REPORT FROM THE CHAIRMAN:
THE UNDERGRADUATE PROGRAM Thanks to the efforts of the Undergraduate Executive Committee (David DeLaura, Jean-Michel Rabate, Farah Griffin, Stuart Curran, Eric Cheyfitz, Alice Kelley, John Richetti, David Espey, and Vicki Mahaffey) and of the student Undergraduate Advisory Board (consisting of 30 of our most engaged majors--the most energetic UAB at Penn by far), the Undergraduate Program is moving successfully through a second year of its Three Year Plan. During the first year, we completely overhauled our offering to the College General Requirement, a project that involved the creation of four new courses to serve non- majors and pre-majors, new courses that are already thriving. This reform also meant a dramatic change in all our intermediate-level courses--which are now much smaller and serve a more clearly defined student group (mostly sophomore and junior majors and very curious non-majors). In year three of our reform, we will focus exclusively on major advising. In the current--second--year, we are reconceiving, and significantly expanding, our offering of "concentrations" within the major. In addition to new five-course concentrations, students will have the option of choosing from among six-course interdisciplinary options, in which students are required to take three non-English department courses that are closely related to their chosen approach to English literary study. In part, this reconception of the English concentration serves our goal of becoming better citizens of the College; we attract many, many students to our courses, have "declared" more majors than ever, and want our students' intellectual experience to be enriched by contact with our colleagues across the humanities (and, as well, to share our resources with other, especially, smaller departments and programs). We are also working on an innovative collaboration with the School of Engineering. This program of curricular glasnost we hope can be used as a model for the "21st-Century Undergraduate Education" now much talked about at Penn, in which barriers between Schools and disciplines are at least not hindrances to new intellectual exploration. One new form of exploration for us is in electronic texts and communication. We won two grants last year that enabled us to wire the entire department, virtually and actually (every Bennett Hall room now has an ethernet connection). Little more needs saying about this revolution, since we are able to invite all those who read this newsletter to come across the Internet and participate. It's now the best way to find out about us and our doings (better, I'll admit, than this newsletter). Read the English Gopher and find out what we're doing, singly and collectively--events, programs, grants, publications, awards, curricular changes, new faculty, promotions, etc. (gopher.english.upenn.edu). We will add any alumnus of our program-- former faculty, former students, and "friends" of the department--to our alumni listserver (alumni@english.upenn.edu); simply send a subscription request to "english@english.upenn.edu". See you on the 'Net. --Al Filreis
THE GRADUATE PROGRAM In September the Graduate Program welcomed an impressive new class. We have eleven new Ph.D. students (including five with Master's degrees) and sixteen students who are studying for the M.A. only. Our job placement record last year was respectable given the very weak market, although we are producing superb doctoral students who deserve better. Five of our Ph.D. students found tenure-track jobs at fine universities, including the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Calgary, the University of Alabama, and the University of Toledo; two more accepted one-year positions. Many thanks are due to David DeLaura for his work as Placement Officer last year, as well as to Eric Cheyfitz for taking on the job this year. The graduate program is active and thriving, and we look forward to many challenging and lively discussions over the coming year about intellectual issues as well as improvements to the curriculum and the community. --Vicki Mahaffey
THE HONORS PROGRAM The department graduated eight students with honors in 1994, their projects ranging from a tracing of the Arthurian tradition through medieval and early renaissance literature to a study of the heroine figure in contemporary African-American fiction. The Haney Prize for the best honors thesis was divided between two students, Brian Kennedy for his study of the American trials of Ulysses and Tropic of Cancer, and Jennifer Snead for her thesis on Emily Dickinson and the gendering of landscape in 19th-century American culture. The award was presented to Brian and Jennifer at the department's annual party for graduating majors. The junior honors seminar in spring 1994 was the first course in the department to be conducted entirely in a computerized classroom. Apart from learning to do traditional library research, students became adept at conducting research via online resources at Penn and on the Internet. They submitted most of their written work electronically, as well as feedback and criticism of each other's work. Four of the students from this seminar, as well as two creative writers, are enrolled in the 1994-95 Honors Program. --Jim English
