IN ENGLISHOccasional Newsletter of the Whittier College Department of English Language and

LiteratureVolume 19, #1, October, 2018Dr. Charles S. Adams, Editor

Professor, English

On-Line Presence

Some of you may be aware that the Whittier College English Department has a Facebook page. Alum and information guru Mike Garabedian, and Professor Andrea Rehn have been managing it, and they ask that those of you who are into such things “like” it. And we think there is a lot to like. Your editor finds that sometimes the links below work and sometimes they do not. Most of you know how to find the stuff without them.

https://www.facebook.com/WhittierCollegeEnglishDepartment

And our regular college-based site is:

http://www.whittier.edu/Academics/EnglishLanguageAndLiterature/

This Newsletter will be up on that site and will be updated as more information comes in and your editor gets around to it.

EVENTS! EVENTS!October 30th: Putrid Poetry Reading! 7-9 p.m., Dezember House. Bring and read the worst published poems you can find (they are easy to find!). Professor Adams challenges you to find one worse than William McGonagall’s “The Tay Bridge Disaster” (1880).

November 5th: Reading in Wardman Library, 12:30-1:30 p.m.. David Gewanter reading from Fort Necessity. Joe Donnelly reading from LA Man. Lunch provided for students! 

November 14th: More Than A Major: English Skills in the Career World4-6 p.m., Dezember House. As part of the Backpack to Briefcase series, this program will featue alumni English majors and what they have done with their degrees. Guess

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what? English majors get great jobs! Contact Michelle Chihara if you need to know more.

November 17th: The Milton Marathon (see below, in Wendy Furman-Adams’ “What We Have Been Up To” entry).

November 26th: Reading in Wardman Library, 12:30-1:30.  John Brantingham, reading from A Sublime and Tragic Dance, poems and paintings about J. Robert Oppenheimer. Kate Durbin, reading from HOARDERS (forthcoming book) and other books. Lunch provided for students!

The English Department Writing Awards(Keep your work!)

Every year we offer a set of prizes for the best work submitted by students in the areas of poetry, creative prose, and scholarly writing. Be sure to stay tuned for the announcements asking for submissions for the next academic year’s awards—the deadlines are always fairly early in Spring Semester. You cannot win if you do not enter. All Whittier students are eligible to enter. The prizes are cash (well, checks actually). You could win more than some of your professors have made on their books and articles! In addition, look at the same time for notices of the deadlines for submissions to the Literary Review, which publishes work in all genres by Whittier students. Again, any student can submit. We need to thank lots of donors, alumni, faculty, friends, and students, for help funding these prizes and the Review.

What Have We Been Up to Lately?Tony Barnstone: I have been putting the finishing touches on an anthology of Chinese and American ecopoetry that emerged from the LIASE (Luce Initiative on Asian Studies and the Environment) grant directed by Professor Jake Carbine. Several students from Barnstone’s classes and from the LIASE special spring break in China trip last year will be published in the anthology, along with work co-translated from the Chinese by myself, by Professor Michelle Chihara, and by Professor Scott Creley. The anthology will be a special issue of the literary magazine Manoa and will also be published as a book by the University of Hawaii Press. I am also working on an introduction to another edited volume, the selected poems of Mary Ellen Solt, the most important American practitioner of the experimental movement called Concrete Poetry. I have completed a new book of poems titled American Spoken Here (they are very much political poems in the era of Trump and of environmental degradation), and am marketing it to publishers. Beyond that, I am just doing his best to be a good daddy to my son and a good professor to my students and a good colleague to my community.

Bethany Wong: It’s been a busy first semester teaching at Whittier. Most of my time is spent prepping, teaching, and grading. A few of my favorite things have been getting acclimated to Whittier’s campus (I spend a lot of time waiting for and riding the elevator

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in SLC and running up and down the stairs in Hoover) and meeting students and colleagues. In other news, I applied and was accepted to present a paper featuring some of my archival research at the annual meeting for the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies held in Denver this spring. Once things are more settled, I will return to working on my book manuscript about theater and the novel. It’s been a pleasure and a privilege to be a part of the Poet community.

Wendy Furman-Adams: Most of my best news—both of recent past and near future—involves travel with Whittier College students. Last May-term I explored Sicily and the Naples area (which together used to be known as the “two Sicilys”) with an adventurous group of twenty-five, including one brave and energetic mom. The course, called “The Cultural Mosaic of Southern Italy,” began with a short stop in Rome—followed by more extensive visits to Palermo, Siracusa, and Taormina (including such sites as Mount Etna and Monreale, home of some of the world’s most beautiful medieval mosaics); then on to the Naples area (including Pompeii and the breathtaking island of Capri). We had glorious weather--at times a little hot, but always brilliantly blue and sunny. And we shared an amazing “mosaic” of experience—one pieced together from literal ancient and medieval mosaics but also from the bustle of modern Balaró (a West African immigrant community in the middle of old Palermo) and the blue, blue Mediterranean at Capri and Taormina.

This coming Jan-term will be my sixth time to co-lead the Classical Greece and Rome course to Rome, then on to Athens and the Peloponnese, with another terrific group of 25 Whittier students. Over the fall, the class is reading Greek and Roman philosophy and literature in preparation for our trip--where we plan to walk in the Agora where Socrates was imprisoned and executed; visit the cave in Cuma where Aeneas is supposed to have visited the Sybil; and sit in the ancient theaters where the plays we’ve been reading premiered between 440 and 405 B.C.E.

More immediately, I’m looking forward to the English Department’s Milton Read-a-thon on Saturday, November 17. Between about 1:00 p.m. and midnight—perhaps a bit later—we’ll read Paradise Lost aloud word by word, line by line, from beginning to end. We will also enjoy plenty of good snacks and a delicious dinner break. Once all Milton students have been accommodated, all others—faculty and students—are welcome to join. Please contact Ashley Mora (amora@poets.whittier.edu) for details.

Jonathan Burton: I’ve returned to campus from a productive and rejuvenating sabbatical during which I divided my time four ways: I was volunteering at a local middle school, writing a chapter for my book project on the history of Shakespeare in American secondary education, cooking every recipe I could find by Melissa Clark, and preparing a project for my upcoming Shakespeare in American Life class. That project, titled “The Qualities of Mercy Project” will connect my class with Shakespeare classes on a dozen other campuses from Hawaii to Massachusetts and Michigan to Texas. We’ll be exploring what you can do to/with a single Shakespearean play (The Merchant of Venice) in a wide range of American settings. Each of the participating classes will make a video performing, adapting or responding to a section of the play. Then the 13 short

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films will be uploaded to a single playlist where you’ll be able to watch what happens to the play as it moves from Chaminade University (in Hawaii) to Whittier College, to Texas A & M, to Lafayette College, to Spellman College, etc. Hopefully by the time our next newsletter appears, I’ll be able to share information about where you can view the results.

