English Department
Electronic Newsletter
Volume 5, Issue 4
April 2006
As
the snow melts, the temperature rises, and the semester winds down, I’m sure
many of us are anticipating the end of classes and summer plans. After the summer, of course, we have another
semester to look forward to, and, though registration is well underway, this
issue of
You
will also find the usual list of upcoming events and faculty and student
accomplishments.
I
wish you the best of luck with the end of the semester, and would like to
congratulate any graduating seniors.
As
always, please send me information that you would like to see in the next
edition of
Rachel
Hovel
From the Department Head
As the end of the semester draws near, I would like
to thank all of you for making this the productive, successful year that it
was. I also wish to recognize and thank those who are leaving. Professor Bill
Knox, after eighteen years at NMU, has accepted the position of
Director of the
I also wish to thank freshman Rachel Hovel.
She has done an excellent job editing
Best wishes for the summer,
Jim Schiffer
Someone
Said It:
I
want the fine, kindling wine-sap of spring,
gold, and of inconceivably fine, quintessential brightness,
rare almost as beams, yet overwhelmingly potent,
strong like the greatest force of world-balancing.
-D.H. Lawrence,
“Craving for Spring”
Announcements:
e The
NMU poetry club meets twice a week, Tuesdays and Wednesdays at 8 PM in room
1302 of New Science Facility. Comprised
of undergrads, grad students, alumni, and community members, they meet to
workshop poems, and they plan to hold open mic events
throughout the semester. The NMU Poetry
Club website has been developed to post and workshop poems, and may be found at
www.nmupoetryclub.jibegod.com. For more information, contact Manda Fredrick at afredri@nmu.edu.
eMembers
from NMU’s chapter of the Sigma Tau
Delta English honor society successfully presented literary papers and creative
works at the organization’s national conference in
e Reminder to undergraduate English majors and minors!
Save
copies of your papers from all the English courses you take during your
undergraduate career. As seniors you
must compile an individual portfolio of your work for the capstone course, EN
493, so be sure to keep back up files.
Upcoming Events:
eClasses
end on Friday, April 28th, 2006.
Finals week will begin on Monday, May 1st.
eCommencement for graduating
seniors will take place on Saturday, May 6th, 2006 at 10:30 AM in
the Superior Dome.
Fall 2006
Course Offerings
Below,
you will find descriptions of English courses offered during the upcoming fall
semester. These classes may be special
interest or specially offered, so please contact the department or professor
with questions.
e
NAS 295:
Special Topics: Kinomaage (The Earth Shows Us the Way),
Professor
Aimee Cree Dunn, with language consulting by Don Chosa.
Mondays
and Wednesdays, 5:30-9:50 PM
Summer
Session 1 (May 22 - July 1)
2
Field Trips Outside of Class Required
4
Credits
Those
interested in learning more about how to work with the plants that grow in the Northwoods and in looking at how the Anishinaabeg
and Western cultures relate to the earth may be interested in signing up for
"Kinomaage: The Earth Shows Us the Way" offered
Summer Session I by the Center for Native American Studies.
Through
field trips and local walks, students will acquaint themselves with area plants
traditionally harvested by the Anishinaabeg. The
primary purpose of the course is to get students outside of the classroom, help
them become acquainted with area plants and plant communities, discuss the
ecological concerns affecting area plants and their communities, and deepen
their understanding of the cultural values that underlie one's treatment of the
earth.
No
prior experience with plants or Native studies is necessary.
For
more information call 227-1397 or 227-2035 or e-mail adunn@nmu.edu.
e EN 595, Critical
Thinking: Theory and Pedagogy in Literacy Instruction
Professor Laura Soldner
Wednesdays, 6 to 9:20 PM
Fall 2006
This four-credit, graduate pedagogy course will provide students
with an analysis of critical thinking and current brain theory. Using
this theoretical basis, students in the course will learn to plan literacy
instruction that builds and enhances students’ critical thinking.