THE THEATRE ARTS PROGRAM: The Theatre Arts program continues as an interdepartmental undergraduate major, governed by a faculty committee drawing heavily upon English Department faculty, including Rebecca Bushnell, Lynda Hart, Phyllis Rackin, and Cary M. Mazer. This year's production season consists of The Glass Bead Game adapted (from Hermann Hesse's Magister Ludi) and directed by Theatre Arts Lecturer Edward Isser (which toured the Edinburgh Fringe Festival last summer); A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare, directed by Psychology Professor Henry Gleitman; Miss Julie by August Strindberg, directed by Cary M. Mazer (which serves as the acting-thesis project for senior Theatre Arts majors); a production, which will tour to Edinburgh next summer, directed by Theatre Arts Lecturer James F. Schlatter; and several student directing-thesis productions, including two original performance pieces, and Six Degress of Separation by John Guare. --Cary Mazer
THE CREATIVE WRITING PROGRAM Our large undergraduate program thrives, with over 40 English majors now concentrating in creative writing and taking courses of instruction in fiction and advanced fiction, poetry, playwriting, screenwriting, writing for children, and creative non-fiction. We are pleased that this year, three alumni of this program have published first books: Jennifer Egan her first novel, and Michael Jennings and Jay Rogoff their first collections of poetry. Our small graduate program continues to provide candidates with a rigorous academic curriculum as well as instruction in writing fiction and poetry. Visiting writers this year included the poet Bruce Weigl, National Book Award nominee Margaret Gibson, Pulitzer Prize winner Louise Gluck, poet and post-modern theorist Charles Bernstein, and novelists/poets Richard Elman and Robert Gluck. We were also fortunate to have on our campus both Allen Ginsberg and Robert Creeley during an exciting three-day conference on radical writing. --Gregory Djanikian
THE FRESHMAN ENGLISH PROGRAM The academic year 1993-94 was the first year of the College Writing Requirement. About two-thirds of the writing courses were taught in the Freshman English Program, and about one-third in other departments like History, Sociology, Philosophy, History and Sociology of Science, and Art History. Three graduate students in the department won the Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching: Alison Chapman, Vic Tully, and Elizabeth Yukins. Two sections of the English 800 graduate course for first-year teachers are being taught this year: "Dialogue and Revision in African-American Narrative" by Herman Beavers and "Sex, Violence, and Women in Medieval Culture" by David Boyd. Approximately 200 students are enrolled in freshman versions of these courses. --David Espey
WRITING ACROSS THE UNIVERSITY Now that Penn's new writing requirement is a year old, students are starting to take the variety of writing seminars we offer for granted. Writing courses in subjects such as "Writing About Gender and Culture" (Folklore), "Writing About Moral Issues" (Philosophy), and "Writing About Science and Society" (History and Sociology of Science) have found a receptive audience. In all our classes students practice argumentation as well as critical reading of text and upgrade their research skills. So far we're very pleased with the results of the new program. --Peshe Kuriloff
KING'S COLLEGE PROGRAM In 1993-94, 22 Penn students were at King's College London as part of this programme for part or all of the year. Since Penn students in the programme do not receive the usual extracurricular support that they in enjoy in Philadelphia, directers have customarily provided a fair amount of extra-academic attention. The last academic year was no exception; myself and teaching assistants Lisa Freeman and Daryl Wadsworth arranged 22 events of different kinds during the course of the year. Grade inflation is less pandemic in the U. K. than it is here at Penn; indeed, it may not exist at all: consequently our students at King's do not have grades as high as a comparable group would have at home. Only about 30 percent of grades are A-minue or A; if one excludes the grades in the theatre course which our visiting lecturer teaches, the proportion is even lower, about 20 percent. The annual prize, now $100, for the best Penn student was awarded to Ms. In Young Chase, who had an average for the year of 3.78. During the year, we made some modest improvements in the funding of the program, and for the first time we have a visiting professor from King's, Dr. Rivkah Zim, teaching at Penn in Spring 1995. --Paul Korshin
PAPERS, LECTURES, ACTIVITIES, HONORS
Nina Auerbach <nauerbac@dept.english.upenn.edu>: Since returning from being a visiting professor at UCLA in 1993, two forthcoming books have been in press. The University of Chicago Press will publish my book, Our Vampires, Ourselves, in 1995, and Scribner's will publish my monograph on Daphne du Maurier in (I assume) 1995 as well.
Houston A. Baker, Jr. <bakerh@a1.relay.upenn.edu>: During the 1993-94 academic year, Houston A. Baker, Jr., delivered the commencement address and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Louisville in his home town. His essay "Critical Memory and the Black Public Sphere" appeared as the lead article in the special issue of Public Culture devoted to the black public sphere. He served as Berg Professor of English at New York University during the spring term. He delivered the John B. Russwurm Lecture at Bowdoin College and the J. Shannon-Clarke Lecture at Washington and Lee. The presidential search committee responsible for the arrival of Judith Rodin occupied much of his time during the fall. During the summer he gave the keynote address and served as a seminar leader for Penn State's "African American Voices: Language, Literature, and Criticism in Vernacular Theory and Pedagogy."
