In This Issue

In This Issue: Note from the Chair Professor of the Year Buzz Alexander receives CASE Award for Professor of the Year New Modernisms Five views on modernist studies today Welcome to the Department Introducing of our nine newest members In their Own Words Four recent Hopwood winners tell us what’s behind their craft On the Shelf Recent publications by our faculty Remembering the Hopwood’s 75th Anniversary celebrations & a look at Death of a Salesman Note from the Chair NOTE FROM THE CHAIR

Greetings from the Chair! 2007 Henry Russel Award in recognition of her We’re well enmeshed in the fall term, teaching “exceptional scholarship and conspicuous ability as a in excess of 6000 students in courses ranging from teacher”—one of the highest honors the University freshman writing to graduate seminars. It’s been an bestows upon junior faculty members. Jennifer exciting fall in many ways, especially since we’ve just Lutman received the Outstanding Graduate Student welcomed nine new faculty members, about whom Instructor Award for 2006 from Rackham, having you can read in the pages ahead. been selected from nominees across the University. We also welcomed fifteen new doctoral students. This is an impressive award indeed, recognizing Just recently, Gregg Crane, the Director of Graduate outstanding scholarship, passion for learning and Studies, organized a trip for them to Chicago and teaching, and commitment to excellence in teaching, the Newberry Library. After the comfortable train mentoring, and service. Patsy Yaeger was named ride through a Michigan landscape shimmering the new Editor of PMLA, the Modern Language Sidonie Smith, with fall colors, the students arrived in Chicago and Association’s premier journal in our field. Scotti Department Chair proceeded immediately to a tour of the Newberry. Parrish’s recent American Curiosity: Cultures of Then they spent all day Saturday looking up archives Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World, as they pursued their own research projects. The won Phi Beta Kappa’s Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize The U‑M English Alumni Newsletter is published once weekend certainly helped our students bond with for 2006 as a “scholarly stud[y] that contribute[s] a year by the Department of each other, and their time spent holding old books significantly to interpretations of the intellectual English Language and Literature, University of Michigan, 3187 and papers in their hands enabled them to feel and and cultural condition of humanity.” And Buzz Angell Hall, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1003 smell the pleasures of scholarly research. Alexander won the CASE (Council for Advancement

Editor: As you know from last year’s newsletter, we and Support of Education) Professor of the Year Macklin Smith have been revising our concentration curriculum Award. Publication and Design: Anthony Cece under the leadership of Anne Curzan, Director of Those of you who tell stories of your days

The Regents of the Undergraduate Studies. During the 2004-05 year, in Ann Arbor might want to know that Larry University of Michigan: David A. Brandon we agreed to introduce sub-concentrations and Goldstein’s anthology of writings about Ann Arbor, Laurence B. Deitch also reached agreement on what these would be. Writing Ann Arbor: A Literary Anthology, came out Olivia P. Maynard Rebecca McGowan Having defined our goals for coherence within the last year from the University of Michigan Press. Andrea Fischer Newman Andrew C. Richner concentration, we turned to our gateway courses. In December we say “good retirement” to S. Martin Taylor Katherine E. White Many of you recent graduates will remember English George Bornstein, who has taught at Michigan Mary Sue Coleman (ex officio) 239 (What is Literature?) and 240 (Introduction since 1970. In honor of George’s retirement and The University of Michigan, an to Poetry) as dual pre-requisites. Our current 239 his decades of leadership in Modernist Studies, we equal opportunity/affirmative action employer, complies with all will become a revised 300-level course entitled are holding a conference that will celebrate exciting applicable federal and state laws regarding non-discrimination and Introduction to Literary Studies and will be the scholarship in the field. We offer here a series of affirmative action, including Title IX of pre‑requisite for concentration in English. Our pieces by our modernists, suggesting the diversity and the Education Amendments of 1972 and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation current 240, much loved by faculty who teach it, richness of contemporary Modernist Studies. Act of 1973. The University of Michigan is committed to a policy will become a required 300-level course. We want And finally, we have had another remarkable of non-discrimination and equal opportunity for all persons regardless all students who move into the concentration to year of fundraising on behalf of the Department and of race, sex, color, religion, creed, have completed Intro to Literary Studies, and we its many programs. Details are highlighted within. national origin or ancestry, age, marital status, sexual orientation, feel that the Poetry course must remain an essential As you know, the state of Michigan is in a financially disability, or Vietnam-era veteran status in employment, educational component of our students’ learning experience. constrained situation, dependent on an automobile programs and activities, and admissions. Inquiries or complaints Over the past year, English faculty have won industry under pressure and in transition. Our may be addressed to the University’s many honors and awards. Eric Rabkin received last Department is committed—as is the University— Director of Affirmative Action and Title IX/Section 504 Coordinator, year’s student-sponsored Golden Apple Award for not only to surviving the downturn in the state’s 4005 Wolverine Tower, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-1281, (734) his excellence in teaching. Nick Delbanco earned a economy but to enhancing the excellence of our 763-0235, TDD (734) 647-1388. For other University of Michigan Distinguished University Professorship, the highest programs, our students, and our faculty through information call (734) 764-1817. honor awarded by the University. Enoch Brater innovative scholarly and curricular initiatives. We earned a Collegiate Professorship, the highest depend upon your good will and your generosity in honor awarded in LS&A. Anne Curzan received a this venture. And we thank you for that generosity.

