Reading Matters, Vol. 12, Issue 13

From (under) the Chair's Desk

I got notification from the Director of University Relations a week or two back that our department was receiving perhaps unfavorable press in a review essay published by our recently departed colleague, Tom Lutz, on Salom.com. Tom’s essay proved to be a reflection on the complex relationship between writers and academics. He starts in bemused confessional mode about the life of the English professor:

Think you know how to read, do you?

A new throng of authors wants to save literature from our nefarious English departments and teach us how to read their way. Now, class, pay attention.

Mar. 08, 2007 | I am surprised that I am not a novelist. I am an inveterate liar, so I have at least one of the necessary skills. I love the novel as a form in as deep and devoted a way as any man loved any art, and writing novels is the only thing in the way of a life's work that I've ever really wanted to undertake. Still, I remain novel-less.

I have Jack Kerouac and Hunter Thompson to blame for my early misdirected energies. They encouraged me to believe that the essence of writing was the wild life that preceded it, to believe that I was doing the better part, and the most important part, of novel-writing by imitating them not on the page, but in the bars and on the highways. I realize now this was an error in judgment.

So, too, was my decision to get a Ph.D. in literature as a step toward the nice cushy professorship that would allow me to lay back and watch myself write novel after novel, with perhaps a collection of stories here and there. The graduate work and academic gigs that followed meant that I had to teach and write a bunch of other things, those publish-or-perish scholarly books and the requisite pile of articles full of words like "overdetermination," "supplementarity," "hybridity," "imbrication" and "polyvocality," words that produced the squiggly red underlines of my spell-checker and earned me the enmity of the very novelists and poets I wanted to join.

A little later he draws on his teaching experience here:

Over the past 15 years, I taught an average of a semester a year at the University of Iowa, the home of the famous Writers' Workshop. When I started the writers were on the fourth floor and the critics on the third. I often had a Workshop student or two in my graduate courses, and I would bring the creative writing faculty in to meet my undergrads. By the time I left two years ago, that had long ceased. A durable and unbreachable wall had been erected between the writers and the scholars. They looked at each other not as allies in a common project, but as enemies. Now the Workshop has moved across campus and the divorce is final.

A shade over-emphatic in expression, but the underlying sentiment is broadly accurate, I thought. Still, Tom’s amused polemic was enough to make me think about the ways that breach might be healing.

The good news, I think, is that the trend is now in the opposite direction. As chair, I have tried to be as cooperative as possible in working with the Writers’ Workshop. At a rather modest level, we have supported enthusiastically WW nominations for Ida Beam fellows, and the combination seems to win the approval of the selection committee. I am certain that many of us and our students appreciated James Tate and Michael Chabon this year and will be excited to see Edward P. Jones and Louise Glück next year. And surely we do still have an interchange of graduate students. I know that many of our Ph.D. and MFA students appreciate taking WW seminars and I believe that there is a trickle of WW MFA students taking our Ph.D. and MFA courses.

Still, the biggest rapprochement between the two units is likely to flow from Provost Hogan’s initiatives with the Writing University. A committee chaired by Ed Folsom is still shaping up proposals for a designated Writing Track within our major and I look forward to hearing details and leading a discussion on it at our faculty meeting of April 12. While I expect the committee is still working on questions of oversight, the very fact of a joint committee between the English Department and the Writers' Workshop (Dee Morris, Robin Hemley, Doug Trevor, Loren Glass; Samantha Chang, and James Galvin) indicates cooperation between the two units in pursuing a joint cause. We are also cooperating on other Writing University initiatives, working with Chris Merrill on the Virtual Writing University (note its combined listing of WW and NWP events and take a look at the Daily Palette, organized by Lynne Nugent from The Iowa Review). Graduates of the WW and NWP rub shoulders as Postgraduate Writing Fellows, living in the newly-designated “Writers’ House,” 111 Church Street. There may be a traditional and quite understandable tension between practitioners who create literature on the one hand and scholars who analyze it on the other, and yet both units in reality contain a broad spectrum of overlapping activity, and any stark opposition is surely a false dichotomy—pace Tom Lutz, we have vastly more in common than we have separating us!

On a different bit of developing business, no clarity yet on the 2007-08 university budget, but the negotiations have begun in earnest with some real numbers now getting bandied about. You may have noticed that Governor Culver’s projected budget provides a supplemental allocation to the regents’ institutions of $25M. While this is less than the $32M the universities were asking for, I guess that the rather ebullient response of Gary Steinke, the Regents’ Executive Director quoted in the press—“This is absolutely fantastic news… This is ecstatically fantastic news”—hints that this may be a rather good budget year! More as I learn it.

