Stanford University Department of English

"For distinguished fiction by an American author... Awarded to The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson (Random House), an exquisitely crafted novel that carries the reader on an adventuresome journey into the depths of totalitarian North Korea and into the most intimate spaces of the human heart. An epic novel and a thrilling literary discovery, The Orphan Master's Son follows a young man's journey through the icy waters, dark tunnels, and eerie spy chambers of the world's most mysterious dictatorship, North Korea. Part breathless thriller, part story of innocence lost, part story of romantic love, The Orphan Master's Son is also a riveting portrait of a world heretofore hidden from view: a North Korea rife with hunger, corruption, and casual cruelty but also camaraderie, stolen moments of beauty, and love. A towering literary achievement, The Orphan Master's Son ushers Adam Johnson into the small group of today's greatest writers."

External Link for more info about Adam Johnson wins Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for 2013

Everyday life in the far outposts of empire can be static, empty of the excitement of progress. A pervading sense of banality and boredom are, therefore, common elements of the daily experience for people living on the colonial periphery. Saikat Majumdar suggests that this impoverished affective experience of colonial modernity significantly shapes the innovative aesthetics of modernist fiction.

"Prose of the World" explores the global life of this narrative aesthetic, from late-colonial modernism to the present day, focusing on a writer each from Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, and India. Ranging from James Joyce’s deflated epiphanies to Amit Chaudhuri’s disavowal of the grand spectacle of postcolonial national allegories, Majumdar foregrounds the banal as a key instinct of modern and contemporary fiction—one that nevertheless remains submerged because of its antithetical relation to literature’s intuitive function to engage or excite.

External Link for more info about Saikat Majumdar's new book, "Prose of the World: Modernism and the Banality of Empire"

In her new book, Our Aesthetic Categories: zany, cute, interesting, Prof. Ngai explores how the zany, the cute, and the interesting saturate postmodern culture. They dominate the look of its art and commodities as well as our discourse about the ambivalent feelings these objects often inspire. In this . . . study, Ngai offers a theory of the aesthetic categories that most people use to process the hyper-commodified, mass-mediated, performance-driven world of late capitalism, treating them with the same seriousness philosophers have reserved for analysis of the beautiful and the sublime.

External Link for more info about Sianne Ngai's "The zany, the cute, and the interesting"

 Prof. Elaine Treharne's latest publication, Living through Conquest, is the first ever investigation of the political clout of English from the reign of Cnut to the earliest decades of the thirteenth century. It focuses on why and how the English language was used by kings and their courts and by leading churchmen and monastic institutions at key moments from 1020 to 1220. English became the language of choice of a usurper king; the language of collective endeavour for preachers and prelates; and the language of resistance and negotiation in the post-Conquest period. . . . While many scholars to date have seen the period from 1060 to 1220 as a literary lacuna as far as English is concerned, this book demonstrates unequivocally that the hundreds of vernacular works surviving from this period attest to a lively and rich textual tradition.

External Link for more info about "Living Through Conquest: The Politics of Early English, 1020-1220"

The issue opens with the late Diane Middlebrook’s experimental exploration of the life and work of the first-century BCE poet Ovid [Publius Ovidius Naso]. Middlebrook’s provocative narrative begins with a fictional account of Ovid’s birth from the perspectives of the midwife and mother, and it proceeds to surmise familial details about influences in the young poet’s life and how they might have influenced his work.
Middlebrook writes about the birth of Ovid: “A human body had grown inside another human body, then burst forth whole and perfect, to be tied off in a knot: there it was, the permanent evidence of an amazing transformation.”
 

External Link for more info about The late Diane Middlebrook published posthumously in current issue of the journal Feminist Studies (Summer 2012, 38.2)

Ends of Enlightenment explores three realms of eighteenth-century European innovation that remain active in the twenty-first century: the realist novel, philosophical thought, and the physical sciences, especially human anatomy. The European Enlightenment was a state of being, a personal stance, and an orientation to the world. Ways of probing experience and knowledge in the novel and in the visual arts were interleaved with methods of experimentation in science and philosophy. This book's fresh perspective considers the novel as an art but also as a force in thinking.

"John Bender's writing on enlightenment culture has been a major inspiration for many years. Many of these essays are classics, and all repay close attention. Whether writing about anatomy or hypothesis, Hume's sentences or game theory in Laclos, Bender combines formal, socio-historical, and visual analysis into a unique wellspring for work in eighteenth-century studies. The collection is a real boon for the field and should be on the shelf of every one of its scholars."—Jonathan Kramnick

External Link for more info about New Book by John Bender

This is a book that no reader or writer of poetry will want to be without. At well over a million words and more than 1,000 entries, the Encyclopedia has unparalleled breadth and depth, offering expert synthesis and indispensable bibliographies.

Roland Greene, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford University, served as the editor in chief for this landmark work, thoroughly revised and updated for the twenty-first century.

External Link for more info about The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry & Poetics, Roland Greene, editor in chief

Eavan Boland has been awarded the 2012 PEN Literary Award in the category of Creative Nonfiction for her latest book A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet (W.W. Norton & Co.).

PEN Center USA’s annual awards program, established in 1982, is a unique competition that recognizes writers living west of the Mississippi River for literary excellence in eleven categories: fiction, creative nonfiction, research nonfiction, poetry, children’s literature, graphic literature, translation, journalism, drama, teleplay, and screenplay.

External Link for more info about Eavan Boland wins 2012 PEN Literary Award

Professor Elaine Treharne specializes in the cultural contexts, contents, and languages of Early English manuscripts from c. 700 to 1500. She is particularly interested in the materiality of the manuscript book, its tactile nature, and the multiple layers that make up the codex (its 'architexuality'). Research on this topic will lead to a phenomenological study entitled The Sensual Book, a volume focused on the interactions between early manuscripts and their users, and the theoretical implications of touch and the 'voluminous'; a second monograph, Beauty and the Book: Arts and Crafts to Modernism, 1890-1940, will examine the 'voluminousness' of the book in the work of William Morris, Eric Gill, Edward Johnston, and David Jones. The history of text technologies is a flourishing field of scholarship, and Treharne will be editing a new four-volume Encyclopaedia of Book History: Manuscript, Print and Digital Technologies, due to be published in 2014.

The Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards is the country’s only juried literary competition devoted to recognizing books that have made an important contribution to society’s understanding of racism and the diversity of human cultures. Each year the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards jury honors works of fiction and nonfiction and recognizes one individual whose life work has enhanced an understanding of cultural diversity. Arnold Rampersad, the Sara Hart Kimball Professor in the Humanities, Emeritus, at Stanford, is the author of The Life of Langston Hughes, which is widely considered the definitive biography of the poet. Volume One, published in 1986, won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Nonfiction; Volume Two, published in 1988, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He also has written award-winning biographies of Ralph Ellison, Jackie Robinson and W.E.B. Du Bois.

External Link for more info about Arnold Rampersad wins Anisfield-Wolf Book Prize Lifetime Achievement Award

Presented annually to a living U.S. poet whose lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize is one of the most prestigious awards given to American poets. It is also one of the nation’s largest literary prizes. Established in 1986, the prize is sponsored and administered by the Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine.

“R.P. Blackmur once said that great poetry ‘adds to the stock of available reality,’ and that’s certainly true of W.S. Di Piero’s work. He wakes up the language, and in doing so wakes up his readers, whose lives are suddenly sharper and larger than they were before. He’s a great poet whose work is just beginning to get the wide audience it deserves.”

External Link for more info about W. S. Di Piero, Professor Emeritus in English, Awarded the 2012 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize

Marjorie Perloff writes on twentieth and now twenty-first century poetry and poetics, both Anglo-American and from a Comparatist perspective, as well as on intermedia and the visual arts.

An eminent scholarly organization of international reputation, the American Philosophical Society promotes useful knowledge in the sciences and humanities through excellence in scholarly research, professional meetings, publications, library resources, and community outreach. This country's first learned society, the APS has played an important role in American cultural and intellectual life for over 250 years. Many founders of the republic were members: George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Rush, James Madison, and John Marshall; as were many distinguished foreigners: Lafayette, von Steuben, Kosciusko.

External Link for more info about Marjorie Perloff, Professor Emerita in English, Elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2012

 “Johnson’s novel accomplishes the seemingly impossible: an American writer has masterfully rendered the mysterious world of North Korea with the soul and savvy of a native, from its orphanages and its fishing boats to the kitchens of its high-ranking commanders. While oppressive propaganda echoes throughout, the tone never slides into caricature; if anything, the story unfolds with astounding empathy for those living in constant fear of imprisonment—or worse—but who manage to maintain their humanity against all odds. The book traces the journey of Jun Do, who for years lives according to the violent dictates of the state, as a tunnel expert who can fight in the dark, a kidnapper, radio operator, tenuous hero, and foreign dignitary before eventually taking his fate into his own hands. In one of the book’s most poignant moments, a government interrogator, who tortures innocent citizens on a daily basis, remembers his own childhood and the way in which his father explained the inexplicable: ‘…we must act alone on the outside, while on the inside, we would be holding hands.’ In this moment and a thousand others like it, Johnson juxtaposes the vicious atrocities of the regime with the tenderness of beauty, love, and hope.”
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, (STARRED REVIEW )

External Link for more info about New Novel by Adam Johnson, "The Orphan Master's Son"

Saldívar receives a 2011 National Humanities Medal in honor of his cultural explorations of the U.S-Mexico border.

In a White House ceremony on February 13 President Obama awarded a National Humanities Medal to Stanford English and comparative literature Professor Ramón Saldívar.

 His teaching and research, centering on globalization, transnationalism and Chicano studies, were recognized for "his bold explorations of identity along the border separating the United States and Mexico."

 

External Link for more info about Ramón Saldívar awarded a National Humanities Medal by President Obama

On December 2nd, the English Department welcomed guest speakers to “Careers in Teaching,” a conference designed to inform graduate students about career possibilities in independent high schools and community colleges. The day was attended by more than 60 people from 15 different Stanford departments, including English, the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages (DLCL), biology, anthropology, the school of education, and earth sciences. The occasion was full of energy and optimism. Capturing in a word the spirit of the event, Eric Chandler of the Kent Denver School described it as "inspiring."

The panelists came from some of the best private schools and community colleges in the country, including the Branson School in Marin County, the Castilleja School in Palo Alto, the Crossroads School in Santa Monica, Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, Horace Mann in New York, Kent Denver in Colorado, and the Menlo School in Menlo Park. They also included the president of the Association of Departments of English, Tom Hurley, and Jonathan Ball, the director of school services for the leading independent school recruitment firm, Carney, Sandoe, & Associates in Boston.

In the first session, Stanford Ph.D. alumni spoke frankly about the deliberations that led them to their current positions.  In the second, four panelists, all with Ph.D.s in the humanities, explained the day-to-day experience of teaching in an independent school or community college.  The third session focused on logistical matters, providing insight into how to apply and make oneself competitive for such positions.  All of the panels involved full and vibrant discussion sessions.  The participants were also able to speak with the panelists at greater length during the afternoon “breakout” session.

"Careers in Teaching" was funded by a SCORE grant from the Vice Provost for Graduate Education.

Video of the conference is available on the conference website under the "Pages" section of the right sidebar: http://careersinteaching.stanford.edu

 Why did Queen Elizabeth I compare herself with her disastrous ancestor Richard II? Why would Ben Jonson transform Queen Anne and her ladies into Amazons as entertainment for the pacifist King James? How do the concepts of costume as high fashion and as self-fashioning, as disguise and as the very essence of theatre, relate to one other? How do portraits of poets help create the author that readers want, and why should books, the embodiment of the word, be illustrated at all? What conventions connect image to text, and what impulses generated the great art collections of the early seventeenth century?

In this richly illustrated collection on theatre, books, art and personal style, literary critic and cultural historian Stephen Orgel addresses himself to such questions in order to reflect generally on early modern representation and, in the largest sense, early modern performance. As wide-ranging as they are perceptive, the essays deal with Shakespeare, Jonson and Milton, with Renaissance magic and Renaissance costume, with books and book illustration, art collecting and mythography. All are recent, and five are hitherto unpublished.

