5 X Friday: Assistant Professor Kim Todd

Her work has been called "spellbinding" (by The New Yorker) and "beautifully written" (by Outside magazine). A big welcome to Kim Todd, a new creative nonfiction addition to the Creative Writing Program faculty roster. Todd has written one book about that vagabond Sparrow, another about a female naturalist who, in 1699, voyaged from Amsterdam to South America to study insect metamorphosis (Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis), and her self-explanatory first, Tinkering with Eden: A Natural History of Exotics in America. It's no surprise she holds masters in both environmental studies and creative writing (from the University of Montana). What led her there? Read on.

Summer e-Quarterly Out Now

Our professors don't just go home and read after class: As our profile details, one competes in high-level competitive ice dancing; another spins African music as a radio deejay. But, yes, they also read: Professor John Watkins describes his latest perusals, including Solzhenitsyn and other Russian novelists. Plus a boatload of great summer books from faculty and alums. Check out the new issue of our alumnae/i newsletter, e-Quarterly.

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!

Michael Hancher Wins Service Award

Professor Michael Hancher is a winner of the 2014 President's Award for Outstanding Service, becoming "a member of an elite group of faculty and staff of the University community" who have provided exceptional service to the University well beyond the regular duties of a faculty or staff member. Since joining the Department of English in 1972, he has served as Director of English Graduate Studies, CLA Associate Dean for Faculty and Research, Chair of English, and most recently Vice Chair of the Faculty Consultative Committee of the Faculty Senate, which serves as the consulting body to President Eric Kaler and as the executive committee of the Faculty Senate. The award will be conferred at a Board of Regents meeting on Thursday, May 8, 3:30 pm, at 600 McNamara Center. Congratulations!

Spring e-Quarterly Out Now

What is our new Assistant Professor Amit Yahav reading (besides the 18th century)? What new books are out from faculty, students, and alums? How is English participating in Northrop Auditorium's Grand Reopening? Find out in the new issue of our alumnae/i newsletter, e-Quarterly.

Faculty Receive Awards

Assistant professor Elaine Auyoung, who joined the department this past fall, has been named a Institute of Advanced Study fall 2014 Residential Fellow. Fellows work intensively on their own research and creative projects and meet regularly to discuss their work and exchange ideas at the IAS offices. Auyoung's project is entitled "Missing Fiction: The Feeling of Realism." . . . Five English professors have received Imagine Fund Annual Faculty Awards, which support innovative research in the arts, design, and humanities. The professors and their projects are as follows: Dan Philippon, "Ideal Meals: Ecology, Morality, and Pleasure in the Sustainable Food Movement"; Paula Rabinowitz, "Lineages of the Literary Left: Essays in Honor of Alan M. Wald"; Jani Scandura, "Proximity: A Case Study"; Katherine Scheil, "The Shakespeare Circle and Anne Hathaway Shakespeare"; and John Wright, "The Worlds of James McCune Smith: Science, Race Elevation, and the Brotherhood of Chess." Congratulations to all!

Katherine Scheil Named Scholar of College

English professor Katherine Scheil has been named 2014 CLA Scholar of the College, an annual award celebrating outstanding achievement by faculty in the College of Liberal Arts. The award recognizes professors who have taken intellectual risks and whose work has had a significant impact on their field; Scholars of the College receive a stipend totaling $10,000 per year for three years to support their research or creative work. Scheil's most recent publication is She Hath Been Reading: Women and Shakespeare Clubs in America. She is working on a book about Shakespeare's wife Anne Hathaway. Congratulations!

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!

5 X Friday: Regents Professor Patricia Hampl

This past spring, Regents Professor of English Patricia Hampl was honored with the Dr. Matthew Stark Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Faculty Award from the College of Liberal Arts. The award recognizes Professor Hampl's distinguished writing, teaching, and service in this area, including her work with the University's Human Rights Program establishing the Scribe for Human Rights Fellowship. In 2011, Hampl co-organized an international conference devoted to the relationship between the personal narrative voice and human rights, "My Letter to the World: Narrating Human Rights." Hampl, of course, is the author of six celebrated memoirs, and she's working on a seventh. What's it about? Read on. . . .

