Literature and Faith

At Seattle Pacific University, I teach a course called Literature and Faith for the English department with which I am free to do more or less whatever I like. I love the course because it allows me to talk about my favorite things: poetry and Christianity. But also I love how much is possible under those headings. I never teach the same class twice, so I’ll be mixing up the reading list and likely the course structure for next year’s iteration—maybe reading Dostoyevsky, Dillard, and Dante? Bailey and Milton on Devils? But this year I had the readings and lectures grouped around the various genres that I think Christians have contributed uniquely to, ones that wouldn’t exist, I think, apart from believers. For the curious, here’s what we read under those headings.

NB: most of these we read in excerpt. The idea is to give students a familiarity with these many works that they might see the diversity of authors and styles available under such a rubric and that they might build respectable reading lists.

NBII: We do read CS Lewis Screwtape Letters in its entirety; all poems come from Ryken’s Soul in Paraphrase (Crossway).

Introduction and Method

C.S. Lewis, Experiment in Criticism

Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur”

St. Francis of Assisi, “Canticle of the Sun”

Gungor, “Brother Sun, Sister Moon”

Hymnody

C. Phillips, The Hymnal

Charlotte Elliott, “Just as I Am”

Getty/Townsend, “In Christ Alone”

Bridges/Thring, “Crown Him with Many Crowns”

H.Lyte, “Abide with Me”

In-class screening of Amazing Grace (dir. Pollack, 2018) 

John Newton,“Amazing Grace” 

H. Constable, “O Gracious Shepherd”

Spiritual Realities

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, part 1

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, part 2

Dante trans. Mary Jo Bang 

Dante trans. Clive James

Drehrer, How Dante Can Save Your Life

Sermons

F. Beuchner, “Magnificent Defeat”

P. J. Bailey, Festus

Anne Bradstreet, “Burning of our House”

Bp. Michael Curry “Royal Sermon”

Billy Graham "How to Live"

G. Herbert, “Redemption”

Allegory

Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress

Lewis, Pilgrim’s Regress

Spenser, The Faerie Queen

Spenser “Most Glorious”

Donne, “Batter my Heart”

Spiritual Autobiography

James K.A. Smith, On the Road

Augustine, Confessions

E. McCaullie, Reading While Black

Milton, “When Faith and Love”

Blake, “And did Those Feet”

Devotionals

Elizabeth Elliot, Streams in Desert

Dorothy Day, On Pilgrimage

Katherine Parr, Meditations

Herbert, “The Collar”

Donne, “Death be Not Proud”

Apologetics

Spufford, Unapologetic

Chesterton, Everlasting Man

Final Thoughts

Christina Rossetti, “In the Bleak Midwinter”

First Nations Version: Indigenous New Testament

The Talk

It occurs to me that the venues we have for discussing work in academic journals is deficient. The current model of what stands for conversation is thus: Professor A publishes a research article in a journal making some arguments or observations. Professor B, when she comes across the journal article while researching an article of her own, perhaps years later, will incorporate her amendments and critiques of Article A in her own article, published perhaps in the same journal, but usually not, a year from the time of her first finding it, since the timeline to publication in peer-reviewed disciplines is so (justifiably) long. 

This method has merits: not least that everything is on record, and a person wishing to wade into the debate, even decades later, can pick up the thread (like some later Theseus!) and heave shoulder to wheel. But it lacks spark. And it requires a level of formality—restating the original positions, totting up citations, revisiting source material—that is in-conducive to having something like a real exchange. 

Another method, about which I’ve written a little here and here, by which academic conversations are held is through conferencing, though again, useful as they undoubtedly are, the conversation part never quite fires off in writing, since position papers are written beforehand. This method makes negatives of the former’s positives. The actual exchanges take place verbally, and once. I try to take notes sometimes while at the table, but then it’s hard to cite formally, as in, "I think Professor Y said over drinks once that X, or something to that effect." 
The third way they happen is on discipline, even period-specific listservs. Mine is called NASSR-L, but I found so many of the exchanges hostile, and so many others self-promoting that I’ve unsubscribed. When a conversation does develop, it means we’re flooding 200-something inboxes. Some of us inbox-zero types feel bad about that. 

