New Books by English Professors

Since September, three English professors have published new works. Professor Paula Rabinowitz's American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street (Princeton University Press) has drawn praise for its passion and acuity. She was invited to write about her favorite post-war pulps in The Wall Street Journal. Fresh from his third appearance in the annual Best American Poetry anthology, Professor Ray Gonzalez published the "vibrant" (according to Booklist) Soul Over Lightning (University of Arizona Press), his 13th poetry collection. Finally, Professor Nabil Matar published his authoritative compendium of research on British Captives from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1563-1760 (The Atlantic World, Brill). Congratulations to all!

5 X Friday: Professor John Watkins

Distinguished McKnight University Professor of English John Watkins first studied at England's Oxford University when he was a young man out of Arkansas by way of Indiana University. A Marshall Scholarship recipient, he was tasked to do exactly what he loved: "read like crazy," think, and write. Watkins has been back to Oxford many times since, as an Elizabethan scholar, but is looking forward to three months there this coming academic year, his longest visit in more than 15 years. He's been invited to be a senior research visitor at Oxford's Keble College--one of three honors he won this spring, along with Guggenheim and American Council of Learned Societies fellowships. With his parents passed, he says, he doesn't go back to Arkansas; in many ways, Oxford has become his place of origin: "It does feel a lot like home." Read more.

