton
Somali novelist Nuruddin Farah finishes up three autumns with English as the CLA Winton Chair.
Somali novelist Nuruddin Farah first visited Minneapolis, and specifically the Department of English at the University of Minnesota, in 1988 as an Edelstein-Keller Visiting Writer in the Creative Writing Program--years before the Twin Cities became a major destination for Somali refugees fleeing civil war. Little did he know that he would return numerous times, culminating with a three-autumn tenure starting in 2010 as the College of Liberal Arts' Winton Chair.
English has again been privileged to play host. And Farah has more than returned the favor. He has taught three graduate courses in English. He gave the fall 2010 Commencement address. In September 2011, he published his 11th novel Crossbones, which has received wide acclaim across the U.S., Europe, and Africa, and is a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. His publication reading packed the Central Minneapolis Library, one of three readings presented under the department's auspices in collaboration with CLA and community partners. He's also written and produced staged readings for two plays, the latest of which, A Stone Thrown at the Guilty, is presented in revised form December 7 and 8 at Rarig Center's Stoll Thrust Theatre.
These theatrical productions have been exhilarating for a writer who has always been interested in drama. This fall, he's had the opportunity, because of the Winton Chair, to hire celebrated British theater director Irina Brown to workshop and develop A Stone Thrown at the Guilty. The reading, featuring professional Twin Cities actors Sonja Parks and Bruce Young, as well as local Somali youth, will be followed by a discussion led by Brown and Farah, presenting a rare opportunity for Twin Cities audiences to observe a world-class theater director develop a work of drama with an esteemed international writer.
"The ethical and political ideas the play raised have an urgency that felt very current," says Brown, who has directed two plays at London's National Theatre. "It is inspired by Dostoyevsky, and, like Dostoyevsky, Farah is not afraid to tackle complex dilemmas of faith, of political and social turbulence. The insight, courage, and potential of this play made me believe we should find a rehearsal room to develop this piece. I am thrilled that now we get such a wonderful opportunity to work together."
Another highpoint of Farah's time here has been teaching. "I've enjoyed the students, from whom I've learned a great deal," Farah acknowledges. "They've been quite impressive.
"I've also had the opportunity to mount some courses that probably hadn't been tried before. The experience of mounting original courses and teaching them, and then finding that the students have also enjoyed them, has meant a great deal to me."
Farah is thankful to the department for providing him this freedom, which he has embraced with course reading lists ranging across continents. The first course focused on books that, in Farah's words, "changed our understanding of literature in the 20th century," and included Günter Grass, Joseph Conrad, and Chinua Achebe. The second, also a reading course, tackled first novels by authors who would go on to write paradigm-shifting work. This year, Farah's students are reading authors known for books written in their second, third, or fourth language, such as Michael Ondaatje and Henry Roth.
He has delighted too in having a foot in both disciplines of English, drawing students from the Creative Writing and doctoral literature programs. Declares Farah: "My principle when teaching is to say to the students, 'I can't teach you to write or to research. What I can do for you, however, is make you appreciate reading.' It's only after you understand and appreciate the art of reading, and the act of reading, that you can write and research better."
Finally, Farah has very much appreciated his interactions with the greater Somali community in the Twin Cities, through high school and college talks, community meetings, and, particularly this fall, the process of staging the play reading, which has involved young people as actors, graphic designers, and publicists. "The first two years I was talking to the community at large," Farah describes, "which was successful in that people were still feeling the wounds, the scars of the civil war. This past year I have been concentrating mainly on the young, because now you have a crop of young Somalis, some of whom are interested in theater, some of whom are interested in literature and culture. We've been talking about how to remain Somali and at the same time fulfill their American dream."
Farah, who is held in great esteem by many Somalis for his achievements, is uniquely qualified to talk about that balance. His second novel, A Naked Needle (1976), was not well-received by the Somali government of dictator Siyad Barre, and Farah was encouraged not to return. He has chosen to remain an Africa-based writer by living, teaching, and writing in many African countries and currently resides in Capetown, South Africa. And yet he is also a citizen of the world, receiving international literary prizes such as the Neustadt and flying to countries around the world for talks and residencies. During his stint in Minnesota, he has become a familiar face to an airport cab company. How does he stay sane and grounded in the midst of such upheaval?
"By keeping my eyes on the ball," Farah responds, "and the ball is Somalia. Focusing on what makes me continue to live and work and think, which is: I am a writer, I come from Somalia, and on top of that the world has been kind to me. The fact that I have been able to hold the Winton Chair for three semesters has strengthened my belief in that kindness," he says with emphasis.
"I'm very grateful to CLA and to Dean James Parente. I'm very grateful also to my friends in Minneapolis."
The door's always open.
The Winton Chair in the Liberal Arts was established in October 1987 to encourage "innovative, distinctive research in the liberal arts" with the special directive that the chair be held by individuals whose research or creative work "questions established patterns of thought." The benefactors were David Michael Winton and Penny Rand Winton.]]>
In Remembrance: Kent Balestag:blog.lib.umn.edu,2012:/cla/discoveries//8315.3773762012-11-26T19:59:14Z2012-12-05T14:39:52ZProfessor Emeritus Kent Bales, scholar of American literature and respected administrator, died October 8, 2012....Teresa Sutton
Professor Emeritus Kent Bales, scholar of American literature and respected administrator, died October 8, 2012.
Professor Emeritus Kent R. Bales passed away October 8, 2012, in Minneapolis. A two-time chair of the Department of English, Bales was an effective and collegial administrator, mentoring staff and colleagues, finding common ground on divisive issues, and encouraging a sense of community through festive dinners at his home with his wife Maria Gyorei.
Recalls Professor Michael Hancher, who served as director of Graduate Studies during Bales' first five years as chair: "It was a pleasure to work with him; he had a ready leadership style that made shared work for a common cause enjoyable."
A scholar of American literature, he was well-known for his writing on Hawthorne--which was intimidatingly knowledgeable, as Edelstein-Keller Professor of Creative Writing Charles Baxter noted when Bales retired in 2008.
Born in Kansas, Bales excelled in sports and academics at high school in Salt Lake City. Yale University offered an academic scholarship, and he played tackle for the Yale football team, serving as captain when he was a senior. In 1958, he graduated with a BA in American Studies. He received his MA from San Jose State in 1963 and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1967.
That same year, Bales joined the English faculty at the University of Minnesota, where he would teach American Literature for 41 years. Bales was awarded the prestigious Fulbright Scholar Award twice and went on to serve on the National Fulbright Committee. His wife a native of Hungary, Bales traveled there often and worked with the Hungarian government to organize a conference on American literature and to encourage reciprocal student exchange. He was also a visiting professor in Salzburg, Austria. He acted as dissertation adviser for many graduate students, even as he spent increasing amounts of time in administration.
In his two stints as chair of the department, 1983-88 and 2000-03, he provided critical support for controversial initiatives on creative writing and feminist studies. Several faculty members remember his tactfulness and cogency in tense meetings at the department, college, and University level. According to Professor Gordon Hirsch, "Kent was a model citizen in such settings: articulate, forward-looking, forceful, and open-minded."
Bales directed Graduate Studies (1991-94) and Undergraduate Studies (1999-2000), while also taking on leadership roles in the wider University community: Director of Graduate Studies for Liberal Studies, 1994-96; Chair, Senate Committee on Faculty Affairs, 1997-99; and Chair, Senate Joint Committee on Faculty Appointments, 1997-2000.
As the assistant to the Director of Graduate Studies, Karen Frederickson remembers Bales as her "ideal first boss" in the department: a kind and thoughtful mentor. "Kent used to stand in the doorway of the graduate office," she goes on, "greeting people who walked up the stairs or came down the hall, saying hello and falling into conversation with them if they had a little time to spare. I liked this friendly approach."
Bales is survived by his wife, daughter Liza and son Tom, and five grandchildren. Memorials preferred to the Alzheimer's Association or the Sierra Club.]]>
In Remembrance: Margery Durhamtag:blog.lib.umn.edu,2012:/cla/discoveries//8315.3774652012-11-26T19:50:44Z2012-12-01T01:10:00ZProfessor Emerita Margery Durham, scholar of Victorian literature and co-founder of the Nineteenth Century Subfield in English, died September 23, 2012....Teresa Sutton
Professor Emerita Margery Durham, scholar of Victorian literature and co-founder of the Nineteenth Century Subfield in English, died September 23, 2012.
Margery Durham, professor emerita of English, died September 23, 2012, in Polson, Montana. Durham was a scholar of Romantic and Victorian literature, especially Matthew Arnold (the subject of her dissertation), George Eliot, the Brontë sisters, and Charles Dickens. Among other articles, she wrote the widely cited essay "The Mother Tongue: Cristabel and the Language of Love," about Coleridge's poem, which was included in (M)Other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation, edited by her colleagues Shirley Garner and Madelon Sprengnether along with Claire Kahane (Cornell University Press, 1985).
"Margery was a devoted student and teacher of the full range of Victorian literature, glad to share her understanding of its complex forms and values," remembers Professor Michael Hancher. "More than 30 years ago she was a founding member of the Victorian Literature Subfield, which continues today as the Nineteenth Century British Subfield. She played a key role in the enduring tradition of Victorian studies at Minnesota, and will long be remembered for that contribution, as well as for her generous friendship and hospitality."
Durham was born in 1933 in Nashville, Tennessee, and received her BA (1955) with honors in American History from the College of New Rochelle, a liberal arts college near New York City. She worked as a copy editor in Washington, D.C., and New York City, where she began taking evening classes at New York University. There she completed a MA in English Literature, followed by a PhD in English Literature at Indiana University in Bloomington in 1965.
Durham joined the faculty at the University of Minnesota that year and taught in the Department of English for three decades; she also taught for a year at the University of East Anglia in England. In 1969, she married a colleague, Lonnie Durham, whom she had met as a graduate student at Indiana. As her obituary notes, "Their relationship as colleagues was a delightful mix of collaboration and competition, underlined and punctuated by loving wit."
The Durhams retired in the fall of 1996 and moved to Polson, Montana, a small town south of Glacier National Park on Flathead Lake. There Margery enjoyed drawing and painting, as well as playing bridge and hiking, fishing, and swimming, until a palsy related to Parkinson's curtailed her activities. Margery is survived by her husband, her daughters, Alice and Emily, stepson James, and one grandson.
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In Remembrance: Norman Frumantag:blog.lib.umn.edu,2012:/cla/discoveries//8315.3773732012-11-26T19:37:17Z2012-12-01T01:11:35ZProfessor Emeritus Norman Fruman, scholar of Coleridge and Wordsworth, and erstwhile comic book writer, died April 19, 2012....Teresa Sutton
Professor Emeritus Norman Fruman, scholar of Coleridge and Wordsworth, and erstwhile comic book writer, died April 19, 2012.
Norman Fruman, an educator and scholar best known for his biography of the English poet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and a long-time member of the Department of English at the University of Minnesota, died April 19, 2012, at his home in Laguna Beach, California, of cancer. He was 88.
