After numerous high-level meetings and multiple white papers, the English Department has an official presence on Facebook. Please stop by for the latest news, or just to say hello. In Department news:

***SAVE THE DATE*** On Thursday, September 29 from 12:45-2:00, the English Department will be hosting a “Welcome New and Returning English Majors and Minors and Those Interested in English” party on the second floor of Briggs. (Yes, we know the title’s woefully long and our crack team of linguists is at work shortening it.) English faculty will be there, along with food and beverages. Stay tuned for further details.

Also . . .

Dr. Claire Crabtree’s essay “The Consecrated, Contaminated Land in Faulkner’s ‘The Bear’ and Morrison’s Beloved” will be published in the book Faulkner and Morrison, due out from the Southeast Missouri State University Press later this year.

“For Whom the Belle Toils: Americana’s Chaste Love Affair with the Drag Queen,” an essay by Dr. Rosemary Weatherston, is forthcoming in the ”Gender and Sexuality: American Texts, Contexts, Controversies” issue of The Americanist: Warsaw Journal for the Study of the United States.

Dr. Laurie Britt-Smith gave a presentation, “Accessing literacies of faith and justice in a multi-cultural classroom,” in June as part of a symposium with scholars from other Jesuit institutions. The symposium, “The Spiritual Life of the Classroom,” was part of the conference of the European Association of Teachers of Academic Writing, held in Limerick, Ireland.

Drs. Weatherston and Rombes will be chairing sessions at the “Detroit, Global City” conference in late September at Wayne State University.

Dr. Mary-Catherine Harrison’s article “How narratives overcome empathic bias: Elizabeth Gaskell’s empathy across social difference,” was published in June in Poetics Today: International Journal for Theory and Analysis of Literature and Communication.

Among the many excellent English classes offered this Fall, one is ADAPTING WOMEN: ENL 4670 (Wednesdays 4:00-6:30) taught by Dr. Harrison. Here is the class description:

How have expectations of gender and sexuality changed or stayed the same
 over the past two hundred years?  In this course, we will investigate this
 question through the critical lens of adaptation–that is, through stories,
 novels, and films that tell and retell stories about women. We will examine
 adaptations in fiction and in film (as well as the “original” texts they 
revise) in order to investigate the process of adaptation and how it
 functions as fictional or cinematic interpretation. By examining texts in 
relation with each other, we will be able to compare and contrast authors’ 
use of literary and cinematic form and discuss the cultural values, social
 context, and gender politics that inform each text. We will begin the
 course by reading “classic” fairy tales paired with modern feminist 
revisions and animated retellings. We will then read pairs of literary 
texts alongside cinematic adaptations.

photo by Dina Goldstein

P.S. Interested in learning more about majoring or minoring in English at UDM? E-mail Professor Rombes, English Chair, at rombesnd@udmercy.edu. The Department offers major concentrations in Literature, Creative Writing, and Professional Writing, as well as minors in Literature and Creative Writing, with a Professional Writing minor coming soon.

The 2011 issue of [SIC], the University of Detroit Mercy undergraduate literary journal published by the English Department, is hot off the presses, and word is it’s one of the best issues yet. As always, the journal is open for submissions to all UDM students, and completely edited, peer-reviewed, and designed by UDM students, with English Professors Rosemary Weatherston, Claire Crabtree, and Timothy Dugdale serving as faculty advisors. The students who work on the journal as content and design editors receive invaluable real-world editing experience, as well as the final product in the form of the journal itself, which they can use in their portfolios as they seek internships and jobs (and of course just to impress friends and family members). This year’s issue marks the 18th year of the journal, and features a powerful collection of poems, short stories, non-fiction, photographs, and drawings. So, on the official day of its release, here are some images of the journal:

“

Blue sky

Two texts

(And in this short video, [SIC] takes it first ever car ride down Livernois Avenue in Detroit, listening to the car radio.)

University of Detroit English alumnus (‘64) and nationally renowned poet Michael Heffernan visited Professor Claire Crabtree’s English 2450: Study of Poetry class on April 14. To a packed room of students and professors, Heffernan spoke eloquently and movingly about his time at U of D, where, he said, the Jesuit education deeply shaped who his is. He read poems, and with humor, grace, and insight discussed the intricacies of poetic inspiration and the writing process. Heffernan has won numerous prizes, including the Iowa Poetry Prize and two Pushcart Prizes. He read from both his older work and from the poems in his new book At the Bureau of Divine Music. It was a mark of the power of his poetry and his generosity as a speaker that, when it was time for the event to end, no one really wanted to leave. Below left: Michael Heffernan. Below right: Professor Claire Crabtree and Heffernan.

Poet Michael Heffernan

In his provocative new essay published in the international journal CTheory, “The UnNatural, or Who’s Your Daddy? Tiger Woods, Nike, and Corporate Parenthood,” Professor Freeman offers a powerful critique of Tiger Woods as a brand. Drawing on diverse sources ranging from Supreme Court cases involving corporate personhood, Jean Baudrillard, biographies of Woods, exposes of Nike’s labor practices, television commercials, and more, he explores how Woods represents a locus point of a powerful global corporate imaginary. Here is a small sample:

“Digitizing Tiger as a two-dimensional character in a game format in which “players would be able to become Tiger Woods, at least on-screen,” EA Sports is peddling a “participation mystique” à la Xbox in which the audience can mingle with and play against the elite. Baudrillard’s project of precipitating rotting “by accentuating the simulacral, parodic side of dying games” is thwarted here. Given the Supreme Court’s expansion of the power of corporations such as Nike, the triumphal neoliberalism of unfettered capitalism hardly seems like a dying game. Derrida’s own project of exorcising the specter by “bringing this representation back to the world of labor, production, and exchange, so as to reduce it to its conditions” is also problematized by the willingness of players to ignore those conditions, the real world misery that allows such corporations to carry on business (and pleasure) as usual.

Meanwhile, Nike and EA Sports continue to run the show. Reducing Tiger to a simulation, EA Sports enlists any number of people in a game located at least one world away from the sweatshops that make it all possible. Predator Courses, indeed. We the players become absorbed in this simulated world of endless fairways and pleasant greens. And this is why Nike wants desperately for Tiger to get back in the game. It is through the play of Tiger that Nike gets so many others to play along as well, blinded to its ruthless exploitation by the glare of that thousand-watt smile.”

In addition, Professor Freeman’s article “Interrogating the Soliloquist: Does It Really Go Without Saying?” has just been published in the journal symploke.

Three English Department faculty are headed in the next few weeks in different directions–literally–for scholarly reasons. Professor Laurie Britt-Smith will be attending the Four C’s Conference (The Conference on College Composition and Communication–the national association of college and university writing instructors) in Atlanta. Dr. Britt-Smith (assistant professor and Director of the Writing Program) will be a discussion leader for the panel “Ethics, Participation, and Service Learning: When It’s Not Clear on Whose Side You Are” on April 6.

On April 7, assistant professor Mary-Catherine Harrison will be at Washington University in Saint Louis presenting at the International Society for the Study of Narrative. And then, later in the month, Dr. Harrison will be presenting a paper at the Midwest Victorian Studies Association in Topeka, Kansas.

And on April 7, Professor and Chair Nicholas Rombes will be in Canada at the English Department’s Critical Media Lab (where he is Visiting Scholar and Artist) at the University of Waterloo. There, he will be launching his DO NOT SCREEN project, a new academic/creative experiment investigating the haunted spaces between analog and digital cinema.