The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

  Dr. Joe Drury recently presented at the American Society for 18th Century Studies conference in Philadelphia, which took place April 9-11. At the event, Dr. Drury presented his paper, “‘A Singular Man’: James Boswell’s Oddness,” which posits Boswell’s “oddness” as whimsy, a trait characterized by his almost compulsive tendency to overshare.  I was given the opportunity to sit down with Dr. Drury to discuss his paper in further detail. He cites Sianne Ngai’s book Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, and Interesting, as sparking his interest in whimsy. Ngai’s book, Dr. Drury explains, is a “cultural analysis of our everyday aesthetic vocabulary,” especially that vocabulary which extends beyond the popular yet constraining conception of aesthetics as beauty. While Ngai’s novel explores the “zany, cute, and interesting,” Dr. Drury is more interested in whimsy. Dr. Drury explains that whimsy “has its origins in the period that I study, the Enlightenment, the long 18th century…I ...

The Graduate English program celebrated its 16th annual Thesis and Field Exam Symposium last night, with nine students presenting on their theses and field exams to an audience of over 25 students, faculty, and staff in SAC 300.  After everyone had a chance to enjoy dinner, Graduate Director Mary Mullen opened the evening with a toast to the graduating class. We then began the academic presentation portion of the evening with students presenting in groups of three followed by time for questions and discussion.  The first student to present was Alexis Atwood, who presented her field exam on Civil War, Poetics, and Vulnerability: Investigating Corporal Vulnerability in Salvadoran Poetry of Witness. Her field exam was based upon a comprehensive reading of selected poems of witness, memoirs, and testimonial narratives that surround the civil war in El Salvador in the late 1970s. Her aim was to explore how poetic forms represent corporeal vulnerability and to understand how poems b...