As I say, imperfect. 

By contrast, consider Twitter’s virtues: lightning response, long-form linked opinion shared with the author and venue and tagged with the subject. The author and journal get traffic, the exchange is public, and the form limits windbaggery. I see this all the time by following feeds from people like @ayjay @jwilson1812 and @pegobry. Usually, the exchanges are about some cultural topic, in popular venues, but the conversation is real. People change their minds. The truth outs. Couldn’t something similar be tried by/for academics? Wouldn’t new relationships be formed by the proverbial fireside? And wouldn’t the (usually-beleaguered) journals appreciate the hits? 

Sometimes I’ll read an article and appreciate most of it, but have a few minor disagreements. Not enough to make an article out of, but inconsistencies I’m not comfortable letting lie. My practice now is to let them lie and remain uncomfortable. Perhaps this is being done on a large scale already and I’m just not following the right people. I say we take a cue from our friends in the Twitterverse. I know we’re all busy, but I’ll send a few friendly (read: critical and arrogant, it’s my default shorthand, unfortunately) volleys in the next weeks, in the interests of experiment.

The Apps Arms Race

This article came just in time. I'm drowning in apps. A friend (@dwittig) sent it via Pocket during my work time, and, easily distracted as ever, I opened it and read the article right then. @fchimero is right, we/I need fewer tools in our lives and more narratives, better understanding of existing ones. The alarm couldn’t have come at a better moment for me, as I was in the middle of a purchasing frenzy of new apps in the hopes of developing a workflow solution for my many writing projects.

Just yesterday, I installed and set up Postbox as an email manager. I was fed up with Apple Mail, whose long indexing times even for small inboxes was driving me crazy. I’d been very happy with Sparrow, but it never learned to sort junk mail, and so was a flood of hormone ads. And I’d been pleased for a minute with Mailbox until I wasn’t. Already this abundance seems crazy to me, since email isn’t a huge part of my work; I don’t have much to sort, nor have frequent occasion to call up old threaded conversations. Students email to tell me why they can't do assignements, universities email to tell me they won’t be needing my excellent services. It isn't hard to manage.

What is hard: figuring out how to organize my academic research and writing projects. Apart from the two journal articles I have out and under consideration at journals presently, I have

• a book review due at month’s end
• 4 other academic articles, mostly on c19 poets, in various states of dress
• 2-3 casual essays done and ready to go out,
  • 3 in progress
  • 1 under consideration at a magazine.
• 1 poetry manuscript under consideration at a press,
  • another complete and waiting for a June open-reading period,
  • and new poems coming all the time that need homes.
• a scholarly monograph whose pitch was well received, meaning a press is waiting for the full mss, which is waiting to be written. 
• another monograph which is patiently waiting for the first. 
• weekly job letters and research statements required by universities worldwide. 
• myriad blog posts, letters, translations I’m working on.

If it isn’t obvious from a list like this, I start new projects before finishing old ones. Right now, my system for organizing this information is a mess. I have some notes in Evernote, some bits of prose in DayOne (where I’m writing this), most outlines and some drafts in Workflowy, other outlines in Pages, and most notes handwritten in one of ten file folders, which were once separated by paper, but are now just color coded by whimsey. I downloaded Ulysses III, but there trial—counted down, weirdly by chronological days, no fuse days—ran out before I got to type a single file. Just the other day, another friend (@joelhenghartse) recommended OmmWriter. It’s a beautiful app, and while I love the writing environment and soundtrack, I’m not sure how to use it yet. I typed some material onto the beautiful trees and now what? I can’t get it to save via the down arrows, and so copy/paste it somewhere else, but where? And when the download feature did work, it created .txt files with which I should do what? Keep adding to by topic under filenames like “Notes for X Project”? Or do I make new (clean) .txt files for each note, tagging the saved files with the new (as yet unused) Mavericks tags?

As you can surmise, this is not something I have the time to devote attention to. It’s divided quite enough already. But I do devote attention to it. Every new whiz bang that comes out I look into, yes, because its flashy, but also because I have a problem and don’t know how to solve it.

