David Lodge

Loose Canons Volume 4, Issue 2•Emory University English Department•July 2001

2001 Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature

David Lodge to be Featured in October Series

C

onsciousness and the Novel” will be the theme of the 2001 Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature, Oct. 710, featuring British critic and novelist David Lodge. The Oct. 7 lecture will be held at 4 p.m. in the auditorium of the Woodruff Health Sciences Administration Building; the Oct. 8 & 9 lectures, will be held at 8:15 p.m. in Goizueta Business School Auditorium, Room 130; Photo by Isolde Ohlbaum the reading on Oct. 10 will be held at 8:15 p.m. in the Glenn Memorial Auditorium. Lodge retired from a 27-year career as professor of modern English literature at the University of Birmingham in 1987, to pursue writing full-time. He is the author of numerous novels: The Picturegoers (1960); Ginger, You’re Barmy (1962); The British Museum is Falling Down (1965); Out of the Shelter (1970); Changing Places (1975), for which he was awarded both the Hawthornden Prize and the Yorkshire Post Fiction Prize; How Far Can You Go? (1980), which won the Whitbread Award for book of the year; Small World (1984), which was nominated for the Booker Prize; Nice Work (1988), which won the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award; Paradise News (1991), and Therapy (1995). His work has been translated into more than 20 languages. Lodge’s works of literary criticism include Language of Fiction (1966), The Novelist at the Crossroads and Other Essays on Fiction and Criticism (1971), The Modes of Modern Writing (1977), Working with Structuralism (1981), and After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism (1990). He has also edited Modern Criticism and Theory (1988), Scenes of Clerical Life, and Lucky Jim. In addition, Lodge wrote Write On (1986), a collection of occasional essays, and The Art of Fiction (1992), a selection of articles originally published in the Sunday Independent. Small World, a parody of academic life, was adapted as a television series in 1988 and Lodge himself adapted his Nice

Work for television, which won a Royal Television Society Award for the best drama serial of 1989 and a Silver Nymph at the International Television Festival in Monte Carlo in 1990. In 1994 he adapted Charles Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit for a six-part BBC series. His first stage play, The Writing Game, was produced at the Birmingham (England) Repertory Theatre in 1990 and adapted for television in 1995. His latest publication, the novella Home Truths, is based on a play of the same title, which premiered at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 1998. Lodge was the recipient of the CBE (Commander of the British Empire) in 1998 for services to literature, and is a Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des lettres. The biennial Ellmann Lectures, inaugurated by Seamus Heaney in 1988, were endowed in honor of the literary achievement of Richard Ellmann (19181987), who served Emory University as Lodge the first Robert W. Woodruff Professor from 1980 to 1987. The Department of English is the home of the Ellmann Lectures, chaired and directed by Ronald Schuchard, Goodrich C. White Professor of English. The lectures aim to perpetuate the tradition of Ellmann’s writing, which set the highest standards of critical inquiry and humanistic scholarship, and his public lectures, which were unparalleled in the appeal to a worldwide audience of readers. In addition to Heaney, Ellmann past lecturers include Denis Donoghue, Helen Vendler, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and A.S. Byatt. The 1999 Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature, featuring A.S. Byatt, are now available in the collection, On Histories and Stories, published by Harvard University Press (2001) www.hup.harvard.edu.


Alumni Reception Planned An alumni reception will precede the David Lodge lecture on Oct.10. Please feel free to drop by the Kemp-Malone Library, third floor, North Callaway Center, 6:30-8 p.m.

Inside: Bauerlein’s Book•Gruber’s Bakeless•Erben’s Ecocriticism•Quinn’s Construction

Natalie Angier Delivers Women’s History Month Lecture

Wrestling With the Subject of Beauty

T

hey are barbarians who mistake their own customs for human nature,” George Bernard Shaw once observed. Natalie Angier, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Woman: An Intimate Geography and The Beauty of the Beastly: New Views on the Nature of Life, explored and exposed such confusion of custom and nature in her recent keynote address for Emory’s celebration of Women’s History Month. Citing sources as disparate as the Kahun Papyrus and 19th-century catalogues of women’s medical complaints, Angier took aim at the popular neo-Darwinian, evolutionary psychological posture that maintains beauty as a universal, rather than arbitrary, perception and that resuscitates “all the old clichés about human behavior.” Beauty is neither wholly appealing nor benign, insisted Angier; in fact, it can be downright dangerous. Take, for example, the elaborate striations of the poison dart frog or the bold tesserae of the monarch butterfly, both of which employ beauty as a warning mechanism. Worse still, beauty often aligns itself with awkwardness and even discomfort, as in the case of the peacock, whose tail feathers remain a heavy, ungainly,

Photo by Annemarie Poyo

almost ridiculous appendage. As such, fashion becomes a self-imposed handicap: the wearer (or victim, depending on your perspective) advertises implicitly, “I’m willing to endure the pain of piercings and tattoos and Manolo Blahnik stilettos in the interest of selfexpression; it’s indicative of my alertness, stamina, resourcefulness, cash, and–most importantly–my willingness to keep up with fashion.” So, ultimately, the excruciating becomes exquisite. This cultural attention to fashion, meanwhile, makes Angier even more suspicious of conventions of evolutionary biology that find unassailable universals in both beauty and health.

Loose Canons Loose Canons is published three times a year by the Department of English Department Chair/Cristine Levenduski, Ph.D. Director of Graduate Studies/Richard Rambuss, Ph.D. Director of Undergraduate Studies/Deepika Bahri, Ph.D. Director of Creative Writing/Lynna Williams, M.F.A. Editor/Designer/Mary Alma Durrett




Send all inquiries or submissions to the editor, Department of English, Emory University, 302 N. Callaway Center, 537 Kilgo Circle, Atlanta, GA 30322, or call (404) 727-6420 or Fax: (404) 727-2605. Opinions contained within Loose Canons reflect the views of the writer and not necessarily those of the English Department of Emory University.

For example, recent studies have purported a (nearly) unanimous male predilection for women with waist-tohip ratio of one to two; trotting out a parade of contemporary beauty icons from Marilyn Monroe to Kate Moss, the study indicated that, regardless of cultural or geographic provenance, the one-to-two ratio broadcasts an image of health, fertility, sexual viability, and, by extension, evolutionary advantage. However, further studies revealed that men from certain Peruvian communities unexposed to western culture perceived the one-to-two ratio as unhealthy, and instead preferred women with a substantially thicker build. The venerable ratio, observes Angier, remains a cultural construction that–while profound–lacks a legitimate biological origin; in short, the scientific community has allowed custom to masquerade as human nature. Briefly put, though, how are Angier’s comments relevant to our literary enterprises–or even to the humanities at large? Given the campus’s recent attention to reconciliation, to what extent do the scientific and the literary communities intersect, inform, and temper one another? Angier (who, incidentally, abandoned a dissertation in medieval literature to launch Discover Magazine) declares biology a “feminist tool” with which to excavate the persistence of both scientific and cultural myths. Her stance, finally, is a relativistic, inherently postmodern one that does more than simply perforate what she calls the “rigid, cocksure, [and] archaic” structure of sociobiology; rather, it weds the rigor of the scientific method to an ideological relativism that pervades literary, cultural, and gender studies. Hers is an effort that owes as much to Derrida as to Darwin.
—Michelle Wallace is a graduate student whose academic focus is on 20th-century Southern literature, popular culture and representations of class. Contact her at [email protected]

E-mail your Canons submissions, address changes, job changes to [email protected] 2/Loose Canons/July 2001