To
engage students in critical thinking, active learning methods will be
emphasized in this course. Classroom activities will include individual
and small group presentations as well as Socratic questioning, case studies,
and role playing. Students will be required to maintain a reflective
journal, teach mini-lessons, analyze journal articles, and complete a
cumulative final.
Contact Professor Soldner at 227-2672 or lsoldner@nmu.edu.
e EN 590: Genre, Form, and the Renaissance Lyric
Professor
Robert Whalen
Fall
2006
This
course examines the English Renaissance lyric and its subgenres, such as
sonnet, epigram, ode, elegy, country-house poem, verse epistle, satire,
devotional lyric, complaint, and pastoral. Authors include such luminaries as
Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, and Milton; the “minor” metaphysicals George Herbert, Herrick, Vaughan, Marvell;
and notable seventeenth-century women writers such as Aemilia
Lanyer, Rachel Speght,
Margaret Cavendish, Katherine Philips, and Aphra Behn.
Students
will write both critical essays and creative works in deliberate imitation of
one or several of the genres explored in the course. This dual emphasis on
critical and creative writing serves all students well: both aspiring literary
critics in whom the creative process will cultivate an intimate knowledge of
poetic form and thereby enhance their critical capacities; and aspiring poets
for whom deference to generic convention is a necessary and crucial aspect of
their creative development.
Though
the Renaissance to us seems a largely alien culture, it was also the most
productive period of English literary history when it comes to the invention
and development of verse forms and genres. Our survey, then, will pay at least
as much attention to form as to semantic content – to the material stuff of
poetry (oral/aural and visual) as well as the ideas that inform it. We will
also consider the historical/material conditions of literary production in the
period, particularly the relationship between manuscript and print at a time
when the “author function” (Foucault’s phrase) and the modern publishing
industry were being forged.
For
more information, contact Professor Whalen at 227-2678 or rwhalen@nmu.edu.
e LB 121: Western Values:
The Ancient Greeks and the Bible
Instructor: Dr. Mark Smith, Professor of English
Tuesdays
and Thursdays, 9:00-10:40
Course
#: 80970
4
Credits
The
course is organized around the following questions and individuals.
1. How can we cope with human suffering? & Oedipus
& Job
What should our relationship be to God?
2. What qualities should our leaders have?
& Odysseus
& Moses
How best can we form a community?
3. What is worth dying for? Socrates
and Christ
Works
studied: The Bible (Old and New
Testaments), Homer’s
Odyssey, philosophical writings of Plato and
Aristotle, plays by Sophocles and Aristophanes, and others
For
more information, call or email Dr. Smith at 227-2676 or masmith@nmu.edu.
Faculty
Accomplishments:
eStephen Burn had a review of Suzanne Nalbantian's
Memory in Literature
appear in the latest issue of James
Joyce Quarterly, and a review of Jeremy Green's Late Postmodernism in the next
issue of Modern Fiction Studies. He has also been offered a contract by Dalkey Archive Press for his second book - a collection of
essays devoted to Richard Powers.
eSandy Burr will give two refereed papers in
Additionally, Burr recently won a
Faculty Research Grant from the Children’s Literature Association (ChLA) to research her project entitled “Dialogues on
Science: Recovering Women’s Science Writing for Children, 1780-1830.”
This grant will help underwrite visits to the Bodleian Library at
Burr would also like to report
that she is a member of the Editorial Board and a manuscript reviewer for Scientific
Journals International (SJI), the largest global public-access repository
for scholarship on the Internet. To date she has reviewed articles
ranging in subject from Canadian fiction to TESL (Teaching English as a Second
Language).
e Aimee Cree Dunn,
who recently added her grandmother's and mother's last name to her own name, authored
an article, "Making the Connection:
Bears, Dams, Mines and Powerlines in Wisconsin
and the U. P.," that will be published in the Northwoods
Wilderness Recovery online newspage.
eMarek Haltof
published an article on “The Monstrosity of Auschwitz in Wanda Jakubowska’s The Last
Stage (1948)” in The Ranges of Evil:
Multidisciplinary Studies of Human Wickedness, edited by William Andrew
Myers (Oxford: Inter-disciplinary Press, 2006): 269-276 [eBook; http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/publishing/idp/eBooks/roeindex.html].
