Berkeley
EN GLISH
2011 2011
A NEWSLETTER FOR THE ALUMNI AND FRIENDS OF THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
Namwali Serpell Wins the Rona Jaffe
Foundation Writers’ Award
In September, Professor Namwali Serpell was presented
with a Rona Jaffe Foundation
Writers’ Award for 2011. The
national prize is given annually to six women writers
who demonstrate excellence
and promise in the early
stages of their careers, and
it will provide Serpell with
$25,000 to conduct research
in Zambia for her novel-in-progress, Breaking. Serpell
describes the book as an “epic, set over the course
of the last century, about three Zambian families
– black, white, brown – caught in a cycle of desire
and retribution.” “I envision,” she adds, “a sprawling, grandiose novel that captures my home country
while speaking to the larger historical shifts that gave
us a world of in-betweeners.”
Kent Puckett Wins the Distinguished
Teaching Award
Last spring, Kent Puckett became the twenty-fifth member of the
English Department’s faculty to win the campus’s Distinguished
Teaching Award. Puckett joined the department in 2002, just after
completing his Ph.D. at Columbia University, and he soon gained a
reputation among undergraduates for teaching difficult material
(like critical theory) in lucid and compelling ways. On evaluations, students have praised him for his serious engagement with
the subject matter, and Puckett’s “teaching philosophy” statement
– posted on the award website – also conveys his appreciation of
the “magic” that happens in class when the objects of discussion
(theories, novels, poems, films) feel so important that they merit
the closest possible scrutiny: “Understood as an endeavor shared by
students and teachers, teaching gives us the space, the time, and the
will to take things seriously.” And yet there is nothing grave or solemn about Puckett’s teaching style, which students also described
as humorous and delightfully surprising. The originality of Puckett’s mind, the vitality, and the “genius” with which he is repeated
credited are linked by the students to the evident pleasure he takes
in their shared intellectual life.
Serpell, who was born and lived in Zambia until her
family moved to the U.S. in 1989, came to the Berkeley English Department in 2008, after receiving her
Ph.D. from Harvard. She has joined a growing cadre
of faculty here who are both literary scholars and
creative writers. Serpell’s critical writing and teaching focus on ethics and formal experimentation in the
contemporary novel. Her creative work has appeared
in Callaloo, Bidoun, The Believer, and Tin House. Her first
published story, “Muzungu,” was selected by Alice
Sebold and Heidi Pitlor for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories 2009 and was shortlisted for the 2010
Caine Prize for African Writing.
Puckett’s classes are at once ordered and adventurous. According to
one member of the award committee, as a lecturer he is “perfectly
organized,” “animated,” and “luminous,” while at the same time
spontaneous. It’s a combination that seems to characterize all of his
interactions with his students, and he reflects on it in his teaching
philosophy statement: “Why” he asks, “do I value the presentation
of argument over – but not
instead of – the presentation
of information?” The answer:
“Arguments aren’t found; they
are made.” To teach students
to engage in the creative activity of making arguments, he
explains, he explicitly models
this process: “This means both
that I want to foreground the
method . . . and that I want the
classroom to be a space where
my students and I can make
new, unexpected, and unfinished arguments as we go.”
Serpell expressed her delight on receiving the Rona
Jaffe Award, explaining that it represents an important vote of confidence in her promise as a novelist.
She also reported that she’s happy to be teaching in a
department where faculty and students are encouraged to practice the analysis as well as the creation of
literature.
Message from Department Chair Samuel Otter
Over the past year, department faculty have published
books on a wide range of topics: agency, identity, and
obedience in Latin and Old English monastic texts;
literary discourse and monetary crisis in 16th-century
England; Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá’s 17th-century reflection on imperial conquest; essay anthologies on medieval
and Latin literature, on Herman Melville, aesthetics, and
phenomenology, and on ideas about space in the works of
James Joyce; a co-written picaresque novel about friendship; a book of epigrams; and a novel exploring the effects
of globalization in contemporary Bangalore.
This year’s Holloway Lecturer
in the Practice of Poetry is
Judith Goldman, who taught
a poetry workshop and gave
a public reading this fall. She
is the author of three books of
poetry, the just-published l.b.;
or, catenaries and also Vocoder
(2001) and DeathStar/rico-chet
(2006). We continue to host a
vigorous series of poetry and
fiction events, including the
Holloway poetry readings and “Mixed Blood” series, organized by Lyn Hejinian and Cecil Giscombe, and “Story
Hour in the Library,” organized by Vikram Chandra and
Melanie Abrams.
Bharati Mukherjee delivered the department’s 2011
Charles Mills Gayley Lecture on the topic of “Immigrant
Writing: Changing the Contours of a National Literature.” As you will read in these pages, Namwali Serpell
won the Rona Jaffe Foundation Award for women writers
at the early stages of their careers. Professor Serpell has
one novel almost completed and another in progress, and
her short story “Muzungu” appeared in the 2009 edition
of The Best American Short Stories. Kent Puckett became the
25th English Department recipient of the Distinguished
Teaching Award; English Department faculty members
have won more Distinguished Teaching Awards (almost
twice the number) than any other Berkeley department.
Our commitment to teaching was further recognized as
Jennifer Miller won the Berkeley Graduate Assembly’s
Faculty Mentor Award and Maura Nolan received the
2011 Faculty Award for Outstanding Mentorship of GSIs.
We also welcomed our new colleague David Marno, a
specialist in Renaissance literature, who comes to us
from Stanford University after receiving his Ph.D. this
past summer. He is working on a book about the poetics
of grace in John Donne’s Holy Sonnets. We are conducting
searches for two new faculty members at the assistant
professor level in the fields of Asian American literature
and 20th-century British and/or Irish literature. Last
year, John Bishop, a specialist in 20th-century literature
and an expert on the fiction of James Joyce, retired. We
were saddened by the death of Michael André Bernstein,
a scholar of modernist comparative literature, a literary
theorist, and a creative writer. Both of our colleagues are
profiled in these pages.
Professor Nolan, with the assistance of Professors Kathleen Donegan and Eric Falci, is directing the second year
of our innovative Chernin Mentoring Program for undergraduate majors and undeclared or transfer students.
This program has been supported by a generous gift
from alumnus Peter Chernin (B.A., 1974), who wished to
provide greater access to department, university, and Bay
Area resources for our majors. Another alumnus, David
Corvo (B.A., 1972), has established a scholarship fund
for majors in their senior year. We are deeply grateful to
all of our alumni/ae who support the department, its
students, and its programs. If you wish to learn further
details about giving to the department’s several funds,
please click on the “Give to English” button on the upperleft corner of the department home page: http://english.
berkeley.edu. If you wish to contribute, please use the
envelope included in this newsletter or donate through
“Give to English” on our website.
We began the fall by unrolling our new department
website, designed by our technology specialist Darrend
Brown with input from our faculty and students. I encourage you to visit the new site, read about the research
interests and teaching experiences of our graduate students and faculty, and learn about events in the department and on campus. You will appreciate the vibrancy
of literary studies at Berkeley. In my columns for the last
two annual department newsletters, I have mentioned
the strains and challenges of these difficult fiscal times
for the University of California. The difficulties persist,
but as you will see in this newsletter, on our website, in
the achievements of our faculty and students, and in our
continued superlative national rankings, we are resilient. We have not simply preserved but strengthened this
exceptional department.
2
Learning to Teach at Berkeley:The English Department’s Teaching Success
six former winners of the Distinguished Teaching Award
are teaching full-time in the department now: Elizabeth
Abel (1997 winner), Mitch Breitwieser (2009), Steven
Goldsmith (2007), Kevis Goodman (2005), Jeffrey Knapp
(2002), and Sue Schweik (1989).