Kate Durbin: My artwork “Unfriend Me Now,” a short film that explores the role of Facebook in Trump's election, was recently shown with Peer to Space gallery in Berlin, and is currently on view in an exhibition called POLE (aptly about polarization) in Berlin at Projektraum Galerie .

My new poetry book HOARDERS will be out this Spring from Gramma Press. I recently presented HOARDERS on a panel at the &Now Innovative Writing conference at Notre Dame in Indiana with Janet Sarbanes, Bill Lessard, and Becca Klaver. The panel was called De-Re-Forming Pop Culture. I'll be presenting a talk called "Pop Culture as Fodder for Innovative Texts," as well as doing a reading, this month at Mt. St. Mary's Borders of Performance MFA annual conference.

Katy Simonian: Last year I had the opportunity to present my research on the work of Zabel Yessayan at the PAMLA (Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association) Conference in Oahu, Hawaii. My paper, “Her Armenia: Zabel Yessyan and the Voice of the Feminine” focuses on Zabel Yessayan’s literary and journalistic work as an Armenian woman which made her a target for persecution during and after the Armenian Genocide of 1915. This year, I have decided to continue my exploration of Armenian writers, with a more specific focus on poetry. I am currently working on a paper that draws connections between the work of Saint Gregory of Narek, Sayat Nova and Mikael Nalbanian among others. The connective thread between these writers is a desire to convey the nuances of a uniuely Armenian identity through love, family and the pursuit of liberty in all forms. This connective thread is woven into the complex and ever-growing tapestry of Armenian literature.

Michelle Chihara: The big event of this fall for me was the publication at long last of The Routledge Companion to Literature & Economics, an edited volume of 38 essays to which I co-wrote the introduction, edited half the essays and contributed a chapter. Please ask me to see it in the flesh -- and please request it early and often from your library and other libraries! It's a very expensive tome, and will primarily be bought by institutions and libraries, but the introduction is accessible to general readers and will, I hope, give you a good sense of what my sub-field is all about and why it's important. I recently published an article called "Extreme Hoards: Race, Reality Television & Real Estate Value During the 2008 Financial Crisis" in Postmodern Culture, and this fall, I did an interview about the article with Johns Hopkins University press. The interview was titled "Envisioning a New Reality." Then, a French colleague translated the interview and published it on his French online magazine: "Crise financière et téléréalité : un entretien avec Michelle CHIHARA" on "Web Revue Des Industries Culturelles et Numerique." I've never been translated into French before! This October, I presented my ongoing research into behavioral economics and popular culture at The Association for the Study

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of the Arts of the Present annual conference. For this, I was able to travel to New Orleans. I didn't get to see much of the city, but I enjoyed the one long run in the Marigny neighborhood that I was able to take. A friend of mine likes to say that academia is like a pie-eating contest, and when you win, they give you more pie. It feels a bit like that right now, it has been a busy and challenging year, but I'm always happy to see my Whittier students and friends in the Poet community and to share the latest with them! dAve pAddy: During the spring of 2018, I was on sabbatical, and I was able to travel to Devon and Cornwall to begin work on a project related, in part, to the writer Daphne du Maurier. I spent a good amount of time in the Special Collections at the University of Exeter looking at copies of her manuscripts and correspondence. Some of the work I did there will feed into next semester’s senior seminar. I also have a bite and may be working on an article related to this project to be published next year. More on this when I know more.

Joe Donnelly: My alma mater, Colgate University, recently asked me to interview myself for its quarterly magazine, The Colgate Scene. Here's the link, for what it's worth.

 http://news.colgate.edu/magazine/2018/09/11/joe-donnelly-interview-la-man/?fbclid=IwAR1JjcRFC2wP2Cn_uy3rQljAwWAUvSWCyMapmmNmweRulufDIwOHsrimGDE

Andrea Rehn: As you know, I’ve not been teaching in the department this year as I am leading the Whittier Scholars and Digital Liberal Arts programs for the moment. However, I am still dreaming in literature, and managed to sneak Frankenstein into a class this year. (It’s the 200th Anniversary of the novel this year! Do reread it, see the play at the Shannon Center, and watch the Frankenstein Chronicles when you have 7 hours to spare. Oh, and check out this awesome online archive of all things Shelley-Godwin, including multiple drafts of Frankenstein itself: http://shelleygodwinarchive.org/)

I will be offering a couple classes of interest to English majors soon: hopefully I will be leading a course to Puerto Rico in May 2019. The course will focus on learning about Puerto Rican literature and culture while working to help communities still recovering from the devastating hurricane last year. Check with the Office of International Programs and watch your email for updates. AND, come study Jane Austen’s England in May 2020! This course will retrace the locations of Austen’s literary life including Bath, Lyme-Regis, Chawton, Winchester, and London while reading her novels, walking the countryside, and dancing like it’s 1815.

Geoffrey Long: My biggest recent development (after leveling-up from adjunct to Visiting Assistant Professor here at Whittier, of course) is the completion of my PhD in Media Arts and Practice from the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts this summer. My thesis was on "Transmedia Aesthetics," an emerging set of characteristics unique to storyworlds that span multiple media and a framework for how to write such transmedia stories. It draws best practices from writing novels, graphic novels, film, television, video games, and emerging media such as augmented reality and

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virtual reality, and couples them with worldbuilding practices from both fiction and real-world scenario planning. This is the basis for the Transmedia Storytelling course I'll be teaching in January, and I'm currently working with MIT Press to turn it into my first academic book.

Charles S. Adams: I have less scholarly material to report than my colleagues, I guess. As many of you know, I have faced some significant heath challenges in recent months (actually years), and I spent my summer on those, mostly. I have lots of things to say about the state of health care in America. I am teaching a more limited schedule as I phase into retirement. But I will be teaching through the 2020-2021 academic year. I am keeping my hand in things like the Institute for Baseball Studies at Whittier College (third floor Mendnhall). Check us out on Facebook. Over 6000 books. The huge Santillan collection of material related to the Dodgers. Artwork. Memorabilia. Watch for our programming over the course of the year.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/347883628706532/about/  

News From the College Writing ProgramCharlie Eastman, Director

Plus ça change… Over the summer we conducted a grueling—yes, grueling is the word I want—assessment of senior capstone papers. Johnathan Burton and Gino Conti were among the sacrifices…er, readers…on this project.

