The EUA Production of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida

The full cast of the EUA's production of Troilus and Cressida

In what follows, Professor Kevis Goodman -- usually a silent partner in the composition of blog postings -- recounts the English Undergraduate Association's recent staging of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida.

Kyle Binkowski (Class of 2009) is drawn to plays that have never or have rarely been performed. This attraction started during the Spring term of 2008, when Kyle and a number of his classmates, who had just completed a semester of the English Department’s upper-division lecture course on John Milton, decided to produce the dramatic poem Samson Agonistes—a work that Milton insisted “never was intended” for the stage. It culminated last weekend (April 24-26) with a splendid production of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, perhaps the least frequently staged of Shakespeare’s plays. Professor David Landreth, who teaches Shakespeare regularly at the undergraduate and graduate levels, explains some of the reasons why. With its thirty different roles, Landreth commented, “not only are there so many characters for the audience to keep track of, but this bewildering variety of roles serves to articulate an even more bewildering variety of divergent and incompatible perspectives on the same events.” For these reasons and others, Kyle had initial trouble persuading the English Undergraduate Association to sponsor the production, but the EUA and other sponsors (the ASUC, the English Department) came through in the end and provided the necessary support, both moral and financial.

Several days after the performances, I interviewed Kyle, classmate Marc Juberg, who played a melancholy Troilus, and Kevin Ligutom, who acted the part of Diomedes. Marc and Kevin had previously collaborated with Kyle on Samson Agonistes—Marc playing Samson. A rarely

Marc Juberg and Ellie Garber as Troilus and Cressida respectively

performed play “is easier to make your own,” Kyle explained, because “the audience comes with no preconceptions about how it should be staged.” Moreover, Marc added, Troilus and Cressida is a drama that “speaks to a postmodern audience” in particular, because it “multiplies inconclusive endings,” resists closure, and “leaves its audience with unanswered questions.” “The exigencies of the present take precedent over happy endings and other formulations of fiction,” he continued, and “there is something very beautiful about that.” (Marc, in case you are wondering, is writing his senior Honors thesis on the play.) Kevin Ligutom agreed, pointing out that Shakespeare’s version of the plot flouts the expectations that most viewers bring to the enactment of the story of the Trojan War. Shakespeare’s Achilles (played by Zach Ritter, formerly the blustering giant Harapha in Samson Agonistes) is neither particularly heroic nor especially good in battle—in fact, he needs an entire brigade of Myrmidons to ambush Hector (David Andres Mejia) before he can kill him.

The logistical challenges were formidable for the entire cast. They had to locate rooms for rehearsals and acquire performance spaces large enough for the epic scale of the story and the size of the assembled cast. The usual division of labor between actors, on the one hand, and stage crew, costume designers, and set engineers, on the other, became irrelevant, as the cast came together to draw on their own resources. Aeneas (Lauren Mueller) and Andromache (Aileen Ritchie) designed the set, which was built and engineered with the additional help of Diomedes, Troilus, Achilles, Priam (Randy Eisenberg), Calchas (Jenny Elizabeth Oberholtzer), Thersites (Elizabeth Osborne), even Helen of Troy herself (Jerrine Tan), and others. Pandarus (Rachel

An example of the handiwork of Aileen Ritchie

Levinson-Emley) and Ulysses (Vivian Wauters) helped with the costumes, while Andromache crafted the beautiful masks that helped single actors play multiple parts. “I cannot stress the community aspect enough,” Kyle insisted, noting numerous unsung heroes, who labored long nights and hauled sets between the several spaces that the cast had wrested from several campus departments, which control them during the day. The blog, too, regrets that it cannot sing—or name—them all in this space.

The strong bonds forged were all the more remarkable because most in the group had never met each other; they came together from a wide variety of majors and with very different degrees of experience. Kyle’s open call to the campus netted both trained actors, well versed in Shakespeare performance, and first timers, discovering both the play and acting for the first time. Ellie Garber, who was radiant and playful as the unfaithful Cressida, has performed in many Shakespeare festivals, for example, while Agamemnon (Andrea Johnson), a Physics major, was encountering his work for the first time. Others fell in between, like the poignant and prophetic Cassandra (Hayley Housman), who reported that she “came into the play having taken English 117S [the department’s Shakespeare lecture],” and now, after “three months of living and breathing Shakespeare, [is] beginning to get a glimpse of the endless tragic, twisted, hilarious beauty that exists in his work.”