1. Can you talk briefly about the connection you see between human rights and the personal narrative voice? Your book A Romantic Education, about visiting Prague pre-Velvet Revolution, is a classic memoir, but also a moving example of a personal narrative intersecting with a larger story of human rights struggles. What are five other great books that take on this challenge?
It's one of the curiosities of American literature that the first person voice claims special authority for us. We seem to trust the individual voice over the "omniscient" narrator. This is even more true for stories of political trauma and radical human suffering. Why is a little girl's diary the undisputed essential document of the Holocaust? It was written, after all, before she saw and experienced the worst tortures of that genocide. Her voice doesn't embody "the worst," but gives us indelible proof of what we lost when this irreplaceable girl was murdered by the forces of "the worst." So I suppose for me the trust in the relation between the personal voice and the overwhelming crush of human rights violations started with Anne Frank's Diary. My passion for memoirs has always been rooted in a political and historical enterprise, rather than in the psychological how-I-got-to-be-me kind of writing. I think of the first person voice as an instrument, not as a subject in itself. The books that come to mind that remain my models for personally voiced writing contending with the forces of injustice include Hope Against Hope by Nadezdah Mandelstam (about the Soviet terror and the gulag), Native Realm and The Captive Mind by Czeslaw Milosz, The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund deWaal, and Joe's War: My Father Decoded by Annette Kobak--to name only a few.
2. You and Human Rights Program Director Barbara Frey created the Scribe for Human Rights Fellowship and granted the first one in 2006. Since then, MFA students, in collaboration with Human Rights Program staff/students, have researched and written about current stories from immigrant detention in the Midwest to sex slavery in Cambodia. After seven years, what do you see as the greatest accomplishment of the fellowship?
The fact that the University has a vibrant commitment to human rights and has a dynamic leader in Barbara Frey who saw instantly the connection between narrative writing and human rights--that's the biggest and most enduring accomplishment of the Scribes program and touches students beyond those who have been Scribes themselves. I think it has also been a challenge to all of our Scribes to understand they aren't meant to turn themselves into investigative journalists. Even though that's tempting in the face of some of the horrific cases the Human Rights Program studies and works on. Each Scribe is meant to be whatever writer he or she is--poet, fiction writer, memoirist. I think every Scribe has been humbled by the encounter with harrowing subject matter and has had to recommit to the service of literature and language in the face of experiences that invite silence and turning away. I like to think that each Scribe has not simply become a human rights activist but has reaffirmed a relation with the most vulnerable source of literature--the individual voice.
3. Okay, gotta ask: As a scholar of F. Scott Fitzgerald and his work, what did you think of the Baz Luhrmann Great Gatsby?
Crazy about it! A lot of my friends urged me not to go, as if I would somehow be wounded by seeing the movie. I guess they thought the movie was too down market for oh-so-literary me. But aside from the frame (of Nick Carraway being in a kind of nursing home where he writes The Great Gatsby) which was corny and flat-footed, I thought Baz Luhrmann did a brilliant job of breaking all the hallowed attitudes about the novel and making it live on the screen as no other attempt has managed. The choice of Jay-Z for the music was nothing short of genius. I saw it in 2D and 3D--went twice. I think this is one to see in 3D. And let's hear it for Leonardo DiCaprio who refused to deny Jim Gatz/Jay Gatsby his boyishness in the midst of his famous mystery. Did I mention I was crazy about the movie?
4. Your last memoir, The Florist's Daughter, won a Minnesota Book Award in 2008. What project(s) are you working on currently?
I'm writing a short book that's taking a long time called The Art of the Wasted Day, a riff on the idea of leisure and a homage to the inventor (sort of) of the essay, Michel Montaigne. I see this project (not that anyone else will) as the third in a trilogy of books, each about an art form. My first was Spillville, about Dvorak's 1893 summer in Spillville, Iowa, which was my book about music (I started as a piano performance major at the University), then Blue Arabesque, about visual art whose hero figure is Matisse, and now to literature with this one--and to what I see as literature's most feral form, the essay.
5. What are you reading or what have you read lately that you think is great?
Strange that someone like me is called (and call myself) a "writer." A more accurate label might be "reader" considering the time I spend on other people's work. I'm an omnivore reader--poetry, fiction, nonfiction. And I'm a magazine buff--everything from The New York Review of Books (my favorite literary review) and The New Yorker (I usually find a couple things worth finishing) to cooking magazines (I mourned the loss of Gourmet, a wonderful source of personal essays). I confess to the typical "late style" habits of many writers--re-reading books I've long loved. Recently I returned to Anna Karenina, a book I adored as a 19-year-old romantic, detested with fiery feminist outrage at 30, and now found myself putting down, saying, "OK, that's the greatest novel ever written," as if I were giving out an Academy Award. A more recent novel, The Glass Room by Simon Mawer, is an extraordinary evocation of Central Europe between the two wars, based on a family's relation to a Modernist house modeled on one by Mies van der Rohe in Brno. Perhaps the most striking memoir of the last year is the great post-War historian Tony Judt's book, The Memory Chalet. Judt died of ALS before age 60, and wrote this book in the midst of his many losses, including his ability to write or speak. I return often to William Trevor, Alice Munro, Penelope Fitzgerald. And I'm always reading Montaigne these days--partly for my own project, but really because he's irresistible.
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5 X Friday: Assistant Professor Elaine Auyoung