Publications, Presentations, and other Faculty Matters

Jon writes:

I am delighted to report that Provost Hogan has now added his support to the positive recommendations on promotion and tenure for Matt Brown, Loren Glass, and Priya Kumar. The cases now proceed to the formality of approval by the Iowa Board of Regents at their May meeting. Congratulations, once again, to Matt, Loren, and Priya!

Congratulations to Miriam Gilbert on her election to a three-year term on the CLAS’s Educational Policy Committee. This, you will remember, is the College-level committee overseeing all aspects of undergraduate education, including both General Education and the majors, and that considers policies that affect our teaching. I am sure we will be well-served by having Miriam represent us on this committee from August 2007 until May 2010.

Matt Brown presented “The Index, the Abecedary, and the Record” at the biennial Society for Textual Scholarship conference in New York City, March 14-17; the paper was part of a session he organized and chaired which considered questions of literary value within editorial and bibliographical theory. Matt and Jessica DeSpain staffed the conference’s only book exhibit, an exclusive show of recent fine press work from the UI Center for the Book.

Ed Folsom was in New York City over spring break to be filmed as a "talking head" in the new two-hour Whitman film to be broadcast on "The American Experience" series on PBS in 2008. He is also editing the book based on the program.

News Matters

The DI notes that Ed Folsom is making his mark on the UI presidential search:

The UI presidential-search committee zoned in on a list of qualities the next university president must possess during its weekly meeting on March 2. The list, created by committee member Leonard Hadley, specified seven characteristics, but English Professor Ed Folsom suggested adding the quality of being an intellectual leader to the list.

"The university presidents who are most respected nationally and in their own institutions are those who articulate an intellectual vision to guide the institution," he said.

Graduate Matters

Barbara writes: The Graduate College has awarded Dean’s Fellowships to four of our applicants to the graduate program and two more are pending. When called upon, please help us recruit!

Congratulations to Nicki Buscemi on winning a 2007-08 Marcus Bach Fellowship for Graduate Students in the Humanities.

NWP Matters

The Daily Iowan recently provided an update on what Joshua Casteel has been up to since his play Returns was performed at the University of Iowa.

Yiyun Li (NWP '05) was recently included in a list of twenty-one fiction writers named the "Best Young American Novelists" by Granta. Also included in the list are three graduates of the Iowa Writers Workshop. The UI news release is here.

Staff Matters

Jon writes: I am delighted to report that Gayle Sand has been selected to receive the Mary Louise Kelly Staff Excellence Award. While the booty from this particular award is rather modest (a $50 gift certificate), the glory is great—and most well-merited! The award recognizes Gayle’s imaginative leadership, exceptional service, and ability to constantly generate ideas that improve efficiency. As the nomination explained in part, “If the $7M enterprise involving 55 faculty, 150+ graduate students, a thousand majors, and countless Gen.Ed.Lit. responsibilities that is the Department of English moves forward and even thrives and improves, it is almost entirely on account of the imaginative leadership, dedicated hard work, and brilliance in thinking through systems of the department’s administrative associate, Gayle Sand.” Gayle’s achievement will be recognized at the CLAS Staff Recognition Reception, Tuesday, March 27, 2:30-4:00 p.m., in 104 Iowa Advanced Technologies Laboratories building. Congratulations, Gayle!

Department Calendar

Mar. 23 (Fri.), 4:00 p.m., Conroy Reading Room, Dey House—James Galvin of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop will present a free public lecture on William Faulkner's writing. A UI new release about this talk is here.

Mar. 26 (Mon.), 3:30-5:00 p.m., International Programs Commons Room, 1117 University Capitol Centre—Talk by Mary Lou Emery, “Arts of Seeing: Transatlantic Modernism and Anglophone Caribbean Literature.” This talk is part of the Caribbean, Diaspora and Atlantic Studies Program’s Spring Lecture and Performance Series: Caribbean Discourses and Contrapuntal Modernity.