The performances draw enthusiastic reviews from the audience, which included veteran faculty instructors of English 117, including Professor Landreth and Professor Stephen Booth, the production’s Executive Producer. Professor Landreth wrote the blog that, in spite of his original reservations about the choice of this difficult play, he “was impressed by how continuously lucid the EUA production was, not to mention how frequently delightful.” He added that he found

Elizabeth Osborne as Thersites

Pandarus (Rachel Levinson-Emley) “skilled and interestingly elusive, often making surprising plays for sympathy rather than going over the top with the character’s creepiness.” For one GSI who came to the performance, “the star of the show was certainly Thersites” (played by the enviably limber Elizabeth Osborne), because “her tenacious interpretation of the character of the fool as equal parts devilish and humorous, wanting to bring others down but only as a way of surviving, brought the tenor of the tragedy into a more complex relationship with that genre.” This professor, who is so far gone as to confess her peculiar preference for Milton in general, felt that three hours went by without a moment’s notice.

Kyle, Marc, and other members of the cast are graduating this month, as are many of this year’s board of the English Undergraduate Association. But the EUA goes on and hopes to mount a Shakespeare play next year. We admire their energy and intelligence, and we hope they do, too.

Read full post....

Professor Eric Falci and the Science of the Lyric

This past fall sophomore English major Sarah Watson enrolled in Professor Eric Falci's ENGL 180L: Lyric Verse. Reading the semester's course descriptions, she had been intrigued by the course's claim that much of the semester would be spent "sorting out what the title of this course means." When it went on to mention an exceedingly diverse list of poets -- from Sappho to Dickinson, Marvell to Ashbery -- along with a no less various catalogue of critical concepts -- chaos theory, cognitive science, ecology -- she wasn't exactly sure what she was in for, but she knew it would be fascinating. The wide-ranging concerns of the course actually coincided with Sarah's own academic orientations because, in addition to majoring in English, she is pre-med and tackles her science requirements with interest (if not always with total enthusiasm).

Sarah's hunch about the course turned out to be accurate. As Professor Falci's syllabus and lectures lived up to the course description and ranged widely across poets and critical texts, Sarah found new delights in and new insights into literature that she had never expected. One of her favorite parts of the course was re-reading Dickinson, since, she said, she hadn't enjoyed her poetry very much when she had read it in high school for the first time. When Professor Falci assigned Virginia Jackson's book Dickinson's Misery along with the poetry, Sarah saw how one could read history back into the lyric form, which had seemed, at first glance, to be outside of time. Sarah's interest in the argument that Jackson makes about the Dickinson's fascicles -- small, hand-tied volumes in which Dickinson bound her poetry -- led her to write an essay on a Dickinson website which contextualizes the poetry with their manuscript versions.

Professor Falci noted that he took a lot of chances in putting his course together. Not only did he include a number of difficult and experimental poets on his syllabus, but he also challenged his students with works as opaque as Martin Heidegger's "Poetically Man Dwells," Giorgio Agamben's "The End of the Poem," and "The Rejection of Closure" by the department's own Lyn Hejinian. Falci was delighted, however, by the chutzpah and motivation of his students as they wrestled with these difficult texts. For her part, Sarah said that she greatly liked the Agamben but wasn't sure if she really understood the Heidegger. Reading essays like these together with works like Harryette Mullen's Sleeping with the Dictionary showed her how much
fun it could be to watch people try and figure out how to make meaning out of theoretical or poetic opacity.

Sarah also said she enjoyed reading Marianne Moore's poem "The Fish" along with the linguist Roman Jakobson's famous essay "Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances," which uses research into aphasia to present a theory of language on the basis of to two fundamental functions of metaphor and metonymy. To her surprise, her roommate was reading the same essay for an Anthropology course. The coincidence sparked some interesting conversations as the two compared their professors’ different uses of Jakobson's theory. This cross-over with science -- along with her own interest in medicine and chemistry -- led Sarah to write her final paper on the prevalence of chemical metaphors in some of the poetry and theory she had read over the semester. She was particularly intrigued by T.S. Eliot's metaphor of the catalyst in his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and the imagery of "precipitates" that cultural theorist Theodor Adorno has used in his work. What is the bridge, she wondered, between science and literature that our current organization of knowledge obscures?

