Piers Brown Talk on Wednesday

　

The Department of English presents: The Faculty Research Colloquium

"The wrongs that I have done thee stir / Afresh within": Motion and Emotion in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale  by Piers Brown

What is the relationship between motion and emotion in early modern thought? In the early-nineteenth century, emotion replaced an older discourse of passions and affections, but this change is prefigured by a long-standing connection between feeling and motion. Most obviously – and predominantly in Shakespeare's plays, as in most other writers – the verb 'to move' and the process of 'moving' is used in a rhetorical sense of experiencing or inducing emotion. This Latinate term, which was rarely used in the modern sense of abstract movement, existed alongside a more expansive, and more concrete Anglo-Saxon vocabulary of affective change registered on the surface of the body, particularly swaying, shaking and stirring. Here, I am interested in two problems: first, how the idea of emotion as motion which originates in philosophy and rhetorical theory is related to vernacular andpopular understandings of emotion. Second, how the discourse of 'stirring' registers the fragile and obscure origins of feeling, which depends not on Galenic humoral theory, but on Aristotelian natural philosophy. This approach reveals the connection between the problematic moment early in Shakespeare's play when Leontes first becomes agitated, and the emotional final scene, the statue of Hermione moves for the first time, and those watching her – both characters and audience – are themselves moved.

February 27, 2013
2:30 p.m., 130 Colson Hall

A not-so-minor triumph

This post is a tad late because we're still coming down from the high that anyone would experience upon winning—yes, that's right, winning—this past Friday night's Big Brothers Big Sisters Ultimate Trivia Challenge, held at the Erickson Alumni Center and emceed by Martin "Keep It Clean" Dunlap, of the downtown library.

Your team, Team Hexabomb, was once again ably led by Professors Lara Farina and Scott Crichlow (Political Science) who were joined by Professors Ballentine and Claycomb, along with Ann Claycomb (an MFA program alum, of course, who now knows everything that's worth knowing on account of her job in the Provost's office) and yours truly, who, it must be noted, knew that the "crease" is the area in front of the goaltender in hockey.

It was a close contest with alarming questions on many topics of supposedly "general knowledge," including units of measure, presidential history, famous dogs, and the periodic table, but we prevailed.

Our prize included the return of our entry fee and gift cards to DP Dough.

But the best part, besides the winning, was the discovery of A Very Good Chocolate Chip Cookie. This blogger at least is forever on the lookout for such a thing, and if anyone knows who is responsible for those cookies or what the secret ingredient is, do let me know.

Dr. Speese

Thanks to Lisa Weihman, the Tenants just got the news that Erin Johns Speese has completed the requirements for her degree. As Lisa says:

"Today Erin successfully defended her dissertation, 'The Modernist Sublime: Parenthood and the Intersubjective Sublime Subject in Faulkner, Forster, Lawrence, and Woolf.'  Many thanks to her committee members: Gwen Bergner, Ryan Claycomb, Adam Komisaruk and Lisa Rado. Congratulations, Dr. Speese, on an excellent defense!"

 

The Tenants are very pleased to be able to add their congratulations too.

On an unseasonably warm day in Februrary

Here's a poem I hope you'll like. It's got clouds and so do we, though ours might be a little different. And a terrific wind here, too. If you're reading this in Morgantown, you know; if not, you'll just have to take my word for it.

Anyway: clouds are interesting, aren't they? A kind of narrative, quick or slow.

The poem is by Laura Jensen, from Bad Boats, a hard-to-find-but-so-worth-it book (Ecco, 1977). This poem would also be excellent for a sound and line analysis (one of my favorite assignments, as my students know), if you like to do that sort of thing in your free time.


The Cloud Parade

In deference to the cloud parade,
the horse has shed its winter red,
stamped its last horseshoe out of the shed,
and left no forwarding address.
The heavens turn furniture,
attics and beds, men with mustaches
heels over heads; they cover the sun
to a gloomy shade,
in deference to the cloud parade.

Scarves! Echoes! Pavilions!
The meat grain in bacon, the star-stun
in roast, the bone down the well, the moon
down the wane, the smoke from the fireplace,
beautifully made,
in deference to the cloud parade.

Call for Applications: ACLS Public Fellows

ACLS Public Fellows

Fellowship Details

• Stipend: $65,000 per year, with health insurance coverage for the fellow
• Tenure: Two years; start date in mid-July or early September 2013, depending on the position
• Applications accepted only through the ACLS Online Fellowship Application system (ofa.acls.org). The system will open on January 24, 2013. Please do not contact any of the organizations directly.
• Application deadline: March 27, 2013
• Notification of application status will occur by email starting May 2013.

ACLS invites applications for the third competition of the Public Fellows program. The program will place 20 recent Ph.D.s from the humanities and humanistic social sciences in two-year staff positions at partnering organizations in government and the nonprofit sector. Fellows will participate in the substantive work of these organizations and receive professional mentoring. The fellowship provides a stipend of $65,000 per year as well as individual health insurance.

This program, made possible by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, aims to expand the role of doctoral education in the U.S. by demonstrating that the capacities developed in the advanced study of the humanities have wide application, both within and beyond the academy. Now in its third year, this innovative initiative allows talented humanities Ph.D.s to gain valuable, career-launching experience in areas such as arts management, development, communications, public administration, and digital media.

ACLS seeks applications from Ph.D.s who have received their degrees in the last three years and who aspire to careers in nonprofit administration and public service by choice rather than circumstance. Competitive applicants will have been successful in both academic and extra-academic experiences.

