“Touching the Past” Symposium Friday

[fig 1: The IMDb doesn’t know what Dante looks like]by J J Cohen So John Filardi, an alumnus of the GW English Department, is here teaching a course on screenwriting, focused upon comedy. By all accounts it has been a terrific class. Today he invited Emmanuella Chiriqui (Sloan from Entourage) to his class. When I…

Department alumnus Keith Feldman writes: I’m pleased to report that I write you from my new office at UC Berkeley, where I’ve just begun a tenure track position in comparative ethnic studies. As you might imagine, I’m thrilled—and deeply humbled—by the opportunity to work in such a generative atmosphere. I was hired in part because…

English 40W: Myths of Britain Spring Semester 2009Jeffrey J. Cohen Much great English literature turns out not to be so English after all: the action of the epic Beowulf unfolds in Scandinavia; King Arthur was a Welsh king before he was an English one; Shakespeare’s Tempest takes place on an island in the Mediterranean, but…

Through its alliance with the Folger Shakespeare Library, the best archive of Shakespeare and Renaissance materials in the US, and one of the best in the world, GW is uniquely positioned to train researchers in early modern and medieval studies. Even Ivy League schools do not have these resources. Here is what we have already:…

See this stack of books? English Honors students read them all … two at a time. Well, not really. But it’s a nice thought. I had a professor in college who had a photographic memory (really). In one class, he began reading Moby Dick and then closed the book and continued to “read.” For about…

Mention the Pulitzer Prize, and you’ll conjure images of a weathered novelist, scowling over the rim of his snifter. If the Pulitzer laureates at GW are any indication, however, a comic book sketch is a more accurate image. In the span of two weeks, the GW English Department has hosted Michael Chabon and Art Spiegelman,…