1. You've been working on a book on interdynastic marriage in European peacemaking. What are your goals for your 2014-15 sabbatical year?
I would like to get this manuscript finished. I think everyone going into a sabbatical says that. Where it is now, I've gotten the chapters drafted, but they're very drafty chapters. One of the things that happens when you're writing a book is that by the time you finish drafting those last chapters the first ones don't necessarily fit the book very well anymore--because your central conception of the project has changed. So this is my chance to sit down, start reading--feeling desperately ill and hating everything--and writing a clean manuscript.
[In Oxford] I have all the resources of the Bodleian Library, which is like the Library of Congress: It's a copyright library; they have an incredible manuscript collection. It is one of the best places on the planet to work. The other thing of course is you become part of the senior community there. You're having all your meals in college, which allows lots of fruitful conversation and lots of interdisciplinary exchange. I know people throughout the university--both in English and in history. Keble has a pretty strong Elizabethan faculty now, so it's a good place to end up if you're doing 16th, 17th century, including good diplomatic historians, good social historians, a wonderful literary scholar, Diana Purkiss.
2. Can you give an example of something you discovered while writing this book that you'll need to add to the first chapters?
I realized that there was a Virgilian thread that runs throughout this. At the end of the Aeneid, there is one of the great literary interdynastic marriages of all time. Aeneas the Trojan relocates his people to Italy; he's told by the gods that he will marry the princess of the local tribe; war breaks out, because of course someone else is interested in her; but at the end of the day peace is made, he does marry her. And the fusion of the native Latins with the interloping Trojans creates the basis of the Roman Empire, the Roman people. That myth comes up a lot in tributes to various marriages throughout the European centuries, so I'm going to bring that Virgilian subtext out more. It's fun, because this book circles back and answers questions that I dealt with 20 years ago writing my first book [The Specter of Dido: Spenser and Virgilian Epic].
3. What do you appreciate most about Oxford?
Music, music, music. I have a real passion for early British music, modern British music: It's a great place to hear everything. It's the kind of place you can go and have an incredible conversation about Nicholas Maw or Michael Tippett; people know what you're talking about.
I love working in the Bodleian. I swear I write better there. It's a gorgeous 17th-century building with massive windows. Yes, it can get cold in the winter, but you wear gloves. I have some amazingly happy memories of reading [John] Donne's sermons, setting sunlight filtering through the glass at the Bodleian--it was the perfect place to be reading Donne since he's so death-obsessed. I think that was the best educational experience I ever had.
Another thing that I really love about Oxford is that it is walkable. Oxford is a city, but the university is the heart of the historical core, and that's manageable by foot. A lot of faculty either live in college or very close, and that allows conversation to happen. If you're going to a concert, it's a five- or ten-minute walk. I cannot wait to be back to that. You can walk to country villages by foot, with wonderful little pubs and things. If you get on the train, you can be in deep, deep, deep English countryside in no time.
This essay that I'm writing now, it began with a long walk there with a friend who's a Russian historian, and a conversation we had on why so many diplomats end up becoming creative writers--what is the link there? I'm getting an essay out of it; I'll probably end up getting a book out of it.
4. More, please, on that essay?
One of the things that can be often fun about a sabbatical year is you have a little bit of time not to deal with your central project but to think about something else that will sort of keep you going for the future. Increasingly, I'm thinking about international law. There's a standard problem in international law. It's the most basic problem you can have: Does it exist? Putin moves troops past the Eastern border, and Obama screams, "You've violated international law." But what is international law exactly? It's not produced by a legislature. It's not like there's international policing authority that can really do anything. There is the international court, but that's brand new, and it's not at all clear what its jurisdictions are.
What that sounds like to me is that the project of international law is finally a project of the imagination. The second you're saying, "Does it really exist?" you are saying, "Or is it a dream?" The argument I think I want to make is that we will be making better and stronger international law if we realize that its imaginative quality is indeed the best thing it's got going--the fact that it isn't tainted by a political process that creates it (in the way that national legal codes are), that it can actually be a place for free legal speculation.
This is why [16th-century poet] Philip Sidney is becoming important. Sidney's whole defense of poetry is: Poets are being attacked by the Puritans because they are indulging in make believe, writing things that are not true; Sidney's point is that, yes, what we write is not true, but: the historian can give you a brazen world, we can give you a golden one. In the process of imagining golden worlds, with better people in them than you will find in day-to-day experience, we can inspire everyone to be better. One of Sidney's associates was an Italian living in England named Alberico Gentili, who wrote one of the first treatises of international law. He dedicated it to Sidney. Sidney had certainly done diplomatic work. And his Arcadia, this enormous prose romance, is talking a lot about how states relate to each other, and how they relate to each other on a legal basis. So I think this is a good place to start teasing out what the role of the imagination is in the ordering of world systems. It's certainly something to keep me out of trouble.
5. What could get you into trouble in Oxford?
The only drawback is English food. I'm eating in college. Every morning will begin with the three most frightening words in the English language: "full English breakfast." The dangerous thing for me is that I actually like that kind of stuff. But you just cannot do it for three months--the way I did it for two years [while a student at Oxford]. I'm still running 5K a day to make up for what I did to my body when I was 22. Everything has a cream sauce. And the vegetables: If there's a vitamin left, you boil it some more.
It is getting harder, it is getting much harder, to find good country pub food. You know, the classic meat pie with the cold water suet crust. I actually tracked one down last summer by taking a train to Banbury, getting off, and walking five miles into the country. I got the Platonic form of meat pie. But it took work.

Creative Writing Program Spring Newsletter

New faculty member Kim Todd is interviewed in the 2014 spring Creative Writing Program newsletter, along with Q & A with award-winning alums Ethan Rutherford and Amanda Coplin. Plus news about publications and awards from faculty, students, and alumnae/i!

5 X Friday: Associate Professor Peter Campion

The new director of our nationally ranked Creative Writing Program this month published his third collection of poetry with the University of Chicago Press, El Dorado. (You can hear him read the title poem at Slate.) Professor Campion launches the book at the Sixth Annual Hunger Relief Benefit Reading 7 pm Tuesday, October 29, at McNamara Alumni Center. He will be joined by Graywolf Press novelist Robert Boswell, who has a new book himself, Tumbledown. (Plus, of course, host Charles Baxter.) "I wanted to get more voices into these newer poems," Campion relates of El Dorado; "some of them are more ventriloquial than previous poems of mine." For more about the rewards and challenges of directing and teaching Creative Writing, why he doesn't tweet, and the impact of technology on poetry criticism, read on.