– by Luke Terlaak Poot, doctoral student in English
On April 21, 2011, Cal English professor Kent Puckett
stepped to the podium in the Zellerbach Playhouse to
accept the university’s Distinguished Teaching Award.
In front of an audience of cheering faculty, staff, and
students, Puckett began, “I not only teach at Berkeley, I
learned to teach at Berkeley.” Given the recognition the
department has received for outstanding teaching, it
wouldn’t be a stretch to say that Puckett learned from the
best.
All of which raises the question: why? Does the English
Department just possess an unusually high number of
excellent teachers, or does literature somehow lend itself
to teaching? Does the act of teaching literature itself lead
to better teaching? Do Cal English professors, like Puckett, actually learn to teach at Berkeley?
After all, Puckett is only the most recent in a long line
of English professors who have received the award. The
Berkeley campus began giving the Distinguished Teaching Award (DTA) in 1959, and since that time, 25 English
professors have won it. It is the highest teaching honor
given by the university, and the selection
process is especially
rigorous: nominated
candidates must pass
through a meticulous
review of student evaluations, course histories,
grade distributions,
statements from former
students, and teaching
philosophies. Finally,
the candidates who
emerge from these rings of fire are visited in class by
members of the Academic Senate-appointed selection
committee, who in turn debate the relative merits of each
candidate before selecting the few deserving recipients.
As a result of this stringent selection procedure, in the
fifty or so years the award has been given, only about 240
teachers have won the thing.
At first glance, teaching literature might seem a lot easier
than teaching a highly technical subject like Chemical
Engineering, or necessarily abstract subjects like Physics
or Philosophy. After all, literature professors generally
deal with much more familiar
materials. Plays, poems, and
novels – these are all cultural
objects that promise their own
enjoyment, regardless of what
the experts have to say about
them. Your average freshman
is more likely to enjoy a good
story than a good calculus problem.
But upon further inspection,
the familiarity of literary texts
may actually represent a challenge to the literature professor. Because students often
have strong opinions about literature, English teachers
are never working with a blank slate. They do not get to
build their students’ understanding of what literature is
and what it does from the ground up. Rather, the English
classroom is made up of conflicting (and sometimes contradictory) opinions, often deeply felt. English professors
must quickly learn the finer points of diplomacy.
And among those 240 are 25 English professors. To put
that figure in context, 25 is the same number of times
that the second and third most awarded departments
– Electrical Engineering & Computer Science and Law –
have won the award combined. English professors have
won the DTA more than four times as often as Economics
professors and six times as often as Political Science professors, just to name two of the university’s most popular
majors. The English Department has been recognized for
outstanding teaching more consistently than any other
department on campus. In addition to Professor Puckett,
The best English teachers are able to provide remarkably
new insights into the most familiar materials. Walking
out of a good English lecture, students exude a unique
glow, equal parts “I never thought about it that way”
and “I never realized how complex this text was.” Illuminating the surprising complexity of literary texts often
requires just as much complication as clarification. And
this mixture of enlightenment and estrangement may
be unique to teaching literature. Reviewing the teaching philosophies of past DTA winners, a trend quickly
3
Jennifer Miller and Maura Nolan Win Awards for
Mentoring Graduate Students
(Teaching Success, continued from previous page)
emerges: English professors repeatedly stress the importance of questioning, uncertainty, and paradoxes as roads
to insight. By contrast, faculty from other departments
overwhelmingly emphasize the importance of having a
firm grasp on the topic – thoroughly understanding the
issue before attempting to communicate it to students. Of
course, there’s nothing incompatible about a thorough understanding and an eye for complication. But unlike those
subjects in which a teacher’s ability to explicate means the
difference between success and failure, in English, explanation alone is insufficient. English teachers must also surprise students, challenge them to read in more daring ways,
and make them uncomfortable with pat answers. To do all
of that, they must continually renew their own responses
to the works they teach.
Recognizing the ongoing nature of English education may
get at what makes the English faculty such skilled teachers. Like Professor Puckett, they are continually learning to
teach at Berkeley.
Previous English Department Winners of the
Distinguished Teaching Award
Mitchell Breitwieser
Steven Goldsmith
Kevis Goodman
Jeffrey Knapp
Donald M. Friedman
Elizabeth Abel
Julian Boyd
Susan Schweik
Janet Adelman
Frederick Crews
Norman Rabkin
Stephen Greenblatt
Stephen Booth
Anne Middleton
Hugh Richmond
Masao Miyoshi
Josephine Miles
Ulrich Knoepflmacher
Ralph Rader
Richard Collier
Edward Snow
Gardner Stout
Paul Alpers
Paul Piehler
The Berkeley English Department has always been remarkable for the scholars of medieval literature and culture that
it has housed and produced.
During the spring of 2011, two
of our faculty’s medievalists,
Jennifer Miller and Maura
Nolan, were honored for their
mentorship of graduate student research and teaching.
Professor Miller received a Faculty Mentoring Award
from the campus’s Graduate Assembly, a student body
that represents graduate and professional students
at the University. This award honors “members of the
Berkeley faculty who have shown an outstanding commitment to mentoring, advising, and generally supporting graduate students.” Professor Miller’s many interests
include historiography, hagiography, medieval rhetorical culture, insular political relations, multilingualism,
translation and textual transmission, philology, dialectology, and paleography.
In a separate ceremony, Professor Nolan received the
Faculty Award for Outstanding Mentorship of Graduate Student Instructors (GSIs). This annual award is
co-sponsored by the Graduate Council’s Advisory Committee for GSI Affairs and the GSI Teaching and Resource
Center; since 1999, it has been presented to a faculty
member who has provided outstanding pedagogical
mentorship to GSIs. Professor Nolan was cited for her
work with graduate student instructors in English
45A (“Literature in English through Milton”) and with
graduate fellows in the Peter and Megan Chernin Mentoring Program. The author of John Lydgate and the Making
of Public Culture (Cambridge, 2005) and the co-editor of
two essay collections in medieval studies, she focuses on
late medieval English literature and the vexed relationship between the “medieval”
and the “Renaissance.” She is
the fifth department member
to be cited for her mentoring
of graduate students; previous winners have been Janet
Adelman (2006), Steven Goldsmith (2008), Kevis Goodman
(2004), and Susan Schweik
(2007).
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4
David Marno Joins the Faculty
The English Department
warmly welcomes David
Marno, who joined us as
Assistant Professor at
the start of the 2011-2012
academic year. A specialist
in early modern literature,
with a particular interest in the relationship
between literature and
religion in that period,
Professor Marno received
his Ph.D. in Comparative
Literature from Stanford
University earlier in 2011. While the travel time from Palo
Alto to Berkeley may be short, the trajectory that brings
him to us is not: Marno comes originally from Budapest,
Hungary, where he received his B.A. in Philosophy as well
as two M.A. degrees (in Philosophy and History, respec-
tively). His Stanford dissertation explored the devotional
genre that he calls “the poetry of thanksgiving” and, in
particular, the state of attentiveness that poets sought to
achieve by means of poetic form; he suggests, in fact, that
the early modern practice of “thanking” offered a distinctive mode of cognition – “attending” as a way of “thinking.” Fluent in three languages, with reading knowledge in
five more, he has published articles – both in English and
Hungarian – on topics ranging from Dante and Milton to
Hegel and Hayden White.
During his first term in our department, Professor Marno
taught a large lecture course on Shakespeare as well as a
smaller group of advanced majors in a seminar on religion
and poetry in the Renaissance. He reports that the privilege of weekly dialogues with Berkeley’s brilliant undergraduates in both classes has made the transition from the
vita contemplativa of dissertation writing to the vita activa of
teaching not only easy and natural but truly delightful.
