Brava!

This past Saturday night I had the pleasure of seeing fellow STJEnglish blogger Tara Bradway's production of The Tempest.

Tara's Adirondack Shakespeare Company (she is the director) put on The Tempest "In the Raw." The concept is to use as little props and scenery as possible so the actors and the audience are intimately engaged with the text and the performance. When I got to the performance space in the D'Angelo center I didn't know what to expect. The lighting was very bright and I could see all of the actors in varying stages of preparation for the performance. As an avid theater goer and community theater actor I was taken aback as an audience member being privy to what I had always considered the behind the scenes magic where actors are running lines or figuring blocking or taking deep gulp breaths to calm nerves. As the time came closer for the show to begin actors were dressing and getting into place. Why were we witnessing this? I kept wondering. I had been used to seeing actors coming from behind the curtain or entering stage left or right. I wondered if this watching the actors prep would ruin my ability to lose myself in the show.

And then the performance began. 

The transformation was immediate and I soon forgot that I was sitting in a conference room in D'Angelo hall. I was immediately transported to the island with Prospero and Ariel. I was soothed by the sounds of the ocean and I was horrified by and for Caliban and I was laughing out loud at Stephano and Trinculo. And you know what that meant? I was in the text.

After studying The Tempest for a semester in Dr. Steve Mentz's Intro to the Profession I had grown to know this play intimately.  The performance brought the play to life and it occurred to me that seeing the actors prepare, and get into position, and the tons of other stuff they were doing was part of drawing me into the theater experience. It became a collective experience. I began to look forward to seeing the changes as several of the actors fulfilled more than one part. To watch them go from character to character as an actor was admirable.

I was sorry I had missed Titus Andronicus the night before. Having seen The Tempest, I now look forward to seeing it this Saturday on our Manhattan campus.

So Brava, Tara and the Adirondack Shakespeare Company. Thank you for allowing me to "suspend my disbelief" and mean it.

Don't miss this weekend's performances:

Manhattan Campus - Saval Auditorium

Friday, February 25 - Titus Andronicus

Saturday, February 26 - The Tempest

All shows are at 7:30 p.m. Admission is FREE with St. John's ID. 

Where Art Belongs

 An interesting event recommended by Dr. Ganter:

CHRIS KRAUS

Where Art Belongs: You Are Invited to be the Last Tiny Creature

Thursday Feb 24

6:30pm

James Gallery, CUNY Graduate Center

365 5th Ave (34th/35th Streets)

FREE and open to the public.

Join Chris Kraus for an examination of artistic enterprises of the past decade that reclaim the use of lived time as a material in the creation of visual art. Her new work, Where Art Belongs, expands the contention she raised in Video Green that "the art world is interesting only in so far as it reflects the larger world outside it." Exploring the uses of boredom, poetry, privatized prisons, corporate philanthropy, vertically integrated manufacturing and discarded utopias, Kraus points to the surprising persistence of micro-cultures within the matrix.

Kraus is the author of I Love Dick, Aliens & Anorexia, Torpor, Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness and the forthcoming novel Summer of Hate. A co-editor of semiotext(e), she's also the recipient of the 2008 Frank Jewett Mather award in art criticism.

No reservations. Arrive early for a seat.

212.817.2005

Co-sponsored by the English Department, the Center for the Study of Women and Society, and the GC Poetics Group

http://www.centerforthehumanitiesgc.org/events

Summer NEH Institute at the Folger Library in DC

The deadline for applying to the summer NEH Institute to be held at the Folger from June 13 - July 14 is March 1. It's a great line-up of faculty at the best place in the US for Shakespeare and early modern studies. Also note that, even though it says it's for "College and University Teachers," grad students are eligable. The NEH pays for your travel & housing expenses.

More below

The Charles Johnson Student Fiction Award

The Charles Johnson Student Fiction Award from Southern Illinois University Carbondale is an annual award competition intended to encourage increased artistic and intellectual growth among students, as well as reward excellence and diversity in creative writing. Each year, $1000 and a signed copy of a Charles Johnson book will be awarded to the winner. The winning entry will also be published in the Winter/Spring issue of CRAB ORCHARD REVIEW. The award is co-sponsored by Charles Johnson, CRAB ORCHARD REVIEW, and the SIUC Department of English and College of Liberal Arts.

