UW-L English Studies Blog

"Using Contemplative Pedagogies to Deepen Reading" - Friday, November 19, 2:30-3:45, 3310 Student Union

UWL English Department's William J. and Yvonne Hyde Colloquium Series 2021-2022 presents:

"Using Contemplative Pedagogies to Deepen Reading" by Dr. Rebekah Fowler.

Our students are stressed and pressed for time. Using mindfulness or contemplative pedagogies provides a pause for our students that can also encourage deeper reading when used in the classroom. Contemplative pedagogies are experiential in nature, promoting recognition of how our senses and emotions influence our responses to learning and utilizing silence and reflection to connect more deeply with course content. This colloquium presentation will give participants the opportunity to experience two types of contemplative practices–lectio divina and beholding­–in readings of literary texts. Lectio divina, or "divine reading," uses a four-step monastic/religious reading practice as a fruitful approach to reading a passage of text more deeply, while beholding makes the link between the written word and images, inviting readers to visualize text, find an image that approximates that vision, and then closely examine the image before reflecting on how that image connects to the text.   

Participants will experience two types of contemplative practices: lectino divina and beholding.

ALL UWL INSTRUCTORS WELCOME!

Friday, Nov. 19
2:30-3:45 p.m.
3310 Student Union

"Trans as Risk: Risk Communication in Anti-Transgender Rhetoric" - Friday, December 10, 2:30-3:45, 3310 Union

William J. and Yvonne Hyde Colloquium Series Presents:

"Trans as Risk: Risk Communication in Anti-Transgender Rhetoric" by Dr. Louise Zamparutti

In early 2020, Idaho introduced the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act, banning transgender athletes from participating in sports. Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Florida soon followed with similar bills. This presentation analyzes the rise of anti-trans rhetoric in multiple forms of public discourse. Dr. Louise Zamparutti integrates stasis theory with Kenneth Burke's concept of piety to show how transgender personhood is negated as trans is abstracted into a nonhuman agent and communicated as a risk to cisgender individuals and to a cisgender worldview.

Dr. Zamparutti concludes by proposing Burke’s theory of Perspective by Incongruity and S. Scott Graham's Functional Stasis Theory as launching points for more equitable deliberation that would energize the action of change in language and concept-association, dislodging pieties from their fixed pillars and revealing human potential for transformation.

Friday, December 10, 2021
2:30-3:45pm
3310 Union

Also available on Zoom: https://wisconsin-edu.zoom.us/j/92861028299

The UWL Poetry Club is hosting a reading and discussion with Dr. Lalita Hogan - Wednesday, April 24, 7:00-8:00pm, 3120 Union

The UWL Poetry Club is hosting a reading and discussion with Dr. Lalita Hogan, who will be reading from her book titled A Country Without Borders: Poems and Stories of Kashmir. Attendees are invited to bring a poem about their memories or experiences of "home" to share. Wednesday, April 24th, 7-8 pm, 3120 Union. Further Info: Marissa Davis ([email protected]) or Mya Lonnebotn ([email protected]).

“Robert Pirsig and Wallace Stegner: Crossing to Safety” - Friday, April 19, 2:30-3:30pm, Wimberly 104

Dr. Peter Olson will present “Robert Pirsig and Wallace Stegner: Crossing to Safety” on Friday, April 19 from 2:30-3:30 p.m. in Wimberly 104.