This term we offered 33 sections of College Writing, 2 sections of Developmental Writing, and 10 Writing Intensive courses across a number of departments (after subtracting upper division English classes, though tmost of those also serve this requirement). We are delighted to have Katy Simonian, Kate Durbin, Gino Conti, Claire Koehler, and Daniel Holland back again, and we were pleased to welcome Shonda Buchanan and Megan Herrold to our writing corps! Spring looks to be leaner: two sections of College Writing, but also 18 Writing Intensive sections.

Sigma Tau DeltaCongratulations to all of you who qualified/will qualify this year to be members of the Whittier (Jessamyn West) chapter of Sigma Tau Delta, the national honorary society in English! Well done! (Note: you’re not really a member until you get initiated. And the national folks say you are not really in until you have paid a membership! See Professor Furman-Adams, Professor Morris, or Angela Olivas in the department office if you have questions.)

What Have We Been Reading Lately?

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Tony Barnstone:  Very little! I am mainly reading for the books I am writing or for the classes I am teaching. Books on my shelf right now include Patricia Smith,Incendiary Art, Clint Smith, Counting Descent, Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, Tony Hoagland, Application for Release from the Dream, Kevin Prufer, National Anthem, Tracy K. Smith, Wade in the Water, Gary Snyder’s The Practice of the Wild, and William Archila’s The Gravedigger’s Archaelogy. Some of these I am reading for the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th time. When I write a new book of poems, I have to come up with a new way of writing, and I do a lot of wide reading to think about what techniques I might adapt to the project at hand. In a way, it means unlearning everything so that I can learn some new mode that will excite me, and hopefully my readers, too!

Bethany Wong: These days I am mostly reading and rereading for my classes. Teaching five days a week has been helpful in thinking not just about what I read, but also how and why I read. Ask any of my students in “Rise of the Novel” this fall and they will tell you the early novel was extremely long. Also, since I teach and research centuries-old literature, I am constantly asking myself: “What does this text have to say to us now?” However, upon recommendation from a colleague, I am also reading What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories by Laura Shapiro which traces the history of women and their relationships to food. To talk about food is to talk about identity and it’s been fascinating to trace the culinary choices of extraordinary women who range from Dorothy Wordsworth to Eva Braun. Thinking about food and fellowship is timely given the number of lively conversations I have been having with colleagues in the CI and with friends in restaurants around LA.

Jonathan Burton: Among the books I’ve enjoyed recently are Mislaid by Nell Zink, The Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu, Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi, The Good Lord Bird by James McBride and The Shakespeare Requirement by Julie Schumacher. Of these I’ll most strongly recommend Liu’s stories (especially for fans of Black Mirror) and McBride’s novel (for fans of American history and unreliable narrators). Both are loads of fun and winners of major awards (for Liu, the Nebula and Hugo awards; for McBride the National Book Award).

Wendy Furman-Adams: When I began teaching a little bit less this year, I’d hoped to read a great deal more. Somehow, that hasn’t yet happened. I still stay pretty busy reading Homer and Milton, Plato and Euripides--making sure they’re fresh in my mind for class. But I also continue to read intensively each week in my effort to gain perspective on current global events—especially in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Harper’s, and The Atlantic. Meanwhile, I’m having fun working my way, profile by profile, through Joe Donnelly’s LA. Man--a collection of interviews with luminaries ranging from Wes Anderson to Sean Penn and Carmen Electra. Some of the interviews take up serious issues; others are simply fun. All are written with wit and verve; all serve as brilliant models of profile writing—one of the many genres Professor Donnelly teaches to Whittier’s fortunate students. I recommend this lively read!

Kate Durbin: On dAve Paddy's suggestion, I just finished The Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata. It's about a single, 36

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year old woman who works at a convenience store and loves it. Everyone in her life finds this harrowing. I really love this book. It's embrace of the artificial as something comforting, and its embrace of loneliness, makes it very unusual. 

I also just read Paul Tremblay's new horror novel, The Cabin at the End of The World. I appreciate how his horror novels always possess some ambiguity in terms of what is real and what is simply fear feeding itself. 

Michelle Chihara: I have been re-reading the books for my Leadership & Literature paired class with Lana Nino's Humanistic Values in Leadership, and I have to mention Warlock, a long Western based  on the shoot-out at the OK Corral by the wonderful writer Oakley Hall. I love this book, and am always excited to share it with students. Outside of class, I have been reading the books of Claire Messud, which I have been devouring at night and during bouts of insomnia. I'm particularly fond of The Woman Upstairs. I just read J.D. Connor's brilliant book Hollywood Math and Aftermath: The Economic Image, which is economic history, film history and film studies rolled into one. And I also found Sianne Ngai's Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute and Interesting amazingly insightful. I listen to a lot of podcasts, but I have to mention one a colleague in the department first recommended to me, the exceptionally wise therapist with the charming French accent Esther Perel's live counseling sessions, Where Should We Begin? because it got me to read her books, which are also very profound about human emotions. 

Katy Simonian: I have just begun reading Geoffrey Robertson's memoir, Rather His Own Man, which chronicles his journey from aspiring law student to one of the most well-respected and impactful jurists in the world. His book, An Inconvenient Genocide, documents his work to combat genocide denial and human rights violations in order to promote international recognition of the Armenian Genocide and prevent future crimes against humanity. I had the pleasure of meeting Geoffrey Robertson two years ago at a special ceremony during which he was honored for his commitment to human rights and his role as co-counsel with Amal Clooney in the case of Perincek vs. Switzerland. The ruling resulted in the Armenian Genocide being recognized as "a clearly established historical fact" and remains on record in the European Court of Human Rights. It is a pleasure to read such a thoughtful, interesting reflection from a man whose work is an inspiration to me and so many. I encourage everyone to read and learn about his life and work.

dAve pAddy: The Japanese have an amazing word: tsundoku. It means buying more books than you can possibly read and being surrounded by the piles of books you haven’t quite yet got to. Being on sabbatical meant that I was able to dive into some of those stacks with greater voracity, even if the piles look untouched and tower ever higher. Anyway, here are some of the standouts from this year’s reading.