Herman Beavers <hbeavers@dept.english.upenn.edu>: I gave papers at the "Race in the Americas" conference here at Penn in September on a panel dealing with race and masculinity. I also gave several other papers this year: one at a symposium sponsored by George Mason University entitled "Dancing with the Devil in a Two-Story House: Hierarchy, Narrative, and Resistance in Toni Morrison's Beloved," one at the Frederick Douglass Centennial Celebration at West Chester State University entitled "Is There Reason to be Discouraged: The African American Literature Course in Multicultural Perspective", and one at the Toni Morrison Society entitled "The Politics of Wordwork." I also gave lectures at Sarah Lawrence and Marywood colleges this semester. My book, Wrestling Angels into Song: The Fictions of Ernest Gaines and James Alan McPherson, will be out in March from the University of Pennsylvania Press. And I have essays due to appear in three volumes sometime next year on Eddie Murphy, Charles Johnson, and Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville. And last but not least, for those of you who didn't know, I got married in May and I have spent the last six months, figuring out ways to catch up with my very busy wife.
Nancy Bentley <nbentley@dept.english.upenn.edu>: Nancy Bentley's first book, The Ethnography of Manners, is slated to appear in January from Cambridge University Press. The book examines nineteenth century novels and ethnographies as related forms for mastering social life through the analysis of manners. An article she published last Fall, "White Slaves: the Mulatto Hero in Antebellum Fiction," will be reprinted this Spring in Subjects and Citizens: Nation, Race, and Gender from "Oroonoko" to Anita Hill edited by Cathy Davidson and Michael Moon. In May, Nancy presented a paper, "Henry James and the Equivocation of Culture," at the Harvard Center for Literary and Cultural Studies. A paper presented in October for the American Studies Association Conference was entitled "Reform and Regionalism: Is the Prison a Region?" In April she will present "Wharton, Car Accidents, and the Erotics of Publicity" to the Edith Wharton Conference at Yale.
Dan Bivona <dbivona@@dept.english.upenn.edu>: Dan Bivona completed his second book, Imperial Agency: Bureaucratic Discipline and European Subjects, this year. It is currently being read by Stanford University Press. He is now beginning a study of Victorian middle class conceptions of the urban poor. He delivered papers in 1994 on Henry M. Stanley, at the INCS conference at William and Mary, and on T. E. Lawrence, at the Semiotics Association conference in Philadelphia. His review of N. N. Feltes' Literary Capital and the Late Victorian Novel is forthcoming in South Central Review.
Toni Bowers <tbowers@dept.english.upenn.edu>: Toni Bowers was invited to be the featured speaker for Women's History Month at Grinnell College, where she spoke on "Queen Anne and the Politics of Maternal Self-Representation." She was also the featured speaker at Cornell College's celebration of Women's History Month. She has recently returned from a five-month fellowship at the Huntington Library, supported by the W. M. Keck Foundation and the Andrew Mellon Foundation. There she finished a book on the construction of middle-class norms for motherhood during the first half of the eighteenth century in Britain, and began her second book, an examination of the problem of consent in coercive sexual situations. This summer, she will speak on the politics of maternity in Augustan England at the International Enlightenment Congress in Muenster, Germany. She was recently honored to have been invited to speak at a conference entitled "Going Public: Women's Writing and the Production of Britain, 1660-1745," to be held at the Huntington Library in December, 1995.
Deb Burnham <dburnham@sas.upenn.edu>: Deborah Burnham has a volume of poems, Anna and the Steel Mill, forthcoming from Texas Tech University Press.
Rebecca W. Bushnell <rebecca@reality.sas.upenn.edu>: Rebecca Bushnell will give a paper on "Agency and Nature in Early Modern English Gardening Books," at the MLA Annual Meeting in San Diego. Publications in 1994 included "Jocasta's End and the Fate of Women's Reason," forthcoming in Classical World (1994); "From Books to Languages," Common Knowledge 3, N1 (1994) 16-38; "George Buchanan, James VI, and Neoclassicism," in Scots and Britons: Scottish Political Thought before the Union of 1603, ed. Roger Mason (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994.
