Monthly Archives: August 2018

Monday Missive - August 27, 2018

August 27, 2018 by Mark West
Categories: Monday Missive

In the Days of My Youth — This past weekend I saw Hal Ashby’s 1975 comedy, Shampoo, which is one of the films featured in the Charlotte Mecklenburg’s film series titled “Hal Ashby in the Seventies.”  Sam Shapiro, one of our part-time faculty members, organized this film series.  There are three more films that will be screened as part of this series:  Bound for Glory, which will be screened on September 8; Coming Home, which will be screened on October 6; and Being There, which will be screened on November 10.  For more information about this film series, please click on the following link:  https://www.cmlibrary.org/blog/summer-film-series-showcases-hal-ashbys-seventies-classics

Seeing Shampoo brought back memories of my days at Franconia College, an experimental college that operated in northern New Hampshire from 1963 to 1978.  I graduated from Franconia College in 1975, the same year that Shampoo came out.  I remember seeing Shampoo in a movie theater in Littleton, New Hampshire, which was the only theater that showed first-run movies in that part of New Hampshire.  Just for curiosity’s sake, I Googled this theater, and to my amazement, I discovered that it still exists.

Shampoo perfectly captures the more hedonistic aspects of the counter-culture movement associated with the late 1960s and early ’70s.  However, this period was also associated with the controversies surrounding Richard Nixon and the Vietnam War.  Even though Shampoo takes place against the backdrop of the 1968 presidential election, it does not address the political questioning that was such an important part of the lives of many young people at the time.  The central characters in Shampoo are much more interested in engaging in sexual relations than they are in engaging in political debates.

I recommend pairing Shampoo with the 1976 film All the President’s Men.  Released just one year after the debut of Shampoo, this film celebrates the determination and idealism of two young journalists who take it upon themselves to expose the corruption and crimes of a president who thinks he is above the law.  Taken together, these films show two different sides of American culture and society during these tumultuous years. Shampoo deals with the breakdown of traditional mores while All the President’s Men deals with the rising skepticism toward authority figures.  Like many of my contemporaries, I experienced both sides in the days of my youth.  Although these films were made more than forty years ago, they still speak to issues and concerns that relate to life in America in 2018.

Visiting Author Presentation — New York Times best-selling YA author Alan Gratz will speak on campus Wednesday, September 5th, at 5pm as part of the NC Humanities Council funded project co-led by Sarah Minslow and me, “The Child in Southern Literature and Film.” The specific location of his presentation will be announced in a few days.

Alan received degrees in Creative Writing and English Education from the University of Tennessee and lives in Asheville, NC. He has written more than 14 books for young readers, including the latest, Ban This Book, which is set in NC. I hope you will join us for his talk. For more information visit www.alangratz.com

Kudos  — As you know, I like to use my Monday Missives to share news about recent accomplishments by members of the English Department.  Here is the latest news:

Boyd Davis is the co-author of a paper titled “Seniors’ Media Preference for Receiving Internet Security Information: A Pilot Study” that is featured as part of an international workshop on Mobile Privacy and Security for an Ageing Population in Barcelona, Spain.

Ron Lunsford and his son, Christopher Lunsford, recently learned that their paper titled “The Letter of Medical Necessity as Genre:  Who Creates It and Who Controls It” will be published in the proceedings of the IEEE ProComm Conference.  The conference took place in Toronto in July.

Upcoming Events and Meetings — Here is a list of upcoming events and meetings:

Library Social and Award Ceremony for Prof. Consuelo Salas. Thursday, September 6, 4 p.m., Halton Reading Room (Atkins Library)

English Department Mtg   Friday, September 7, 11:00am-12:30pm in Fretwell 280C (English Department Conference Room)

Quirky Quiz Question — All the President’s Men features two characters who are based on the real-life journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.  Do you know the names of the actors who played these roles?

Last week’s answer: Beth Caruso

The person who is currently in charge of the Atkins Library’s Visualization Lab received her M.A. in English from our English Department.  Do you know her name?

Monday Missive - August 20, 2018

August 20, 2018 by Mark West
Categories: Monday Missive

Engagement and Outreach — Our English Department has a long history of engaging with educational partners and allies and reaching out to community organizations.  This tradition is alive and well as is reflected in two recent developments involving members of our English Department.