Robert Pirsig, the writer who transformed a startlingly original Chautauqua delving into the metaphysics of quality was also a reformer at the nexus of technology and art; Wallace Stegner, a writer raised on the plains of Saskatchewan, became the founder of Stanford’s creative writing program. Stegner divided his creative energies between didactic environmental writing and imaginative literature. Pirsig sought a reconciliation, perhaps futilely, between Western metaphysics and nominalist psychology. Pirsig’s book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance traces a complex narrative that combines travel journalism, nature writing, rhetorical exhortation, and the implications of an “undifferentiated aesthetic continuum,” through the development of his alter ego Phaedrus. Pirsig’s narrative is a chiasmus, a crossing that witnesses failure and reversal. Stegner explores human relationships that survive by means of trust and empathy even as his perspective remains critical and ironic of human potentialities that appear to be incapable of transcendence. Stegner’s environmental writing attributes human action to the willful harm done to the natural environment. Both authors recognize their own sense of contingency with respect to place—the West—and to American cultural dilemmas precipitated by late capitalism. Both authors attempt to address their contingency through a movement of return, a crossing to safety through their ability to translate their experience into art. Their connections to the landscape and commitments to direct and original seeing ultimately illuminate what Lawrence Buell terms the “environmental imagination.”

“Habits of Mind, Movements in Writing: First-Year Writers as Learners” - Friday, March 29, 2:30-3:30pm, Wimberly 104

First-Year Writing (FYW) touches the lives of nearly every student who attends UWL. Because FYW focuses on high-impact practices and has a lower faculty-to-student ratio than other general education courses at UWL, it is a powerful space where the Habits of Mind from the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing (metacognition, curiosity, creativity, responsibility, flexibility, engagement, persistence, and openness) converge. Not surprisingly then, studies show that a student’s performance in FYW, “even when compared to other courses in the major and other general education courses, is a particularly strong predictor of whether students persist in their education” (Garrett, Bridgewater, Feinstein). The Framework, created by the Council of Writing Program Administrators, The National Council of the Teachers of English, and the National Writing Project, is intended for instructors and administrators—but what about the voices of students? How do students' own perception of or resistance to the Framework measures signal their readiness for writing in the university? Professor Sara Heaser will share the results of a two-year, mixed-methods study of institutional and student-led data; Habits of Mind, Movements in Writing: First-Year Writers as Learners is tailored for anyone who considers or works alongside first-year students at UWL.

For disability accomodations, contact Stephanie Speer at SSpeer(at)uwlax.edu or 785-8577

“‘But Nobody Says So’: On John Ashbery’s Later Prose Poems” -- Friday, February 15, 2:30-3:30pm, Wimberly 104

On Friday, February 15, Dr. Tom Jesse will present “‘But Nobody Says So’: On John Ashbery’s Later Prose Poems” from 2:30-3:30pm in Wimberly 104.

Over the course of a career that began in the mid-1950s, American poet John Ashbery (1927-2017) published 28 collections of poems, won nearly every major award an American poet can win (including 1976’s “Triple Crown”: The Pulitzer Prize, The National Book Award, and The National Book Critics Circle Award), and attracted a large following of critics and scholars who have made his work the subject of countless reviews, monographs, journal articles, and dissertations. Comparatively little has been written, however, about his occasional use of prose forms throughout his lengthy career—and critics have been especially hesitant to engage with the prose poems published after the year 2000 (i.e., Ashbery’s “later period”). This presentation focuses exclusively on these recent prose poems to argue that, far from being an afterthought in the poet’s vast oeuvre, these texts actually represent some of Ashbery’s most innovative and entertaining experiments with language over the past twenty years. As readers and critics begin to assess the complete trajectory of Ashbery’s writing life, they can no longer afford to ignore the poet’s comedic, satiric, and—above all else—playful forays into the world of prose poetry.

“Aristotelian Rhetoric, Humanistic Studies, and the Other” -- Friday, November 16, 2:30-3:30, Wimberly 104.

Dr. Haixia Lan will present “Aristotelian Rhetoric, Humanistic Studies, and the Other” from 2:30-3:30 p.m. on Friday, November 16 in Wimberly 104.

