Geoff Sirc Honored at CCCC

Professor Geoff Sirc was honored March 22 at the 65th Annual Convention of the Conference on College Composition and Communication in Indianapolis with a six-speaker tribute panel entitled "Never Mind Geoffrey Sirc." The Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) is the world's largest professional organization for researching and teaching composition. Panelist Victor J. Vitanza, Professor of English at Clemson University, noted: "Sirc is the most dangerous man in writing instruction." The panel, which included Sirc as respondent, inspired a flurry of tweets, compiled here. Congratulations!

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!

John Watkins Awarded Guggenheim

Congratulations to Distinguished McKnight University Professor of English John Watkins, who has been named a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow. The Guggenheim Foundation supports projects by humanities scholars, creative writers, artists, and scientists: This year, 178 fellows were chosen out of almost 3,000 applicants. Watkins was also recently awarded an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship and a Keble College at Oxford fellowship. Watkins will be completing a book project on interdynastic marriage in European peacemaking from the late Middle Ages to the end of the 17th century. More about Professor Watkins here. Associate Professor of English Peter Campion received the fellowship in 2011.

5 X Friday: BA Alumnus Erik Storlie

Erik Storlie (BA 1962; MA English 1962, Berkeley 1965; PhD American Studies, University of Minnesota 1976) says he was born too late to be a Beat and too early to be a hippie, but he hit the 20th century exactly right to hang with Dylan, drink with poet (and Minnesota English professor) James Wright, drop acid with Timothy Leary, help bring Zen Buddhism from Berkeley to Minnesota, and join Robert Bly in the early days of the Men's Movement. Luckily for the rest of us, he's chronicled his journey through all these adventures in a new memoir, Go Deep & Take Plenty of Root: A Prairie-Norwegian Father, Rebellion in Minneapolis, Basement Zen, Growing Up, Growing Tender. An affable 73-year-old, Storlie sat down for an interview in Lind Hall, nearby where he teaches at the University's Center for Spirituality and Healing. Read more.

5th Annual English Undergrad Conference

On Thursday and Friday, April 3 and 4, the Department of English is pleased to present the fifth iteration of a conference celebrating our undergraduates' creative and critical work. This year, there will be papers on everything from Shakespeare to the video game Mass Effect, along with poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Actor and BA alumna Naomi Ko, who has a featured role in the new independent film Dear White People, will speak at the top of a panel on fiction, identity, and desire Thursday evening at 7 pm. A panel of alumni discusses employment and the road out from English on Friday morning at 8:50 am. Plus much more! Free and open to University students, faculty, and friends.

5 X Friday: PhD Candidate Anne Marie Spidahl

Very few debut novels are reviewed in the august New York Times Book Review: as of December, PhD candidate Anne Marie Spidahl's Nothing stands among them--surveyed favorably by polarizing novelist Tao Lin, no less. Under the name Anne Marie Wirth Cauchon, Spidahl published her first novel with the small press Two Dollar Radio in November. She started Nothing while an MFA student in creative writing at the University of Montana six years ago and won a MacDowell Colony Fellowship to continue work on it. With influences as disparate as Lou Reed's songs and Theodor Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, the book follows two young people stumbling around Missoula in a haze of alcohol, pills, and wildfire smoke, seeking at once annihilation and some recognition of their painful emptiness. Spidahl is now studying 20th- and 21st-century novels and theory. Read more.

1. The Missoula Nothing portrays is not most people's idea of Montana. You've written: "The dream of salvation in the West is real even if the West is not." Could you expand on that?
I'm slightly obsessed with Missoula's sinister underbelly. The day I arrived I saw my first dead body: A biker had just been hit by a mini-van-driving-dad, and he lay dead in the road, his leathers all twisted around his bald head, the dad and kids staring, nauseated with fear. Maybe it's partly because Missoula is based on transience: students, tourists, hobos, bikers, rivers. But I love Missoula, and Montana in general. For my husband (Ben) and me, it really is "the last best place." In Montana there's still an exit from the infinite self-referential loop: People still are overcome, people still escape, people still get lost or wild. But saying that partly contradicts what I meant by "The dream of the West was real even if the West was not." With that line I was thinking about how we all keep living lives we hate (or only tolerate) because there's an Out-There where things are different. Heaven, Florida, the Wild-Wild West, whatever--believing means we can delay forever our own real being. To me that's a problem. But at the same time, it shows we keep holding on to something more than this, or maybe, holding on to something more in this.
2. More than one review of the book has asserted that the characters are not likeable. What's your response?
I dislike the characters of Nothing just as much as the next guy. They are cliquey poseurs and haters; they manipulate each other and themselves for twisted self-interest. I started Nothing thinking: This world is hurtling toward catastrophe, but we're all keeping on as if it isn't. How can we stand it? I suppose it's because we all have fantasies that keep life sensible and justify each of our particular little lives but are completely insufficient for dealing with the age of the hand-held device, the war on terror, global economic crises, climate change. So even if I dislike Ruth, James, and Bridget, I partly identify with them since I am insufficient and struggling in this world too, and sometimes that means I do the things I hate about them too.
3. Tao Lin's comment in The New York Times about your characters was you didn't "seem interested in totally maintaining the illusion that Ruth and James are people." True?
Tao Lin was right: I didn't aim for the reader to forget that Ruth and James are characters that I made up. I might've made my disbelief in them more explicit, but I am afflicted with excessive subtlety. What I was thinking, basically, is that Ruth and James are working with what they get given--language, trendy colors, certain ideas of what's possible to do in life, etc. Some of what they're given controls and limits them, so they can't break out of those pesky insufficient fantasies. In early drafts I was trying for a conspiracy--a system of interests far beyond what the characters can understand that reveals itself only fleetingly. I think its remnants serve to undermine their authenticity. (But somewhere in there I did think of them as people too, since I believe in people: in hatred, love, lust, suicide.) This relates to your next question. . . .
4. Ruth and James' constant feeling that they are being watched is so fascinating--because, given NSA cel phone tracking and youth marketing, they are. They're also part of generation raised to display themselves via social media: you're not real if you're not seen. So it's a desperate paranoia (please let someone be watching) at the same time it's a justified paranoia (the real watchers are taking notes to better manipulate them via products and propaganda). In representing 21st-century "disaffected youth" did you see it differing in severity or kind from its antecedents?
As exemplified by NSA surveillance, I think we're living in a moment of particularly unsettling fleeting glimpses of the system of interests far beyond what we can understand. I think you suggested better than I can the conflicted nature of technology and surveillance today, and how the very definition of humanity is tied up in it. So, yes, I do think our moment is unique in its redefinition of the human, and in the level of development and expansion of capitalism. I think that the characters in Nothing worry about these things too, and their worry cripples them, brings them to nothing, which may be the only place from which they can start again.
5. What made you want to earn a PhD? What drew you to English at Minnesota?
I chose to pursue my PhD because I want to spend my life reading and writing books and because I love college students, but also because I was a pregnant waitress and I needed a real job; I needed to show my daughter what's possible, especially for women. I chose to pursue my PhD to read philosophy and literature systematically and with guidance, to think about how literature works, and to try and understand its relationship to society.... I couldn't understand the world around me and wanted to step back and think about it. And last but not least, I chose to pursue my PhD because I wanted to "do the right thing" and make my parents and my grandparents proud, of course! Once I made this decision I was only interested in studying at Minnesota. The faculty is excellent, as are my classmates. I went to Macalester for college and am happy to be back. I love Minneapolis.
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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.