Last week the university announced that Consuelo Salas is the 2018 recipient of the J. Murrey Atkins Library Faculty Engagement Award.  Consuelo, who has a joint appointment with the University Writing Program and the English Department, is being honored for her innovative and collaborative work with three of the librarians at Atkins in order to enrich the educational experiences of her students and promote “information literacy.”  As part of this collaborative effort, Consuelo arranged for her students to draw on the resources of the library’s Visualization Lab (VisLab) in their research and writing projects.  In an email Consuelo sent to me about this collaboration, she wrote, “Our collaborative curriculum has prepared students not only for their future university coursework but also for their future professions and to be critical and engaged citizens. We plan to continue our collaboration in future courses.”

Consuelo will receive the Atkins Library Faculty Engagement award during a ceremony scheduled for 4:00 p.m. on Thursday, September 6, in the Halton Reading Room.  For more information about Consuelo’s award, please click on the following link:  https://inside.uncc.edu/news-features/2018-08-14/salas-receives-atkins-library-faculty-engagement-award

The English Department’s tradition of community outreach extends well beyond Charlotte’s city limits.  For example, several members of our department are involved in an upcoming cultural event called On the Same Page:  Ashe County’s Literary Festival.  This festival will take place in West Jefferson, North Carolina, on September 11-15, 2018.  Chris Arvidson and Henry Doss, two of our part-time faculty members, are helping to organize and promote this festival, and Bryn Chancellor is participating as one of the featured authors.  One of the other participating writers is Tracy K. Smith, who is the current U.S. Poet Laureate.  For more information about this literary festival, please click on the following link:  http://www.onthesamepagefestival.org/

As these two recent examples demonstrate, our English Department does not exist within the confines of an isolated academic silo.  To riff off lines from Johnny Cash’s “I’ve Been Everywhere” and Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,”  we are everywhere, man, from Atkins’s high-tech VisLab to Ashe County’s Lit Fest.

Kudos  — As you know, I like to use my Monday Missives to share news about recent accomplishments by members of the English Department.  Here is the latest news:

Clayton Tarr published a review of Big & Small:  A Cultural History of Extraordinary Bodies in the most recent issue of the Children’s Literature Association Quarterly.  

Upcoming Events and Meetings  Here is a list of upcoming events and meetings related to the start of the fall 2018 semester:

–Classes Begin                     Monday, August 20    Classes begin at 5:00pm/First day of daytime classes is on August 21

–CLAS All Faculty Mtg            Friday, August 24       8:30am-12:00pm in McKnight Hall

–English Department Mtg     Friday, September 7          11:00am-12:30pm in Fretwell 280C (English Department Conference Room)

Quirky Quiz Question — The person who is currently in charge of the Atkins Library’s Visualization Lab received her M.A. in English from our English Department.  Do you know her name?

Last week’s answer: Go Tell It On The Mountain

Another Country is James Baldwin’s third novel. His first novel came out in 1953 and is an example of autobiographical fiction.  Does anybody know the title of Baldwin’s first novel? 

Monday Missive - August 13, 2018

August 13, 2018 by Mark West
Categories: Monday Missive

The Great American Read — The English Department is not alone in its efforts to promote the love of reading. This point was underscored for me last week when I participated in the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library’s kick-off event related to PBS’s eight-part series titled The Great American Read.  This series celebrates 100 of America’s best-loved novels as chosen in a recent national survey.  The kick-off event took place at the Main Library on August 9, and it involved a screening of the two-hour launch episode.  At various points during the screening, the organizer of the event hit the pause button, and I then led a group discussion about some of the novels featured in the episode.

I thoroughly enjoyed watching this episode of The Great American Read and talking about it with the librarians and members of the public who came to the event.  We were a very diverse group, but we were brought together by a shared love of stories.  Often our discussions veered off in unexpected directions, but they always had some connection to the 100 novels covered in the series.  For example, when we were discussing James Baldwin’s Another Country (one of the novels on the list), we started talking about the jazz scene in Paris during the 1950s and ’60s.  However, since jazz figures in the story, this detour still added to our understanding and appreciation of Baldwin’s novel.

The kick-off event is but one of a series of events that the Main Library is sponsoring in conjunction with The Great American Read.Starting on September 13, the library will screen the other episodes in the series each Thursday during lunch time.  For more information about these screenings, please click on the following link:  https://www.cmlibrary.org/blog/read-watch-discuss-and-vote-great-american-read

As I drove home from the kick-off event, I reflected on the fact that this program involved a three-way partnership: the Public Broadcasting System, Charlotte’s public library, and the English Department of Charlotte’s public university.  All three of these partners are committed to serving the public, and all recognize the importance of reading and the power of well-told stories.