02 Autumn 2006 U‑M Department of English Professor of the Year

their insistence, creativity, hard Professor of the Year questioning, reflection, risk-taking, and courage. They have taught me Excerpts from William “Buzz” more than I can say, and I wouldn’t be here without them. Alexander’s remarks on acceptance of The incarcerated who have the CASE Professor of the Year Award entered our workshops and exhibitions seize upon the creative irst, I wish to thank the Carnegie Foundation for collaborative spaces we provide to Fthe Advancement of Teaching and the Council tell their stories, own their histories, for Advancement and Support of Education for this make their own images, and create award. I am grateful and humbled that you saw fit new relations and lives. Living in to select me. And I am especially grateful because extremely restricted conditions, your award inevitably recognizes that the work of the they are hungry for learning and Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP) rises out of a creation, they are full of struggle largely invisible national crisis. and laughter and risk-taking and When I came to Michigan in 1971, we had three resilience and courage. They have or four prisons and around 3,000 prisoners. We now taught me and my students more have 52 prisons and nearly 50,000 prisoners. In 1970, than I can say. our national prison population was 200,000. At the It has been my great fortune to end of 2004, it was nearly one and a half million, have been teaching all these years at a more than six-fold increase. This policy of social the University of Michigan. I have William “Buzz” Alexander Arthur F. Thurnau Professor control through mass incarceration, initiated in the had, and PCAP has had, nothing 70s, is built on a series of laws that keep men and but incredible support at every level women in prison on a scale unmatched elsewhere in in this great institution, including and especially in  www.case.org the world, to the point that over 10 percent of our my home unit, the Department of English Language For more information on the incarcerated citizens will leave prison in coffins. This and Literature, and in the School of Art and Design. Professors of the Year program policy has destroyed millions of individuals, has taken I cannot sufficiently thank the administrators, them away from their homes during the long, most colleagues, and staff who have been behind us at every  www.prisonarts.org productive years of their maturity, has doomed half moment. For more information on PCAP of their children to prison, and has destroyed selected As the quality and responsibility of our work has neighborhoods and communities. This policy is so become evident, we have been increasingly supported disguised and justified that most of the bright, eager by the Michigan Department of Corrections at students who come to the University of Michigan every level, by Director Patricia Caruso and by have no idea it exists. My teaching and the work of hard‑working, program-oriented special activities PCAP have been a limited response to this crisis…. directors, correctional staff, and wardens. …We are This is not an individual award. I am receiving grateful for this support. it on behalf of my students in PCAP and the several …But most of all I wish to express my debt to thousand incarcerated youth and adults in Michigan four of my greatest mentors, three lifers and an ex-lifer who have worked with them. It is they who have in the prisons where I have worked. They live or have earned it. lived in the desperate condition of those who may The students have entered my classes knowing never leave the walls, and they have taught me more there is something they must find out that no one than anyone what it means to be a human being. has told them and realizing that the knowledge might Their love for others, their courage, their laughter and change their lives. In the prisons, juvenile facilities, resistance, their daring to create hard and true stories, and community they encounter terrible pain and their struggle to maintain the light in their souls, their oppression, and they find wonderful creativity, great spirit are all part of who I have tried to become, resilience, and resistance. They learn the economics and they stand behind every piece of our work. Thank of incarceration. And they respond on their own you, Mary Glover, George Norris Hall, Romando terms. Some of them join PCAP. They inspire me with Valeroso III, and Sharleen Wabindato. Alexander photo courtesy of CASE

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technology, war, racial violence, migration, and immigration: in short, to the array of epochal changes we call modernity. Broadening the field to encompass not only literary texts and their forms, modernist studies aims to reanimate, for readers a century later, the social landscapes in which those texts took shape— and which they in turn remade. Broadening the field to encompass not only literary texts and their forms, modernist studies aims to reanimate, for readers a century later, the social landscapes in which those texts took shape— and which they in turn remade. Questions about the role of literature have remained central. How do literary texts, from avant- garde drama to widely read novels and “little” magazines, make sense of the bewildering, exhilarating array of experiences and challenges that modernity poses? How do the soundscapes of the twentieth century, from the urban street and the syncopated rhythms of Tin Pan Alley and jazz to the rhythmic hum of the industrial machine, enter into experimental poetry? How do modernist texts

Illustrations by Anthony Cece new modernisms look at newly visible citizens and subjects—African-American literary modernism—or rather, migrants and Eastern European Introduction as the organizers put it, “the immigrants, industrial workers, Sara Blair modernisms” of literary and refugees, lesbians and gay men, cultural experimentation, created veterans, shopwomen, suffragists; n 1999, a group of scholars not only by such perennial and how in turn do modernist Ifounded a professional society favorites as T.S. Eliot, James images participate in social called the Modernist Studies Joyce, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, responses to such new identities? Association. Its mission was but by a broader array of writers At one time, modernist literature to promote exchange of ideas responding in splendidly varied was imagined as willfully distant about new ways of studying ways to urbanization, proliferating from the social struggles (and

04 Autumn 2006 U‑M Department of English New Faculty Introductions commercial practices) that define poetry, poets, and the movies, on MICHAEL AWKWARD returns modernity. Now it is seen as an the automobile and the airplane to Michigan as the Gayle Jones Collegiate Chair of active participant in them—and as American cultural icons, Afro‑American Literature and Culture. Michael began his all the richer, all the more and on the male and female career at Michigan in 1986 before leaving for positions at provocative, for being so. bodies as objects of aesthetic Penn and Emory, where he To this thriving field, representation, scientific was the Longstreet Professor members of Michigan’s English study, and myth. of African‑American Literature—and we’re department have visibly While widening the thrilled to have him back! contributed. Some of our younger scope of modernist studies, Michael is the author scholars explore the relationship Michigan’s scholars have of numerous books between the experience of war shaped critical methods by and articles including in the trenches and on the home which these kinds of issues are Negotiating Difference: Race, front, and the creation of new explored. The MSA’s eighth Gender and the Politics of expressive forms (John Whittier- conference in 2007 will be Positionality (Chicago, 1995), Scenes of Instruction: Ferguson); consider links between titled “Out of the Archive”; A Memoir (Duke, 1995), the modernist novel’s exploration among scholars who have and, forthcoming, Soul of interior life and new kinds of most powerfully influenced Covers: Rhythm and Blues public spaces, e.g., the London current understandings of Remakes and the Struggle Embankment, the modern flat the importance of archival for Artistic Identity (Aretha (Andrea Zemgulys); argue for materials in thinking about Franklin, Al Green, Phoebe the importance of debates about the meaning and afterlives of Snow), (Duke, 2007). language and national identity literary texts is George Bornstein. to twentieth-century narrative In his role as President of the experimentation (Joshua Miller). Society for Textual Scholarship, AMY CAROLL comes to us from Duke Such work has developed in and in groundbreaking work— University, where she received her Ph.D. in Literature fruitful dialogue with the projects including Material Modernism: in 2004, and Northwestern, where she was a Mellon of our more senior scholars. In The Politics of the Pageand Post-doctoral Fellow in English and Latina/o Studies. addition to her acclaimed The The Iconic Page in Manuscript, Her work engages with questions of performance in the Dialogic of Difference: An/Other Print, and Digital Culture, co- context of Mexican and U.S. representations of the “New World Border.” Her essays have appeared in a number of Woman in Virginia Woolf and edited with U‑M’s Theresa journals, including Christa Wolf, Anne Herrmann has Tinkle—George has argued Signs and The recently published Queering the for the significance of material Drama Review; Moderns: pose/portraits/performances, forms (typefaces, design, layouts, and her poetry and a study of gender and racial formats, not “language” alone) to prints have also crossings as strategies of response the creation of the meanings and appeared widely, to modernity. Enoch Brater’s value of literary works. Through in journals like Talisman, Carolina epochal work on Samuel Beckett his work on manuscripts and Quarterly, and in and Arthur Miller has led to the other archival sources, George Gloria Anzaldúa publication of Arthur Miller’s has also contributed to the and AnaLouise America: Theater and Culture newly comparative emphasis in Keating’s in a Time of Change, a study of modernist studies, with recent anthology, The the cultural and social contexts work on African-Americans, Bridge We Call Miller’s work negotiated and Jewish-Americans, and the Home. shaped. Larry Goldstein has creation of modernist fiction, written widely on contemporary and on historical links between continued pg. 06  continued pg. 07 

