A reprint of an announcement of interest.

Romantic Circles is very pleased to announce a new audio resource, a recording of the panel discussion about the new Jane Campion film Bright Star, which can be downloaded here:

http://www.rc.umd.edu/audio/BrightStar.mp3

or recieved as part of the (free) subscription to the RC Audio podcast by pasting the link below into the podcast aggregator of your choice (iTunes, etc.)

http://www.rc.umd.edu/audio/audio.xml

More information is below:

On 13 September 2009, the Keats-Shelley Association of America hosted a special advance screening of Jane Campion’s new film Bright Star, about the love between John Keats and Fanny Brawne, at the New York Public Library. Following the screening was a special panel of reactions to the movie, featuring Stuart Curran (distinguished professor Emeritus of the University of Pennsylvania and president of the KSAA), Christopher Ricks (William M. and Sara B. Warren Professor of the Humanities and Co-Director of the Editorial Institute, Boston University), Timothy Corrigan (professor of English and Director of Cinema Studies, University of Pennsylvania) and Susan Wolfson (Professor of English, Princeton University).

Special thanks are due to to several people who helped to facilitate this screening/panel and its recording: Marsha Manns (Director, Keats-Shelley Association of America), Oleg Dubson (Apparition, the film’s distributor), Doucet Devin Fischer (Co-editor, Shelley and his Circle) Cheryl Raymond (Manager, Programs, Special Events, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts), Mike Diekmann (Manager of Audio Visual Services New York Public Library for the Performing Arts), Sarah Zimmerman (Associate Professor of English, Fordham University), John Bugg (Assistant Professor of English, Fordham University), Zachary Holbrook (Research Associate, Shelley and his Circle), and Elizabeth Denlinger (Curator, Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, New York Public Library).

Mike Quilligan
———————
Site Manager, Romantic Circles
www.rc.umd.edu

A reprint of  an advertisement of interest.

Gallatin School, New York University
March 4–6, 2010

New York University’s Gallatin School will host a conference, co-sponsored by the Poetry Society of America, on March 4, 5, and 6, 2010, on the work of Wallace Stevens. Stevens’ poetry will be at the center of the conference, and speakers include some of Stevens’ most distinguished readers—scholars and poets alike. Presentations will consider Stevens’ early work in New York in relation to the temper of the times, but also how his continuous relationship to the city might have helped to shape his later poetry. Those interested in attending or in receiving more information should contact

Lisa Goldfarb
lisa.goldfarb@nyu.edu

or

Nicole Derise
nicole.derise@nyu.edu

The Fall issue of Literary Matters: The Newsletter of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics (Volume 2, Number 3) has been released. It features Clare Cavanagh’s President’s Column, “The Company of Readers”; Leslie Harkema’s From The Editor, “One ‘Why’ for the ‘W’: Fighting Graduate Malaise”; and a sneak peek at the 15th Annual Conference.

To read the issue, click here.

The Summer issue of Literary Matters: The Newsletter of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics (Volume 2, Number 2) has been released. It features Clare Cavanagh’s President’s Column on “Rereading Nafisi in Evanston”; Brian J. Buchanan’s “A Response to Wordsworth’s ‘Bleak Season’ lyric”; and profiles of a prominent donor, our incoming vice-president, and our outgoing secretary-treasurer.

To read the issue, click here.

The National Endowment for the Humanities supports undergraduate course development through:

• Enduring Questions Course Grants (new courses)
• Teaching Development Fellowships (existing courses)

Enduring Questions Course Grants (up to $25,000)
What is the good life?  What is beauty?  What is friendship?  What is the relationship between humans and the natural world?  Enduring questions such as these have long held interest to college students and allow for a special, intense dialogue across generations.