Beauty, Take Two

Miss Idaho Weighs in on the Subject

C

an beauty itself ever be fully defined? I like to think of it as a concept with contours in constant flux. Having recently spent 17 days representing my home state of Idaho at the Miss USA pageant in Gary, Ind., I have witnessed a contemporary, commercialized notion of external beauty, but since then have begun to explore the concept of beauty from a different perspective. In the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde wrote, “The artist is the creator of beautiful things.... Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meaning in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty.” Wilde spends much of the rest of the book detailing for the reader the exact definition of this Beauty with a capital “B,” but I am ultimately left unsettled by his conclusion that Beauty can exist in and of itself without beautiful meanings. So let me proffer my own personal definition at this moment in time—with complete

consciousness of its likeliness to change—and admit up front that for Wilde I am one with hope but not a member of the elect. Beauty is located in some inner sense of oneself. This can often be mistaken for confidence; in the particular expression of a smile or a certain detail of the gait of one’s walk. The confusion is natural as Beauty is made possible in part by precisely this confidence—a lovely internal awareness manifested through one’s actions. Confidence alone is not enough to ensure beauty and, in fact, if blurred into egotism or self aggrandizement can even turn ugly. To the recipe for Beauty, then, must be added consciousness of one’s faults and a graceful acceptance of them. Beauty cannot exist without passion. This raw excitement for life can take a variety of forms and be centered in several different activities—art, interaction with people, a thirst for adventure—or concentrated in just one. I was with a friend recently at a concert by one of his favorite musical groups and when the band took the stage his face glowed with passion

and his smile was unabashedly, genuinely huge. He looked Beautiful. An appropriate synonym for Beauty, perhaps, is radiance. Radiance is fluidity; it sparkles, it’s infectious. Ultimately, I believe a person’s Beauty is reflected in the impact that person has on others. The magnetism of a radiant person draws others to her and allows her to touch their lives and forge a true, Beautiful connection. Critics of beauty pageants often say they set women up to be judged on superficial qualities. I disagree, and perhaps that is why I competed at Miss USA. I value passion and radiance and a sense of myself, and by my definition of Beauty, pageants measure these much deeper qualities.
Barchas —Elizabeth Barchas is a senior, majoring in English and Russian Language and Culture.

GRADUATE STUDENT NEWS Patrick Bixby presented his paper, “A Crisis of Origins: Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and the Darwinian Revolution,” at the annual meeting of the International Association for Philosophy and Literature in May. He has also organized a panel for the 2001 SAMLA convention entitled “Postmodern/ Postcolonial: Intersections in Literary Theory and Practice.” Tony Cuda presented “Certain Mischief and the Supplicating Voice: The Indeterminate and an Ethics of Criticism” at a conference entitled “Reproductions: Literature, Theory, and Cultural Studies in Transforma-

tion” held at the University of California at Irvine in May. Rosslyn Elliott presented a paper entitled “The Dramatic Art of the Novels of William Dean Howells” at the Northeast MLA Conference in Hartford, March 30. Katherine Ellison presented “ ‘If the Arrow Flies Unseen’: Closing, Enclosing, and Foreclosing the Witnessing Narration in Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year,” in the “Death as Closure” panel of the Princeton Eighteenth Century Society’s annual conference, entitled “Closure in the 18th Century,” held at Princeton on May 5. On May 24

she traveled to Cambridge to present “The Hard Girdle of History: Birth Control and Eugenics in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and the 1930s South” at the American Literature Association (ALA) Annual Conference. Margaret Koehler presented her paper, “Turns of Grammar in Pope’s ‘Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot’ and Swift’s ‘The Author Upon Himself’,” at a meeting of the Southeastern American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies held in March in Huntsville, Ala. Tom Lilly presented “Representing Grad News continued on page 4

Loose Canons/July 2001/3

Emory English Alumnus Named Board Chair

B

en F. Johnson III, managing partner of the Atlanta-headquar tered law firm of Alston and Bird, and a 1965 alumnus of Emory, was elected chairman of Emory University’s Board of Trustees on Nov. 9 following the retirement of Bradley Currey. A member of the board since 1995, Johnson has served as chairman of the board’s Academic Affairs Committee during his time as alumni trustee. “At the heart of a great university is an exciting undergraduate experience,” says Johnson. He recalls with fondness his days as an undergraduate, and notes the “remarkably durable friendships that began in Harry Rusche’s English Honors Program. I had a wonderful experience in the English Department. My most memorable

professors were my two [Honors Program] advisors. We had our weekly seminar meeting at Harry Rusche’s apartment; we would have afternoon tea and immerse ourselves in Milton and Spenser. I frankly was more into Melville, Dreiser, Hemingway and Fitzgerald than the Faerie Queene, but Harry patiently got me through it, and I’m sure I’m a better person for it.” Johnson says his lifelong love of O’Neill and the American Theater grew from his association with senior Honors Program advisors Al Stone, who was an American Literature scholar. “He became a particularly important mentor to me,” notes Johnson whose avocation for theater helped nurture his son Armistead’s vocation. Currently affiliated with the

Director’s Eye production company in New York, Armistead plans to stage O’Neill’s The Great God Brown in April and May, reportedly the first revival of the play in over 50 years. “One other important impact Johnson of the English Honor Program on my life was friendship that began there with two of my fellow students: Ann Estes (now Klamon) and Adair Roberts (now Massey). They have continued to be two of my closest friends and with their husbands are part of a regular travelling sextet with me and my wife Ann.”


Graduate Student News Continued Continued from previous page American Nativism in Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798)” at the Romantic Nationalisms 1750 - 1850 Conference at the University of SurreyRoehampton, July 1. Lilly has also accepted a graduate fellowship through Emory University’s Office of UniversityCommunity Partnerships. Jeff Massey presented a paper entitled “The Monsters and the Critics: Teaching Beowulf, The Hobbit, and Tolkien” at “Beowulf in Our Time: Teaching Beowulf in Translation,” a conference held at Kennesaw State University, March 23-24. He presented “From Baggins to Beowulf and Back Again: Teaching (via) Tolkien,” at “Concerning Hobbits and Other Matters: Tolkien Across the Disciplines,” a conference held at the

University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn. on April 26. Carol Newell presented a paper, “The Dilemma of Home: Julia Peterkin’s Bright Skin,” at a meeting of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association held in Birmingham, Ala., 10-12 November 2000. Aimee Pozorski gave a seminar presentation on Fascism and the Avant-Garde at the 2000 New Modernisms Conference held at the University of Pennsylvania, 12-15 October 2000. Natalie Prestwich presented a paper, “ ‘Piece by Piece’: The Erotics of Ornamentation in Robert Herrick’s Hesperides” at the Eighth Annual Meeting of the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies, held in New Orleans, La., 16-19 November 2000.