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the Harlem Renaissance and such writers as Langston Hughes, theories. the cultural revolution in early Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, These intersecting twentieth-century Ireland. James Baldwin, and Lorraine conversations prompted the In my corner of the field—the Hansberry. In their collaborations field that goes under the rubric study of U.S. modernism—the with photographers, and their “American Studies” to a critical ongoing work of redefinition has creation of experimental and reevaluation of itself. Its very resulted in exciting conjunctions. socially conscious photo-texts, appropriation of the term Familiar texts of high modernism these writers work to invent new “American” from the rest of the are now set in fluent conversation expressive forms responsive to Americas led scholars in the with the cultural experimentation the energies—liberatory, radical, 1990s to reconsider the role of of the Harlem Renaissance; violent—of their times. Read the U.S. in the Americas in the with multilingual texts by such as self-conscious responses to spirit of journalist and critic José writers as Henry Roth and a rapidly diversifying culture, Martí’s 1891 anti-imperial call Carlos Bulosan; with traditions such participants in America’s for a hemisphere not dominated of socially conscious and popular modernisms(s) speak more by U.S. interests, “Nuestra writing. The result is a richer fluently than ever of their América” [“Our America”]. sense of the formal innovations moment, and to our own. This new scholarship viewed and the social resonances of all the U.S., controversially, both these bodies of work. My work as an empire and as a site of brings to bear on literary texts Multilingual ongoing, complex relations of an interest in visual culture, an Modernism desire, violence, appropriation, increasingly definitive aspect of mimicry, and exclusion. everyday experience after the turn Joshua L. Miller Simultaneously, race and ethnic of the twentieth century. From studies challenged Anglo- the stereopticon (a device for comparison of the course dominance by documenting the enjoying images of “exotic” places Aofferings of almost any vibrant and long-standing cultural and spectacles, including racial, English Department in the contributions and strategies of ethnic, and working-class ghettos) United States today—including resistance by African-Americans, and early film to the portrait Michigan’s— with those of ten Asian-Americans, Jews, Latino/as, cards exchanged by genteel or twenty years ago will illustrate and Native-Americans. Americans and the photographic significant changes due to Despite these substantial “documents” of Depression- multiculturalism. Why did these changes to the fields of American era have-nots, visual objects changes occur, and where do we Studies and U.S. literature, shaped social ideals, responses, go from here? one form of hierarchy that did and rhetorics, and such objects The turn toward the study not immediately come under exerted a powerful influence of transnational movements, scrutiny was the privileged status on modernist writers aiming to organizations, and contacts of English and the consequent negotiate the relationship between emerged from innovative reluctance to teach or discuss non- social challenges and aesthetic scholarship in the 1980s and English cultures within the nation. possibilities. In a book I’m ‘90s on nationalism and social The political ideology that has completing this year, titled Harlem identities. Examinations of argued for language restrictions on Crossroads: Black Writers and nationalism also led to significant citizenship (U.S. Americans must the Photograph in the Twentieth engagements with theories of race speak English) remains a potent Century, I argue for the central and ethnicity, postcolonial and issue today. Not until 1998, importance of photographic indigenous studies, gender and when Werner Sollors published practice and images to the work of sexuality studies, and globalization Multilingual America, did a

06 Autumn 2006 U‑M Department of English New Faculty Introductions collection of essays on this topic languages. In many cases, their MICHAEL BYERS, a former Stegner exist. Since then, the topic has works drew on multiple languages Fellow at Stanford University, holds an MFA from the become a subject of considerable simultaneously, creating hybrid University of Michigan (1996) and is the author of two attention, including anthologies narrative languages like books, The Coast of Good of recovered texts in non-English Franglais, Spanglish, Yinglish, Intentions, a book of stories, languages, sociolinguistic studies and so on. And I have not even and Long for This World, a of speech forms, dictionaries mentioned the vast number novel. He is currently at of Spanglish and other mixed of authors, from Creole work on a novel about the discovery of Pluto in 1930. languages. In recent years, the New Orleans to the Mexican The Coast of Good Intentions American Studies Association Southwest and in urban won the Sue Kaufman Prize has dedicated several annual communities where Chinese, for First Fiction from the convention topics to the U.S. in Italian, Spanish, Tagalog, and American Academy of Arts transnational and multilingual Yiddish—among others—were and Letters, was a finalist contexts, including the 2007 spoken, who wrote entirely in for the PEN/Hemingway meeting, whose theme is “América these non-English languages. Award, garnered a Whiting Aquí: Transhemispheric Visions Newspapers in non-English Writers’ Award, and was a and Community Connections.” languages also thrived during New York Times Notable Book, among other Readers of early twentieth- these years as the numbers of citations. Long for This century U.S. literature have long readers swelled. World was also a New York been familiar with strikingly Meanwhile, other Times Notable Book, was discomforting art, but scholarship U.S. modernists wrote a finalist for the Washington State Book Award, won the on modernism has only begun in transformed registers of Virginia Commonwealth University First Novel Award, and to address the centrality of its English, including vernaculars, won the annual prize for fiction from Friends of American transnational and translational “slanguage,” and invented idioms. Writers. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared inBest linguistic tensions. Driven by Gertrude Stein’s syntax was so American Short Stories, Best American Travel Writing, Prize the ethos of defamiliarization, distinctively odd that it was Stories: The O. Henry Awards, and several other anthologies. modernists transformed familiar lampooned as “Steinese,” though and habitual elements of everyday she enjoyed such responses, life into unpredictable and strange noting that those who derided LUCY HARTLEY arrives at Michigan forms, creating an aesthetics of her sentences were the same from the University of Southampton, where she taught from 1995 until fragmentation and mixture as they readers who quoted her accurately. 2006. She’s generated self-consciously “new” African-American writers James the author of literature for an unprecedented Weldon Johnson, Jean Toomer, Physiognomy and the age. Writers wittily re-scripted Sterling Brown, and Zora Neale Meaning of Expression existing literary genres and forms, Hurston debated whether and in Nineteenth-Century in part by resisting the expectation how vernacular speech forms Culture (Cambridge, that literary works must be written might be reclaimed from racist 2001) and numerous in one language. A wide range connotations. In the book that articles and essays. of U.S. modernists—including I am currently completing, I Hartley is currently working on a book such notable figures as Carlos argue that multilingual and about the social Bulosan, John Dos Passos, Ernest vernacular U.S. modernist and political uses of Hemingway, Langston Hughes, authors represent a neglected the aesthetic in the Henry James, Claude McKay, literary tradition, multilingual nineteenth century. Américo Paredes, Ezra Pound, modernism. Through their and Henry Roth—translated depictions of U.S. Americans, from and wrote in non-English these authors documented the continued pg. 08  continued pg. 09 

