- Newsworthy: Kathryn Pratt Receives Research Grant to Study Romantic Theatrical Rhetoric and Melancholia at British Library in London
- ABD Colloquium - Dissertation-Summarizing Workshop - Today - November 10 - 3:15 pm in 8009 Haley Center
- Rescheduled English Hour - Monday - November 15 - 3:30 pm in 3104 Haley Center
- EGO Meeting - Wednesday - November 17 - 3:15 pm in 8009 Haley Center
- Literature After Dark - Tell About the South - Wednesday - November 17 - 7:45 pm in 3195 Haley Center
- Biggio Center Professional Development Seminar - November 18 - 12 pm in 202 Foy Student Union
- Publications - Paula Backscheider and Charlie Rose
- ASECS Endows Paula Backscheider Archival Fellowship
Newsworthy:
Kathryn Pratt Receives Research Grant to Study Romantic Theatrical Rhetoric and Melancholia at British Library in London 
At the end of December, Kathryn Pratt, Assistant Professor of English, will fly to London to finish the research for her book project, The Rhetoric of Melancholia and the British Theatrical Tradition, 1750-1850, working with the help of grants provided by the University Office of Research and the College of Liberal Arts.
In her book manuscript, Pratt explores how melancholia became associated with theatrical representation in the Romantic period. Like the rest of the nation, Romantic writers felt acutely the political and economic uncertainties of the times. These included the destruction of old certainties with the French Revolution and, in its bloody aftermath, the failure of revolutionary optimism and the hardships endured by literary professionals and others in a depressed economy.
Casting about for a way to recoup their losses, Romantic writers turned to the rhetoric of melancholia that had emerged out of the eighteenth-century theatrical tradition, including the works of theater managers Thomas Sheridan and John Walker. In their wake, famous figures including William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Edmund Burke reacted with alarm or delight to the excessive "sympathy" that spectacular new stagings of tragedy elicited from viewers. The name they gave to this physicalized sympathy was "melancholia." In fact, what writers found compelling about melancholia was the way that its association of the physical with the intellectual arts of persuasion could lend power to literature as a place in which the human being resisted its experiential losses. When Romantic writers claimed this theatrical melancholia for the field of literature, they took from the evolving tragic tradition the rhetoric of physical loss and desire that came to distinguish Romantic literature both from the contained and pleasurable sadness of the previous era's language of sensibility and from the ephemeral nature of the bodily eloquence of the stage.
Pratt studies melancholia by attending to the literary and rhetorical theories of the period. Literary critics who study psychoanalytic theory have incorporated the term "melancholia" into an ahistorical, post-Freudian methodology from which the Romantic historical "melancholia" needs to be recovered. More attentive historical critics have explored the period's cross-pollinations of literary and theatrical culture, and others have addressed the history of Romantic rhetorical theory. No critic before Pratt, however, has addressed the importance of Romantic melancholia as a central paradigm of human identity around which the humanistic disciplines began to construct themselves.
As well as finishing her book on Romantic melancholia, Pratt is working on an article about Walter Scott ad nineteenth-century New Orleans theater. Looking at New Orleans theater culture between 1820 and 1830, Pratt reads Walter Scott's popularity in both French and English language theater as a complex instance of converted nationalism. She argues that two iconic plays performed in New Orleans between 1820 and 1830 (Rob Roy and La Dame Blanche) reveal what a fierce battle was being waged between the waning but powerful French culture and burgeoning American audiences to define New Orleans as a European city whose identity was either uniquely French-American or properly British-American. In this creolized city culture, the separatist sentiment that would eventually make Scott an infamous Civil War presence took ethnic and regional form on the New Orleans stage.
ABD Colloquium - Dissertation-Summarizing Workshop - Today - November 10 - 3:15 pm in 8009 Haley Center
The ABD Colloquium and the Job Placement Advisors will coordinate a dissertation-summarizing workshop today, November 10, at 3:15 pm in 8009 Haley Center.
All who are preparing for job interviews are invited. Please bring a draft of a 3 minute description of your dissertation and be prepared to work on refining it to effectively answer queries at interviews and cocktail parties. Some experienced members of the faculty will be on-hand to help you condense your description and sharpen your delivery.
Rescheduled English Hour - Monday - November 15 - 3:30 pm in 3104 Haley Center
Chris Keirstead's English Hour presentation has been rescheduled for Monday, November 15, in 3104 Haley Center. Refreshments will be served at 3:30 pm, with Keirstead beginning his presentation at 4 pm.
EGO Meeting - Wednesday - November 17 - 3:15 pm in 8009 Haley Center
EGO will meet on Wednesday, November 17, from 3:15 to 4:15 in 8009 Haley Center.
Literature After Dark - Tell About the South - Wednesday - November 17 - 7:45 pm in 3195 Haley Center
Tell About the South: Let Freedom Ring (2000) will be shown on Wednesday, November 17, at 7:45 pm in 3195 Haley Center. Narrated by Rita Dove, this documentary tells the story of Southern Literature from the Civil Rights Movement until the present.
Biggio Center Professional Development Seminar - November 18 - 12 pm in 202 Foy Student Union
The Biggio Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning at Auburn University will continue its Professional Development Seminar Series on Thursday, November 18. All Auburn University and PFF Cluster Institution faculty and graduate students are invited to attend.
Seminars will be held in 202 Foy and start with refreshments at noon. Participants are asked to bring their own lunches; beverages and cookies will be provided. Dr. Bill Buskist, Professor, Psychology, will begin his presentation, "Characteristics of Effective College Teaching," at 12:15 pm.
Publications - Paula Backscheider and Charlie Rose
Paula Backscheider's review essay on Catherine Burroughs' edited collection British Romantic Theatre has just appeared in Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film. An introduction to the plays of Samuel Foote, which was printed first in 1983, was also published in late October as part of the latest volume of Literary Criticism From 1400 to 1800.
Charlie Rose's short story, "A Ford in a River," has been published by the on-line review, Blackbird.
ASECS Endows Paula Backscheider Archival Fellowship
The American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies has just announced that the fellowship named in her honor, the Paula Backscheider Archival Fellowship, has been sufficiently endowed to be awarded. Applicants must be ASECS members and propose a significant project dependent on work in archives, repositories, and special collections in the U.S. or abroad.
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Last updated November 10, 2004