The award competition is open to all undergraduate and graduate students who are U.S. citizens or permanent residents currently enrolled full- or part-time in a U.S. college or university. There is no entry fee. Entrants may only submit one story. All entries will be screened by published and accomplished writers and editors. The award winner will be selected by Charles Johnson. Finalists must meet all contest guidelines and be able to verify their status as students. (Evidence of current enrollment: a xeroxed copy of a grade transcript, a class schedule or receipt of payment of tuition showing your full- or part-time status for the Spring 2011 semester. The name of the institution and its address must be clear. Please indicate the name of the department of your major field of study.)

Dirt!

We are seeking contribution from all disciplines to an American Studies essay collection on DIRT.

Dirt is among the most material but also the most metaphorical and expressive of substances.  This collection hopes to bring together essays that explore how people imagine, define, and employ the various concepts and realities of dirt.  What does it mean to call something dirty?  How do we understand dirt and its supposed opposite, cleanliness?  How do we explain the points at which we draw the line between clean and dirty, what we embrace and what we refuse to touch? Drawing on multiple disciplines we hope to uncover and foreground the (often unconscious) centrality of the metaphors and actualities of dirt to U.S. cultures, values, and lived experiences.

Possible formulations of this keyword include (but are not limited to):
   * Dirty words
   * Dirty pictures and dirty minds
   * Dirt and disorder
   * Hygiene
   * Trash
   * Dirt and art
   * Waste, human and otherwise
   * Excess and excrescences
   * Germophobia
   * Fear of impurity
   * Chthonic dirt
   * Sanitation
   * Urban construction and destruction
   * Getting the dirt: gossip, revelation, exposure
   * Filthy lucre
   * Washing one’s hands
   * Animals and animality
   * Dirty jokes
   * Dirty politicians
   * Corruption and scandal
   * Ecology/sustainability
   * Dirt collectors (hoarders, Collyers syndrome, cat ladies)
   * Getting down in the dirt (reality shows, mud wrestling, spectacle)
   * Landfills and parks design
   * Disgust, repulsion, nausea
   * “Dirty immigrants” and other epithets

   * Sustainable dirt

Please send abstracts  and cvs to Patricia Yaeger at  pyaeger@umich.edu and Hildegard Hoeller at hilhllr@aol.com by April 30th, 2011.   Essays should be 9000 words and will be due December 15, 2011.

Hildegard Hoeller

Professor of English

CUNY-CSI and the Graduate Center

It's Shakespeare ... IN THE RAW.

And now for my own shameless self-promotion ... 

Last semester I took Introduction to the Profession with Dr. Mentz. For my semester-long project touching on The Tempest, our keystone text for the course, I decided to produce The Tempest along with Titus Andronicus. I was (and am) really interested in thinking about how Shakespeare's revenge play mutates into a play like The Tempest. So I'm conveniently using connections from my own theatre company (Adirondack Shakespeare Company) to do this!

I have gathered a cast of thirteen professional actors who will appear in both productions on back-to-back nights with only thirteen hours of rehearsal for each show. ADK Shakes produces "raw" shows with minimal rehearsals, minimal props, costumes, and sets. By stripping away everything extraneous, we're trying to get down to the essentials of theatre -- the audience, the actors, and the words. Our approach is completely text-based, so I am incredibly excited to pair this with my coursework in the D.A. program. My final paper for the class was on why I chose to double the roles of Caliban in Tempest and Lavinia in Titus, which will be played by the same actress. (I am doubly excited to announce that a revised version of this paper will be published in a journal called Cahiers later this year!)

So! Here are all the relevant details for the shows. (If anyone would like postcards to pass out in your classes, just leave a comment or shoot me an email at tara.bradway10@stjohns.edu. I can drop them in your mailbox this week.)

Queens Campus - D'Angelo Center, 4th Floor, Rm 416 C

Friday, February 18 - Titus Andronicus

Saturday, February 19 - The Tempest

Manhattan Campus - Saval Auditorium

Friday, February 25 - Titus Andronicus

Saturday, February 26 - The Tempest

All shows are at 7:30 p.m. Admission is FREE with St. John's ID. More info on our website: click here.

The Bookfish -- A Top Humanities Resource

We have some exciting news to share on behalf of English Department Faculty Member & Fellow Blogger Dr. Steve Mentz! Perhaps you have noticed Dr. Mentz's blog on our own blog roll (check out the right-hand column). You weren't the only one.

Dr. Mentz's Blue Humanities Blog has been chosen by Online Ed Database as one of their 50 Best Blogs for Humanities Scholars. You can check out their featured list here.

Congrats, Dr. Mentz!

If you have other exciting news that you would like to share on the blog, don't hesitate to contact us.

Symposium on Love: Feb 14th

In his remarks in Tucson after the terrible tragedy there, President Obama said, “In the fleeting time we have on this earth, what matters is not wealth, or status, or power, or fame – but rather, how well we have loved.”

