In This Issue

V OLU M E 2, N O . 1 LN A T H E A M E R I C A N L I T E R A R Y N A T U R A L I S M N EWSLETTER Found! A Missing Aspern Paper: In This Issue: We here at ALN would like to begin this issue with a tip of the cap to Jeanne Campbell Reesman, Features who organized and hosted the ALA Symposium on American Literary Naturalism that was held at Crossing Cultures New and Old: Teaching 00 Newport Beach, California, this past October 4-6, Naturalism as a Fulbright Professor in Greece 2007. It was a marvelous and inspired event, fea- Jeanne Campbell Reesman turing a nice blend of traditional three-paper panels and vibrant round-table discussions, as well as su- On Teaching Naturalism Through Film 00 perb keynote addresses by Donald Pizer and Earle Jeff Jaeckle Labor. The venue—the Hyatt in Newport Beach, California—was perfectly suited to the occasion, Before Adam and The Scarlet Plague: Two 00 and the lunches and receptions offered everyone a Novels of Evolution by Jack London great chance to break bread and shake hands with Lawrence I. Berkove other scholars of literary naturalism. It was also great to see the mix of long-established naturalism Reviving, Recovering, & Redefining 00 scholars and early-career scholars and graduate stu- American Naturalism dents at the symposium: it speaks well of the health Cara Elana Erdheim of our field and promises continued fortune for the next generation of scholars. So, if you missed the New Light on Dreiser’s Schooldays in 00 symposium, you missed a good one. Thanks, Warsaw, Indiana Jeanne, for all of the hard work. For more on the Stephen C. Brennan symposium, please see the reflective essay by Cara Elana Erdheim in this issue of ALN. Interview In your hands is the third issue of ALN. There are many fine folks who deserve thanks for helping Ten Questions with Gary Scharnhorst 00 to put this issue together, and I cannot list them all, but special thanks go to Jeanne Campbell Reesman, Jeff Jaeckle, Lawrence Berkove, Cara Elana Erd- Departments heim, Stephen Brennan, Gary Scharnhorst, and John Dudley for their fine contributions to this is- Five on Twenty-One 00 sue. In addition, my continued thanks go to Steven Frye for his help with every facet of ALN, and to Naturalism News 00 Stephen Fairbanks for his generous and capable editorial assistance. The Call of the Papers 00 In this issue of ALN you’ll find the call-for- papers for the upcoming 2008 ALA conference in Bibliographic Update 00 San Francisco. I hope many of you will consider submitting a proposal to one of the sessions. In the From the Archives 00 meantime, I hope you enjoy issue number three of Tulare Land Troubles ALN. A Fistful of Websites 00 Naturally, Eric Carl Link A LN Crossing Cultures New and Old: was “Ni,” and so on. But I was ready with my greeting of (“Hi! Good Teaching Naturalism as a afternoon!”) to be followed with the universal Fulbright Professor in Greece Greek phrase that can mean hello, good bye, or even thank you: We got a warm Jeanne Campbell Reesman welcome at the airport from Eleftheria and Stavros, but unfortunately, it turned out my On a bright autumn morning in September next attempt at Greek was “ 2006, my son John, 14, and I boarded the first ,” or “My baggage has been lost.” of several flights from San Antonio to Thessa- Pieces were recovered and returned to us over loniki, Greece, where I would take up my Ful- the course of the next week, but one bag, the bright Fellowship as a Professor in the Ameri- main one with my clothes, of course, had van- can Literature and Culture Department at Aris- ished. There were a lot of phone calls to British totle University, Greece’s largest university, for Air in London and Athens and more important- the next five months. Not only were we thrilled ly Eleftheria’s befriending of the woman in at the chance to spend time in Greece, but we charge of lost baggage at the Thessaloniki air- looked forward eagerly to reuniting with Dr. port, to whom I later took chocolates. One Eleftheria Arapoglou at Aristotle University, evening at about 6 p.m. I had tried to call Brit- who had ten years previous completed her ish Air in Athens, only to be met with a very M.A. in English on a Fulbright at my home in- brusque woman’s voice which informed me, stitution, the University of Texas at San Anto- “Airport closed.” I wasn’t convinced, but there nio. Eleftheria, with whom I would team-teach was no arguing. Eventually the airline decided a course on 19th-Century American