The Chernin Mentoring Program: Year Two
In last year’s newsletter, we announced the inauguration of
the Peter and Megan Chernin Mentoring Program, a twoyear pilot program that has been transforming the experience of English majors. Based on intensive exit surveys and
the swelling number of students who want to take part, we
can report with confidence that the Chernin program has
been an extraordinary success.
Maura Nolan, remarked in welcoming the 2011-2012 cadre
of Chernin undergraduates, “For too long, being an English
major often meant being isolated from other English majors
and the ideas they could share about literature, writing,
and planning for the future. Our program is founded on the
idea that the English Department is a community in which
members find support, dialogue, and friendship across
the boundaries of age and
rank.”
Made possible by a generous
gift from Peter and Megan
Chernin, the mentoring program consists of three faculty
Prior to the Chernin Promembers, working with six
gram, students did not
of our most accomplished
have sustained discussions
graduate students (the year’s
about their overall English
Chernin Fellows), to guide
major in light of their goals.
and to serve the intellectual
Now, the Chernin Fellows
needs of a maximum of 240
are able to discuss one-onprospective or declared majors
one with undergraduates
in three distinct ways. These
what they would like their
three prongs of mentoring
overall course of study to
Chernin Program visits the Berkeley Art Museum
include one-on-one advising
teach them, what kinds of
sessions, bi-weekly small group meetings, and frequent
classes benefit them most, the skills on which they want
events and field trips for the group as a whole. The involveto work, and their reasons for majoring in English. This
conversation enables the mentors to suggest classes that
ment of faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates at
are particularly well-suited to the students, not only in
all levels creates a cascading effect that has worked particularly well. As the program’s faculty director, Professor
the English Department, but across the university – often
5
The Chernin Mentoring Program: Year Two (continued)
then waned during quiet periods of the semester, faculty
now see that their office hours are consistently busy, often
visited by students who acknowledge that they simply
never thought to come before.
classes that students haven’t known about or considered.
Just as important as these one-on-one relationships are the
community connections forged among the students, both
in their small groups and across the mentoring program as
a whole. Group discussions have helped the students to see
that becoming an intellectual is something that happens
between and outside of classes, as they talk to each other
about ideas and the literature that they love. Topics have
included: “What is critical reading?”; “Keywords for English
majors”; and “Finding a critical voice.” In larger groups, students have listened to diverse department faculty members
describing “the book that made me a professor” (and why)
and to leading Shakespeareans discussing the “Merchant of
Venice.” During several career panels, they have heard from
alumni/ae of the department who have gone on to careers
outside the academy. There were also group visits to the
Berkeley Art Museum, the Bancroft Rare Book Collections,
and Doe Library, as well as special events like the inspiring evening on creative writing at Berkeley, in which the
assembled group heard from department poet Lyn Hejinian
and the editors of creative writing publications on campus,
followed by an open microphone session in which students
read their work to their professors, mentors, and peers.
Numbers are eloquent too. The first semester of the program attracted 150 students, while the second drew 210,
with 30% them returning from the previous term. This fall,
230 students have joined the program. We hope very much
that the Chernin Mentoring Program will become a continuing feature of the department and serve as a model for
enhancing the undergraduate experience in other departments on campus and at other large universities across the
nation. We know of no other program quite like it.
We asked our most recent graduates to submit entries to
an essay-writing contest on the topic of what they’ve done
with their B.A. degrees in English, and we received over
thirty entries. Here’s a short sample from the winning
essay by Lindsay King, Class of 2010:
“It occurred to me at some point during my first
year at Berkeley that I could perhaps justify
my field of study by pairing it with something
more…say…practical. I then made the entirely
logical and completely rational decision that
I could offset the ‘impracticality’ of studying
English by double majoring in English and
French. I can still hear my stepdad’s laughing
yet somewhat worried (and probably thinkingabout-student-loan-repayment) chuckle over my
cell phone the fall of my sophomore year when
he exclaimed what are you going to do with that?
And at first, my response was – again – naturally
like that of many an English major: I’m going to
be a lawyer! Somewhere along the road, though, as
I wandered through Wordsworth’s The Prelude and
crisscrossed to Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la pluralité
des mondes, I figured out that I didn’t want to be a
lawyer. . . .”
The copious comments gathered at the end of the program’s
first year have been articulate and emphatic. “There is
camaraderie within the English Department, and I feel that
through the Chernin Program I am becoming a part of it,”
wrote one student, and another agreed, noting: “My mentor helped me see and appreciate all of the amazing people
in the program, and I feel extremely lucky to be part of it.”
Others came out fortified against the skeptical query, “So
what are you going to do with a degree in English?” Some
students got particular ideas for potential career options,
while others reported a new confidence that options remain
open, because (as one respondent put it) “being able to
write, to create, and to analyze is a valuable skill to be taken
to the workforce.” Or, as another wrote: “I liked seeing how
the skills we don’t realize we pick up from earning a degree
in English are applicable in a variety of fields.” Students
were also thrilled to have a glimpse of the “human” side of
the faculty members they usually encounter in the lecture
hall. “Hearing professors speak so honestly and personally about what they do was an amazing experience,” one
noted, while others were paradoxically reassured to learn
that “professors still face the same struggles that we face.”
Their professors also notice a change. If once the population
of office hours waxed with the onset of papers and exams,
Finish reading this essay and the two second-place winners on our Department Blog:
http://ucberkeleyenglish.com/
6
A Tribute to John Bishop
– by Mitchell Breitwieser and Eric Falci
monumental erudition and insight, Bishop was primarily concerned that his students themselves become adept
readers of the books that he put before them. His presentation of what he knew and what he’d thought was aimed
at provoking students to embark on literary voyages
such as his own by demonstrating that doing so was a
possible and deeply enticing option for them. Whether in
his legendary Joyce seminars, his other seminars on literary modernism, his lectures on contemporary literature,
or his lectures in his introductory survey class, Bishop
led his students to discover unsuspected intellectual
potentialities in themselves, and
earned their sincere and strong
gratitude in response. It should
be noted that as a consequence
of Professor Bishop’s teaching
quite a number of Berkeley students became intelligently conversant with literary works that
continued to baffle his faculty
colleagues, many of whom left
Professor Bishop’s Charles Mills
Gayley Lecture in 2005 wishing
that they too could have listened
to him for a semester or two,
rather than only for an evening
in the early spring.
In the international community of literary scholars, John
Bishop is widely regarded as one of the very few most
learned, astute, and creative among those who write
about James Joyce. His book, Joyce’s Book of the Dark (1986),
is an influential and much-beloved examination of Joyce’s
notoriously challenging novel Finnegans Wake. By showing that the famous obscurity and impenetrability of
the Wake’s ceaselessly punning and densely multilingual
prose is not meant to simply baffle or frustrate readers,
but rather is essential for a book
that explores the “noughttime”
realm of evening, sleep, and
dream, Bishop freed a generation
of readers and scholars to take
the Wake at once more seriously
and more playfully. Elucidating
the surface-level complexities of
Joyce’s palimpsestic sentences as
well as the conceptual systems
and texts that galvanized Joyce’s
“NIGHTLETTER” – among
them The Egyptian Book of the
Dead, Vico’s The New Science,
and Freud’s The Interpretation
of Dreams – Bishop’s capacious
reading clarified the Wake by
taking seriously its “clearobscure,” “Sheeroskouro” method.
He demonstrated that a book so
polyvalent as the Wake requires
an equally open reading practice
if we are to register fully both
the monumental significance of
Joyce’s masterwork and the great pleasure of its “blotch
and void” pages. Over the course of his career, Bishop’s
ability to demonstrate what it means to read Joyce led to
many invitations to speak at many quite prestigious conferences and institutions in Europe and North America,
invitations prompted by a widespread hope that his fire
might be caught by listening, and it often was, to judge
by his reputation.
