Poem of the Day: e. e. cummings’s “somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond”
Ever since my time on my high school newspaper, improper grammar has really irked me. For example, I’m a huge fan of the Oxford Comma. Also, I used to watch Keeping Up with the Kardashians and cringe anytime the characters said, “my sister and I” when the correct phrasing would have been, “my sister and…
Vacation on Mount Desert Island Nina Gilden Seavey, Sunset on Bar Harbor, 2015 So where would we go for vacation in 2015? Various considerations set aside the old pattern of the northern Minnesota lake. My daughter Eleanor (GWU 2010) has been living for a while with her boyfriend Greg Fortier in Manhattan. Greg has…
October can be an interesting time for literature professors writing about contemporary novelists, because the Swedish Academy announces the Nobel Prize in Literature during this time, changing the fate of little-known masters overnight or causing controversies around acclaimed authors to arise. Many English departments offer courses on world literature and Nobel laureates. This…
(Paris, AFP) All the world’s a stage but the irony is the rest of the globe often has an easier time understanding William Shakespeare than English speakers. Thanks to frequently updated translations that dispense with the archaic Renaissance language, foreign audiences often find the Bard easier to follow. Take “King Lear”, a new version…
Dear English Department students, Professor Maria Frawley I am writing to introduce myself as the new Chair of the English Department and to welcome you back to campus for the start of the 2019-2020 academic year. After nearly ten years in the Honors Program, it is a real pleasure to return to my English Department…
Professor Chu describes “Narratives of Return: Transpacific Returns in Asian American Literature” at Renmin University On Wednesday, December 26, I gave a talk for English language and literature students and scholars at Renmin University in Beijing. The university, also known as People’s University of China, was founded in 1950 as the first national university…