For that matter, as this blog has been wondering over the past few weeks, what is the bridge between literature and the "real world" that we sometimes forget to notice? After Professor Falci's course, it seems as if Sarah is in prime position to give that question some very interesting, and perhaps unexpected, answers.

But we are also interested in your thoughts on the issue; feel free to leave a response!

Read full post....

Out of the Classroom, Into the Community

In last week's post, we focused on the ways in which two current graduate students are

Artwork currently on display at the Alphonse Berber Gallery.

leveraging the new media of the blogosphere to disseminate critical thinking on history and literature in broad new ways. This week, we bring you examples of a different, perhaps more "concrete" kind of outreach by describing the efforts of the Department's students to get out into the community with their thoughts on art and literature by opening a new art gallery and participating in poetry conversations on the radio.

Indeed, undergraduates Cameron Jackson and Jessica Cox have dived headlong into the community in their roles as co-directors of the newly opened Alphonse Berber Gallery on Bancroft Avenue across from the University. Housed in a beautiful 7200 sq. ft. Julia Morgan-designed building, the gallery had its grand opening on February 27 and presents the work of dynamic, aggressively innovative emerging to mid-career contemporary artists. It describes its inaugural show, "New Nature," which runs until April 11, in the following terms:

"'New Nature' will focus on how fourteen West Coast artists engage with and interrogate their relationship to the natural world in ways that are personal, provocative, and at times seemingly hostile toward traditional notions of ecological awareness. The work of Reuben Margolin, Justin Margitich, and MachineHistories (Jason Pilarski & Steven Joyner) translates their experience of

Artwork currently on display at the Alphonse Berber Gallery.

the wild, elemental, and biological into a mechanistic idiom. Viewers find themselves contemplating the natural by way of the very ontological mode that supposedly alienated them from it in the first place. In part, "New Nature" seeks to challenge the mindset that regards technology and environment as inherently opposed, exploring how they serve as means for engaging with and understanding one another. Imagining the possibilities for reconciliation, the artists presented in "New Nature" compel us to find new modes of participation in our continually evolving environment."

In a somewhat different way, the department's graduate students have also ventured out of the classroom and into the larger community. Second-year PhD student and practicing poet Gillian Osborne describes how Professor Cecil Giscombe (whose award-winning book we recently profiled here) took the helm of the graduate poetry workshop which the department offers each fall. Though the workshop had its usual diverse enrollment from a smattering of departments — from English to Public Health, with a variety of other Humanities sprinkled in between, Gillian notes that, with Professor Giscombe, something was different. His sights were set, she reports, on steering the class not only toward an expansion of their poetic practices, but also toward a broadening of where those practices might occur. Over the semester, they were to embark on an experiment of poetry in public.

This public was reached via the air, courtesy of a local radio station in Point Reyes, KWMR

Professor Giscombe and his workshop in Point Reyes.

whose DJ Brian Kervin had invited the class to participate in the “Swervin’ Kirven Show.” The class thought about what poetry on the radio could mean, how it might sound. Making three trips to KWMR, each time with a different assortment of students from the class, the workshop conducted live and wandering conversations that forged their way into the thickets of debates over “poetry of place,” questions of form and translation, and investigations of different poetic registers. They read their own work as well as that of other poets, ranging from the deeply canonized to the insistently disruptive; there were contests—limericks and clichés—and callers. Gillian writes, "We couldn’t entirely anticipate what would happen, and, since allowing oneself to be surprised is an essential element to Cecil’s pedagogy and poetic approach, this was entirely the point."

The English Department is proud to have such vibrant and pioneering students as part of its community.

Read full post....

Two English Majors Chosen for Inaugural Cohort of Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship

In what follows, second-year graduate student Monica Huerta describes the inauguration of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellows Program at Berkeley. A Mellon Fellow herself, Huerta playfully profiles two undergraduate English majors, Cecilia Caballero (who also focuses on Chicano Studies) and Teresa Jimenez, who are part of the first cohort of Berkeley Fellows.

***
In Arts and Humanities Graduate Diversity Program Director Josephine Moreno’s words, there is “something very special” about the five students chosen to inaugurate the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellows (MMUF) Program at Berkeley. Founded in 1988 to address the shortage of faculty of color in higher education, the MMUF “targets students with exceptional academic promise and potential for careers that will contribute to diversity and equal opportunity in the academy. The program supports Fellows by providing guidance, role models and the environment and resources to strive for the highest academic goals.” We in the English Department are particularly proud to be represented by Cecila Caballero and Teresa Jiminez, two outstanding young scholars.