1. As the new director of the Creative Writing Program, what are your goals for your three-year term? What are the best features of our program, and what are its challenges?
I think the fundamental strength of our graduate program is our ability to support and guide emerging writers through a crucial time in their writing lives. We're able to fund our MFA students for three whole years--without a "tiered," competitive system--and that makes a big difference. There's a wonderful community spirit among students and faculty here. I learn a lot myself from my colleagues, from talking with them, and of course from reading their books.
My main goal as director is simply to keep this already impressive machine in good order. I want our students to thrive. It's actually enlightened self-interest: It makes us as faculty feel great to see our students publishing and garnering awards and, most important, growing as writers.
One challenge, I think, has to do with our [graduate student-produced] magazine, dislocate. For ten years now, it's bumped along from issue to issue--nobly so. But I'd really like to see it become a more prominent magazine. I'm heartened that the English Department realizes the nature of the situation and is committed to putting more energy and "umph" behind the magazine. I hope that in the next year, we'll have a "re-launch" and really start to make a mark. We certainly have first-rate student editors on the job.
2. You are a regular (and award-winning) reviewer of other people's poetry (for the Los Angeles Times, Poetry, etc.). When the online world was abuzz over a Slate essay about writers reviewing other writers too generously (in part because of the identification of the writer with her writing brought about by Twitter) I thought of you, as you have not been afraid to be critical in reviews. What's your philosophy of reviewing, in terms of being willing to be thumbs down as well as up? Do you tweet, and why or why not?
I think the main rule for reviewers should be an obvious one: tell the truth. I also wouldn't want to review a book that I had absolutely nothing good to say about. What's more, when I'm writing a review or critical essay, I want to present my thinking and feeling about a book and not simply the gavel-clack of judgment. As someone suggested to me, it's like the old directions on math homework: show your work. More important to me than, say, Randall Jarrell's judgments on the poetry he reviewed or George Bernard Shaw's judgments on music--and, of course, their judgments are important--was the actual experience of reading them, of seeing these incredible minds in motion.
I don't tweet. My attention span is compromised enough by raising two little kids. I have a lover's quarrel with facebook. I love seeing pictures of my high school friends' children, hearing what people are up to, etc. It provides a wonderful way to stay in touch. But I dislike feeling zapped by the screen--scrolling randomly because my attention span's too shot to read a novel or even a good magazine. I'm not sure about how social media affects literary criticism. I do think that, as technology has moved undeniably forward, popular literary criticism has actually taken a step or two backward. There are so many fewer venues now, so many fewer opportunities to get paid for it than there were even ten years ago. There's a lot of free content out there, but it's not always as good as it should be; it's often not even edited. At a certain point, I hope, people will realize that they need to pay for quality, whether online or not. That's my grumpy opinion of the moment, anyhow.
3. You're teaching an advanced poetry seminar right now--is there any one thing you're encouraging your students to learn?
One thing I do in that class is present seven key formal elements of poems--action, voice, sentence, phrase, line, sound, and metaphor--in order to give the students a better feeling for how these elements work together at any given moment in a poem, how they combine and separate, much like the modes of a musical scale. There's no set method, no doctrine, not even any real rules. But these formal elements are some of the major facets of the big diamond of poetry. Other than that, I just encourage them to read, read, read--and to read mostly poems that were not written last week. Of course, as graduate students, they're already working on a high level, so I try also to attend to each of their specific ambitions.
4. You led the effort to bring poets Daisy Fried and Josh Weiner to campus for a reading on November 7. What excites you about their work?
One thing I love about both of their work is the formal range--they write all different kinds of poems; they're adventurous writers. And they both, in their different ways, let the world rub through the page. That is, their poems have real texture, flavor. They're also both superb teachers, so I'm looking forward to bringing them into class and relaxing while they work their magic.
5.What are you reading or what have you read lately that you think is great?
I've been reading poems from the Oxford anthologies of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry. Incredible. There's nothing like Andrew Marvell at the end of a long day, I tell you!

