The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

LST 7101:  Foundation: Modern--  Eros, Time, and Madness Dr. Alan Pichanick W 6:15-9:30 p.m. In this course, we will investigate the nature of human desire and its relation to psychic well-being. We will focus our discussion on Plato’s Phaedrus, Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Plato’s Phaedrus recounts a dialogue between Socrates and his eponymous interlocutor discussing three speeches about the nature of love (eros), as well as the effect of rhetoric upon the soul. It is in this work that eros is called a “divine madness”. Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents picks up several themes explored in Plato’s dialogue, probing the nature of desire and selfhood in a pre-civilized era and its subsequent transformation and disease in the development of civilization. Mann’s novel is influenced by both Plato and Freud. It takes place in a sanitarium, in which the protagonist checks in for a three-week visit, only to end up staying...

Please join us at noon on Friday, February 1st to say farewell to our beloved program coordinator, Brooke Erdman! Let's give her a nice send off and wish her luck at her new position in the Graduate Studies Office!

ENG 9730, taught by Dr. Travis Foster, will be offered this summer! See below for course description (click to expand). Note that the course is being held from 1-4pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Congratulations to Dr. Brooke Hunter, whose book, Forging Boethius in Medieval Intellectual Fantasies , was published by Routledge at the end of last year! Dr. Hunter's book examines the influence of the thirteenth-century Pseudo-Boethian forgery De disciplina scolarium on medieval understandings of Boethius (died 524 CE). Tracing the popularity of De disciplina ’s vision of Boethius in the middle ages in relation to its current scholarly neglect, Dr. Hunters shows how medieval schoolmen saw themselves and the past, and how modern scholars imagine the medieval past. In exploring this alternate Boethian persona through a variety of different works including texts of translatio studii et imperii , common school texts, the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer, and humanist writings, Dr. Hunter's book reveals a new vein of medieval Boethianism that is earthy, practical, and even humorous.

Save the date: The 21st Annual Villanova University Literary Festival! All readings begin at 7 p.m., are free, and are followed by a reception and book signing. For a full list and description of events, visit the Lit Fest's informational page .

Congratulations to Dr. Alice Dailey, whose article, " Little, Little Graves: Shakespeare's Photographs of Richard II ," was just published in the prestigious journal Shakespeare Quarterly . Dr. Dailey's essay argues that the play's many static, inset images of a dead King Richard function through a "temporal aesthetics" that cannot be summarized by the concept of the king’s two bodies, as Ernst Kantorowicz influentially argued. In place of this paradigm, Dr. Dailey invokes "the photographic phenomenology of Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag to describe how Richard generates images of his grave to proliferate himself across multiple temporal dimensions." Richard objectifies himself as a corpse while by imagining himself in the position of someone contemplating his grave after his death. By capturing himself in images of morbid stillness, Richard deploys a "photographic technology of aesthetic objectification and scopic anticipation....