Becoming a Fellow is not easy. The application process is much like applying to graduate school and involves a statement of purpose, a lengthy writing sample and an interview in which each applicant is expected to articulate not just their scholarly contribution to their chosen field, but also how they envision their academic career in relation to Mellon’s mission of promoting diversity in universities. Before all of this, however, there occurs what Mellon Fellows refer to as “the talk:” a professor pulls you aside after class, or shifts in her seat during a routine office hours visit before asking, “Have you considered going to graduate school?” Glowing compliments about your “work” follow, and you are honored (surprised) that they consider your late-nights turned into essays and ideas turned into clumsy questions something called “work.” Often, “the talk” is the first time a student considers the professoriate a viable career option. In the cases of Cecilia and Teresa, we have Professors Genaro Padilla, Laura Pérez, Gautam Premnath, and José Saldivar to thank for nudging these powerful women in the direction of MMUF and the academy.

After chatting with these two English majors over coffee, I found that Cecilia and Theresa certainly proved Moreno exactly right: there is something very special and, I would add, very exciting about these young scholars.

Cecilia Caballero
Hometown: Antioch, California

About CC: She is most likely reading several books at once. The day we met, she was in the middle of at least The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest, Carla Trujillo’s Living Chicana Theory, and Ana Castillo’s The Guardians.

Caballero began her career in reading obsessed with any written material she could get her hands on, including the backs of cereal boxes. She prioritized her education even as, in high school and through her time attending community college, she became the main source of income for her family. Her father had suffered a work-related accident that left him disabled; he could no longer perform his physically demanding jobs in agriculture and construction. She repeats his cautionary words, “Use your brains, not your hands,” and it’s clear her strength is her family.

Caballero hit the ground running as soon as she transferred to Berkeley. Her eyes shone with excitement describing the transition, especially in Professor Laura Pérez’s Chicana feminism class, where she discovered an interest in Chicana performance art to compliment her study of Chicano literature.

Caballero sees her work in comparatively analyzing forms of indigeneity in Chicano culture as fulfilling both intellectual and social concerns. She envisions her role in the academy as part of the larger movement toward continuing to broaden the parameters of “American” literature and culture. Through her career as a scholar, she hopes to use her intellectual work as an exemplar so that her students might nurture their own aspirations. For her work as a Mellon Fellow, Professor Genaro Padilla of the English department will serve as her mentor.

The only one of her four siblings and the first in her family to attend college, Caballero is already changing her community’s notion that Berkeley and schools like Berkeley are “for geniuses.” The reality is that higher education draws its strength from students as committed to their curiosity as Caballero.

Book that made CC first love reading: The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros

Book that made CC first love scholarship: Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America by Mae M. Ngai

Favorite Berkeley smell: incense (“…someone always seems to be burning it.”)

Favorite affective response to literature: challenged

Teresa Jimenez
Hometown: Berkeley, California; Portland, Oregon (born: Guadalajara, Mexico)

About TJ: When telling me why she worked after finishing high school before going to college, Jimenez stops to consider, “I just kept getting promoted,” and smiles. Even chatting with her briefly, it’s not hard to figure out why.

She affectionately calls her mother, whose family is from West Virginia and Pennsylvania, a “hippie Catholic,” to explain how it is her older brother and sister came to be born in Yugoslavia and Zambia, respectively. Her father preferred that she be born in Guadalajara, although she lived in Berkeley until she was eleven. Jimenez’s parents met as students at Laney College in Oakland, before they transferred to Cal to finish their undergraduate degrees. Jimenez would later move to Portland – where she attended high school – with her mother, who had by then converted to Buddhism.

Returning to Berkeley after high school, Jimenez worked in local restaurants, where promotions kept her busy and writing creatively kept her imagination fueled. Two years ago, Jimenez decided it was time to go back to school. “I knew from the get-go,” she says, “that I wanted to be an English major and that I wanted to go to school full time.” Her mother has an M.A. in education and her father completed his PhD in Berkeley’s Spanish department. Teaching, suffice to say, is in her blood. “I idolize teachers; I always have.”