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falsity of the notion that the U.S. Bronte, George Eliot), but no men and women. Women want was or would become an English- female contemporaries. Her to write and be published and only nation. All of these novels contemporaries are T.S. Eliot, men want women to publish were written primarily in formal whom she publishes, and James them and sell what they have and recognizable U.S. English, Joyce, whom she prefers not to written. The solution isSexchanges but they encouraged readers to read. But of course she has female (II), whereby transvestism as question the presumed “standard” contemporaries: Jane Mansfield, metaphor reveals the sexual self by injecting exciting and seductive whom she greatly respects for her to be merely another costume non-English languages, vernacular perfecting of the modernist short and sexual instability enables speech, and transliterated story and whose passing at the age forms of impersonation in literary immigrant accents. of 35 she very much mourns; and style. By the time Gilbert and The flourishing of Vita Sackville-West, whom she Gubar complete Volume III, multilingual literatures in the admires not for her writing, which Letters from the Front (1994), first half of the twentieth century she finds too conventional, but which takes modernism past challenged the notion that U.S. for her sexual daring, including WWII, their project has been English was a national “standard.” her impersonation of a wounded superseded by Rita Felski’s The These authors invented new WWI soldier. Gender of Modernity (1995). narrative idioms that used the Sherrie Benstock in 1986 Women becomes gender; formal aesthetics of modernism published Women of the Left Bank modernism becomes modernity; to represent the surprisingly deft 1900–1940, a book that populates and literature becomes part of a accents of vernacular speech. The literary modernism entirely larger understanding of culture. arresting writings of linguistically with women. Some of them are Factory workers, shopgirls and experimental interwar writers writers (Edith Wharton and shoppers become as emblematic opened a wide debate over the Gertrude Stein), some of them of the modern as women writing. boundaries of U.S. citizenship, run bookshops (Sylvia Beach and Women take on the attributes national culture, and literary Adrienne Monnier), some of them of that which was traditionally modernism itself. publish small magazines (Margaret masculine, i.e., the New Woman, Our perspective from the Anderson and Jane Heap). They while woman, such as Lulu in twenty-first century suggests that know each other; some of them Pabst’s Pandora’s Box (1929), studies of both transnational live together; they write for each comes to represent a “non- and national modernisms will other. alienated, and hence nonmodern, require ever more multilingual In No Man’s Land (1988), identity” that allows the masculine conversations Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar to enter modernity. shifted the scene from the Left A gendered “modernism Bank of Paris, a community of of the margins” expands a field Gendered mostly elite expatriate American still exclusionary in terms of Modernisms women, to the trenches of WWI. class and race in order to look Anne Herrmann Their discussion of women at parallel literary and social writers in the twentieth century traditions—such as in the Harlem would require three volumes, Renaissance, where Zora Neale Room of One’s Own (1928) is rather than the single volume Hurston and Nella Larsen are Aa slim little volume in which they devoted to the nineteenth. among the most influential writers Virginia Woolf imagines she has No man’s land is the site not just and representations of New Negro female literary precursors (Jane of national armies at war, but of manhood include men-loving Austen, Emily and Charlotte the War of the Words (I) between men. This focus has also retrieved

08 Autumn 2006 U‑M Department of English New Faculty Introductions isolated texts such as Caballero: Woolf, but where Virginia Woolf’s RYAN HARTY is the author of the A Historical Novel, co-written by words have entered the household. story collection Bring Me Your Saddest Arizona, which Jovita Gonzalez and Eve Raleigh won the 2003 John Simmons Award for Short Fiction. in the 1930s and 40s, about His stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories Mexican women in Texas, and War & 2003, The Pushcart Prize XXVII, Playboy, Tin House, Ella Cara Deloria’s novel from the Modernism The Missouri Review, and 1940s, Waterlily, a retelling of the many other publications. John Whittier-Ferguson He has received fellowships life of a female Dakota (Sioux). from the Corporation of Hurston and Deloria, incidentally, Yaddo and the MacDowell studied with the ethnographer n 1937, Wyndham Lewis, Colony. At Stanford Franz Boas, while Hurston and Ithe English painter, author, University he was a Gonzalez both practiced as and editor, published his Stegner Fellow and Jones folklorists. autobiographical account Lecturer. He received his Meanwhile a “deviant of the years we have come MFA from the University of Iowa, where he was a modernism” returns to the to associate with the Teaching‑Writing Fellow. masculine modernism of Joyce greatest achievements of He is currently a Helen and Eliot and rereads it from a Anglo‑American modernism. Hertzog Zell Visiting queer perspective, to consider Its title, Blasting and Professor at the University not just the relation between the Bombardiering, evokes his of Michigan. sexes, but the male homoeroticism editorship of the avant-garde at play in the most canonical journal BLAST (published of modernist texts. A “Sapphic in June of 1914) and also modernism” rereads the urtext his time as an artillery spotter PETRA KUPPERS comes from Bryant of modern lesbianism, Radclyffe during the Great War. In his University, where she served as an Assistant and Associate Hall’s The Well of Loneliness title as well as in the text proper, Professor of Performance Studies, and Manchester (1928), to provide it with a Lewis, an exuberant satirist Metropolitan University and Swansea College. She’s new genealogy that includes a who characterizes himself as a written widely in performance studies, disability studies, and feminist and cultural theory; her books include The rereading of the censorship trial, “sardonic lion, in a particularly Scar of Visibility: Medical Performance and Contemporary fashion, the London female police contemptible and ill-run Zoo,” Arts (Minnesota, 2007) and Disability and Contemporary force—all enabling a rereading of takes a grim delight in connecting Performance: Bodies the novel itself. the art of the modern age with its on Edge (Routledge, If Virginia Woolf began most terrible failure: total, world- 2003). Author of a discussion of what it meant encompassing war: “You will be numerous essays, to be a woman writer in the astonished to find how like art editor of several 1920s, the twenty-first century is to war, I mean ‘modernist’ art. collections, she’s also won fellowships in has popularized her to the point They talk a lot about how a war medical humanities where her face is perhaps more just-finished effects art. But you (University of Texas recognizable than her work, and will learn here how a war about Medical Branch), her work decorates dishes sold by to start can do the same thing. I community dance Pottery Barn with words from A have set out to show how war, art, (New Zealand), and Room of One’s Own, “One cannot civil war, strikes and coup d’états the arts (Rhoide think well, love well, sleep well, if dovetail into each other.” Island Foundation), among others. one has not dined well.” Literary If revolutionary, even violent modernism has reached the point novelty is a hallmark of modern where it includes not just Virginia culture, if the “shock of the new” continued pg. 10  continued pg. 11 

