English Department News

            

April 18, 2001

          

Volume 3, No. 26


April 18

  

Graduate Faculty meeting, 3:00 p.m., HC 3104

April 18

  

Meeting of Tenured Faculty, 4:00 p.m., HC 3104

April 23

  

Great Books Committee meeting, 3:00 p.m., HC 9030D

April 23

  

English Hour, "Plagiarism in Great Books, A Round Table Discussion," 4:00 p.m., HC 3104

April 26

  

Benson Lecture and Undergraduate Awards Ceremony, Patricia Yaeger, "Ghosts and Shattered Bodies, or, What Does It Mean to Be Haunted by Southern Fiction?" 3:00 p.m., Auburn University Hotel and Conference Center Auditorium

April 30

  

Graduate Studies Committee meeting, 2:30 p.m., HC 9030D

May 2

  

Classes end

May 2

  

Graduate Student Reception, 4:00 p.m., Pebble Hill

May 3

  

Reading Day

May 4-5, 7-9

  

Final Exams

May 12

  

Graduation

May 22

  

Classes begin for Summer Term


Celebration at Pebble Hill

Authors at the English Department's Book Author Reception gathered for a group photograph before the festivities began. Pictured below (front row) are Tim Dykstal, Judy Troy, Hilary Wyss, (second row) Jon Bolton, Bert Hitchcock, Paula Backscheider, Betsy Smith, (third row) Miller Solomon, Don Cunningham, Tom Nunnally, (fourth row) George Crandell, Pat Morrow, Jeremy Downes; not pictured: Peter Huggins, Taylor Littleton, Constance Relihan, and Robin Sabino.


"Brood Descending a Staircase"


Plagiarism in Great Books: An English Hour Round Table Discussion

The Great Books Committee is sponsoring a roundtable discussion of "Plagiarism in Great Books" on Monday, April 23, 2001 at 4:00 p.m. in Haley Center 3104. Everyone who has taught, teaches, or will teach Great Books is welcome.
Have you had the unfortunate experience of plagiarism in your Great Books classes? Are you afraid you will one day and need advice on how to deal with it? Do you want to learn how to prevent it? If so, or if you have valuable insights to share on these topics, please join us in an open discussion.
Our panel will give a view from the Academic Honesty Committee on how cases are dealt with now, a view from the committee working on changing the process of dealing with plagiarism, and a view from instructors who have prosecuted plagiarism cases. We will also be offering useful advice on tracking down the sources of plagiarized papers on the Internet, creating assignments that are "plagiarism-proof" and working with students to reduce the temptation to plagiarize.
We are hoping that it will be a true round-table, so please come by bringing your Original Ideas on plagiarism! Hopefully, pooling our experience will help make the process of dealing with academic dishonesty easier, and rarer, for all of us.
If you come for no other reason, come because there will be treats!

Ghosts and Shattered Bodies to be Topic of 2001 Benson Lecture

Patricia Yaeger, Professor and Director of First and Second Year Studies at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), will deliver the 2001 Benson Lecture as part of the English Department’s annual undergraduate awards ceremony. Dr. Yaeger’s topic will be “Ghosts and Shattered Bodies, or, What Does It Mean to Be Haunted by Southern Fiction?” The 2001 Benson Lecture is scheduled for Thursday, April 26th at 3:00 p.m. in the Auburn University Hotel and Conference Center Auditorium. The lecture is free and open to the public. A reception for Professor Yaeger will follow her presentation.
In her most recent book, Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing 1930-1990, Dr. Yaeger engagingly tells the story of Southern writing--a narrative of a literature about community, about place and the past, about miscegenation, white patriarchy, and the epic of race. In this pioneering work, Yaeger provides an entirely new set of categories through which to understand Southern literature and culture.
For Yaeger, works by black and white Southern women writers reveal a shared obsession with monstrosity and the grotesque and with the strange zones of contact between black and white, such as the daily trauma of underpaid labor and the workings of racial and gender politics in the unnoticed yet all too familiar everyday. Yaeger also excavates a Southern fascination with dirt—who owns it, who cleans it, and whose bodies are buried in it.
Yaeger's brilliant, theoretically informed readings of Zora Neale Hurston, Harper Lee, Carson McCullers, Toni Morrison, Flannery O'Connor, Alice Walker, and Eudora Welty (among many others) explode the mystifications of Southern literary tradition and forge a new path for southern studies.
Yaeger is the editor of Geography of Identity (1996) and co-editor with Beth Kowaleski-Wallace of Refiguring the Father: New Feminist Readings of Patriarchy (1989). She is also the author of Honey-Mad Women: Emancipatory Strategies in Women’s Writing.


Jessica VanSlooten will be presenting "Hitting the Road with Jack: Beat Writers and the Gendered Spiritual Quest" at the Women's Studies Graduate Student Panel on Wednesday, April 25, 2001, from 12:00 to 1:00 p.m. in Foy Union, Room 208. Patsy Fowler will present "Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure: Female Sexual Liberation or Male Sexual Fantasy?" on Thursday, April 26, 2001, also from 12:00 to 1:00 p.m. in Foy 208.
If you would like to include an item in the "Professional Notes" section of The English Channel, please submit your note to George Crandell.


A memorial service for Mary Kuntz's husband, John Pratt, will be held on Friday, April 20, 2001 at 3:30 p.m. in B-6 Dudley Hall. A reception will follow the service at St. Dunstan's Church, 136 E. Magnolia Avenue.
If you would like to include an item in the "Personal Notes" section of The English Channel, please submit your note to George Crandell.
Please submit items and direct all questions or comments about The English Channel, to George Crandell, who currently maintains this site.
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