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I recently discovered the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare and found his novel Broken April to be one of the best books I’ve ever read; it just hits that sweet spot of what I love in fiction. Looking forward to reading much more by him. A trip to Japan got me, finally, venturing further into Japanese fiction. Absolutely loved the classic The Sound of the Mountain by Yasunari Kawabata, and I can also highly recommend the darkly quirky contemporary novel, Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata. Seriously, go read that now. It’ll definitely be making its way into my Why Read? course. Other biggies along the way were experimental masterpieces like Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz and Tom McCarthy’s C. Emmanuel Carrère is always astonishing to read (Limonov remains one of my favorite books of the last ten years) and My Life as a Russian Novel is no exception. I started Rachel Cusk’s anti-narrative trilogy (the first book is Outline), which is thoroughly engaging, though I think Karl Ove Knausgaard is still better in this mode (do pick up his lecture Inadvertent for one of the most intriguing bits of contemporary literary criticism). Also very much enjoyed the latest from two of contemporary science fiction’s masters: William Gibson’s The Peripheral and Hannu Rajaniemi’s Summerland. Finally, I have to make a special case for Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Café. I still haven’t got around to reading her super-praised book on Montaigne (and I will do), but this is a master class in collective biography that will make you remember why philosophy matters and can be such a life-saving joy. And the piles continue to rise.

Charles S. Adams: My main reading accomplishment is actually finishing Grant, the huge (1000 page) biography of Ulysses S. Grant by Ron Chernow. Chernow is perhaps best known for his biography of Alexander Hamilton on which, I believe, the musical Hamilton is based. Grant is one of the best biographies I have ever read, totally changing my view of a man I thought I knew a lot about, rethinking him as a man of considerable intelligence, kindness, and competence rather than a brutal general and corrupt President. His bad reputation is undeserved; I think he was a great man. Following my theme of biography, I read my friend Peter Stark’s biography Young Washington. Here too, I find my view of George Washington to need considerable revision, in particular concerning his involvement as a young soldier with really starting the violence known as the French and Indian War. He had a lot more to do with that than I previously thought. I recommend anything by Stark, especially Astoria, an antonishing tale of the follow-up to Lewis and Clark in the Pacific Northwest. I did read some other things over the summer, most significantly Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Cornelia Nixon’s Jarrettsville, in preparation for teaching them this semester for the first time.  

Charlie Eastman: Geez, I am going to have to scrape my memory neurons... Well, Mexican property and immigration law, for one. But I kicked off the summer with a re-read—first in over 30 years, I believe—of Heart of Darkness, and then a weighty history by Matthew Restall, When Montezuma Met Cortes. On dAve pAddy’s recommendation, To Die in Spring, by Rolf Schumacher—follows a young man hoodwinked into the German army in the late innings of WW2. Hunger, by Roxane Gay, is one of the most moving reads I’ve had in a spell. I had to make a couple attempts, but I did eventually get through Orphic Paris by Henri Cole. Probably a me thing more than a him thing. I read back-to-back two novels by Julie Schumacher, Dear Committee

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Members and The Shakespeare Requirement. Both are quite funny, or would be if they didn’t capture the state of the Humanities so damn well. The experience was not unlike biting down on an aching tooth; one knows one shouldn’t, but there it is. I’m currently reading The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. I know I’m leaving some stuff out; we’ll all get over it, I’m sure.

Joe Donnelly: I've recently read David Ulin's book/essay The Lost Art of Reading, Books and Resistance in a Troubled Time, which was recently updated and reissued. Aside from being a true mensch, Ulin is the former books editor at the Los Angeles Times and this book is a great prep work for teaching Why Read?

I also recently read the novel Cherry and reviewed it for the Los Angeles Review of Books. Cherry is the prison-penned, roman a clef by Nico Walker, a decorated Iraq War vet who came home to PTSD and the opiod crisis. It feels urgent and relatable in ways that writing-program produced fiction often does not. Here's the review in LARB: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/more-than-son-of-jesus-son-on-nico-walkers-cherry/

Geoffrey Long: Naturally, most of my recent reading has been directly tied to the completion of my PhD. The most central texts for that research were Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide by Henry Jenkins, which popularized the term "transmedia" and introduced the idea of transmedia storytelling; Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation by Mark J.P. Wolf, which presents a brilliant history of fictional worldbuilding; As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality by Michael Saler, which argues that such deeply immersive stories as Sherlock Holmes, the Cthulu mythos and Lord of the Rings were "virtual worlds" before anyone ever flicked on a computer; and Literary Gaming by Astrid Ensslin, which plots a wide range of interative narratives on a "ludic-literary" spectrum, depending on each work's emphasis on gameplay or reading. Absolutely wonderful stuff, but now that I have a breath or two to get caught up on my personal reading, Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology, Nnedi Okorafor's comics debut Shuri, and Sylvain Neuvel's Sleeping Giants are all on my nightstand. Oh, and my six-year-old daughter Zoe and I are currently reading Luke Pearson's brilliant Hilda series, the graphic novels that are the basis for the new Netflix animated series.

English Department Courses for January, and Spring 2018-2019 Academic Year

(All Subject to at Least Some Change)

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Below is supplemental information from most of the faculty about the departmental courses scheduled for the remainder of this academic year. It is in the nature of our subjects that a course description in the catalog rarely says exactly what any given offering will cover. There are always big choices faculty members have to make, and these change over time. The details are, again, always subject to change, but we hope this will help. As we acquire more information and make changes, we hope to adjust the on-line versions of this document. Please see or e-mail the instructors, Angela Olivas in the department office, or our current department chair, Jonathan Burton, for answers to questions these descriptions might raise. We note as well that some instructors may be teaching courses in the INTD, GCS, WSP, THEA, and GWS (love those acronyms!). It is entirely possible that there are courses taught in other departments that good for ENGL credit that your editors and schedulers missed. Students should consult the Whittier College Catalog concerning prerequisites for all courses. In particular, most courses require ENGL 110 or 120 or their equivalent as a pre-requisite for enrollment. Some courses taught as part of pairs require co-enrollment in the paired course. See the instructors if you have questions.

ENGL 110 note: (only offered in Fall): This course is designed for first-semester, first-year students with a strong background and continuing interest in the study and writing of literature. While it counts toward the requirements of the English major (as an alternative to ENGL 120), it does not fulfill the COM 2 (writing intensive) requirement as ENGL 120 does. But do not despair—we have worked to designate many of our other courses to fulfill this requirement, which should be reflected in the schedule of courses.

ENGL 120 note: As with “Exploring Literature,” individual instructors will organize the course around specific themes of their own devising, though all sections have the same goals. All of them count for the COM 2 Lib Ed requirement and will enable a student to then take upper-level English courses. Where there is no extended description, the instructor is still thinking about it. It is always possible that if a particular section does not draw enough students in preregistration it could be cancelled. If this happens, students should see their advisors, the registrar’s office, or any member of the English Department and we will do our best to find an open spot in another section.