She says of her aspirations for mentorship in the academy: “I want all my students to know that academia or writing are possibilities for them.” Jimenez is equally dedicated to her scholarship and to her creative writing and wants her students to feel authorized to explore all their writerly voices. Currently, Jimenez envisions working with her mentor, Professor José Saldivar of the English department, on a project that compares W.E.B. DuBois’ idea of “double-consciousness” with Gloria Anzaldúa’s “mestiza.” Jimenez is also interested in exploring representations of alienation and solidarity in the work of Sandra Cisneros and Toni Morrison.

Book that made TJ first love reading: The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkein; Greek mythology; The Yellow Fairy Tale Book by Andrew Lang; Mexican folktales

Book that made TJ first love scholarship: Collected Poems by Pablo Neruda

Favorite Berkeley smell: jasmine

Favorite affective response to literature: inspired/empowered

Read full post....

Undergraduate Major Spends a Research Summer at Yale

UC Berkeley is famous for inspiring its undergraduates to pursue advanced degrees in graduate school, and the English Department is no exception. Senior English major Ana Schwartz, one of the department’s very promising young scholars, spent this past summer participating in Yale University’s Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship, where she was funded by the Leadership Alliance, a program that helps to prepare minorities who are under-represented in the academy for graduate school. A Mexican-American who grew up in Sonoma County and a transfer student to Berkeley, Ana reports that she was a bit dumb-founded by the gothic grandeur of a university like Yale (and she also reports that she was happy to return to the sunshine and tall trees of Berkeley’s campus).

As a participant in the program, Ana spent her summer exploring the rich holdings of Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library. She was paired with a faculty advisor from Yale, with whom she met once a week to discuss the progress and development of her research. Though she initially began with a plan to think about Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, she quickly turned to more contemporary issues. What is the ambivalent relationship that contemporary “highbrow” culture has to the phenomenon of the Oprah Book Club?, she wondered. What is the resistance to this kind of “democratization” of literature in the hands of a minority female leader? Indeed, how is the “female reader” figured in contemporary popular discourses and why is there such a critique of “book clubs” in general? These questions led her to trace the representation of and response to Oprah’s book club in the New York Times and the ways in which these representations either coincided or diverged from treatments of Toni Morrison’s difficult book Beloved (which, Ana noted, Oprah has never chosen as a selection despite having starred in the film version).

Ana’s research culminated in a presentation at a conference in Hartford where all the undergraduates who were funded by the Leadership Alliance (and who had spent their summers at over 20 different universities) met to exchange their ideas. As one of the few humanities students in a sea of scientists (of the 25 students at Yale alone, only 5 were in the humanities or social sciences), Ana quickly found her niche and reports having stimulating conversations about a wide range of issues.

Ana is currently working on an honors thesis that, at the time of this writing, is provisionally about the mother-daughter dynamic in postcolonial literature. She was one of Berkeley’s nominees for the Rhodes Scholarship (no small feat, to be sure) and has applied to graduate programs in English and American Studies. She hopes to continue her work on contemporary literary and cultural issues, especially the role that literature plays in the process of immigration and naturalization.

Read full post....

The Importance of Being "Ernest"

The following is an account, written by first-year student Marsha Polovets, about the Freshman Seminar she took this semester. Freshman and Sophomore seminars are one-credit courses given by a faculty member to a small group of lower-division students to explore a scholarly topic of mutual interest together. Marsha has been enrolled in Professor Katherine Snyder’s “Rethinking Hemingway” course which focused on gender issues and the way they have reinvigorated Hemingway studies over the past two decades.
***

On the first day of class, Professor Snyder asked the students to list what images or words we associated with this iconic author. The entries on the board quickly piled up: “expatriate,” “fishing,” “war,” “journalist,” “bullfighting,” “stoicism,” “alcoholic,” and so on. Many answers flashed through my mind, but now that I look back on it, the most important one never came until writing this blog. Hemingway was special to me because I associated him with my grandfather through his rugged character, his love for boxing, and his noble looks. I signed up for the class because I wanted to see the essence of the man and the writer. Do I still connect Hemingway to my grandfather? In some ways yes, and in some ways probably no, but I definitely appreciate Hemingway more than I did before.