Upcoming Creative Writing Faculty Publications

Assistant Professor Peter Campion will be publishing his third book of poetry, El Dorado, with the University of Chicago Press in October. He is interviewed about the book by poet Katie Peterson. Professor Ray Gonzalez will present his 12th book of poetry, Beautiful Wall, in 2014 with BOA Editions, publisher of five of his earlier volumes. Finally, Professor Julie Schumacher just sold a novel with the working title Dear Committee Members to Doubleday. This will be Schumacher's second novel for adults; she's published five for younger readers since her first adult novel, The Body Is Water (1995). Congratulations!

5 X Friday: Professor Paula Rabinowitz

Professor Paula Rabinowitz stars in our third installment of 5 X Friday, in which we pose five questions to Department of English alumnae/i, faculty, and students. Professor Rabinowitz has been instrumental in bringing Australian National University scholar Ruth Barraclough to speak Monday, October 22, about the image of the factory girl in Korean literature. And Rabinowitz last summer published, with co-editor Cristina Giorcelli, Exchanging Clothes: Habits of Being II (University of Minnesota Press), part of a four-volume series deciphering how clothing and accessories offer cultural, political, and social meanings. More . . .

1. This summer you published the second volume in your University of Minnesota series on clothing, Habits of Being, which you edit with Italian literary scholar Cristina Giorcelli. Can you talk about the article of yours included in it?
This one is on the covers of lesbian pulp novels and why everyone always has to wear a slip in them ["Slips of the Tongue: Lesbian Pulp Fiction as How-to-Dress Manuals"]. I did research into the role of these books in the forging of an early lesbian subjectivity and culture. But also I found material on lesbian breast-binding in the 1950s and the underwear people were wearing, butch and femme underwear, so . . . you always learn something.
2. This volume also includes an essay by a former advisee, Katalin Medvedev, called "It Is a Garage Sale at Savers Every Day: An Ethnography of the Savers Thrift Department Store in Minneapolis." Medvedev, now an associate professor at the University of Georgia, earned an Apparel PhD at the U. How did you end up directing a dissertation for the College of Design?
Katalin was a professor in Hungary of Russian Literature and a quite famous radio journalist. She decided to get a PhD in women's studies and came to work with me. Then she figured out that it was easier to get a job with a PhD in design than in women's studies. So she redid her prelims and insisted that I remain her dissertation chair, along with Apparel Professor Emerita Joanne Eicher.
She is a dress historian. Her dissertation is on the use of clothing by women during the Soviet period, communist rule in Hungary, and how women subverted the constraints on them. For instance, dye lots were not the same, so in a matching outfit the skirt would be made in Poland and the jacket in East Germany, and they didn't have the same dye lot so the greens would never match. She interviewed all these women about how they redecorated their clothing. It's clothing as a site of semiotic and political dissent and discourse.
Most of the clothes that were owned by these people were burned when Hungary opened up. Apparently there's like five [communist-era] bras left in Hungary, and they're in museums--it's material culture, and it's been wiped out. A lot of her work is looking at news film to see what they were wearing. She's top-notch.
3. Didn't you have other students from Eastern Europe at that time?
Masha [Zavialova, PhD 2008] and Anca [Parvulescu, PhD 2006]; they were this cohort of brilliant women who were my students, so-called . . . all of whom knew way more than I did about everything. Anca was the Romanian translator of Gloria Steinem; Masha translated Alice Walker into Russian. They all ended up in a seminar I was teaching about materialist feminist theory. Basically what they started working on in that class became their dissertations.
4. You got an Imagine grant to bring Ruth Barraclough from Australia to speak next Tuesday Oct 22: what's your connection with her?
She had a post-doc in History and Asian Language and Literature here a few years ago and is a scholar of Korean working-class women's history. She has a terrific new book out, Factory Girl Literature: Sexuality, Violence and Representation in Industrializing Korea (University of California).
She's one of my co-editors on this project, called Sex Text Comrades, on what's called "red love": the part of the Communist Party that people forget about, which was that it was very sexually risqué in the early times. In fact the communists were supportive of gay rights and abortion in the years before Stalin clamped down. And that was central to the story of modernism and modern female experience.
And then there's the global spread of proletarian writing amongst women, which is based not on 1920s communism but rather on the very different temporalities as different nations industrialized. In Korea, women didn't start working in factories until the 1970s, but it's the same story as my story about the women in America in the 1930s [Labor and Desire: Women's Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America]. So we have scholars from all these different countries thinking about the connection between desire and proletarianism.
Fifty Shades of Red Love? You just need a good book cover.
That's easy; I have 400 of them.
5. ?
I'm working on a monograph called American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street for Princeton. In a way, that pulp fiction lesbian article was the beginning of this project. It's kind of a sequel to my noir book [Black & White & Noir: America's Pulp Modernism]. It's about the paperback revolution and the circulation of high culture as trash--in the way that Faulkner became marketed as a sex novelist after Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road was such a big hit, and they turned all these Southern authors into steamy sex writers. You have to come to my office and see these paperbacks . . . .
Alums, send us your story! Share your announcements, awards, and news.
For other 5 X Friday interviews, go to our home page.