The National Endowment for the Humanities will award Enduring Questions course grants, which support a college faculty member from any discipline with up to $25,000 to develop a new humanities course at the undergraduate level on a question of enduring significance, to be taught at the sponsoring institution at least twice during the grant period. The application deadline is September 15, 2009. For more information and instructions, please see the grant guidelines at http://www.neh.gov/grants/guidelines/EnduringQuestions.html

Teaching Development Fellowships (up to $21,000)
The National Endowment for the Humanities will award Teaching Development Fellowships to support college and university teachers pursuing research aimed specifically at improving an existing undergraduate course that the applicant has taught already in three different terms and will continue to teach. The research undertaken as a part of the project may involve engaging with fundamental texts or sources, exploring related subjects or academic disciplines, or cultivating neglected areas of learning. Research in any area of the humanities is welcome.

Teaching Development Fellowships cover periods from three to five months and carry stipends of $4,200 per month. Thus, the maximum stipend is $21,000 for a five-month award period. The application deadline is October 1, 2009. For more information and instructions, please see the grant guidelines at http://www.neh.gov/grants/guidelines/TD_Fellowships.html.

Congratulations are in order to ALSC member Bruce Gans, who has been awarded a $15,000 Enduring Questions grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Enduring Questions grant seeks to encourage both faculty and undergraduates to “grapple with the most fundamental concerns of the humanities.” Gans’ award was given in recognition of his proposed course on the Enduring Question “What is Freedom?” which will draw most of its material from amongst the Encyclopedia Britannica’s list of Great Books. Gans has been working for many years to integrate Great Books curricula into community colleges, and the NEH’s recognition of the viability of Gans’ methodology is encouraging to all Great Books advocates.

-Thom Plasse

The 2009 Lesley University Writers’ Conference runs from Sunday, July 29 through Friday, July 31 on Lesley’s campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Faculty includes Afaa Michael Weaver and Steven Cramer (Poetry), David Elliot (Children’s Book Writing), Marcie Hershman (Nonfiction), and Rachel Kadish and Michael Lowenthal (Fiction). The guest authors this year are Julia Glass, M.T. Anderson, and Gail Mazur.

For detailed information, visit www.lesley.edu/info/luwc.

The ALSC’s most recent issue of Forum, “The Latest Illiteracy,” has garnered a mention in Mark Bauerlein’s blog on The Chronicle of Higher Education Website. In his piece, Bauerlein assesses the latest debate over William Strunk Jr. & E.B. White’s The Elements of Style, coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of its release. His focal point is the dialog between Geoffrey K. Pullum and Andrew Ferguson regarding EOS’s legitimacy as a pedagogical text. The findings presented in Forum are cited as further confirmation that a decline in the quality of the English language is a very real phenomenon, one that Elements of Style has for a half-century acted against as a minor but dependable force.

The ALSC is exceptionally well-represented in this week’s issue of The New Republic (July 1, 2009).  Please turn to page 51 to read Literary Imagination editor Peter Campion’s poem “Gile Mountain,” and flip to the following page to read councilor Rosanna Warren’s review of Songbook: The Selected Poems of Umberto Saba.   We congratulate both of our gifted poet-critics for yet another exceptional set of achievements.

Christopher Ricks, our Immediate Past President, has been knighted for “services to Scholarship” as part of the Queen’s Birthday Honours. Others recognized this year include former British poet laureate Andrew Motion.  In responding to this honor “for services to Scholarship,” Christopher Ricks, with characteristic generosity, praises all the services he has received, returning this statement:

“For services to Scholarship.”  Thanks, that is, to all the services that have generously been done to me. By Boston University, to which John Silber and Jon Westling brought me 23 years ago; by Oxford (Balliol College, Worcester College); by Bristol University; by Cambridge (Christ’s College); and by the Institute of English Studies, University of London. By Oxford University Press, Longman, Faber, Penguin, and (soon) Yale University Press. By the Mellon Foundation. By the British Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Tennyson Society, the Housman Society, and the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. By colleagues and friends among whom it would be invidious to select. These have proved to be the indispensable services.

The ALSC warmly congratulates our colleague and friend Sir Christopher on this honor, and itself is honored by his thanks.