This fall, the Department of English welcomes Dr. Elaine Auyoung as a new assistant professor here at Minnesota. Professor Auyoung received her BA from Stanford in 2005, followed by a PhD in English from Harvard in 2011. She was an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Associate 2011-13 at Rutgers University, where she taught Victorian literature and modern fiction. Auyoung is working on a book about, as she describes, "the surprising way in which nineteenth-century novels cue readers to feel as if vibrant, expansive fictional worlds exist beyond the printed page." At the same time, she notes, readers know that "nothing in the novel exists at all"--resulting in a cognitive dissonance that writers such as Dickens acknowledge and even encourage. More. . .



1. What led you to this research topic?
I've always marveled at how literary artists can seem to bring into being so much more than what appears on the printed page. At Harvard, my quest to get to the bottom of this phenomenon was continually inspired by the Cognitive Theory and the Arts Seminar led by Elaine Scarry, Anna Henchman, and Alan Richardson. This seminar is a haven for anyone fascinated by the deep relationship between artistic creation, aesthetic experience, and the capacities of the human mind. Over the years, I have learned so much from the psychologists, philosophers, art historians, linguists, neuroscientists, musicologists, and literary scholars who have shared their work with this group.
2. What is your favorite work to teach?
One of my favorite texts to teach is Great Expectations, because students tend to be surprised by how much they enjoy it. When students first come into my class, some of them aren't especially excited to be reading Victorian novels. (They're not alone: Henry James called them "loose baggy monsters.") Once we make our way into Dickens, though, these students invariably discover that nineteenth-century fiction is much less intimidating and much more accessible and entertaining than they expected.
3. What was the most interesting/intriguing book/essay/entry you've read this year? What was it about?
A dazzling book that I couldn't put down this summer is Michael Saler's As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality. Online fan communities that perpetuate the fictional worlds of Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings are commonplace today, but Saler, who's a cultural historian, returns us to the moment when English and American readers first began to inhabit imaginary worlds for long periods of time. He argues that participation in large-scale fan communities didn't emerge until the late nineteenth century, when Sherlock Holmes became the world's first "virtual reality" character. Saler's larger claim is that the ironic exercise of belief in imaginary worlds is a means by which we re-enchant modern life.
4. Where did you grow up? Is there anything from there you especially miss?
I grew up in California before moving to Massachusetts for graduate school. Something that I miss about the West Coast (besides the sunshine and the ocean, of course) is the scent of eucalyptus trees, which instantly transports me back to my childhood. I'm eager, though, to get to know the very different kind of natural beauty that surrounds us in Minnesota. I foresee many canoeing and cross-country skiing expeditions in my future.
5. What are you most excited about in joining the English faculty at Minnesota?
What really sets this department apart, I think, is its intrepid spirit. Its deep, longstanding commitment to exploring new ideas and scholarly approaches comes through in the remarkable range of scholarly and creative work pursued by faculty members, in the interdisciplinary projects invented by graduate students, and in the breadth of undergraduate course offerings that cover everything from Aristotle to Zadie Smith and from food writing to hip hop. There's a truly vibrant intellectual environment here that gives students and faculty the freedom to produce their best work.
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5 X Friday: Professor Andrew Elfenbein