Mar. 29 (Thr.), 4:00 p.m., Univ. of Iowa Museum of Art—Nick Yablon will give a talk titled "Trouble in Eden: Fantasies of Ruin on the American Urban Frontier, 1825-37." The respondents to his talk will be Joni Kinsey, School of Art and Art History, and Susan Scheckel, Department of English, State University of New York at Stony Brook and Visiting Scholar at the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies. Assistant Professor Yablon is in the Department of American Studies. His talk is a collaboration of International Programs, Interdisciplinary 18th and 19th Century Colloquium, and the UIMA. This talk is a part of a series presented in connection with the UIMA exhibition Picturing Eden (Feb. 4-May 13). The UI news release about this event is here.

Mar. 30 (Fri.), 1:00-2:30 p.m., Gerber Lounge—Peter Manning, Obermann Fellow and Professor of English at SUNY Stony Brook, will present and discuss his work in progress, which is titled "A Romantic Poet Lives On: Reading Late Wordsworth." Manning is the author of Byron and His Fictions and Reading Romantics as well as the co-editor of the Romantic volume of the Longman Anthology of British Literature.

Mar. 30 (Fri.), 4:00 p.m., 704 Jefferson Building—John Raeburn will be the speaker at the American Studies Floating Friday lecture. The title of his talk is "Ben Shahn and Modernity: Photographs, 1938." During the summer of 1938, photographer Ben Shahn visited a dozen adjacent small central Ohio towns, the most concentrated attention to a single locale by any Farm Security Administration photographer (usually they stayed in a place a day or two and then moved on). During those six weeks he made about 325 pictures in these towns—mostly streetscapes, architectural studies, and depictions of typical activities—and in this talk Raeburn will be concentrating on those which suggest the degree to which modernity—in the form of technological innovation, mass communications, and a consumer culture—had pervaded these traditional communities. A reception and informal discussion follows.

Apr. 2 (Mon.)—Deadline for proposals for Fall 2007 CLAS First-Year Seminars

Apr. 3 (Tue.), 4:00-5:00 p.m., BCSB 203—Ted Striphas, Assistant Professor and Director of Film and Media in the Department of Communication and Culture, Indiana University, will give a talk titled "Harry Potter and the Culture of the Copy (Warning: Not Endorsed by J.K. Rowling!)." His talk is sponsored by the Department of Communication Studies and the UI Center for the Book.

Apr. 5-7 (Thr.-Sat.)—Poetries Symposium, organized by Dee Morris and Mike Chasar with a keynote lecture by Cary Nelson and featured appearances by Maria Damon, James Sullivan, and Robert von Hallberg. The complete schedule for the symposium is here.

Apr. 5 (Thr.), 7:30 p.m., Gerber Lounge—Cary Nelson (Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), will give the keynote address for the Poetries Symposium. His talk is titled “When Context Is All: The Specificity of Popular Poetry.”

Apr. 6 (Fri.), 10:00 a.m., Gerber Lounge—The Poetries Symposium continues with a panel titled “The Futures of Poetry Studies,” featuring Melissa Girard (Univ. of Illinois) speaking on “Backward Glances: The Sentimental Poetess at the Height of Modernism,” Stephan Healey (Univ. of Minnesota) speaking on “Notes on the Value of Poetry, or, What's the Difference Between an MFA Candidate and a Prisoner,” and Matthias Regan (Univ. of Chicago) on “Embodied Politics, or, the Poet as Perceiver and Improviser.”

Apr. 6 (Fri.), 1:30-2:30 p.m., Room 2032, Main Library—James Sullivan (Illinois Central Coll.) will give a talk titled “Poetry Broadsides: Looking at the Printed Poem, Holding It in Your Hands” as part of the Poetries Symposium.

Apr. 6 (Fri.), 2:45-3:45 p.m., Gerber Lounge—Maria Damon (Univ. of Minnesota) will give a talk titled “Poetry and Cultural Studies: (im)Plausible Pre-histories and Futures” as part of the Poetries Symposium.

Apr. 6 (Fri.), 4:00-5:00 p.m., Gerber Lounge—Robert von Hallberg (Univ. of Chicago) will give a talk titled “The Recovery of Sentiment in Popular U.S. Poetry of the 1940s and 1950s: Sinatra; Doo Wop” as part of the Poetries Symposium.

Apr. 6 (Fri.), 4:00 p.m., 40 Schaeffer Hall—Talk by Sidney Mintz, Dept. of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University, "Emerging Creole: Creolization and the Construction of Culture." This talk is part of the Caribbean, Diaspora and Atlantic Studies Program’s Spring Lecture and Performance Series: Caribbean Discourses and Contrapuntal Modernity and is co-sponsored with the Dept. of Anthropology.