U‑M Department of English Autumn 2006 09 New Modernisms

has long been considered an apt those non-combatants caught particularly personal, urgent way phrase for the impact of modern up in the wars’ more general their predecessors’ related attempts art, if resistances, challenges, damage to humanity—the to put their lives in order. surprises, and contestations literature of witness—was I first began teaching a are characteristic aspects of the cordoned off from those texts course in this department called cultural productions of the early that were less immediately, less “Writing about War in the twentieth century, then Lewis’s evidently affected by wartime. Twentieth Century” on September linking of art and war makes at The paradigmatic instance of the 7, 2001. Events since that day least figurative sense. Further, segregation of the modernists have unfortunately made the Lewis insists that sociopolitical from the most direct forms of teaching of the course more conflict of all sorts necessarily writing about war occurs with and more immediately relevant. shapes culture, not simply as war W. B. Yeats’s well-known decision Students come to my course becomes a subject for artists, but to exclude Wilfred Owen and with an already acute sense of as the fact and the conditions of other poets of the Great War from how war changes even aspects war change human consciousness. his edition of The Oxford book of of life—travel, reading, jokes, Some sixty to a hundred million Modern Verse in 1936. (About that fashion—that might once have people died in the world wars that great lyric poet of the First World appeared relatively unconnected bracket the cultural productions War, Yeats writes to Lady Dorothy to conflict. They seem to of modernism, “the years of l’entre Wellesley, “He is all blood, dirt, me to be newly aware of the deux guerres,” as Eliot wryly sums and sucked sugar-stick.”) disturbingly contested range of them up in Four Quartets, his Though humans can indeed meanings gathering around ideas great suite of poems of the Second be mastered by suffering, undone of human society. They are also World War. Those dead, along by trauma, rendered infantile or alive to shocking possibilities of with the wars that produced them, bestial by the horrors of war, we transformation: how skyscrapers have come to haunt the study of have come to understand such may become “the Pile,” the human modernism today. regressions as an inescapable body or a piece of trash a bomb, Though there was speculation part of experience—experience an ordinary man or woman an during and after both world wars ironically produced in the modern exalted or depraved being. about the connections between era on a vaster scale than at any Such ironies did not escape war and literary culture, and other period of history. The those earlier moderns, the though what many consider to historian Peter Fritzsche has modernists, whose works often be the foundational text of such suggestively wondered “whether speak to us now with a power analysis in the modern academy— trauma is itself a historical case, that has been renewed by the Paul Fussell’s The Great War and a manifestation of the social events of the early twenty-first Modern Memory—appeared in narratives by which modern century. Consider in conclusion a 1975, it is really only within the subjects move about in historical small handful of instances where past fifteen years or so that the time.” Far from being exceptional, a twentieth-century writer feels relationship of modern culture to the military and civilian veterans time going backward, civilization modern wars has an appropriately of violence may increasingly come undone. Here is the last scene central place in the criticism and to be seen as typical modern in Virginia Woolf’s last novel, the teaching of modernism in men or women, fractured by written during the Battle of English and American colleges exposures to traumatic experience, Britain, set in the summer of and universities. And until fairly attempting to reassemble 1939, when an English country recently, the writing by those themselves through forms of house and its inhabitants devolve who fought in the wars and by storytelling, understanding in a and the book ends in a time

10 Autumn 2006 U‑M Department of English New Faculty Introductions long before recorded history: some aspects of the world into JULIE ORRINGER is a Helen Hertzog “The window was all sky without which they came, have much Zell Visiting Professor in the Department of English. Her colour. The house had lost its to learn from the moderns’ short story collection, How to Breathe Underwater, was shelter. It was night before roads experience of the monstrous a New York Times Notable Book and the winner of the were made, or houses. It was the realities of war. Northern California Book award. Orringer is a graduate night that dwellers in caves had of Cornell University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, watched from some high place and was a Truman Capote Fellow in the Stegner Program at Stanford University. Her stories have appeared in The among rocks.” A few paragraphs Changing Paris Review, McSweeney’s, earlier, one of the characters has Modernisms, Ploughshares, Zoetrope: been reading from H. G. Wells’s All-Story, The Pushcart Outline of History (1919), and Changing Prize Anthology, The Best though she has been referring New American Voices, to this book throughout the Selves and The Best American afternoon, she finds herself, at George Bornstein Non‑Required Reading. She was the recipient of a the end of this long day, stuck 2004-5 NEA grant for her back at our primitive beginnings: current project, a novel “‘Prehistoric man,’ she read, set in Budapest and Paris ‘half-human, half-ape, roused t is after all a grrrreat in the late 1930s. She himself from his semi-crouching “Ilittttttterary period,” lived in Ann Arbor as a position and raised great stones.’” wrote Ezra Pound exuberantly teenager, and graduated We must wonder for ourselves to his friend and sometime from Huron High School. whether these stones are raised protégé T. S. Eliot in a letter to build or to do battle. Wells that included suggestions for himself, in an allegorical ghost revising Eliot’s then-unpublished story of 1937, The Croquet Player, poem The Waste Land.That offers an answer characteristic of work would add to the luster GILLIAN WHITE received her Ph.D. the time of Woolf’s novel, poised of the movement that we now in 2006 from Princeton University, where she was a between recollection of the First call modernism. For Pound it prize fellow at the University Center for Human Values. Her research is in modern and contemporary American World War and the certainty of included T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, poetry, and she is currently at work on a book project the Second: “Man, Sir, unmasked Marianne Moore, James Joyce, that explores the and disillusioned, is the same Hilda Doolittle (H. D.), William concern to represent fearing, snarling, fighting beast he Carlos Williams, and a host of “contingency” was a hundred thousand years ago. others. Nowadays the term evokes in contemporary These are no metaphors, Sir. What an even wider range of writers poetics. She recently I tell you is the monstrous reality. from African-Americans to white published a long The brute has been marking time ethnics to producers of a world review essay on Elizabeth Bishop in and dreaming of progress it has literature in English, and, as with the London Review of failed to make.” Wells and Woolf the modernists themselves, also Books. found even the most distant past involves linkages with other arts, speaking with painful relevance with popular cultures, and with to the present state of the world. political and social formations. We, in turn, as we reread texts When I first began to with a new appreciation for the study literary modernism in conditions under which they were graduate school in the far-off written, a new understanding of 1960s, modernism referred continued pg. 12  continued pg. 13 