"A learned and well-written book about the philosophy of imagination and the late-medieval practice of devotional meditation. Karnes's argument is powerful and convincing, and makes a valuable addition to a lively field in current medieval studies."   

(Nicholas Watson, Harvard University)

"Michelle Karnes has given us a book of deep learning, lucidity, and intelligence. It reveals the learned origins and the intellectual cogency of meditative forms long thought simplifying and popularizing, and explains why minds of the first rank cultivated them. Never before has medieval devotional literature seemed so smart as Karnes shows it to be. In a single graceful arc, Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages sweeps away a conventional account of late-medieval religious writing and supplies what we need to build a better one."

(Steven Justice, University of California, Berkeley)

http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo12046435.html

John and George Keats—Man of Genius and Man of Power, to use John’s words—embodied sibling forms of the phenomenon we call Romanticism. George’s 1818 move to the western frontier of the United States, an imaginative leap across four thousand miles onto the tabula rasa of the American dream, created in John an abysm of alienation and loneliness that would inspire the poet’s most plangent and sublime poetry. Denise Gigante’s account of this emigration places John’s life and work in a transatlantic context that has eluded his previous biographers, while revealing the emotional turmoil at the heart of some of the most lasting verse in English.

http://bookhaven.stanford.edu/

External Link for more info about The Keats Brothers: The Life of John and George by Denise Gigante

Each June the ADE (Association of Departments of English) arranges two seminars where chairs of ADE-member departments share information and consult about issues facing their departments and the field. In 2011, Stanford's English Department Chair Jennifer Summit hosted the Seminar West.

The seminar also features a workshop for new chairs, led by two seasoned administrators, where those about to start or just completing their first year as department chairs can glean practical advice and have questions answered about all aspects of chairing.

Directors of graduate studies attend Seminar West, where a preseminar workshop and sessions devoted to their concerns take place.

External Link for more info about MLA ADE Summer Seminar West at Stanford

. . . Broadly put, the digital humanities is the nexus between computing and the humanities. Matthew Jockers, a Stanford English lecturer, academic technology specialist and co-organizer, describes the field as divided into two strands: those who study "digital objects" using traditional means – for example, studying the history of videogames; and those who are using computational analysis to do text analysis and text mining.

External Link for more info about Digital Humanities . . .

W. Simone Di Piero is a poet, essayist, and translator. Euripides' lyrical, seldom-performed play Ion is a snapshot from an earlier life for the acclaimed poet – the time he was a freelancer way back in the 1970s. Di Piero eventually became a professor as well as a Guggenheim and NEA-awarded poet, and gave up the vicissitudes of freelance living. Ion was his first and last attempt to translate from the Greek. He has been writing and teaching in Stanford's Creative Writing program since 1982.

His latest book of poems is Chinese Apples: New and Selected Poems (2007). The most recent collections of essays are City Dog (2009), and When Can I See You Again? (2010). For the poet, who grew up in an Italian working class in Philadelphia, his more usual translation ventures are from the Italian – including acclaimed volumes of Giacomo Leopardi's Pensieri and the poems of 20^th century poets Sandro Penna and Leonardo Sinisgalli.

External Link for more info about From Greek to English: Professor W. Simone Di Piero's translation takes the stage

The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium

"Re-imagining the truths we hold to be self-evident and writing with discernment, cogency, and wit, Michele Elam poses the question of the color line for the twenty-first century--'What line?'--across a dazzling array of media and genres." -- Joseph Roach, Yale University

External Link for more info about Prof. Michele Elam's New Book

During frequent trips to London, English Professor Martin Evans spent many days searching for houses, apartments, pubs and other buildings associated with literary figures. This interest led him to create a website, Authorial London, which puts authors' lives in cultural context.

External Link for more info about London by Author: new interactive website maps writers' lives

ARNOLD RAMPERSAD, the Sara Hart Kimball Professor in the Humanities, Emeritus, has been awarded a National Humanities Medal. The medals were presented by President Obama on March 2, 2011 during a White House ceremony. Rampersad, whose award-winning books have profiled W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Jackie Robinson and Ralph Ellison, was cited for his work as a biographer and literary critic.

External Link for more info about Arnold Rampersad Recipient of the National Humanities Medal

Professor Eavan Boland, Director of Stanford's renowned Creative Writing Program, gave a one-hour interview to Michael Krasny of KQED's "Forum" on her latest book,  A Journey With Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet, to be published this April. The following link will access this interview.

External Link for more info about Eavan Boland on Public Radio

Terry Castle's The Professor will appear in paperback in January 2011, due to its huge success. 

It was named one of  the Top Ten Books of 2010 by New York Magazine; the Editor’s Pick Top Ten Gay and Lesbian Books of 2010 by Amazon.com; and one of the Best Books of 2010 in Bookforum.

A feature in the current Bookforum lists some of Professor Castle's own top books of the past year, 'Pub Dates: A Year in Reading,' includes Kay Ryan's The Best of It: New and Selected Poems. Castle writes, "I've been spouting about it high and low: Ryan's on a zip line to Parnassus. Modest and majestic—she lays it down. My favorite poem at the moment is 'Outsider Art.'"

Sam Anderson, in his Top 10 Books of 2010, writes, "It’s a familiar paradox: English professors, allegedly the world’s reigning experts on great writing, are some of the worst writers in the world. Terry Castle, a longtime Stanford professor, is mercifully immune to this cliché. She writes about art (Georgia O’Keeffe) and life (losing her virginity) in a big human stew of tones: goofy, analytical, slangy, raw, confessional. Her portrait of Susan Sontag, 'the bedazzling, now-dead she-eminence,' is a comic masterpiece."

External Link for more info about THE PROFESSOR in Several Top Lists of 2010

“This is a landmark volume, and one which will give new direction to the study of early modern women and the multiple ways in which they are active participants in the literary culture of the sixteenth century.” – Margaret Ezell

This volume initiates a new history of early women’s writing. Focusing on a wide variety of texts—from verse and drama to household records and recipes—it reconsiders what writing meant to the women who produced and used it.

The 110 years of British history that define this volume’s scope (1500-1610) witnessed dramatic upheavals in politics, religion, society, and culture. As these illuminating essays reveal, women actively participated through their writing, in key developments of the period: new media technologies, emergent performance spaces, Reformation and Counter-Reformation movements, and shifting representations of nation and race that marked colonial expansion.

Bringing together an exciting group of leading and emerging scholars in the field, this volume both establishes the importance of women’s writing to sixteenth-century literary culture and offers a new paradigm for reading the diversity of textual forms that emerged at this seminal moment in the history of British literature.

External Link for more info about Jennifer Summit and Caroline Bicks, Editors: The History of British Women's Writing, 1500-1610 (Vol. 2)

"Hazel Markus and Paula Moya have assembled an all-star roster of scholars to put to rest, once and for all, the fallacy that 'race doesn't matter.' This volume is absolutely necessary and will fast become a landmark of scholarship on race and ethnicity."  -- Henry Louis Gates Jr.

A collection of essays, which focuses on race and ethnicity in everyday life, drawing on the latest in science and scholarship from across the disciplines including sociology, history, biology, psychology, anthropology, literature, education, drama, and communication.

External Link for more info about "Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century" by Paula Moya and Hazel Markus

The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, editor. Published by the Library of America to mark the centennial of Twain’s death, this collection brings together the words of over 60 writers, from his earliest reviewers to today, probing the many facets of Mark Twain: his incomparable humor, his revolutionary use of vernacular language, his irreverence and skepticism, his profound grappling with issues of race, his fearless opposition to the injustices and outrages of an imperialistic age. 
 

External Link for more info about Prof. Shelley Fisher Fishkin marks the Mark Twain Centennial

Roland Greene, professor of English and of comparative literature, launched the website Arcade in November. It's now attracting more than 5,000 visitors per day and providing humanities scholars with an intellectual network, a digital salon and a sounding board for ideas. This new website has the potential to bring humanists together all over the world – and revolutionize the way scholars do business.

External Link for more info about New ARCADE Website Brings Humanists Together

"The Culture of Diagram offers a bracingly innovative and insightful critical genealogy of 'diagrammatic knowledge' of the past 250 years. It represents interdisciplinary thinking at its path-breaking best: bringing together art history and visual studies, cultural and intellectual history, and science studies, Bender and Marrinan establish critically fresh and compelling insights that will spark considerable and ongoing discussion in each of those fields."   (Daniel Brewer)

External Link for more info about Profs. John Bender and Michael Marrinan's collaborative work

 Prof. Vermeule wonders how readers become involved in the lives of fictional characters, people they know do not exist. Vermeule examines the ways in which readers’ experiences of literature are affected by the emotional attachments they form to fictional characters and how those experiences then influence their social relationships in real life. . . . From the perspective of cognitive science, Vermeule finds that caring about literary characters is not all that different form caring about other people, especially strangers. The tools used by literary authors to sharpen and focus reader interest tap into evolved neural mechanisms that trigger a caring response.

Susan Sontag once called Terry Castle “the most expressive, most enlightening literary critic at large today.” But her new book, The Professor and Other Writings, proves she's one of our most expressive and enlightening memoirists as well.  - (Salon.com)

"These essays are written by a brilliant mind at play. There is a sparkling intensity and wit in the tone, tempered by wisdom, but loosened by honesty and humor. Terry Castle is a great noticer, a superb and fearless observer of both herself and the world. The essays in The Professor are likely to become classics of their kind." - Colm Toibin, author of The Master and Brooklyn

External Link for more info about Terry Castle's new book "The Professor and Other Writings"

When the poet and cultural critic W. S. Di Piero turns his attention to things that have mattered in his life--cities, poetry, movies, photography, art--readers are in for an exhilarating ride. City Dog, both a series of essays and the autobiography of a consciousness, ranges from Di Piero's early years as the son of Italian immigrants in South Philadelphia to his working life as a writer. The collection includes a few choice pieces from out-of-print collections and new work that shows Di Piero puzzling over other preoccupations: memory, music, eros, the social order, Dante, Sid Ceasar, Van Gogh, and even hats. . . . This intimate compilation reveals the common themes that have connected his wanderings all along.

External Link for more info about Professor and Writer W. S. Di Piero's Latest Book of Essays: City Dog

As Gavin Jones points out in his new introduction, Margaret perhaps stands alone in its creation of a female character who grows in social rather than domestic power. The novel also remains unique in its exploration of transcendental philosophy in novelistic form. Part eco-criticism, part seduction novel, part temperance tract, and part social history, Margaret is a virtual handbook for understanding the literary culture of mid-nineteenth-century America, the missing piece in puzzling out connections between writers such as Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, and Thoreau. First published in 1845, Sylvester Judd’s novel centers on the fictional New England village of Livingston . . .

External Link for more info about Professor Gavin Jones revives neglected classic of American Literature

Bede was the author of more than 40 works. "In his time, there was no one like him," said Brown. The Northumbrian monk known as "Venerable Bede" (c.672-735) has been called "the teacher of the whole Middle Ages" and "the father of English history." For Brown, author of the newly published Companion to Bede, he is something more: The early scholar has been Brown's lifetime's work. Bede was the ultimate polymath--a master of every subject of his time: poetic principles and practice, mathematics, astronomy, history, theology, grammar.

External Link for more info about Professor Emeritus George Hardin Brown, one of the world's leading authorities on Venerable Bede, has published a new book on England's earliest polymath

In October Rampersad returned home to Trinidad to receive an honorary degree from the University of the West Indies at the St Augustine campus graduation ceremonies.     

External Link for more info about Professor Emeritus Arnold Rampersad awarded Honorary Degree from the University of the West Indies

PEN American Center is the U.S. branch of the world's oldest international literary and human rights organization. International PEN was founded in 1921 in direct response to the ethnic and national divisions that contributed to the First World War. PEN American Center was founded in 1922 and is the largest of the 144 PEN centers in 101 countries that together compose International PEN.