I wrote here about simplifying productivity solutions by pretending its 1765, but I don’t know how to make that work in my scholarly life. Frank Chimero’s idea about notebooks and pencils though is very, very appealing.

European Efficiency: Academic Job Search Edition

As everyone knows, Europeans, compared with Americans, are just plain good at certain things. Among them:

• building stuff
• making art
• wearing clothes
• eating and 
• oh well, I’d better stop because it gets depressing.

But did you know that they are also much, much more efficient at conducting academic hiring processes? I’ve been on the market this year for university positions in British Literature both in America and abroad. Since my family is Italian, I have the option through jure sanguinis of becoming a citizen thereof, which I’ve just recently begun to pursue, meaning that, by Autumn, I’ll be permitted to work in any European Economic Area.

So, I’ve sent off a few applications to positions I’ve found listed at jobs.co.uk. I know England has her own scholars and that the European academics I’ve met are terrifically qualified, but since so many American academic jobs are given to them, I’m assuming the allure of the foreign works both ways.

But the difference between the processes could hardly be greater. Proper American jobs are announced in September, materials usually due in early November, interviews conducted at MLA in either December or January, campus visits thereafter in February or March, thence to salary negotiations, work release etc until in April sometime, one has an offer for the coming Fall. That’s the usual mode anyway, though it varies from school to school as budgets firm up and faculty lines are dedicated. To say the least, that’s a long and cumbersome process.

In America, I’ve submitted applications in November and heard nothing till February, by which point—since the MLA is passed—I assume I haven’t been shortlisted, but I don’t know for sure. Sometimes, I won’t hear anything at all. I spend weeks assembling materials, mailing them, praying, and just nothing. There are jobs I haven’t heard from that I find out via public rumor sites have not only shortlisted candidates, but interviewed them, and extended offers, all without sending notice to the applicants. One job I was a finalist for said nothing till the secretary sent a personal note saying she was sorry it didn’t work out. “Didn’t it?” I wondered, hoping for a clerical error, until I heard, 7 weeks later, from the committee saying they’d gone with the other candidate.

This all seems to me strange business. I’ve had nice interviews with folks, sent them a thanks, and then not been told either way how they felt. I don’t only mean the whole slush pile of 200+ applicants; they didn’t even send rejections to the shortlist of 15 whom they’d personally met. How hard would it be to have a secretary pen a form rejection? You can even set up a gmail folder to reply to all applicants with a “thanks, but no thanks.”

Contrast that with the European system. Last month, I sent three applications abroad: one to Switzerland, one to England, and one to Scotland. Within a week, I’d heard from all three. They were just short, but still very polite acknowledgments of receipt like,“Thank you for your application for this posting. We will contact you with the outcome in due course.” This from not one of the universities, but all of them. It was refreshing, just knowing that they had them in hand, that the systems hadn’t failed.

This is important because sometimes the systems fail. I’ve sent off applications, or thought I sent off applications, only to find them in my outbox a month later after the deadline has passed. Apparently, this can happen with large files transmitted electronically.

Within another week, I’d heard back (negatively, alas) from all of them likewise. One contained a personal note from the committee chair saying she’d personally found my research quite intriguing and was sorry the committee didn’t go forward with it. I’m disappointed that I didn’t get the opportunity to meet with these people, but at least I knew quickly. At least I wasn’t sitting around for months thinking that I may be moving my family to Scotland next year, or Baltimore, or wherever.

It’s nice. And this process is agonizing enough without our adding to it prolonged anxiety. With so much competition and so much on the line, couldn’t we try to alleviate some pressure by adopting a few formalities from our cousins across the sea?

A Response to Critics of Academia

Ill-lustrous Academic Job Market

I've looked for so long with trepidation at this moment, it's hard to explain, even to myself, the peace I feel having arrived at it. Bred of hyperbolic warning, the chanting Chicken Little cant had built up for years to say that when you go up on the job market, you will find it a wasteland, cry out for thirst and you will find no water or

The world...hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night

...as Matthew Arnold has it in "Dover Beach."