John Bishop retired from the
university at the end of 2010,
following a stroke. He continues
to undergo therapy in central
New York State, near his family. Fellow Joyce scholar Margot
Norris, Chancellor’s Professor
of English and Comparative Literature at UC Irvine,
recently reported to the department that Bishop still
loves Joyce, and has been reading Ulysses with a colleague,
Michael Davis (Le Moyne University). She added that “he
has also never lost his love of teaching, and is therefore
excited to have the opportunity to teach six one-hour
sessions on Joyce with Professor Davis in November
2011. This shows how the passion for literature and for
learning can not only survive extreme medical emergencies and conditions, but also contribute substantially to
recovery. As Joyceans go, John Bishop is a real hero!” We
agree.
He was equally successful in the classroom, where his
task was the same as the one he set for himself in his
book: rather than transmitting to his students his own
7
Michael André Bernstein Remembered
possibilities of the past” even when confronted with history’s greatest disasters. With Five Portraits: Modernism and the
Imagination in Twentieth-Century German Writing (NorthwestMichael André Bernstein, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Berkeley for over three decades, passed ern, 2000), he explored modernism’s distinctive fascination
with the contradictory logic of masterpieces, carefully tracaway this spring, at the age of 63. A brilliant scholar, critic,
ing the sustaining tension between the fulfillment and the
intellectual, teacher, novelist, poet, and wit – and one of
frustration of the desire for the all-embracing work in poets,
the most profound thinkers of the vast sweep of modern
novelists, and philosophers alike. In scores of essays and in
literature, art, and history – Michael arrived at Berkeley in
regular reviews for The New Republic, The Times Literary Supple1975, already an obviously precocious talent. Born in Innsment, and The Los Angeles Times
bruck, raised between Europe
Book Review, he ranged tirelessly
and North America, he entered
across the world of modern letPrinceton University without
ters, invariably turning erudibothering to complete high
tion into insight and reshaping
school, graduating in 1969 as
what he touched.
university valedictorian, with
a degree in Romance LanguagBut this intellectual power was
es and the highest cumulative
not limited to literary criticism.
grade average in the school’s
In 1984, he published a volume
long history. At Oxford, he
of poems entitled Prima della
took a second degree (B.Litt.
Rivoluzione, and he was working
in Medieval and Modern
on a new novel when he fell ill.
Languages), before completWith Conspirators – published
ing a D.Phil. in English, with
in 2004; quickly translated into
a thesis that became his first
Italian, Dutch, French, Spanish,
landmark book, The Tale of the
Portuguese, Polish, and RusTribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern
sian; nominated for numerous
Verse Epic (Princeton, 1980).
prizes – he had already put his
thinking on masterpieces and
The Tale of the Tribe argued passideshadowing to spellbinding
sionately for poetry’s indisuse, conjuring up the precaripensable work as a site of
ous world of pre-1914 Central
history and memory, finding
Europe on a massive novelistic
in Pound and poets after him a
scale. Nor was it limited to the
defense of “the very possibility
page, as generations of students
of making sense of the condiengrossed by mesmerizing
tions of our common history.”
courses on Balzac, Flaubert,
Ever mindful of the need, in
Musil, Joyce, and Proust (“all of
Pound’s phrase, to “remember
Proust’s novel,” he promised, rather than mere chapters) can
that I have remembered,” Michael’s work never swerved
attest.
from the urgent task of making sense of these conditions
and never hesitated to challenge critical orthodoxies that
failed to register their complexity. In Bitter Carnival: Ressenti- Among numerous other honors, he was awarded the
inaugural Koret Israel Prize in 1989, as well as ACLS and
ment and the Abject Hero (Princeton, 1992), he explored the
Guggenheim Fellowships; elected a Fellow of the American
disturbing underside of the carnivalesque – moving from
classical satire through Diderot, Dostoevsky, and Céline and Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1995; and chosen to deliver
the English Department’s Gayley Memorial Lecture in 1996.
into contemporary mass culture, to examine the ambiguously menacing figure of the abject hero, whose power and
The Michael A. Bernstein Memorial Fund has been estabdanger rest on his servility. In Foregone Conclusions: Against
lished in his honor, to support graduate study in modern
Apocalyptic History (California, 1994), he challenged historiliterature. Donations may be made through the UC Berkeley
cal thinking that trades complexity for coherence, calling
Foundation (http://givetocal.berkeley.edu/; search under
for a historical imagination that “sideshadows” rather
“Bernstein Memorial Fund”).
than “foreshadows,” alert to “the unfulfilled or unrealized
– by C. D. Blanton
8
Student Honors and Prizes
Judith Lee Stronach Prizes: Joseph Cadora (for prose);
Kim Oja and Joseph Cadora (for poetry)
Rosenberg Lyric Poetry Prize: Jane Gregory
The Shakespeare Prize: Lauren Mueller
Shrout Short Story Prize: Rosetta Soleil David, Betty Ho,
Leila Mansouri, Jenny (Yi) Xie
Yoshiko Uchida Prize (for fictional or non-fictional prose):
Peter Hagen
We congratulate the English Department’s undergraduate and graduate students who received a wide variety of
awards during the 2010-2011 academic year (awards given
in the 2011-2012 academic year will appear in our next
newsletter).
Department:
At commencement in May 2011, Martin Zirulnik received
the Department Citation and Mark Schorer Prize, given
annually to the department’s outstanding senior major. The
Bertrand H. Bronson Prize for the best Honors thesis was
awarded to Sydney Miller, for her “The Responsibilities of
Names: Nomenclatural Entrapment and Onomastic Escape
in the Novels of Vladimir Nabokov,” and the Chauncey
Whetmore Wells Prize for the best senior seminar essay
went to Chad Hegelmeyer, for “Are We Too Close?” In addition, 44 English majors earned James Phelan or H.W. Hill
Prize scholarships for work of exceptionally high caliber.
In the graduate program, Anna Abramson’s “Stages of
Scripting: Pre-Scribing, Re-Writing, and the Performance of
Authorship in Henry IV” received the Joel Fineman Prize
for the best essay written by a first-year doctoral student.
Benjamin Saltzman was awarded the Benjamin Kurtz
Prize for the best graduate student essay, with an essay
entitled “The Reflexivity of Forgetting in Alfred’s Pastoral
Care.” In addition, he won the Barbara H. Kurtz Award,
which goes to the student whose performance in course
work during the first two years of the doctoral program is
judged to be outstanding. At a campus-wide celebration in
April, seven of our advanced graduate students were named
Outstanding Graduate Instructors: Alex Benson, Maude
Emerson, Brian Gillis, Lynn Huang, Manya Lempert, Christopher Mead, and Jill Richards. Within the department, Ben
Cullen, Charity Ketz, and Jocelyn Rodal won Outstanding
Teaching Assistant Awards.
National Awards:
Our graduate students won numerous nation-wide fellowships and prizes for their research or writing. Shannon Chamberlain won First Prize from The Jane Austen
Society of North America’s Essay Contest; Leila Mansouri’s
“The Sleeping” was cited as a notable story of 2010 by Best
American Short Stories; and Rebecca Munson’s novella, “Lafayette Square,” was shortlisted for the Paris Literary Prize
competition. Ashley Barnes was awarded a Winterthur
Museum and Library Research Fellowship; Monica Huerta
held a summer-in-residence fellowship at the National Hispanic Cultural Center; the Medieval Academy of America
gave Marisa Libbon their 2011 Schallek Fellowship; Jennifer Lorden received a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship from the
U.S. Department of Education; and Marcelle Maese-Cohen
received a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship. For a
more complete list of awards, as well as significant publications by our graduate students, see the department’s blog
entry: http:/ucberkeleyenglish.com/?p=811.