Gregg Camfield <gcamfiel@dept.english.upenn.edu>: 1994 has been a banner year for me, with the publication of my first book, Sentimental Twain: Samuel Clemens in the Maze of Moral Philosophy (Philadelphia, U Pennsylvania P), closely followed by the acceptance for publication of my second book, Humor in a Heartless Haven: Literary Comedies of Domesticity in 19th century America (Forthcoming, Oxford UP). I've presented parts of the new book at NEMLA, International Society for Humor Studies, and ALA conferences and am scheduled to present another piece at next year's NEMLA convention, too. I've also had an unrelated article, "Kate Chopin-hauer:, or, Can Metaphysics Be Feminized?" accepted by the Southern Literary Journal. Closer to home, my teaching has been honored by Penn's students: I received the first annual English Undergraduate Advisory Board's teaching award in May.
Diana Cavallo: Diana Cavallo has a poem, "Requiem for Louise Varese," in the current issue (Fall 1994/Winter 1995) of Confrontation. She recently read from the anthologized sections of her novel, Juniper Street Sketches, in New York at Rizzolo Soho and in Chicago at the annual conference of the AIHA (American Italian Historical Association), where she also chaired a session on the "Image of Italian Americans in Four Anthologies" that were under review and discussion. Another reading from the anthology, The Voices We Carry, is scheduled for May 1995 at the Donnell branch of the New York Public Library.
Eric Cheyfitz <cheyfitz@dept.english.upenn.edu>: Eric Cheyfitz has been working on a book entitled What Work Is There For Us To Do? Toward An American Studies of Social Vision and Social Action, parts of which have seen publication over the last few years in American Quarterly, American Literary History, and, forthcoming, in Critical Theory and the Teaching of Literature: Politics, Curriculum, Pedagogy, an anthology that will be published this year by the NCTE. He also recently published a piece on James Fenimore Cooper and the establishment of federal Indian law that appeared in the collection edited by Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease, entitled The Cultures of U.S. Imperialism. He recently joined the steering committee of the Urban Studies Program at Penn, and is also serving as Job Placement Officer for the English Department.
Hennig Cohen: Hennig Cohen, as he has since his retirement, continues to teach at Penn, this term a freshman seminar on Moby-Dick. He gave a series of lectures at King's College, London, on 19th Century American literature and the visual arts. His "Melville and the Art Collection of Richard Lathers" is published in the December 1994 Melville Society Extracts.
Stuart Curran <curran@acuity.sas.upenn.edu> Stuart Curran has followed up his edition of The Poems of Charlotte Smith (Oxford University Press, 1993) with an essay on "Charlotte Smith and British Romanticism" for a special issue of the South Central Review, the journal of the South Central MLA, focusing on the Brown University Women Writers Project. He continues to serve as a member of the Project Board and to function as section editor for literature between 1740 and 1830. His electronic edition (CD-ROM) of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which will be contextually and critically comprehensive, will be delivered to the University of Pennsylvania Press sometime this coming summer. He is also coeditor of a major group of essays on Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World forthcoming from the Johns Hopkins University Press in 1995. Within the department he has been encharged with a new Committee on Electronic Texts and Computing that is building an archive of dependable texts that, where copyright is no issue, will make such texts freely available from the departmental gopher. He continues to serve on the Executive Committee of the Graduate Group in Comparative Literature and has been added to the Executive Committee of English as well. As Director of the Center for Italian Studies at Penn, he oversees the undergraduate major in this interdisciplinary major and advises students on study in Italy. There he ventured in late-April in order to teach a four-week seminar at the University of Trento and to discover that the puritanical Council decrees of another time seem rather swamped these days by both first and last oozings of Pinot Grigio.
Margareta Degrazia <degrazia@dept.english.upenn.edu>: Two essays were published this year, "Fin de Siecle Renaissance England" in Fins de Siecle, ed. Elaine Scarry and "Soliloquies and Wages in the Age of Emergent Consciousness" in Textual Practice. An essay written with Peter Stallybrass has been translated to appear in GENESIS (as "Materialite du text shakespearien"). She is currently directing the Penn Programme at King's College, London and has a received a Guggenheim Fellowship for the following year to work on the periodization of the early modern period.