Gitanjali Shahani has been awarded a Vernacular Modernities Fellowship which will allow her to study the personal accounts of women who transgressed “the boundaries of the ‘inner domain’ during the nationalist era and the Independence struggle [in India],” as relayed through “autobiographies, family histories, religious tracts . . . and other cultural artifacts that speak of a struggle to negotiate the dichotomies of home/world, traditional/ modern.” Shahani’s research will be conducted in India. Sean Wells presented a paper, “Southern Masculinity: Literary Invocations of Nathan Bedford Forrest,” at the English Graduate Organization conference entitled “Souths Global and Local” held at the University of Florida, Gainesville in April.
Johnson photo by Jon Rou

4/Loose Canons/July 2001

Pulitzer, National Book Award Winner to Speak July 26-27

2001 Writers’ Festival to Feature Annie Proulx

E

. Annie Proulx, winner of the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 1993 National Book Award for Fiction, will be the featured author for the 2001 Summer Writers’ Festival, to be held on campus, July 26 and 27. Proulx, who attained her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history at the University of Vermont and Sir George Williams University, Montreal, respectively, is “a writer whose stories compel and startle us with their rightness of music, their closeness of observation, their rendering of hard truths in the lives they inhabit,” notes Judson Mitcham, poet, novelist and director of the Summer Writers’ Institute and Festival. Proulx’s second novel, The Shipping News, won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and was described by the New York Times as a work which “displays Ms. Proulx’s surreal humor and her zest for the strange foibles of humanity....Her inventive language is finely, if exhaustively, accomplished....almost an encyclopedia of slang and lore.” Postcards, Proulx’s first novel, won the 1993 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. She was the first woman to be

Photo by Jim McHugh

Festival-goers will hear Proulx read from her work, July 26, and talk about her research techniques (“The need to know has taken me from coal mines to fire towers, to hillsides studded with agate, . . to the sunny side of an iceberg.”) as well as her methods of writing (“I write anytime, anyplace—in the middle of the night, by the side of the road, on airplanes, at home, anywhere.”). A reception and booksigning will follow the 8 p.m. reading in 208 White Hall. highlight of the two-day festival will be a conversation, on July 26 at 4 p.m. between Proulx and Jim Grimsley, an awardwinning playwright and novelist, who is a senior resident fellow in Creative Writing at Emory. The conversation will take place in 207 White Hall. On the final day of the festival, July 27 at 10 a.m., Proulx will conduct a public Master Class on the craft of writing in 207 White Hall. All festival events are free and open to the public. For more information, contact the Creative Writing Program, Emory University, phone 404727-4683, or e-mail [email protected].


A Proulx

honored with the award. The New York Times described Postcards as “...a meaty stew of archetypal plots and characters, their juices mingled in defiance of convention....Story makes this novel compelling; technique makes it beautiful.” More recent works by Proulx, Accordion Crimes (1996) and Close Range (1999), have demonstrated her astonishing scope.

Gruber wins 2001 Bakeless Literary Publications Prize

T

he Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference of Middlebury College recently announced the winners of the 2001 sixth annual Bakeless Literary Publication Prizes. The Bakeless Prizes, named for Middlebury College supporter Katharine Bakeless Nason, are an annual book series competition for new authors of literary

works in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Bill Gruber’s collection of essays, “On All Sides Nowhere,” was chosen by William Finnegan for the creative nonfiction award. Gruber’s book-length manuscript will be published by Houghton Mifflin in its distinguished Mariner Original Paperback line. In

addition, he will receive a fellowship to attend the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in August 2002.


E-mail your Loose Canons submissions, address changes, job changes to [email protected]

Loose Canons/July 2001/5

Bauerlein Studies 1906 Atlanta Race Riot

I

n his recent publication, Negrophobia: A Race Riot in Atlanta, 1906, Professor of English Mark Bauerlein explores the racial climate of Atlanta before and after a pivotal race riot. In the years leading up to 1906, Atlanta achieved a progressive status with regard to race relations. Atlanta’s black and white, wealthy and poor, had co-existed without major racial violence; however, in 1906, Atlanta succumbed to the violence that marked the rest of the South. Once known for its progressive stance on race, Atlanta became one of the major sites of racial bias in the country. In an interview with Rian Bowie, a graduate student in English, Bauerlein, discusses the major public figures involved in the riot, and the political, economic, and cultural factors that marked Atlanta before and after the event. Bowie: What sparked your interest in the Atlanta Race Riot of 1906? Bauerlein: The immediate impetus was my moving from downtown Atlanta to Inman Park and just being interested in the area. I went to look up some information on Booker T. Washington at the Auburn Avenue Library. On one of the panels displayed along the street, there was a reproduction of a cover of a French newspaper that showed a street scene of turmoil and pandemonium and the caption translated as the “Massacre of Negroes in the Streets of Atlanta.” I learned that a race riot occurred in Atlanta, one that involved some important persons in U.S. and South-

6/Loose Canons/July 2001

Photo of Marietta Street, circa 1906, courtesy of the Atlanta History Center ern history; the riot involved fatalities and required the assistance of the state militia. Bowie: How much scholarship has been published on this period in Atlanta history? Bauerlein: Very little. There are no books on the riot, a few articles back in the ’60s, and a few dissertations on the riot that were never published. Bowie: How did you research for this publication? Bauerlein: It just came together over four years of digging in archives, gathering pieces of letters, municipal documents, newspapers, magazines, and composing them into an account of the riot, one that tries to focus on the people and the events, that

minimizes analysis. Bowie: There is an abundance of information on the North Carolina Race Riot of 1898. Why is there so little historical documentation on this riot? Bauerlein: Atlanta, from the time that it was founded in the 1830s, was a city of commerce. It always had a very active Chamber of Commerce; it was really run by a plutocracy of powerful families—railroad people, cotton freight people, bankers, and factory owners. From the beginning, they skillfully handled Atlanta’s PR machine. Race relations, in comparison with other Southern environments, were pretty good for many years.

Bowie: How did Atlanta, at least for a time, escape the hostile climate of the South after Reconstruction? Bauerlein: One reason was that the business and political leaders had a dialogue. They met frequently to discuss the way things were going in the city. The goal for the white leadership was not to interrupt the flow of capital. For the black leadership, it was to cultivate a setting that could serve as a base for political protest. That extends throughout most of Atlanta’s history, except in 1906 when radical negrophobia, which was sweeping the South, finally hit Atlanta. Bowie: How did that type of animosity take shape? Bauerlein: The white leadership was racist but it leaned toward a paternalistic racism, not negrophobia. In 1906, the white leadership started to act differently. The politicians, the police officers, even some of the business leaders started to talk in terms not just of white supremacy, but white supremacy that regards African American males as dangerous, recidivist, as potential criminals, as degenerates. Whereas for the paternalistic whites the question was how do we lead blacks; for the negrophobe, the question was how do we control them. Politicians like Hoke Smith, who ran for governor that year, saw this as an opportunity to play the race card, and he answered the question with “we will control the Negro peacefully if we can but with guns if we must.” Bowie: Would you talk a bit about Atlanta’s black community in 1906? Bauerlein: African Americans were granted an inferior position in society. However, the black community was able to develop an intellectual class, a business class, a middle class, and that success gave to Atlanta a model of progressive race relations. Atlantans felt that race relations here were better than they were anywhere else. We had an active African American Press. We had radicals like W.E.B. DuBois, Max Barber, and Bishop Turner, who when he saw negrophobia

rising told his congregation to “Buy guns!” Turner said that 60 years before Malcolm X said it, and he didn’t suffer significant harassment for it. Bowie: You talk about the Atlanta paradox: The “black middle class, the radical, the racist sheriff, the New South economy, the white supremacist, the black militant, and Jim Crow” all working side by side. Do you think that trying to mediate these paradoxical relationships left Atlanta open for what came about in 1906? Bauerlein: I think up until that point, those kinds of contradictions could coexist. You could have an African American press that would mock the city leaders, that would mock the white mayor, that would make fun of the Recorder’s Court Judge Broyles. Somehow it was all kept together. That does not mean that it was successful. The very fact of the riot shows that it wasn’t successful. Bowie: How difficult was it to put all of these paradoxical personae in a kind of dialogue without overt commentary? Bauerlein: First, you recognize that you’re dealing with some controversial and dismaying material, much of it with its own ideological slant, and try to give as honest an account of it as you can. There are, of course, varying degrees of selectivity but there are ways of lessening bias. You test the language of others’ descriptions for tendentiousness. You examine the selections of evidence and what people do with that evidence. I sort of put it out there and let readers decide. Bowie: I found the way that class played out in your book quite interesting. Bauerlein: Class markers are much more distinct in 1906 Atlanta. You see someone on the street with certain modes of dress, speech, demeanor, and those are very much mapped onto class distinctions which are observed by whites and blacks. Many of the distinctions that whites applied to the black community were adopted by black moderates, whether strategically or earnestly or with a mixture of the two. Those distinctions carry over into the

general discourse, so that you often hear the phrase “the better class of Negroes.” You also hear the “better class of whites” repeated over and over. I mentioned that Atlanta was a plutocracy, the Inmans, Candlers, Englishes, Maddoxes, Woodruffs, being the leading families of the city. In the wake of the riot, many people said that it was the lower class whites who were responsible. They would also point to the victims and say these weren’t lower class blacks. Bowie: I wanted to ask you about class with regard to the hysteria surrounding black men and their perceived threat to white womanhood. You don’t hear people, black or white, necessarily talking about it as myth or exaggeration. Bauerlein: No, you don’t, and the reason that you don’t hear that played out is that if you did, you would have to say that the Southern white woman is a liar. If you’re a black man, you don’t talk about the Southern white woman. That’s off limits. Barber does it and he’s run out of town. The amazing thing about that Joe Glenn trial is that a white woman on the witness stand is declared to be a liar. In the Glenn trial, the jury determined that she was mistaken, and fortunately, they had another suspect. One wonders what would have happened if they had not had another suspect. The Wilmington Riot of 1898 was, in part, sparked by an article by a black editor who wrote about white women, and in that article, I think he said that many cases of alleged rape are white women surprised with their black lovers [who] would rather be known as being raped by a black man than desiring a black man. Bowie: Much of this, it seems to me, goes back to Ida B. Wells and her early anti-lynching efforts. She challenged this idea of the black man as a threat by proving that the vast majority of the claims were feigned rather than real crimes of sexual assault and that this myth became the standard excuse for lynching. Bauerlein: Even Teddy Roosevelt, in one speech, said look at the cases, only 25 percent of them were for charges of

Loose Canons/July 2001/7

rape. One wonders how many of those were for real charges of rape or were manufactured after the lynching. This was the climate.

a public figure in the black community, you’ve got to retain the respect of the black and white communities. That requires savvy, and public contortions.

Bowie: In the Max Barber telegram, which you place near the end of the book, he talks about Hoke Smith having white people go in black face into the communities and perpetrate these crimes. Did you find any evidence to support Barber’s claims? Bauerlein: There is one piece of evidence in what David Howard, the undertaker, said when he went down to Lakewood and retrieved a body. He goes and gets the body, begins to prepare for burial, opens the shirt and white skin is underneath. He stops working and calls the white undertaker to come get the body because black undertakers couldn’t work on white bodies.

Bowie: Could you talk a bit more about the public/private dimensions to some of the other black leaders? Bauerlein: A lot of the leaders’ statements have to be read as coded statements. Booker T. Washington spent 30 years making coded statements. Behind the scenes, he could be very direct and tactical, but in every public statement he made he considered how it would play in the black community and in the white community. It is those figures, the black public figures, who were the most difficult to portray. Context for all of their statements is crucial. DuBois was easy because he didn’t compromise much in his public statements. Barber is another complicated figure. He didn’t have a community base that DuBois, Turner, Procter, and Bowen did. They had jobs in universities or congregations, so they had community ties beyond their public speech. All Barber had was his public speech; he was an editor with a periodical. If he got into trouble, he had no one to fall back on. I think that this is why he disappeared. Washington destroyed him, and the city authorities sent him out of town.

Bowie: For me it seems that three of the most colorful and/or representative of the Atlanta paradox, were Max Barber, Hoke Smith, and Booker T. Washington. Bauerlein: In a way, most of the negrophobes were very easy to portray. For one thing, they provide direct and sensationalistic quotations. Senator Ben Tillman, Governor Vardeman, John Temple Graves, and Tom Watson lay out, in the most disgraceful terms, exactly what the negrophobic racist feels and thinks. They’re saying it in the newspapers for 100,000 people to read, and on the Senate floor in Washington D.C. Bowie: Who were among the more difficult figures to represent? Bauerlein: Those who found themselves in a position of having to act publicly in ways that countered their beliefs. You can tell they have different constituencies to deal with, and they feel tremendous ambivalence in how to convert their private experience into public expression. A figure like Reverend Procter is complicated. He’s a moderate, respected by whites, who testifies before the city council, a couple of weeks before the riot, if “you don’t do something blood will flow.” If you are

8/Loose Canons/July 2001

Bowie: Throughout the text, Washington emerges in very interesting and complex ways. There’s a kind of ambivalence to his character. Bauerlein: One feels that ambivalence reading the episodes in which he appears. There’s that opening vignette of Washington sitting at his desk, writing a speech where he quotes from the Bible, “Come to me and I will teach you to be fishers of men.” I picked that because there is Washington talking about leadership and about how to gather people around him, and what he’s doing at that moment is trying to gather information about his enemies so that he can discredit them. That’s the difficulty in reading someone like Washington. Ten years ago, PMLA had an issue on African American literature and history. I think DuBois appeared in about every

article. Booker T. Washington’s name did not appear in a single issue which is odd since he was the most famous man in the U.S. at the turn of the century. Washington had charisma; he had a gift of oratory that was stunning. He was a master at courting favor and securing assistance, and he was tireless at both. His machinations are awe inspiring. The underhandedness and the range are intriguing. In another era, he would have been a master politician and would have gone very far. I think there is a lot of dissertation work to be done on Washington as an American myth maker. Bowie: Speaking of myth making, would you talk about the role of the media because their role in the riot plays out in very clear ways in your text. Bauerlein: You know it’s not much different from the way it is now. Whenever there is a big sensationalistic story, the ratings go up. When it’s over, then every one goes back and blames the media for sensationalizing. The media argues that they’re just giving people what they want. You have that same dynamic. Sensationalism sells. In 1906 you had something parallel to the CNN’s 30-minute updates; you had the “extras.” The Atlanta Evening News could put out “extras” every two hours. What was interesting, though, was that this may have been one of the first campaigns in which the candidates used the media. Hoke Smith had The Atlanta Journal in his pocket. He would give speeches, and he would make sure they published them. Bowie: You talk about English and other white city leaders condemning Hoke Smith, condemning the media, condemning the rioters in this very overt way. Could you talk about that? Bauerlein: Three days into the riot, there’s a meeting of the Chamber of Commerce. Charles Hopkins gets up and says “you know a few days ago, I could have gone into any New York bank and gotten us as much money as I wanted. Today, we couldn’t get a dime.” James English, president of Fourth National Bank and the head of the Chattahoochee Brick Company, says, “These rioters have cost us money. To

hell with the race issues. We’re losing cash everyday.” Bowie: It’s somewhat depressing, albeit not surprising, that it all boils down to economics. Bauerlein: The bottom line is that Booker T. Washington was great because he was encouraging a docile black labor class, which was very good for business. Bowie: Right, economic prosperity but no political disruption. Bauerlein: Yes, they changed their tune a few days after the riot started, for sound business reasons. Bowie: Interestingly, you end with Griffith’s Birth of a Nation and a look at

the formation of Atlanta’s negrophobic thought, which would become entrenched for the next 40 years. Bauerlein: [The movie] made normal what in 1906 was radical. The Klan in 1906 was anathema to Atlanta. The Klan was not good for business and recalled secessionist sentiments and night riders and this was not what the New South was about. In 1915, the Klan was reborn in Atlanta and suddenly, the Klan occupied city hall and the governor’s office. Black militancy was stifled in the city. DuBois was gone, Washington was dead, Turner was dead, Herndon devoted himself to business concerns, and Barber disappeared. So it was, I thought, a suitable conclusion.

Bowie: Could you talk about this book in the context of more recent racial conflicts? Bauerlein: If you look at riots, they are often triggered by an event, [such as] the Rodney King [brutality incident in Los Angeles]. But riots take a long time to happen, and you need to look at the community situation to see why things happen. In the 1906 Atlanta riot, the reason I go back about a year is to try to give this idea of moving forward to what everyone knows is going to happen. The lesson here is to recognize a community situation that is getting tense enough so that if something does happen it will create a riot.


FACULTY NEWS John Bugge, professor, performed in a production of David Kranes’s play, “Beautiful Dreamer,” a play about Stephen Foster, American music, and American racism, held on campus, April 1, as part of the Brave New Works Marathon sponsored by Theater Emory. Pat Cahill, assistant professor, delivered a paper entitled “Calculating Men” at the Tenth Annual Interdisciplinary Symposium in Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque Studies, held at the University of Miami in February. She presented the paper “Spare Men and Great Ones” at Jonathan Crewes seminar on “Normative Shakespeare” at the Annual Meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America in Miami in April. In May she accepted an invitation to discuss “Wound-Man Walking,” a chapter of her book manuscript, with the faculty and graduate students who make up the Medieval and Renaissance Group at the University of Pennsylvania. Walter Kalaidjian, professor, presented a paper entitled “Work Zones: Hypermedia and the Place of Poetry in the Composition Community,” at the Annual College Composition and

Communication Convention, held in Denver in March. In March, Jim Morey, associate professor, delivered a paper, “The Summative Impulse in Old English Studies,” at the “Beowulf in Our Time” conference at Kennesaw State University in March. John Sitter, Charles Howard Candler Professor, edited and contributed two chapters to a book just out from Cambridge University Press, entitled The Cambridge Companion to EighteenthCentury Poetry. In March Rick Rambuss, professor, was invited by the Hudson Strode Program to the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, where he presented a lecture titled “The Least English of All English Poets.” In April, he gave a jointly sponsored English Department and Art History Department lecture at the University of Mississippi. His presentation juxtaposed the poetry of the 17th-century religious poet Richard Crashaw with the works of the photographer Andres Serrano and painter Chris Ofili. He also presented a paper in April, titled “Non-Shakespeare Shakespeare Films” in a seminar on

Shakespeare and Film at the Shakespeare Association of America conference in Miami. Gary Wihl, professor and dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, edited a missing manuscript of Walt Whitman’s essay on Kant, Hegel, Fichte and Schelling, entitled “Sunday Evening Lectures,” for publication in the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, Winter 2001 issue. In September, 2000, Wihl delivered a lecture, “Individualism and Liberalism in the Poetry of Walt Whitman” at the National Humanities Center in the Research Triangle Park. Lynna Williams’ short story, “Personal Testimony” was read by Tony Award-winning actress Cherry Jones May 9 in the “Selected Shorts” series at Symphony Space in New York. Her essay, “Scenes from the Lorca Lounge” was published in the spring 2001 Bellingham Review.


E-mail your Canons submissions, address changes, job changes to [email protected] Loose Canons/July 2001/9

Uncompromising Undergraduate

Quinn on Mastering Language in the Service Sector

O

nce, I found myself working in an industrial freezer just south of Rome, Italy, with four Italian technicians and an interpreter. The temperature was somewhere between 10 and 15 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, and my feet no longer felt like feet. My Italian friends and I were trying desperately to get some machinery to work. At a critical moment we looked around to see that our skinny, and therefore cold-sensitive, interpreter had slipped out. The next moments were spent with a flurry of gestures and frequent consultations with an Italian-English dictionary. We found a way to communicate, finished our work, and then went outside to warm up and kill the interpreter. There have been occasions in my construction career when my command of the English language has been less than helpful. Those occasions have been rare and have been limited to parts of Europe, Canada, Philadelphia, and most of Rahway, New Jersey. The type of construction that I am in now requires a great deal more communication than my work in Italy. I remodel people’s homes. How I ended up choosing remodeling as a profession has a lot to do with my decision to buy a beat up old house and renovate it. I did not, however, take it up because I found sheetrocking fun. Nor was it because I suddenly blossomed as a carpenter. I did not take delight in sanding floors. God knows I did not take delight in sanding floors.

What I did enjoy was being involved in all facets of the work. I found that I particularly enjoyed the design and planning phases. I also enjoyed solving the problems and pulling it all together. And I liked seeing the results. Coming up with a design and then managing my own projects was one thing. I just thought it up and did it. No particular communication skills required. When I started working on other people’s homes things changed dramatically. No longer was it my Quinn house, my vision, my result. Now I found myself spending as much time in discussions with my clients, understanding their needs, and defining the project as I did in construction. The projects themselves grew increasingly large and elaborate and I had to direct a small army of craftspeople for weeks and months to get all the work done. I quickly learned that extensive documentation and clear communication were the key elements for the success of my projects.

ALUMNI NEWS Rand Brandes ’85, professor of English at Lenoir-Rhyne College, spoke on Seamus Heaney’s new translation of Beowulf at the Beowulf in Our Time conference at Kennesaw State University in March. Marshall Boswell ’97, has a short story collection, In Between Things, that has just been accepted for publication by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. The book is scheduled for release in September 2002. Algonquin also has first-option rights on his recently completed novel, Alternative Atlanta. Finally, a new story of his entitled “How to Prosper During the Coming Bad Years” is scheduled to appear in the fall 2001 issue of The Sun. Laura Callanan ’99, visiting assistant professor at Mount Holyoke College, presented “Reading as Revolution: Harriet Martineau’s Rendering of Interpretive Dynamics in The Hour and the Man (1841),” at the Narrative Conference, Rice University, March 8-11. She presented “Plague Narratives and the Fostering of Academic Dialogue: A Case Study in Interdisciplinarity,” presented at the Teaching Literature Conference, Rutgers University, March 24. She also served as moderator and organizer or “Ruins in the Trans-Atlantic Imagination,” a panel presented at “Space, Culture, Power: An Interdisciplinary Conference,” University of Aberdeen, Scotland, April 10-11.

Katherine Clark ’93, assistant professor of English at Dillard University in New Orleans, has compiled her second oral autobiography, Milking the Moon. A Southerner’s Story of Life on This Planet, which is scheduled to be published by Crown in August. The text recounts the life and writings of Mobile, Ala. native Eugene Walter as told by Walter near the end of his life. Norman Finkelstein ’80, professor English at Xavier University in Cincinnati, has had a second book published by SUNY Press, entitled Not One of Them in Place, Modern Poetry and Jewish American Identity. His work, a volume in the SUNY series in Modern Jewish Literature and Culture, explores “the ways in which Jewish belief, thought, and culture have been shaped and articulated in modern American poetry.” Finkelstein stepped down last year after serving six years as department chair. Jane Hiles ’93 associate professor of English at Samford University in Birmingham has been named director of the university’s London Studies Program. Jennifer Keith ’93, assistant professor at University of North Carolina-Greensboro, contributed a chapter to a book recently released by Cambridge University Press, entitled, The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry, which was edited by Charles Howard Candler Professor John Sitter.