ENGL 290 and 390 note: These numbers are for courses that are new ideas or perhaps not intended to be offered on a regular basis. The numbers can be repeated. Be careful about signing up for the correct section. There are a fair number of 290s this year, for instance. As space may be limited, you do not want to be shut out of the course you intended to take by mistakenly signing up for something else.

January 2019ENGL 290, Profile Writing (Joe Donnelly)

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This course focuses on the profile—the art of writing about people. Profile writing is a staple of newspaper and magazine writing. It marries the journalist’s core skills—interviewing, researching, reporting, analyzing, synthesizing—to literary techniques such as voice, structure, character development and plotting. It does this in order to paint indelible portraits of people we care about… whether we knew we cared about them or not. At least, that’s what it does when it’s done well. The best profiles illuminate the current culture, convey larger social issues, and place us firmly in the thick of the human condition. We will learn how to do them right. In the process, you will become better writers, thinkers and journalists.

ENGL 290, Try Not to Scream: Contemporary Horror Fiction (Kate Durbin)This course will explore contemporary horror novels as windows into the human condition and the state of the globe.  Books include: John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Let Me In, William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist, Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho, and Natsuo Kirino's Out.  Films include The Witch, The Cabin in the Woods, and Paranormal Activity. Students will also create their own horror narratives via the gaming platform Twine based on concepts gleaned in class, in collaboration with the Digital Lib Arts Lab.

ENGL 384, Robin Hood Through the Ages (Sean Morris)How have successive generations adapted Robin Hood to address their own concerns, and why do these stories continue to fascinate us after more than 600 years? We'll read the original medieval ballads, plays, and chronicles; Renaissance versions such as Ben Jonson's The Sad Shepherd and Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona and As You Like It; Walter Scott's Ivanhoe; Tennyson's The Foresters; and works by Keats and Dryden, among others. Along the way we'll dip into tales of other outlaws medieval and modern, including films like The Adventures of Robin Hood and perhaps Zorro. Some of the readings are in Middle English, but don’t worry: You’ll learn everything you need to know about that in class. ‘Welcome to Sherwood!’

ENGL 390, Experimental Drama in New York City (Jonathan Burton)Experimental Drama/NYC will be a partial travel course with online, on-site and classroom components. Students will explore the theory and practice of experimental drama, in a course divided into three parts: (1) Immersion in experimental drama; (2) Theorizing experimental drama; and (3) Practicing experimental drama. In the first week of the course, students will meet in New York City to attend performances associated with four experimental theater festivals as well as one mainstream Broadway performance that will serve as a point of comparison. Upon returning to campus, we will read twentieth and twenty-first century theories of experimental drama and edit and expand journal entries written in New York. During the remaining period of the term, students will workshop their own experimental work, rehearse it and finally present it in performance accompanied by prefatory essays of the sort you might find in a theater program.

ENGL 290/390, Writing Poetry in Mexico (Tony Barnstone)Students who take this class should have four poems already written at the start of the term, which they will submit to workshops in Mexico.  This poetry writing workshop is a

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travel class that begins earlier than the normal Jan Term semester start. Students will travel to Mexico on Jan 1st or 2nd, 2019 and stay there for about 10 days, after which the workshop will continue in Whittier.  Students will travel with me and another faculty member to San Miguel de Allende where we will attend the San Miguel Poetry Week. which will take place from Wednesday, January 2nd (travel on the 1st or 2nd) through the 7th in San Miguel Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico. This is one of the oldest and most important poetry fests in Mexico, and students will attend many readings and give their own participant reading at the end of the week. All students will study not only with me but also with 3 other poets, and you can expect two of them to be some of the most famous poets in America and one to be a famous poet from England. We will also be meeting important writers from Mexico and hearing them read their work. After the week of the festival, students and faculty will remain in San Miguel for several days doing local activities, seeing local architecture, going to the botanical gardens, perhaps horseback riding, going to natural hot springs, and other fun stuff, all the while writing poems about their experiences. San Miguel has extraordinary 16th and 17th century architecture, thermal baths, colorful markets, four-star Mexican restaurants and Jazz bars and is known worldwide as one of Mexico's most charming places. This magical town has been a retreat for artists from all over the world. Great poets such as Pablo Neruda lived here. Neal Cassidy died here. Mexican muralist, David Alfaro Siqueiros painted here. Today writers and artists flock to San Miguel seeking beauty along with a rich cultural scene. You will note that I plan on making it a course that can be taken either at the 290 or the 390 level so that it can count as an advanced workshop and/or a 300 level class for English majors and Creative Writing Track majors.

And, Recommended, Though Not Departmental

INTD 290, Transmedia Storytelling from Mythology to Marvel (Geoffrey Long)How do you tell stories across multiple media, including those that don't exist yet? As students design their own transmedia storyworlds, they will learn the art, history and business of designing vast storyworlds like Star Wars or the Marvel Universe; the literary history of vast storyworlds including ancient mythology, Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, and literary “shared worlds” including H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulu mythos or George R. R. Martin’s Wild Cards; the fundamentals of writing for multiple media including comics, film, television, video games, augmented reality and virtual reality; and the art of designing experiences that connect these stories together and inspire audiences to tell stories of their own.

Spring 2018

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See head note at the start of this course listing section for a discussion of the ins and outs of ENGL 120, Why Read? registration.

ENGL 120, Sections 1, 4 and 5: Why Read?: Changing Fictions (Bethany Wong)How do writers of fiction make a case for the importance of literature in our everyday lives? What strategies do authors use to highlight the problems in society as failures of sympathy and imagination? Attending to form, style, and voice in a variety of genres (including poetry, drama, and novels), we will examine how authors from the 16th century to the present seek to persuade their readers that engaging closely with literature helps construct creative and productive individuals. For the authors on our syllabus, finding an artistic voice requires translating and adapting the past for the present so be ready to learn some new words and new ways of communicating from hundreds of years ago. Throughout the term, we will analyze how fiction justifies its existence, contending that the ability to read and write well is also the power to change hearts and minds about social issues that continue to puzzle, plague, and inspire our current times.