But after six years in my Ph.D. program, I am at long last gathering materials for a nationwide search, not as practice for applying for hypothetical teaching jobs, or research jobs, but for actual positions that exist at actual universities, for which I am qualified and after which I am eager. 

What I wasn't expecting is the level of fun it would be, matching my skill-set and background to the needs of various universities and laying that over a grid of desirable cities and the attendant possibilities for my wife's dancing career, like some great pattern-seeker, like a game. Moreover, I thought the work itself would be drudgery: tailoring letters of application to those schools once I'd narrowed the list and requesting recommendations etc etc ad infinitum, but even that has been a joy. I can't help but dream of possible lives in any of these places. 

So far, I've been asked to two interviews, and a campus visit. At the latter, I found a position, department, and college that were so perfect I had to recalibrate what I thought was possible from the profession, from life even. They didn't make the offer in the end, but knowing jobs like that are out there, and that people get them is encouraging, despite everything. 

Notes to Conference Presenters, or, What I Learned not to do by Attending MLA

Offered here for the edification and instruction of the people, and for the benefit of the world, some negative lessons in conference presentation, courtesy of my time at MLA Chicago. Many young academics will be in this thing for a long while; keep these commandments, that it may go well with you.

• Read more slowly

Almost no matter how slowly you're reading now, go slower.

• You don't actually have to read the whole time

Take a minute and speak, elaborate, share an anecdote. Remember, your audience has been in sessions all day, and is in no position to welcome an indiscreet wash of verbiage. 

• Remember: a conference paper is not quite the same as a journal article.

It's shorter, and needs less evidence/support. They can be livelier, and take more chances, since you won't be on record for the ideas therein. We might have an actual conversation following, and part of your job is to help make that happen.

• To that end, Dear Conference Organizers: demand copies of the essays before the conference, and distribute to the panel.

I've been on a dozen panels and never had this happen. The first time I hear my co-panelist's paper is the moment s/he shares it with the audience as well. This means my "response" to the other papers is knee-jerk, scattered. It's no trouble to request the papers two weeks out and give us a chance at real intellectual engagement: argument, even. 

• You do not have to say "unquote."

We know the quote is over because you stopped speaking in iambic pentameter. Also, we know the work and the can tell your prose from, say, Wordsworth's. If these fail, you can signal with your tone, or a pause, that the quoted material is over. 

• Men, if at all possible, try wearing suits that fit.

We do have to stare at your body for an hour, after all. Ladies, you're doing great. 

• Oh, and OMG, while you may use an iPad to take notes, you may not type notes on an old laptop during a presentation.

Especially if you have clickey, manicured nails. 

Diabolical Anthems

 I probably wouldn't think anything of it, were I not lesson-planning for tomorrow's #Milton class, and this song just happen to come shuffling across my iTunes, but how seriously wicked it is, and how typical. I don't know anything about Greg Holden, apart from the fact that he made this song and Insound (where I buy my records) is giving it away for free. It's a beautiful tune, and a heartfelt, bold delivery, even if it's full of annoying non-sequesters, but when the chorus comes, it is perfectly diabolical. The lyric goes

I will not be commanded

I will not be controlled

I will not let my future go on

without the help of my soul

I can't really make heads or tails of the closing couplet: probably he's pledging to be a more spiritually in-tune person forthwith, and probably that spirituality has more to do with hiking than with established religious traditions, or with a community of believers, but those first lines: geesh.

On the one hand, its obviously just more of the "we don't need no thought-control" aimless rebellion sold by the thought police that are our modern media heroes: the recording "artists" of America (NB this guy's British though). But this declaration is so broad it might as well have come from Satan himself, who says in Paradise Lost,

...Is there no place

Left for repentance, none for pardon left?

