Upcoming Sessions Spring 2008 Friday, 2 May 2008:       Gary Sange      Topic: “Comic Surrealism”
	First Friday Directed by Bryant Mangum The English Department is pleased to announce the beginning of the second season of its open forum for the exchange of ideas on research, teaching, and writing. Everyone is invited to attend. FIRST FRIDAY is a continuation of a long tradition that goes back almost to the beginning of VCU’s English Department. A year after RPI merged with MCV in 1968, Ann Woodlief, now retired, began a departmental newsletter called The English Exchange. This became the first in a long line of public exchanges in which members of the department began sharing their ongoing research and writing—and sharing ideas about what they were doing in the classroom. When Richard Priebe came to VCU in 1973 he initiated an informal series of exchanges that were known as Brown Bag Lunches. This symposium went on to become university-wide in scope, and fifteen to twenty-five members of the department participated in it regularly. When the College of Humanities and Sciences Symposium ended there was an informal continuation of it, organized around a central theme each year.  During the late 1980s another group in the department began a symposium on Composition Theory; and in 1990 Marcel Cornis-Pope and Bill Griffin put together a faculty discussion group called Theory Across the Curriculum, which met until 1994. In 1994 Terry Oggel initiated the Faculty Symposium to give faculty an opportunity to discuss their research and writing through presentations that were open to the public.  It met during the lunch hour and followed the format of the earlier Brown Bag lunches.  This was an active and successful endeavor that involved participation of at least two-thirds of the English Faculty for a decade. A detailed discussion of the Faculty Symposium, including a history of exchanges like it mentioned above, as well as the Symposium archive, is available on the web at this address:  http://www.has.vcu.edu/eng/symp/ FIRST FRIDAY embodies the tradition of exchange of ideas on research, teaching, and writing of the Faculty Symposium that Terry started more than a decade ago. We will have three presentations each semester to be given in the departmental conference room, Hibbs 308.  Everyone in the department, the university, and the community at large is invited to attend; and all in the department are invited to volunteer to make a presentation. The goal over the next four years is to have as many members of the department as time permits participate as presenters. During the spring semester (2007) the following faculty members made presentations: Laura Browder, Marcel Cornis-Pope, and Nick Frankel. During the fall (2007) and spring (2008) the following faculty members are scheduled for presentations: Josh Eckhardt, Susann Cokal, Gretchen Soderlund, Les Harrison, Winnie Chan, and Gary Sange.   We meet from 3-4:30 PM, and there will be refreshments.  We will also upload abstracts (and sometimes transcripts of the presentations) to the FIRST FRIDAY website: http://www.firstfriday.vcu.edu
return to top	Previous Presenter Archive:  Friday, 4 April 2008: Les Harrison “Never flitting, still is sitting”: Poe’s Raven and the Problem of Mass Culture Abstract: In his 1845 essay, “Anastatic Printing,” Edgar Allan Poe looks with hope toward the advent of new communication technologies which would democratize the publishing process, freeing the author from the control of the publisher, allowing him to “arrange his pages to suit himself, and stereotype them instantaneously, as arranged” interspersing “them with his own drawings, or with anything to please his own fancy, in the certainty of being fairly brought before his readers, with all the freshness of his original conception about him.” The liberatory rhetoric is, no doubt, familiar to scholars of the World Wide Web and the assorted “new medias” of the past fifteen years.  Yet while the web and its allied medias have worked to bring an abundance of Poe “pages” before a wide variety of readers, the quality of “freshness,” of “original conception,” remains elusive.  On the one hand, the “popular” Poe pages continue to present gothic and macabre images of the author: Poe as the American Byron.  On the other hand, more “scholarly” sites, and, in particular, the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, while more sensitive to the multivocal properties of Poe’s authorial voice, subsume this multivocality beneath a valorizing rhetoric dedicated to “celebrating” the author’s achievement.  In both cases, the visitor to the site is denied an “original” or “fresh” relationship to Poe insofar as their experience of the author and his works is mediated by these competing conceptions of Edgar Allan Poe. Focusing on the widely-reprinted and frequently-illustrated poem “The Raven,” this paper will examine Poe’s deep ambivalence towards the visual technologies characteristic of an emerging mass culture over the course of the nineteenth century.  While Poe’s critical writings emphasize an aesthetics centered around the poetic creation of “supernal” beauty and “indistinctness,” his most successful poems and tales repeatedly offer their readers spectacular images—the “stately Raven,” enshrouded figure of Madeline of Usher—in order to compete for the attention of a readership newly awash in the proliferating images of an increasingly visual culture.  Friday, 1 February 2008: Winnie Chan “Sarah Josepha Hale and the Proto-Post-Colonial Rhetoric of the Thanksgiving Menu” Abstract: In the October 1857 number of Godey’s Lady's Book, editor Sarah Josepha Hale augured that “[t]he Day of Thanksgiving would . . . soon be celebrated in every part of the world where an American family was settled.” The exuberance of her editorial belies the fact that Hale had been making the same appeal for months, and would continue to do so from her “Editor’s Table” until October, 1863, when President Lincoln, attempting to hold together a nation torn by Civil War, would make his famous Thanksgiving Declaration. In fact, Hale had been advocating a day of thanksgiving for a glorious “Yankee nation,” united North and South, since before 1827, as editor of several increasingly influential ladies’ magazines. Moreover, in her cookbooks and, perhaps most fundamentally, in her first novel, Northwood (1827), she would set down the now-familiar menu, described in strikingly militaristic terms. A stalwart abundance of American meat, for instance, serves “as a bastion to defend innumerable bowls of gravy.” As for the holiday occasioning such dazzling gluttony, it, “like the Fourth of July,” is a “national festival” to be “observed by all people.” This presentation interrogates the Thanksgiving menu as the unstable, edible reification of a nationalist rhetoric, which self-consciously promoted (and revised to include distinctly British foods) the first “fusion” meal between the pilgrims and the Wampanoag as the first post-colonial cuisine. However fictional, the now-familiar Thanksgiving foods stabilized an imagined community, the shared spectacle of their common, private consumption solidifying a society in violent transition. As patriarchal and racist as it is patriotic, Hale's nationalization of this regional feast constitutes an unlikely, early manifestation of what Salman Rushdie famously declared “the Empire writ[ing] back.” Friday, 7 December 2007: Gretchen Souderland “Journalist or Panderer? Investigating and Framing Underage Web Cam Sites” Abstract: If the television brought images of the outside world into the home, web camera technology potentially inverts this trend by transmitting activities in the home to outside viewers.  Over the last two years, there have been a number of high-profile cases of teenagers utilizing their home computers, web cameras, and other web-based commercial establishments like PayPal to establish and conduct their own home-based interactive Internet pornography businesses. This presentation will consider recent journalistic and public policy discourses surrounding these sites–often run surreptitiously out of minors’ rooms–especially the uneasy representation of teens as simultaneously stars, victims, producers, perpetrators, and entrepreneurs. I argue that what is being produced is not only a classic narrative of underage victims and adult perpetrators but also a new set of complex social and legal relationships enabled by and embedded within these new technologies.  Friday, 2 November 2007: Susann Cokal “Turning Cold Hard Facts into Technicolor Lies” Abstract: A discussion of some of my research—into, among other things, miracles, Mormons, wet-nursing, medieval sculpture, Victorian painting, frontier prostitutes, the technology of the greenhouse, Munchausen by Proxy, tuberculosis, sixteenth-century gynecology, and the history of the needle—that has led to two books, Mirabilis (2001)and Breath and Bones (2005), and The Kingdom of Little Wounds, a novel-in-progress set in Renaissance Scandinavia. Friday, 5 October 2007: Joshua Eckhardt “Manuscript Verse Collectors and the Politics of Anti-Courtly Love Poetry” Abstract: The early modern collectors of John Donne’s manuscript verse accomplished much more than scholars have recognized. Manuscript experts and editors have shown that these collectors made Donne the most popular poet in the manuscripts of the period, and in several cases recorded more authoritative texts than did printers and publishers. Yet, by focusing exclusively on Donne’s poems, editors in particular have taken them out of their immediate contexts in manuscript books, most of which feature great numbers of other poets’ works as well. In their poetry anthologies, or miscellanies, manuscript verse collectors regularly opposed Donne’s most popular and sexually explicit poems, such as “To his Mistress going to bed,” to courtly love lyrics, like those that Sir Walter Ralegh purportedly wrote for Elizabeth I. In so doing, collectors effectively consolidated the hitherto unrecognized poetic genre of anti-courtly love poetry. Employing methods that distinguish them from better-known literary agents (such as authors, stationers, and even readers), manuscript verse collectors came to exhibit this overlooked genre as both the aesthetic and the ideological antithesis to the Petrarchan lyrics that Ralegh and others had associated with the late Elizabethan court. Friday, 2 February 2007: Laura Browder “If This Is Tuesday, it Must be Montgomery:  or, Adventures in Documentary Film Making” Abstract: In the early 1970s, the Klansman and former Wallace speechwriter Asa Carter reinvented himself as the Cherokee author Forrest Carter--and wrote a bestselling “memoir” about his childhood.  I’ll be showing the twenty-minute promo of Gone to Texas: The Lives of Forrest Carter, a documentary based in part on my book Slippery Characters, and talking about my work as a writer and co-producer of the film. Laura Browder's talk was recorded and subsequently published in the spring 2007 issue of Blackbird: on online journal of literature and the arts Friday, 2 March 2007:  Marcel Cornis Pope “Interplaying National and Transnational Perspectives in post-1989 Literary History” Abstract: The break-up of the bipolar world system in 1989 has removed the traditional ideological polarizations between East and West, “first” and second” world, but has to some extent replaced them with nationalistic and ethnocentric perspectives that promote new cultural divisions. Under these circumstances, the input of a mediating consciousness is needed now more than ever. By comparing, translating and interfacing cultures, this type of consciousness can help us rediscover that middle ground between Eastern and Western, dominant and peripheral that we have neglected because of our polarized worldviews.  Post-1989 comparative literary history can help us reconstruct that middle ground of intercultural coexistence, emphasizing “transference,” “translation,” and “cultural contact.” The multifaceted landscape of East Central Europe, punctuated by multicultural and minority discourses, is an especially fertile ground for a transnational literary history that, while not neglecting the points of conflict, will foreground the conjunctions and crossings between cultures. I test these claims on examples taken from the History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, a multi-volume work I am currently co-editing with John Neubauer. Friday, 6 April 2007: Nick Frankel “The Designer’s Eye: Ornament and Poetry in the mid-Victorian Period” Abstract: This will be a presentation about the relation between graphic design and poetry in a specific text—John Murray’s 1841 edition of J. G. Lockhart’s “Ancient Spanish Ballads,” as the epitome of a certain kind of ornamented literary text that was especially popular at the beginning of Victoria’s reign. I shall begin by generalizing about early Victorian fascination with a Romanticized Orient (which, for the Victorians, included Southern Spain) as well as the penchant for gorgeously illustrated “picturesque” books that accompanied early Victorian developments in graphic reproduction. But essentially I shall be reflecting on the interdependency of design and text in this edition—and by impliciation, on what the Victorians have to teach us about the interpendency of mind, eye and the reading “senses.”