ENGL 120, Sections 2 and 8: Why Read?: Science Fiction (Kate Durbin)Surveillance, time travel, and dystopias: in this class, we will examine race and gender dynamics, environmental issues, global politics, and questions of technology, genetics, and ethics via the novels of Octavia Butler, Michel Faber, Suzanne Collins, and others, as well as the 2015 Jennifer Phang film Advantageous, the Netflix series Black Mirror, and more. We will ground each text in the political contexts from which they were written, examining each parallel world as a revealing mirror of our past, present, and possible futures.

ENGL 120, Sections, 3, 6, and 7: Why Read?: Can the Empire Write Back? (Katy Simonian). What is a homeland? Critic and author V. S. Naipaul suggests home exists within the mind of any inhabitant. By contrast, Salmon Rushdie claims that in a sense, homelands and borders are imaginary, subject to both creation and destruction. Rushdie’s “The Empire Writes Back” also posits the idea that postcolonial writers carve and claim large territories within the English language through literature. Other writers such as Jamaica Kincaid, Brian Friel, James Joyce, Jean Rhys, and Chinua Achebe approach this seemingly simple question from the standpoint of language, ownership and cultural subjugation. The title of this course, Why Read?, challenges us to appreciate the broader concerns of literature and the impact of language on the way in which we perceive, understand, and ultimately read the world. During the course of the semester, we will engage with topics such as language, culture, identity, various forms of discrimination and overcoming violent physical and political subjugation through the exploration of selected works of literature from the ever-developing postcolonial era. The course is not a survey of Twentieth Century English Literature, but rather a detailed look into varieties of postcolonial fiction from some of the different corners of the former British Empire which dominated the literary world for the last century. By reading literature, with an emphasis on short fiction, from Ireland, Africa, the Caribbean, and India, we can gain a stronger understanding of the complexities of language, which is the connective thread between each of these writers and their works. By the end of the course, we will ask

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ourselves the question of whether or not voices of the Empire can indeed write back, and in doing so examine the impact of literature on identity and the concept of “homeland” in the context of the colonial and postcolonial experience. To read is to recognize the power of literature as a means of conveying an understanding of ourselves and others and we will endeavor to embrace our power as readers throughout this course.  ENGL 120, Section 11: Why Read?: Imprinting L.A. How Los Angeles Became Literature (Joe Donnelly)This class will dip into some of the currents in the remarkable river of writing that runs like blood through the City of Angels. Angeleno literature is deep, wide and fast and it carries explorers from old worlds to new, from the past to the future, from despair to redemption. Like the city itself, Los Angeles’ literature is one of the greatest experiments in multicultural assimilation going on in the world. Thanks to its great literary tradition, the city exists as much in our imaginations as it does under our feet.

ENGL 205: Ecopoetry (Tony Barnstone)This is a version of the Beginning Poetry Workshop, but it is focused on reading and writing poetry about the environment—ecopoetry. Students will learn how to write poetry from the beginning to the sonnet, and no experience is required.  The class is for absolute novices just as much as for advanced beginners with deep backgrounds in creative writing. In addition to writing our own poems, we will read a wide range of world poetry about topics ranging from ecology to apocalypse, with a special focus on the literature of China. 

ENGL 221, Major British and American Writers from 1785 (Michelle Chihara)This course continues the survey of literature in English begun in ENG 220 (Which is a pre-requisite). One of the big differences in this course from ENGL 220 is that in addition to continuing our review of the developments in and of British literary history we will have to consider the somewhat parallel trajectory of American literary history. The course will in fact begin with some of the foundations of American literature. Moving back and forth between British and American literature, we will examine Romanticism, the Victorian Age, Realism, Modernism, and conclude with some directions taken in contemporary literature. As we investigate the predominant ideas and aesthetic premises in each era, we will also consider literature’s relationship to matters such as the rise and fall of the British Empire, the building of the American nation, the historical importance of revolution and industrialization, and matters of race, class, and gender. As we consider shifting notions of aesthetics, we will also consistently ask: “What is the relationship between national identity and literature, if any? What was/is the literary canon, and how should we think about it?” Out of some necessity, we will focus on representative works rather than trying to do it all. This course is foundational for the English major and will include guest appearances by departmental faculty, who will introduce their particular literary interests.

ENGL 290, Quaker Campus Workshop (Joe Donnelly)Students who work on the production and writing of the Quaker Campus can claim credit

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for their work through this course, so long as they are also enrolled in a journalism course.  The course is to be taken only as Pass/No Pass.  

ENGL 290, Section 2: Narrative Journalism (Joe Donnelly)Journalism has been described as storytelling with a purpose. Narrative journalism, or literary journalism as it’s sometimes called, takes the basic tenets of solid journalism—industrious and accurate reporting, the search for the best obtainable truth, good writing—and applies them to a richer and deeper level of purposeful storytelling. Think of it as the literature of civic life.

ENGL 311, History of the English Language (Sean Morris)This is your language 1000 years ago: “Hwæt! We gardena in geardagum þeodcyninga þrym gefrunon, hu þa æþelingas ellen fremmedon.” What happened?!?! How did we get here from there? And while we’re at it, we still want to know why “police” and “ice” don’t rhyme, but “knight” and “bite” do. And why can you have two dogs, but not two sheeps or oxes? And why do they talk funny in other states, calling a “soda” a “pop” and other crazy things? Why? I will tell you why, if first you sojourn with me through… the History of the English Language. Welcome to H-E-L.

ENGL 321, British Literature 700-1500 (Sean Morris)Monsters and heroes and saints, oh my! This course is part “Greatest Hits of Medieval England” and part “Secret, Shocking, Fun Texts of Medieval England.” We’ll read such classics as Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Morte d-Arthur, possibly some Canterbury Tales alongside lesser-known works like The Owl and the Nightingale, Havelok the Dane, William and the Werewolf, and even Anglo-Saxon handbooks on punishment. These texts will give you the usual modern understanding of the Middle Ages, and will also show you where this paradigm falls short. Some texts will be read in Middle English—don’t worry, we’ll get you through it! (Who thought “getting medieval” could be so fun?)

ENGL 326, Topics in Shakespeare Studies: Shakespeare in American Life (Jonathan Burton)In this class we will focus on the methods of historicism and reception studies to examine Shakespearean drama in a range of geographic, temporal and political contexts. Following an intensive reading of several of Shakespeare’s plays, we will consider how those same texts have taken on new forms and meanings in American culture from the 18th century up to the present. Our exploration of the American afterlives of Shakespearean drama will feature a range of contexts, including literary and political life, education, performance, and business, and especially a consideration of Shakespeare and American Immigration. In other words, we will consider how Shakespeare has been harnessed to various projects in American life, such as defining an independent nation, incorporating (or ostracizing) new citizens, making a profit, and educating leaders.