Throughout its 85-year history, PEN American Center has remained a writer-centered organization in which members play a leading role. PEN presidents, such as Arthur Miller, Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, and Salman Rushdie have, and continue to place themselves at the forefront of the struggle to oppose censorship and defend writers.

Today, PEN American Center is comprised of 3,400 Professional Members who represent the most distinguished writers, translators, and editors in the United States.
 

External Link for more info about Prof. Terry Castle elected to PEN American Center

Prof. Tallent has been honored by the Dean with the coveted Award for Distinguished Teaching for her superb work in the classroom and her extraordinary skills as a teacher and mentor of undergrduates in English and the Stegner Fellows in the Creative Writing workshops at Stanford.  She is the past recipient of two Phi Beta Kappa teaching awards at the local and regional levels. Tallent teaches her signature course "The Development of the Short Story" in Spring quarter.

The English department is currently searching for an Associate Professor of Creative Writing – Fiction and for an Assistant Professor of African American Literature. Stanford University is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to increasing the diversity of its faculty. It welcomes nominations of and applications from women and members of minority groups, as well as others who would bring additional dimensions to the university's research and teaching missions.

Full Details Here (.pdf)

 "For those unaware—as I was until I read this book—that Mark Twain was one of America's early animal advocates, Shelley Fisher Fishkin's collection of his writings on animals will come as a revelation. Many of these pieces are as fresh and lively as when they were first written, and it's wonderful to have them gathered in one place." —Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation and The Life You Can Save

"A truly exhilarating work. Mark Twain's animal-friendly views would not be out of place today, and indeed, in certain respects, Twain is still ahead of us: claiming, correctly, that there are certain degraded practices that only humans inflict on one another and upon other animals. Fishkin has done a splendid job: I cannot remember reading something so consistently excellent."—Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, author of When Elephants Weep and The Face on Your Plate

External Link for more info about Professor Shelley Fisher Fishkin's Latest: Mark Twain's Book of Animals

Championed by the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society's Fair Use Project, Shloss has won her case against the estate of the celebrated Irish author James Joyce of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, which  had become notorious in scholarly circles for its conflicts with scholars, authors and Joyce enthusiasts. "It's a breakthrough, not just for me but for everybody who has to deal with a literary estate," said Shloss.   

External Link for more info about Prof. Carol Shloss Wins Important Suit for Freedom in Scholarly Research

Lunsford is studying almost fifteen thousand pieces of writing collected from 189 undergraduates, in a project that spanned five years (including the students’ first year out of college). She looked at anything and everything—essays, journals, blog posts, chats, e-mails. Her conclusion: “We’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization.” (from The Book Bench, The New Yorker, Sept. 10, 2009)

External Link for more info about Prof. Andrea Lunsford on "New" Literacy

English Professor SHELLEY FISHER FISHKIN recently received the Mark Twain Circle Certificate of Merit "for long and distinguished service in the elucidation of the work, thought, life and art of Mark Twain." As he presented the award on Aug. 9 in New York, University of Illinois English Professor Bruce Michelson, president of the organization, asked: "Can you think of anyone who has done more, in the past 20 years, to keep Mark Twain on the front page of the national newspapers and magazines? To get his work into the lights on Broadway? To bring the visual and textual experience of his first editions out of the rare book rooms and into the hands of new generations of ordinary readers?"

Professor Shelley Fisher Fishkin has published a new book entitled Feminist Engagements: Forays into American Literature and Culture.

"Feminist Engagements is enormously valuable and great fun to read."

-Erica Jong, poet and novelist

"Feminist Engagements employs a feminist lens to re-view American writers and American culture from the nineteenth century through the beginning of our twenty-first century. This book is excitingly, intellectually engaged and, at the same time, movingly self-revelatory. Every page is to be savored."

-Annette Kolodny, Professor Emerita of American Literature and Culture, University of Arizona

Professor Denise Gigante has published a new book entitled Life: Organic Form and Romanticism.

"The idea of the organic has troubled critics from Coleridge through Walter Pater on to their modern scholars. Denise Gigante's Life brings extraordinary clarity and renewed force to this traditional perplexity."

-Harold Bloom

"Life develops an important subject with much persuasive force, making use of extensive and careful research. It demonstrates that concepts of eighteenth-century vitalistic biology are essential to understanding the forms of major Romantic poems."

-Karl Kroeber, Columbia University

A professor in the Stanford English Department for over thirty years, George Dekker has written a book that recalls a decidedly unscholarly adventure of his youth. Touching Fire: A Forestry Memoir brings back to life the seven student summers he spent as a forest firefighter in northwestern California. A description of fighting fires in the wild, his narrative celebrates the coastal redwoods and protests the irresponsible harvesting practices that have made them an endangered species. The memoir also recounts the hard choices he had to make as a young man between a life in the Forestry and very different kind of life in the Academy.

The Journal of Transnational American Studies, the brainchild of English Professor Shelley Fisher Fishkin, has launched its inaugural issue. The peer-reviewed online journal is sponsored by the American Studies Program at Stanford, of which Fishkin is director, and the American Cultures and Global Contexts Program at the University of California-Santa Barbara. Fishkin is also founding editor of the journal. The first issue includes contributions from scholars and writers based in Germany, Ireland, Japan, Poland, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, the United States and Vietnam.

External Link for more info about American Studies Journal Publishes First Issue

Cited for his craft and his empathy, Stanford English professor and popular short story writer Tobias Wolff takes home The Story Prize for Our Story Begins. “It is this great sense of the human condition, combined with the close detailing of everyday life that makes Tobias Wolff such an exceptional writer. He deserves The Story Prize, not only for his early work showcased in Our Story Begins, that many of us have studied and read and learned from in the past, but for the ten new stories included, that show he is still at the top of his game.” 

The Story Prize is an annual book award honoring the author of an outstanding collection of short fiction with a generous cash award. Eligible books must be written in English and first published in the United States during a calendar year.

External Link for more info about Tobias Wolff wins The Story Prize

English Professor John Felstiner has published a new book entitled, Can Poetry Save the Earth?

"John Felstiner's study is a remarkable attempt to bring the rich tradition of nature poetry to our aid in the current and ongoing ecological crisis. I find particularly moving his extraordinary range of sympathy for the very varied poets he discusses." - Harold Bloom

"It is John Felstiner's unique vision of the nature poem as a bio-world in itself - holding safe for us what we have freely endangered - that gives this book a radiance of power and conviction. It also marks it out as of central importance in the developing conversation on poetry and the environment." - Eavan Boland

"Eavan Boland's growing international reputation is grounded in the recognition that she is the first great woman poet in the history of Irish poetry." (Albert Gelpi)

Over the course of ten books of poems spanning four decades, Eavan Boland has changed the landscape of Irish poetry, creating new spaces and a new language. A Critical Companion is an essential guide to the poetry, prose, and critical writing of this acclaimed poet.
Contains biographical introductions and chronology; introductory surveys of each aspect of Boland's work; a representative selection of Boland's poetry and prose writings; reviews, interviews and critical discussions of each of Boland's books; photographs; and a comprehensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources.


"Boland is one of the finest and boldest poets of the last half-century." (Elaine Feinstein, Poetry Review)


"Boland's work continues to deepen in both humanity and complexity . . . her highly articulated ars poetica has already remapped the territory of contemporary poetry." (Fiona Sampson, Irish Times)

Join in the festivities this week for our celebration of Milton@400: A Symposium in Honor of J. Martin Evans.  Events include:

Thursday, December 4, Terrace Room:  All-day marathon reading of Paradise Lost
(8am-6pm) including lots of food, drink, and snacks throughout the day and a light buffet reception to conclude.

Friday, December 5, Stanford Humanities Center: All-day symposium of new scholarship on Milton's life and works.  Please come to hear as many panels as you can! 

See http://milton400.stanford.edu for more details including panel schedule, speakers, and abstracts.
 

External Link for more info about Milton @ 400

"With Ursula Heise's superb book, ecocriticism begins truly to 'think globally.' With exceptional sociological sophistication and critical insight, she exposes the ambiguity of 'staying home,' arguing for an 'eco-cosmopolitan' openness to the pleasures and possibilities - and unique risks of globalization." (Greg Garrard)

"At the leading edge of a rapidly evolving environmental discourse, Ursula Heise announces the moment of a new eco-cosmopolitanism. Her visionary manifesto....gathers the most politically serious and aesthetically challenging of contemporary writers in order to take us beyond the reassurance of a return to Mother Nature....and to make real possibilities of an environmentalism without borders." (Bruce Robbins)

Professor Emeritus Bliss Carnochan has published a new book, Golden Legends: Images of Abyssinia, Samuel Johnson to Bob Marley. The principal subject of this book is the allure of the exotic, as represented by Abyssinia, to the British imagination. In addition to Johnson and Marley, some others included are James Bruce, Richard Burton, Evelyn Waugh, Wilfred Thesiger, Sylvia Pankhurst, and Dervla Murphy.

"I can think of no other book on Abyssinia quite like this one....As usual, the scholarship is excellent - unobtrusive, thorough, wide-ranging, with often exciting juxtaposition and connections....Of vitally absorbing interest." (Alexander Maitland)

SHELLEY FISHER FISHKIN, a professor of English and director of the American Studies Program, has been appointed to a five-year term on the Board of Governors of the University of California Humanities Research Institute—that is, the board for all the humanities centers in the 10-campus UC system. The president of the UC system made the appointment in July. The institute promotes collaborative work representing different fields and institutions within and beyond the University of California—a good match for Fishkin's broad, interdisciplinary research interests.

External Link for more info about Prof. Fishkin appointed to UC Humanities Research Institute

Prof. Michele Elam receives an endowed Chair, the Martin Luther King Centennial Professorship.

Elam is also launching Race Forward, a 3-year initiative creating innovative interdisciplinary alliances

"The Program in African & African American Studies (AAAS) at the Center for Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity launches a new, campus-wide initiative called "Race Forward" Fall 2008... "Race Forward” is a three-year, interdisciplinary project that involves scholarly fields of research and teaching that have not extensively engaged critical race studies or where scholars or students of color have been underrepresented... "Race Forward" offers three thematic foci across three years, each of which will tie together various talks, dinners, courses, consortia, symposia and other collaborations. 2008-09 focuses on Race & Faith; 2009-10 examines Race & the Environment; and in 2010-11 we turn our attention to Race and Human Health. The last two years relate closely to two of Stanford’s Challenge Initiatives and all three years respond to the University's call for multidisciplinary research, teaching, and learning that will prepare citizens for the 21st century."
-AAAS Website

External Link for more info about Prof. Michele Elam Receives an Endowed Chair; Launches "Race Forward."

"Memory’s Library is a superb book, as excellent in execution as it is original and ambitious in conception.” (Peter Stallybrass)

“Jennifer Summit offers persuasive—and original—views of the role played by Renaissance librarians in seeking and defining scientific knowledge. With deft strokes, she paints a picture of how collecting medieval manuscripts helped humanist scholars create the concept of textuality we still live with. Without the librarians, Summit shows, literature, and knowledge generally, would look very different.” (Stephen G. Nichols)


 

“Denise Gigante’s volume of the major English familiar essayists is the best available. She covers the entire range from Addison and Steele through the greatness of Dr. Johnson on to the high Romantics Hazlitt, Lamb, and De Quincey. This book will be widely and gratefully read.” (Harold Bloom)

“This is a splendid project. No other collection of its scope and variety exists.” (James Engell)

“I’m not sure when I’ve had so much pure reading pleasure.” (Cynthia Wall)


 

“Every page of Seth Lerer’s brilliant book reminds us of the supreme and enduring value of childhood reading. This volume deserves the attention of all who care about the shaping of lives—educators on all levels, policy makers, psychologists, and parents as well as scholars. Lerer writes that children’s literature is meant docere et delectare (to instruct and to delight), and this is precisely what he himself had done in this fascinating book.”
(by Ellen Handler Spitz)

External Link for more info about Prof. Seth Lerer's latest book, Children's Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter

"Wolff's alchemy in these stories is oddly and deeply transformative. They inevitably rise above their ostensible subject into some universal terrain. How Wolff achieves this effect is something of a miracle. . . ." San Francisco Chronicle, March 16, 2008

External Link for more info about Tobias Wolff's latest book of new and selected stories, Our Story Begins, is hitting the best-seller lists!