U‑M Department of English Autumn 2006 11 New Modernisms

primarily to the group of Anglo- romantics,” and Wallace Stevens more interested in the connections American experimental writers had labeled his enterprise a “new between textual construction among whom Pound played romanticism.” and literary interpretation and such a crucial role. Because Struck by important between textual theory and the modernists had been the differences among versions of literary theory. In some ways, darlings of the then‑prominent works as varied as Yeats’s poems the editor is the first critic of a New Critical approach to close (which he revised repeatedly work, whose decisions (How does reading of literary texts, their himself), Shakespeare (whom Nella Larsen’s novel Passing end? stock stood high in the academy. subsequent editors have What does King Lear say when he The New Critical emphasis on reconstructed in different ways), dies? What is the “word known irony, paradox, balance, and the Bible (with differences to all men” in Ulysses?) set the treatment of art works (especially in composition, assemblage, parameters of subsequent criticism poems) as well-wrought urns transmission, and translation), and theorizing. Those interests worked especially well on texts and the Treaty of Waitangi (with led to staging, here at Michigan, like Eliot’s “The Love Song its three major versions, two of several national conferences and of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Yeats’s them in Maori) in New Zealand, then to editing several collections “Sailing to Byzantium,” Moore’s I became interested in the 1980s based on them, featuring a variety “Poetry,” Joyce’s Dubliners, and in the differing constructions of of scholars grappling with the other works central to modernist texts. The process of publication issues. The resultant volumes achievement. In contrast, the from manuscript to print seems include Representing Modernist formerly dominant Romantic always to involve more people Texts and Palimpsest: Editorial poets had sunk to the bottom of than the author and more versions Theory in the Humanities, co- the academic value system. of the text than one, while edited with our own Ralph I have spent my entire career print representations of authors Williams. putting together periods, ideas, themselves resistant to print Meanwhile, the formerly and social or political groups not technology (like William Blake or lionized modernists of the often associated with each other. Emily Dickinson) seem a far cry New Critics (except for Joyce That effort underlay my doctoral from the work that those authors and H. D.) had become road- dissertation and first book,Yeats actually produced. Publication kill to critics nourished by and Shelley (1970). As I worked itself involves production crews poststructuralist theory. Both on it, academic colleagues and is an inherently social act undergraduate and graduate bombarded me with questions rather than one of individual students continued to love the like, “I can see why you want to genius transparently rendering modernist poets, but too many write on Yeats, but why would you itself. Such considerations led me critics now rushed to dismiss them ever want to write on Shelley?” into archives of both authors and as “elitist” and “fascist”—charges Undeterred then as now by publishers, and then to my own so simplistic and distortive when fashionable shibboleths, I devoted construction of several editions made globally that it was hard the next decade to publishing of W. B. Yeats, including two for modernists to refute them. books like Transformations of volumes in the Cornell Yeats series It occurred to me that attention Romanticism and to arguing and, eventually, Under the Moon: to the material form of texts alongside those critics who saw a Unpublished Early Poetry of W. B. might offer a way to historicize modernist/romantic continuity Yeats published by Scribner. modernists more accurately. If that has eventually become widely As I delved into issues literary texts included not just accepted. After all, Yeats had of textual construction and words but also their physical termed himself one of the “last transmission, I became more and embodiments, those materialities

12 Autumn 2006 U‑M Department of English New Faculty Introductions could cast a powerful light on point of view. It also led to my W. B. WORTHEN, J. L. Styan Collegiate their social implications. The current project on The Colors of Professor of Drama, has joined the Department from his modernists, of course, had always Zion: Blacks, Jews, and Irish a previous position as Professor and Chair of the Department known that, and Pound, Yeats, Century Ago, which mines a of Theater, Dance, and Moore, Alain Locke, or Langston wide range of materials from Performance Studies at the Hughes expended considerable high to popular culture, from University of California, time and effort on the physical literature to film and cartoons, Berkeley. He had previously taught as Professor of appearance of their books. from Zionism to Irish and English and Professor of Our own particular Black Nationalisms, and from Theatre and Dance at the historical moment, with its poetry to the racialist pseudo- University of California, ongoing transition from print to science of the late nineteenth Davis; as Professor of digital culture, has demystified and early twentieth centuries. English and Professor of various means of transmission Our current stress on tensions Theatre, and Director of or publication and thrown their and appropriations among the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Theatre and Drama at various qualities and limitations ethnic and racial groups calls Northwestern University; into prominence. Addressing this attention to only half of the and as Professor of English issue, another national conference story; while acknowledging the at the University of Texas was arranged, with Terri Tinkle, stresses and exploitation, I will at Austin. He was also here at Michigan on The Iconic argue in the new project for one of the founding Page in Manuscript, Print, and lost connections of support and faculty members of the Digital Culture, which again mutual help as well. That offers International Center for Advanced Theatre Studies at morphed into an influential both a more accurate and a more the University of Helsinki, and has taught at the Bread Loaf School of English, Middlebury College as well. book. To illustrate the potential helpful model for thinking about Professor Worthen has lectured widely in North America of the new electronic media for such matters than the increasingly and in Europe, most recently teaching at the University literary study, I also a dozen years dated “positionality” and identity of Tampere, Finland, and the University of Lisbon. He ago built the “Electronic Yeats politics of the rapidly receding is a past editor of Theatre Journal and of Modern Drama, Prototype,” which intrigued 1980s. and is the author of many articles and several books, students and seemed innovative Looking back over nearly four including: The Idea of the Actor: Drama and the Ethics at the time, but now looks a bit decades as a publishing scholar, of Performance (Princeton UP, 1984), Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater (U of California P, 1992), quaint. I am struck by how much our Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (Cambridge As always, such work took conceptions of modernism have UP, 1997), Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance me back to literary interpretation. changed, and by how much my (Cambridge UP, 2003), and Print and the Poetics of Modern It resulted in still another book, own work has changed along with Drama (Cambridge UP, 2006). He is currently writing on Material Modernism: The Politics of them. In remaking modernism, drama and the technologies of reading. the Page, published by Cambridge we remake ourselves, and every University Press in 2001. That generation must learn to “make it project argues for the importance new.” As Wallace Stevens reminds The English Department is proud of changing versions of the us, “It can never be satisfied, the material text in materials ranging mind, never.”  and happy to welcome these nine from the poetry of W. B. Yeats and newest members of our faculty! Marianne Moore through Joyce’s Ulysses and a range of works from the Harlem Renaissance like the  www.lsa.umich.edu/english/faculty New Negro anthology which had For more information on our all our faculty, in addition to the nine members introduced here, rarely been studied from that please visit the English Department website.

