ALSC Officer Contributes to National Conversation on Workforce Reduction Dec 23
New York Times reporter Matt Richtel has interviewed ALSC Secretary-Treasurer William Flesch for an article on alternatives to workforce reduction in the current economy. Speaking in his capacity as head of the faculty senate at Brandeis University, Flesch is quoted on his suggestion that the school’s faculty give up 1 percent of their pay. “What we are doing is a symbolic gesture that has real consequences — it can save a few jobs . . . It’s not painless, but it is relatively painless and it could help some people.” Read the full article here.
Call for Papers: Gulliver’s Travels Dec 16
A message from Ignatius Critical Editions series editor Joseph Pearce.
We are looking for critical essays for the forthcoming Ignatius Critical Edition of Gulliver’s Travels. The first three titles in this new series of critical editions were published this Spring (King Lear, Frankenstein, and Wuthering Heights). The second and third batches are already being edited (Hamlet, Pride and Prejudice, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Merchant of Venice, Huckleberry Finn, The Scarlet Letter, and The Romantic Poets) and we are now ready to accept essays for the edition of Gulliver’s Travels.
Essays should be written in accordance with the Chicago Manual of Style (15th edition) from a tradition-oriented critical perspective and should be between 3,000 and 5,000 words in length. Contributors will be paid 10 cents per word for accepted essays if the work is previously unpublished and a payment of $100 will be made for previously published essays. Deadline for receipt of all essays is January 1st, 2009.
Please reply by e-mail if you are interested in submitting an essay, giving details of your proposed title or thesis.
ALSC Members Selected as National Book Award Finalists Nov 6
Three ALSC members were recently named finalists for the 2008 National Book Award for poetry: Frank Bidart for Watching the Spring Festival (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Reginald Gibbons for Creatures of a Day (Louisiana State University Press), and Richard Howard for Without Saying (Turtle Point Press). Winners will be announced in each of the categories (Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Young People’s Literature) on Wednesday, November 19 at the 59th National Book Awards Benefit Dinner and Ceremony at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City. Morgan Entrekin, Sonny Mehta, Lynn Nesbit and Holly Peterson are chairing the event, and Eric Bogosian will emcee.
Please visit www.nationalbook.org for more information.
– Liza Katz
New NEH Funding for Courses on Enduring Questions Sept 29
What is the good life? What is friendship? What is good government? Is there a human nature, and, if so, what is it? What are the limits of science? Enduring questions such as these have long held interest to college students and allow for a special, intense dialogue across generations.
The National Endowment for the Humanities has recently launched “Enduring Questions: Pilot Course Grants.” This new grant program will support college faculty from any discipline with up to $25,000 to develop and to teach a new undergraduate humanities course that addresses questions like these.
The application deadline is November 13, 2008, and the sponsoring institution must agree to offer the course at least twice. For more information and instructions, please find the grant guidelines at: http://www.neh.gov/grants/guidelines/EnduringQuestions.html.
We encourage you to share information about this new funding opportunity with your members.
If you have any questions or need additional information, please do not hesitate to contact me at 202-606-8317 or lmikal@neh.gov.
A Look Back: Shakespeare After Shakespeare at the 2007 ALSC Conference Sept 23
This is part one of a retrospective on the 2007 ALSC Conference in Chicago. To learn more about our upcoming conference in Philadelphia, visit http://www.bu.edu/literary/conferences/.
This Friday-afternoon session began the ALSC’s 2007 conference on a scholarly note. Association president Morris Dickstein opened the session with a brief welcome, remarking on the partnership with the Poetry Foundation, its support of poetry generally, and how natural it was, therefore, for the ALSC to open the convention with a panel on Shakespeare, one of literature’s greatest poets. Convener Stephen Orgel then provided a critical framework for the panel’s three papers, noting his hope that the proceedings would “encourage thinking on how canons are put together,” a subject to which Shakespeare is central. According to Orgel, the “rich raw material” of Shakespeare’s work has proven “endlessly malleable” through centuries of manuscripts, printed editions, revivals, readers, librarians, and audiences. Unfortunately, Michael Wyatt, one of the four scheduled panelists, could not attend. But Orgel shared some of Wyatt’s research on Measure for Measure, in connection with the early eighteenth-century editor Charles Gildon, and Purcell’s opera Dido & Aeneas to provide the audience with a “teaser” of what was to follow.
