Message from the Chair of the Department
Another semester approaches, another newsletter arrives. Do come to the department’s holiday party, December 11,
and watch for (and join in) readings by students and faculty early in 2013. Also, the Theatre Department turns “English”
with Shaw’s Hearbreak House this month and Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night in April (following Project Theatre’s fine
recent Hamlet)--several English students in all three shows. The department liaisons have been working hard to plan
events for your delight and eagerly welcome your ideas for others.
Marjorie Kaufman, a legendary member of this department, died last month at 90. Remembering her, a former
student and colleague recalled Marjorie’s conviction that “a text read carefully will reveal itself and will reveal its reader
to herself.” That simple belief would seem at the heart of what all us readers aspire to.
May the old year and the new bring you reason for hope, some rest, and good dreams. --John Lemly
Faculty Profile: Professor Wes Yu
New Publications
Professor Yu specializes in
medieval literature and will teach
a class on Chaucer this spring.
What’s your guilty pleasure?
The B-52s, but I mean their early,
more ragged, New Wave stuff.
What’s your favorite film?
Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last
Emperor (1987), part of which was filmed in the actual
Forbidden City in Beijing. The film beautifully explores
what it means for Pu Yi, who rose to the Manchu throne
at age 3 and died a gardener in Mao’s China in 1967, to
be caught out of time and place as Western politics and
modern war rewrite the Asian continent. His story is
largely about the failure of romanticized pasts under the
force of stark realism, which reminds me of a scene where
the young Pu Yi is learning to read English newspapers.
Various pages of the newspaper are hanging on his wall
as if he can experience the exigencies of the modern
world only through the flimsiness of his adolescent
Chinese aestheticism. I particularly love Bertolucci’s
juxtapositions of the Forbidden City against Shanghai in
the roaring 20s.
Do you have a favorite text to teach?
Piers Plowman by William Langland. I would best
describe this work as “verbal” in both the colloquial and
grammatical senses of the word.
Karen Osborn, novelist and Visiting Assistant Professor
of English, published her fourth novel this fall. In
Centerville, she explores an act of violence and its effect
on the inhabitants of a small Midwestern town. Set in
1967 against the backdrop of the civil rights movement
and the escalating Vietnam War, Centerville follows the
lives of four people after a deadly explosion in the town.
The book is a study on human nature and how people
try to make sense of the situations they find themselves
in, says Osborn. “The characters are trying to reach an
understanding of something that can’t be understood.
That is the truth I had to reveal.” Osborn has authored
three other novels: Patchwork, Between Earth and Sky,
and The River Road. (Office of Communications, “MHC’s
Osborn Discusses New Novel”)
Associate Professor Amy Martin’s new book, Alternations: Representing Nationalisms, ‘Terror,’ and the State
in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Ireland, will be released
early next year. As described by the Ohio State University
Press, “Taking as its archive political theory, polemical
prose, novels, political cartoons, memoir, and newspaper
writings, Amy E. Martin’s Alter-Nations examines the
central place of Irish anticolonial nationalism in Victorian
culture and provides a new genealogy of categories such
as ‘nationalism,’ ‘terror,’ and ‘the state’.... Alter-Nations
argues for the centrality of Irish Studies to Postcolonial
and Victorian Studies, and reconceptualizes the
boundaries and concerns of those fields.”
Winter Social
Please join us for our annual Winter Social for an afternoon of delights both confectionary and literary!
Professors Yu, Roychoudhury, and Quillian will regale us with tales fitting this festive season.
Tuesday, December 11, 4:15 PM, Cassani Room, 102 Shattuck Hall
Upcoming Events
Graduate School Tips
Student Reading
Please come join us as we celebrate the many voices
of the Mount Holyoke College English Department! On
Wednesday, January 30 (tentative) from 7:00 to 9:30, we
will gather to hear students read from original works of
fiction, nonfiction, essays and poetry as we cheer the start
of a new term and celebrate the many curious minds and
sublime imaginations at work among us. Don’t be shy!
Writing is best when shared. If you would like to participate
by reading from your own work, please be in touch with
either Cindy Meehan or Catherine S. Manegold. If you just
want to come join us to come listen, please do. Dessert,
coffee and snacks will carry us through. Come and go as
you please, and be sure to invite your friends.
On Wednesday October 9, the English department held a
well-attended workshop on applying to graduate school.
Professors Rodgers, Roychoudhury, Alderman, and
Day presented an overview of the application process,
shared their experience as graduate students, and fielded
student questions. The discussion focused on how to
determine whether graduate school was a good option,
how to select a graduate program, and how to craft a
strong application. Faculty emphasized the importance
of starting early, getting faculty feedback, and tailoring
applications for specific departments. This will be an
annual event.
Wordsworth Exhibition
Professor Alderman’s students in his Fall semester
Wordsworth seminar are currently curating an exhibition
on the poet at the Archives and Special Collections of the
Frost Library at Amherst College. There will be an opening
reception at the beginning of the spring semester.
Submit your creative writing to Verbosity,
Mount Holyoke’s literary arts magazine!
[email protected]
Deadline: Midnight, December 31, 2012
Lunchtime Thinkers
Regular informal brown bag events where English faculty
will discuss the impact of critical touchstones, conceptual
keywords, and cultural theories on their analysis of
literature and culture. No prior reading or preparation will
be needed.
90th Annual Glascock Poetry Competition, April 19 & 20
Students who wish to be Mount Holyoke’s poet-contestant
in the 2012 Glascock Intercollegiate Poetry Competition
are required to submit their work electronically to the
Department of English ([email protected]) by 4:30
pm on Monday, February Feb 18, 2013. Selected poetry by
this year’s judges, Cleopatra Mathis, Mary Jo Salter, and
John Yau, will be available in early Spring.
Winter Poetry
This season calls to mind “Winter’s dregs made desolate,”
in Thomas Hardy’s “Darkling Thrush,” but that poem ends
with unexpected music:
So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.
Chris Benfey Inducted into Academy
Since its founding by John
Adams, James Bowdoin,
John Hancock, and other
scholar-patriots, the American
Academy has elected leading
“thinkers and doers” from
each generation. The current
membership includes more
than 300 Nobel laureates,
some 100 Pulitzer Prize
winners, and many of the world’s most celebrated artists
and performers. Christopher Benfey, Andrew W. Mellon
Professor of English and interim dean of faculty at Mount
Holyoke College, was among 180 influential artists,
scientists, scholars, writers, and institutional leaders
who were inducted into the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences at a ceremony in Cambridge on October
6. Benfey described the ceremony, in which his name
was announced by actor Alan Alda, as “pretty great.” On
stage, at a gathering of all the new members, Benfey read
three pages from his memoir, Red Brick, Black Mountain,
White Clay. (From the Office of Communications, “Benfey
Inducted into Academy”)
We know you’re doing exciting things! Write to us at
[email protected] so we can feature your story in
the next issue of the newsletter.