University Prizes:
American Academy of Poets Prize: Gillian Osborne
Eisner Poetry Prize: Rachel Beck, Jane Gregory,
Christopher Miller, Swati Rana
Hass Scholars Program: Stephanie Matabang
Ina Coolbrith Memorial Poetry Prize:
Christine Deakers
Jengyee Prize - Leadership for a Better World:
Jasmine Wang
Joan Lee Yang Memorial Poetry Prize: Abram Coetsee,
Andrew David King, Rachael Trocchio, Jenny (Xi) Xie
9
Faculty Notes
Elizabeth Abel’s Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow was awarded Honorable Mention for the American Studies Association’s
2010 John Hope Franklin Prize (best book in
American Studies). This year, she contributed
an essay, “Racial Panic, Taboo, and Technology
in the Age of Obama,” to Trans-scripts, an interdisciplinary online journal. She gave talks
at the Center for African American Studies
at Princeton, the Photography and Memory
Workshop at Yale, a conference on “Visible
Race” at Berkeley, a conference on “Literature
and Media” at the University of Tulsa, and
the Berkeley-Stanford Graduate Conference.
She also participated in a panel discussion of
Alice Childress’s Trouble in Mind at the Aurora
Theater in Berkeley.
Joel Altman presented a paper entitled “‘Your
sorrow was too sore laid on’: Shakespeare and
the Subject of Ekphrasis,” at the 2011 Shakespeare Association of America conference and
at St. Andrew’s University in October, where
he has been doing research on The Winter’s Tale.
In 2010, Ann Banfield published, with Daniel
Heller-Roazen, an interview with the French
linguist and philosopher Jean-Claude Milner,
in the Journal of the Jan Van Eyck Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique. She gave a talk, “Beckett
between Yeats, Joyce and Proust,” at the Center for the Humanities at Temple University,
and a plenary session titled “From Le Style
Indirect Libree to Represented Thought: Some
New Hypotheses on the Origins of a Literary
Style,” at the Congrès Mondial de Linguistique
Française. In May of 2011, a conference to celebrate her retirement took place on campus,
which involved numerous former students as
speakers and as organizers.
Ian Duncan published several essays in 2011,
including “We Were Never Human: Monstrous Forms of Nineteenth-Century Fiction”
(in Victorian Transformations: Genre, Nationalism
and Desire in Nineteenth-Century Literature) and
“Urban Space and Enlightened Romanticism”
(The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Romanticism). Rather more onerous was the omnibus
review-essay on “Recent Work in NineteenthCentury Studies” for the 50th anniversary issue of Studies in English Literature. Invited talks
included the first Douglas Mack Lecture for
the James Hogg Society Conference and a lecture at Harvard’s English Institute. Duncan
also gave the 2011 Joseph S. Schick Lecture at
Indiana State University on Jane Austen and
Walter Scott – he also presented this material
at a colloquium at the University of Colorado.
He spoke on “Late Scott and the Ends of Man”
at the MLA Convention in Los Angeles, and
participated in a one-day conference on the
Berkeley campus, entitled “Character, Irony,
Form: A Forum on the Novel.” Duncan was
appointed the Florence Green Bixby Chair in
English.
Nadia Ellis continues to prepare her first
book manuscript. She was awarded two
faculty fellowships at Berkeley toward this
end – one at the Townsend Center for the
Humanities and a second at the Institute of
International Studies. In research beyond the
book manuscript, she published two new
essays: “The Eclectic Generation: Caribbean
Literary Criticism at the Turn of the Century,” in The Routledge Companion in Anglophone
Caribbean Literature, and “Out and Bad:
Toward a Queer Performance Hermeneutic of
Jamaican Dancehall,” in Small Axe. The second
is part of ongoing research exploring queer
theory and LGBT culture in the Caribbean.
Also related to this research was a lecture at
Berkeley’s Center for Race and Gender (“A Poetics of Delicacy: Queer Caribbean Oral History and the Politics of Inclusion”), drawing
on interviews with LGBT Caribbean subjects
over the past two years.
Eric Falci’s book, Continuity and Change in
Irish Poetry, 1966-2010, is forthcoming from
Cambridge University Press. He continues
to work on a second book project, which is
about the relationship between poetry and
music from the late nineteenth through the
twentieth centuries.
Thomas Farber published his fourth collection of epigrammatic writings, Foregone Conclusions, with a companion essay describing
his long obsession with the form. Akule, his
third collaboration with the marine photographer Wayne Levin, was published earlier
this year. His nonprofit publishing house, El
Leon Literary Arts, which has now published
23 books, brought out Barrio Bushido, a powerful novel by former Cal student Benjamin
Bac Sierra. This is the second time he has
published a book by a former student in the
English Department.
Cecil S. Giscombe has three essays coming
out: one in the Kenyon Review on the problem
of mortality and the “persistent rumor”
10
of the eastern mountain lion; a second on
disability, black music, and railroad work,
in the anthology Beauty is a Verb; and a third
on poetry and poetics in Angles of Ascent. His
play, Lycanthropes/Entre Chien et Loup, was
performed at the Poets’ Theatre Festival in
San Francisco; most of the cast was made
up of his current and former U.C. Berkeley
students. He was a visiting writer for short
stints at the University of Alabama, the
University of Montana, and at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied
Poetics. Recent creative writing courses have
included a lecture on non-fictional prose and
a class entitled “Traveling, Thinking, Writing.” The final project of a freshman in this
second course won the Yoshiko Uchida Prize
(for a substantial prose work).
In 2011, Mark Goble’s
e Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Lifee (2010) was awarded
Honorable Mention from the Modernist Studies Association.
Marcial González is writing a second book on
the cultural history of Chicano farm workers.
As part of this project, he presented a paper
on Elva Treviño Hart’s autobiography, Barefoot
Heart: Stories of a Migrant Child, at the 2011 MLA
convention, and he spoke at a symposium
entitled “From the Fields to the Academy” at
Michigan State University. This symposium
recognized educators who are former migrant
farm workers, and his paper, “Children of the
Fields: Representations of Work and School
in Chicano Farm Worker Narratives,” will
be included in a collection of essays from
Michigan State University Press. Another
essay, “Literary Narratives of Farm Workers:
The Proletarianization of Chicanos,” will
appear in Created Unequal: Class and the Making
of American Literary Narrativee (Routledge).
In conjunction with this project, in recent
years Professor González has twice taught an
undergraduate course entitled “The Literature and History of Mexican American Farm
Workers: 1930-1990.”
Dorothy Hale presented new work related
to The Novel and the New Ethics, her current
book project, at a conference on secularity
and the novel, held at Stanford University’s
Center for the Study of the Novel. At Berkeley,
Professor Hale participated in a roundtable
discussion of the Avenali Lecture, delivered
by Joyce Carol Oates at the Townsend Center.
She also introduced the Forum on the Novel
Faculty Notes (continued)
for the Berkeley Consortium for the Study of
the Novel and she organized a panel entitled
“Novel Theory Now.” Professor Hale is among
the theorists interviewed on the current
state of narrative studies in the forthcoming
collection, Five Questions: Narrative Theories
and Poetics. She continues her involvement
with the Teagle Foundation project, a multicampus research group that asks “What is
a Reader?” Findings from the Teagle group
were presented at the Association of Departments of English (ADE) meeting in 2011,
where she co-led a seminar for new and continuing Graduate Chairs. She still serves as
the Director of Graduate Studies in English.
Robert Hass’s most recent work includes a
long essay, “On River of Words,” about the
founding of an environmental non-profit, for
a volume entitled Blueprints: Bringing Poetry
into Communities. Translations of his poems
have appeared internationally. An Albanian
translation by the poet Gentian Cocoli was
part of a project co-sponsored by the Library
of Congress and the National Library to inaugurate an American poetry series, which also
included volumes by Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot,
Wallace Stevens, and John Ashbery. During
the year, Professor Hass read poems at Exeter,
Tulane University, Queens College, Harvard
University, and the University of Texas, and
he participated in the Rotterdam Poetry Festival. He also received an honorary doctorate
from the University of Iowa.