None left but by submission; and that word

Disdain forbids me, and my dread of shame 

among spirits beneath (iv.79-83)

Even as he considers reconciliation with God, and fleeing finally the Hell he himself has become, Satan trips not on the act, but on the concept of submission, which he cannot abide, just like, apparently, this Greg Holden fellow. Spirituality aside, I can't help but think what a terrible employee he would make. Or soldier. Or student. "Write your name on your paper, Greg." "I WILL NOT BE COMMANDED!" Or a dancer: "Okay you cross to center and..." "I WILL NOT BE CONTROLLED!"

And I'm worried not just for him--Mr. Holden's attitude and humility problems are no especial concern of mine--but for the legions his song compels to throw their fists in the air chanting that slogan over and over. Control is for the weak! Aiming is for cowards! Cooperation be damned! Rise up with me! We may yet challenge the Omnipotent in arms!"

Follow-up: turns out, he's a good-natured and generous sort of chap who wrote this song for a charity, and based it on a literary character: not Milton's, but Dave Eggers'. Still. 

DHSI UVic

Thanks to the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington, I was able to attend this year's Digital Humanities Summer Institute, hosted by the University of Victoria in B.C., just up the proverbial street from Seattle. While I learned a lot (and was bewildered often), perhaps the most helpful aspect of the DHSI was incidental to it. 

Though the sessions themselves were compelling, and will feature in future research of mine, most immediately rewarding was that the conference coincided, whether intentionally or not I can't say, with another academic gathering: the Academic Congress 2013, which drew scholars from all over the continent in every area of artistic and humanitarian concern. Seven thousand participants were gathered at the UVic at the same time, outgoing as we were incoming, but in that crossover, I made several connections with scholars from Mexico to Montreal at the opening night buffet, where I also caught up with my old colleague and DH wunderkind, Dr. Jentry Sayers.

Furthermore, as is often that case with academic conferences, but which I've never seen on such a scale before, publishing houses had sent representatives to the book tent, so I was able to talk editions with editors from Broadview Press, McGill-Queen's University Press, University of Toronto Press, and others I admire. Invaluable.

Buy on Amazon

There also, as grace would have it, I met Joel Heng Hartse, who was there giving a paper at the commons, and which I wouldn't have known had I not seen #uvic on a Twitter post. Hartse's book Sects, Love, and Rock and Roll, was one of my favorite reads last year: empathetic and wise, and dead-on in taste. He writes for magazines like Paste and Geez, and teaches Applied Linguistics classes at the University of British Columbia over in Vancouver. We'd met briefly at a reading he gave with Dr. Jeff Keuss at Seattle Pacific, but meeting an author at a book signing is never a terribly intimate affair. 

While we were talking in the courtyard of the MacLaurin Building, Digital Humanists buzzing around us, we had (okay, he had) an idea for a media project that we began working on right on the spot: he downloaded the appropriate software, and we recorded the first episode/incarnation of P.E.P.I. (more information forthcoming post processing).

Who knows if it will amount to anything, but this is what I love about conferences. They are more than sessions, more even than the exchange of business cards in between. We not only talked about, but began--actually put words on tape and paper--a DH project on the first night of the conference that is we think useful and interesting and that will include other participants in culture and academia as the series progresses.  

I'm not sure if it would have happened had we not been at the same conference. Probably not, and it certainly wouldn't have happened that way, coming off the kinetics of meetings, exchanges, and the sense of possibility that attend these gatherings. 

ICR: Shelley Among the Ruins of Language

So should we save an absence? Should we save the void and this nothingness at the heart of the image? -Jean Baudrilliard

Last month, I flew down to Phoenix to give a paper at ASU staged by the International Conference on Romanticism, on the broad topic of "Catastrophes." I've attended the ICR once before, when it was held at Oakland University in Rochester, MI, and had a collegial and intellectually-rewarding time, and was eager to find myself in such company again.   

Conferences get short shrift in these hyper-connected times--why fly across the country to read a paper out loud that you could just as easily email to all the members, who could then read it on their own time? Are the ten pages of notes I took worth the price of the flight?--but I find them immensely useful.  One meets the few true colleagues we have in an era of specialization and those meetings often turn into real research: I ended up in Germany for a year because of a conversation I had while balancing plastic cup of champagne on my hors d'oeuvres plate at NASSR Vancouver. What's more, one gets a sense of the field--its upcoming directions, its major players, a ranking of the relative esteem in which specialists hold various journals and publishing houses, and a hundred other corrections, spurs, that are unavailable, or indecipherable anyway across digital media, or even a row of spines. 