Greg Djanikian <djanikia@dept.english.upenn.edu>: Gregory Djanikian's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The American Scholar, Antioch Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cimarron Review, Gulf Stream Magazine, Negative Capability, Poet Lore, Poetry, and Tar River Poetry, and in the anthology, Unsettling America, Penguin, 1994. His third collection of poems, About Distance, will be issued in January by Carnegie-Mellon. He also was a resident this summer at Yaddo, Saratoga Springs.
James English <jenglish@actuality.sas.upenn.edu> I was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in May. My book, Comic Transactions: Literature, Humor, and the Politics of Community in 20th-Century Britain was published by Cornell in July. I continue as review editor at the electronic journal Postmodern Culture.
David Espey <despey@dept.english.upenn.edu David Espey delivered a paper on "Multiculturalism and Humor" at a conference on American Studies in Turkey in October. He also conducted several workshops on the teaching of writing, sponsored by the USIS. His article entitled "America and Vietnam: The Indian Subtext" appeared in the 1994 issue of The Journal of American Culture and Literature, published by SUNY Buffalo and Hecettepe University of Turkey.
Al Filreis <afilreis@dept.english.upenn.edu>: Cambridge University Press recently published Al Filreis's new book, Modernism from Right to Left. An essay, "'Beyond' Beyond the Culture Wars: Gerald Graff & Anti-communism," is forthcoming in Review (and is also available in the English Gopher). This year, Filreis helped organize and moderate "Howard Fast & the Cold War," Symposium on Cold-War Culture, Van Pelt Library, in March 1994. The Penn-Edison Partnership, which he founded, is now in its fourth year. He is the recent recipient of a Pew Charitable Trusts grant, for developing the new English electronic text and communications computing network.
Michael Gamer <mgamer@dept.english.upenn.edu>: Michael Gamer is the newest member of the department's standing faculty. Two articles by him came out in 1994: "Marketing a Masculine Romance: Scott, Antiquarianism, and the Gothic" in Studies in Romanticism 32:4 (Winter 1993), and "Confounding Present with Past: Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, and Gothic Politics" in Poetica 39-40: Medievalism and Romanticism. He also delivered two papers this year: "Realizing a Romantic Pedagogy: Romantic Women Writers and the Romance of Real Life" at this year's annual meeting of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, and "Picturesque Forms and Gothic Contents: Wordsworth and the Genre of History" at this year's annual meeting of the Midwest Modern Language Association.
Lynda Hart <lhart@dept.english.upenn.edu>: Lynda Hart's book, Fatal Women: Lesbian Sexuality and the Mark of Aggression, was published in July by Princeton University Press and released in the U.K. and the Commonwealth in September by Routledge. She spent most of the summer in Australia as a delegate to the Third International Women Playwrights' Festival. While she was in Australia she was invited to lecture in Sydney and Melbourne from her work in progress on sadomasochism. She has also been presenting this new work in the U.S. in a variety of venues. She has had articles appear this year in the journals Literature and Psychology and GENDERS. After a minor misunderstanding, she was awarded tenure and promoted to Associate Professor in June. She has just returned from the Sixth North American Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Studies Conference at the University of Iowa where she spoke on the topic: "Lipstick and Lawyers: Living as a Dyke in the Academy."
Daniel Hoffman: In his first year of retirement, Daniel Hoffman has found few idle hours. He has published essays on Robert Frost and Robert Lowell (Gettysburg Review), and on John Masefield and on Stephen Crane (Sewanee Review). His Form and Fable in American Fiction was reissued (University Press of Virginia), with one chapter reappearing also in Washington Irving: The Critical Reaction, edited by James W. Tuttleton (AMS Press). His essay, "Hunkering, Gross, Mystical, Nude" is in Geoffrey Sill's anthology, Walt Whitman of Mickle Street (University of Tennessee Press), and "Talking Beasts" in Critical Essays on Ted Hughes, edited by L. M. Scigaj (G. K. Hall). New poems in Atlanta Review, Georgia Review, and Hudson River.
Edward Irving <Edward.Irving@m.cc.utah.edu> Judy Moffett and I moved to Salt Lake City in August and find it a beautiful place to live. I will have a chapter on "Christian and Pagan" in the forthcoming Beowulf Handbook, and an article on the Old English poem "Advent" will appear in Anglo-Saxon England next year. I'm presently working on a paper on Tennyson's translation of "The Battle of Brunanburh" which will be presented at a conference in Manchester next April.
