A BIPOC Writing Hangout will take place on Tuesday, February 15 from 7:00-9:00 pm online. Faculty of color in the English Department host this BIPOC writing hangout for Villanova community members who identify as people of color. Current students and alumni are welcome. Please feel free to bring friends to the semester's last hangout. Email Dr. Adrienne Perry at Adrienne.perry@villanvoa.edu for the meeting link.
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Editorial Staff/New Book Reviews: Elizabeth Nación, Donovan Hill, Chloe Cherry, Autumn Anderson, Juliana Peri, Adrianna Ogando, Grace Kully, Ava Lundell, Patrick Leggett, Sara Hecht, Caroline Schroder, Catherine Wood, Katie Reed, Billy Lay, Alex Marino (forthcoming).
New Poetry: Caroline M. Mar, Kamakshi Ranjan, and Sonam Tsomo Chashutsang
New Prose: Kai da Luz
Yesterday was a full moon, the first of 2022.
A dear friend who splits her time between Minnesota and Sweden wrote that Stockholm was empty today. Was it the full moon, she wondered, or was everyone in hiding—not just from the cold, but from the newest COVID-19 surge? On the phone with another friend recently, they dubbed 2022 the “junior year of the pandemic.” This winter, as the wind howls and the temperatures drop, as we check the number of cases in our counties and lay low—or maybe we don’t—it can be easy to forget that there are other meanings for surge.
What about a “powerful rush of an emotion or feeling?” A feeling like Black joy, maybe, that is fought hard for and nurtured in the face of chaos and uncertainty. Maybe that feeling is the love connecting two adult sisters in the review of Mary H. K. Choi's book Yolk. There may not be one word to describe the emotion that rushes through us as we watch a parent learning to write, practicing their alphabets, but Sonam Tsomo Chashutsang's poem “Unfinished” gets us closer. In this newest issue of Bridges there are floods of memory, the longing that characterizes nostalgia, and in Kamakshi Ranjan’s poem the warm buzz that accompanies coming home to our hive.
This issue reminds us of the need to reflect on how we label the world around us. As in Caroline M. Mar's poems, it invites us to consider naming and how the language we use demands definitions to come. "Slip knot," “good mothers,” “yonder,” or “interesting women.” Sometimes, like Kai da Luz, we have to conjure entirely new words (and worlds) because the ones we have just won’t do. At Bridges, we want to remember that reading is intimate because, like good conversation, it requires that we reach out in good faith and in anticipation of insight and connection. What about surge as the electricity of reading something that inspires or challenges? Another name for it could be connectivity, spark.
The spirit of our department is multidisciplinary, which is exactly the essence of Vagabond Multilingual Journal. Whether a student is exploring the translation of a queer Cambodian novel into English, or expressing their cultural Chicano heritage through poetry, or engaging with film criticism to explore the representations of African American societies, these interdisciplinary but committed forms of writing are what Vagabond wants to highlight. It is for this reason that the Comparative Literature Undergraduate Journal is proud to announce the return of Vagabond Multilingual Magazine, UC Berkeley's ONLY multilingual magazine (last published in 2014).
We are dedicated to fostering diversity and unity through this magazine by giving a platform to students for them to share their voices and to embrace their cultural and linguistic legacies. Vagabond will publish multilingual/multicultural creative, academic, and critical projects including but not limited to:
For more information and full submission guidelines, please visit our Vagabond submissions page. To see older submissions from the original magazine, please visit Vagabond's original website.
Submissions for the Spring 2022 issue will be accepted until February 21st 11:59 p.m., Pacific Time.
For over 10 years, the Comparative Literature Undergraduate Journal at UC Berkeley has been showcasing the best undergraduate research in literature and media from universities all over the world.
We are writing to issue a last-minute reminder for everyone to submit their papers for the Fall 2021 issue and would like to extend this call for papers to all interested undergraduates and recent graduates. We invite research papers from all those working in, around, or critically engaging with literary topics in a comparative nature. Papers in any language are welcome. Possible topics include but are not limited to:
· Papers comparing at least two authors or texts
· Interdisciplinary research engaging multiples disciplines within the humanities
· Research engaging with literary theory and schools of criticism
For more information and full submission guidelines, or to view past issues of CLUJ, please visit our website’s submissions page.
Submissions for the Spring 2022 issue will be accepted until February 21st 11:59 p.m., Pacific Time.
The VU English Program's graduate director, Evan Radcliffe, was recently profiled by the university regarding a course he put together this past fall. You can read the piece in its original setting here.
The magic of Harry Potter first flew in (on a broomstick, of course) to homes everywhere nearly 25 years ago. Debuting in 1996 with Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (retitled Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone for American publication in 1997) J. K. Rowling’s fantastical world of witches and wizards both captivated and enticed readers of all ages, assimilating itself into every facet of popular culture.