Here is the abstract for my presentation:

Recent collections like Wordsworth’s Poetic Theory (2010) edited by Alexander Regier and Stefan Uhlig, and Literary and Poetic Representations of Work and Labor in the Romantic Era, edited by Christopher Clason (2011), have shown renewed interest in the formal properties of poetic difficulty, even poetic disaster. This paper means to introduce to that discussion a poetic economy wherein nothing is lost. Even the weakest lines and most faltering spans of attention contribute, in this economy, to the launch of a larger conceptual framework unachievable without the original defeat, which suggests a new and recuperative way of reading weakness and displacement by contextualizing their discussion under the heading of performative aesthetic loss.

In Shelley Among the Ruins of Language, I argue, (adopting Levinson’s terms in The Romantic Fragment Poem) that an “authorized fragment” (one wherein the poet has an opportunity to finish the work, but doesn’t, as opposed to an “accidental fragment” wherein he drowns, loses the mss., etc) constitutes a thing a la Bill Brown and Jean Baudrilliard’s “thing theory,” and that it thereby deserves unique consideration. When poets promise something, and fail to deliver, often--if these are to become active failures or redeemed catastrophes, they are suggesting something about the greatness of their original conception. With their argument, I mean to highlight not only the difference between “authorized” and “accidental” fragments in Romantic poetry, which distinction Levinson maintains too, but to differentiate between fragments that should be read as remnants-- pieces meant to be read as parts oferstwhile wholes, and those that should be read as ciphers, pieces of truncated production meant to imply a never-present but imagined wholeness.

The whole thing was handled beautifully by Mark Lussier and Ron Broglio, and I felt especially lucky to hear presentations by Marilyn Gaull and Angela Esterhammer; most exciting though, was a chance to see my friend and former colleague Jeffrey C. Johnson, and Frederick Burwick, who I seem to run into around every corner.  

I was also glad to hear papers by my co-panelists in the "Theorizing Disaster" session:

• Kimberly DeFazio: “Material Events: de Man, Badiou, and Romantic Disaster”
• Caroline Heller: “‘What manner of man art thou?’: The Catastrophic and Autobiographical ‘Life-in-Death’ in S.T. Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’”

Great thanks to ICR for arranging this banquet, to ASU for hosting us, and to my own Department of English at the University of Washington for making my trip possible.  

Teaching Digital Humanities

This is my tenth year of teaching at the university level, and while I usually have students make some kind of project in addition to writing essays, the projects for the class I've just finished were exceptional, for the clarity of thought that went into them, and the sheer import of the undertakings. 

The class was called Texting: Writing about Digital Humanities, and the idea was to introduce students at an early stage in their academic careers (this was my first time teaching Freshmen in quite a while) to the plethora of tools available to them during this explosion of all things digital, but also to the problems surrounding the humanities generally, and the digital ones specifically. Not least: what are they?

If nothing else, I wanted to gain, over the course of the class, an answer to that question, and so we set out, week by week, confronting the memes and websites, databases, archives, and articles that make up the debates surrounding

• Digital Music
• Digital Scholarship
• Digital Poetics
• The New Aesthetic
• News Aggregators
• Centers, Symposia, Initiatives
• DH Resources particular to UW

One student, in a farewell blog post, summed up our project particularly well:

After taking English classes for more than 7 years, I expected to re-learn about things I have already been taught. How wrong I was. My English 111 class's focus was digital humanities; something I've never even heard of. We learned to navigate our way of information, data, history, poems, research, and so much more through the future of the digital age. We live in this digital age and it only grows from here, so I thought that learning about it now will only allow us to strive for greater success later. It doesn't end here. We would take digital works of course, such as articles, blogs, poems and really learn to dig deep into them and read. Read for context, read for analytical purpose, but we also read for style. Like what apprentices do, we learned from people who were better than us, who had mastered what we desired.

