The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

Who’s Afraid of Woolfbot? Professor Megan Quigley and MA Student Tate Gibbons Explore the Use of A.I. Chatbots in the Classroom By Nikola Stojcic MA ‘28 For many of us in the humanities, the encroachment of artificial intelligence usage into our academic lives has provoked feelings of wariness, to say the least. Indeed, what role is there, if any, for artificial intelligence in the field of English literature? For Professor Megan Quigley and 2nd year English MA student Tate Gibbons, the answer might look something like their custom chatbot, “The Lighthouse”--or, as it has come to be known, Woolfbot. In her forthcoming article “ Refined Out of Existence”: Modernist Impersonality Revisited, ” Professor Megan Quigley describes how in the summer of 2024 she began studying the recently unarchived eight volumes of T.S. Eliot’s Complete Prose . To help her sift through nearly 7000 pages of prose and to better understand and evaluate the usage of A.I. for herself, Professor Quigley created a ...

Professor Quigley published an essay, "What If?: New Insight into the Friendship of Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot" about her research on T. S. Eliot in the Los Angeles Review of Books . She has been working in a recently unsealed archive of letters between T. S. Eliot and Emily Hale at Princeton University. In Professor Quigley's words: "Nearly two years ago, an archive of letters was unsealed at Princeton that radically changed the way scholars understand the life and work of T. S. Eliot. Two months later, with COVID-19 numbers soaring, this long-awaited archive slammed shut again. On Monday, October 18, 2021, I was the first external scholar finally to return to those papers. Unsurprisingly, the focus of readers so far has been on the shocking relationship memorialized in the letters between Eliot and Emily Hale, the American teacher with whom he was avowedly in love. But the Hale letters contain at least one other revelation, with profound and as yet unexplored ...

Congratulations to Dr. Megan Quigley, whose article, "Reading Virginia Woolf Logically: Resolute Approaches to Woolf's The Voyage Out and Wittgenstein's Tractatus , was just published in the journal Poetics Today in a special issue focusing on the relationship between logic and literature. Dr. Quigley's article argues for a “resolute reading” of Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out , akin to Cora Diamond and James Conant’s reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus . She argues that, like some recent readers of the Tractatus , we should think of The Voyage Out as therapeutic nonsense. What does that mean? The “resolute" approach to the Tractatus argues that we should embrace Wittgenstein’s own assertion that the Tractatus is finally nonsense. Accordingly, the Tractatus acts as a kind of therapy, enabling us to dispense with certain types of philosophical, linguistic, and analytical claims. Quigley argues that Woolf’s The Voyage Out takes a...

When Virginia Woolf’s brother died, she lied about it for nearly a month in a series of letters to her closest friend. In The New Yorker , Professor Kamran Javadizadeh examines why.

A Villanova MA alumna and a current Villanova MA student will be presenting at a forthcoming panel sponsored by the International Virginia Woolf Society at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900. Laura Tscherry, '17, now a Ph.D candidate at Indiana University Bloomington, will be presenting "'Isn't it odd how much more one sees in a photograph?' -- Words, Images, and Action in Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas ." Current Villanova master’s student Sarah Beth Gilbert will be presenting "Virginia Woolf's Fantastical Feminist Sci-Fi: Orlando, Gender Subversions, and the Critique of Identity." The conference will take place from February 20th to the 22nd, 2020.