Evan Radcliffe, PhD, an associate professor and Director of the English Graduate Program, was first introduced to the series through his children. Together, Dr. Radcliffe and his family read all seven novels and discussed their thoughts around the dinner table. Now, years later, Dr. Radcliffe has crafted an English course with the specific purpose of analyzing Harry Potter through a literary lens, transposing those boisterous dinner table talks to the enthusiastic halls of Villanova University.
Although an inaugural course this Fall 2021, it is no surprise that ENG 3690 Harry Potter: Quests / Questions filled up within a day. Most seats were grabbed by Villanova seniors who wanted to take a less traditional English course; one with a modern twist that would round out their Villanova academic experience with pizzaz.
Amanda Smith ’22 CLAS, one of those lucky seniors, is an English major who entered the course primarily because Harry Potter was a “big part of [her] childhood and love for reading and literature.” While most students were familiar with Harry Potter to some degree, few had analyzed the novels as pieces of meritorious literature.
Children and adults alike have come to recognize Harry Potter as the good guy who, with help from a lively cast of family and friends, defeats evil. But as adults revisiting the series through a critical lens, students were struck by the less-obvious ambiguity. “How is it different reading the novels now than when [they were] high school students?” Dr. Radcliffe wanted to know. For many, the answer was complicated. Why is bravery, above all else, expounded and what message does that send to young children? Is it ever really possible (even in a work of fiction) to be all good or all bad? How do we develop and maintain empathy for complex characters, especially when they act outside of our own set of values?
Even J. K. Rowling herself was discussed. Her recent comments regarding the transgender community sparked debate and inspired students to ask if art can ever truly be separated from the artist? And how does one reconcile a love for Harry Potter with the disapprobation of its creator?
These questions were not easily answered. But that, according to Dr. Radcliffe, may just have been the point. “Students became more sophisticated readers and also more mature thinkers in general.”
Smith heartily agreed. “I’ve read the series six or seven times but I’m still seeing different themes [each time I go back to it].”
Sitting in on the course, there were lively debates, impassioned pleas to join one camp or another and even disagreements. But above all else, Dr. Radcliffe feels there is inherent value in studying the series.
“You see what’s involved in children’s and young adult literature. You apply reading skills to the world around us. And then you can do that in relation to books that we’re already passionate about... I’ve learned a lot myself. [It was a] very collaborative course.”
It is hard to imagine a world in which Harry Potter does not exist. And for that reason alone, there is value in recognizing what it has offered us, how it has influenced us, and where throughout life this fantastical literature has shaped us.
Time to dust off those old copies.
Professor Mullen will participate in a two day, online symposium sponsored by the Rutgers British Studies Center and Berkeley's British Studies Center on "How Victorianists (Might) Talk about Race" on February 17 and 18th. She will present her research on nineteenth-century Ireland in a paper titled, "Comparison, Colonial Unknowing, and Ireland."
The Point magazine features a conversation between Villanova alum, Jessica Swoboda, and Professor Javadizadeh, about criticism in public. In it, Professor Javadizadeh discusses his writing--both academic scholarship and his public writing.
Here's a taste:
"I’ve been thinking recently about something that the critic R. P. Blackmur said, which is that the thing that makes poetry poetry (and what distinguishes it from mere “verse”) is that it “adds to the stock of available reality.” And that feels like a sensible definition to me. I like that definition of poetry. I think that a critic, whether writing in an academic journal or whether writing in a sort of journalistic space for magazine or whatever, might help a reader see how a poem, for instance, has added to the stock of available reality. Here’s the new experience you can have while reading this poem. But I also think that the critic can, at times anyway, make their own writing do that for a reader."
Read the full interview here.
On January 20, 2022, the Chicago Public Library is sponsoring an online event featuring Professor Lutes's ongoing collaborative work to recover work by Alice Dunbar-Nelson. Registration and additional information available here. Times are in Central time (i.e. 7 pm EST).
Professor Quigley published an essay, "What If?: New Insight into the Friendship of Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot" about her research on T. S. Eliot in the Los Angeles Review of Books. She has been working in a recently unsealed archive of letters between T. S. Eliot and Emily Hale at Princeton University. In Professor Quigley's words:
"Nearly two years ago, an archive of letters was unsealed at Princeton that radically changed the way scholars understand the life and work of T. S. Eliot. Two months later, with COVID-19 numbers soaring, this long-awaited archive slammed shut again. On Monday, October 18, 2021, I was the first external scholar finally to return to those papers. Unsurprisingly, the focus of readers so far has been on the shocking relationship memorialized in the letters between Eliot and Emily Hale, the American teacher with whom he was avowedly in love. But the Hale letters contain at least one other revelation, with profound and as yet unexplored consequences for the history of literary modernism. We now know more details about Eliot’s invitation to visit Woolf on the weekend that her death was announced in 1941. She had invited him on March 8, when she felt herself spiraling into depression again. He declined the invitation due to a cold. He wrote about the coincidence of the timing in a regretful letter to Hale."
Read the entire essay here.
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| T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf |
