Hannah McSorley, a senior English major at SUNY Geneseo, has had her story “Washing Machine Time” published online at Crab Fat Magazine. Hannah’s story was originally written for Assistant Professor of English Lytton Smith’s section of ENGL 201: Foundations of Creative Writing, where it received workshop feedback from students in that class. “It’s wonderful to see that revision process leading to a publication,” says Dr. Smith. “Congratulations to Hannah!”
Jess Fenn story selected for special issue of Boston Review
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.
Greenfield and Carlo essay to appear in Arthur Miller Journal
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.
Kenneth Asher Publishes Book on Ethical Criticism with Cambridge University Press
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).
Beth McCoy And Eight Geneseo Alumni Co-Authored Article Accepted For Publication
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.
Lytton Smith collaborates on essay exploring poetry in translation
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.
Thom Metzger novel forthcoming from Meerkat Press
Adjunct Professor of English Thomas Metzger’s thirteenth book, Meet me in the Strange, a novel, will be published by Meerkat Press.
Greenfield and Nolan co-author article on teaching with Arthur Miller journal
Professor Tom Greenfield and Geneseo English major alum Megan Nolan (’14) are co-authors of an article in the Spring 2016 issue of the Arthur Miller Journal. “All My Journals: The Arthur Miller Journal [AMJ] as Intro to Literature College Text,” is based on Greenfield’s and Nolan’s experiences, as professor and teaching assistant respectively, using the Journal as a required text in Greenfield’s ENGL 203 class on Arthur Miller’s plays. The Arthur Miller Society, headquartered in New York City, donated 25 volumes so that each student in the class could have a personal copy of the Journal to use throughout the semester.
Lytton Smith sound poem featured in online journal
“Dear World Service,” a new sound poem by Assistant Professor of English Lytton Smith, is included in the second issue of ythm, an audio journal of contemporary poetry. Written in response to Robyn Schiff’s “Death of a Salesman,” Smith’s poem is one of five audio-only poems in the issue. A podcast can be found via Soundcloud. The issue also features work by Katie Peterson, Michael Joseph Walsh, and Sheila McMullin.
Taking its name from Nathanial Mackey’s gloss of “ythm” as “anagrammatic myth” in his 1993 poetry collection School of Udhra, ythm is an argument that “the spoken voice is central to both the praxis and appreciation of contemporary poetry,” and central, in particular, to the American tradition.
ythm editor Sean Pears found Smith through the blog that Smith maintains for Geneseo students in Literature and Creative Writing, The Contemporary Poem. Responding in a comment to student Nicole Pero’s post about “breaking from sound” via Benjamin Franklin, which neatly synthesized themes from Geneseo’s Western Humanities courses and the Advanced Poetry Workshop, Smith suggested “isn’t sound a form itself?,” offering Karen Volkman’s sonnets from Nomina, published by Rochester-based BOA Editions, as an example.
Smith credits the English department’s transition to four-credit courses with creating the space in his classes to incorporate student blogging.
McCoy publishes article on FEMA and Post-Katrina New Orleans
Distinguished Teaching Professor Beth McCoy’s article on “The Archive of the Archive of the Archive: The FEMA Signs of Post-Katrina New Orleans and the Vévés’s of Voudoun” appears in a new collection from Indiana University Press edited by Jonathan P. Eburne and Judith Roof, The Year’s Work in the Oddball Archive. The collection “positions itself within the history of mirabilia launched by curiosity cabinets starting in the mid-fifteenth century and continuing to the present day. These archives (or are they counter-archives?) are located in unexpected places—the doorways of Katrina homes, the cavity of a cow, the remnants of extinct animals, an Internet site—and they offer up ‘alternate modes of knowing’ to the traditional archive.” You can preview the essay in Google Books here.