SUNY Geneseo
English major alum Evan Goldstein (’17) and Assistant Professor of English Lytton Smith are both included in a new issue of the online journal BathHouse focused on ideas of collaboration. The nine poems were written as part of a back-and-forth poem exchange between Goldstein and Smith.
The issue also features photographs taken by Goldstein as part of his CIDD Ambassadorship at SUNY Geneseo in the Summer of 2016.
My Radar Data Knows Its Thing, a poetry chapbook authored by Assistant Professor of English Lytton Smith, has been selected as the winner of the inaugural Foundlings Chapbook Contest and Artist Residency. The chapbook will be designed by guest book artist Steve Fitzmaurice, and Foundlings Press will publish Dr. Smith’s collection in mid-January 2018. Dr. Smith will complete a weekend residency at Hotel Henry in Buffalo this November. The four runners-up were Terez Peipins, Tige DeCoster, Benjamin Brindise, and George Guida. Dr. Smith’s chapbook includes poems about radio, radar and wireless, devised based on research visits supported by funds from the Office of the Provost. All the poems in the collection begin with or rewrite Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s famous novel opening, “It was a dark and stormy night…”
Renowned writer Junot Díaz has selected English Department lecturer Jess Fenn‘s short-story, “Athena Dreams of a Hollow Body,” for the upcoming Boston Review print special issue, Global Dystopias, which also includes Nalo Hopkinson, Maureen McHugh, and an interview with Margaret Atwood.
From the Boston Review’s announcement:
If we have, as Junot Díaz says, reached peak dystopia, then Global Dystopias might just be the handbook we need to weather the storm.
Preorder your copy here.
SUNY Geneseo Professor of English Maria Lima will deliver the James and Julia Lockhart Lecture on Monday, September 25 at 5 p.m. in Doty 300 (the Tower Room).
The talk, titled “Reclaiming the Human: from the Bildungsroman to Neo-Slave Narratives,” will explore questions of genre, language, institutional power, and literary production and reception, arguing that it is time for comparatists to stop invoking the German Bildungsroman as a point of origin for all seemingly autobiographical narratives.
Prof. Lima held the James and Julia Lockhart Endowed Professorship from 2014 to 2017. SUNY Geneseo’s supported professorships provide eligible faculty members with a $6,000 annual grant for the term of their three-year appointment, the privilege, as a part of their normal teaching load, to design and teach one course of their choosing during one year of the Professorship, and the responsibility of delivering one College-wide lecture on a topic of their choice during the third year of their Professorship. These faculty have demonstrated superior teaching and involvement of students in the learning process, superior advisement, both formal and informal, a visible and meaningful involvement in campus life, and an active scholarly life.
Professor Tom Greenfield and senior Erin Carlo are co-authors of a 3000-word essay that’s been accepted by The Arthur Miller Journal (Penn State University Press) for publication in Fall 2017. “Strange Stage Fellows: Arthur Miller and Harold Pinter” grew out of discussions that occurred over the course of a year during which Carlo took two classes with Greenfield: The Legacy and Influence of Arthur Miller (ENGL 203) and Anglo–Irish Absurdist Drama (ENGL 486). Their essay identifies a recent trend in comparative scholarship between the two playwrights, moving from early hard-edged contrasts toward later nuanced explorations of artistic similarities in their work.
Dr. Kenneth Asher, who is jointly appointed in English and Philosophy departments at Geneseo, recently published a book on literary criticism titled Literature, Ethics and the Emotions with Cambridge University Press. His monograph examines the longstanding connection between literature and our interpersonal ethical understanding of emotions. According to Cambridge University Press, “Asher argues that literary scholars should locate this question in the long and various history of moral philosophy. On the basis of his own reading of this history, Asher contends for the centrality of emotions in our ethical lives and shows how literature – novels, poetry, and drama – can each contribute to crucial emotional understanding.” Asher’s analysis is supplemented by chapters on T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and George Bernard Shaw to provide a detailed exploration as to how modernist authors approach the issue of ethical understanding and formation of self. You can find more information on Asher’s publication here.
Professor Asher has been a member of the English department since 1986. His previous publications include T.S. Eliot and Ideology (Cambridge University Press, 1995) and “Emotions and the Ethical Life in D.H. Lawrence” (Cambridge Quarterly, 2011).
Accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed journal Genders is “’There is No Magic Here’: Saidiya Hartman, Percival Everett’s Zulus, and Slavery’s Archive,” an essay coauthored by Distinguished Teaching Professor Beth A. McCoy and Geneseo alumni Gregory J. Palermo (English/Literature, Physics), Jeremy A. Jackson (English/Literature), Danielle M. Ward (English, Geological Sciences), Timothy Moriarty (English/Creative Writing), Christina Broomfield (English/Literature, Art History), Melissa Ann Smith (Childhood/Special Education), Matt Huben (English/Literature), and Justin M. Turner (English/Literature).
The essay emerged from the collaborative final project in McCoy’s Fall 2013 ENGL 394 Black Apocalyptic Fiction seminar. You can view the full essay here.
Assistant Professor of English Dr. Lytton Smith has just published a collaboratively-authored essay, written with Dr. Katherine Baxter, on the poetry of Chamoru poet Craig Santos Perez and Maori poet Robert Sullivan.
“Writing in Translation: Robert Sullivan’s Star Waka and Craig Santos Perez’s from unincorporated territory” is the first comparative study of these poets’ works, and it makes an argument for translation as a “kinetic space” defined not by a movement from “source” to “target” language but as a means for allowing “multiple idioms and registers to co-exist, displaying a range of power structures and social hierarchies simultaneously.”
The article appears in Vol 2.2 of Literary Geographies, an interdisciplinary open-access e-journal that provides a forum for new research and collaboration in the field of literary/geographical studies.
Come to the Fringe Festival in Rochester, New York next weekend and see what the English department’s creative writers, filmmakers, and multimedia artists have prepared for your enjoyment! All events are free.
See page 35 of the print Festival Guide for a full listing, including free performances from 11:30 am to midnight on Saturday, September 24. Events include:
Concessions are available at both the Spiegelgarden and Lyric Theatre. Free parking at Lyric, garage and pay lots near Spiegelgarden.
Adjunct Professor of English Thomas Metzger’s thirteenth book, Meet me in the Strange, a novel, will be published by Meerkat Press.