Blake M. Hausman, a Thomas Gray Lecturer
in Reading and Composition, published
his first novel in March 2011. Riding the Trail
of Tears is a surrealistic revisiting of the
Cherokee Removal, set in near future North
Georgia. The book has been described as
“innovative” (Publisher’s Weekly), “uniquely
moving” (Booklist), and a “rollicking entry in
the small but growing Native American sci-fi
canon” (East Bay Express).
A translation of Lyn Hejinian’s My Life appeared in Spain, as Ma Vida (2011), while
another book, The Wide Road, co-written with
Carla Harryman, was published by Belladonna Press. Work from her next collection,
The Book of a Thousand Eyes, appeared in various
literary magazines. At the MLA, there was a
special panel on The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography, San Francisco
1975-1980, a ten-volume collaborative project
that she has participated in for a number
of years. During the spring, she gave readings and formal lectures at the University
of Chicago, the University of Calgary, and
Naropa University, where she served as the
first Allen Ginsberg Fellow. As a U.C. Berkeley
Arts Research Center Fellow, she collaborated with graduate student Christopher
Patrick Miller to launch an online journal
called FLOOR, dedicated to the exploration of
aesthetic practices underway outside, as well
as within, the various realms of recognized
art-making. Over the summer, Professor
Hejinian was involved in events taking place
in conjunction with two Gertrude Stein
shows in San Francisco, at SF MOMA and at
the Contemporary Jewish Museum.
Colleen Lye co-edited two collections of
essays about the crisis of public higher
education, one with Christopher Newfield
for South Atlantic Quarterly (Spring 2011) that
features U.C. student activist perspectives,
and one with Newfield and James Vernon for
Representations (Fall 2011), on the question
of the humanities and the neoliberal public
university. A piece relating to her current
book project on Asian American knowledge
economies, entitled “The Literary Case of Wen
Ho Lee,” appeared in the June 2011 issue of
The Journal of Asian American Studies. Another,
“Reading for Asian American Literature,” is
part of a new Blackwell Companion to American
Literary Studies. Although on sabbatical in
2010-2011, she thought it would be fun to
co-chair the 2010 conference program of the
American Studies Association in San Antonio
– and after all the logistics were sorted out, it
actually was.
Professor Emeritus Richard Hutson has
been elected to serve as the president of the
Western Literature Association, the regional
branch of the MLA, for 2013, for which he will
be hosting 300 or so people in Berkeley in
October, 2013. Recent publications include
“Renaissances americaines: de la jeremiade au
western,” “William S. Hart’s Hell’s Hinges in the
Progressive Era,” and “Cooper’s Leatherstocking
Tales.” He delivered two papers at recent WLA
meetings: “Tejano/Anglo Culture, Love and
Work in Andy Adams’s A Texas Matchmaker
(1904)” and “The Economy of Violence:
Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest.”
Donna Jones’s book, The Racial Discourses of Life
Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism and Modernity,
was released by Columbia University Press
11
in 2010. During the same year, she was the
plenary speaker for the conference “Theories
of Life in the 20th and 21st Centuries,” at
Rutgers University. She also delivered papers
at the annual conference of the American
Comparative Literature Association and at
U.C. Irvine. Her essay “‘The career of living
things is continuous’: Reflections on Bergson,
Iqbal and Scalia” will appear in the journal
qui parle. In December 2011, she travels to the
University of Wisconsin, Madison to speak at
the Mellon Sawyer seminar on “Biopolitics:
Life in Past and Present.” Jones is at work on
two books: The Ambiguous Promise of European
Decline: Race and Historical Pessimism in the Era of
the Great War and The Tribunal of Life: Reflections
on Vitalism and Biopolitics.
Georgina Kleege participated in a group
research project on the topic of Critical
Disability Studies at the U.C. Humanities
Research Institute (UCHRI) in Irvine. The
group consisted of scholars and artists
interested in representations of disability in
literature, art, design, performance, technology and medical history. She reports: “As our
final project we . . . are organizing a week-long
artists’ residency, where artists in all media
(visual artists, filmmakers, performance
artists, choreographers, sound artists, and
creative writers) will be invited to consider
issues of multiple access and disability in the
conception and design of a creative work.”
Inspired by this project, Professor Kleege has
started working with Berkeley’s Department
of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies to
explore ways to make all their performances
more accessible.
The journal Choice named Jeffrey Knapp’s
Shakespeare Only (2009) an Outstanding
Academic Title; the book also appeared in
paperback from the University of Chicago
Press in 2011. In the spring, he organized a
symposium at Berkeley on “Toleration and
the English Renaissance,” featuring Stephen
Greenblatt (Harvard University) and Alexandra Walsham (Cambridge).
David Landreth gave a paper on Mary Tudor’s
queenly domesticity as it was represented on
coins and in plays, at a conference in Berkeley
on Early Modern Britain, and another at the
MLA on the liveliness of matter in Spenser’s
The Faerie Queene. His book, The Face of Mammon: The Matter of Money in English Renaissance
Literature will be available in January 2012,
from Oxford University Press.
Faculty Notes (continued)
Celeste Langan has been appointed the Acting Director of the Townsend Center for the
Humanities for 2011-12. In her spare time,
she continues work on a book project called
PostNapoleonism. Most recently she presented
“Afterlives of Napoleon” at the 2011 MLA and
at the 2011 International Scott Conference in
Laramie, Wyoming.
During 2011, the French translation of David
Miller’s 8 ½ appeared, with a Chinese version
forthcoming in 2012. He helped on the former, but gratefully abstains from all interference with the latter. He also published a piece
of his current Hitchcock project,“Hitchcock’s
Hidden Pictures,” in Critical Inquiry; a memorial essay on Barbara Johnson in GLQ; and
some reconsiderations of Chabrol and Fellini
in his “Second Time Around” column for Film
Quarterly. Among other activities, he continues to give before-the-show talks for 42nd
Street Moon, a San Francisco theater group
that revives old Broadway musicals.
Jennifer Miller continues her research in the
literatures of post-Conquest Britain, working
on her book, Multilingualism in Medieval Britain,
and on another project, “Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Archival Imagination.” Two
essays are forthcoming, entitled “La3amon’s
Welsh” and “Angevin Politics and Arthurian
Romance.” She is also revising an invited
paper on the cantus of Thomas de Hales for
Viator. Professor Miller continues to support
the Early Middle English Society, which she
co-founded with her students, and to teach
new subjects, such as courses on translation
from Anglo-Norman into Middle English,
on the bestiary and medieval Scholasticism,
and on the multilingual books of thirteenthcentury Britain. She won the Graduate Assembly’s 2011 Distinguished Faculty Mentor
Award for her supervision and professional
mentoring of Berkeley Ph.D. candidates.
Bharati Muhkerjee’s latest novel, Miss New
India, appeared from Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt and is available in multiple formats
and languages. Her other publications from
this year include an article in American Literary History called “Immigrant Writing: Changing the Contours of a National Literature”
(adapted from her Gayley lecture), a short
story in The Southampton Review, and a contribution to MORE magazine. Among her major
talks were a lecture to the United Nations
in New York (“Unlearning Intolerance: Can
Literature Affect Change?”) and appearances
on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” and “The Bryan
Lehrer Show,” Michael Krasny’s “Forum”
(KQED), Iowa Public Radio, and “West Coast
Live!” She was also honored by a plaque in
“The Writer’s Walk” at the University of Iowa.