He also organized and chaired a panel on “Popular Cinema behind the
Iron Curtain: The Case of Polish Cinema” at
the recent Society for Film and Media Studies Conference in
eJennifer Howard
has a short story, "Breathing Lessons," forthcoming in Blue Mesa
Review, and her essay, "This is Not Survival Skills," will appear
in the spring issue of Redivider.
eTeresa Hunt
has been named by a national vote of her peers a "fellow" of the
oldest and most
prestigious organization devoted to rhetoric and technical communication in the
eZ. Z. Lehmberg gave two presentations regarding writing center
work at the 2006 Conference on College Composition and Communication:
“Faculty-Tutor Conflicts: What is a Director to Do?” and “In their Own Words: A
Case Study of Emerging Rhetoric Literacy.” The conference was held in
eBeverly Matherne
served on a panel at the AWP conference in
e Russell Prather’s article, “William Blake and the Problem of
Progression,” is forthcoming in the journal Studies
in Romanticism. His most recent
conference presentations were at
“Configurations of the Third, 1800 to present: Third Agents and the
Missing Links of Modernity” at St. John’s College at the University of
Cambridge, U.K., and at the XIVth biennial gathering
of the Rousseau Association at Hamilton College in upstate New York. This past year his paintings were shown at
the Oasis Gallery in
eJim Schiffer
has received a summer research grant from the Folger
Shakespeare Library in
Finally in print: "'Honey Words': A Lover's
Complaint and the Fine Art of Seduction," in Critical Essays
on Shakespeare's A Lover's Complaint: Suffering
Ecstasy, ed. Shirley Sharon-Zisser (Ashgate). His review of Shakespeare's Sonnets by
Paul Edmundson and Stanley Wells appears in the
latest issue of Shakespeare Quarterly (Winter 2005).
eJaspal Singh
will be a Visiting Scholar during the month of July at the James S. Coleman
African Studies Center (JSCASC),
eHeidi Stevenson’s entry
on Beat poet Amiri Baraka will soon be published in
the Encyclopedia of Activism and Social
Justice.
eNMU’s English Department is
well-represented in a recent book, Sir Gawain and the Classical Tradition:
Essays on the Ancient Antecedents, ed. E.L. Risden,
eNMU Faculty Grants Awarded
(Adapted from The NMU Campus
Newsletter, Kristi Evans)
Four faculty members
from the English Department have been awarded grants of up to $7,000 for
various research projects through the Faculty Grants Program. The program
provides financial support for faculty research projects, scholarly activities,
papers for publication, and creative works.
Stephen Burn
has been awarded $4,687 in support of two book projects. The first,
titled Understanding
Jonathan Franzen, is a study of one of the most acclaimed American novelists
of recent years. The second, Millennial Fictions: The American Novel in the 1990s, is
a longer study of the changing shape of American literature at the end of the
20th century.
Ronald Johnson
has been awarded $6,977 to draft part one of a novel titled The Last Rodeo.
This project will explore the experiences and values of three generations of
ranchers: the first generation, which came to maturity during WWII; the second
generation, who came to maturity in the 1960s; and the third generation, who
are now coming into maturity in our contemporary period. The individual
sections of this project will be submitted to editors of journals as separate
stories.
Beverly Matherne has
been awarded $5,470 to complete research for a bilingual book of linked prose
poems on Antoine Laumet de Lamothe
Cadillac, founder of
Robert Whalen has
been awarded $7,000 in support of The Digital Temple, a comprehensive
electronic edition of the English verse of 17th-century poet George Herbert.
This project will take advantage of current technologies to provide scholars,
teachers, and students access to Herbert’s work, which has limited availability
in printed form.