Apr. 6 (Sat.), 1:15 p.m., Room 2229 of the Seamans Center for the Engineering Arts and Sciences—Cary Nelson, national AAUP president and Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, will present a talk titled "The End of Education: Globalization and Academic Freedom," followed by a panel discussion and questions and comments from the audience. This talk is the keynote lecture of a combined meeting of the University of Iowa chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the Iowa AAUP State Conference. The meeting and lecture are free and open to the public.

Apr. 9 (Mon.)—Deadline for proposals to design and direct the Obermann Summer 2008 Research Seminar

Apr. 10 (Tue.), 7:00 p.m., Prairie Lights Bookstore—Huston Diehl will read from her new book, Dream Not of Other Worlds: Teaching in a Segregated Elementary School, 1970. A UI news release about the reading is here. You can attend the reading, listen live on the Internet at http://writinguniversity.uiowa.edu, or catch a broacast on the WSUI's "Live from Prairie Lights" series. Hour-long episodes air at 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. Saturdays, and 7 p.m. Sundays on AM 910 WSUI in Iowa City, AM 640 WOI in Ames and AM 1010 KRNI in Cedar Falls. A program is also broadcast at 5 p.m. Sundays on 91.7 FM KSUI in Iowa City.

Apr. 11 (Wed.), 7:00 p.m., Prairie Lights Bookstore—Robin Hemley will read from Invented Eden. A UI new release about the reading is here. You can attend the reading, listen live on the Internet at http://writinguniversity.uiowa.edu, or catch a broacast on the WSUI's "Live from Prairie Lights" series. Hour-long episodes air at 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. Saturdays, and 7 p.m. Sundays on AM 910 WSUI in Iowa City, AM 640 WOI in Ames and AM 1010 KRNI in Cedar Falls. A program is also broadcast at 5 p.m. Sundays on 91.7 FM KSUI in Iowa City.

Apr. 12 (Thr.), 3:45 p.m., Gerber Lounge—Department Meeting: discussion of the possible new Creative Writing Track within the English Major

Apr. 13-15 (Fri.-Sun.)—7th annual Craft Critique Culture Conference.

Apr. 13 (Fri.), 2:30-4:00 p.m., 331 EPB—The Early Modern Reading Group will meet to discuss an article by Jailyn Moreland. A copy will be available for photocopying in the Zimansky Reading Room. Please contact Stacy Erickson (stacy-erickson@uiowa.edu) for more details.

Apr. 19 (Thr.), 3:45-5:15 p.m., Richey Ballroom, 3rd floor, IMU—The Graduate Awards Ceremony

Apr. 19 (Thr.), 7:30 p.m., UI Museum of Art—Riley Hanick, writer-in-residence at the UI Museum of Art and a student in the Nonfiction Writing Program, will giving a reading with Robin Hemley and Patricia Foster.

Apr. 26 (Thr.), 3:30 p.m., Old Capitol Senate Chamber—Executive Vice President and Provost Michael J. Hogan will give his spring address in an event sponsored by the Faculty Senate.

Apr. 27 (Fri.), 3:30-5:00 p.m., the Museum of Art's Lasansky Print Room and Willis Atrium—Undergraduate Honors Award Ceremony. Thesis advisors: Please note this date on your calendars and that this year the event is scheduled on a Friday rather than a Thursday as has been the tradition in the past.

May 2 (Wed.), 3:30 p.m., Harper Hall, Voxman Music Building—Steeldrum workshop and presentation by Ray Holman, composer and performer from Trinidad. This event is part of the Caribbean, Diaspora and Atlantic Studies Program’s Spring Lecture and Performance Series: Caribbean Discourses and Contrapuntal Modernity and is co-sponsored with the School of Music.

May 4 (Fri.), 2:30-4:00 p.m., 331 EPB—The Early Modern Reading Group will meet to discuss a paper about King Lear by Doug Trevor. Please contact Stacy Erickson (stacy-erickson@uiowa.edu) for more details.

May 5 (Sat.), 3:00 p.m., Clapp Recital Hall, Voxman Music Building—World Percussion Concert with Ray Holman. This event is part of the Caribbean, Diaspora and Atlantic Studies Program’s Spring Lecture and Performance Series: Caribbean Discourses and Contrapuntal Modernity.

Nov. 1-3 (Thr.-Sat.)—NonfictioNOW Conference