Professor Fruman's Coleridge, The Damaged Archangel (George Braziller, 1971) revealed a darker side of the so-called "Sage of Highgate" than had previously been known. Although many scholars and other readers were shocked by Fruman's portrait of the revered Coleridge as a liar and plagiarist, his findings were too well-documented to be dismissed or ignored. Among the book's 100 mostly favorable reviews, many of them in non-academic publications, The Times Literary Supplement called it the most important Coleridge study since John Livingston Lowes' The Road to Xanadu (1927).
Born in the Bronx, New York, in 1923, Fruman was the son of Russian immigrants, attended Townsend Harris Hall, a free, three-year high school for gifted boys, and then the City College of New York. In 1943, about to begin his senior year at CCNY, he was drafted into the army as an infantry private. A year later, he attended Officer Candidate School, was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant, and was sent to Europe as the youngest combat platoon leader in the 42nd Infantry, the famed "Rainbow Division."
As such, in late 1944, Fruman, just turned 21, took part in the Battle of the Bulge, the last great German counteroffensive in the West. Fruman's unit was ordered to defend an Alsatian town 30 miles north of Strasbourg, and to hold the line there at all costs. He and his men did so until they ran out of ammunition, then became prisoners of war. The survivors of his unit, many of whom died in a failed escape attempt along with most of their would-be rescuers, were finally liberated in April 1945.
Back at City College by year-end, Fruman graduated in 1946, received his MA in Education from Columbia Teachers College in 1948, and--after a three-year stint as a writer-editor at The American Comics Group, and later as a freelance writer--a PhD in English from New York University in 1960. The Coleridge biography grew out of his work on his doctoral dissertation.
In addition to his years at the University of Minnesota (1978-94), Professor Fruman taught at California State University, Los Angeles (1959-78), where he won the Outstanding Professor Award; as a Fulbright Professor at the University of Tel Aviv; and as a visiting scholar at various universities in France, while also writing many article-length studies and reviews. In 1994, he was one of the leading initiators of the organization now known as the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW). For many years he also served on the board of the National Association of Scholars, and was the cofounder of its Minnesota affiliate. But in an interview in 2010, Professor Fruman acknowledged that it was the Coleridge book for which he was likely to be best remembered: "It made me both famous and infamous."
Professor Fruman is survived by his wife of 53 years, Doris, three children, Jessica, Sara, and David, and four grandchildren.
Adapted from an article by Roy Winnick in Literary Matters (2010).]]>
New Pagestag:blog.lib.umn.edu,2012:/cla/discoveries//8315.3768062012-11-19T15:54:45Z2012-12-12T20:15:32ZA harvest of books from faculty and alumnae/i published 2011-2012....Teresa Sutton
A harvest of books from faculty and alumnae/i published 2011-2012.
Aaron Apps (MFA candidate)COMPOS(T) MENTIS: Poetry
BlazeVOX, 2012
Biman Basu (PhD '90)The Commerce of Peoples: Sadomasochism and African American Literature
Lexington, 2012
Edelstein-Keller Professor of Creative Writing Charles Baxter, editorSherwood Anderson: Collected Stories
Library of America, 2012
Here--for the first time in a single volume--are all the collections Anderson published during his lifetime: Winesburg, Ohio (1919), The Triumph of the Egg (1921), Horses and Men (1923), and Death in the Woods (1933), along with a generous selection of stories left uncollected or unpublished at his death. Exploring the hidden recesses of small town life, these haunting, understated, often sexually frank stories pivot on seemingly quiet moments when lives change, futures are recast, and pasts come to reckon. They transformed the tone of American storytelling, inspiring writers like Hemingway, Faulkner, and Mailer, and defining a tradition of midwestern fiction that includes editor Charles Baxter.
Ruth Berman (PhD '79)Bradamant's Quest
FTL, 2011
Mary Casanova (BA '81)Frozen
University of Minnesota Press, 2012
Feng Sun Chen (MFA candidate) Butcher's Tree: Poems
Black Ocean, 2012Mick Cochrane (PhD '85)Fitz
Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2012
Amanda Coplin (MFA '06)The Orchardist
Harper Collins, 2012
Professor Maria Damon, with Jukka-Pekka Kervinen Door Marked X
cPress, 2012
Experimental collaborative poetry from Damon and Finnish artist Kervinen.
Kim Donehower (PhD '97), with Charlotte Hogg and Eileen SchellReclaiming the Rural: Essays on Literacy, Rhetoric, and Pedagogy
Southern Illinois University Press, 2011
Lauren Fox (MFA '98)Friends Like Us
Knopf, 2012
Peter Geye (BA '00)The Lighthouse Road
Unbridled Books, 2012
Gerald Jay Goldberg (PhD '58), as Gerald JayThe Paris Directive
Nan A. Talese/Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2012Janet Groth (BA '57)The Receptionist: An Education at The New Yorker
Algonquin Books, 2012
J. Jack Halberstam (PhD '91) The Queer Art of Failure
Duke University Press, 2011
J. Jack Halberstam (PhD '91)Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (Queer Ideas Book)
Beacon Press, 2012
Leigh Herrick (BA '88) Home Front: Poems of the Bush II Years
2012
Patricia Hodgell (PhD '87), as P. C. HodgellHonor's Paradox
Baen Books, 2011
Kate Hopper (MFA '05) Use Your Words: A Writing Guide for Mothers
Viva Editions, 2012
Clay Jenkinson (BA '77)The Character of Meriwether Lewis: Explorer in the Wilderness
Dakota Institute Press, 2011
Kathleen Jesme (BA '75)Meridian (Tupelo Press Snowbound Prize)
Tupelo Press, 2012
John Jodzio (BA '99)Get In If You Want To Live
Paper Darts Press, 2011
Angela Karstadt (Falk) (PhD '99)Thinking and Writing in Academic Contexts: A University Companion
Studentlitteratur, 2011
Sam Kean (BA '02)The Violinist's Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code
Little Brown, 2012
Garrison Keillor (BA '66), editorGood Poems, American Places
Viking, 2011
Erin Felicia Labbie (PhD '01), editor, with Allie Terry-FritschBeholding Violence in Medieval and Early Modern Europe
Ashgate, 2012
Ellen Lansky (PhD '96)Golden Jeep
North Star Press of St. Cloud, 2011
Elizabeth Larsen (MFA '02) with Joshua GlennUnbored: The Essential Field Guide to Serious Fun
Bloomsbury, 2012
Professor Josephine Lee, editor, with Don Eitel and R. A. Shiomi Asian American Plays for a New Generation
Temple University Press, 2011
This volume showcases seven exciting new plays that dramatize timely themes that are familiar to Asian Americans. The works variously address immigration, racism, stereotyping, identity, generational tensions, assimilation, and upward mobility as well as post-9/11 paranoia, racial isolation, and adoptee experiences.
George Levine (PhD '69)Darwin the Writer
Oxford University Press, 2011
George Levine (PhD '69), editorThe Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now
Princeton University Press, 2011
Professor Nabil Matar, editor with Judy A. HaydenThrough the Eyes of the Beholder: The Holy Land, 1517-1713
Brill, 2012
The collection examines the view of holiness in the "Holy Land" through the writings of pilgrims, travelers, and missionaries. The period extends from 1517, the Ottoman conquest of Syria and Palestine, to the Franco-British treaty of Utrecht in 1713 and the consolidation of European hegemony over the Mediterranean. The writers in the collection include Christians (Orthodox, Protestant, and Catholic), Muslims, and Jews. This book is the first to juxtapose writers of different backgrounds and languages, to emphasize the holiness of the land in a number of traditions, and to ask whether holiness was inherent in geography or a product of the piety of the writers.
Professor Nabil Matar, editorHenry Stubbe's The Rise and Progress of Mahometanism
Columbia University Press, 2012
Professor Matar edits, introduces, and annotates this edition of the first European text (1671) to acknowledge Muhammad as Islamic Prophet (rather than "imposter") and to offer a full account of his life.
Tim Nolan (BA '78)And Then (American Poetry Series)
New Rivers Press, 2012
Sheila O'Connor (BA '82)Keeping Safe the Stars
Putnam Juvenile, 2012
Professor Paula Rabinowitz, editor with Cristina Giorcelli Exchanging Clothes : Habits of Being II
University of Minnesota Press, 2012
The second in a four-part series charting the social, cultural, and political expression of clothing, dress, and accessories, Exchanging Clothes focuses on the concept of transnational "circulation and exchange." These essays focus on not only the global exchange of material commodities across time and space but also of the ideas, images, colors, and textures related to fashion.
Anna Reckin (MFA '99)Three Reds: Poems
Shearsman, 2011
Karen Rigby-Huang (MFA '04) Chinoiserie: Poems
Ahsahta Press, 2012
Katie Robison (PhD candidate)Downburst
Quil Press, Inc., 2012
Associate Professor Katherine ScheilShe Hath Been Reading: Women and Shakespeare Clubs in America
Cornell University Press, 2012
In the late 19th century hundreds of clubs formed across the United States devoted to the reading of Shakespeare. From Pasadena, California, to the seaside town of Camden, Maine; from the isolated farm town of Ottumwa, Iowa, to Mobile, Alabama, on the Gulf coast, Americans were reading Shakespeare in astonishing numbers and in surprising places. Composed mainly of women, these clubs offered the opportunity for members not only to read and study Shakespeare but also to participate in public and civic activities outside the home. Katherine West Scheil uncovers this hidden layer of intellectual activity that flourished in American society well into the 20th century.
Professor Julie SchumacherUnbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls
Delacorte, 2012
The story of a mother-daughter book club most of the daughters didn't want to join. The members of "The Unbearable Book Club" were all going into eleventh grade A.P. English. But they weren't friends: "We were literary prisoners, sweating, reading classics, and hanging out at the pool. If you want to find out how membership in a book club can end up with a person being dead, you can probably look us up under mother-daughter literary catastrophe."
John Sitter (PhD '69)The Cambridge Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Poetry
Cambridge University Press, 2011
Angela M. Smith (PhD '07)Hideous Progeny: Disability, Eugenics, and Classic Horror Cinema (Film and Culture Series)
Columbia University Press, 2012
Robert Stark (PhD '07)Ezra Pound's Early Verse and Lyric Tradition: A Jargoner's Apprenticeship
Edinburgh University Press, 2012
Cheryl Strayed (BA '97) Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
Knopf, 2012
Cheryl Strayed (BA '97) Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life From Dear Sugar
Vintage, 2012
Francine Marie Tolf (MFA '06)Prodigal: Poems
Pinyon Publishing, 2012
Sarah Wadsworth (PhD '00), with Wayne Wiegand Right Here I See My Own Books: The Woman's Building Library at the World's Columbian Exposition
University of Massachusetts Press, 2012
Michael Walsh (MFA '06)Sleepwalks illustrated chapbook
Red Dragonfly Press, 2012
Kari J. Winter (PhD '90)The American Dreams of John B. Prentis, Slave-Trader (Race in the Atlantic World, 1700-1900 Series)
University of Georgia Press, 2011
David Wojahn (BA 1976) World Tree (Academy of American Poets' Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize winner)
University of Pittsburgh, 2011
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Alum Stories: A Bountiful Harvesttag:blog.lib.umn.edu,2012:/cla/discoveries//8315.3763322012-11-15T19:30:45Z2012-11-15T21:17:57ZAmanda Coplin (MFA 2006), whose debut novel hit the bestseller charts, talks about her grandfather the orchardist, writing about violence, and being "steeped in a task."...Teresa Sutton
Amanda Coplin (MFA 2006), whose debut novel hit the bestseller charts, talks about her grandfather the orchardist, writing about violence, and being "steeped in a task."