Visit her website at http://www.missnewindia.com/, which includes links to her blogs
on globalization and its effects on class, and
generational and gender relations in contemporary India.
John D. Niles recently moved to Boulder,
Colorado. A festschrift that he commissioned
and co-edited is due out this fall: The Genesis
of Books: Studies in the Scribal Culture of Medieval
England in Honour of A.N. Doane. Among his
other recent publications is an essay titled
“On the Danish Origins of the Beowulf Story,”
in the collection Anglo-Saxon England and
the Continent. During 2010-2011 he gave
invited lectures in York, Leeds, Cambridge,
St. Andrews, and Seville, as well as at the
Universities of Missouri, Iowa, and Colorado.
As President of the International Society of
Anglo-Saxonists, he hosted its 2011 biennial
conference on “Anglo-Saxon England and the
Visual Imagination.”
Maura Nolan co-edited a volume of essays,
entitled Medieval Latin and Middle English Literature: Essays in Honour of Jill Mann (2011), with
Christopher Cannon. Her contribution to the
volume, “The Poetics of Catastrophe: Ovidian
Allusions in Gower’s Vox Clamantis,” focused
on John Gower, the subject of her ongoing
book project, and the controversial first book
of his polemical Latin work, the Vox Clamantis
(“A Voice Crying”). She also published the
essay “Style” in Cultural Reformations: Medieval
and Renaissance in Literary History, part of the
Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature series. Another article on Gower, “Gower
and Sensory Aesthetics: Fortune, the Virgin,
and the Poetics of Agency,” is coming soon in
a collection honoring Anne Middleton.
In 2011, Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe published
“Orality and Literacy,” in Oral Literature of the
Middle Ages, and she lectured on the relationship between the monk Goscelin and his
former pupil, the recluse Eve, at the International Congress on Medieval Studies. She
had great fun teaching English 104 (“Introduction to Old English”), where students
read thousand-year old riddles, worked with
virtual manuscripts, practiced exercises on
12
the circolwyrde (new OE for “computer”), and
learned to order pizza in the year 1000. Her
book, Stealing Obedience: Narratives of Identity
and Agency in Later Anglo-Saxon England, is
forthcoming from the University of Toronto
Press.
Samuel Otter co-edited and co-wrote the introduction (along with Geoffrey Sanborn) for
a volume on Melville and Aesthetics (Palgrave,
2011). He gave talks at a Berkeley conference
accompanying the premiere of Philip Kan
Gotanda’s play, I Dream of Change and Eng, and
in Rome, on ekphrasis, poetry writing, and
print collecting in Melville’s Clarel. At the
2011 MLA, he participated in a roundtable
discussion about critical practice in American literary studies, and he chaired a panel
on “Literature and Economic Crisis.” He has
continued to serve on the editorial boards
of Representations and ESQ: A Journal of the
American Renaissance, and as Associate Editor
of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies. In the
English Department, where this is his third
year as Chair, he taught an advanced graduate seminar on “Melville’s Forms.”
In 2011 Morton Paley published “William
Blake,” in the Cambridge Companion to English
Poets, and “Blake and Chichester,” in Blake in
our Time: Essays in Honour of G.E. Bentley, Jr. He
reviewed The Illustrated Shakespeare, by Stuart
Sillars, for The Wordsworth Circle, and Blake’s
Margins: An Interpretive Study of the Annotations,
by Hazard Adams, for the online “New Books
on Literature.” He spoke about Catherine
Blake at the 2011 MLA, and he has articles on
Blake coming out in the University of Toronto
Quarterly. He remains co-editor of Blake: An
Illustrated Quarterly, now in its 45th year.
Scott Saul continues to research and write
his biography of Richard Pryor, forthcoming
from HarperCollins. He has also recently
written essays on the comic artist Dan Clowes for The Dan Clowes Reader and on the music
documentary Wattstax for an essay collection
entitled The Music and the Movement.
LitQuake, the yearly San Francisco Literary
Festival, has named Ishmael Reed as recipient of their 2011 Barbary Coast Award. An
award event in October included readings, an
excerpt from Reed’s most recently produced
play, Body Parts, and music with his lyrics.
Reed has long championed the work of other
writers, and this year his current publishing
Faculty Notes (continued)
imprint, Ishmael Reed Publishing Company,
published New and Selected Yuri, a collection of
poetry and fiction by the Japan based writer
Yuri Kageyama. Courtesans of Flounder Hill, the
first published collection by the Alaska based
poet Ishmael Hope, is forthcoming in 2012.
Reed also serves as Producer for The Domestic
Crusaderr Project, helping to mount productions of new plays by Wajahat Ali, his former
U.C. Berkeley student. During 2011, his
“Should Mark Twain Be Allowed to Use the
N-Word?” appeared on the Wall Street Journal’s
blog, Speakeasy; his play, The Preacher and the
Rapperr was performed at the Festspielhaus in
Baden-Baden; and a poem, “Scrub Jays,” was
chosen by Robert Pinsky for Slatee magazine.
Hugh Richmond gave a course during 2011
with the California Shakespeare dramaturge
Philippa Kelly, entitled: “Sovereignty and
the Individual in Shakespearean Tragedy.”
He continues on the Advisory Board of the
California Shakespeare Theatre. Much of his
research is on the internet through significant Shakespeare sites, such as the Open
Shakespeare Project in Cambridge, UK, and
many of his earlier books have been republished in electronic form. Berkeley’s own
newly upgraded website, “Shakespeare’s Staging,” added images, educational exercises, and
essays to the visual galleries, including studies of audiences’ impact on the performance
of Shakespeare’s tragedies. His 1979 essay on
“Shakespeare’s Navarre” was reprinted in
Shakespeare Criticism, and he also presented papers at the 2011 meetings of the Shakespeare
Association of America and the International
Shakespeare Association.
Peter Dale Scott’s 2011 publications included
a book chapter entitled “A Difficult, Inspirational Giant,” in An Invisible Rope: Portraits
of Czeslaw Milosz; several poems (“In Honor
of Pat Tillman,” “To the Tea Party Patriots,”
“Changing North America”); and numerous
articles focused on U.S. government activities
and international policies. He also spoke to
the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco
and at centenary celebrations of Milosz, held
at UCLA and at Berkeley.
Susan Schweik is happy that her 2010 Research Group in Critical Disability Studies
will result in a 2012 sequel, a residential
workshop on “Art Inclusion: Disability, Design, Curation,” sponsored by U.C.’s Institute
for Research in the Arts. Her book, The Ugly
Laws: Disability in Public, was released in paperback, and she has recently published “Carlos
Montezuma and the Normal Body of the
(Native) Citizen” in Social Research. In 2011
she gave invited lectures in Prague and Oslo,
as well as at Penn, The New School, Barnard,
Sarah Lawrence, U.C. San Diego, and Arizona
State. In addition to an increasing research
emphasis on race and disability, she finds
that her new work is focusing on disability
and war. She is excited about an upcoming
trip to Vietnam to continue her research on
the effects of Agent Orange there, and she is
also at work on a longer term project on disability representation and the 1940s war film
“The Best Years of Our Lives.” She continues
as Associate Dean of Arts and Humanities.
Katherine Snyder’s essay, “The Post-Apocalyptic and the Post-Traumatic in Margaret
Atwood’s Oryx and Crake,” is forthcoming in
Studies in the Novel; her review of Atwood’s The
Year of the Flood appeared in Women’s Review of
Books. She presented parts of her research on
Atwood at the Contemporary Women’s Writing Network and at the MLA. Having recently
completed another article, “Gatsby’s Ghost:
Traumatic Memory and National Literary
Tradition in Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland,” she
delivered papers drawn from this work at
the Rocky Mountain MLA and at the national
MLA. She also taught a new undergraduate
seminar, “My Lost City: Modernist, PostModernist, and Post-9/11 Fiction.” She continues to serve as the Director of Berkeley’s
College Writing Programs.