Please join us on Valentine’s Day for an interdisciplinary symposium on love presented by seven distinguished St. John’s College scholars.

Symposium Participants:

Dr. Raymond DiGiuseppe, Psychology, “The Evolution of Love”
Rev. Robert Lauder, Philosophy, “Love: The Godly in Existence”
Dr. Kathleen Lubey, English, “Bad Romance: Love, Sex, and Marriage in Eighteenth-Century Britain”
Dr. Sharon Marshall, Institute for Core Studies/English Composition, “Don’t You Just Love It? Teaching and Learning as a Practice of Love”
Dr. Heidi Upton, Institute for Core Studies/Discover New York, “Love and the Musical Imagination: The Home Note”
Dr. Lara Vapnek, History, “Mother’s Love and Mother’s Care: Wet-Nurses and Their Infants”
Dr. Christopher Vogt, Theology and Religious Studies, “More than ‘Saying Yes to the Dress’: A Catholic Perspective on Married Love”

Monday, February 14, 2011
4:00-5:30 pm
D’Angelo Center 416 A&B
A reception will follow

Upcoming Lecture...

The Colloquium Series of the SJC Department of English and the Interdisciplinary Program in American Studies present a lecture by 

Dr. Rachel Adams

"Reading for Ability: Disability Studies, Aesthetics, and the Art of Judith Scott."

Thursday, February 17th @ 4:00 P.M. 

Writing Institute

St. Augustine Hall Room 150

Rachel Adams is Professor of English and American Studies at Columbia University. She is the author of Continental Divides: Remapping the Cultures of North America (University of Chicago Press, 2009) and Sideshow U.S.A: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination. Her two areas of interest are transnational American literature and culture, and Disability studies. Her talk comes from a new research project on intellectual disability and the arts.

For more information please contact Dr. Robert Fanuzzi, fanuzzir@stjohns.edu.

TOMORROW: Dishing Gender

I just heard about this event coming to campus tomorrow, Tuesday, February 8 from noon to 1:00 p.m. The event will be held in the IWS (Writing Center) conference room. Don't forget to sign in at the front desk! Here's some more detailed info about the event:

Please join us to talk with Aliena Shoemaker, manga author and St. John's graduate.

 

Aliena writes graphic novels with her creative partner Chloe Chan, travels to speak at convention panels, and designs e-book covers for authors like Jean Sasson.

 

Aliena is currently writing the comic Two Keys, which is published monthly on the MangaMagazine website. The first trade paper back volume will be available in April from MangaMagazine. Her previous comic titles that were self-published sold nearly four thousand copies and have been translated into three languages on the internet.

 

Lunch will be served.

 

For more information contact Jennifer Travis: travisj@stjohns.edu

If you're interested in Medieval Studies ...

I would like to recommend a blog that I have been following for awhile, called In the Middle. It's a group blog run through George Washington University's Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute.

They have some really interesting events coming up this semester in Washington, DC (and in Kalamazoo, MI) and I wanted to share in case anyone is interested in taking a train to DC to check one of these out. Possibly anyone taking Dr. Rice's Medieval Romances class this semester ... ?

Here is the short list of DC events and a link to the full blog post on events for this spring. Leave a comment here if you're interested in a day-trip!

On February 11 Maghan Keita will join us for a conversation on two precirculated essays that examine medieval and early modern race. Keita is a historian of contemporary Africa who has been conducting recent research in a much earlier time period. I blogged about one of his journal essays (on the African presence in Malory) some time back.

On Thursday 2/24 at 4 PM, we will have a book launch celebration for Gil Harris (George Washington University) and Madhavi Menon (American University). Gil's excellent book Shakespeare and Literary Theory was recently published by Oxford, and Madhavi's fabulous edited collection Shakesqueer (containing pieces by many scholars familiar to ITM readers) was just released by Duke. The celebration takes place in the English Department seminar room, Academic Center 771 (801 22nd St NW).


March 11 and 12 is our paradigm altering and cataclysmic conference Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects in the Early Modern and Medieval Periods. Registration is limited to 50 and does require a fee to offset room rentals and catering. Most of the Friday events, including Jane Bennett's plenary, are free and welcome all who wish to attend; no registration necessary for those.


Friday April 1 at 9 AM is a breakfast seminar with Suzanne Miller, who this year joined the history department of the George Washington University. Her essay "Christiano non dicam rectore sed fidei perversore: Episcopal Resistance to Outside Rule in the North Adriatic and in Europe, c. 1100-1350" will be pre-circulated two weeks in advance.