The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

Emerald Isle Edition By Guest Contributor Jesse Schwartz This past summer, I had the privilege of spending 8 weeks as an archival intern at the Jackie Clarke Collection in Ballina, Ireland. I had this opportunity because of the Irish Studies Program at Villanova, which sends (and funds!) two or three students from Villanova to the Jackie Clarke every summer. I had never been to Ireland before, and it was an amazing experience to live and work in Ballina, which is a small town in County Mayo in the west of Ireland. The museum is a small, publicly funded, non-profit collection of historical materials that formerly belonged to Ballina resident, Jackie Clarke. The museum has three full-time employees, and a rotating part-time staff of six other workers, all of whom were lovely to get to know and work with. In his lifetime, Jackie Clarke collected over 100,000 pieces of Irish history, and turned his collection over to the town after his death in 2013. My job was two-fold: half of the...

The English department has just issued its sixth annual faculty summer reading recommendations list! Jump over to the post in Recommended Books to check it out. (That page also has lists from previous summers--just keep scrolling and click "Older Posts" at the bottom of the page!)

For any of you interested in science writing, including writing science fiction, check out the Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop . Launch Pad “is an education/public outreach effort” whose “primary goal is to teach writers, editors, and creative professionals about modern science, specifically astronomy, and in turn reach their large and diverse audiences.” The workshop, which takes place July 22-28, 2019 , at the University of Wyoming in Laramie , is free, and Launch Pad can sometimes offer travel assistance. The lecturers include Christian Ready, who was an undergraduate at Villanova and whose mother, Cecilia Ready, teaches in our department as an adjunct faculty member. Applications are open until March 15; click the link above to learn more!

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...

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.