The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

We have 75th anniversary crew-neck sweatshirts and t-shirts in stock, as well as hats, totes, hoodies, and more! Stop by the office or write to Program Coordinator Mike Malloy if you are interested!

 Spring 2024 Course Descriptions ENG 8460 Science & Fiction Before Sci-Fi Dr. Joseph Drury ENG 9520 Writing & Indigeneity Dr. Kimberly Takahata ENG 9730 Staging the Spanish Tragedy Dr. Alice Dailey GWS 8000 Critical Perspectives on Gender Dr. Travis Foster ENG 8460 Science & Fiction Before Sci-Fi Dr. Joseph Drury CRN 33402 Thursday 7:30-9:30 pm   An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump by Joseph Wright of Derby The first science fiction novel is often said to be Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. But what did literary authors have to say about science in the century and a half between the Scientific Revolution and the creation of the world’s most famous monster, the period now known as the Enlightenment? In this course, students will read and analyze some of the key philosophical texts that helped establish the distinctive methodology and goals of the new science alongside a range of fictional texts—drama and poetry as well as novels—that explore its social and p...

Jean Lutes just published "Feminisms" in  The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Novel and Politics .   A brief summary of the chapter: "Twentieth-century feminist activism and thought spread with an urgency and ambition unseen before, as advocates for women achieved mass recognition, unsettled long-held convictions, and upset the status quo in ways unimaginable in previous centuries. No novel   genre escaped these changes or failed to register them. Feminist politics reshaped the content, and sometimes the form, of the novel. Yet, dramatic as the expansion of US women’s opportunities w as, progress was never unchallenged or universal. Feminist political gains inspired significant backlash: Patriarchy supporters fought back. Meanwhile, feminist organizing fractured from within. Before the twentieth century even began, women of color were explaining why they couldn’t be expected to identify only as women, as if all women belonged in a single categor...

On Wednesday, October 18 from 6-8 pm the Villanova Center for Arab and Islamic Studies will host a teach in on Palestine featuring English faculty members. Come with questions!

A recent article in  The Villanovan  discusses new additions to Villanova's Code of Conduct. It features Professor Megan Quigley saying: “I don’t believe in just banishing it,” Quigley said. “Well, for certain assignments I do. I already have assignments in my classes where the students give a paper prompt to ChatGPT and then we analyze what it produces for its strengths and weaknesses.” Later in the article, she comments:  “I would say that, for me, writing and thinking go hand in hand,” Quigley said. “Analyzing and synthesizing information, finding out what a strong versus weak claim is, whether you need those skills for law or teaching or writing or journalism, I think you are still going to need to have them.” Check out the full article  here . 

This weekend, professors Kamran Javadizadeh and Megan Quigley put their poetry skills to work at the T. S. Eliot conference in Cambridge, MA. They co-taught a seminar on "T. S. Eliot and Close Reading” to a group of professors and graduate students at the Houghton Library at Harvard University on Friday. Megan later delivered a lecture, “Perfectly good, normal and right: Eliot, Attraction, and Intimacy,” in Emerson Hall, the same philosophy building where T. S. Eliot took his philosophy courses at Harvard a century ago. Speaking of close reading, for more close reads you can listen to Kamran’s podcast on  Apple  or  Spotify .

Check out  this article  from  The Villanovan,  written by VU undergrad Caitlyn Foley, on celebrating 75 years of the undergrad English major at Villanova.

On Friday Sept. 15th, Dr. Megan Quigley presented a paper in Switzerland (really on zoom!) on reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s   Klara and the Sun   with ChatGPT and the Logic and Modern Literature Conference at the University of Lausanne. She thanks Erica Hayes, in Falvey Library’s Digital Scholarship Lab, and Jamie Wojtal, her RA, for assistance with AI side of the project. What do you think ChatGPT wrote when prompted to answer if the border between human and artificial intelligence was vague? And what does that mean for humanity’s “evolution” with AI?

 Professor Kamran Javadizadeh reviews Ben Lerner's  The Lights  in  The New Yorker.  Check out his essay here .

Professor Adrienne Perry recently visited Emily Dickinson's house. She shares some photos from the visit below. In her words: " What was most inspiring and exciting to me about this visit was to see how her family home has changed over time, as it's been decorated with period furnishings, including wallpaper created from scraps found in the home. I am always struck by the size and simplicity of her writing desk, to think that she wrote some 1,800 poems in this place, and to hear the docents speak about the wo rld around her. There was also a fascinating display about her editorial and drafting process, and a first edition of her poems, which featured the images of ghost pipe flowers. Talk of ghost pipe and the images of them, alongside Emily, sort of followed me around all weekend." A portrait of Emily Dickinson and her siblings from the drawing room Emily Dickinson's bedroom/ writing desk Emily Dickinson's bedroom Professor Adrienne Perry in front of Emily Di...