The class explicitly aimed at education's not being theoretical. I didn't just want them to know what I could tell them during our ten weeks together, but how to learn/make/do whatever it is they are individually in to better ever afterward. Again, a student summed it up better than I can:

I remember in our first day of class, our teacher told us something that stuck with me. He said, "You can do, what you can do." He put great emphasis on how much impact one person can make if they really wanted to. Throughout the whole quarter, we learned about many great organizations and devices that became successful just because one person had a crazy idea.  Due to English 111, I have learned "One person is all it takes", is overused for a reason; because it's true.

You can read more of the students' weekly responses here.

Projects

This is the really exciting part.  The students completed two large projects for the class in groups; one of them, called "The New Aesthetic Project," I'll have to tell you about later; the other was a Free Project of their own choice and devise. The prompt said simply find something that could be better and make it that way using the tools we've discussed. Here's a sample of what they outlined and built:

• A Facebook page--The Husky Food Project--featuring photos and reviews of every restaurant, eatery, or coffee stand on campus
• A book (pdf preview here), yes, that you can buy in hardback, softcover, or pdf from here, which is a guide to all the public art on University of Washington's campus, featuring pictures, history, and a short description of each.
• A Comprehensive Digital Map of UW building interiors (for finding your class on the first day of school, bathrooms, etc) whose pitch is just a model of professionalism and urgency.
• An e-book about 100 Changes Due to Tech.
• A website listing all the free products available to students at UW

The point is, I was impressed. These students, for many of whom this was their first college class ever, conceived of, argued for the importance of, and executed significant projects they designed, while writing papers, doing readings, and keeping up with the other, rather large project we were working on as a class.  Hats off!

PAMLA: Coleridge and the Prison Bower of Meaning

This year's Annual Conference of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association was hosted by Seattle University and held October 19-21 - 110th.  I contributed a paper on Coleridge to the session "To Sleep, Perchance to Dream."

Abstract: 

 In Coleridge’s Dream Theory and the Dual Imagination, Kathryn Kimball puts forward the poet’s outline of sense impressions that “arrive constantly,” “whether asleep or awake,” which “the night-working imagination transmutes into dream images,” arguing that, while the poet can be said to have a purposeful theory of dreams, the main reason he was so concerned was that “dreams are an escape from a difficult life.”  

Using Kimball’s assemblage, and a section of the Biographia Literaria called "Nihil Negativuum Irrepresentabile," I argue that the arrest of such “transmutations” becomes for Coleridge an aesthetic technique wherein the Imagination is staged as a mediator who is intentionally exhausted by the difficult (or impossible) task it is set.  He explains the difficulty of his project: to produce “a body at one and the same time in motion and not in motion,” and his method: to erect “...a motory force of a body in one direction and an equal force of the same body in an opposite direction,” which he argues “is not incompatible, and the result, namely, rest, is real and representable.” The interjection of the man from Porlock, for example, during the composition of Kubla Kahn,  like the overvaluation of albatross-hunting, is that second “motory force” which demands that the imagination mediate between the two opposites in an effort to achieve a place of retirement. 

This paper reads Coleridge’s failures of thought and willful obfuscations in the Biographia Literaria as Deluzean attempts to construct a kind of black hole in which meaning is itself imprisoned, with the intention of defining the imagination’s mediative role between states:real and unreal, sleep and waking. 

It was a lively conference in which to participate, and much larger than the usula discipline-specific conferences I attend.  The best part was connecting with people outside my particular area of specialization and hearing the fine papers by my co-panelists (see full program here):

• Patrick Randolph: "

  Who Are You?" Queerly Destabilizing Identity in Wonderland

• Rebecca McCann: 

  “The Scientific Possibilities of Mesmerism”: Dreaming of Utopia in The Diothas

• Kristine Miller: 

  The 'Fever Dream' of the Post-9/11 Cop: Trauma, Personal Testimony, and Jess Walter's The Zero

Special thanks to our panel chair, Lauren Bond (La Sierra University), to the conference organizers from Seattle University, and to the Renaissance Hotel for having us.