Kudos  — As you know, I like to use my Monday Missives to share news about recent accomplishments by members of the English Department.  Here is the latest news:

Janaka Lewis recently published an essay titled “Why This Book?:  Authorship, Genre, and Reader Reception in Tobe” in a collection titled Why Does No One in My Books Look Like Me?:  Tobe and Ongoing Questions about Race, Representation, and Identity.  Ashli Quesinberry Stokes edited this collection, which was published by UNC Charlotte’s Center for the Study of the New South in collaboration with the Charlotte Teachers Institute.

Matthew Rowneyrecently presented a paper titled “Plastic Nature: The Albatross and the Anthropocene” at the Coleridge Conference held at The University of Cambridge.

Upcoming Events and Meetings  Here is a list of upcoming events and meetings related to the start of the fall 2018 semester:

–University Convocation     Thursday, August 16    8:30am reception in Lucas Room/9:30am-11:00am Convocation in McKnight Hall

–Classes Begin                     Monday, August 20    Classes begin at 5:00pm/First day of daytime classes is on August 21

–CLAS All Faculty Mtg     Friday, August 24       8:30am-12:00pm in McKnight Hall

–English Department Mtg    Friday, September 7        11:00am-12:30pm in Fretwell 280C (English Department Conference Room)

Quirky Quiz Question — Another Country is James Baldwin’s third novel. His first novel came out in 1953 and is an example of autobiographical fiction.  Does anybody know the title of Baldwin’s first novel?

Last week’s answer: Bloomsbury Publishing
Scholastic is the American publisher of the Harry Potter series.  Do you know the name of the British publisher of the Harry Potter series?

Monday Missive - August 6, 2018

August 06, 2018 by Mark West
Categories: Monday Missive
Celebrating the 20th Anniversary of Harry Potter with Balaka Basu — Twenty years ago next month J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was published in America for the first time.  The book appeared in Great Britain in 1997 under the title of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, but when Scholastic published the book in the United States in September 1998 they changed the name of the magical stone mentioned in the title.  The book and the six additional Harry Potter books that followed it became so popular that they helped define an entire generation of young Americans.

This phenomenon is the focus of Balaka Basu’s forthcoming collection titled The Harry Potter Generation in the World:  Critical Essays, which Balaka co-edited with Emily Lauer.  I contacted Balaka and asked her for more information about this collection.  Here is her response:

The idea for our Harry Potter collection emerged when we realized that our students, many of whom had grown up reading the Harry Potter series, had commonalities of experience that seemed to be defined by their exposure to these texts and their iterations on page and screen. While sometimes referred to as millennials and sometimes as the 9/11 generation, we believe this series of novels has also been a generation-defining event.  J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series transformed a generation of young people into readers. Initially a literary community where fans of the series could interact with one another in unprecedented ways, Harry Potter fandom grew into a transmedia phenomenon and eventually a ubiquitous, culture-defining era. Twenty years later, the Harry Potter generation has come of age, poised to become parents, teachers, writers, scholars, and critics. As the essays in this collection observe, this generation uses the abundant knowledge and purposeful lessons absorbed from Rowling’s immensely popular narrative to negotiate their life experiences as they take their places as society’s adults.

Balaka’s collection is scheduled to be published at the end of 2018, just in time to be included in the celebrations surrounding the 20th anniversary Harry Potter’s American debut.

Kudos  — As you know, I like to use my Monday Missives to share news about recent accomplishments by members of the English Department.  Here is the latest news:

Aaron Gwyn‘s The World Beneath has been selected as a featured book by the UNC Charlotte Alumni Book Club.

Daniel Shealy recently delivered a paper titled “Marrying the Marches: Modern Matrimony in Little Women,” at Orchard House, Home of the Alcotts, Summer Conversational Series, in Concord, MA.

Suzi Spillane, a recent graduate of our M.A. program in literature, has accepted a full-time teaching position at Catawba Valley Community College.

Upcoming Events and Meetings  Here is a list of upcoming events and meetings related to the start of the fall 2018 semester:

–University Convocation Thursday, August 16    8:30am reception in Lucas Room/9:30am-11:00am Convocation in McKnight Hall

–Classes Begin                   Monday, August 20    Classes begin at 5:00pm/First day of daytime classes is on August 21
–CLAS All Faculty Mtg      Friday, August 24       8:30am-12:00pm in McKnight Hall

–English Department Mtg   Friday, September 7    11:00am-12:30pm in Fretwell 280C (English Department Conference Room)

Quirky Quiz Question — Scholastic is the American publisher of the Harry Potter series.  Do you know the name of the British publisher of the Harry Potter series?

Last week’s answer: Cats in the Cradle
“Taxi” was Harry Chapin’s first hit single.  One of his other hit singles is a song about the relationship between a father and his son over the course of many years.  What is the title of this song?