E-mail your Canons submissions, address changes, job changes to [email protected] 10/Loose Canons/July 2001

M

ost people who choose to renovate their homes have never been through the process before. They are unfamiliar with the terminology and are often intimidated by the whole idea of renovation. Most importantly, they will only see exactly what they purchased at the end of a fairly long process. In a way, it seems almost unAmerican. There is no instant gratification. This can be a recipe for disaster in terms of mismatched expectations unless there is clear and regular communication all the way through the pre-construction phase. Then comes construction. That’s the part where our clients have to live on the construction site. Living on a construction site can be unnerving. Most people who are unnerved want to talk about it. We have a lot of “process” conversations with our clients during this phase. I know it sounds cliché in this “information age” but at my Atlanta-based company, SawHorse, we have come to see ourselves as a communication company. We do an excellent job of putting the sticks and bricks together. But the actual construction is the last phase of a complicated process. It is the culmination of months of discussions and meetings and planning sessions with our clients. As we have grown, we find that excellent customer service is as much a function of constant communication as it is excellence in construction. We spend the majority of our days collecting, organizing and transmitting information on projects. By the time we start construction on a project we will have created a “job book” that’s three inches thick. Our focus on improved communication is accelerating. In the last three years our biggest expenditures by far have been

for technologies that increase our ability to communicate with one another. This year we will link our clients through our Website so that they can monitor and comment on the project as it progresses through design. When I left Emory with my Smith-Corona portable typewriter I had no inkling that I would live through the second coming of Gutenberg. I also had no inkling I would become a construction worker. That’s what I like about the future—you just never can tell.


Jennifer Margulis ’99, penned an essay on Lucretia Mott which appeared in the Dictionary of Literary Biography 239: American Women Prose Writers, 1820-1870. Margulis’s review of James Walvin’s biography of Olaudah Equiano was published in the African Studies Review in September; another review is forthcoming in the ASR on John Cullen Gruesser’s book, Black on Black: Twentieth-Century African American Writing about Africa. Her article “The Trickster Teacher: Encouraging Active Learning in the Literature Classroom” (a version first appeared in Loose Canons, November 2000) was accepted for publication Humanities in the South. Margulis has received a Faculty Research Grant from Mount Holyoke College to write, direct, and produce a documentary film on the writer Octavia Butler. She is mentoring two WEED Scholarship students who will assist in her film efforts this summer.

Oklahoma, Norman. Her spouse, Kenneth Hodges, a medievalist and also a Michigan Ph.D., will join her at Oklahoma as a visiting assistant professor.

Diana Miles ’00, received a contract from Peter Lang Publishing, Inc. to publish her book, tentatively entitled Women, Violence, and Testimony in the Works of Zora Neale Hurston. She begins work as an assistant professor of English at Morehouse College, fall 2001. Su Fang Ng MA ‘96 passed her Ph.D. oral defense at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and accepted a tenuretrack position in early modern studies at the University of

Kudos

—Jerome Quinn ’69 is the founder of SawHorse, an Atlanta-based construction company.

Congratulations to the following students who received their doctorates during Commencement ceremonies in May: Laura Barlament Sherrill Duchock-Diller Anna Engle Patricia King Miriam Moore Karen Poremski Kristan Sarvé-Gorham Vickie Taft Shirley Toland-Dix

Waisted Women: Anorexia Nervosa and Victorian Literature, a book by Anya Silver ’97, has been accepted by Cambridge University Press. Her poems, “Silent Night” and “A Mary” where recently published in Many Mountains Moving and her poem, “Stillbirth” appeared in The Madison Review. Jessica Rabin ’00 has accepted a position as assistant professor at Anne Arundel Community College in Maryland. The Cumberland Poetry Review (Fall 1999) published David Raney’s essay, “ ‘I have only my body for a voice’: Sex and Silence in Louise Gluck’s Poetry.” His essay “House Divided: Brothers and Balance in the Short Stories of John Cheever” has been accepted by The Journal of the Short Story in English (Spring 2001). Matt Stewart ’88 , was promoted to associate professor with tenure at Boston University. He published Modernism and Tradition in Ernest Hemingway’s IN OUR TIME, in February. Kristina Straub ’84 has been promoted to full professor at Carnegie Mellon University.


Loose Canons/July 2001/11

Solomon Captures Coriolanus

Traversing the Space Between B.A. and M.A.

T

he fifth cut on David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane (1973) is a little song called “Cracked Actor.” Throughout my year enrolled in the English Department’s B.A./M.A. Program, as I chipped away at the contours of my master’s thesis on Shakespeare’s final tragedy, Coriolanus, Bowie’s chorus whipped through my head: “Crack, baby, crack, show me you’re real/Smack, baby, smack, it’s all that you feel,” Bowie screams. The theatrical sado-masochism of “Cracked Actor” at first provided a kind of relief from the insistence of the thesis, but I quickly realized that “Cracked Actor” was precisely the point for which I was searching. Having enrolled as a College senior in the BA/MA Program, I shouldn’t have been surprised in the least that David Bowie sewed up the strands of my thesis. Perhaps the most dynamic texture of the program became the way that my life and my academics intermingled, so that the solitude of incessant writing was contained by contact with professors, friends, films and even David Bowie rewriting and being rewritten by the thesis itself. For a time I only had conversations in which “performativity” was the key term, but those conversations and the contexts in which they occurred continually curled back into Coriolanus. When I brought drawings by gay haut-pornographer Tom of Finland to my thesis defense as handouts for my committee, I felt a sort of glorious thrill--not only at the transgression of suffusing Renaissance tragedy with contemporary pornography, but at how intensely I felt that I had found a community of scholars willing to engage and challenge my work, as well as a sense of

what “my work” might actually be. The abstract nuances of a scholarly community was not, however, the force that propelled me into the program. Two or three weeks into September 1997, once I caught up with the pace of my freshman year at Emory, the B.A./M.A. Program became a sort of elusive conquest for me. The idea behind the program itself is rather simple: a junior year student makes formal application to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and if accepted, spends the senior year of dually enrolled in Emory College and the Graduate Solomon School. This enrollment entails studying in a series of graduate classes and producing a master’s thesis—all in a single year. From a rather detached standpoint, it seemed like a pretty hot program: I could complete two degrees without worrying about the financial and temporal expenditure of graduate school, and it would offer me a chance to explore whether to pursue a Ph.D in English. In this sense, I first conceived of the B.A./M.A. Program in terms of a concrete end: a master’s degree and (perhaps even more valuable) an assurance of a

‘Probing Our Relationship to the World Around Us’

Greener Thinking and Acting in the Academy

I

n late March, I joined 90 people from across the university at a workshop titled “Nurturing a Green University” to discuss the relationship between Emory and the natural environment. Participants who gathered for the workshop already shared a deep concern for the scale of environmental degradation, both at Emory and in the world at large. From smog and urban sprawl to global climate change and the extinction of species, the group acknowledged an array of environmental problems that may eventually threaten human existence, and felt compelled to carry this awareness beyond the confines of the meeting and spawn concrete changes. As an institution of higher education, we agreed, Emory University bears the social and ethical responsibility for

instilling a broad environmental consciousness and ecologically sound behavior both within its own realm and in society in general. “Greener” thinking and acting, therefore, should affect our operations, our research, our discourse, and our teaching. In the Department of English, we seem far removed from questions of environmental health and sustainability. After all, we study and teach the products of human culture and imagination, not the “data” that constitute the physical world around us. One of the most famous literary figures who spurned such disciplinary division was Henry David Thoreau. In his “Natural History of Massachusetts,” Thoreau relayed: “Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower

E-mail your Canons submissions, address changes, job changes to [email protected] 12/Loose Canons/July 2001

future career. I do have the master’s degree if not exactly any assurance, but what proved ultimately so worthwhile for me— in Emory and in the B.A./M.A. Program in particular—was the experience of working with some phenomenal professors (among them Rick Rambuss, Cathy Caruth, Pat Cahill, Michael Elliott, and Mark Jordan) and forcing myself to teach myself—sometimes outside of any coherent structure. In fact, the program produces a sort of odd disequilibrium, in that its most valuable and rich textures are also bound up in its weaknesses. I spent the year feeling not so much dually enrolled in both Emory College and the Graduate School as somehow stuck in a liminal space between the two—or, as Eve Sedgwick might put it, kinda both and yet kinda neither. Though this sort of interstice did produce in me its own forms of confusion and aloneness, it also forced me to hone the dimensions of what I wanted my experience to be, and in this sense it provided me with a terrific preparation for the position in which I find myself now as I leave Atlanta for New York, trying to deal with an overwhelming influx of possibilities without a sure sense of direction. Writing this piece now, after I’ve just graduated from Emory, I’m taken not so much by what I’ve materially gleaned, but how much I already miss the communities I found and joined through taking part in the program. I think now that what remains with me is not so much the endless hours of emptied packs of cigarettes and piles of Xeroxes strewn across my room, but rather the end of those vivid experiences which punctuated and shaped my classes, the thesis, and my life for the past year. It’s a loss I hope never to lose.
—Jesse Solomon graduated with highest honors in May 2001 with a B.A./M.A. in English.

in a truth.” What would be the repercussions of applying this maxim to our life and work in the English department? To begin as Thoreau did in “Economy,” the first chapter of Walden, we would have to evaluate the ways in which we conduct our daily lives. Although we all treasure the tangible qualities of the printed word, we could reconsider the quantity and the quality of the paper we use to teach, do research, and perform our administrative duties. As individuals and as a department, we need to join a campus-wide effort to recycle, use recycled products, and conserve energy.

T

horeau’s objective in living at Walden, of course, was not only to promote an simpler life style but also to understand the relationship between his mind and the world. As readers,

Ecocriticism continued on page 16

Tally Places in Glascock Competition

I

had the privilege of representing Emory at the 78th Kathryn Irene Glascock Intercollegiate Poetry Competition at Mount Holyoke College in April where I placed second among six contestants. Professors Lynna Williams and Jon Loomis (in the Creative Writing program) recommended me for participation in this event following the likes of Sylvia Plath and Seamus Heaney. The experience was most memorable for the contact I had with the competing undergraduates from five other schools: Amherst, Bryn Mawr, Johns Hopkins, Mount Holyoke, and Smith. We spent an afternoon getting acquainted and comparing notes on our respective Creative Writing programs. I anticipated feeling somewhat second-rate among students primarily from northeastern liberal arts institutions. However, the excellence of our school, and more specifically our department, quickly made my apprehension disappear. I realized that I had failed to fully recognize or appreciate the quality of the program at Emory. Thankfully, an opportunity like the Glascock furthered my pride in and my excitement over all the scholarly resources at Emory. In four years, I have studied with Ha Jin, James Flannery, Cathy Caruth, Ronald Schuchard, and Jon Loomis, and I have attended readings and lectures by Adrienne Rich, Louise Gluck, Charles Simic, Charles Wright, and Frederick Busch. When I compared Emory’s liberal arts programs to those of others in the Glascock competition (ones that I expected would dominate the field) I discovered that their programs do not hold a candle to ours. Later we attended a colloquium featuring three poet judges: April Bernard, John Peck, Alastair Reid. In the Glascock room, surrounded by the works of past participants, we were captivated by the judges’ discussion of the purposes, processes, and products of poetry, and were thrilled with opportunity to raise a few questions ourselves. That evening, when Emma Christenson from Bryn Mawr, the first reader and eventual winner, finished her first poem, I wondered what on earth I was doing there. Her powerful command of the language, ability to articulate sentiment without sentimentality, and intense presentation overwhelmed me. I read four poems from my honors thesis, entitled “The Living,” which thematically swept from family, through travel and humor, to mortality. In the time between readings, I enjoyed hearing about other undergraduates’ works in contemporary poetry, which varied from narrative to lyricism, romance, political commentary, and meditation. This experience affirmed my confidence in Emory University, exposed me to writers from around the country, and allowed me access to famed poets who returned comments on our poems and signed our books with special advice regarding our current work. I was honored both to represent Emory and to be runner-up, and when I returned home, I fell asleep contemplating of all the weekend’s pleasure, discourse, and edification.
—Meghan Sanders Tally graduated SUMMA CUM LAUDE in May 2001 with a B.A. in English and Creative Writing.

Solomon photo, page 12, and Erben class photo, page 16, by Mary Alma Durrett

Loose Canons/July 2001/13

Alchemy I. Retiring, under the doping of unnatural fatigue, I, somnambulist, declined hall lamps and passed into the kitchen. Stopping there to extinguish, I was called to a crinkle behind the stove. Peering behind it, through shade and wire I saw you: gray, delicate, epileptic, jerking your head on a plastic wrapper. Curiosity once dared me to eat a pebble of rat-poison— headache, diarrhea ensued. But you, tender pest, are brought to spasm, pink limbs in protest, dentia exposed, wet. II. Suctioned to the plastic pillows, the remote controlled bed, calling with effort, your tongue is dried hard—you sound deaf. I still don’t know you’re dying, drugged to schizophrenia. A thinned finger indicates, the window? the glass of water? that photograph? I approach with water— you groan negative. Straw in the glass, a finger to vacuum, I moisten your mouth— improvised saliva. Still muted, you motion to come close, navigate arms around my neck. This is no hug—medicine has mutilated your insides. You need help to sit up, to breathe. —Charles C. Carter

14/Loose Canons/July 2001

2001 English Department and Creative Writing Program Awards

A

ward Winners

T

he winners of the 2001 English Department and Creative Writing Program Awards received their awards from poet Charles Wright, currently a professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Wright, who won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for his collection of poetry, Black Zodiac, was on campus April 16 and 17 for a reading and colloquium, co-sponsored by the Hightower Fund and the Friends of the Emory Libraries, and for the presentation of the student awards. Anton DiSclafani, a creative writing major, won the English Department’s Undergraduate Essay Award for “The Ambiguity of Love in Tess of the d’Urbervilles and The Woodlanders.” Lauren Gunderson received the Artistine Mann Award in Drama for her work, “Parts They Call Deep.” Anton DiSclafani received the Artistine Mann Award in Fiction for her work, “Tightness.” Charles C. Carter’s poem, “Alchemy,” received the Artistine Mann Award in Poetry and his “Modus Vivendi” received an Honorable Mention from the Academy of American Poets. Lauren Cook received the Artistine Mann Award in Creative Non-Fiction for “The Portrait of a Southern Housewife.” Gretta DesCamp was the winner of the Academy of American Poets prize for her “Sleep for two in a single bed.” Ariana Jakub’s poem, “What My Mom is Thinking,” received an Honorable Mention in the Artistine Mann Award competition; Jared van Aalten received an Honorable Mention for his drama, “Sheer Time”; and Lauren Paige Giles received an Honorable Mention in the Mann competition for her fictional work, “The Purple Heart Highway.”