Finally the Fall 2012 Last Lecture is Here

The English Graduate Organization Presents

The Fall 2012 Last Lecture, by Lisa Weihman:

Irish Lesbian Terrorists!

Or, How I Stopped Worrying about Yeats and Learned to Love

The Bomb

  

Friday, 15 Feb. 2013 at 4 PM

Colson 130

Our Dancing Doctoral Students

Some of the Tenants heard a huge ruckus coming from the Graduate Student Dining Room earlier this week and, upon investigation, discovered that there was a massive celebration underway, including the popping of champagne corks and frenzied dancing, because two of the doctoral students have just had articles accepted for publication. And so, the Tenants are pleased to announce that:

 

Artist's depiction of frenzied dancing



Kwabena Opoku-Agyemang's essay, "'Rituals of Distrust': Illicit Affairs and Metaphors of Transport in Ama Ata Aidoo’s 'Two Sisters' and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s "Birdsong,'" has been accepted for publication in Research in African Literatures and should appear in the Autumn issue (44.3).

Valerie Surrett's essay, "'Always Better, Less Rude, to Talk about Things That Were the Same': The Necessity of Otherness to a Functioning Public Sphere," has been accepted for publication in a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary Thought.

Dissertation Boot Camp 2013

 

   

2013 Dissertation Boot Camps

WVU Writing Center

Boot Camp 1: May 13-17

  Boot Camp 2: June 10-14  

 

Are you in the early stages of your dissertation?  Would you like some guidance and feedback as you begin the process of writing?  If you are a Ph.D. candidate and answered yes to the above questions, consider joining us in the WVU Writing Center for a Dissertation Boot Camp.     

Participants will meet Monday through Friday from 10:00am-4:00pm (with one hour given for lunch). While the workshop is free for WVU students, participants will be expected to attend each session. Each day will be divided into three parts: 1) Topic-Based Discussions; 2) Unstructured Writing Time; and 3) Optional Peer Workshopping.  Note, editing services will not be provided.     

During the Boot Camp, the following topics will be covered:     

Day 1: Overview of Boot Camp and Goal Setting for the Week    

Day 2: The Proposal/Prospectus     

Day 3: The Literature Review     

Day 4: Balancing Writing and Researching     

Day 5: Planning the Rest of Your Summer 

 

Space is limited to 10 participants per Boot Camp (May 13-17 or June 10-14).

       

For more information, contact WVU Writing Center Coordinator, Nathalie Singh-Corcoran (Nathalie.Singh-Corcoran@mail.wvu.edu). To register for the event, contact James Holsinger (jholsing@mix.wvu.edu).

CFP: Queer Theoretical Essays on Revising the Victorian Family

Queer Relations:  Revising the Victorian Family (proposal deadline: 1 April. 2013)

Dr Duc Dau, University of Western Australia and Dr Shale Preston, Macquarie University

contact email: duc.dau@uwa.edu.au and shale.preston@mq.edu.au

We invite contributions for an upcoming volume of essays which examine the Victorian family through a queer lens. 

The Victorian family can be taken to mean the nineteenth-century nuclear or extended family, or the family of texts associated with the Victorian period (e.g. nineteenth-century and neo-Victorian texts).  We are looking for exciting interrogations into the discourse of the Victorian family.  These interrogations can focus on untraditional familial arrangements, non-normative relationships, polyamorous attachments, queer families in disparate communities/locations (e.g. circuses, theaters, brothels, homes for fallen women, monasteries, convents, hospitals, schools, ships, military units, thieving fraternities), homosexual/homosocial utopias, erotic fantasy worlds (e.g. fairy, goblin), etc. 

Alternatively, the interrogations can examine queer 20^th and 21^st century texts/domains/mediums that allude to or mash-up the Victorian family of texts (canonical or otherwise) or seek to revise traditional notions of the Victorian family.  Focus areas can include but are not limited to the novel, poetry, film, television, theater, auto/biography, periodicals, the internet, steampunk etc.

Please send 300 word proposals and a two-page CV to the editors Dr Duc Dau at duc.dau@uwa.edu.au and Dr Shale Preston at shale.preston@mq.edu.au by 1 April 2013.

Completed chapters of 6,000 - 8,000 words will be due by 1 February 2014.

Two poems for a Friday

These are from Charles Wright who just won the Bollingen Prize, which goes to "an American poet for the best book published during the last two years or for a lifetime achievement in poetry."

And the prize? $150,000.

Nice, huh?

From Sestets (FSG, 2009), these poems, with Wright's characteristic "low rider" line, just might get you thinking, on a snowy Friday, about the math of that kind of money, about a lifetime and its work.



Homage to What's-His-Name

Ah, description, of all the arts the least appreciated.
Well, it's just this and it's just that,
                                                       someone will point out.
Exactly. It's just this and it's just that and nothing other.

From landscape to unsuppressed conjunction, it's only itself.
No missteps, no misreading.
                                               And what's more metaphysical than that,
The world in its proper posture, on all fours, drinking the sweet water?



Tutti Frutti

"A-wop-bop-a-loo-lop a-lop-bam-boo,"
                                                                 Little Richard in full gear—
What could be better than that?
Not much that I know of, at least not in my green time.

It's hard, O, my, it is hard,
To find a sustainable ecstasy, and make it endure.
Detail, detail, detail—God and the Devil
                                                                 hang side by side between each break.