The works of Aristotle (384-322BCE) are often interdisciplinary and sometimes misunderstood, since he inquired into matters metaphysical and physical but we today have rather distinct fields of studies. For example, Aristotle sees the connection between pursuits in the Humanities and in the natural sciences as in, among others, logic, and Aristotelian logic dominated the West for two millennia, so today the name Aristotle has often become synonymous with the label inflexibility. A case in point is his treatise Rhetoric. Neo-Platonic rhetoricians passionately resist the linear “successive generalization” (Berthoff 43b), and the neo-Sophistic rhetoricians credited Aristotle only ever so reluctantly: “as Aristotle himself insisted [as absolute and inflexible as that self was]” (28 emphasis added) that sometimes facts—the signified—needed to be hammered out by the use of signifiers. Yet, most people including many rhetoricians say little to nothing about the enthymeme, the "substance" (Rhetoric 1354a15) of Aristotelian rhetoric, and the complexity of the Greek concept techne translated as both science and art. Certainly, Aristotle is seriously limited in many ways like all thinkers are, but at a time when we emphasize diversity for the purpose of better connecting with each other, we may find Aristotelian rhetoric a way for us in the humanities to connect with the other.

“The Target Shoots First: Selling and Selling Out for the Columbia House Record Club” -- Friday, Oct. 19, 2:30-3:30, Wimberly 104

Dr. Chris McCracken will present “The Target Shoots First: Selling and Selling Out for the Columbia House Record Club” from 2:30-3:30 on Friday Oct. 19 in Wimberly 104.

Much of the work we do in technical and professional writing classrooms is an effort to bridge gaps between workplace and academic discourses. In this presentation, Dr. McCracken will demonstrate one of the ways he does that work in his professional writing classes by way of a fairly obscure documentary titled The Target Shoots First. This first-person documentary, directed by and featuring Chris Wilcha, focuses on Wilcha’s first year designing catalogues for the (now-defunct) Columbia House Record Club during the early-mid 1990s. The Target Shoots First is an autobiographical look at selling and selling out for the Columbia House Record Club that offers students a uniquely candid view into how writing mediates and structures professional organizations and identities. The documentary also functions as a fascinating artifact from a pivotal time when digital technologies began to fundamentally change how people collaborate.

The Target Shoots First is currently available on Vimeo for free: https://vimeo.com/58192159

"Modernizing Misogyny in Shakespeare’s Shrew" - Friday, September 21, 2:30-3:30, Wimberly 104

"Modernizing Misogyny in Shakespeare’s Shrew" by Dr. Natalie Eschenbaum

UWL English Department's William J. And Yvonne Hyde Colloquium Presentations 2018-2019.

An NPR review of Vinegar Girl (Hogarth 2016) states that Anne Tyler’s modernization of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew is a “fizzy cocktail of a romantic comedy, far more sweet than acidic.” This presentation by Dr. Natalie Eschenbaum considers how Tyler’s novel adopts and adapts the critical debate concerning the play’s misogyny. Social historians have helped to contextualize the shrew-taming plot, some claiming that Shakespeare’s tale is similarly “romantic” and “sweet” when read in context. Students push back against such conclusions, however, arguing that teaching Shrew and its informing histories reinforces the patriarchy and risks normalizing misogyny. Dr. Eschenbaum's presentation responds to students’ concerns and is informed by girlhood and cultural studies.

Free and Open to the Public. All are welcome to attend. 

Friday, September 21
2:30-3:30
Wimberly 104

 

“Telling Our Stories: English and the Public Humanities” - Friday, April 20, 2:30-3:30, Wimberly 112.

Dr. Rebekah Fowler will present “Telling Our Stories: English and the Public Humanities” from 2:30-3:30 p.m. on April 20 in Wimberly 112. 

This presentation is a report of and commentary on Dr. Rebekah Fowler's experiences at the 2017 National Humanities Conference in Boston, MA. In this presentation, she will address a range of topics related to the role of the public humanities, including public partnerships, funding opportunities, mediating difficult conversations, intellectual humility and conviction of ideas, and the importance of stories. She will also show a short video on the nominees for the 2017 Schwartz Prize in the Public Humanities to open up the conversation about how we, as an English Dept. already are doing some of this work, and where we could be doing more to help our students, our campus, and our community tell their stories. 

This event is free and open to the public. All are welcomed to attend.