From “The Ambiguity of Love in Tess of the d’Urbervilles and The Woodlanders”

T

hough two separate novels, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and The Wooodlanders engage with similar themes. Through comparing and contrasting the two novels, we will gain greater insight into Hardy’s philosophical views as relating to love, sexuality, gender differences, and social struggle, among other topics. Let us begin, then, by examining Grace Melbury and Tess Durbeyfield, the female protagonists of their novels. Since the dilemma of social status seems to be involved in the outset of each character’s conflict, this subject will be undertaken as well. Love’s struggle is perhaps most violently represented in Tess Durbeyfield. At the core of Tess’s conflict is her name: Durbeyfield. Only when she learns of her true name, d’Urberville, is she persuaded by her parents to visit her ancestors at Trantridge. It is here that she meets Alec, her “cousin,” who will eventually (and indirectly) cause her death. Alec’s social standing, of a higher status than Tess’s, plays a large role in her demise. Social standing and class-consciousness were extremely important during the Victorian era, and his importance is easily detected in Tess of the d’Urbervilles. The very title suggests the ambivalence Tess feels in regard to her indefinite status, and also the uncertainty with which society treats her. It is of the greatest irony that Alec and his family are not really d’Urbervilles, and only adopted the name when they became wealthy. Wealth, as evidenced, is directly tied to social standing. The “new” d’Urbervilles were able to “buy” their name. It is only because Alec is wealthy, and a d’Urberville, that he is able to retain Tess as his employee. More explicitly, it is only because Alec is wealthy enough to own a horse that he is able to carry Tess into the woods. Literally and figuratively, Alec stands above the peasants that walk with Tess.

Sleep for Two in a Single Bed I will never fall asleep with you beside me your hot breath tickling my cheek your arm a skinny speed bump beneath the arch of my back. I stare at the cracks in the ceiling willing myself to hold still wanting instead to turn back side stomach side the movement that lulls me to sleep. And then I’m walking the halls my bare feet carry me silent across the carpet tracing and retracing my steps until I can feel the darkness of sleep again my shoulder brushing the wall as I drift into dreams Too soon I return but so tired I could sleep anywhere even in the confines of your long arms. When I wake, I find you gone my body curved into a question mark curled around the shadow of your warmth.

Excerpts from Winning Works —Anton DiSclafani

—Gretta DesCamp

From “The Portrait of a Southern Housewife”

A

s a child, Sally dreamed of having a large, “bubbly and happy” family, complete with four children. She aspired to become a conductor of music, perhaps under the influence of her mother who was a trained opera singer. She wanted the American dream and the All-American family. Her body had other plans. Sally was diagnosed with a tipped uterus early in her marriage and was told it would be close to impossible for her to have children. When she learned she was pregnant with Charlie, Sally counted her blessings and accepted that it was a miraculous occurrence that might never happen again. Charlie grew up as an only child. As a young couple, Allen and Sally spent their summer with two other couples they had befriended in college. They would pack up their belongings, Charlie, and the family dog, Winston, and live on Nantucket Island for a couple of weeks out of the year. These summer days and nights were filled with lobster bakes, long walks, lemonade stands, and philosophical debates. Sally watched her friends’ children grow up with Charlie and especially loved to dress and diaper the baby of the bunch; a little girl with blonde curly locks and a freckled face. As Charlie grew older, Allen’s consulting work brought the family to many different places, including Mexico for five years. Then Allen was offered the position of President of Egleston Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia and so the Gayers moved to the South indefinitely. When Charlie graduated from Westminister, a prestigious private school located in the upper-class suburbs outside of Atlanta, Sally prepared to say goodbye to her only child. She accepted a job working for Young Audiences, a program dealing with the overwhelming need for arts in the public school systems. Charlie left for Princeton University in the fall of 1989 and Sally threw herself into her work.

From “Tightness” “It’s not about size,” she says. “I would never want you to think it was the size. It’s about me, it’s about how I feel.” She’s chopping a tomato as she tells me this. “Are you listening?” “Yes.” The chopping sound is becoming louder and louder. “So what do you think?” “I think I’m just here to help with dinner.” The chopping sound stops. She hands the cutting board to me and I lift the lid off the pot on the stove. The steam rises toward my face. “You know,” she says, “a lot of women do it. It’s a confidence issue. Your father and I both agree it’s a confidence issue.” She folds a napkin and lays it on the placemat. “You’re too young to know this, but breasts are very important. In some ways, they define a woman. Of course, women with small breasts can still be happy, but I don’t think they’re so well defined. As women, I mean. After all, why would so many women be getting breast implants if it wasn’t an issue?” —Anton DiSclafani

—Lauren Cook

Loose Canons/July 2001/15

Ecocriticism continued from page 13 interpreters, and teachers of literature, we are experts in analyzing how literary artifacts reflect and influence the encounter between human beings and the world around them, now and in the past. While Thoreau sought to find correspondences between himself and the natural world, our discipline has too frequently limited the definition of “the world” to human culture and society. In recent years, then, ecocritical literary scholarship and teaching has begun to stress the idea that human culture is inextricably connected to the physical environment. According to Cheryll Glotfelty, editor of the influential Ecocriticism Reader, such a critical stance “takes as its subject the interconnections between nature and culture, specifically the cultural artifacts of language and literature.” An ecologically conscious reading of literature, in other words, does not ask us to disregard the crucial roles language and culture play in the way writers and texts mediate between the world and their minds in favor of a supposedly “objective” external reality. Rather, ecocritical scholars and readers acknowledge that no literary work has the power to completely disengage itself from the environmental qualities of the place where it was produced. Ecocriticism, therefore, has often paid special attention to those texts and authors who espouse this interconnectedness between the natural environment and human subjectivity. Reading and teaching authors such as Wordsworth, Thoreau, Muir, Borroughs, Leopold, Abbey, Oliver, Momaday, Snyder, and Kingsolver can remind us of the manifold ways in which literature responds to the powerful influence of the natural environment. While many ecocritics have focused on nature writing, other scholars, such

Erben, left, and members of his Expository Writing class, “Environmental Issues in the 21st Century,” often take their discussion into the field.

as Robert Kern, now aim “to recover the environmental character or orientation of works whose conscious or foregrounded interests lie elsewhere.” From William Shakespeare to Toni Morrison, we could try to understand how literary figures whose work we do not primarily associate with “nature” are nevertheless grounded in and affected by a specific place or environment. Both approaches combined provide us with the tools to understand how culture and literature have shaped our perception of the natural world, and how, in turn, the natural environment can profoundly influence human beings, art, and culture. Ultimately, ecocritical strives to be more than another theoretical/critical “school,” but, by affecting our conscious involvement of literature and culture, it attempts to change our social and institutional practices. cologically conscious reading and teaching, then, does not simply ask us to understand the subjectivity of writers and characters in literature, but to probe our own relationship to the world around us. Even though we do not study the scientific basis of the natural environ-

E

ment and do not publicize the latest natural disaster, our work may ultimately have a more lasting effect on the ways our students and we think and act in a world that consists of more than the spheres of society and culture. As readers and teachers trained in the trivium of gender, race, and class, we will find ourselves in relatively unknown territory, asking questions more frequently than answering them. Ultimately, however, we may discover the reward of saying with Walt Whitman: “I am afoot with my vision.” I would like to encourage everyone in the department and outside to join in discussing our relationship to and responsibility for our natural environment. How can our discipline and our teaching play an active role in forging a deeper ecological consciousness in our society? Let us talk about these questions on our listserves, in the departments, in our classrooms, and, I hope, in the magnificent places that are part of our campuses but not always part of our minds.
—Patrick Erben is a graduate student whose academic focus is on early American literature, German colonial writings, and ecocriticism. Contact Erben at [email protected]

We’re online: www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/news 16/Loose Canons/July 2001