The remaining three panelists were very much present. Anston Bosman, Amherst College, presented a paper entitled “Retouching the Lord Hamlet,” which treated primarily an early seventeenth-century German version of the Hamlet narrative, known in a contemporary English translation as Fratricide Punish’d. For Bosman, this play exemplifies what he calls “inter-theatre,” a “transcultural hybrid of polyglot productions” that features traces of earlier texts and stagings from different countries. He situates this German version of the Dane within a “tradition of hybrid Hamlets,” and his focus ultimately involves our more familiar textual “versions” of the play—the Variorum Hamlet and the 1982 Arden edition.
Bradin Cormack, University of Chicago, next argued in “Remaking Shakespeare’s Sonnets” that Shakespeare invokes an “erotics of substitutability” that privileges legal textuality, transmission, and the conversion of the immaterial into the material. This discourse, or “poetics of possession,” illuminates the various figures of ownership and inheritance in these poems, and it ensures—at least in the 1609 edition of the sonnets—that the “poems themselves do a good deal of the work of imagining their reception.” Bradin offered the memorable example of a legal manuscript featuring a “nest of couplets,” or as he puts it, motifs isolated as usable form, to illustrate the response by one reader from Shakespeare’s near future, the sort of reader already imagined in the sonnet sequence itself.
Finally, Jeffrey Knight, Northwestern University, concluded the panel with his paper “Of Shreds and Patches: Shakespeare’s Afterlife in Books.” Knight began with a simple, material question—how do we physically make, buy, sell, and read books? He considers bound, and rebound, editions of Shakespeare’s quartos and folios as his first case study, showing how modern institutions value a “perfect” or orderly collection that is often at odds with original printings of these texts and the reading habits of those who owned them. “Pre-modern books in modern archives are fundamentally divorced from original contexts,” Knight asserted. He introduced a miscellany of early modern books found in several major rare-book libraries, and showed how archivists’ efforts to bleach, standardize, and rebind ruins the integrity—the authentication and completeness—of the very “high prestige texts” whose preservation is presumably so important. These early modern books could be used as notepads, as file folders, or for the propping up of children (!), and they are all objects of “limited possession,” eventually passed down to heirs, etc. (Isn’t everything?) “Mutability is precisely what made these desirable,” said Knight, making some concluding comparisons with today’s new technologies such as iTunes and Sony Reader, which resembles nothing so much as a Renaissance commonplace book.
In the closing Q&A session, Orgel decried archivists’ habit of bleaching books; this practice values “literature” that is reflected in a “pure, pristine object,” and untainted by marginalia and other traces of readers’ histories. Dickstein quipped that we don’t want used texts, which share a reputation with pre-owed vehicles. In any case, each of these three papers was a more respectable vehicle to explore Shakespeare’s literary afterlife, and the issues of reception generally.
– Brett Foster
The text of this post originally appeared in ALSC Newsletter 14.1 (Winter 2008).
David Ferry will read at Boston University Sept 17
We are pleased to announce that David Ferry, poet, translator, and lifetime member of the ALSC, will read at Boston University’s Katzenberg Center (871 Commonwealth Ave, 3rd floor) on Thursday, September 25 at 5PM. He will be reading from his new translation of the first three books of Virgil’s Aeneid, among other works.
Ferry is the author of Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations, which won the 2000 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry and the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, as well as numerous volumes of translation.
The reading is free and open to the public. It is part of the fall 2008 Poetry Reading Series at Boston University, co-sponsored by the Boston University Humanities Foundation and the University Professors Program.
A recent recording of Ferry reading from his work is available as part of the ALSC podcast series.
– Liza Katz
Call for Papers Deadline Extended to Friday Sept 15
One seminar of the 2008 ALSC Conference in Philadelphia to be held October 24-26 has re-issued its call for papers. The seminar is “Literary Magazines: Meeting Places.” All submissions must reach the convener of the session by Friday September 19, 2008.
Morris Dickstein, distinguished professor of Theatre and English at the CUNY Graduate Center will chair the seminar. Papers should be sent to Professor Dickstein as well as to the Association’s office. Additional prospective members and current members alike are encouraged to apply.
For further information on requirements, our seminars in general, or this seminar in particular, please visit our conference website here.
– Beth Stone
Welcome Sept 10
Welcome to the future home of the ALSC News Weblog. While we get settled here, please visit our Website to learn more about us and our activities. Forthcoming events include our 2008 Conference in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, October 24-26, which you can learn more about here.
You might also be interested in visiting The Valve, a literary blog that we sponsor.
– E. Christopher Clark