"English professors now study everything except English," argues Professor Andrew Elfenbein in his 2009 book Romanticism and the Rise of English (2009). By "English" he means the history of the English language--and how its particular forms at any one time influence how writers write. That volume, which won Outstanding Academic Book Award from Choice, sets out to brush off contemporary literary criticism's blind spot, specifically looking at how literary authors responded to new usage rules in the 18th century. In the book's afterward, Elfenbein confesses that his examinations of Romantic English are leading him into psychology "as a means of investigating language production, reading comprehension, and writing strategies." Sure enough, this spring he won an American Council of Leaned Societies Fellowship for 2013-14 to work on a project that brings together cognitive science and literary criticism. (Elfenbein also received a Grant-in-Aid of Research, Artistry & Scholarship this spring from the U's Office of the Vice President for Research.) How did he get interested in that topic? Where does he see literary criticism going? What does he love about teaching large survey courses? Read on. . . .

1. Your ACLS Fellowship project, entitled "The Gist of Reading," combines science and literary criticism "to provide scholars for the first time with models and vocabulary for describing the reading strategies and mental processes of nineteenth-century readers." How did you become interested in this interdisciplinary work?
My journey into cognitive science began after reading a book on reading written by two literary critics. It provided an overview of reader response theories, and it made me feel that the field had become stuck. Wolfgang Iser, Stanley Fish, Janice Radway, and others had done important work on reading, but the terms of the debate had stagnated. At the same time, Alan Richardson had pioneered the field of cognitive literary studies. Although I had mixed feelings about the results of such studies, they raised the profile of cognitive science as a possible resource for literary critics. I took the simple step of looking in the online course guide for courses on reading at the U that were offered outside of English. I found a course by Paul van den Broek (now at the University of Leiden) on reading comprehension, offered by the Department of Educational Psychology. I wrote to Paul and asked him for the syllabus; he kindly invited me to consider auditing the course, and I did. I was lucky to find in Paul a brilliant scientist, teacher, and colleague. His course encouraged me to start a long and continuing process of re-educating myself in the theories and methodologies of a new discipline. Along the way, I have worked with a series of extraordinary scientists, many of whom participate in the Textgroup sponsored by the Center for Cognitive Sciences here at the university. Although cognitive literary study has flourished since I began my work, my particular area, the psychological study of reading, has received little to no attention. As a result, my work does not look like much of the other work in the field, because I am asking fundamentally different questions.
2. The Department of English this year hired two 18-19th century English literature professors, Elaine Auyoung and Amit Yahav. You chaired the search committee last fall. Reading the applications must have been like getting a wide angle view of your field: what surprised or energized you? What do the two selected bring to the table?
The quality and the volume of the applications were overwhelming: we found ourselves turning down even applicants with books from prestigious presses. In general, I felt that some of the historicist paradigms that have energized the fields in the past several decades are beginning to give way to new alternatives. I was particularly impressed by candidates asking new questions about realism and the novel that depended less on unmasking its ideological underpinnings and more on understanding realism as a technique. Auyoung and Yahav are two exceptional, very different critics who will bring an incredible wealth of knowledge and creativity to our department. Both combine intense engagement with literary texts with unusual and unexpected approaches to familiar questions: I am thrilled that they will be joining us.
3. I witnessed you teaching the large survey class Brit Lit II with a fascinating lecture on Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. Even when you randomly selected people to answer your questions, they had articulate and thoughtful responses. Do your students just know they have to come prepared, or are there sometimes moments of "I don't know; I didn't read it"? What do you enjoy about teaching a large class, as opposed to a seminar?
Lecturing at the U is one of the huge privileges of my job. I work with students to create an atmosphere of mutual trust, so that they know that when they speak in class, I will treat them with respect and interest. I really care about what they have to say. That particular lecture class is a historical introduction to British literature (it even carries CLE credit in history), so it differs from a seminar because I spend a large amount of time discussing British history. I also enjoy the chance to model for students what a sustained literary interpretation looks like, though I stress that my reading is not the best or the only possible reading.
4. You are the current Chair of the James Russell Lowell Prize Committee, which is charged with selecting the best book of literary criticism of 2012 by a current member of the Modern Language Association (the main U.S. professional association for literary scholars). Chairing and serving on the committee seems like both an honor and a lot of work! What's the process?
We receive over 110 books and have to choose one winner. The MLA has designed the process well so that the members of the committee have a fair division of labor. It's a chance to get an overview of some of the best and most compelling work in the discipline.
5. What non-academic book have you read and enjoyed recently?
I'm loving Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow: it's a fine overview of the work he did with Amos Tversky on heuristics. I'd recommend it to anyone interested in how people make judgments.
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Promotions for Scheil and Campion