A brilliant debut novel in which personal histories crisscross to delineate the social history of a city . . .



"This is a book to cherish for a very long time, for its descriptions and evocations as well as for what it tells us about the ebb and flow of human expectation."
- Amit Chaudhuri

External Link for more info about Silverfish, Professor Saikat Majumdar's debut novel

Social anxiety about poverty surfaces with startling frequency in American literature. Yet, as Gavin Jones argues, poverty has been denied its due as a critical and ideological framework in its own right, despite recent interest in representations of the lower classes and the marginalized. These insights lay the groundwork for American Hungers, in which Jones uncovers a complex and controversial discourse on the poor that stretches from the antebellum era through the Depression.

Reading writers such as Herman Melville, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, James Agee, and Richard Wright in their historical contexts, Jones explores why they succeeded where literary critics have fallen short. These authors acknowledged a poverty that was as aesthetically and culturally significant as it was socially and materially real. They confronted the ideological dilemmas of approaching poverty while giving language to the marginalized poor--the beggars, tramps, sharecroppers, and factory workers who form a persistent segment of American society. Far from peripheral, poverty emerges at the center of national debates about social justice, citizenship, and minority identity. And literature becomes a crucial tool to understand an economic and cultural condition that is at once urgent and elusive because it cuts across the categories of race, gender, and class by which we conventionally understand social difference.

Combining social theory with literary analysis, American Hungers masterfully brings poverty into the mainstream critical idiom.

External Link for more info about New Book by Prof. Gavin Jones

Professor Emerita of English, Diane Middlebrook, died on December 15, 2007 in San Francisco. Memorial to be held at 5:00 on Monday, March 31 in the Encina Hall Conference Room.

External Link for more info about Diane Middlebrook

Eavan Boland is Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Stanford. Born in Dublin in the 1940s, she lives there when not in residence at Stanford. She has published nine volumes of poetry, her most recent being Domestic Violence. Boland is universally acknowledged as the preeminent female poet and contemporary writer of her native Ireland.

“Boland is one of the finest and boldest poets of the last half century. No one has articulated with more poise the dilemmas of being a woman poet in Ireland.” Elaine Feinstein, Poetry Review


“Admirably tough-minded [and] eloquently expressed. . . . Boland transforms the past from a place that is long gone to a place that we can travel into . . .” New York Times Book Review

External Link for more info about Eavan Boland, Poet and Director of the Stanford Creative Writing Program

Jay Fliegelman, the Coe Professor in American Literature and a leading figure in American studies, died Aug. 14 at his home in Menlo Park. He was 58. The memorial service was held on September 20 in Memorial Church.


"...he was not just one of the most important scholars of his generation, but one of the great teachers of our time," said Ramón Saldívar, English department chair.

The Jay Fliegelman Memorial Fund has been established to support graduate student scholars. Contributions may be sent c/o the English department.

External Link for more info about Memorial Service held for Professor Jay Fliegelman

The definitive biography of one of the most important American writers and cultural intellectuals of the twentieth century—Ralph Ellison, author of the masterpiece Invisible Man. In 1953, Ellison’s explosive story of an innocent young black man’s often surreal search for truth and his identity won him the National Book Award for fiction and catapulted him to national prominence. Ellison went on to earn many other honors, including two presidential medals and election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, but his failure to publish a second novel, despite years of striving, haunted him for the rest of his life. Now, as the first scholar given complete access to Ellison’s papers, Arnold Rampersad has written not only a reliable account of the main events of Ellison’s life but also a complex, authoritative portrait of an unusual artist and human being.

This biography describes a man of magnetic personality who counted Saul Bellow, Langston Hughes, Robert Penn Warren, Richard Wright, Richard Wilbur, Albert Murray, and John Cheever among his closest friends; a man both admired and reviled, whose life and art were shaped mainly by his unyielding desire to produce magnificent art and by his resilient faith in the moral and cultural strength of America.

A magisterial biography of Ralph Waldo Ellison—a revelation of the man, the writer, and his times.

External Link for more info about New Book by Prof. Arnold Rampersad—Ralph Ellison

Seth Lerer’s Inventing English is a masterful, engaging history of the English language from the age of Beowulf to the rap of Eminem. Many have written about the evolution of grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary, but only Lerer situates these developments in the larger history of English, America, and literature. Each concise chapter illuminates a moment of invention--a time when people discovered a new form of expression or changed the way they spoke or wrote. In conclusion, Lerer wonders whether globalization and technology have turned English into a world language that reflects on what has been preserved and what has been lost. A unique blend of historical and personal narrative, Inventing English is a surprising tale of a language that is as dynamic as the people to whom it belongs.

External Link for more info about New Book by Prof. Seth Lerer - Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language

Carol Loeb Shloss, an acting professor of English at Stanford, has won the right to publish her scholarship on the literary work of James Joyce online and in print based on a settlement agreement with the Joyce Estate.



Relying on many primary sources, Shloss's work focuses on the life of Lucia Joyce: her unacknowledged artistic talent, her tragic life spent mostly in mental institutions, and the unrecognized influence she exerted over her father's work. Upon learning of Shloss's scholarship, the Joyce Estate—controlled by Joyce's grandson Stephen James Joyce—denied her permission to quote from any of the materials controlled by the estate and repeatedly threatened Shloss with a copyright infringement suit.



Recently, Stephen James Joyce and the Joyce Estate entered into a settlement agreement enforceable by the court that lets Shloss publish this material electronically and also publish a printed supplement to her book Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake. In 2003, Shloss had deleted substantial portions of the manuscript to avoid the threat of copyright litigation from the estate.



In 2005, Shloss created a supplemental website containing the supporting material that was cut from her book but did not make the website publicly available. In a series of letters to Shloss, the Joyce Estate threatened legal action if the website were to be made public. In 2006, Shloss decided to sue, asserting that the website uses the work in a scholarly transformative manner—a manner allowed under U.S. copyright law.



"The work of literary scholars is inherently transformative," Shloss said. "We take the writing of someone whose work we love and share it with others. We keep our human inheritance alive by making it part of a dialogue with our peers, our friends, our students and the generations that follow us. When that dialogue is interrupted, when we are squeezed between the aggression of literary estates and the apprehensions of publishers, something very important is lost. I fought not just for Lucia and Joyce, whose words had to be taken out of my book, but for the freedom to consider what happened to them and for the freedom of others to respond to my ideas. 'Fair use' exists to foster this liveliness of mind; its measure is in transformation not in a restrictive counting of words. Everyone who worked on this case understood that something far more important than my particular book was at stake in the fight. It was an honor to work with them."



Courtesy of the Stanford Report

External Link for more info about Prof. Carol Shloss settles copyright lawsuit with Joyce Estate

Academic technology specialist Matt Jockers supports Professor David Riggs with digital humanities

David Riggs had been kind to the new guy in the department, taking Matthew Jockers mountain biking to show him the best local trails. Then came the day when Riggs, a professor of English and a Shakespeare specialist, realized he could tap the young scholar’s expertise. Riggs was working on a new biography of the Bard, and he knew that Jockers, as the department’s ATS (academic technology specialist), could help him with his copious notes.

“David was doing a close, week-by-week look at Shakespeare’s life, and he used the word ‘timeline’ in a conversation we had,” Jockers recalls. “I immediately saw a visualization tool developing.”

Jockers designs computer-based programs that allow him to probe and analyze large literary databases. “The tools I build are for doing a particular kind of analysis that I call macro analysis—designed to find patterns and lack of patterns across large [bodies] of literature.”

In the 60-year history of the field variously known as humanities computing or digital humanities, Jockers says practitioners have developed “great tools.” But typically they’re programs that are used to analyze a single work of literature—by providing, say, a concordance for Moby Dick. The custom tools Jockers works on can sort through 250 novels per hour, and are the equivalent of thousands of concordances for thousands of books. “It’s not a tool that’s designed to help us understand Bleak House, but to see where Bleak House falls in the literary history of the 19th century.”

As he discussed the Shakespeare project with Riggs, Jockers visualized a timeline that would designate historical events in blue and publication dates of Shakespeare’s works in red. Places where the blue and red blocks overlapped or diverged prompted questions. “Why do we have a surge in publications from 1600 to 1601?” Jockers queries. “Why is nothing published after 1604, except for King Lear in 1608?”

Riggs looked at the timeline and saw “a great teaching aid,” one that he tested in his graduate seminar Who Was Shakespeare? “Any time we were looking at a play or an event, I could say, ‘What was he doing in April 1597?’ and click on the timeline, and all the information appeared on the screen,” Riggs says. “It was like I was able to take all my notes into the classroom, zero in on the part I wanted to use, and then get the students brainstorming along with me about what was happening at that point.”

As he continues to compile notes for his biography of Shakespeare, Riggs is adding new data to the timeline, including the dates of performances of the plays. He even has a dream of adding allusions to Shakespeare—“every time somebody mentions him”—to the timeline. “The goal is to go online, to make it a public access database, a resource for anyone, anywhere, who’s interested in the life of Shakespeare, or who’s teaching the plays and wants to be able to connect them to the life,” he told an audience at the IT Open House in November. “Stanford and the ATS program could sort of bequeath it to the scholarly world at large, as an instrument for collaborative research in the humanities.”

(from Stanford Magazine), photo by Linda A. Cicero

External Link for more info about The Bard in Bits and Bytes

W. S. Di Piero is the author of numerous volumes of poetry and essays. His latest book of poems, Chinese Apples: New and Selected Poems, is just out from Knopf. He is Professor of English at Stanford.

External Link for more info about New book of poems by W.S. Di Piero, CHINESE APPLES: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS

“Christopher Rovee’s Imagining the Gallery presents a fascinating new view of the way in which the portrait served as a metaphor and a subgenre in Romantic literary culture. Deftly balancing literary analysis and cultural history, Rovee’s beautifully written book makes an important contribution to the fields of Romantic studies, art history, and cultural studies.” [Judith Pascoe] How did Britons see themselves and their country in the early decades of the nineteenth century? Imagining the Gallery argues that in the years leading up to the First Reform Bill in 1832, the encounter with portraiture involved and instantiated the imagining of a British social body. By revealing cultural institutions such as art galleries as dynamic spaces for envisioning a new political order, it uncovers portraiture's critical role in the momentous reimagining of the national community that took place in romantic Britain. In the process, Imagining the Gallery rethinks some of the basic premises of romantic literary and cultural studies. Conventionally evoked as reinforcement for the myth of the poet (Byron's celebrity portraits; the haunting death-mask of Keats), portraiture is shown here to be a major conceptual category, a prevalent metaphor, and a ubiquitous form of print culture. In an age when epic poetry gets written as extended self-portraiture, when the prestige of the novel is measured by its galleries of characters, and when political debate unfolds as a contest between rhetorical portraits, literary portraiture joins the sublime of landscape as an essential visual-verbal category. From the family gallery at Pemberley in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice to the printed portraits of working men and women that were published in books; from the eighty-plus paintings of the Poet Laureate William Wordsworth to the gigantic living portrait that is Victor Frankenstein's Monster; Imagining the Gallery presents portraiture as a transformative cultural discourse that helped to remake the body politic in the image of the private individual.

Lerer has studied children's literature for 13 years and is working on a critical history of the subject. A professor of English and comparative literature, he's interested in both recurring patterns and cultural variations--noting, for example, that when Puritan children learned their ABCs from The New England Primer, the little poem keyed to the letter 'A' reads "In Adam's Fall, We sinned all." The moral message is a particular of that time and place, but the form of the alphabet book is a constant.

So is the idea that, in a sense, all the world's a book? Alice in Wonderland is chock-full of scenes of reading and misreading, and many other kids' books from Winnie the Pooh to the Harry Potter series speak to decoding the world.

