UW-L English Studies Blog

Meshing academic, business worlds gives students a preview of future career possibilities

Celia Groff and Kaitlindh Moubry remember age 22 well. Armed with degrees in English literature and classical humanities, respectively, they didn’t know the extent of their career possibilities.

The two came to a UW-La Crosse technical writing class to share the future they found in the not-so-familiar field of technical writing. Both work at Epic, a Verona-based company that develops and installs health care software. The company has grown significantly in the last 12 years and now employs nearly 120 technical writers.

“Being able to write well is not a common skill these days,” notes Groff. “We wanted to let students know Epic is a potential career path because we want to attract good colleagues.”

Epic employees visited English Professor Marie Moeller’s technical writing class twice during spring semester. They focused on project management, effective communication and the importance of working with and connecting to clients.

Full Story: http://news.uwlax.edu/writing-for-work/

"The Quest for Knightly Identity: Knight-Errant or Knight-Domestic?" - March 8th, 2:30-3:30, Wimberly 113

A Presentation of the English Department's William J. and Yvonne Hyde Colloquium Series.

Dr. Rebekah Fowler, English Department faculty member, will continue the English Department’s 2012-2013 William J. and Yvonne Hyde Colloquium Series with a presentation entitled "The Quest for Knightly Identity: Knight-Errant or Knight-Domestic?"  Medieval romances are rife with tales of knight errantry, but what happens when a knight wishes to replace a life of adventure and tournaments with one of domestic stability and defense of home and family? In this presentation, Dr. Fowler will examine how Chrétien de Troyes’ Yvain, ou le Chevalier au Lion represents the emergence of the "domestic knight" as an alternative knightly identity to the more common romance ideal of the knight errant. In particular, she will consider the social construction of masculine identity and the quest for suitable social (and individual?) roles. The presentation runs from 2:30-3:30 p.m. on Friday, March8^th, in 113 Wimberly Hall. The event is free and open to the public. To arrange for disability accommodations, contact english@uwlax.edu or call 785-8295.

“The Battle Without Killing: Eliza Haywood and the Politics of Attempted Rape” - December 7th, 2:30-3:30, Wimberly 113

A Presentation of the English Department's William J. and Yvonne Hyde Colloquium Series. 

Dr. Kate Parker, English Department faculty member, will continue the English Department’s 2012-2013 William J. and Yvonne Hyde Colloquium Series with a presentation entitled “The Battle Without Killing: Eliza Haywood and the Politics of Attempted Rape.”  This presentation brings eighteenth-century poetry into conversation with the burgeoning domestic novel through a case study of Haywood’s The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751) and its mock-heroic depictions of attempted rape.  Dr. Parker contends that, through Haywood’s parodic and often disturbingly comic representations of sexual violence, she both instantiates and resists a mock-heroic model of rape (elsewhere exemplified by poems like Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock) that trivializes both the female experience of desire and the social dynamics of courtship in eighteenth-century fiction. The presentation runs from 2:30-3:30 p.m. on Friday, December7^th, in 113 Wimberly Hall. The event is free and open to the public. To arrange for disability accommodations, contact english@uwlax.edu or call 785-8295.

"'Milk for the pussens': Animality in James Joyce's Ulysses" -- November 16th, 2:30-3:30, Wimberly 113

A Presentation of the English Department's William J. and Yvonne Hyde Colloquium Series. 

Dr. Adam Putz, IAS faculty in English, will continue the English Department's 2012-2013 William J. and Yvonne Hyde Colloquium Series with a presentation entitled "'Milk for the pussens': Animality in James Joyce's Ulysses." Dr. Putz will present findings from his research trip to Trinity College, Dublin, which was supported over the summer by the National Endowment for the Humanities and UWL's International Development Fund. His archival work at TCD focused on the Royal Zoological Society in order to reconnect the configurations of animality in Ulysses to representations of poverty that begin but do not end with Bloom and his cat. Therefore, this paper interrogates Joyce's investment in the larger project of not only blurring the boundaries between the city's built and natural environments, but also between its human and nonhuman inhabitants. The presentation runs from 2:30-3:30 p.m. on Friday, November 16^th, in 113 Wimberly Hall. The event is free and open to the public. To arrange for disability accommodations, contact english@uwlax.edu or call 785-8295.

 

"Disgust before Disgust: Repulsion in Renaissance Literature" -- October 12th, 2:30-3:30, Wimberly 113

A Presentation of the English Department's William J. and Yvonne Hyde Colloquium Series.

Dr. Natalie Eschenbaum, English Department faculty member, will continue the English Department's 2012-2013 William J. and Yvonne Hyde Colloquium Series with a presentation entitled "Disgust before Disgust: Repulsion in Renaissance Literature." The word "disgust" did not enter the English language until 1598. In this presentation, Dr. Eschenbaum will consider how literary texts expressed the powerful emotion of aversion as this new word was coming into being.  She will address such questions as:  How and why did early modern English individuals experience revulsion, and how and why did they express this revulsion in poetry, plays, and prose?  What does it mean for literature to instruct, to delight, and to disgust?  The presentation runs from 2:30-3:30 p.m. on Friday, October 12^th, in 113 Wimberly Hall. The event is free and open to the public. To arrange for disability accommodations, contact english@uwlax.edu or call 785-8295. 