The Department of English is pleased to announce the promotion of two of our faculty members: Peter Campion to Associate Professor with tenure, and Katherine Scheil to Professor. Campion will publish his third collection of poetry, El Dorado, this October with the University of Chicago Press. Scheil published her second monograph, She Hath Been Reading: Women and Shakespeare Clubs in America (Cornell University Press) last fall, and has a third, The Afterlife of Anne Hathaway, in progress. Congratulations!

Regents Professor Hampl Receives Stark Award

Regents Professor of English Patricia Hampl will be honored with the Dr. Matthew Stark Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Faculty Award April 17 at the College of Liberal Arts' Celebrate Faculty Excellence ceremony and reception, 3:30 pm in the Coffman Union Great Hall. The award recognizes Professor Hampl's distinguished writing, teaching, and service in this area, including her work with the Human Rights Program establishing the Scribe for Human Rights Fellowship, which supports an MFA creative writing student working with the Human Rights Program as a writer-in-residence. The Stark awards are based on a generous donation from Dr. Matthew "Matt" Stark, a former professor at the University of Minnesota and former executive director of the Minnesota Civil Liberties Union. Professor Hampl is the second English professor to be so honored since the Stark awards begin in 2009. Congratulations!

5 X Friday: Professor Charles Baxter

Charles Baxter is one of the most well-known--and admired--short story writers alive. Last year, he won the Rea Award for the Short Story, a prestigious prize judged by his peers. What you might not know is that for 20 plus years, he's been organizing and hosting literary readings to raise money for hunger relief in the U.S. His fifth annual Hunger Relief Benefit at the University of Minnesota takes place 7 pm, Tuesday, April 2, at McNamara Alumni Center. As becomes clear below, Baxter is not the type of writer who spends all his time focused on his fiction, although his healthy output of well-loved novels (such as Saul and Patsy) and collections (Gryphon was named a Notable Books of 2011 by The New York Times) might argue otherwise. The guy likes a challenge. This past fall he published his first memoir piece in an issue of Ploughshares edited by Regents Professor Patricia Hampl. "After being in a rollover accident and surviving it," he notes dryly, "I was ready to write about the experience." We feel lucky to (still) have Baxter here as the Edelstein-Keller Professor in Creative Writing. More . . .