Student
Accomplishments:
eShirley Brozzo
(MFA candidate) has her poem “Lady in Turtleneck,” published in Interdisciplinary
Humanities: Inspirations from the Cave, a Fall
2005 publication from the National Association for Humanities Education.
eShirley Brozzo (MFA candidate),
Grace Chaillier (MFA), Jody Trost
(MA), and Leann Miller (MA, Training and Development)
had a panel, “Honoring the Sacred:
Paying Homage to the Lives within Louise Erdrich’s Painted
Drum,” at the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association
conference in Atlanta, GA, April 11-16.
e
Kyle Flak, M.A. candidate, has new
prose poetry appearing in the next issue of Poetry Harbor,
eEliza Neckar’s
nonfiction piece "My Life as a Superhero" was recently accepted for
submission in the upcoming issue of MSU's literary
journal, The Offbeat. She was also recently accepted into UW
Madison’s pre-doctoral program in the Mass Media and Journalism
Department. She will complete a second
master's degree there in mass media and journalism studies in two years, then
move directly into their doctoral program. At that point, she hopes to make her doctorate
an interdisciplinary doctorate in English and communications.
eApril Lindala (Interim
Director - Center for Native American Studies), Susan Morgan, Kate Mueller, and Brianna Reckeweg
presented a tribute panel on the combined works of Joy Harjo
at the Native American Literature Symposium at Mt. Pleasant,
This is the premier Native Lit conference in the
nation. These students were all in Allison
Hedge Coke’s 601 poetry workshop in the fall where they studied the work of Joy
Harjo. They
submitted a proposal per Hedge Coke’s suggestion; it was accepted and they did
a great job. Congratulations to these
graduate students on their academic presentation.
Diversions:
This
semester the English Department team won three out of the five games in the
intramural soccer tournament. Befitting
a team in which all of the players were really good at MLA formatting,
organization was the foundation of the team’s imperious three-match winning
streak. Starting at the back, the team normally featured the cat-like reflexes
of Houle or Smolens in goal. Protecting the keeper,
Dodson and Hanson were a formidable partnership who prepared for games by
eating raw meat all week and punching brick walls (several opposing forwards
may never dare play football again after encountering the Dodson-Hanson
nexus). In the midfield Smith was
composed, Haltof (prior to injury) drew on his many
years experience in the Polish professional leagues, and the energetic Mueller
joined them for the last game. The sorry ageing figure of Burn sort of muddled
between the midfield and the attack and had to be substituted every five
minutes for medical attention, but Honorary professor Harry took time off from
World Cup preparations to orchestrate the team’s attacking play and set up
nearly all the goals.
The
cutting edge was provided by team-captain Markle
(whose injury in the third game played a major role in the team’s ultimate
demise), supplemented by the pace and imagination of Reckeweg
and Martin who were a constant goal-threat.
It should be noted that the team embodied both modern and classical
codes of decorum and never argued with referees or cursed opposing players.
Squad: Stephen Burn, Todd Dodson, Marek Haltof, Andrew Hanson, Dustin Harry, Adam Houle, Jason Markle, Suzy Martin,
Kate Mueller, Brianna Reckeweg, Mark Smith, John
Smolens.
Results and Scorers (no report is available
for the final match):
0-1
4-1
(Markle 2, Burn, Harry)
1-0
(Burn)
1-0
(Martin)
Back
row (left to right): Suzy Martin, Andrew
Hanson, Todd Dodson, Mark Smith, Brianna Reckeweg, Dustin Harry
Front
row (left to right): Stephen Burn, John Smolens
Andrew
gives offensive signal as Libero demonstrates
flawless positional play.
Libero’s
patented play called Dov’e la palla? (Where’s the ball?)
Stephen decoys the opposition with his famous
chicken imitation while Brianna closes in on the goal
Adam a) demonstrates how to choke up on the bat; b)
says the secret Goaltender’s Prayer
Feedback:
*What
did you think of this issue of
*What
do you want to see in the next issue?
*Email
rhovel@nmu.edu with any comments, questions
or concerns. Faculty and students are asked to send announcements of courses and
events, as well as news of your accomplishments. Undergraduate and graduate students are also
encouraged to submit poems for possible publication.
Thank you!
Rachel Hovel