Alice Kelley <akelley@dept.english.upenn.edu>: During the past year I have spent most of my non-teaching time working as an advisor to students in the College Advising Office and through Freshman Advising, and as a sort of human clearing house for student issues that are connected with academics in my position as Faculty Liaison to Student Services. So I have organized and run a conference for faculty called "Helping the Student Learn: Promoting Academic and Personal Success," have served on several Faculty Senate and University Counsel committees that are addressing advising and academic policy, have published the Faculty Guide to Student Services and a series of articles in the Almanac, and have contacted dozens of students, self-referred or referred to me by faculty, to try to guide them through whatever difficulties they were facing.
Kristin H. Lattany: I spoke in March to the Dean's Colloquium at Douglass College (New Brunswick, New Jersey) about my current research, and in May was on the faculty of the Sandhills Writers Conference at Augusta College in Augusta, Georgia. An article, "The Girl with the Red Dress on," appeared in Langston Hughes: The Man and the Writer (Proceedings of the 1991 conference with that title), published by Garland.
Romulus Linney: Romulus Linney is writing a play with William Kennedy, author of Ironweed, on a grant from PEW Charitable Trusts. His play "2" played at the Playmakers Theatre in North Carolina this fall, as did "Ambrosio" in Chicago. He was made Honorary Doctor of Literature by Oberlin College in the spring of 1994.
Robert Lucid <rlucid@dept.english.upenn.edu>: Bob Lucid continues as Faculty Master of Hill House and, with David DeLaura, has been designing programs for visiting writers at Penn under the Steinberg Symposium heading. Allen Ginsberg and Robert Creeley have been the most recent guests, and Norman Mailer will spend a week in the Spring. The Mailer biography continues to be being finished.
Vicki Mahaffey <mahaffey@dept.english.upenn.edu>: During the past year Vicki Mahaffey completed a draft of her book, Shattered Images: The Sub/Version of Desire in Multinational Irish Literature. She also began a three-year term as Graduate Chair. Reauthorizing Joyce (Cambridge, 1988) will appear in a paperback edition with a new preface from the University of Florida press in January. Her article on "'Pere-version' and Im-mere-sion: Idealized Corruption in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and The Picture of Dorian Gray" appeared in a special issue of the James Joyce Quarterly on "Joyce and Homosexuality" that was published last month, and her article on "Fascism and Silence: The Coded History of Amalia Popper" is forthcoming in the next issue. She has recently completed two additional articles, "Fantastic Histories: Nomadology and Female Piracy in Finnegans Wake," which was commissioned for a volume of essays on Joyce and History edited by Mark Wollaegher, Victor Luftig and Robert Spoo, and "Waking Yeats: Female Symbols of Ireland and contemporary Irish Women Poets," which is forthcoming in The Future of Modernism, edited by Hugh Witemeyer (University of Michigan Press, 1995). In addition to working on the final revision of her book manuscript, she is doing an essay on the "Ithaca" episode of Ulysses for a feminist/historicist collection of essays edited by Kimberly Devlin and Marilyn Reizbaum, and she will be giving a paper at MLA on nomadology.
Elisa New <enew@dept.english.upenn.edu>: Elisa New's The Regenerate Lyric: Theology and Innovation in American Poetry was published by Cambridge University Press in 1993, and this semester, she was awarded a Penn Faculty Fellowship to complete The Line's Eye: Perceptual Power and Natural Force in American Representation to be published by Harvard in early 1996. An article emerging from the latter book, "Elizabeth Bishop's Creation" is forthcoming in a volume entitled The Calvinist Roots of the Modern Era (University Press of New England) and another, "Beyond the Romance Theory of American Vision" will appear in the Fall 1995 issue of American Literary History. Other articles in progress include "Bible Leaves! Bible Leaves! Hebraism and Hellennism in Midcentury America Melville's Moby-Dick" which will appear in a special issue of Poetics Today, and "The Reformation of Robert Lowell" will appear in Robert Lowell: The Critical Heritage, to be published by G. K. Hall. Papers delivered this year include a paper on Jonathan Edwards and the poets, delivered at an interdisciplinary conference, "The Writings of Jonathan Edwards" in June of 1994; a paper on Jews and multiculturalism presented at the 1994 meeting of the American Studies Association; and a response to three papers on Theoreau's Journal to be offered at the American Literature Association meeting in June of 1995.