Amanda Coplin (MFA 2006) published her debut novel The Orchardist (Harper) in August--and made The New York Times bestseller list two weeks later. The book, about an early 20th-century apple grower in Eastern Washington who befriends two pregnant runaways, was also a Publishers Weekly top ten pick, a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and a top ten for fall 2012 O Magazine selection. Reviews of the book align Coplin's writing with that of a host of masters: Faulkner, Steinbeck, Brontë, Cather, Cormac McCarthy. When Coplin, who now lives in Portland, Oregon, read at Micawber's Books in St. Paul in mid-September, her novel was already in its fourth printing. "What a crazy time!" noted Coplin, who appeared a bit giddy to be back in Minneapolis with book in hand and former professors Charles Baxter and Julie Schumacher in the audience. We caught up with her later through email.
How did you write The Orchardist? Did you know the story before you started, or figure it out as you wrote?
The characters of Talmadge, Della, and Angelene came to me first: I saw them in the orchard, held within an incredible tension. This tension could not be resolved within the scope of a short story, and so I looked to the novel form. I would say plot has been one of the main challenges for me as a writer. I am interested in unconventional plots, and how those can be as satisfying and therapeutic for the reader as more conventional plots.
Can you describe what research you did for this book?
I read early Pacific Northwest pioneer accounts--journal entries, oral accounts--as well as the agricultural history of the area. I studied books on horse physiology and behavior, and early methods of orchard-keeping. I wanted the historical details to reinforce the themes of the novel, but never overwhelm it.
You dedicated the book to your grandfather. What makes this story in some way his?
My grandfather's demeanor--quiet, gentle, patient--as well as his work ethic as an orchardist influenced me greatly as a child. I wanted to capture his love for the orchard landscape, and his constant engagement with it. I wanted to study this relationship between a person and their surrounding landscape, how it affects their interiority and informs their personal philosophies and beliefs.
Your interest in the environment underlies the story without being at all intrusive or preachy: it's just apparent in how characters interact with the world and with each other. Where did you learn "kinship with the earth"?
From my grandparents and parents, first and foremost, I learned the value of respecting your place on earth and engaging with it. However, this sense of kinship has been sustained and deepened by certain works of literature, which celebrate the relationship between human beings and the natural world, works by authors such as William Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, Patrick White, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Barry Lopez, and Wendell Berry, among others.
Deliberate caring for the world, whether for the health of an orchard or of a townspeople, seems to bring some characters a sense of blissful selflessness that others find (much more temporarily) in destruction, danger, or obliteration. Your novel seems to be written with great care: is writing for you an exercise in present-ness, in being bodiless, "steeped in a task," to use your phrase?
Yes, this is exactly what it is. It seems like a paradox but it is not: to plumb the depths of the self to overcome the self, to contact what lies beyond it.
A couple reviews on Amazon complain of the "sex and violence" in the book. Do you feel that people are still more uncomfortable with the idea of a woman writing about violence than they are of a man?
Some people have been surprised by the violence in the novel, but I hardly know why. There is such violence in the world, varied and more terrible than that which I recount in the book. And it is not like I write about such violence in graphic detail--or I hope I do not, that would be pornographic--because I am less interested in the violence itself as compared to how it affects the characters involved. No one is exempt from violence in the novel because no one is exempt from violence in life. It hardly matters if it makes us uncomfortable or not; in fact, it should make us uncomfortable.
As for the female/male aspect of writing about violence--yes, I think people are more startled when a young woman writes about violence of the sort I do in the novel. I don't know why, other than because of the lingering attitudes and assumptions about what a woman should or should not write about.
What were any classes you had at the U that were particularly helpful?
I learned a lot from Charles Baxter's workshops. He has a particular way of evaluating fiction, at looking at what is on the page and how that matches up against the author's intentions. I also took a class on English prose styles from Steven Polansky; that was really important, and really fun. Another class comes to mind: a poetry class taught by John Minceszki, [MFA alumna] Yuko Taniguchi, and G. E. Patterson. There were a lot of wonderful poets in that class, and it was such a supportive environment: magical, really. Other classes on long fiction taught by Julie Schumacher and David Treuer helped me as well.
You thank a ton of poets in your acknowledgements. How did poetry inform The Orchardist?
When I was an undergraduate student at the University of Oregon, I was good friends with a group of poets who studied under Dorianne Laux. I wrote fiction, but I read a lot of poetry. I still do. Poetry is very important to me; it affects my mind in a way that is distinct from prose, and yet it inspires me to write prose.
What was the heart of the Minnesota Creative Writing Program experience for you?
The most important aspect of the MFA program was the three years of financial support that allowed me to focus on my work--and the teachers mentioned above, who taught me so much about writing and life.
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Paula Rabinowitz: A Clothes Collaborationtag:blog.lib.umn.edu,2012:/cla/discoveries//8315.3746512012-11-05T20:41:25Z2012-11-30T20:10:23ZProfessor Paula Rabinowitz collaborates with Italian professor Cristina Giorcelli on a four-volume, English-language series about the cultural, social, and political meanings of clothing and accesssories....Teresa Sutton
Professor Paula Rabinowitz collaborates with Italian professor Cristina Giorcelli on a four-volume, English-language series about the cultural, social, and political meanings of clothing and accesssories.
It started in Rome, with a pair of shoes. Paula Rabinowitz was a 1997 Fulbright professor at University of Rome 3. Cristina Giorcelli was the head of the graduate program in American Studies there--and the editor of a book series on the cultural, social, and political meanings of clothing and accessories, Abito e Identita: Ricerche di storia letteraria e culturale. "I've been into shoes for a long time, and of course, I'm in Italy, where there's a shoe store on every corner," recalls Rabinowitz in a conversation in Lind Hall. "I had one particular store that I adored, up the hill from my apartment. It was like the guy who owned it had my brain." Coincidentally, Giorcelli was looking for someone to write about shoes for her series. "She knew I was always coming in on the way to work and saying, 'Look at these shoes I bought!'" Rabinowitz laughs. "I was really honored that an Italian would ask me to write on shoes."
The essay that resulted, "Barbara Stanwyck's Anklet: The Other Shoe," arose organically from Rabinowitz's interest in film noir. It was included, 15 years later, in Rabinowitz and Giorcelli's book Accessorizing the Body: Habits of Being I (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), the first of a four-part series that selects and translates the best from Abito e Identita and includes new articles. This past summer, Exchanging Clothes: Habits of Being II arrived, focusing on the world trade in clothing and accessories and the accompanying exchange of meanings around those items.
After she left Rome, Rabinowitz had continued to write for Giorcelli, and they'd spoken about producing an English language collection of Abito e Identita. "I knew that Doug Armato [University of Minnesota Press Director] was interested in getting into fashion studies," reports Rabinowitz. "The whole thing worked out while we were both chairing our respective departments, figuring, 'Oh well, this will be easy to do'--you can't really think when you're a chair, but you can do a little organizational work."
A "little" turned out to be optimistic. First they had to agree on what to select from 11, and counting, volumes of Abito e Identita, which mostly meant that Rabinowitz had to review them and then argue with Giorcelli. "When you work with someone, it's totally maddening; you want to kill each other half the time," she claims gleefully, "but also it's really great because you do get these different ideas of what's important and what's not. For instance, there's a piece in one of the most recent Abitos about the uses of the hood in torture. Cristina said, 'I doubt they'll even let us publish it.' And I said, 'You know, Cristina, we have the Bill of Rights here.' When I actually read the essay, every one of the sources is American. So I said, 'This is not even new to us.' We didn't put that one in."
While the editors asked the original writers of the articles to arrange for their own translation to English, Rabinowitz had to painstakingly review the results. "A lot of [translators] don't know the technical language," she notes. One article was by a psychoanalyst, a Lacanian: "They kept talking about 'the glance,' and I thought it was kind of evocative--and, all of sudden, a day before the page proof deadline, I thought, 'Wait a minute, she means "the gaze"!'" Rabinowitz laughs in disbelief.
One area Rabinowitz has enjoyed is the opportunity to include new or recent work by colleagues and former students. Accessorizing the Body features past advisee Becky Peterson (PhD '10), with an excerpt about poet Laura Riding from her dissertation, as well as textile art from Department of English professor Maria Damon. In the second volume, Katalin Medvedev, another former advisee, provides an ethnography of Savers thrift stores. For the third, which will have a 19th century focus, Rabinowitz caught up with pioneering woman video artist Beryl Korot and recruited her piece "Florence," a combination of weaving and video about Florence Nightingale. Rabinowitz asked Joanne Eicher, Regents Professor Emerita of Design, Housing and Apparel, with whom she directed Medvedev's thesis, to contribute to volume four, with its theme of everyday fashion across the world.
Giorcelli is "marching forward" with number 12 of the Abito series, Rabinowitz says. For her part, she's glad to be ending Habits of Being at four volumes. Since her tenure as chair ended, Rabinowitz has been working on a book for Princeton entitled American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street. "It's kind of a sequel to my noir book [Black & White & Noir: America's Pulp Modernism]," she says. "It's about the paperback revolution and the circulation of high culture as trash--in the way that Faulkner became marketed as a sex novelist after Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road was such a big hit, and they turned all these Southern authors into steamy sex writers."
The current project grew out of the research Rabinowitz did for another Giorcelli article, "Slips of the Tongue: Lesbian Pulp Fiction as How-to-Dress Manuals" (included in Exchanging Clothes: Habits of Being II). In the essay she looks at the covers of lesbian pulp novels, which often featured women in slips, and relates them to the books' role in the forging of an early lesbian subjectivity and culture. An unexpected side effect of this focus: Rabinowitz's office is now decorated with over 400 luridly colored paperbacks from the mid-20th century.
Of course, Rabinowitz has always had an interest in visual culture: cinema, photography, painting. So fashion was not, in the end, such a stretch. "When you start taking apart clothing--earrings, buttons, the little flowers in your hair, keychains, watches--then you start thinking, 'Wow, all these little details,'" enthuses Rabinowitz. "And, if you're a literary critic, that's what you do, you 'read in detail,' to use Naomi Schor's phrase."
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Katherine Scheil: Women's Shakespearetag:blog.lib.umn.edu,2012:/cla/discoveries//8315.3761182012-11-05T13:46:19Z2012-11-30T20:13:14ZProfessor Katherine Scheil overturns traditional views of Shakespeare readers in America with her new book about 19th-century women's Shakespeare clubs....Teresa Sutton
Professor Katherine Scheil overturns traditional views of Shakespeare readers in America with her new book about 19th-century women's Shakespeare clubs.
Watching the Olympics' opening and closing ceremonies, Associate Professor Katherine Scheil noticed with some amusement the continuing idealization (and consequent defanging) of Shakespeare as England's "national poet": "The actual content of the plays is often at odds with the conception of the ideal poet," she observes wryly, "which makes for great fun for readers and audiences who discover Shakespeare's uncanny ability to connect with human situations, often on a very realistic level."