As Seth Lerer puts it, "I want to go where the wild things are, but I also want to be home for dinner." Children's books let kids have it both ways.

External Link for more info about English Professor Seth Lerer Rediscovers Kids' Lit

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS), one of the country's oldest honorary learned societies, announced in April the election of new fellows, including Stanford University scholar and English Professor Franco Moretti.

External Link for more info about Franco Moretti elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Poet, novelist, journalist, and ethnographer, Américo Paredes (1915-1999) was a pioneering figure in Mexican American border studies and a founder of Chicano studies. Paredes taught literature and anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin for decades, and his ethnographic and literary critical work laid the groundwork for subsequent scholarship on the folktales, legends, and riddles of Mexican Americans. In this beautifully written literary history, Ramón Saldívar establishes Paredes' preeminent place in writing the contested cultural history of the south Texas borderlands. At the same time, Saldívar reveals Paredes as a precursor to the "new" American cultural studies by showing how he perceptively negotiated the contradictions between the national and transnational forces at work in the Americas in the nascent era of globalization.

External Link for more info about Ramón Saldívar's new book The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary

"This variorum edition will be the basis of all future Donne scholarship." Chronicle

"An occasion for celebration. Among the most ambitious and valuable collaborative scholarly enterprises [in our time]. Superb." Early Modern Literary Studies

"Academic libraries and specialists in Renaissance and 17th-century studies schould feel compelled to own each and every volume of this series." Seventeenth Century News
This is the fourth volume of the Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne to appear. Based on an exhaustive study of the manuscript and print history of these poems, this volume presents a newly edited critical text of the Holy Sonnets and a comprehensive digest of the critical-scholarly commentary on them from Donne's time through 1995. In detailing the transmissional history of the poems among manuscripts and printed editions of the seventeenth century, the editors identify and print both an earlier and a revised authorial sequence of sonnets, as well as presenting the scribal collection--which contains unique authorial versions of several of the sonnets--inscribed by Donne's friend Rowland Woodward in the Westmoreland manuscript. The volume also casts new light on the question of dating the Holy Sonnets and reexamines their traditional associations with such other poems as the "La Corona" cycle and the verse letter "To E. of D. with Six Holy Sonnets."

External Link for more info about The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of JOHN DONNE, Vol. 7: The Holy Sonnets , Helen Brooks, Co-Contributing Editor (with Robert T. Fallon and P. G. Stanwood); Indiana University Press, 2005

"With the centennial of his death approaching next year, 'The Sport of the Gods is both timely and necessary as the first book to compile the breadth of Dunbar's most important writings, including his short novel for which this volume is named. . . . In these works, the stoic young man in the starched collar, as Dunbar often appeared in photographs, is a force of unbending intelligence and fiercely argued opinions. As a collection, 'The Sport of the Gods broadens not only an appreciation of Dunbar's wide-ranging talents but underlines the wealth of potential lost when Dunbar succumbed to tuberculosis when he was only 33."
-- Boston Globe

Shelley Fisher Fishkin is a professor of English and the director of American studies at Stanford University. An award-winning author, she is past president of the American Studies Association.

David Bradley is an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Oregon, and the author of South Street and The Chaneysville Incident, for which he received the 1982 PEN/ Faulkner Award.

External Link for more info about The Sport of the Gods and Other Essential Writings by Paul Laurence Dunbar

This literary honor, awarded annually since 1988, "recognizes a body of work which demonstrates excellence in the art of short fiction," as announced by the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. Wolff is the Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor of English at Stanford University. He has written two memoirs ("This Boy's Life" and "In Pharaoh's Army"), two novels ("Old School" and "The Barracks Thief"), and three volumes of short fiction: "In the Garden of the North American Martyrs," "Back in the World" and "The Night in Question." Wolff also has received the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and numerous other awards. The award pays tribute to the late writer Bernard Malamud.

"This book is an important aid to anyone studying Chaucer and looking for a guide that is both readable and aware of recent developments in the field. It deserves to be widely used in teaching at both undergraduate and graduate levels. Seth Lerer has gathered a wonderful group of scholars who write incisively and always interestingly about subjects they know in depth." Nicholas Watson, Harvard University

External Link for more info about The Yale Companion to Chaucer,
Seth Lerer, editor

Classic Rough News by Kenneth Fields

"These wonderful poems offer a rare mix of the highest lyric craft in the service of a compelling, persuasive human voice. Again and again here, clear language and powerful music bring the reader into a world which is full of reflection, doubt, the pain of memory, and the exuberance of daily living. What is remarkable is the way superb craftsmanship always succeeds in making these poems a delight to read, while at the same time deep feeling never fails to make them memorable." Eavan Boland

External Link for more info about Kenneth Fields

Gil Sorrentino, Professor Emeritus of English, wins the 2005 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Lannan Foundation Gilbert Sorrentino, ?like a reckless heir to Borges, Barthelme and Groucho Marx, co-opts the language of critical discourse to subvert his audience?s preconceptions and, in so doing, redraws the boundaries of ?acceptable? art? (The New York Times). For much of the 1950?s and 60?s, Sorrentino published literary journals and magazines and in 1965 took a job at Grove Press where his first editing assignment was Alex Haley?s The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Sorrentino?s first novel, The Sky Changes, was published in 1966, and over 20 titles of fiction and poetry have followed. In 1973, Sorrentino published his most commercially successful work, Mulligan Stew. Of his novel, Blue Pastoral, the Atlantic Monthly says, ?Sorrentino demonstrates, with a steady flow of puns, parodies, misquotations (deliberate), incorrect historical references (ditto), and hideous verse (presumably also ditto), that the country abounds in foolishness.?

External Link for more info about Gil Sorrentino

Al Gelpi, the Coe Professor of American Literature, Emeritus, has received the Morton N. Cohen Award for the most distinguished edition of letters in 2003 and 2004 for The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, which he co-edited and for which he wrote the critical introduction. The award will be presented at the Modern Language Association meeting in December.

Ramón Saldívar appointed new Chair of English as of September 1, 2005

External Link for more info about Dean appoints new Chair of the English Department: Ramón Saldívar

The Fictions of Romantic Tourism: Radcliffe, Scott, and Mary Shelley Exemplary Romantic novelists, Ann Radcliffe, Sir Walter Scott, and Mary Shelley were also keen tourists and major contributors to the discourse of Romantic tourism. The shaping power of this discourse ? already highly developed in poetry, travel literature, and the visual arts by the time they began writing ? affected not only what they saw and felt on tour but also how they imagined their greatest novels. Defining both tour and novel as privileged spaces exempt from the numbing routines and hampering contingencies of domestic life, they brought the tour into fiction and fiction into the tour. George Dekker?s introduction and opening chapters trace the affiliations between Romantic-Age tourism and the pilgrimage and Grand Tour, illustrate the many ways that Romantic tourists fictionalized their experiences even while maintaining a shrewd eye on cultural difference, and clarify why and how the Romantic novel departs from the conventions of eye-witness realism developed by Defoe and Richardson. Subsequent chapters discuss the tours of Radcliffe, Scott, and Mary Shelley in relation to such ?Age?-defining novels as The Mysteries of Udolpho, Waverley, and Frankenstein and to others less widely read today, such as The Romance of the Forest, Guy Mannering, and The Last Man. The work of one of the leading scholars of British and American Romanticism, The Fictions of Romantic Tourism is the first extended study of the intimate kinship between Romantic fiction and tourism and the first to attend closely to the active commerce, the fluid interplay, within the larger discourse of Romantic tourism, between British Romantic fiction, poetry (especially that of Wordsworth, Scott, and Byron), tour books, landscape painting, and book illustration (as exemplified by the collaboration between Scott and J. M. W. Turner).

. . . three essays setting out to demonstrate the power of abstract models to revolutionize our understanding of literary history. What do the quantitative curves of novel production tell us about the interplay of markets, politics, sexes, generations, in the life and death of literary forms?... a bold and revolutionary approach to literary scholarship. Stanford University literature professor Franco Moretti argues passionately that for too long, those who study literature have restricted themselves to a narrow handful of canon texts, thus allowing their view of literary history to be terribly distorted by a skewed sample base. Instead, Moretti claims, the discipline should start charting, graphing, and mapping themes and trends of larger literature samples, in order to systematically reveal trends and a larger picture. Drawing heavily on research and seamlessly blending the critical objectivity of mathematics with more traditional forms of literary evaluation, Graphs Maps Trees is a breath of fresh air and enthusiastically recommended for college literary studies and reference shelves, due to its daring challenge to the status quo. (Midwest Book Review, August 2005)

External Link for more info about GRAPHS, MAPS, TREES: Abstract Models for Literary History by Franco Moretti

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the country's oldest honorary learned societies, announced the election of the 2005 class of Fellows. This year's Fellows include five Stanford scholars, including John Felstiner.

Founded in 1780 by Revolutionary leaders John Adams, John Hancock and James Bowdoin, the academy has provided a forum for scholars, professionals and government leaders to share ideas and work together for the betterment of the nation. The academy has more than 4,500 members and 600 foreign honorary members, and hosts several research programs addressing pressing contemporary issues such as the role of the humanities in American culture, global security, the use of technology in global development and methodologies for education policy assessment.

The election of this year's class brings the number of Stanford scholars in the academy to 221.

John Felstiner, professor of English, teaches modern poetry, Jewish literature and literary translation. He earned a doctorate at Harvard University and joined the Stanford faculty in 1965 and also has taught at the University of Chile, Hebrew University in Jerusalem and Yale University. During the 1970s, Felstiner developed critical approaches to poetry by civilians and soldiers from the Vietnam era and, after teaching in Israel, began to study and teach the literature that emerged from the Holocaust.

He is the author of The Lies of Art: Max Beerbohm's Parody and Caricature and Translating Neruda: The Way to Macchu Picchu. His book on the German-speaking Jewish poet, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Modern Language Association's James Russell Lowell Prize, and won the Truman Capote Prize for Literary Criticism in 1997. Felstiner has edited an anthology of Jewish American literature and of Celan's poems and prose. Currently a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, he is at work on a book on poetry and environmental urgency.

Orgel received a 2005 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

External Link for more info about Professor Stephen Orgel receives the Academy Award in Literature

Assistant Professor Brett Bourbon is the Recipient of the Highest University Teaching Honor: the Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching.Bourbon was cited for strong leadership and intellectual commitment to the English Department Honors Program in strengthening its intellectual rigor; for creating a challenging learning environment that pushes students to discover what is important and meaningful in their own work and the work of others; for thoughtful interrogations and support that encourage every student to contribute to discussions and collective struggles with intellectual problems; and for his uncommon gifts as a teacher and mentor, leading his students to declare that he deserves all the teaching awards that exist.

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What does eating have to do with aesthetic taste? While most accounts of aesthetic history avoid the gustatory aspects of taste, this book rewrites standard history to uncover the constitutive and dramatic tension between appetite and aesthetics at the heart of British literary tradition. From Milton through the Romantics, the metaphor of taste serves to mediate aesthetic judgment and consumerism, gusto and snobbery, gastronomers and gluttons, vampires and vegetarians, as well as the philosophy and physiology of food.What does eating have to do with aesthetic taste? While most accounts of aesthetic history avoid the gustatory aspects of taste, this book rewrites standard history to uncover the constitutive and dramatic tension between appetite and aesthetics at the heart of British literary tradition. From Milton through the Romantics, the metaphor of taste serves to mediate aesthetic judgment and consumerism, gusto and snobbery, gastronomers and gluttons, vampires and vegetarians, as well as the philosophy and physiology of food. The author advances a theory of taste based on Milton?s model of the human as consumer (and digester) of food, words, and other commodities?a consumer whose tasteful, subliminal self remains haunted by its own corporeality. Radically rereading Wordsworth?s feeding mind, Lamb?s gastronomical essays, Byron?s cannibals and other deviant diners, and Keatsian nausea, Taste resituates Romanticism as a period that naturally saw the rise of the restaurant and the pleasures of the table as a cultural field for the practice of aesthetics.