U‑M Department of English Autumn 2006 13 In their Own Words

People who read my work, read were the Greek tragedies and and who don’t know me very well, the poetry of Larkin and Jarrell. often seem surprised to discover The humor there is scary—the I’m not a particularly morbid or best kind of humor. My mother grief-stricken person. At a reading was a funny, optimistic person, once, my husband overheard one but she never read me any woman say to another, “I didn’t prettified fairytales. I never heard expect her to be such a happy how the pigs who built their little person.” But I am! Still, I’m houses out of straw and sticks inspired by solemnity to write. escaped to their brother’s brick My poems often express sorrow, house. Those pigs, in my mother’s and my novels all record either version, got ripped limb from a murder (four) or an accidental limb and eaten by the wolf. To death (one). Early works I loved to me, that was the heart of the story.

At Left: Laura Kasischke with Boy Heaven, her novel for young adults, the latest in a productive career that includes four other novels and six volumes of poetry. *At Right: Elizabeth Kostova with her acclaimed novel The Historian, recently #1 on the New York Times Bestseller List.

 www.lsa.umich.edu/english/media Visit the multimedia section of the Department’s website to hear samples of various authors, including Laura Kasischke, reading from their work Kostova photo by Marion Ettlinger

Faculty Publications (L-R): Enoch Brater, Arthur Miller: A Playwright’s Life and Works; Anne Carson, Answer Scars (not pictured), Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides (translated with preface); J. Edward Chamberlin, Horse: How the Horse Has Shaped Civilizations; Anne Curzan, How English Works: A Faculty Publications Linguistic Introduction; Nicholas Franklin Delbanco, Spring and Fall

14 Autumn 2006 U‑M Department of English Faculty Publications

I’ve been writing almost Michigan’s peerless English MFA since I could hold a pen in my program, and finally with the little fingers, and my writing support of a Hopwood Award. has always come out of what I The unexpected public success of read—mainly the masters and the novel has been a challenge as mistresses of the nineteenth- and well as a reward—I’m frequently early twentieth‑century novel. faced by readers who pick up my Right now I’m reading Hardy’s book thinking it’s about Dracula Jude the Obscure for the first in a conventional sense and are time and it has me walking into surprised to find in it a serious walls. I also write short stories, discussion of East European poetry, and essays, although the history. Actually, I find my topics rigor of those forms awes and as writer are love in its various frightens me. I prefer the forgiving forms and the human obsession capaciousness of the novel, and with history. I’m working on a I like to believe, with E. M. new novel which promises to Forster, that “Oh, dear, yes—the be equally baggy and is already novel tells a story.” I wrote The requiring considerable research. Historian first privately and for I take daily ferocious pleasure in my own entertainment, then trying to express on paper the act with help from the University of of living.

Faculty Publications (L-R): Nicholas Franklin Delbanco, Anywhere Out of the World; Laurence Goldstein, A Room in California, Writing Ann Arbor: A Literary Anthology; Lorna Goodison, Goldengrove: New and Selected Poems; Barbara Hodgdon & W.B. Worthen, The Blackwell Companion to Shakespeare and Performance; Laura Kasischke, Boy Heaven (opposite page, top left)

U‑M Department of English Autumn 2006 15 In their Own Words

Soon after The Hill Road was up. She probably immigrated published, a grandmother from in the Forties or early Fifties. I Massachusetts wrote to say that walked through that village many she enjoyed the stories, particularly times when I was young, a walk “The Postman’s Cottage.” She that lasted a few seconds. I would concluded her letter by thanking glance at the few old houses lining me for “keeping her grandfather the street, one of which, several alive, even if it’s only in a story.” years before, was a pub owned by The characters and situations the grandmother’s grandfather, in the stories are fictional, but the whose name was Ryan. For the landscape feels real. story, I needed a pub in the village. The grandmother grew up I believe I named the owner Ryan, in a rural village, in southwestern for that was quite an ordinary Ireland, not far from where I grew name.

At Left: Patrick O’Keeffe with The Hill Road, recipient of both the Whiting Writers’ Award and the 2006 Story Prize. At Right: Davy Rothbart, occasional voice on NPR’s This *American Life and founder of FOUND magazine, with The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas, and FOUND II.

 www.foundmagazine.com For more information on Davy Rothbart and FOUND magazine O’Keeffe photo by Valerie Laken O’Keeffe photo by Valerie

Faculty Publications

16 Autumn 2006 U‑M Department of English Faculty Publications

On nights when I’m struggling with my writing, rained down on him, and in his I’ll find myself all of a sudden online, googling journal he credited The Lone the title of my story collection The Lone Surfer of Surfer of Montana, Kansas for Montana, Kansas. What I’m looking for in those them, though, to be fair, he was in moments is encouragement from a stranger— such an odd, reflective state that someone’s post in their LiveJournal, a mention night, he might’ve had the same on their MySpace page under Favorite Books. It response if he’d read “Green Eggs sometimes feels like a desperate search, but just and Ham.” Still, the notion that hearing one person’s response to my book always my stories had touched this one gives me enough nourishment to keep writing. sweet, confused soul so deeply One day, doing my little Google creep, I fueled my writing for months to stumbled across the online journal of a young come. Every day I kept following Marine stationed near San Diego. He’d bought my the Marine’s journal. He traveled book because he liked the cover and had mistakenly to Germany, the Philippines, thought it would be about surfing. On one of his and then to Afghanistan. Finally, last nights before heading overseas, he’d gone for a half a year later, he quit the long, brooding, introspective walk through town, military and moved carrying my book along. At a sad late-night diner, back home to he’d read it cover to cover. Something in the stories North Carolina seemed to crack him open, and he was slammed to work as a with the full force of feelings he hadn’t really been bartender and allowing himself to feel. All kinds of life revelations to surf.

