The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

 This coming Monday!  

 Second-year MA student Isobel McCreavy will be presenting her paper " Focalizing on Young Adult Literature: The Dangers of Ignoring Focalization" at the 118th Annual PAMLA Conference in Las Vegas on November 11th!  Isobel's essay "examines the use of tropes and narrative roles in young adult fiction to examine the messaging in four young adult works - John Green’s Paper Towns, J. K. Rowling’s the Harry Potter series, Cassandra Clare’s The Mortal Instrument series, and Stephen Chbosky’s Perks of Being a Wallflower. Each work has three narrative roles that dictate the perceptions and identity formations of its characters. The roles of narrator, focalizer and focalizee create dynamics in the works where characters exist only in relation to other characters, and their identities are tied to these roles. Embedded in tropes like the Girl Quest Tale and the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, these roles confine the autonomy of its characters and hint at the dangers of focalization, i...

ENG 8560: Revolutionary Decade: The 1790s Dr. Evan Radcliffe Monday 5:20-7:20 pm   The 1790s was the decade of the French Revolution in Britain as well as France, with each new moment of turmoil in France—what an alarmed Alexander Hamilton referred to as “a rapid succession of dreadful revolutions”—generating its own vehement response across the Channel. The fall of the Bastille and the publication of The Declaration of the Rights of Man , the flight and arrest of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, the royal trials and executions, the outbreak of war between Great Britain and France, the Terror—each year seemed to witness more of these “great national events,” as William Wordsworth called them. Wordsworth (who, like Mary Wollstonecraft, experienced some of the Revolution first-hand) and other British writers addressed these events and their possible implications in varied ways, often through developing their own original approaches and forms. Indeed, many of their works—William Bla...

Held in conjunction with Villanova University's 46th annual Patristic, Medieval, and Renaissance Conference will be the Delaware Valley Medieval Association Graduate Workshop. The event will take place on October 16th in Room 101 of The Inn at Villanova from 10am to 3pm, featuring a plethora of interesting presentations –  including one from Villanova MA student Em Friedman! Em will be presenting their work titled "Somatemporal ecstasy: technologies of eternity in 13th century women's mysticism."  If you are interested in attending or are curious about the workshop, you can register/learn more here . 

VU English professor Yumi Lee, who is on leave from Villanova this year, will be giving a colloquium talk at the University of Pennsylvania this coming Thursday, at 12:00 p.m. This talk examines the newfound visibility of the Korean War in American literature from the late 1990s to the present. Why and how, after going “forgotten” for decades, did the Korean War re-emerge as a topic of interest in contemporary American literature? To answer this question, Professor Lee considers the vexed temporality of the war, which never formally ended, instead remaining suspended in a status that poet Don Mee Choi has described as “ever-pending” (DMZ Colony, 2020). Lee suggests that if we alter our understanding of the time frame of the Korean War, moving from the bounded periodization of 1950-1953 to a more expansive, yet more literal, timeline that extends the war and its effects into the present, then we can read these texts from the 1990s and 2000s not as belated or historical in their approach...