Bob Perelman <perelman@dept.english.upenn.edu>: Bob Perelman's The Trouble With Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein, and Zukofsky was published by California. Princeton will publish The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History in 1995. "Toward a More Powerful Vocabulary: Bruce Andrews and the World Trade Center" is forthcoming from The Arizona Quarterly. His poems appeared in various magazines and two recent anthologies: Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology and From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry. He was invited to participate in a conference on language writing at the University of Southampton, gave a talk and poetry reading there and at Kings College, and readings at Cambridge, Aberystwyth, Durham, and the London Sub-voicive series; he also read at Penn, Cornell, SUNY Buffalo, Stanford, Brown, The St. Mark's Poetry Project, and New Langton Arts. He presented papers at Cornell, SUNY Buffalo, Stanford, and at the Barthes conference at Penn organized by Jean-Michel Rabate and Craig Saper.
Maureen Quilligan <mquillig@dept.english.upenn.edu>: Maureen Quilligan has just finished her last year as judge for the Christian Gauss Award for Literary Criticism given by Phi Beta Kappa; she has been elected Vice President of the Spenser Society, and has just sent off to Cambridge University Press a collection of essays she has co-edited with Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass, titled Reconstructing Renaissance Culture: Object and Subject, a volume drawn from a conference held at Penn two years ago. In the last year she has given lectures at CUNY Graduate School, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Virginia as well as at various conferences. She is presently at work on a collection of essays entitled Incest and Agency: Female Authority in the Renaissance.
Jean-Michel Rabate <jmrabate@english>: In 1994, I published 9 articles, participated in 7 International Conferences (Paris twice, Miami, Edmonton, New York, Genoa, Buenos Aires) and organized with N. Shawcross and C. Saper an International Conference on Roland Barthes ("After Roland Barthes"), accompanied by a photography exhibition at the I.C.A. ("Camera Lucida") at the University of Pennsylvania. The conference proceedings will be published under the title of Roland Barthes and the Arts of Seeing, a collection of essays I am just now editing. I also completed the typescript of a book, Ghosts of Modernity, to be published in 1995 by the University of Florida Press.
Phyllis Rackin <prackin@dept.english.upenn.edu>: I'm currently a Trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America, and a member of the Executive Committee of the MLA Shakespeare Division. In May, 1994, I was inducted into the Douglass Society at Douglass College of Rutgers University. This spring I'll be teaching a seminar at the Folger Institute in Washington D.C. on the cultural implications of cross-dressing in plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. I'll also be giving the Shakespeare's birthday lecture at the Folger. I continue to serve on the editorial boards of SEL and WEVSARA: Selected Papers. Also this spring, I'll be a featured speaker at the Ohio Shakespeare Conference and at a conference entitled "`Wretched Plays' and `Miserable Fragments': Exploring the Dark Corners of the Shakespearean Canon." I'll also be lecturing at Northwestern University and at the University of Maryland. Publications this year: "Foreign Country: The Place of Women and Sexuality in Shakespeare's Historical World," in Enclosure Acts: Sexuality Property and Culture in Early Modern England, ed. John Michael Archer and Richard Burt (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 68-95.
Deborah Rossen-Knill <drossen@linc.cis.upenn.edu>: Deborah Rossen-Knill is completing a series of articles which investigates how fictional dialogue works to enliven and develop characters. The first in this series, "Toward a Pragmatics for Literary Interpretation"(Poetics 22 [1994]), evaluates theories of language use for their ability to describe dialogue in a way which is useful to literary studies. Subsequent papers develop and apply an interdisciplinary model of dialogue in fiction which is sensitive to characters as unique individuals and social beings. In "The Pragmatics of Verbal Parody," they draw from Bakhtin' s literature-based definition of parody to model parody as people use it everyday. They then bring the model back to literature in "The Princess Bride and the parodic Impulse: The Seduction of Cinderella," to explain how and why the film The Princess Bride presents a story of happily-ever-after true love under the guise of parody.
Craig Saper <csaper@ccat.sas.upenn.edu>: During 1994, Craig Saper's review of Making of Exile Cultures: Iranian Cinema in Los Angeles by Hamid Naficy will appear in Sub-Stance (Spring 1994), and his review of Leo Bersani's & Ulysse Dutoit's Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais will appear in the Spring issue of MLN. He presented a number of papers during 1994 including "Detouring Orientalism: Toward a Barthesian Multi-Culturalism," After Barthes, University of Pennsylvania, April 1994; "Hot for Teacher: Roland Barthes as the Professor of Desire in the Context of the Debates Surrounding Political Correctness," Featured Speaker, "Mainstreaming 'Censorship': Academia, Sexuality, and the Celebrity System," University of Massachusetts-Amherst, April 1994; "Artisinal Invention in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Invited Guest Lecturer, Mellon Seminar in Critical Studies, California Institute of the Arts, February 1994; "Who Framed Desire? The Style of Contemporary Film Theory," Invited Guest Lecturer, School of Arts and Sciences, University of California--Riverside, February 1994; "Evidence or Allegory: Representations of the Holocaust," Invited Guest Lecturer, School of Critical Studies, California Institute of the Arts, February 1994; "Tausk's 'Influencing Machine,'" Invited Guest Lecturer, Seminar on Psychoanalytic Theories of Representation, California Institute of the Arts, February 1994. Saper also has a number of articles pending or forthcoming in 1995.
