Anthony Faranda ('12) on Guatemala

Former Villanova English major Anthony Faranda recently published his article "Encountering Guatemala at the age of ten" in Travelmag.  He originally wrote the article for Prof. Karyn Hollis's Travel Writing course.  Click here to read the article.

Fall Reception Pictures and Remarks

Prof. Evan Radcliffe's reception remarks:

In “How to Avoid a Bonfire of the Humanities” a recent article in the Wall Street Journal (25 October 2012; p. A17), Michael S. Malone tells what happened when he invited his friend Santosh Jayaram to talk to his students. Jayaram, Malone writes, “is the quintessential Silicon Valley high-tech entrepreneur: tech-savvy, empirical, ferociously competitive, and a veteran of Google, Twitter and a new start-up, Dabble.” So Malone was worried that Jayaram might discourage students in an English class. But, as Malone writes, “Santosh said, ‘Are you kidding? English majors are exactly the people I'm looking for.’”

Malone describes Jayaram’s reasoning: “Twenty years ago, if you wanted to start a company, you spent a month or so figuring out the product you wanted to build, then devoted the next 10 or 12 months to developing the prototype, tooling up and getting into full production.” But “Most products now are virtual, such as iPhone apps,” and lots of people anywhere in the world can construct them. The most important thing happens before you built the app, because you need to find investors and partners, explain to them and to coders what you want to build, and think about marketing your product—“and you have to do all of that without an actual product. ‘And how do you do that?’ Santosh said. ‘You tell stories.’ Stories, he said, about your product and how it will be used that are so vivid that your potential stakeholders imagine it already exists and is already part of their daily lives. Almost anything you can imagine you can now build, said Santosh, so the battleground in business has shifted from engineering, which everybody can do, to storytelling, for which many fewer people have real talent. ‘That's why I want to meet your English majors,’ he said.”

Malone concludes: “Asked once what made his company special, Steve Jobs replied: ‘It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough—it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.’”

Prof. Lauren Shohet Lecture

This Tuesday, Oct. 30, at 4:00 p.m. Dr. Lauren Shohet will deliver a lecture entitled “Othello’s iPad: Editing, Adapting, Translating.” The lecture will focus on Dr. Shohet’s work on Othello in a variety of exciting contexts, including her recent task editing the play for an iPad app. Dr. Shohet is the Luckow Family Endowed Chair and professor of literature in the English department here at Villanova University.  The event will be held in the Speaker’s Corner on the first floor of Falvey Memorial Library, and in the tradition of previous Scholarship@Villanova events, it is free and open to the public.

The event is part of the Scholarship@Villanova series, a string of lectures highlighting bold publications and research from distinguished faculty members at Villanova. The library will host five more Scholarship@Villanova events before the end of the academic year.

Dr. Shohet truly works on the cutting edge of her field. Focusing on topics of adaptation, materiality, and the digital humanities, she often examines the relationship between form and history. These are subjects of particular relevance to Dr. Shohet, as a scholar of Shakespeare and Milton who often works in a digital context.

But the lecture will focus on more than just the digital; it will also examine Othello in translation, as a common component of high school curricula, and in the context of some of its adaptations from around the world. The lecture will illuminate the many lives of this classic play and is sure to inspire conversation. The audience will even be invited to play with the materials Dr. Shohet helped develop for the Othello iPad app.

Prof. Gail Ciociola and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Prof. Gail Ciociola on first seeing the 1966 film version of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?:
I had just graduated from high school in June and was spending a lot of time with friends on Wildwood's beach that summer. We were looking for something to do one night and I pushed for the Elizabeth Taylor movie playing in some rundown boardwalk movie house.  For one, I was a big fan of Taylor from my mother's uncensored habits of taking me to see everything, regardless of subject matter (see Suddenly, Last Summer) starring Old Violet Eyes.  But there was another motive, as well: I had read several accounts that this movie was even more adult and more shocking; and, thus, in a time of more closely guided morality before the advent of what we actually mean today by "the 60s," it appealed to our fairly traditional Catholic schoolgirls' desire to do something a bit daring. So we went to the 10p feature in a grateful era in which MPAA ratings did not prevent our entry and, by the end of that night, I was irrevocably changed.  Even at a tender 17 years old, I knew that I had seen something very different from every film before it, something very imaginative and very edgy.  I knew in words that I didn't have for it then that I had experienced an infinite possibility for a new order in movies and literature. And Elizabeth Taylor? She was never the same for me again.  She had become Martha forever.

Elizabeth Taylor as Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Registration

Click here to see all Spring 2013 English courses with full descriptions.

Remember to check in with your advisor before registration. If you haven’t, you run the risk of missing your registration time because you don’t have your PIN or of ending up with courses that aren’t the right ones for you.  Your advisor can best help you if you have prepared ahead of time. Before you see your advisor, remind yourself about your requirements, review the requirements you have already taken care of, and think about what courses you want to take next semester; you’re the one who finally is responsible for choosing the right courses for you. Since you probably have the choice of taking some electives, think about things like what excites you and what you wish you knew more about. Don’t be afraid to explore.

Autumn view from the 4th floor of SAC

As you may know, the department also has “A Guide to Advising for English Majors.” Click here to see the newly revised version.

Prof. Alice Dailey's New Book

From Prof. Alice Dailey:
I’m pleased to announce the release of my first book, The English Martyr from Reformation to Revolution, currently in production at the University of Notre Dame Press and due out in mid-December.  This book studies the development of English martyr literature from the late Middle Ages to the execution of King Charles I in 1649.  Martyrdom, I argue, is not a kind of death but a kind of story—a retrospective interpretation that follows a long-established narrative form.  In the Christian tradition, the ideal martyr story is one that replicates as closely as possible the persecutions of pious biblical figures, namely the Maccabees martyrs of the Old Testament, Jesus, and persecuted apostles like Stephen and Peter.  In the violent upheaval that marked the Protestant Reformation in England, both Catholics and Protestants labored to inscribe their suffering believers into the paradigm of Christian martyrdom, often under circumstances that did not match those of biblical persecutions.  This book is interested in how the martyr genre attempts to reconcile the broad range of individuals, beliefs, and persecutions seeking legitimation through claims of typological suffering.  I argue that the genre changes in response to the complex contingencies of the English Reformation and, more significantly, that the events of history are themselves shaped by the pressures of this important literary form.

Click here to see the Amazon listing of the book.

Oct. 26 Reception