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Envy, irritation, paranoia--in contrast to powerful and dynamic negative emotions like anger, these non-cathartic states of feeling are associated with situations in which action is blocked or suspended. In her examination of the cultural forms to which these affects give rise, Sianne Ngai suggests that these minor and more politically ambiguous feelings become all the more suited for diagnosing the character of late modernity.Along with her inquiry into the aesthetics of unprestigious negative affects such as irritation, envy, and disgust, Ngai examines a racialized affect called "animatedness," and a paradoxical synthesis of shock and boredom called "stuplimity." She explores the politically equivocal work of these affective concepts in the cultural contexts where they seem most at stake, from academic feminist debates to the Harlem Renaissance, from late-twentieth-century American poetry to Hollywood film and network television. Through readings of Herman Melville, Nella Larsen, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Hitchcock, Gertrude Stein, Ralph Ellison, John Yau, and Bruce Andrews, among others, Ngai shows how art turns to ugly feelings as a site for interrogating its own suspended agency in the affirmative culture of a market society, where art is tolerated as essentially unthreatening.

Ngai mobilizes the aesthetics of ugly feelings to investigate not only ideological and representational dilemmas in literature--with a particular focus on those inflected by gender and race--but also blind spots in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. Her work maps a major intersection of literary studies, media and cultural studies, feminist studies, and aesthetic theory.

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Seth Lerer, the Avalon Foundation Professor in Humanities, has been awarded the 2005 Harry Levin Prize for his book Error and the Academic Self: The Scholarly Imagination, Medieval to Modern (Columbia University Press, 2003). The award is presented by the American Comparative Literature Association. Books eligible for the Levin Prize in 2005 emphasized literary history or criticism as opposed to theory and were engaged with more than one national literature or with isssues of literary study in general. The 2005 Levin Prize considered books published between 2002 and 2004.

"Neither cultural study nor literary criticism exactly, though bursting at the seams with both, this daring book comes across as a literary criticism of culture, brilliantly retelling one of the deep, untameable stories of those primal transgressions that form and deform us. In a rolling novelistic voice of its own, it narrates a tale of intergenerational desire incestuously conceived by the brain of the Hebrew scripture upon the unconscious body politic of western familial order--only to be passed down centuries later through the revelatory glosses a Joycean Victorianist with a neo-Darwinian sense of evolving possibilities for human need, in particular for the release of the woman from within the law of the father and its violated taboos." --Garrett StewartLot's Daughters: Sodom and Lewinsky
By KATHRYN HARRISON
New York Times, January 30, 2005

LOT'S DAUGHTERS
Sex, Redemption, and Women's Quest for Authority
By Robert M. Polhemus
Illustrated. 432 pp. Stanford University Press. $29.95.

Let?s free-associate. Monica: Bill; thong underwear; oral sex in the Oval Office; Ken Starr; impeachment; semen on a blue dress; Linda Tripp; and, if you're Robert M. Polhemus, the reason that ''the full Lot text moved from relative obscurity into new prominence in the 20th century.''

''Lot's Daughters: Sex, Redemption, and Women's Quest for Authority'' is Polhemus's dispatch from the place he calls Daughterland, where Oedipus is irrelevant, his filial complex eclipsed by a sister condition, ''the Lot complex.'' Remember Lot? It's his wife we've been told to keep in mind, that pillar of salt Christ made the indelible image of failing to renounce past corruption altogether. Lot we prefer to forget. As told in Genesis 19, Lot fled the annihilation of Sodom, lost his mate because she couldn't resist a backward glance and ended up in a cave with his two daughters, who conspired to get him drunk and then seduced him.

''The Lot story is shocking,'' Polhemus says, ''does describe offensive behavior, does probe shameful erotic secrets,'' which might not be so troubling were it not included in the Judeo-Christian canon. But it is; what's more, biblical genealogy traces Lot's seed through David all the way to Jesus. Ultimately, the hope of mankind, of ''a new heaven and a new earth,'' arrives through an act of incest. The intercourse described is not iconoclastic so much as it is desperate, the price of having a future. Lot's daughters believed themselves and their father the sole survivors of universal destruction; humankind, they thought, depended on their breaking taboo by having sex with their father.

The story becomes a complex -- the Lot complex -- because its ''primal interest imposes itself upon history, religion, art and individual psychology, and people in turn impose their history, experience, personal mind-sets and imaginative skills on the biblical text.'' Polhemus doesn't invent the Lot complex any more than Freud invented the Oedipus complex. What he does -- thoroughly and brilliantly -- is identify what has existed for millenniums of recorded history, introducing diverse examples of the archetypal transaction between a young, sometimes very young, woman and the man who, if he isn't actually her father, is old enough to substitute.

So welcome to Daughterland, where we don't read much Hemingway, or grill meat outdoors, and where we're mystified, and a little bored, by all the hysteria over Oedipus, who didn't even know it was his mother he was sleeping with. Oh, he was unlucky, certainly, so unlucky that he happened into what's more usually the female contretemps of being sullied by sex. But can you imagine if every woman who discovered herself the unwitting accomplice to her own defilement thrust pins into her eyes? Seeing Eye dogs would march cheek by jowl down supermarket aisles.

Polhemus is the chairman of the English department at Stanford University, but ''Lot's Daughters'' is not (or not merely) an academic unpacking of text. Its material includes paintings and movies and scandals -- an exciting array of opportunities, from Midrash to Monicagate, each offering an answer to Daughterland's eternal, critical question: what do young women want? What do Jane Eyre and Catherine Earnshaw want? Is their deepest desire distinguishable from that of their creators, Charlotte and Emily Bronte? What will Dora take from Dr. Freud in exchange for his penetrating her unconscious? For what does Lolita use Humbert's lust? Why did Soon-Yi Previn choose Woody Allen as her benefactor over Mia Farrow? And what about Monica Lewinsky -- did she get it, whatever it is, from Bill Clinton?

Men have power. At this late date, they still run everything -- churches and states and multinational corporations. They invent -- machines, institutions, ideas. They claim the moral high ground, make and enforce laws, break them when it's advantageous. They're potent; they have seed women require to project themselves -- and men -- into the future. And the coupling need not necessarily be sexual. Knowledge, position and money are disseminated, too. Sometimes the woman who trades fecundity for position in this world, and in the next, is a girl and the man is her father, symbolically if not biologically. (If her mother isn't as dead as a pillar of salt, she's past bearing life, and looks it.) The moral of ''Lottish'' tales is that incest (and, to a lesser degree, the intercourse of older men and younger women) is ''the human experience that epitomizes the vulnerability of women, the potential for moral degeneration in family structure, and the need to control raw male lust.''

Whether Monica Lewinsky, one of the ''disposable hotties who serve as moral warnings about bad parenting and the evils of libido'' (i.e., the anti-Chelsea, who represents ''nice daughters who deserve and need paternal protection''), succeeded in ''controlling'' male lust is a matter of debate. Certainly she parlayed it into fame, her blue dress the means of literally following the original Lot's daughter's command to ''preserve seed of our father.'' Polhemus, writing ''on the side of the angels, telling of women's progress and men's progress too,'' implies that Lewinsky's refusal to present herself as a victim may be news as good for women as Monica herself was bad news for Bill, ushering in an era in which women needn't apologize for ambition, even when it's vulgar and destructive. After all, she didn't.

''Educational history of the last two centuries features an academic Lot complex,'' Polhemus observes, a little slyly. Indeed. ''Lot's Daughters'' raises consciousness of a permanent and morally ambiguous fact of life. Reading Polhemus will make it difficult to enjoy a novel, watch television or follow the lives in People magazine without remembering the complex he identifies. He's that rare teacher whose class you don't cut because what you get isn't information but an essential way of seeing the world around you.

Kathryn Harrison is the author of the memoir ''The Kiss.'' Her new novel, ''Envy,'' will be published in July.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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(From a review by John Simon in the New York Times, 1/2/2005) "With praiseworthy modesty, Riggs calls his book 'The World,' not 'The Life' of his elusive subject... If you want a concise but thorough critical study of Marlowe's place in world literature, consult 'The Overreacher' by Harry Levin... But if you want an exhaustive account of the life and times, Riggs is your man."Review by John Simon in the New York Times, 1/2/2005

Pity the famous man born the same year as a more famous one: case in point Christopher Marlowe (1564-93) and William Shakespeare. At their simultaneous centenaries, Marlowe was shamefully shortchanged. It would be no less a shame if a recent popular biography of Shakespeare eclipsed David Riggs's worthy ''World of Christopher Marlowe.'' Kit and Will are a pair of equal deservers.

With praiseworthy modesty, Riggs calls his book ''The World,'' not ''The Life'' of his elusive subject. Elizabethan poets (the word ''playwright'' was not yet invented) leave far fewer traces than biographers might wish for. This holds for Shakespeare as much as for Marlowe, though Marlowe benefited from being a brawler and a spy: there is nothing like getting in trouble for getting you into the record books.

Christopher's father, a shoemaker in Canterbury, was the rare poor tradesman who was both literate and litigious. In his son, literacy was transmuted into literariness, litigiousness into falling afoul of the law. These were hard times, when hanging, beheading, even burning at the stake were often deemed insufficient punishment: the hanged man might be disemboweled while still alive; London Bridge was decorated with the heads of presumed traitors; and no one was safe, the male favorites of the Virgin Queen no more than the wives of her much-married father. The boy Christopher could watch from his window as prisoners were carted off to the gallows. At 8, he may well have been aware of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre of Protestants across the Channel: several of his future plays contain massacres.

Between 1547 and 1558, the English state religion changed three times, making Catholics and Protestants equal-opportunity victims. As for anyone suspected of atheism, the sin of sins, he would soon be racked with more than doubt, what with screws literally put on. From the tortured, confessions could be readily extorted, but were they true? When fellow playwright Thomas Kyd was hauled in for questioning about an allegedly antireligious book found in the lodgings he shared with Kit Marlowe -- his roommate, bedmate and quite possibly sex-mate -- Kyd ratted on Kit to save his own neck. Was Marlowe an atheist and a homosexual? The circumstantial evidence is compelling, but proof is lacking.

More relevantly, Marlowe was poor. His six years of early schooling, like the next six in pursuit of the Cambridge B.A. and M.A., were almost all on scholarship. No picnics, any of them. ''Six-year-olds who did no work,'' Riggs writes, ''were said to be 'idle.' '' Kit, to be sure, was in school by then, taught for long daily hours little beyond parsing and memorizing Greek and Latin texts, to be beaten by often ignorant teachers if he balked. Even during play, the boys were compelled to use only Latin or Greek. No wonder their English suffered; during his lifetime, even in official documents, Marlowe was known as Marlow, Marly, Marley, Morely, Merly, Marlen, Marlyn, Marlin and Merling; his only preserved autograph signature reads Cristofer Marley.

Ironically, the future Christ-basher was a scholarship student at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. It was, for a poor youth, a grueling privilege. ''The rich,'' Riggs tells us, ''could roist it out with impunity. . . . The poor scholar could not wear gorgeous apparel, nor frequent riotous company, nor make the excuse that he was a gentleman.'' For him ''plain black gown'' and ''18-hour days, from 4 o'clock in the morning until 10 at night.'' He had a bit of free time on Sunday, but could go out in the evening only accompanied by a proctor. His plain wool clothing had to be, if not black, some other ''sad color''; he was forbidden ''long locks of hair'' and had to seem, in the words of his friend Thomas Nashe, ''mortifiedly religious.'' All this, Riggs points out, sharpened Marlowe's ''awareness of social inequality.'' In his plays, ''to dress above one's station is an infallible sign of social mobility.''

As Riggs stresses throughout, the leads and chief supporting characters were usually poor youths who rose high through physical or mental prowess, even if this flouted historical truth. Thus the real Tamburlaine had never been a poor shepherd, and Marlowe invented similarly lowly origins for the scholarly Dr. Georgius Faustus, Edward II's male lovers, and Peter Ramus, the illustrious scholar murdered in ''Massacre at Paris.''

Disputation -- rhetoric in which one had to argue both sides of an issue -- was a staple of the M.A. curriculum, and disputation drove Marlowe's dramatis personae and the drama of his own life and death. But Christopher learned more than that at Cambridge. In their sparsely furnished digs, ''like other members of the college, Marlowe and his roommates would have slept with one another.'' The contemporary attitude toward homosexuality was, to put it mildly, schizoid. ''Love between men was intrinsic to the humanist educational program. Yet the medieval-Christian impulse to demonize homosexual acts persisted regardless. . . . The law too was equivocal on this issue.''

And what of atheism? In a paper, Richard Baines, a former roommate turned enemy of Marlowe's, summed up for the Privy Council an atheist lecture Marlowe may have presented to Sir Walter Raleigh's group of alleged atheists, who, among other naughty things, spelled the name of God backward. The poet asserted that Moses was a juggler who could easily fool the gullible Jews, that Christ was a bastard and his mother dishonest. Also that he, Marlowe, could come up pronto with a much better religion than the filthily written New Testament. Further, that St. John the Evangelist was Christ's bedfellow, who used him as the sinners of Sodom, and that they who loved not tobacco and boys were fools. Moreover, that he had as good a right to coin money as the queen.

These and similar charges leveled at Marlowe by several others are cited over and over again in Riggs's book, such repetitiousness being one of its few flaws. No doubt Marlowe's ideas about religion and hedonism were derived from the Cambridge curriculum. He had fallen for Ovid's sensual poetry (which he also translated) and the Epicurean philosophy of Lucretius, as well as for hard-nosed history from Polybius and Livy. Virgil was another influence, and it was in seeking an English measure to match the Latin hexameters that he adapted Sackville and Norton's iambic pentameter from their clumsy play ''Gorboduc'' and created the powerful yet flexible blank verse that Ben Jonson dubbed ''Marlowe's mighty line.''

When he left university and had to make a living, Marlowe gravitated toward espionage for the Privy Council and writing for the stage. The two were hardly antithetical. Many playwrights -- including George Gascoigne, Thomas Watson, Anthony Munday, Samuel Daniel and Ben Jonson -- espoused them both. As Riggs notes, ''The plots and counterplots of this era taught Marlowe that spies and scriptwriters had a lot in common.'' It was at the written request of the Privy Council that Marlowe got his M.A. -- by that time, he had often played hooky, mostly on the Council's behalf, employed as he was by them ''in matters touching the benefit of his country.'' The M.A., in turn, benefited Marlowe, and so, even more, did the theater.

Marlowe's ''base origins . . . and lack of any discernible gift for science and mathematics'' made him an unlikely candidate for political patronage; a clerical career was, of course, out of the question. ''The stage supplied Marlowe with an imaginative space commensurate with his intellectual reach'' and boundless ambition. His first major and most popular protagonist, Tamburlaine, proclaimed, ''I hold the Fates bound fast in iron chains / And with my hand turn fortune's wheel about.'' And again, ''Jove, viewing me in arms, looks pale and wan, / Fearing my power should pull him from the throne.'' Tamburlaine's followers, Riggs observes, ''take him for a god and he fulfills their expectations: in performing the role of Tamburlaine, Edward Alleyn became the first matinee idol in English drama.'' The first Tamburlaine play was such a hit that a sequel was called for. No other Elizabethan or Jacobean playwright -- not even Shakespeare or Jonson -- could claim a comparable crowd pleaser.

Still, playwrights were held in such low esteem that the published edition of the work did not mention Marlowe on its title page. For most authorities, the shoemaker's son had made scant progress by switching from cobbler to scribbler, merely trading lasts for lusts. As Lord Mayor Roe warned Archbishop Whitgift, playhouses were attracting ''great numbers of light and lewd-disposed persons as harlots, cutpurses, cozeners, pilferers and such like.'' It was for this antitheatrical disposition, as much as for outbreaks of the plague, that theaters could be closed, and Marlowe's income dwindle.

Christopher's career as man of the thea-ter, postulant for patronage, double agent dangerously embedded abroad and in England among Catholic recusants or Puritan zealots, is too complicated even for summarizing here. Riggs excels in showing how, in the character of Tamburlaine, Marlowe pursued his dream of power; in the amoral and conniving Jew Barabas, he indulged his rebellious and Machiavellian fantasies; and in Dr. Faustus, dramatized his social and sexual appetites. Then, switching from victimizer to victim, he identified with Edward II and his minions as a troubled homosexual. Always, though, the poor scholar was eventually empowered and aggrandized, albeit at the price of a sticky end. Marlowe the lyric poet also gets Riggs's attention, both as passionate shepherd whose invitation to love may be read as to boy or girl, and as the somewhat detached observer of ''Hero and Leander,'' a poem full of digressions to delay the sad ending (a strategy learned from Lucan, whom Marlowe also translated), even unto leaving the poem unfinished. Here, too, Marlowe's master theme pops up, denouncing the Fates: ''And to this day is every scholar poor; / Gross gold from them runs headlong to the boor.''

At long last, Marlowe became more thorn in the side than trump in the hands of the Privy Council, as party to a murder, accomplice in counterfeiting, repeated street fighter and atheist proselytizer. Upon failing to keep a bond compelling him to stay within striking distance of the court, he seems to have elicited Elizabeth's death sentence (''Prosecute it to the full''), so that Marlowe's murder was almost certainly not over a disputed tavern bill, but a staged fight among disreputable drinking companions, one of whom gave him the fatal stab in the eye. That the queen granted the killer a speedy pardon confirms the thesis of a political assassination, to which both Leslie Hotson and Charles Nicholl have devoted distinguished books.

If you want a concise but thorough critical study of Marlowe's place in world literature, consult ''The Overreacher'' by Harry Levin, one of two teachers Riggs acknowledges in a note. But if you want an exhaustive account of the life and times, Riggs is your man. You may applaud Marlowe with T. S. Eliot as the ''bard of torrential imagination,'' or deplore with Graham Greene his legacy of ''a few fine torsos, some mutilated marble'' (all his plays subsist in corrupt texts). But bear in mind: had Shakespeare, like Marlowe, died at 29, he would have stopped at ''Richard III,'' and achieved rather less than Marlowe.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

External Link for more info about The World of Christopher Marlowe by David Riggs, American edition

Polhemus said he is proud of the way the university has changed over his four decades, even as that progress has led to the demise of the small-town feel the university had when he arrived in 1963. "There's always a danger that people forget they're working for a university and not a corporation," he cautioned.

ROB POLHEMUS?S SPEECH TO THE ACADEMIC SENATE

Now I want to get personal for just a few moments. Don't worry, the sort of thing that follows is not going to be repeated in future meetings! However, I hope it won't seem all that distant from our deliberations and our mission. I want to tell you where I am coming from. I'm a member and a champion of the School of Humanities & Sciences, and have been so for several years. I am chair of the English department?for too many years, and a teacher of literature and the arts, and a writer of books on authors, on comedy, love, and on the psychological force of family relationships.

My overall goals for this year are to foster increasing communication among senators and administrative leaders, the president, the provost, the deans, and one another. We're going to take up, among other things, faculty quality of life issues, the spousal issues that the provost has been so concerned about, recruitment and retention, and perhaps the faculty's role in administration.

I'd like to see more airing of the vision of the faculty leaders who have been elected to the Senate. This University is such a great place because it offers a culture where mistakes can be admitted and talked about or avoided. Much more important, it provides a culture where mixed messages can be sent. Mixed messages, given the nature of life, need to be understood, approved, and received. As we keep learning in so many ways, messages that are not in some way ?mixed? are usually wrong.

I've been here a long time, sometimes I think since Teddy Roosevelt! In my first quarter at Stanford, President John Kennedy was shot and killed. Those four decades since then color my perspective and have given me a long view. The changes at Stanford have been spectacular. I'm not going to indulge in ?geezerdom?. But in the midst of daily, weekly and annual life, one can lose sight of the big picture. I think we need to be reminded of the reality and the beauty of progress. All who have lived here for so much time have been involved in the wonderful progress at Stanford.

This place is so much more excellent, so much bigger, so much more important, and so much better overall in so many ways than it was before. Many of you in this room have helped make it so. For instance, Stanford is much more ethnically diverse, and is so much more open to the ideal of equal opportunity than it was when I came here. When I came, Stanford was a solid ?white wall?. Now it is anything but that. It is so much more open, for example, to the aspirations of women and the leadership of women.

In my department in those days, a liberal department, with flaming radicals, there were no women faculty, no ethnic minority faculty, except for one Jew--and he had converted to Calvinist Christianity. Gays had to hide in the closet and lie about their real lives even to close friends whom they trusted.

Ah yes?salaries are always one of the most riveting topics for discussion, and are one of the givens and sureties of university life. Salaries, underage undergraduate drinking, parking, and the problems of undergraduate advising at Stanford are the equivalent of death and taxes in the big world--certainties to complain about! When I started here as a fairly well-paid assistant professor in the humanities, my first salary for a year was $7,500. And would you believe it, we have made so much financial progress that we take for granted that since then my salary has almost tripled!

Okay, I should tell you, if I can tell myself, why I took this job as Senate chair. One reason is because I like the idea of being on the Steering Committee, and I thought you would have better sense than to vote for me as Chair. But it's also because I have given my professional life to this outstanding, humane University, and I care about its excellence.

I am doing this because I believe in faculty being responsible to one's university, school and discipline and trying to work for the overall good of the institution. Institutions are, at the last, people. Of course, also, I accepted it because of vanity and ego gratification of being chosen! But I do believe in the university and the ideal of the university. I have had a good life at Stanford. I think that word "university," and its ideals, are anything but outmoded. Perhaps it's naive to put one's faith in institutions and to profess ideals and faith in them when a moment's thought can find in every institution inconsistencies, weaknesses, selfishness and professional horrors of all kinds. But I do believe in the university, with all its faults, and I believe in the university with all its problems and its people, who are just as flawed as anyone is. I believe that the university is still one of the truly noble institutions in our culture, perhaps the most noble of institutions, more noble in its purposes and in its potential than the military, the government, the corporations, the trade unions, or the organized hierarchical institutions of religion.

It is so because of the idea which still drives and touches us, all of us. This is the university?s dedication to the expansion and the preservation of knowledge, the imparting of knowledge, the disinterested search for truth of all kinds, and the making and the preservation of civilization. That is what we do. What, theoretically, could be a more noble calling than teaching and the research for knowledge?

I have one ?Pollyannaish? vision. It is that excellence in different parts of the university can help many of the other parts. It is not just a mad competitive scramble. We are a place that can be and should be and still is a university with all the effort and responsibilities and the large view that that word suggests. Even though in our respective positions we may not see it clearly, it is true that the excellence, the power and draw of the undergraduate program here, how difficult it is to be admitted, and so forth, enhances and adds to the position and reputation of the professional schools. And the same is true, vice versa, for undergraduate education. The excellence of the professional schools makes the undergraduate college that much more attractive.

Okay. Now I want to say one more thing that may sound na?ve, but which is as true and real for a university as it is for life: money, and the amassing of money must not be the ends, but rather the means. Of course, fundraising is vitally important for a university. It's what facilitates the discovery and the transmission of knowledge and the celebration and practice of human creativity. We couldn't exist without development efforts. And I know that famous piece of wisdom, ?If somebody tells you it's not about the money, you can be sure it's about the money.? But it is incumbent on the faculty members to preserve and celebrate the university and their respective disciplines as areas of free inquiry and the transmission of knowledge and even of wisdom and beauty. And the opportunity for profit, the raising of funds, is not the same thing as knowledge.

It's hard in every field to keep open the full possibilities for free inquiry, for innovation, for disinterested research. It's hard to think about that when research tends to be tied indirectly or directly to the enhancement of personal power and enrichment. Of course, that can be fun, and of course, we can't have free inquiry without the means--the money--to support it. And we in the arts and humanities especially need to understand that. But a slough of articles this year in popular and in specialized journals are reminding us, if we're paying attention, that who pays the piper calls the tune. Again, that's not necessarily bad--but it can certainly become so. And the news has been telling us that knowledge to maximize corporate profits can be a danger and turn into a debased commodity. Big money and power can dry up research.

This is a big national problem in higher education that we all need to think about. I don't think it's a serious threat at Stanford yet, but Stanford is a part of the world and it needs to be vigilant that it doesn't become a problem and practice here.

About the Senate: please come, and please stay through the meetings. Anyway, also come because I have to! There is an interesting built-in tension in the Senate's being that I have noticed and no doubt some of you feel. I was going to try to figure out a way to promise you excitement. But the only sure way to do that is to have crisis and conflict, which is bad, right? Carlyle in his great book The French Revolution says, ?Happy the nation whose annals are boring.? To a certain extent, that's true of the Senate.

So here's a mixed message, the contradiction. We want our meetings to be exciting and boring. The Senate is a place for the faculty to be informed, to take responsibility, to hear recognized faculty members who have taken the responsibility for the governance of academic affairs. And it's a place to interact with administrators, who, after all, are faculty members.

The leadership of Stanford has been excellent in my tenure. The place gets into trouble when confidence between administration and faculty and respect for what others are doing ebbs. That hasn't often happened. But when it does happen, it's because people stop talking to one another or, more accurately, stop listening to one another.

Now I'm going to come up with a real first. It's traditional in senatorial bodies, though not this one, to begin deliberations in each session with a prayer. And non-believing agnostic faith seeker that I am, I am going to leave off this introduction with a prayer. This is actually a secular prayer, though it was composed by a rightwing, archconservative Roman Catholic, British nut, who just happened to be the greatest satirist of the 20th century and one of the great novelists in English, Evelyn Waugh.

It's Evelyn Waugh's ?Prayer for the Magi.? Magi were those late and odd visitors to divinity near Bethlehem. Magi, the wise men, were the intellectuals, the professors of their day, and they thought of themselves as kings. This is a prayer for intellectuals, to be read by us, aspiring to the ?magi status? whether we are biologists, classicists, ethnic studies scholars, genetic researchers, sculptors, legal scholars, philosophers, or what have you. This prayer puts us in our place, but it strangely honors us as the bemused world does honor in its skeptical way both scholarship and academia. It adopts the Christmas story of the three wise men following the star. These figures are indeed like us, and the prayer is for us--scientists in our labs or literary eggheads hit with the sudden flash and brilliant light bulb of an idea.

?Like me,? writes Waugh, ?you were late in coming. The shepherds were here long before. Even the cattle, they had joined the chorus of angels before you were on your way. For you, the primordial discipline of the heavens was relaxed, and a new defiant light blazed amid the disconcerted stars. How laboriously you came, taking sights and calculating where the shepherds run barefoot. How odd you looked on the road attended by what outlandish liveries laden with such preposterous gifts. You came at length to the final stage of your pilgrimage and the great star stood still above you, and what did you do? You stopped to call on King Herod with a deadly exchange of compliments which there began that unending war of mobs and magistrates against the innocent. Yet, still, you came and were not turned away. You, too, found room before the manger. Your gifts were not exactly needed, but they were accepted and put carefully by, for they were brought with love. In that new order of charity that had just come to life, there was room for you, too. You were not lower in the eyes of the holy family than the ox or the ass. You were my special patrons and the patrons of all latecomers, of all who have a tedious journey to make to the obscure truth, of all who are confused with knowledge and speculation, of all who, through politeness, make themselves partners in guilt, of all who stand in danger by reason of their talent. For him, who did not reject your curious gifts, pray always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not quite be forgotten at the throne of God when the end comes to their kingdom.?

Okay. My praying and my personal reporting are done!

External Link for more info about Professor Polhemus Appointed to Chair Faculty Senate

"Marjorie Perloff, the noted and prolific literary critic and comparativist, has written a thoughtful introspection about the intersection of her life with the complexities of the fading Vienna of the 20's and thirties. It's a dizzying array of contrasts and passages: not only her (and her family's) adjustment to American society of the 1940;s and 1950's, but the passage of Arnold Schoenberg, and the contrast of John Cage and Schoenberg. . ."Perloff sheds a personal light on the ambivalences towards Jewishness and the imperatives of conversions. The photographs of girls in dirndls and her prestigious grandfather in morning suit are stunning reminders of the power of illustration and the evocation of period. Though this is memoiristic, Perloff remains a literary critic and there are efforts to re-address Adorno and Gombrich (for example)in terms of their own refugee pasts. Marjorie Perloff changed her name from Gabriele to Marjorie, her school from PS 7 to the fashionable Fieldston, her academic address from Catholic University ultimately to Stanford. The book is about what change means, how it reiterates, to someone whose life was abruptly forced, by the Anschluss, into a totally new mode of looking at the world and thinking about it."--Monroe E. Price

Approaching the study of literature as a unique form of the philosophy of language and mind--as a study of how we produce nonsense and imagine it as sense--this is a book about our human ways of making and losing meaning.

External Link for more info about New book by Brett Bourbon

You may be wondering why I'm up here today. Professor Robert Polhemus, our Department Chair, could not be here, and he has asked me to act in his place. Of course, as a professor of literature, the parent of a young boy, and an avid reader of children's literature, I could not but be reminded of that moment in E. B. White's Stuart Little, when Stuart, off on his journey to find his beloved bird-friend, Margalo, comes upon a sad man sitting on the curb in a small town in upstate New York. The man is the superintendent of schools and he is upset because he cannot find a substitute teacher for the day. "School is supposed to begin in an hour," he laments. Stuart, of course, volunteers. He changes clothes, into what he calls his "pepper and salt jacket, old striped trousers, Windsor tie, and spectacles. "Do you think you can maintain discipline," the superintendent asks. "Of course I can," replies Stuart. "I'll make the work interesting and the discipline will take care of itself."

The thrill of the students at the prospect of a substitute teacher is palpable, and imagine their surprise to find that this very substitute is a mouse -- or as Stuart himself puts it:

"Everyone's eyes lit up with excitement to see such a small and good-looking teacher, so appropriately dressed."

After some humorous preliminaries, they get down to business. Stuart announces that the world gets into a lot of trouble because it has no chairman.

"I would like to be Chairman of the world myself."

"You're too small," said Mary Bendix.

"Oh, fish feathers," said Stuart. "Size has nothing to do with it. It's temperament and ability that count. The Chairman has to have ability and he must know what's important. How many of you know what's important?"

Up went all the hands

"Very good," said Stuart . . . . "Henry Rackmeyer, you tell us what is important."

"A shaft of sunlight at the end of a dark afternoon, a note in music, and the way the back of a baby's neck smells if its mother keeps it tidy," answered Henry."

"Correct," said Stuart. "Those are the important things. You forgot one thing though. Mary Bendix, what did Henry Rackmeyer forget?"

"He forgot ice cream with chocolate sauce on it," said Mary quickly.

"Exactly," said Stuart. "Ice cream is important."

What does this little episode mean? It means that schooling lies not in the affirming of facts or the espousals of an ideology. It means that what we learn in school is the poetry of everyday life. What matters is to find that shaft of sunlight, that little bit of the sublime in ordinary days. There is a music to experience, a beauty in the memories of ordinary domesticity. Such knowledge far exceeds the testable. It is the heart of learning -- the heart, indeed, of any English major. For what we have tried to teach here are not just the allegories of the literary or the histories of texts; we seek to instill the utility of poetry in a prosaic world.

Being chairman of the world, or even chairman of the English department, must be a tough job, and I don't envy Professor Polhemus or any one who would aspire to succeed him. It would be easy to lose sight of shafts of sunlight or be deaf to music when adjudicating meetings or arguing with administrators.

Stuart, of course, has no such worries. For him, what matters is not term-time but summertime. "Summertime is important," he says. " It is like a shaft of sunlight."

"Or a note in music," said Elizabeth Acheson.

"Or the way the back of a baby's neck smells if its mother keeps it tidy," said Marily Roberts.

Stuart sighed. "Never forget your summertimes, my dears." He said. "Well, I've got to be getting along. It's been a pleasure to know you all."

Stuart dismisses his class, and travels north on his quest. Toward the book's close, he runs into a telephone lineman sitting on the roadside. As in so many of his epic encounters, this sage offers him great advice as well.

"My business has taken me into spruce woods on winter nights where the snow lay deep and soft, a perfect place for a carnival of rabbits. I have sat at peace on the freight platforms of railroad junctions in the north, in the warm hours and with the warm smells. I know fresh lakes in the north, undisturbed except by fish and hawk and, of course, by the Telephone Company, which has to follow its nose. I know all these places well. They are a long way from here -- don't forget that. And a person who is looking for something doesn't travel very fast."

In a sense, all teachers are telephone workers. We work the lines of communication, make sure that voices get through, assist in the placing of that call to the imagination. My business, too, has taken me to spruce woods on winter nights and carnivals of rabbits. And all I hope is that, today, you all remember woods and carnivals, platforms and lakes, the smells and sounds that you have traveled to in books. A person who is looking for something doesn't travel very fast. Watch out, by the way, for shafts of sunlight.

As Stuart leaves, and as his book ends, he says to the telephone worker, "Well, I guess I'd better be going. Thank you for your friendly remarks." You can thank me for these friendly remarks later. For now, we have degrees to grant, awards to give, and achievements to celebrate. And when this all is done, join us for ice cream and a note of music at our department reception.

J.M. Coetzee, the Winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature, was the Isaac and Madeline Stein Visiting Writer in the Creative Writing program at Stanford this Spring.

External Link for more info about 2003 Nobel Prize Winner

David Riggs evokes the atmosphere and texture of Marlowe's life, from the stench and poverty of a childhood spent near Canterbury's abattoirs to the fanatical pursuit of classical learning at school.

External Link for more info about New book by David Riggs, British edition

Ramon Saldivar was named this year's recipient of "The Western Literature Association Distinguished Achievement Award, 2003." This is an award given annually to a scholar in the area of Western American literature, for lifetime contributions.

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Professor Lunsford, Director of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric, was named the Claude and Louise Rosenberg, Jr. Fellow in Undergraduate Education this year.

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Professor Toby Wolff's novel Old School received the Bay Area Book Reviewers' Award in Fiction, the Silver Medal in Fiction from the Commonwealth Club Book Awards, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, The PEN/Faulkner Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

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Professor Martin Evans was selected as the Milton Society of America's Honored Scholar of 2004. Evans will be recognized at the Milton Society Banquet at this year's meeting of the Modern Language Association

External Link for more info about Martin Evans: Honored Milton Scholar

The Lambda Literary Foundation has announced that Terry Castle's The Literature of Lesbianism will receive the Editor's Choice award at this year's Lambda Literary Awards banquet. The award is given to books that, in the opinion of the editors of the Lambda Book Report, are of exceptional merit but may not have received adequate recognition.

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Visiting Professor of English, J. M. Coetzee will hold a colloquium at the Arrillaga Alumni Center from 11:00AM-12:00PM on 5/12/2004.

External Link for more info about J. M. Coetzee, Stein Visiting Writer and 2003 Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

Assistant Professor Alex Woloch's new book, The One vs. the Many develops a "powerful new theory of characterization, based on how narratives distribute limited attention among a crowded field of characters. . . Woloch demonstrates how each individual--whether the central figure or a radically subordinated one--emerges as a character only through his or her distinct and contingent space in the narrative as a whole."

External Link for more info about New Book from Alex Woloch

Most accounts of James Joyce's family portray Lucia Joyce as the mad daughter of a man of genius, a difficult burden. But in this important new book, Carol Loeb Shloss reveals a different, more dramatic truth: Lucia's father not only loved her but shared a deep creative bond.

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Professor David Riggs was recently appointed to the Mark Pigott OBE Professorship. Professor Riggs specializes in Renaissance literature including Shakespeare, Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, Jonson and Marlowe.

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