Continues Scheil: "My own students are usually pleasantly surprised at how many connections they have with the issues that preoccupied Shakespeare--love, lust, passion, jealousy, youth, age, etc."
In her new book She Hath Been Reading: Women and Shakespeare Clubs in America(Cornell University Press, 2012), Professor Scheil illustrates how numerous 19th-century and early 20th-century American women discovered in reading Shakespeare at once a challenge and an affinity which vaulted them into unexpected social and civic engagement. At the time, the group study of Shakespeare was considered a "safe" and acceptable activity for women--as opposed to clubs selfishly and dangerously focused on reading novels or fomenting social change. Yet it led women to, as Scheil writes, "read, study, write, speak, argue, and spread their enthusiasm for Shakespeare." It led to women acting together as a force for education (starting libraries, advocating for child labor laws, giving scholarships). And it led to women, from farmers in Kansas to settlers in California, claiming for themselves the space (and time) to grow intellectually and otherwise.
What did these women find so inspiring in Shakespeare? According to Scheil's research, they discovered indelible characters, such as Portia, and, through the characters, ways to talk about gender roles in society. Women used the study of Shakespeare's plays as opportunities to investigate geography, history, religion: the context of the work. They developed speaking skills by discussing and performing the poetic language of the plays. Black women, writes Scheil, "recognized the cultural power inherent in reading Shakespeare." Above all, perhaps, women readers took enough joy from the insight, drama, and occasional bawdiness of the text that they wanted to read, reflect, and discuss even after a long day of labor.
Scheil was writing about women in a different century and country when she first heard about American women's Shakespeare clubs. She had been discussing her paper on the Shakespeare Ladies' Club of 1730s London with another scholar, Mary Ellen Lamb, when Lamb noted tangentially that her mother had participated in a Pennsylvania Shakespeare club. "When I began to dig a bit further," Scheil relates, "I was astonished at the sheer numbers of women reading Shakespeare in nearly every corner of the country."
Scheil's research took her from major research libraries to a "Shakespeare's Closet" in a Georgia woman's home, from printed meeting programs to handwritten records. "The most rewarding part of the book," declares Scheil, "was being able to tell the stories of these women and their relationship to Shakespeare as an author who could provide the intellectual stimulation they eagerly sought, and to give these readers their due place in the history of Shakespeare in America.
"The prevailing story of Shakespeare in America, derived from Lawrence Levine, was that Shakespeare gradually became archaic and inaccessible to ordinary Americans as the 19th century progressed. The evidence that I found demonstrates that ordinary Americans, especially women, were reading and studying Shakespeare voraciously."
Scheil is bent on upending the image of Shakespeare "as the highbrow property of an elite and exclusive enclave" and that goes for the present as well as past centuries. "The Globe Theatre in London just completed the 'Globe to Globe' festival," she reports, "with 38 performances of Shakespeare in 38 different languages. Apparently 83 percent of audiences for these performances were first-time theatergoers, attracted to the productions because of the opportunity to connect with Shakespeare in new ways."
Scheil's next project offers another opportunity for fresh connections: she's looking at how Shakespeare's wife Anne Hathaway has been imagined by biographers, gardeners, playwrights, and novelists since her death. The fascination with Hathaway of course rests on the continuing interest in Shakespeare's life, and primarily the mystery of how this humble country boy went on to create plays that rivet audiences and readers 400 years after his death.
"I recently saw the 'Shakespeare: Staging the World' exhibit at the British Museum," Scheil describes, "and I'm still haunted by the final display of the exhibit. It was the complete works of Shakespeare known as the 'Robben Island Bible,' which Nelson Mandela kept hidden in his jail cell in South Africa where he was imprisoned with other ANC leaders. Each prisoner signed his name next to his favorite passage from Shakespeare. The exhibit ended with prisoner Ahmed Kathrada's comment, 'Somehow Shakespeare always had something to say to us.'"]]>
Julie Schumacher: Tales of an 11th Grade Monstertag:blog.lib.umn.edu,2012:/cla/discoveries//8315.3761242012-11-04T18:03:51Z2012-11-19T20:35:27ZProfessor Julie Schumacher's fifth novel for younger readers imagines a clumsily destructive creature trying to figure out who she is....Teresa Sutton
Professor Julie Schumacher's fifth novel for younger readers imagines a clumsily destructive creature trying to figure out who she is.
Director of the Creative Writing Program, Julie Schumacher this summer published her fifth book for younger readers and teens, a rather astonishing achievement given that she started her first in 2003 as a one-off experiment in developing plot. It turns out she's very good at it: Her 2008 young adult novelBlack Box won a Minnesota Book Award. The new book, The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls, began as an idea from her editor at Delacorte and grew, she says, from what seemed a "fun and simple project" to a structural nightmare of interlocking strands: four high school girls forced into a mother-daughter book club; the fiction they read; one girl's assigned summer writing project; and the defining of literary tools such as "setting."
The book club members read five novels: The Yellow Wallpaper, Frankenstein, The Left Hand of Darkness, The House on Mango Street, and The Awakening. "Originally I planned to have the mother-daughter book club read eight books," Professor Schumacher describes, "but this plan became too unwieldy, because the plots of the novels had to intersect with the lives of my characters. I was writing about an all-female book club, so I decided to narrow down the selection to books written by women; then I started looking at high school reading lists, to find out what 11th grade teachers might want their students to read. I did of course choose books I'm particularly fond of myself--because I had to spend a fair amount of time with them."
That affection comes through in 15-year-old Adrienne's responses, which she records for her English writing project. "I missed Genly Ai," notes Adrienne, at one point, and it's easy to see why she identifies with the confused and ambivalent envoy of Ursula LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness: She is an explorer as well, but her alien world is young adulthood. Like Frankenstein's monster, she is a bumbling, destructive creature full of pain; Adrienne wants to hate her creator (mother in this case) at the same time she is realizing that responsibility for developing a self now rests with her.
The apex of Adrienne's flailing research into identity is an indelible first-person account of binge drinking, which illustrates the perils of over-indulgence through stop-time moments of the sort of rich absurdity practiced by Irvine Welsh. "I certainly wouldn't want to endorse or encourage underage drinking," stresses Schumacher, "but I know from experience that younger readers (like any other readers) don't want to be handed a moral lecture when they read."
Of course, what Adrienne understands as the unforeseeable consequences of an essential investigation looks to her mother like a complete breakdown of her daughter's sense of responsibility. In a book driven by dialogue, Schumacher masterfully portrays how tricky conversation can be, especially between emotionally stressed people (such as a parent and teenager). If she was this wise while raising her own teenagers, now adults, she deserves a trophy. Schumacher laughs. "'Wise while raising teenagers.' That's a good one. I think misunderstandings of any sort are effective tools in a work of fiction," she goes on. "But there's a particular brand of misunderstanding between parent and child, based on withholding of information--and I do try to make use of that withholding, and that tug-of-war regarding power, when I write about younger characters."
If there is less impetus to write those younger characters, with her daughters now out of the house, Schumacher says she would like to keep a hand in both YA and adult fiction, which she doesn't see as vastly different worlds. Currently she is finishing up a collection of short stories (a tantalizing sample was published by the Atlantic Monthly).
Given the structural challenges of The Unbearable Book Club, we might assume that creating short stories would be less traumatic. The author disagrees. "No matter what I'm writing," Schumacher reveals, "it seems that writing something else would be easier.
"Stories seem particularly difficult to me now that I'm trying to finish a few of them, and I'm looking longingly at what would surely be a quick and easy novel that I hope to work on when the stories are finished."
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Alum Stories: Reconstructing a Library of One's Owntag:blog.lib.umn.edu,2012:/cla/discoveries//8315.3761392012-11-03T18:05:46Z2012-11-30T20:15:44ZSarah Wadsworth (PhD 2000), Associate Professor at Marquette University, helps recover the story of a 8000-volume exhibit of women's writing at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair....Teresa Sutton
Sarah Wadsworth (PhD 2000), Associate Professor at Marquette University, helps recover the story of a 8000-volume exhibit of women's writing at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.
In Jeanette Winterson's recent memoir Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal? the teen Winterson in the late '70s sets herself the project of reading fiction A-Z from the library of her small Northern England town; halfway through she laments that "the women were fewer and further apart on the shelves." Eighty years earlier, a group of elite American women who had already convinced Congress to let them organize a Woman's Building for the 1893 Chicago World's Fair decided to build an exhibit there of the largest collection of women's writings ever. They gathered over 8000 volumes, a fourth of which was fiction. However, and here Winterson would move from cheered to appalled, the books could not be handled, let alone checked out over the six months of the exposition.
It is this library's forgotten history that Sarah Wadsworth (PhD '00) and Wayne A. Wiegand uncover in their fascinating Right Here I See My Own Books: The Woman's Building Library at the World's Columbian Exposition (University of Massachusetts Press, 2012). The book begins with the controversies of the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial International Exhibition: the National Woman Suffrage Association's petition to read their "Declaration of Rights for Women" at the Fourth of July festivities was denied (no matter--they took it outside). It goes on to describe the successes and failures of the subsequent push for a strong female presence at the Chicago Fair. Rich with surprising details of these pilgrims' process, the book also provides a lively dissection of how (some) 19th-century women perceived women's literary culture, as represented by one product of their labors, the library.
Wiegand first stumbled on this library's existence in the early '80s, when he was researching his book on Melvil Dewey, he of the decimal system. Wadsworth, who in 2006 published her debut In the Company of Books: Literature and its "Classes" in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Massachusetts Press), heard of Wiegand's project in the late '90s when she was a doctoral student at Minnesota. "Emily Todd (PhD '99) met Wayne at a conference hosted by the Bibliographical Society of America," Wadsworth recalls in an email. "Wayne was interested in collaborating with a scholar of 19th-century American literature with a book-history emphasis. Emily encouraged me to contact him, if the project piqued my interest--which it did!"
Wiegand, then professor of Library and Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, outlined for Wadsworth his research on the Woman's Building and its library: how an exposition Board of Lady (!) Managers had been established in 1890 via Congress and how 117 women, two from each state plus extras from Illinois, had grabbed the opportunity to create one of the most popular exhibits at the 1893 fair, the Woman's Building. For the library itself, each state contributed books published by its native authors.
Wiegand had already completed a draft describing the story. "My part," Wadsworth recounts, "was to continue the narrative with an analysis of the collection and to devise a theoretical framework that would unite the two halves of the book into a cohesive whole."
Figuring out how to analyze 8000 titles, many of them obscure, was, Wadsworth reveals, "almost overwhelming." The project now has a slick database, but at the time what Wadsworth had was nearly 100 pages of double-columned small type. "One of the first conversations I ever had about this project was with [Professor] Donald Ross, who directed my dissertation," writes Wadsworth. "I had recently committed myself to it, and I was more or less at sea. I showed it to Don and admitted that my best idea so far was to take a large set of multicolored highlighter pens to it and look for patterns. With his unfailing pragmatism, acuity, and good sense, Don said that I shouldn't underestimate the usefulness of old-fashioned methods."