Wendy Steiner <wsteiner@dept.english.upenn.edu>: This year Wendy Steiner was named the Richard L. Fisher Professor of English. She completed a book-length study of recent scandals in the arts, tentatively entitled Art in an Age of Fundamentalism, and gave the Lee Frank Lecture in Art History at Swarthmore College along with lectures at the Art Museum of Ontario, Penn's Roland Barthes Conference, and the Princeton Center for Advanced Study. She wrote the introduction to the catalogue for Andres Serrano's exhibition at the ICA in Philadelphia, called "Below Skin-Deep," and published reviews in the New York Times Book Review, TLS, and Art in America. Steiner also designed a new course called "The Twentieth Century" whose readings and images are on the electronic gopher.
Nida Surber <nsurber@dept.english.upenn.edu>: I am a visiting scholar for the duration of the Fall Term, and have had two books come out in 1994: Gift and Exchange in the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Corpus: A Contribution towards the Representation of Wealth (Geneva: Slatkine Editions); and (a translation from English into French) Sweet and Sour Milk (Geneva: Zoe Editions). The latter is by the Somali writer Nuruddin Farah, and was undertaken partly to awaken the interest of the French in emergent literatures in English. I have been quite busy this semester, and have given three formal lectures: A Critique of Derrida's Given Time, a talk entitled "Gifts, Possessions, and Debts in Anglo-Saxon Law," and (at the request of a group of psychoanalysts from Philadelphia and New York) a Lacanian reading of Othello.
Gerald Weales <gweales@sas.upenn.edu>: At the end of 1993, after 25 years, I ceased to do theater reviews for COMMONWEAL. This year I have taken part in forums on Arthur Miller at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven and on Arthur Kopit at the Wilma Theatre in Philadelphia, and have written too many articles and reviews, the most extensive of which have been essays on Athol Fugard in Twentieth-Century Literature (dated Winter 1993, published June 1994) and on Cole Porter in The Gettysburg Review (Autumn 1994).
Siegfried Wenzel <swenzel@dept.english.upenn.edu>: Siegfried Wenzel's study of bilingual sermon texts from the time of Chaucer and the early fifteenth century, entitled Macaronic Sermons: Bilingualism and Preaching in Late Medieval England, was published by the University of Michigan Press this fall. He has continued to investigate several hitherto unknown texts that he came across in this work, which have turned out to be academic inaugural lectures and speeches from Oxford. The result of these studies will be published next year in Speculum, Traditio, and the British journal History of Universities. In late July he attended the international conference of the New Chaucer Society in Dublin and gave a paper on the function of Chaucer's Parson's Tale. A festschrift in his honor, edited by two former students, is to appear in December.
IN MEMORIAM William E. Miller, former assistant curator of the Furness Memorial (Shakespeare) Library, Dept. of Special Collections, died Tuesday afternoon, November 8, 1994, after a long illness. He was 84. Students, faculty, and other readers and scholars who, occasionally or routinely, use Furness's resources for their work on Shakespeare and theater history, all owe a great deal to Bill Miller's devotion to the care and building of this collection over many years. Dr. Miller's own Ph.D. came from Penn ('57). He worked and published on Abraham Fleming, one of the Elizabethan editors of Holinshed's Chronicles, and his work with the Furness Library took advantage of this background of immersion in the period and in Shakespeare's sources. In days before a librarian was curator of the Furness Library, and when the collection was still presided over by faculty who also served as curators, he assisted curator-professors Matthew W. Black, Matthias A. Shaaber, and Roland Mushat Frye. He trained Professor Frye's successor as curator, Georgianna Ziegler, who is now head of reference at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington. Bill had requested no burial and left his body "to science"; in accordance with his final wishes, his eyes (at least) have already gone to someone who needed them.