New Book by Professor Rabinowitz

Professor Paula Rabinowitz is the co-editor with Cristina Giorcelli of Exchanging Clothes: Habits of Being II (University of Minnesota Press), the second volume of a four-part series charting the social, cultural, and political expression of clothing, dress and accessories to decipher how materials offer meanings. This particular volume focuses on the "global exchange of material commodities across time and space but also of the ideas, images, colors, and textures related to fashion." Professor Rabinowitz recently blogged about a clothing exchange in the early '70s that still haunts her: the purchase of a couture Molyneux for $25.

New Faculty Books

Start your summer reading now! Associate Professor Katherine Scheil this spring published She Hath Been Reading: Women and Shakespeare Clubs in America (Cornell University Press, 2012), a fascinating look at how book clubs provided encouragement for female literary education during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries--and a path into public life. This is Professor Scheil's third book. In May, Professor Julie Schumacher publishes her fifth book for younger readers, The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls (Delacorte, 2012). She won a 2007 Minnesota Book Award for her novel The Book of One Hundred Truths.

New Books From Faculty

With spring arrives another crop of books from the Department of English's award-winning faculty. Professor Nabil Matar, recently named a CLA Scholar of the College, co-authored with Gerald MacLean Britain and the Islamic World: 1558-1713 (University of Oxford Press, 2011). . . . Professor Maria Damon published Postliterary America: From Bagel Shop Jazz to Micropoetries with the University of Iowa Press in April. . . . And Associate Professor Katherine Scheil co-edited with Randall Martin Shakespeare, Adaptation, Modern Drama: Essays in Honour of Jill Levenson (University of Toronto Press, 2011).

Charles Baxter Reading

Edelstein-Keller Visiting Professor Charles Baxter will discuss his new book The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot (Graywolf Press) at Magers & Quinn Bookstore, Thursday, August 9, at 7:30 pm. The book inaugurates a Graywolf series on the "art of writing" which Baxter will edit.

Book Presentation & Reception

On Tuesday, July 10, Professor Thomas Augst will discuss Institutions of Reading: The Social Life of Libraries in the United States, an essay collection he co-edited which was just published by the University of Massachusetts Press. A reception and book signing will follow his talk; 3-5 pm at the central Minneapolis Public Library, 300 Nicollet Mall.

Patricia Hampl in NYT Notable Books of 2006

The new memoir by Regents Professor Patricia Hampl was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2006. Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime (Harcourt) is, according to Kathyrn Harrison in her New York Times review, "a paean to the act of seeing, celebrating our capacity to be transformed by the truths art holds, recognizing them as . . . holy."