From the start she was "acutely conscious" of the 19th-century literary canon and how the books she selected to analyze would relate to it. At first she noticed the familiar names on the shelf list--Alcott, Jewett, and Stowe--and thought that she might focus on those canonical works. "Of course, the result would simply be to duplicate what we already know about women writers in the 19th century," Wadsworth notes dismissively. Then she realized that she could use the list to recover unknown but significant writers, which might lead to a revised canon of women authors. However, "simply picking out the best little-known books might produce a new literary history, but in that revised narrative the Woman's Building Library would merely be a stage." (That intriguing if off-base project is still up for grabs.)
Early on, Professor Ross had suggested that Wadsworth think about major trends in late 19th-century literary history: what was the literary context of this collection of works? "We started talking about regionalism," Wadsworth relates, "which of course made perfect sense given the library's geographical foundations. Both the Board of Lady Managers and the collection of books in the library were organized by state, and both the proceedings of the Lady Managers' meetings and many of the books on display reflect an awareness of regional cultures and regional differences."
Indeed, regional cultural differences were built into the very process of organizing the Woman's Building and Library: as the book details, the entire Board of Lady Managers was white; Southern Lady Managers still smarting from Emancipation demanded that no African American women filled vacant spots or were included in planning. In terms of women's products collected for display in the Woman's Building, the Board proclaimed that "colored women should have precisely the same chance that white women had"--which, in practical terms, meant decisions about inclusion were left to the delegates of each state. How that worked out is obvious in the citation of a Lady Manager from Texas, who declared publicly that "the Negroes in my State do not want representation." The representatives from New York were unique amongst their sisters in appointing an African American woman to their own board to actively solicit writings by black women. "This aspect of the library's history illustrates well the divisions within the women's movement," Wadsworth comments, "and the way many white women's organizations closed ranks to prevent the participation and advancement of African American women. Gender solidarity only went so far."
The historical details compiled by Wiegand became Wadsworth's guideposts in surveying the library's writers. "Only after living with this project for several years did I see clearly that the analysis needed to be thoroughly integrated with the library's history," Wadsworth reports. "It was most important to map the collection in terms of the genres and subjects represented, to investigate the representation of race in the library, and to explore the impact of regionalism. I also wanted all these categories of analysis to mesh, so throughout these chapters I used fiction, which accounted for the largest percentage of texts in the collection, as an interpretive lens."
Consequently, for example, readers find that, after Literature, the subjects most represented in the collection (according to Dewey decimal categories) are Geography and History (including female biography, a booming subject in the late 19th century for advocates of women's social significance), Religion, Education, and Sociology. Wadsworth gracefully reveals how 19th-century novels in the collection reflect these interests as well, often incorporating strong women characters with plots turning on religion and tensions around educated women working professionally. The chapter "Ghosts and Shadows" explores the "absent presence" of race in the collection, given that few writers of color were included and in any case were almost always not identified as such. Wadsworth explores the writing of African American women who were included in the Library, as well as novels and books by white women who addressed race or wrote about people of color, especially focusing on Alice Morris Buckner's obscure novel Towards the Gulf: A Romance of Louisiana.
In the book's last chapter, Wadsworth returns to the notion of literary regionalism and queries it through examinations of some of the collection's regionally pitched writing, finding an impulse to "speak for the People," for the working class or immigrants, even as many of the works acknowledged the flexibility and fluidity of social categories. At the same time, Wadsworth uncovers a deep uneasiness in some writers' works with the nation's changing face (40 percent of Chicagoans were recent immigrants in 1890): she especially looks at the works of pro-woman but anti-suffragist writers uncomfortable with the potential for "uninformed" voters.
Years after her doctoral study at Minnesota, Wadsworth, now an associate professor of English at Marquette University, taught a graduate seminar titled Nation and Region. Afterward, Wadsworth was asked to direct a seminar student's dissertation, which was on late 19th- and early 20th-century regionalism. "Meeting regularly to talk about current research helped me continue the conversation on regionalism I'd begun years earlier with Don," Wadsworth observes. "It helped me see how the cycle of teaching, research, and mentoring comes full circle and how one generation of scholarship links to the next."
In like fashion, Wadsworth and Wiegand have re-linked the "lady" managers of the 1893 Women's Library, critics in their own fashion, into the ongoing narrative of and about American literature. With Winterson, those women can say, again, "I see my own books."
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Alum Stories: English & Integrative Designtag:blog.lib.umn.edu,2012:/cla/discoveries//8315.3763102012-11-03T17:25:16Z2012-12-01T23:06:37ZBA alumnus and urban designer Bob Close finds the English skill set--reading, comprehension, synthesis, invention, and written presentation--essential for the challenges of the 21st century....Teresa Sutton
BA alumnus and urban designer Bob Close finds the English skill set--reading, comprehension, synthesis, invention, and written presentation--essential for the challenges of the 21st century.
In September of 2011, after founding and running Close Landscape Architecture+ here in the Twin Cities for 35 years, Bob Close (BA 1969) took a leap into the unknown: He shuttered his nine-person office and accepted a job with AECOM, a global company of some 46,000 employees. AECOM provides professional expertise for building, natural resource, and social projects, with branches in energy and environment, government and transportation, design and construction.
Close is director of landscape architecture for the U. S. Midwest region--which in practical terms means he's helping to design city projects in, say, Saudi Arabia with AECOM architects, engineers, economists, and urban designers. "I really like AECOM's mission," Close remarks in an interview at his office in the LaSalle Plaza in downtown Minneapolis, "to bring together what they can to solve the world's complex problems."
When the offer came, Close was already pondering a new start. "Design is more and more an integrative process," he explains. "What I had been thinking about doing was totally restructuring my practice--not being a room full of landscape architects. Having a few landscape architects, architects, a private developer, having an economist, an environmentalist, an ecologist, an engineer. We did a project like that for the Central Corridor at the West Bank, had all those people around the table, and it was really fun."
These days the table is virtual as often as it is not: "Really, within the [AECOM] network is anything you need," Close notes. "Here in Minneapolis I might need somebody from New York or somebody from Australia. But we have the technologies here--the smart board, the web access--so that you can have a drawing up and in Jakarta they can see you."
This English major didn't intend to end up in urban design. Close's father Winston, who died in 1997, served as University of Minnesota advisory architect and professor; his mother, Elisabeth Scheu Close, who died in 2011, was the first female licensed architect in Minnesota and received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from the University in 2003. The two met as graduate students at MIT, where Austrian native Scheu also received her BA, and started their own architecture firm (and marriage) in Close's hometown, Minneapolis, in 1938.
Close Associates, Inc., was known for Modern residential design, although the Closes also designed Ferguson Hall on the U campus. According to Bob, architecture was such a consuming topic at the home dinner table that all three Close children deliberately turned away from the practice in college. "We didn't want to take over the business," he remembers with a smile. "Back then, that's the last thing you wanted to do."
After he graduated with a double major in English and Studio Art in 1969, Close traveled and worked with no definite aim. And then, when he was living on a farm near Cannon Falls, an offer fell in his lap. "One day," Close describes with amusement, "a guy who I'd never seen in my life knocked on my door--he knew who I was. And he asked me if I'd like to assist him. He was a landscape architect and a city planner; he had a one-man shop in Farmington. And he lived about a mile down the road. Charlie Tooker, his name was. I worked for him part-time for a couple years, and then he just looked me in the eye and said, 'You're wasting your time; you need to go back to school.'"
And so Close came back to architectural design, "through the back door, basically," he says with a laugh. With a growing family, he decided to stay in Minnesota and earn a BA in Landscape Architecture at the U. He began working for one of his teachers while a student, took on teaching design studios after graduation, and shortly after, as he describes, "I just hung out my shingle and thought, 'We'll just see how it goes.'" It went, slowly at first, but before the recession Close Landscape Architecture+ was gainfully employing 15 people. In 2007 he was elected to the Council of Fellows of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA). Close served five terms as an adviser to the Twin Cities Metropolitan Council on its Livable Communities Advisory Committee. And he has been active in the Urban Land Institute Minnesota District Council.
As an undergraduate, Close was transfixed and challenged by his classes, ranging from astrology to meteorology, Shakespeare to studio arts. "I talked to a lot of people, including my parents, and everybody encouraged me to get a liberal arts degree," he recalls. "They said, 'You will learn more about more things than you can possibly imagine; you'll get a fabulous foundation for wherever you end up.' And that was absolutely right."
There's a bit of an edge to Close's tone: he's well aware that popular media, during the recent recession, have taken to critiquing the usefulness--and price tag--of any post-secondary study that doesn't directly prepare one for a high-need occupation. "As a student I read a lot of stuff I would have never read," he goes on. "I learned how to present, how to capture my ideas in words. Comprehension when reading; synthesizing information, and being able to distill it. I still love words. To me, that's what oftentimes architects are lacking--they can't express themselves as well as they might, certainly not in the written word.
"Communication is critical with a client," he stresses. "You want to be sure that they know that you heard them. And you give it back to them: you say, 'Here's where it's led me, it's led me to these thoughts, and that translates into these ideas for you.' Because design is such an iterative process, it's extremely beneficial to hear well and translate what you hear. That's the best way to build trust with a client and to build an idea."
With his focus on process and communication, and his engaging, friendly manner, one suspects that Bob Close would've been an excellent teacher. And, indeed, he did teach urban design and architecture studios at the U for nine years and interdisciplinary design studios at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design for three. Not coincidentally, one of his favorite instructors in English was Professor Emerita Toni McNaron, a pioneering proponent of the more democratically organized classroom who was at the same time as rigorous as any old guard. "I really liked her classes in particular, just because of the intensity," Close reveals. "She was extraordinarily demanding. Out of fear if nothing else, you read, you thought, you interpreted. She was never easy on students, but she squeezed the very best out of them."
Close participated in the 1996 Twin Cities Campus Master Plan for the U, once again returning to his, and his dad's, stomping grounds. He has been tickled to watch many of their recommendations come to fruition, including light rail down Washington Avenue. "Yeah, the '96 master plan was all about livability and blurring the lines between town and gown," he says. "And you can see it: it's transformed in many ways. I see good food in Coffman Union--I see people cooking there. You don't have to go to the Campus Club to get a decent meal. I see the Scholars Walk and see connectivity being paid attention to. The influx of some interesting architecture. Land care, their landscape arm, is doing a fabulous job. To me, the University is paying attention to the fact that it can be a more beautiful place."
Once again, an integrated approach to a complicated problem, one that necessitates skills in listening and reading, comprehension, synthesis, invention, and written presentation. Skills for the challenges of the 21st century that the study of English provides in full. "English was a logical place to be, and I got a lot of encouragement to pursue it," Close declares. "I'm glad I did."]]>
Wednesday, April 10, 2013
Colum McCann Talk and Reading
7:30 pm, Coffman Union Theater
Colum McCann is the author of five novels, the last of which, Let the Great World Spin (2009), won the National Book Award for Fiction and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. He's published two short story collections. The New York Times Book Review called Let the Great World Spin "[o]ne of the most electric, profound novels . . . in years" and "an emotional tour de force." McCann has also written essays and opinion for numerous newspapers and periodicals, including The New York Times, The Times (UK), Atlantic Monthly, GQ, and Granta. Born and raised in Dublin, he earned a BA from the University of Texas. He is currently Professor of Fiction at CUNY Hunter College's Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing.]]>
Ruth Drake Dissertation Fellowship
As an undergraduate, Ruth Drake (BA '31) was an active participant in University clubs and activities. When a nucleus formed of equally committed organizers, one of their boyfriends drawled, "You women are just like a pack of rats running around." Rats! The women laughed--and gleefully adopted the name. The boyfriend became a husband, and the women stayed friends through 70-plus years, proud to be the Rats.