ENGL 336, The European Novel (dAvid pAddy)This course is paired with Elizabeth Sage’s HIST 363 Socialism and Revolution in

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Modern Europe, and together we will explore some of the literature, art and history from the end of the 18th century through the end of the twentieth century, a period rife with revolutionary sentiments in Europe. Think of this as a set of classes in the relationship between art and revolution. My readings will have us think about the changing ways that literature in the modern period has attempted to represent or wrestle with ideas of social and cultural change. We will look at works that attempt to address revolutionary moments directly through content, as well as avant-garde works that make claims to the revolutionary nature of artistic forms in and of themselves. Readings will be heavy and exciting: Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther, Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, Kate Roberts’s Feet in Chains, Franz Kafka’s The Trial, Ismail Kadare’s Twilight of the Eastern Gods, Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude and Georges Perec’s Things, as well as avant-garde manifestoes and political essays by Theodor Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Gyorgy Lukacs and Guy Debord.

Note: Students wishing to enroll in this course will be required to take the pair.

ENGL 337, Gothic Fiction (Bethany Wong)This course will explore how authors of “Gothic” fiction use fear and terror to complicate the relationship between what is seen and what is unseen. Pushing the bounds of rationality, Gothic Fiction contends that what we fear about the supernatural and violence can challenge prevalent views of gender, race, class, and sexuality. In Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, the hero, Henry Tilney, chastises the heroine, Catherine Morland, for looking at the world as if it were Gothic Fiction, saying, “consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained…Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them?” He implies that the world of the Gothic is far removed from our everyday lives. In this course, we will test out Tilney’s binaries of home/aboard, past/present, fiction/reality, self/other. Examining works of authors such as Horace Walpole and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, we will examine the extent to which fantastical stories and states of mind help us reflect on who we are here and now.

ENGL 353, James Joyce (dAvid pAddy)In the year 1999, millennial fever seemed to make people go list crazy. Everywhere we were being asked about the greatest songs of all time, the best TV show, and even the best novel of the twentieth century. In poll after poll, two books rose to the top of that last list: Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and James Joyce’s Ulysses. Given that far fewer people have probably read Joyce’s book than Tolkien’s trilogy, what does this say about the significance attributed to Ulysses? This class will give you a chance to see what all the fuss is about. The course provides an intensive study of the writings of Irish author James Joyce, one of the leading figures of European modernism. In addition to reading about Joyce’s life, his relationship to Ireland and his historical era, we will read three of his four major works: Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the aforementioned Ulysses. We will also take a look at samples of Joyce’s final work, Finnegans Wake. Given the length and difficulty of Ulysses, most of the semester will be devoted to the careful reading of that text. Come and join us if you are ready to delve into some of the most incredibly challenging, but rewarding literature, and learn the importance of the word “Yes!”

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ENGL 355, Contemporary Drama (Jonathan Burton)Drama and theater have always been anxious forms; writings from Aristotle, Plato, and Horace make claims about the impact of drama on the life, mind and morality of actors, writers and spectators. Theater, many argue, is dangerous. As a result, one of the areas of greatest interest in contemporary drama has been metadrama, plays interested in the possibilities and responsibilities of playwright, actor, and audience. Many of the plays that we will read are interested in the performance of race and gender. In addition, we will encounter find actors breaking through the fourth wall, plotlines that zig-zag wildly or poke through narrative frames, playwrights staging themselves and their audiences in powerful and compromised positions, and performers performing performance. If that last phrase seems dizzying, hang on to your hats, these are plays designed to unsettle you. This course is paired with Theater 340.

ENGL 363, Moden American Novel (Charles S. Adams)This course is designed to give some focus to what is happening in the American novel from about World War I into the 1950's, and the relation of those literary developments to cultural issues. It is a prolific period, filled with important work by many writers. The relationship of literature to ideas of nation, race, gender, aesthetics, morality and everything else are rethought once again. I am still considering the exact direction it will take this year as far as specific texts are concerned, though, as usual, my interests are pretty historical. Here is my thinking so far: in the past we have started with some Willa Cather and Gertrude Stein. We then should move on to some Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and John Dos Passos. I feel an obligation to F. Scott Fitzgerald, but time begins to be an issue. We should look at H.T. Tsaing, Zora Hurston, and Jean Toomer and end up with people like Ralph Ellison, Vladimir Nabokov, and Jack Kerouac. So, we will be looking at perhaps nine books. Yes, it is true. Not for the faint of heart, but totally worth it.

ENGL 364: Modern American Poetry (Tony Barntone)This course is a survey of major poets and poetry movements from the end of the 19th Century to the mid-20th Century (the course will focus primarily on American writers, but will dip into the work of a few poets from around the world—poets like Federico García Lorca, Constantine Cavafy and Jorge Luis Borges). The course will be something of a hybrid between traditional literary study and creative writing.  All students in the class will write a small chapbook of their own poems, along with essays about the great poets we’ll be studying in the class.

ENGL 374, Asian-American Literature (Michelle Chihara)Come read poetry, short fiction, graphic novels, novels, drama and more in Asian American Literature! The rich and varied tapestry of Asian American literature will help us consider questions not only about how Asian American writers understand their nations of origin and the traditions that shaped their ancestors, but also, questions about America. How do Asian American writers help us to understand the United States? American culture sometimes becomes focused on a black/white dichotomy in race relations. How do Asian American scholars understand the construct of race? How

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does this understanding help or hinder people? How do these writers understand the individual and the collective? How do questions of race intersect with questions of gender and class? The group of people who refer to themselves as “Asian American” is incredibly broad, it includes at least people who trace their roots to the Pacific rim countries including Japan, Indonesia, the Philippines, the Pacific Islands, as well as Korea, Burma (or Myanmar), Vietnam, Malaysia, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and more. A single racial categorization groups myriad histories and traditions in these home countries, as well as diverse waves of immigration and attempts at assimilation, labor practices, and experiences in the United States. While Asian Americans often suffer under similar prejudices, those too have shifted over the years, as “Asians” become and struggle to become “Asian Americans.” 

