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The English Department wishes everyone a safe and happy holiday. As the students depart for winter break, the department blog is also taking a short hiatus. We will be back online with our weekly Sunday posts (and an all new lay-out!) starting January 4, 2009.
Until then, we leave with you a classic holiday poem: Robert Burns’ “Auld Lang Syne.”
SHOULD auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to min’?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And days o’ lang syne?
We twa hae rin about the braes,
And pu’d the gowans [...]
In what follows, Ph.D. candidate Natalia Cecire offers what she calls an “idiosyncratic list of recent (i.e. from the last ten years) children’s fiction that I’ve enjoyed, with a bias toward fantasy.” Natalia is the co-founder of the Children’s Literature Working Group and offers these recommendations as suggestions either to get your young niece or nephew into good but entertaining reading or to access your own inner child-reader.
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M.T. Anderson, The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation. Volume I: The Pox Party. Candlewick, 2006.
In colonial America, a boy grows up surrounded by scholars, trained extensively in Greek and Latin but unaware of his own origins. The outbreak of revolution leads to disturbing revelations about Octavian and his mother. [...]
The following is an account, written by first-year student Marsha Polovets, about the Freshman Seminar she took this semester. Freshman and Sophomore seminars are one-credit courses given by a faculty member to a small group of lower-division students to explore a scholarly topic of mutual interest together. Marsha has been enrolled in Professor Katherine Snyder’s “Rethinking Hemingway” course which focused on gender issues and the way they have reinvigorated Hemingway studies over the past two decades.***
On the first day of class, Professor Snyder asked the students to list what images or words we associated with this iconic author. The entries on the board quickly piled up: “expatriate,” “fishing,” “war,” “journalist,” “bullfighting,” “stoicism,” “alcoholic,” and so on. Many answers flashed through [...]
PASSED FROM ONE MOUTH TO ANOTHER.*
(a poetry event featuring UCB grad students)
Cecil Giscombe’s English 243 class presents an evening of poetry and song along with food prepared by the poets.
Graduate students Anthony Bello, Rachel Carden, Rebecca Gaydos, Nikhil Govind, Mariah Hamilton, Charity Ketz, Gillian Osborne, Samia Rahimtoola, Robert Reyes, and Rachel Wamsley will read, sing, and recite.
Monday, 8 December • 7 pm • English Department Lounge (Wheeler 330)
(*from “Anthem” by Samia Rahimtoola)
In what follows, second-year graduate student Juliana Chow, one of this year’s organizers for the English Graduate Association’s series of colloquia, reports on a recent department event, entitled Modernism: Material, Spectral, Aural.
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Rubbish, refuse, trash. Noise, static, din.
I know when I go to talks, I’m supposed to be able to make sense of all the words flung out at me, that there is, subtly or conspicuously, a line thrown out to lead me out of one labyrinth and into another. As William Carlos Williams writes, “jumble is superb.”
This was my sense of things at the English Graduate Association’s third colloquium of the semester. Graduate student Kea Anderson and Professor Mark Goble each presented on modernism’s medium, whether it be sound for [...]
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