Recognized as a CLA Alumna of Notable Achievement, Drake remained involved with the University as well. She and her husband Everett A. Drake (JD '33) could reliably be found in the football stands for home games, remembers their son William Drake, in a phone call from his home in San Francisco. William also graduated from the University of Minnesota Law School, as did his grandfather, making three generations of alumni. Everett had a long career at Faegre & Benson, in downtown Minneapolis, as Ruth cared for William and a daughter, Carolyn, in St. Louis Park. The couple lived in Edina after the children left home, and, in 1980, they shocked their friends, William notes, by buying one of the first downtown condos. Everett could then walk to work and Ruth to their church, Westminster Presbyterian.
Ruth continued through her life to volunteer and support community activities, nonprofit groups, and charities. "It was the era [the 1930s to the 1950s] when women didn't work outside the home," her son recalls. "It's unfortunate, because she would've made one hell of a business person. She was a people person, very organized and well-informed. I think she would have been happier had she worked."
When Everett died in 1995 at age 86, Ruth set up a scholarship in his name at the Law School, William reports. "Then she said, 'Well, wait a minute. I've done this for the law school and my husband: I'm going to do it for myself as well. I'll do something for the English department.'" And so she worked with English to endow the Ruth Drake Dissertation Fellowship, which supports doctoral students at the crucial stage of the culminating dissertation project.
"The Ruth Drake Dissertation Fellowship made a critical difference for me," stresses the first recipient, Penelope Kelsey (PhD '02), now Associate Professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. "It allowed me to focus efforts on revising my dissertation in 2001-2002. This respite from teaching also allowed me to interview for multiple jobs, accept a tenure-line position, and successfully defend in June, 2002. The dissertation was the basis for my first book, Tribal Theory in Native American Literature: Dakota and Haudenosaunee Writing and Worldviews (University of Nebraska Press, 2008)."
Since 2001, ten dissertation projects have been supported by the Ruth Drake Fellowship, and nearly all the recipients have secured tenure track jobs. Including Kelsey, four have already published books based on their dissertations. Writes Alex Mueller (PhD '07), Assistant Professor of English, University of Massachusetts at Boston: "I am very grateful for the fellowship because it allowed me a teaching-free semester to finish and successfully defend my dissertation. That dissertation is the basis for my first book, Translating Troy: Provincial Politics in Alliterative Romance, which will be published this April with the Ohio State University Press."
Ruth's generosity to the University did not stop with supporting students. She collaborated with Professor Emeritus Vern Sutton, long-time opera theater director at the School of Music, to establish a fund to bring visiting musicians to campus. And she gave a major gift to the Pillsbury Hall Renovation Fund, which will help to create a permanent home for English this decade.
Ruth Drake died at age 94 on May 4, 2004, not the last "Rat," but the one English doctoral graduates will remember with gratitude years into the future. Professor Kelsey says it best: "Thank you, Ruth Drake!"
Martin B. Ruud Fellowship
When Professor Martin B. Ruud passed away, in 1941, a young professor at the University of Michigan sent a mournful letter to English chair Joseph Warren Beach. "Professor Ruud had a much greater influence on graduate students and young scholars than the number of his published works might indicate," wrote Karl Litzenberg, then an associate professor at Michigan. His words were more prophetic then he knew: graduate students 70 years later are still being supported and inspired by Ruud, though they never knew him.
"Thanks to the generous Martin B. Ruud fellowship," notes current student Amanda Niedfeldt, "I was able to focus the first year of my graduate career on coursework and scholarship. While I look forward to teaching in the years to come, the fellowship enabled me to comfortably and successfully acclimate myself to the world of graduate education before I begin instructing and leading others in the University and the discipline of English."
Another student, Laura Scroggs, concurs, adding: "This fellowship year has allowed me to get to know the University more intimately as I am free to seek out collaborators across campus to enrich my own research."
The Martin B. Ruud Fund emerged from the collective gifts of colleagues and former students, such as Litzenberg, compelled to do something in his name. At first a sum of $68.50 gathered, which the department decided to use to augment Ruud's book collection, which he bequeathed to the University. Then there was talk of publishing a festschrift, a volume of essays from various writers to honor Ruud. (One of Ruud's own books, Studies in English Philology: A Miscellany in Honor of Frederick Klaeber, was collected at the retirement of Ruud's department mentor and edited with colleague Kemp Malone.) Eventually, enthusiasm built to establish a fellowship and scholarship fund in Ruud's name.
Martin Bronn Ruud (1884-1941) was hired as a lecturer by the Department of Rhetoric and Public Speaking in the late teens and was promoted to assistant professor by the time that department was absorbed by English in 1921. Ruud, like Klaeber, was a scholar of medieval English literature and language. He published Thomas Chaucer (University of Minnesota, 1926) and was by Beach's account "almost amazingly" learned. "His interests were . . . austere," described James Gray in The University of Minnesota, 1851-1951, "and the most nearly frivolous thing he ever did was to evolve a theory which was later generally accepted of how the pronoun she had come into the language."
But his knowledge ranged beyond that field, with a special interest in Scandinavian culture. A translator, he also wrote essays for the journal Scandinavian Studies on Knut Hamsun and Ibsen and published two longer works on the history of Shakespeare in Norway and Denmark. With Theodore C. Blegen, he published the important collection Norwegian Emigrant Songs and Ballads. A supporter of the student Ibsen Club, he was responsible, Gray wrote, "for Minnesota's coming into possession of extensive collections of books in the field" of Scandinavian studies. These materials proved essential as the University in 1947 developed a program in Scandinavian studies, which state legislators had long called for as part of the University's responsibility as a land-grant institution.
According to archived department papers, Professor Ruud was humble and gracious in the classroom. A 1918 report concludes: "In manner Mr. Ruud is pleasant, subdued, and nervously hesitant. He is the typical university philologist in mind and manner." In 1920, Beach observed approvingly: "He is on good terms with the students."
By the time he died, 20 years later, Ruud had made himself indispensable. The Department of English sent a letter to his widow praising him for his "searching and disciplined mind, generous and loyal heart, and character of singular strength and integrity." The letter ends: "We would not leave unspoken the sense of loss we have for a colleague so much loved, so deeply respected and admired."
The establishment of the Ruud Fellowship underlined that sentiment--and now generations of students have learned Martin Ruud's name. First-year graduate student Marc Juberg represents yet another. "Coming straight out of undergrad, I knew the transition to graduate-level work would entail a fervent effort on my part to meet the rigorous expectations of Minnesota's accomplished faculty, as well as the high standard set by my brilliant cohort. Being allowed to devote more of my own time towards cultivating my research and writing skills is a privilege that would not have been possible without the Ruud Fellowship's support."
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In his two stints as chair of the department, 1983-88 and 2000-03, he provided critical support for controversial initiatives on creative writing and feminist studies. Several faculty members remember his tactfulness and cogency in tense meetings at the department, college, and University level. According to Professor Gordon Hirsch, "Kent was a model citizen in such settings: articulate, forward-looking, forceful, and open-minded."
Bales directed Graduate Studies (1991-94) and Undergraduate Studies (1999-2000), while also taking on leadership roles in the wider University community: Director of Graduate Studies for Liberal Studies, 1994-96; Chair, Senate Committee on Faculty Affairs, 1997-99; and Chair, Senate Joint Committee on Faculty Appointments, 1997-2000.
As the assistant to the Director of Graduate Studies, Karen Frederickson remembers Bales as her "ideal first boss" in the department: a kind and thoughtful mentor. "Kent used to stand in the doorway of the graduate office," she goes on, "greeting people who walked up the stairs or came down the hall, saying hello and falling into conversation with them if they had a little time to spare. I liked this friendly approach."
Bales is survived by his wife, daughter Liza and son Tom, and five grandchildren. Memorials preferred to the Alzheimer's Association or the Sierra Club.]]>
Edelstein-Keller Professor of Creative Writing Charles Baxter, editor
Sherwood Anderson: Collected Stories
Library of America, 2012
Here--for the first time in a single volume--are all the collections Anderson published during his lifetime: Winesburg, Ohio (1919), The Triumph of the Egg (1921), Horses and Men (1923), and Death in the Woods (1933), along with a generous selection of stories left uncollected or unpublished at his death. Exploring the hidden recesses of small town life, these haunting, understated, often sexually frank stories pivot on seemingly quiet moments when lives change, futures are recast, and pasts come to reckon. They transformed the tone of American storytelling, inspiring writers like Hemingway, Faulkner, and Mailer, and defining a tradition of midwestern fiction that includes editor Charles Baxter.
Ruth Berman (PhD '79)
Bradamant's Quest
FTL, 2011
Mary Casanova (BA '81)
Frozen
University of Minnesota Press, 2012
Feng Sun Chen (MFA candidate)
Butcher's Tree: Poems
Black Ocean, 2012
Mick Cochrane (PhD '85)
Fitz
Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2012
Amanda Coplin (MFA '06)
The Orchardist
Harper Collins, 2012
Professor Maria Damon, with Jukka-Pekka Kervinen
Door Marked X
cPress, 2012
Experimental collaborative poetry from Damon and Finnish artist Kervinen.
Kim Donehower (PhD '97), with Charlotte Hogg and Eileen Schell
Reclaiming the Rural: Essays on Literacy, Rhetoric, and Pedagogy
Southern Illinois University Press, 2011
Lauren Fox (MFA '98)
Friends Like Us
Knopf, 2012
Peter Geye (BA '00)
The Lighthouse Road
Unbridled Books, 2012
Gerald Jay Goldberg (PhD '58), as Gerald Jay
The Paris Directive
Nan A. Talese/Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2012
Janet Groth (BA '57)
The Receptionist: An Education at The New Yorker
Algonquin Books, 2012
J. Jack Halberstam (PhD '91)
The Queer Art of Failure
Duke University Press, 2011
J. Jack Halberstam (PhD '91)
Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (Queer Ideas Book)
Beacon Press, 2012
Leigh Herrick (BA '88)
Home Front: Poems of the Bush II Years
2012
Patricia Hodgell (PhD '87), as P. C. Hodgell
Honor's Paradox
Baen Books, 2011
Kate Hopper (MFA '05)
Use Your Words: A Writing Guide for Mothers
Viva Editions, 2012
Clay Jenkinson (BA '77)
The Character of Meriwether Lewis: Explorer in the Wilderness
Dakota Institute Press, 2011
Kathleen Jesme (BA '75)
Meridian (Tupelo Press Snowbound Prize)
Tupelo Press, 2012
John Jodzio (BA '99)
Get In If You Want To Live
Paper Darts Press, 2011
Angela Karstadt (Falk) (PhD '99)
Thinking and Writing in Academic Contexts: A University Companion
Studentlitteratur, 2011
Sam Kean (BA '02)
The Violinist's Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code
Little Brown, 2012
Garrison Keillor (BA '66), editor
Good Poems, American Places
Viking, 2011
Erin Felicia Labbie (PhD '01), editor, with Allie Terry-Fritsch
Beholding Violence in Medieval and Early Modern Europe
Ashgate, 2012
Ellen Lansky (PhD '96)
Golden Jeep
North Star Press of St. Cloud, 2011
Elizabeth Larsen (MFA '02) with Joshua Glenn
Unbored: The Essential Field Guide to Serious Fun
Bloomsbury, 2012
Professor Josephine Lee, editor, with Don Eitel and R. A. Shiomi
Asian American Plays for a New Generation
Temple University Press, 2011
This volume showcases seven exciting new plays that dramatize timely themes that are familiar to Asian Americans. The works variously address immigration, racism, stereotyping, identity, generational tensions, assimilation, and upward mobility as well as post-9/11 paranoia, racial isolation, and adoptee experiences.