"The Bipolar Expedition: next to normal and Its Abnormal Path to the Pulitzer Prize" - September 21st, 2:30-3:30, Wimberly 113

A Presentation of the English Department's William J. and Yvonne Hyde Colloquium Series. 

Dr. Gary Konas, English Department faculty member, will initiate the English Department's 2012-2013 William J. and Yvonne Hyde Colloquium Series with a presentation entitled "The Bipolar Expedition: next to normal and Its Abnormal Path to the Pulitzer Prize." The colloquium will showcase next to normal, a relatively small, low-budget Broadway musical centered around a housewife with a mental disorder, which seemed a most unlikely candidate to win the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Dr. Konas will discuss the show's score, the issues raised, its creators, and its innovative marketing to understand how next to normal became a hit, touching audience members deeply and winning America's highest literary prize. The presentation runs from 2:30-3:30 p.m. on Friday, September 21^th, in 113 Wimberly Hall. The event is free and open to the public. To arrange for disability accommodations, contact english@uwlax.edu or call 785-8295.

"Enthymeme as Diagrammatic: A Confucian Reading of Aristotle's Rhetoric" - May 4th, 2:30-3:30, Wimberly 113

A Presentation of the English Department's William J. and Yvonne Hyde Colloquium Series.

Dr. Haixia Lan, English Department faculty member, will conclude the 2011-2012 William J. and Yvonne Hyde English Department Colloquium Series with a presentation entitled "Enthymeme as Diagrammatic: A Confucian Reading of Aristotle's Rhetoric." Her talk will focus on Confucius' rhetorical thinking based on an interpretation of Aristotle's rhetoric-as-enthymematic. Dr. Lan will discuss three characteristics of this enthymematic or rhetorical thinking: empathetic, appropriate, and heuristic; in Greek epieikeia, kairos, and topoi; and in Chinese ren (仁), yi (義), and li (禮). She will address the idea that rhetorical activities are processes through which people use public forums to deliberate about matters that are of consequence to the community for the purpose of inventing probable knowledge, forming probable judgments, and making probable decisions. Dr. Lan proposes that understanding Confucius' rhetoric this way can shed light on both similarities and differences between the thinking behind the discursive practices—written and oral—we try to teach Chinese students and the discursive practices with which they are familiar. The presentation runs from 2:30-3:30 p.m. on Friday, May 4th, in 113 Wimberly Hall. The event is free and open to the public. To arrange for disability accommodations, contact english@uwlax.edu or call 785-8295.

 

"Why the Humanities?" a free lecture by Frederick Luis Aldama -- April 26, 5:00 Reception, 5:30 Lecture, 122 Wimberly

 

"Why the Humanities?" a free lecture by Frederick Luis Aldama

Thursday, April 26, 2012
122 Carl Wimberly Hall
5pm reception; 5:30pm lecture

Frederick Luis Aldama is the Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of English and Director of the Latino Studies Program and Latino & Latin American Studies Space for Enrichment and Research at the Ohio State University.

Professor Aldama is editor of five collections of essays and author of seven books, including Postethnic Narrative Criticism, Brown on Brown, Dancing With Ghosts: A Critical Biography of Arturo Islas, Why the Humanities Matter: A Common Sense Approach, Your Brain on Latino Comics: From Gus Arriola to Los Bros Hernandez and A User's Guide to Postcolonial and Latino Borderland Fiction. He has published numerous articles, co-edits the series "Cognitive Approaches to Literature and Culture" (U Texas Press), and sits on the board for the Americas book series (Texas Tech University Press).

Download Chapter 7 of Aldama's Why the Humanities Matter

Download Chapter 13 of Aldama's Why the Humanities Matter

“Perfect example of a country queen”: Gay American English in the American South -- April 20, 2:30-3:30, Wimberly 113

A Presentation of the English Department's William J. and Yvonne Hyde Colloquium Series. 

Dr. Stephen L. Mann, English Department faculty member, will continue the English Department's 2011-2012 William J. and Yvonne Hyde Colloquium Series with a presentation entitled "'Perfect example of a country queen': Gay American English in the American South." Dr. Mann's presentation will focus on the relationship between "sounding gay" and "sounding southern." Findings suggest that listeners who perceive a gay male speaker to be southern may find it more difficult to correctly identify his sexual orientation. However, this difficulty does not lead to a complete incompatibility between sounding southern and sounding gay, a statement which Dr. Mann will support and explain by focusing on two gay male speakers, both consistently perceived as southern, but only one consistently identified as gay. The presentation runs from 2:30-3:30 p.m. on Friday, April 20^th, in 113 Wimberly Hall. The event is free and open to the public. To arrange for disability accommodations, contact english@uwlax.edu or call 785-8295. 

 

English Department Members in the new CLS Newsletter!

Clink on the image to read the first issue of Capstone, the new College of Liberal Studies Newsletter. It includes interviews with English Department members Dr. Virginia Crank, Dr. Kimberly DeFazio, and Dr. Rob Wilkie on their recent research and publications, as well as a story about Dr. Natalie Eschenbaum's "study abroad" week in London with her English Literature class.