Janet Sorensen published an article entitled
“Alternative Antiquarianisms of Scotland
and the North” in Modern Language Quarterly.
She gave the Keynote address at the “Secret
Scotland” Conference at the University of
Glasgow, in October, 2010, and she also presented lectures on her recent work on literature and maritime empire at the University
of Edinburgh and Indiana University.
Elisa Tamarkin published “Transatlantic
Returns” in A Companion to American Literary Studies (Blackwell, 2011). Her essay,
“Literature and the News,” will appear in
the Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century
American Literature in 2012. Her talks last year
included the keynote address at a conference
on Transatlantic Romanticism in Boulder,
Colorado, and participation on an MLA panel,
“New Directions in Early American Studies,”
13
featuring her recent book, Anglophilia. She
continues to serve as Vice-President of C19, a
new society for 19th-century Americanists,
and will succeed as President in 2012.
Emily Thornbury is beginning a project on
the construction (and reconstruction) of
Anglo-Saxon texts, and in the fall semester of
2011 she taught a new undergraduate seminar on the history of the book.
In 2010-11, Robert Tracy’s “Trollope Redux:
the later novels” appeared in the Cambridge
Companion to Anthony Trollope, and his “Little
Dorrit: the Reader in the Text” in the Dickens
Quarterly. An article on Seamus Heaney’s Human Chain is scheduled to appear in the Irish
University Review this fall. He delivered papers
at Dickens conferences in Aix-en-Provence
and Saarbrücken. At the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures
in Maynooth, he discussed James Clarence
Mangan’s adaptation of Balzac’s “Melmoth
réconcilié.”
James Grantham Turner continues to
research and publish on eros, sexuality and
romance in literature and art. He has just
completed a study of drawings from the
Raphael studio which were covered over by a
censor because of their hard-core subject, using electronic techniques to make them visible. Essays just published or about to appear
include “How Big Did She Say That Snake
Was? Teaching the Contradiction in Oroonoko,” “Sexual Awakening As Radical Enlightenment: Arousal and Ontogeny in Buffon and
La Mettrie,” “‘Great Agents for Libertinism’:
Rochester and Milton,” and “‘Romance’ and
the Novel in Restoration England.” He also
works as a miniaturist: forthcoming publications include a history of the English novel
based on just five years (1666-1670) and an
extremely short essay on Hamlet. A new research interest has been the architecture and
thought of Berthold Lubetkin.
Recent Books by Our Faculty
Valérie Bénéjam and John Bishop, eds. Making Space in the Works of James Joyce
James Joyce’s preoccupation with space – be it urban, geographic, stellar,
geometrical, or optical – is a central and idiosyncratic feature of his work.
In this collection of essays, major scholars of Joyce evaluate the perception
and mental construction of space, as it is evoked through Joyce’s writing.
The aim is to bring several recent trends of literary research and criticism
to bear on the notion of space in its most concrete sense. The essays move
from a focus on the phenomenological and intra-psychic to broader and
wider meditations on the social, urban, and collective.
Thomas Farber, Foregone Conclusions:
Equivoques, Aperçus, Spars, and Catarrhs
In this collection, Thomas Farber sustains the tradition of the epigram,
explored before him by writers from Martial through Oscar Wilde. This
literary form, he writes (epigrammatically) is: “A terse observation aspiring to the universal and irreducible. Generally about human foible or fate.
Relies on paradox, hyperbole, or wordplay to compel a flash of recognition.
Kissing cousin of axioms, parables, maxims, apothegms, and Zen koans.”
Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian, The Wide Road
What would have happened had Thelma and Louise not driven off the cliff
but stayed on the road? In Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian’s picaresque
novella, friendship lives on to follow eros through a polymorphic landscape where their fearless, inquisitive “we” encounters “hunger in two
places at once.” The Wide Road is a collaborative investigation of the female
body, friendship, writing, community, activism, travel and the nature and
possibility of human thinking.
David Landreth, The Face of Mammon:
The Matter of Money in English Renaissance Literature
Money talked in sixteenth-century England, as money still does today. But
what the sixteenth century’s gold and silver had to say for itself is strikingly different from the modern discourse of money. As David Landreth
demonstrates, the material and historical differences between the coins of
the English Renaissance and today’s paper and electronic money propel a
distinctive and complex assessment of the relation between material substance and human value. This book offers a new account of the historical
transformations of the concept of value to scholars of early modern literature, culture, and art, as well as to those interested in economic history.
Bharati Mukherjee, Miss New India
Anjali Bose is “Miss New India.” Born into a traditional lower-middle class
family and living in a backwater town with an arranged marriage on the
horizon, her prospects don’t look great. Bharati Mukherjee’s most recent
novel narrates her story, as she sets off to Bangalore, India’s fastest-growing
major metropolis. In this high-tech city Anjali – suddenly free from the
traditional confines of class, caste, gender, and more – is able to confront
her past and reinvent herself. Of course, the seductive pull of modernity
does not come without a dark side. . . .
14
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Recent Books by Our Faculty
Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, Stealing Obedience: Narratives of Agency and
Identity in Later Anglo-Saxon England
as responsible agents in the assumption and performance of religious
identities. To modern eyes, however, many of the choices they make
would actually appear to be compulsory. Stealing Obediencee explores how
a Christian notion of agent action – where freedom incurs responsibility – was a component of identity in the last hundred years of AngloSaxon England, and it investigates where agency (in the modern sense)
might be sought in these narratives.
Samuel Otter and Geoffrey Sanborn, eds. Melville and Aesthetics
This collection of essays represents Melville as an artist for whom questions of sensation, pleasure, and form cannot be separated from philosophical and political concerns. Across this volume, aesthetic theory
deepens our understanding of Melville’s concerns and his career, and
Melville’s works, in turn, are seen as pivotal to reconsidering concepts
such as subjectivity, autonomy, sensory experience, consent, style, and
the “literary.”
Christopher Cannon and Maura Nolan, eds. Medieval Latin and Middle
English Literature: Essays in Honor of Jill Mann
Jill Mann’s writing, teaching, and scholarship have transformed our
understanding of both medieval Latin and Middle English literature,
as well as their intersection. Essays in this volume seek to honor her
achievement by looking at entirely new aspects of these fields, including the relationship of song to affect, the political valence of classical
allusion, and the Latin background of Middle English devotional texts.
Others look again at the literary kinds and ideas most important in
Mann’s own work – beast fable, the nature of allegory, the nature of
“nature,” the relationship of economic thought and literature, satire,
language as a subject for poetry – in the poets she was most drawn to
(Chaucer, Langland, Henryson).
Genaro Padilla, The Daring Flight of My Pen: Cultural Politics and Gaspar Pérez
de Villagrá’s Historia de la Nueva México, 1610
Doomed from the beginning to be read as history rather than poetry,
Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá’s Historia de la Nueva México chronicles Captain
Juan de Oñate’s conquest of New Mexico from its inception in 1595 to
the battle of Acoma in 1599. In this study, Genaro Padilla enters into
Villagrá’s epic poem of the Oñate expedition to reveal that the soldier
was no mere chronicler, but that his writing offers subtle criticism of
the empire whose expansion he seems to be celebrating. In addition to
literary analysis, this book is itself a critique of our modern engagement
with foundational documents, cultural celebrations, and our awareness
of our relationship to New Mexico’s complicated multicultural legacies.
15
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Robert Hass’s Poetry in Dutch, Albanian, and Hebrew
Published by:
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322 Wheeler Hall #1030
Berkeley, California 94720
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Newsletter written and edited by:
Kevis Goodman, Catherine
Gallagher, and Darrend Brown