Realism to open unclaimed bags at Heathrow. I was and Naturalism, her husband Stavros, an engi- asked for a list of the missing bag’s contents: neering professor, and the entire Arapoglou black boots, red sweater, and so on, but at the family would become our Greek family as they last moment I remembered that sitting on top of not only hosted us to seaside lunches in fish everything in that bag was a painting by San tavernas and invited us to the weeks of Christ- Antonio artist Enedina Vasquez as a gift for mas celebrations held in Greece, but also led us Eleftheria and Stavros. In an hour the bag was through those first confusing days of finding found, thanks to friendship! out where the bus stops were, how to get tick- We settled into our apartment in the neigh- ets, how to get a cell phone and internet ser- borhood of Kalamaria, a postwar landscape just vice, which were the reliable taxi companies, out of the city center of furniture and bath and, most importantly, how to order in restau- stores, balconied apartment buildings, and rants. small shops off of Odos Vasllissis Olga, a busy I had studied Ancient Greek in college and cross-town avenue, a 30-minute bus ride from used to read the New Testament in Koine campus. We met our landlady, Mrs. Greek at night. I had devoured travel books and (pronounced, believe it or not, “Skeena”), who studied Modern Greek phrasebooks for months, lived across the hall. I got to know her well in between all the visa issues and other prepara- over the months we stayed. An older lady liv- tions, coming to the uncomfortable realization ing alone, she had many woes, most of which that Modern Greek and Ancient or even Koine emanated from the direction of her estranged Greek were completely different. Not only had husband, who, she confided to me, had “the Greek, like English, undergone a vowel shift, schizophrenia of the skull.” He preferred to live but also consonant shifts. What I thought was on the nearby peninsula of Kassandra, in “Beta” was “Veeta,” Delta was “Theeta,” Nu Chalkidiki. She felt he had turned her two sons 2 V O L U M E 2, N O . 1 against her, and all of them were trying to take ly unrecognized camps outside the eastern her apartment and the one I was in away from gates of Thessaloniki. I asked her what the her, but in the end she prevailed and retained Greeks thought of their national neighbors, first my apartment, into which she moved into after about the Bulgarians on the northern border. I left when her married son and his family Her eyes narrowed. “Dey warship de Debil,” moved into hers. We attended Greek Orthodox she glowered. Hmm. I knew better than to ask Church with her and shared some meals. (In about Turks, but I had seen many Albanian Greece of course this is The Church; it was in- immigrants from the eastern border around and teresting to hear the Catholic Church described so asked about them. Her looks grew darker. as rank modernists.) Mrs. Skeena was often “Dey warship Saa-tin.” I had decided not to ask lonely; I asked her why she didn’t go out with anything else that day when suddenly she blurt- girlfriends, and she told me that in Greece a ed out, “And jour bice-president Dick Cheney, divorced or separated woman does not socialize he warship de Debil!” She seemed to hold him with married friends, and that things that inter- responsible for the events of 911. est single women in the United States are not Located on the Thermaic Gulf in northern generally available there, such as book clubs, Greece, Thessaloniki, Greece’s second-largest cooking classes, singles trips, women’s gyms, city, is a busy port and commercial and cultural and so on. Just about everything in Greece re- capital of Macedonia bordering the western- volves around the extended family, and doing most part of Greece—Thrace—renowned for without one is painful and difficult. I ended up its gold jewelry and fine cloth. It was founded sitting in her kitchen many afternoons when in 315 B.C. by King Kassadros, brother-in-law John was at school to keep her company. She of Alexander the Great, who named it after Al- would cook lunch, teaching me how to make exander’s sister, his wife Thessalia. In Roman some wonderful Greek dishes, especially times it was the capital of the Macedonian stuffed zucchini with a avgolemono sauce, fried province, and in 395 A.D. it became part of the zucchini, eggplant salad, “little shoes” (egg- Byzantine Empire.

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