1. This year marks the Fifth Annual Hunger Relief Benefit sponsored by the Creative Writing Program and hosted by you. How did this tradition start?
What I think happened was that an organization called Share Our Strength initiated nationwide readings for hunger relief in the late 1980s. Over 50 MFA programs participated. One year, I was the national chair for the project, and we had several good readings at the University of Michigan, where I taught before I came here. And then, somehow, the project lost momentum, or the organizational energy failed, and MFA programs gradually stopped staging such readings, with a few exceptions, including New Mexico State University. I felt that such readings were praiseworthy, and I wanted to bring this tradition back to Minnesota.
2. This semester, along with your usual highly acclaimed graduate fiction seminar (see novelist Amanda Coplin's testimony), you are teaching undergraduates in the class Persons & Places. (Baxter the teacher is "brilliant, enthusiastic, funny, and honest," says student Aaron Bristow. "Charlie should be a required course for undergraduate English majors.") What's that been like?
Our undergraduates are lively, sharp, and very alert. It's hard to generalize about them otherwise, because they have very different aesthetic views and approaches, and I try not to impose a particular aesthetic on them. Instead, I try to expose them to a variety of narratives, and in each case--since the class is a combination of interpretation and craft--I try to show them how something was done, i.e., how a writer achieved a particular effect.
3. You recently served as editor for what has been celebrated as a "long overdue" compendium, Sherwood Anderson: Collected Stories (Library of America, 2012). How did that happen?
Max Rudin, the editor-in-chief of the Library of America series, approached me to edit the volume. I think he chose me because, like Anderson, I'm a Midwestern writer, though I'm from Minnesota and Anderson was from Ohio. Anderson was noted for his stories, as (perhaps) I am. I did my best to immerse myself in Anderson's work, and along the way I rediscovered how important he is to contemporary writers, particularly in the theme of a young person leaving the provinces and commerce for art (think of Lena Dunham's HBO series Girls) and in the technique of presenting characters with heavy burdens of feelings but little or no ability to articulate what they feel. He loved inarticulate narrators. Raymond Carver's stories grew directly out of that situation.
4. Your criticism is regularly published in The New York Review of Books, among other places. What interests you about writing on other fiction writers' works?
I never request a particular book for review. In every case, the editor sends me a book and asks if I want to review it. What I enjoy about the work is the challenge of describing the author's body of work--I've reviewed Katherine Anne Porter, Jonathan Franzen, Haruki Murakami, John Irving, and many others--and I do my best to convey how a volume succeeds or fails. Such an assignment forces a writer, any writer, to describe what constitutes a success or failure and to be convincing about it. I think you need to be a practicing novelist to meet this challenge. You have to know what you're talking about. You have to know something about how the book was put together.
5. Your collection Gryphon: New and Selected Stories was published in 2011, one factor leading to you winning the Rea Award for the Short Story a year later. What are you working on now?
I'm working on a book called There's Something I Want You to Do, and in each one of the pieces, the narrative mosaics, one character turns to another and says, "There's something I want you to do." Almost all of the sections take place in Minneapolis, and the first half of the book concerns various virtues, and the last half concerns the vices. I try not to moralize on them, however.

Faculty News

Professor Maria Damon has three text/textile pieces in the Katherine E Nash exhibit The Dance of Words, a group show of artworks that reference the use of text and calligraphic traditions found in many languages and cultures. The exhibit is up until March 15, 2013. . . . Professor Andrew Elfenbein has won an ACLS (American Council of Learned Societies) Fellowship for 2013-14 for a project entitled "The Gist of Reading."

Faculty in the Media

The scholarship of Professor Michael Hancher is referenced in The Times Literary Supplement review of the new edition of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. . . . Responding in part to the discovery of certain bones found buried under a British parking lot, Professor John Watkins looks at current U.S. foreign policy through the lens of Shakespeare & Richard III in Foreign Policy. He was subsequently interviewed on NPR about the story.

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.

Kent Bales 1936-2012

We are saddened to report the October 8th passing of Professor Emeritus Kent Bales, who served the Department of English for 41 years until his retirement in 2008. A graduate of Yale (BA) and Berkeley (PhD), Bales joined the English faculty in 1967 and went on to chair the department twice, as well as direct both undergraduate and graduate studies. He also served as chair of both the University's Senate Joint Committee on Faculty Affairs and Senate Joint Committee on Faculty Appointments. A scholar of American literature, he was well-known for his writing on Hawthorne. He is survived by his wife, Maria; daughter Liza (David) Lee and son Tom (Tiziana) Bales, five grandchildren and many other loving family members and good friends. A private celebration of his life will be held in the coming weeks. Memorials preferred to the Alzheimer's Association or the Sierra Club.