ENGL 400, Critical Procedures (Michelle Chihara)This is the course in which senior English majors complete their “paper in the major” requirement, so a good deal of our time will be spent working on that, culminating in the “Senior Presentation,” where you go public.  In addition, the agenda of this class is theoretical.  Reading a novel, poem, or play may seem a fairly fundamental skill for you by the time you’re a senior English major.  But most of us have not really encountered the reality that there are serious people who have serious disagreements about how to go about these fundamental tasks.  We know it at heart, but most of us have not thought it through.  So, what are the ways that contemporary literary theorists take on the job?  What are people doing right now, arguing about?  Many of these theories are difficult if not mind-boggling, but they will all help you become a more thoughtful reader, careful critic, and, perhaps, sophisticated teacher of literature.  Indeed, a common response from students after learning this material is something like, “I will never be able to read the same way again.”  And, “Why didn’t I know this stuff far earlier in my career?” But maybe you did, and now can put a name to it—that is the point.  Each of us has an approach to literature, but is there a name for what you do? The answer is yes. Maybe not exactly what you do, but probably close.   Instructor Permission Required.

ENGL 410, Senior Seminar: Daphne du Maurier (dAvid pAddy)Daphne du Maurier was one of the most popular novelists of the twentieth century, famous especially for Rebecca (1938) and its subsequent film by Alfred Hitchcock. This popularity proved to be at best a mixed blessing for her. Often unfairly pegged and dismissed as a mere writer of romances, du Maurier and her work are more complex and interesting than many critics have allowed for. Not only did she explore a wide span of genres, from Gothic horror and historical fiction to biography and weird fiction, her stories and novels also open up a diverse set of topics of interest including the uncertainties of gendered and sexual identities, the power of perverse psychopathologies and unconscious forces on our daily lives, the nature of home, the problems of narrating history, the pull of landscape and the politics of Cornwall as English county/Celtic nation. We will read a healthy sampling of du Maurier’s work, as well as a variety of critical materials to enrich our understanding and approach to her unique oeuvre. Our

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primary reading will be: Jamaica Inn, Rebecca, The Scapegoat, The House on the Strand and a healthy selection of short stories (including “The Birds” and “Don’t Look Now”).

ENGL 420, Preceptorship: Teaching Literature (Various Faculty) This course is for advanced students who will act as assistants to faculty in some of the courses above. See individual faculty members concerning what might be involved. Instructor permission required.

Again, Recommended, Though Not Departmental

INTD 290: Creating Storyworlds: Worldbuilding the Real World (Geoffrey Long)The art of worldbuilding is key to designing fictional worlds like Star Wars or the Marvel Universe, but it's also an incredibly powerful tool for individuals, governments and corporations to influence real-world change. Students will learn the art of "non-fiction worldbuilding" or futurecasting - how to draw from current technological, cultural and political trends to collaboratively envision new futures for the real world, how to write design fictions with a human lens at the center, and craft plans for collaboratively making those visions into reality. (No prerequisite is required, but students who took INTD.246 Introduction to Game Design in the 2018 January term or spring semester or the 2019 January term INTD.290: Creating Storyworlds: Transmedia Storytelling from Mythology to Marvel course will find this to be a rewarding sequel.)

INTD 246: Introduction to Game Design 2.0 (Geoffrey Long)Almost everyone enjoys playing games, but what do terms like "play" and "game" actually mean, and how do games really work? As they make multiple games of their own, students will learn the history, theory and fundamentals of game design, how to think critically about games, how games are used for simulation and education, and the art and business of fun and games. (No prerequisite is required, but students who took INTD 246 Introduction to Game Design in the 2018 January term or spring semester or the 2019 January term Transmedia Storytelling course will find this a rewarding sequel.)

Why Did You Get This?

The purpose of this newsletter is to keep students, faculty, and friends informed about the wide variety of activities the Whittier College English Department is engaged in. If there are events of a literary nature that could use a bit of publicity through this vehicle, send information about them to the English Department office. We cannot guarantee when or if they will appear, but it never hurts to try! If you get this and do not want it, or if you did not get it but see a copy and want future issues, please let our Department Administrative Assistant, Angela Olivas (x4253 or see e-mail list below), in the department office, know.

Ways to Help

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While we all live for art alone, other things do matter. There are lots of ways to help us, and we welcome conversations with anyone who wants one. We are all interested in collaborations with alums in various ways, just as a starting point. But money is always useful too. We have two funds that support English Department activities in particular—one for “Student Prizes in Literature” and the other called “Poets for Poets.” The first supports writing prize contests all students at Whittier can enter. We have been giving prizes for fiction, poetry, and prose. Most of the winning work has been published in our Literary Review, edited by our students. The “Poets for Poets” fund supports general activities of interest and importance to the department (we need it to grow a bit more to start using it in the best ways possible). If you are interested in making even very small gifts, “it is all good.” Just tell the office of Advancement (on line or in person) what you want to do.

The Whittier College Department ofEnglish Language and Literature and Affiliates

Charles S. Adams: cadams@whittier.eduProfessor (American Literature, American Studies, Autobiography, Romanticism, Popular Culture, Literary Theory)Tony Barnstone: tbarnstone@whittier.edu (Spring 2018 Department Chair)Professor (Creative Writing--Poetry, Modern and Postmodern American Literature, Asian Literature, Translation)Jonathan Burton: jburton@whittier.eduProfessor (Shakespeare, Drama, Early Modern Studies, Music Writing, Comparative Literature, Literary Theory) Michelle Chihara: mchihara@whittier.edu Assistant Professor (Creative Writing—Fiction and Non-Fiction, Latinex Literature, American Literature, American Studies, Literary Theory)Wendy Furman-Adams: wfurman@whittier.edu Albert Upton Professor of English Language and Literature (Milton, Early Modern Literature, 18th Century Literature, Women’s Studies, Literature and Visual Culture, The Bible, Classics)Sean Morris: smorris@whittier.eduAssociate Professor (Linguistics and English Language, Medieval Literature, Creative Writing, Fun)dAvid pAddy: dpaddy@whittier.edu Professor (20th Century British, Modernism, Postmodernism, Welsh and other Celtic Literatures, Literary Theory, Creative Writing)Andrea Rehn: arehn@whittier.edu Professor; Associate Dean for and Director of the Whittier Scholars Program; Director, Digital Liberal Arts (19th Century British, Postcolonial Studies, Women’s Studies, Travel, Literary Theory)

Visiting Assistant Professors:

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Joseph Donnelly: jdonnel1@whittier.eduGeoffrey Long: glong@whittier.eduBethany Wong: bwong2@whittier.edu

Visiting Instructors:

Kate Durbin: kdurbin@whittier.eduKaty Simonian: ksimonia@whittier.edu

Director, College Writing Programs

Charlie Eastman: ceastman@whittier.edu

English/History/Writing Program Departments Administrative Assistant

Angela Olivas: afreelan@whittier.edu

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