George Levine (PhD '69)
Darwin the Writer
Oxford University Press, 2011
George Levine (PhD '69), editor
The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now
Princeton University Press, 2011
Professor Nabil Matar, editor with Judy A. Hayden
Through the Eyes of the Beholder: The Holy Land, 1517-1713
Brill, 2012
The collection examines the view of holiness in the "Holy Land" through the writings of pilgrims, travelers, and missionaries. The period extends from 1517, the Ottoman conquest of Syria and Palestine, to the Franco-British treaty of Utrecht in 1713 and the consolidation of European hegemony over the Mediterranean. The writers in the collection include Christians (Orthodox, Protestant, and Catholic), Muslims, and Jews. This book is the first to juxtapose writers of different backgrounds and languages, to emphasize the holiness of the land in a number of traditions, and to ask whether holiness was inherent in geography or a product of the piety of the writers.
Professor Nabil Matar, editor
Henry Stubbe's The Rise and Progress of Mahometanism
Columbia University Press, 2012
Professor Matar edits, introduces, and annotates this edition of the first European text (1671) to acknowledge Muhammad as Islamic Prophet (rather than "imposter") and to offer a full account of his life.
Tim Nolan (BA '78)
And Then (American Poetry Series)
New Rivers Press, 2012
Sheila O'Connor (BA '82)
Keeping Safe the Stars
Putnam Juvenile, 2012
Professor Paula Rabinowitz, editor with Cristina Giorcelli
Exchanging Clothes : Habits of Being II
University of Minnesota Press, 2012
The second in a four-part series charting the social, cultural, and political expression of clothing, dress, and accessories, Exchanging Clothes focuses on the concept of transnational "circulation and exchange." These essays focus on not only the global exchange of material commodities across time and space but also of the ideas, images, colors, and textures related to fashion.
Anna Reckin (MFA '99)
Three Reds: Poems
Shearsman, 2011
Karen Rigby-Huang (MFA '04)
Chinoiserie: Poems
Ahsahta Press, 2012
Katie Robison (PhD candidate)
Downburst
Quil Press, Inc., 2012
Associate Professor Katherine Scheil
She Hath Been Reading: Women and Shakespeare Clubs in America
Cornell University Press, 2012
In the late 19th century hundreds of clubs formed across the United States devoted to the reading of Shakespeare. From Pasadena, California, to the seaside town of Camden, Maine; from the isolated farm town of Ottumwa, Iowa, to Mobile, Alabama, on the Gulf coast, Americans were reading Shakespeare in astonishing numbers and in surprising places. Composed mainly of women, these clubs offered the opportunity for members not only to read and study Shakespeare but also to participate in public and civic activities outside the home. Katherine West Scheil uncovers this hidden layer of intellectual activity that flourished in American society well into the 20th century.
Professor Julie Schumacher
Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls
Delacorte, 2012
The story of a mother-daughter book club most of the daughters didn't want to join. The members of "The Unbearable Book Club" were all going into eleventh grade A.P. English. But they weren't friends: "We were literary prisoners, sweating, reading classics, and hanging out at the pool. If you want to find out how membership in a book club can end up with a person being dead, you can probably look us up under mother-daughter literary catastrophe."
John Sitter (PhD '69)
The Cambridge Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Poetry
Cambridge University Press, 2011
Angela M. Smith (PhD '07)
Hideous Progeny: Disability, Eugenics, and Classic Horror Cinema (Film and Culture Series)
Columbia University Press, 2012
Robert Stark (PhD '07)
Ezra Pound's Early Verse and Lyric Tradition: A Jargoner's Apprenticeship
Edinburgh University Press, 2012
Cheryl Strayed (BA '97)
Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
Knopf, 2012
Cheryl Strayed (BA '97)
Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life From Dear Sugar
Vintage, 2012
Francine Marie Tolf (MFA '06)
Prodigal: Poems
Pinyon Publishing, 2012
Sarah Wadsworth (PhD '00), with Wayne Wiegand
Right Here I See My Own Books: The Woman's Building Library at the World's Columbian Exposition
University of Massachusetts Press, 2012
Michael Walsh (MFA '06)
Sleepwalks illustrated chapbook
Red Dragonfly Press, 2012
Kari J. Winter (PhD '90)
The American Dreams of John B. Prentis, Slave-Trader (Race in the Atlantic World, 1700-1900 Series)
University of Georgia Press, 2011
David Wojahn (BA 1976)
World Tree (Academy of American Poets' Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize winner)
University of Pittsburgh, 2011
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You dedicated the book to your grandfather. What makes this story in some way his?
My grandfather's demeanor--quiet, gentle, patient--as well as his work ethic as an orchardist influenced me greatly as a child. I wanted to capture his love for the orchard landscape, and his constant engagement with it. I wanted to study this relationship between a person and their surrounding landscape, how it affects their interiority and informs their personal philosophies and beliefs.
Your interest in the environment underlies the story without being at all intrusive or preachy: it's just apparent in how characters interact with the world and with each other. Where did you learn "kinship with the earth"?
From my grandparents and parents, first and foremost, I learned the value of respecting your place on earth and engaging with it. However, this sense of kinship has been sustained and deepened by certain works of literature, which celebrate the relationship between human beings and the natural world, works by authors such as William Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, Patrick White, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Barry Lopez, and Wendell Berry, among others.
Deliberate caring for the world, whether for the health of an orchard or of a townspeople, seems to bring some characters a sense of blissful selflessness that others find (much more temporarily) in destruction, danger, or obliteration. Your novel seems to be written with great care: is writing for you an exercise in present-ness, in being bodiless, "steeped in a task," to use your phrase?
Yes, this is exactly what it is. It seems like a paradox but it is not: to plumb the depths of the self to overcome the self, to contact what lies beyond it.
A couple reviews on Amazon complain of the "sex and violence" in the book. Do you feel that people are still more uncomfortable with the idea of a woman writing about violence than they are of a man?
Some people have been surprised by the violence in the novel, but I hardly know why. There is such violence in the world, varied and more terrible than that which I recount in the book. And it is not like I write about such violence in graphic detail--or I hope I do not, that would be pornographic--because I am less interested in the violence itself as compared to how it affects the characters involved. No one is exempt from violence in the novel because no one is exempt from violence in life. It hardly matters if it makes us uncomfortable or not; in fact, it should make us uncomfortable.
As for the female/male aspect of writing about violence--yes, I think people are more startled when a young woman writes about violence of the sort I do in the novel. I don't know why, other than because of the lingering attitudes and assumptions about what a woman should or should not write about.
What were any classes you had at the U that were particularly helpful?
I learned a lot from Charles Baxter's workshops. He has a particular way of evaluating fiction, at looking at what is on the page and how that matches up against the author's intentions. I also took a class on English prose styles from Steven Polansky; that was really important, and really fun. Another class comes to mind: a poetry class taught by John Minceszki, [MFA alumna] Yuko Taniguchi, and G. E. Patterson. There were a lot of wonderful poets in that class, and it was such a supportive environment: magical, really. Other classes on long fiction taught by Julie Schumacher and David Treuer helped me as well.
You thank a ton of poets in your acknowledgements. How did poetry inform The Orchardist?
When I was an undergraduate student at the University of Oregon, I was good friends with a group of poets who studied under Dorianne Laux. I wrote fiction, but I read a lot of poetry. I still do. Poetry is very important to me; it affects my mind in a way that is distinct from prose, and yet it inspires me to write prose.
What was the heart of the Minnesota Creative Writing Program experience for you?
The most important aspect of the MFA program was the three years of financial support that allowed me to focus on my work--and the teachers mentioned above, who taught me so much about writing and life.
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After she left Rome, Rabinowitz had continued to write for Giorcelli, and they'd spoken about producing an English language collection of Abito e Identita. "I knew that Doug Armato [University of Minnesota Press Director] was interested in getting into fashion studies," reports Rabinowitz. "The whole thing worked out while we were both chairing our respective departments, figuring, 'Oh well, this will be easy to do'--you can't really think when you're a chair, but you can do a little organizational work."
A "little" turned out to be optimistic. First they had to agree on what to select from 11, and counting, volumes of Abito e Identita, which mostly meant that Rabinowitz had to review them and then argue with Giorcelli. "When you work with someone, it's totally maddening; you want to kill each other half the time," she claims gleefully, "but also it's really great because you do get these different ideas of what's important and what's not. For instance, there's a piece in one of the most recent Abitos about the uses of the hood in torture. Cristina said, 'I doubt they'll even let us publish it.' And I said, 'You know, Cristina, we have the Bill of Rights here.' When I actually read the essay, every one of the sources is American. So I said, 'This is not even new to us.' We didn't put that one in."
While the editors asked the original writers of the articles to arrange for their own translation to English, Rabinowitz had to painstakingly review the results. "A lot of [translators] don't know the technical language," she notes. One article was by a psychoanalyst, a Lacanian: "They kept talking about 'the glance,' and I thought it was kind of evocative--and, all of sudden, a day before the page proof deadline, I thought, 'Wait a minute, she means "the gaze"!'" Rabinowitz laughs in disbelief.
One area Rabinowitz has enjoyed is the opportunity to include new or recent work by colleagues and former students. Accessorizing the Body features past advisee Becky Peterson (PhD '10), with an excerpt about poet Laura Riding from her dissertation, as well as textile art from Department of English professor Maria Damon. In the second volume, Katalin Medvedev, another former advisee, provides an ethnography of Savers thrift stores. For the third, which will have a 19th century focus, Rabinowitz caught up with pioneering woman video artist Beryl Korot and recruited her piece "Florence," a combination of weaving and video about Florence Nightingale. Rabinowitz asked Joanne Eicher, Regents Professor Emerita of Design, Housing and Apparel, with whom she directed Medvedev's thesis, to contribute to volume four, with its theme of everyday fashion across the world.
Giorcelli is "marching forward" with number 12 of the Abito series, Rabinowitz says. For her part, she's glad to be ending Habits of Being at four volumes. Since her tenure as chair ended, Rabinowitz has been working on a book for Princeton entitled American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street. "It's kind of a sequel to my noir book [Black & White & Noir: America's Pulp Modernism]," she says. "It's about the paperback revolution and the circulation of high culture as trash--in the way that Faulkner became marketed as a sex novelist after Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road was such a big hit, and they turned all these Southern authors into steamy sex writers."