Faculty Publications, opposite page (L-R) Top: Thylias Moss, Tokyo Butter; Susan Y. Najita, Decolonizing Cultures in the Pacific: Reading History and Trauma in Contemporary Fiction; Bottom: Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo, Black Cosmopolitanism: Racial Consciousness and Transnational Identity in the Nineteenth-Century Americas; Susan Scott Parrish, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the British Atlantic World; Alisse Portnoy, Their Right to Speak: Women’s Activism in the Indian and Slaves Debates; Eric S. Rabkin, Mars: A Tour of the Human Imagination; Xiomara Santamarina, Belabored Confessions: Autobiography and Black Women’s Labor

Below (L-R) Michael Schoenfeldt, A Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets; Sidonie Smith, Before They Could Vote: American Women’s Autobiographical Writing 1819–1919; Keith Taylor, Guilty at the Rapture; James Boyd White, Living Speech: Resisting the Empire of Force; W.B. Worthen, Print and the Poetics of Modern Drama

U‑M Department of English Autumn 2006 17 Remembering the 75th

th Mendelssohn Theatre in February (directed by Philip Hopwood 75 Anniversary Kerr), a panel on “Avery Hopwood Then and Now” (with Bruce Kellner, Jack Sharrar and Jack Stanley, A note from the Director: Hopwood winner). We sponsored a series of readings by recent Hopwood winners (Laura Kasischke, Elizabeth Kostova, Bich Nguyen and Porter Shreve), a January efore the semester-long poetry reading by ex-Hopwood Committee member celebration starts to feel Alice Fulton and a lecture titled “Losers” by Charles like the receding past, and Baxter on the anniversary weekend itself. That lecture Bbefore we commence the planning will be reprinted in the forthcoming special edition of for our centenary, let me say that MQR—an issue that will feature the work of the 75th Anniversary of the Hopwood Winners since 2000 and will Hopwood Awards Program be co-edited by Laurence Goldstein and proved a full-fledged success. Nicholas Delbanco. Kathryn Beam and We did all those things that Peggy Daub of the Rare Books and we premised and promised, Manuscripts Collections of Harlan and more. To wit, we mounted Hatcher Library mounted a semester- a mini-course of Hopwood- long display of Hopwood memorabilia. related films (taught by Peter The University of Michigan Press Bauland and including The (Philip Pochoda, Director, and Big Chill, by Lawrence LeAnn Fields, Editorial) Kasdan, who came published a volume in and spoke in April), hardcover and paperback a production of The titled The Hopwood Gold Diggers at the Awards: 75 Years of Prized

One of the Many

This first-edition print of former Hopwood winner Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is just one of the many rare finds housed in the Hopwood Room. This early hardcover print cost just $2.50, features cover art by Joseph Hirsch and, on its inside jacket, a picture of the author in his early thirties. Left to right: critical acclaim on the back cover; left inside jacket; endpapers representing Jo Mielziner’s sets, to help readers visualize the stage version; right inside jacket.

18 Autumn 2006 U‑M Department of English Writing. This last was co-edited by Nicholas Delbanco, for Academic Affairs. Of the many individuals who Andrea Beauchamp and Michael Barrett. Harvey supported us in addition, I am especially grateful to Ovshinsky and Hopwood winner Oliver Thornton of Peter and Rita Heydon of the Mosaic Foundation, Jerry HKO Media produced a video “Celebrating Hopwood: May, Vice President for Development, and Margaret 75 Years of Writing Worth Reading.” Burns-Deloria, the Assistant Dean for Advancement, All along State Street banners waved; there were College of LS&A. In the Hopwood Room itself we interviews and stories in local and enjoyed the unstinting year- national media. On Friday April long help of Anna Blackburn 21, after the Hopwood Awards and Monica Buckley as Student Ceremony and the Baxter lecture, Program Assistants, of Michael we gave a banquet for roughly Barrett as Special Assistant 250 celebrants; the next day we and—of course and crucially— held a book-signing party for Andrea Beauchamp herself. She contributors to the anthology is the doyenne of the Hopwood at Shaman Drum. So elaborate Room, both alpha and omega, a series of celebrations could our continuing spirit of place. We not have taken place without worked together for nearly two wide-spread help, and I want years on the planning of the 75th particularly to thank the offices Anniversary program, and from and staff of Mary Sue Coleman, start to finish it could not have President, Lisa Rudgers, Vice succeeded without her: to Andrea President for Communication, Beauchamp, all thanks. Marvin Parnes, Associate Vice —Nicholas Delbanco President for Research, and Lester Monts, Senior Vice Provost Photo by Martin Violet for Michigan Today Nicholas Delbanco and Andrea Beauchamp sitting at the large periodical-covered table, a central, memorable, and inviting feature of the Hopwood Room.

U‑M Department of English Autumn 2006 19 English Needs Your Support

Your gifts, no matter what the amount, contribute critically Thinking about giving? to the many activities of the English Department. One by one, Your support is always greatly appreciated. alums contributed gifts ranging from $25 to $2000 for a total  Please see the postage paid envelope inside. of $28,000 for the department’s Strategic Fund. These gifts If you would like to speak to someone directly, please help support graduate students, enhance the undergraduate feel free to contact the Chair of the Department or classroom, recruit and retain our excellent scholar/teachers, the staff of LSA Development who would be happy to discuss your giving options. The liaison officer for continue our non-campus programs, and respond flexibly to English in LSA Development is Peggy Burns. Peggy’s opportunities and to budget constraints. Over the past year Helen contact information is as follows: Zell’s major gift to the MFA program, announced in the newsletter Peggy Burns Assistant Dean LSA Advancement last year, has made a tremendous difference in our recruitment Direct: (734) 615-6264 of new MFA students who are now well- and competitively- Assistant: Deb Koscielny, (734) 615-6822 supported. Adding to her $5 million gift, Helen Zell has just Email: [email protected] Department Liaison: English/MFA and Honors given an additional $500 thousand to support post-MFA Writing LSA Development, Marketing & Communications Fellowships here in Ann Arbor. The Ben Prize for outstanding College of LSA lectures was made by a group of prominent authors led by U‑M 500 South State Street, Suite 5000 alumni, Brad Meltzer, in honor of long-time department supporter, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1382 P. (734) 615-6333 Larry Kirshbaum. A major gift from Meijer, Incorporated F. (734) 647-3061 supported the Bear River Writer’s Conference, and a major gift Or, if you prefer, you could contact the gift officer from Walter H. Clark, Jr. contributed to an endowed fund to responsible for your region of the country. To learn more about them, please visit the following webpage: support our New England Literature Program. In addition, NELP http://www.lsa.umich.edu/lsa/alumni/contact/ alumni have been involved in a grass-roots calling effort to solicit gifts to endow the directorship. And gifts made in previous years to the Department and to Rackham Graduate School continue to support graduate fellowships. We thank you all. alumni giving

The University of Michigan NON-PROFIT Dept. of English Language & Literature ORGANIZATION 3187 Angell Hall US POSTAGE Ann Arbor MI 48109-1003 PAID ANN ARBOR, MI PERMIT #144