The current project grew out of the research Rabinowitz did for another Giorcelli article, "Slips of the Tongue: Lesbian Pulp Fiction as How-to-Dress Manuals" (included in Exchanging Clothes: Habits of Being II). In the essay she looks at the covers of lesbian pulp novels, which often featured women in slips, and relates them to the books' role in the forging of an early lesbian subjectivity and culture. An unexpected side effect of this focus: Rabinowitz's office is now decorated with over 400 luridly colored paperbacks from the mid-20th century.
Of course, Rabinowitz has always had an interest in visual culture: cinema, photography, painting. So fashion was not, in the end, such a stretch. "When you start taking apart clothing--earrings, buttons, the little flowers in your hair, keychains, watches--then you start thinking, 'Wow, all these little details,'" enthuses Rabinowitz. "And, if you're a literary critic, that's what you do, you 'read in detail,' to use Naomi Schor's phrase."
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What did these women find so inspiring in Shakespeare? According to Scheil's research, they discovered indelible characters, such as Portia, and, through the characters, ways to talk about gender roles in society. Women used the study of Shakespeare's plays as opportunities to investigate geography, history, religion: the context of the work. They developed speaking skills by discussing and performing the poetic language of the plays. Black women, writes Scheil, "recognized the cultural power inherent in reading Shakespeare." Above all, perhaps, women readers took enough joy from the insight, drama, and occasional bawdiness of the text that they wanted to read, reflect, and discuss even after a long day of labor.
Scheil was writing about women in a different century and country when she first heard about American women's Shakespeare clubs. She had been discussing her paper on the Shakespeare Ladies' Club of 1730s London with another scholar, Mary Ellen Lamb, when Lamb noted tangentially that her mother had participated in a Pennsylvania Shakespeare club. "When I began to dig a bit further," Scheil relates, "I was astonished at the sheer numbers of women reading Shakespeare in nearly every corner of the country."
Scheil's research took her from major research libraries to a "Shakespeare's Closet" in a Georgia woman's home, from printed meeting programs to handwritten records. "The most rewarding part of the book," declares Scheil, "was being able to tell the stories of these women and their relationship to Shakespeare as an author who could provide the intellectual stimulation they eagerly sought, and to give these readers their due place in the history of Shakespeare in America.
"The prevailing story of Shakespeare in America, derived from Lawrence Levine, was that Shakespeare gradually became archaic and inaccessible to ordinary Americans as the 19th century progressed. The evidence that I found demonstrates that ordinary Americans, especially women, were reading and studying Shakespeare voraciously."
Scheil is bent on upending the image of Shakespeare "as the highbrow property of an elite and exclusive enclave" and that goes for the present as well as past centuries. "The Globe Theatre in London just completed the 'Globe to Globe' festival," she reports, "with 38 performances of Shakespeare in 38 different languages. Apparently 83 percent of audiences for these performances were first-time theatergoers, attracted to the productions because of the opportunity to connect with Shakespeare in new ways."
Scheil's next project offers another opportunity for fresh connections: she's looking at how Shakespeare's wife Anne Hathaway has been imagined by biographers, gardeners, playwrights, and novelists since her death. The fascination with Hathaway of course rests on the continuing interest in Shakespeare's life, and primarily the mystery of how this humble country boy went on to create plays that rivet audiences and readers 400 years after his death.
"I recently saw the 'Shakespeare: Staging the World' exhibit at the British Museum," Scheil describes, "and I'm still haunted by the final display of the exhibit. It was the complete works of Shakespeare known as the 'Robben Island Bible,' which Nelson Mandela kept hidden in his jail cell in South Africa where he was imprisoned with other ANC leaders. Each prisoner signed his name next to his favorite passage from Shakespeare. The exhibit ended with prisoner Ahmed Kathrada's comment, 'Somehow Shakespeare always had something to say to us.'"]]>
That affection comes through in 15-year-old Adrienne's responses, which she records for her English writing project. "I missed Genly Ai," notes Adrienne, at one point, and it's easy to see why she identifies with the confused and ambivalent envoy of Ursula LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness: She is an explorer as well, but her alien world is young adulthood. Like Frankenstein's monster, she is a bumbling, destructive creature full of pain; Adrienne wants to hate her creator (mother in this case) at the same time she is realizing that responsibility for developing a self now rests with her.
The apex of Adrienne's flailing research into identity is an indelible first-person account of binge drinking, which illustrates the perils of over-indulgence through stop-time moments of the sort of rich absurdity practiced by Irvine Welsh. "I certainly wouldn't want to endorse or encourage underage drinking," stresses Schumacher, "but I know from experience that younger readers (like any other readers) don't want to be handed a moral lecture when they read."
Of course, what Adrienne understands as the unforeseeable consequences of an essential investigation looks to her mother like a complete breakdown of her daughter's sense of responsibility. In a book driven by dialogue, Schumacher masterfully portrays how tricky conversation can be, especially between emotionally stressed people (such as a parent and teenager). If she was this wise while raising her own teenagers, now adults, she deserves a trophy. Schumacher laughs. "'Wise while raising teenagers.' That's a good one. I think misunderstandings of any sort are effective tools in a work of fiction," she goes on. "But there's a particular brand of misunderstanding between parent and child, based on withholding of information--and I do try to make use of that withholding, and that tug-of-war regarding power, when I write about younger characters."
If there is less impetus to write those younger characters, with her daughters now out of the house, Schumacher says she would like to keep a hand in both YA and adult fiction, which she doesn't see as vastly different worlds. Currently she is finishing up a collection of short stories (a tantalizing sample was published by the Atlantic Monthly).
Given the structural challenges of The Unbearable Book Club, we might assume that creating short stories would be less traumatic. The author disagrees. "No matter what I'm writing," Schumacher reveals, "it seems that writing something else would be easier.
"Stories seem particularly difficult to me now that I'm trying to finish a few of them, and I'm looking longingly at what would surely be a quick and easy novel that I hope to work on when the stories are finished."
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Wiegand, then professor of Library and Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, outlined for Wadsworth his research on the Woman's Building and its library: how an exposition Board of Lady (!) Managers had been established in 1890 via Congress and how 117 women, two from each state plus extras from Illinois, had grabbed the opportunity to create one of the most popular exhibits at the 1893 fair, the Woman's Building. For the library itself, each state contributed books published by its native authors.
Wiegand had already completed a draft describing the story. "My part," Wadsworth recounts, "was to continue the narrative with an analysis of the collection and to devise a theoretical framework that would unite the two halves of the book into a cohesive whole."
Figuring out how to analyze 8000 titles, many of them obscure, was, Wadsworth reveals, "almost overwhelming." The project now has a slick database, but at the time what Wadsworth had was nearly 100 pages of double-columned small type. "One of the first conversations I ever had about this project was with [Professor] Donald Ross, who directed my dissertation," writes Wadsworth. "I had recently committed myself to it, and I was more or less at sea. I showed it to Don and admitted that my best idea so far was to take a large set of multicolored highlighter pens to it and look for patterns. With his unfailing pragmatism, acuity, and good sense, Don said that I shouldn't underestimate the usefulness of old-fashioned methods."
From the start she was "acutely conscious" of the 19th-century literary canon and how the books she selected to analyze would relate to it. At first she noticed the familiar names on the shelf list--Alcott, Jewett, and Stowe--and thought that she might focus on those canonical works. "Of course, the result would simply be to duplicate what we already know about women writers in the 19th century," Wadsworth notes dismissively. Then she realized that she could use the list to recover unknown but significant writers, which might lead to a revised canon of women authors. However, "simply picking out the best little-known books might produce a new literary history, but in that revised narrative the Woman's Building Library would merely be a stage." (That intriguing if off-base project is still up for grabs.)
Early on, Professor Ross had suggested that Wadsworth think about major trends in late 19th-century literary history: what was the literary context of this collection of works? "We started talking about regionalism," Wadsworth relates, "which of course made perfect sense given the library's geographical foundations. Both the Board of Lady Managers and the collection of books in the library were organized by state, and both the proceedings of the Lady Managers' meetings and many of the books on display reflect an awareness of regional cultures and regional differences."
Indeed, regional cultural differences were built into the very process of organizing the Woman's Building and Library: as the book details, the entire Board of Lady Managers was white; Southern Lady Managers still smarting from Emancipation demanded that no African American women filled vacant spots or were included in planning. In terms of women's products collected for display in the Woman's Building, the Board proclaimed that "colored women should have precisely the same chance that white women had"--which, in practical terms, meant decisions about inclusion were left to the delegates of each state. How that worked out is obvious in the citation of a Lady Manager from Texas, who declared publicly that "the Negroes in my State do not want representation." The representatives from New York were unique amongst their sisters in appointing an African American woman to their own board to actively solicit writings by black women. "This aspect of the library's history illustrates well the divisions within the women's movement," Wadsworth comments, "and the way many white women's organizations closed ranks to prevent the participation and advancement of African American women. Gender solidarity only went so far."
The historical details compiled by Wiegand became Wadsworth's guideposts in surveying the library's writers. "Only after living with this project for several years did I see clearly that the analysis needed to be thoroughly integrated with the library's history," Wadsworth reports. "It was most important to map the collection in terms of the genres and subjects represented, to investigate the representation of race in the library, and to explore the impact of regionalism. I also wanted all these categories of analysis to mesh, so throughout these chapters I used fiction, which accounted for the largest percentage of texts in the collection, as an interpretive lens."
Consequently, for example, readers find that, after Literature, the subjects most represented in the collection (according to Dewey decimal categories) are Geography and History (including female biography, a booming subject in the late 19th century for advocates of women's social significance), Religion, Education, and Sociology. Wadsworth gracefully reveals how 19th-century novels in the collection reflect these interests as well, often incorporating strong women characters with plots turning on religion and tensions around educated women working professionally. The chapter "Ghosts and Shadows" explores the "absent presence" of race in the collection, given that few writers of color were included and in any case were almost always not identified as such. Wadsworth explores the writing of African American women who were included in the Library, as well as novels and books by white women who addressed race or wrote about people of color, especially focusing on Alice Morris Buckner's obscure novel Towards the Gulf: A Romance of Louisiana.
In the book's last chapter, Wadsworth returns to the notion of literary regionalism and queries it through examinations of some of the collection's regionally pitched writing, finding an impulse to "speak for the People," for the working class or immigrants, even as many of the works acknowledged the flexibility and fluidity of social categories. At the same time, Wadsworth uncovers a deep uneasiness in some writers' works with the nation's changing face (40 percent of Chicagoans were recent immigrants in 1890): she especially looks at the works of pro-woman but anti-suffragist writers uncomfortable with the potential for "uninformed" voters.
Years after her doctoral study at Minnesota, Wadsworth, now an associate professor of English at Marquette University, taught a graduate seminar titled Nation and Region. Afterward, Wadsworth was asked to direct a seminar student's dissertation, which was on late 19th- and early 20th-century regionalism. "Meeting regularly to talk about current research helped me continue the conversation on regionalism I'd begun years earlier with Don," Wadsworth observes. "It helped me see how the cycle of teaching, research, and mentoring comes full circle and how one generation of scholarship links to the next."
In like fashion, Wadsworth and Wiegand have re-linked the "lady" managers of the 1893 Women's Library, critics in their own fashion, into the ongoing narrative of and about American literature. With Winterson, those women can say, again, "I see my own books."
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