The course began with analytical essays by literary critics Debra Moddelmog and Thomas Strychacz who posed challenging questions about the role of masculinity and identity in Hemingway’s works and introduced us to some of the themes and issues we would encounter. First we tackled a chapter from Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway’s highly idiosyncratic study of Spanish bullfighting. Next, we read a selection of short stories, including “Indian Camp,” “The Battler” and “Big Two-Hearted River,” and discussed the ways in which race, sexuality, and gender intersect as well as how Hemingway understands both his male and female characters. The character of Margot Macomber in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” particularly intrigued us: is she weak or powerful? does she mean to save or kill her husband? does his death destroy or liberate her? Our discussion of this complex female character and Hemingway’s ambivalent attitude toward her set the stage for our reading of the gender-bending Lady Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises. We also focused on the male characters in the story: the epicurean Count Mippipopolous, the Jewish boxer/author/scapegoat Robert Cohn, the bullfighter Pedro Romero, and of course Hemingway’s narrator, Jake Barnes, whose sexual war wound makes him, above all, the emblem of masculine lack in the novel and, paradoxically, its epitome of ideal manhood.

Our discussions in the class engaged issues of form as well as content, as we considered how Hemingway’s style—at once concretely descriptive and yet leaving much unspoken, at once flowingly associative and yet awkwardly abrupt—might be understood in gendered terms. Is there such a thing, we asked, as “masculine style,” and what are its implications for narrative voice, character development, and symbolic meaning? Since this was just a one-unit seminar, we didn’t write any full-scale, formal essays, but each week students posted informal responses to the readings and to each others’ comments on our bSpace course website, enabling us to engage more actively with the readings and to develop questions for class discussions. In the final weeks of the course, we reading some parodies from The Best of Bad Hemingway, and then try our hands at writing (and reading aloud in class) our own Hemingway parodies: Hemingway-style prose so bad that it’s good!

The seminar has been a wonderful introduction to Hemingway’s works, and it helped me improve my analytic skills. Professor Snyder really challenged the class to be active readers and look for deeper meanings in the texts. She encouraged us to question the notion that there is a unified essence of masculinity and to recognize that Hemingway’s work can be interpreted in many different ways. I learned that I am interested in exploring the role of gender and identity in literature, and I began to read from a new point of view. It was a special way to start my journey at Cal, and I am very thankful for it. Hemingway has been transformed from a cultural figure and the symbol of masculinity to a complicated person and an insightful author whose works possess an intricate, challenging style and reflects some of the most beautiful and human emotions. I hope to return to Hemingway in the future and “rethink” him again, remembering what I learned in Professor Snyder’s class. Like my grandfather, “Papa Hemingway” will always hold a special place in my heart.

Read full post....

Literature and the Environment

In what follows, fourth-year English major Stacy Lee gives a brief meditation on what is it like to balance a study of literature with her second major, Conservation & Resource Studies.
***

When I see aching beauty in T. S. Eliot’s verses or understand why a no-till system is beneficial for soil fertility, I get the same kind of joy in learning something new and interpreting it in my own way. Because I major in both English and Conservation & Resource Studies, I constantly adjust my vision to see the connections between both fields. In analyzing novels, for instance, the role of the environment often goes unnoticed in the pursuit of a character’s agency. Yet, we are realizing the significant impact of nature in our lives now more than ever; why should it be any different when it comes to the works created to reflect our experiences? The resources within a region have a way of shaping how communities think, behave, and live. Perhaps the closest we come to this realization is through poetry: Whitman aptly writes, “if you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.”

So much of our humanity lies within our environment. Agriculture itself is a story of humans trying to manipulate nature, a world of struggles between protagonists. The greatest tragedy can be found not in books but on marginal lands and waters, in which farmers and fishermen export their food in debt-accumulating systems that leave them too poor to feed themselves. What is more horrifying than societies which consume resources at a rate that reduces the quality of life for future generations? Do we have any agency in determining how this story will end? These are the questions that my English classes inspire me to ask, to find the human heart that beats beneath policies of conservation and behind the manmade sources of particulate matter in parts per million. Just as we try to explain ourselves with words, we also define our humanity with our interactions with nature.

Balancing the two majors is not hard (obtaining advisors’ codes from both L&S and CNR is another story) when I remember to acknowledge a holistic perspective that connections are everywhere between English and Conservation & Resource Studies. I equally admire the flowing syntax of William Cronon’s works in environmental history and that of Tobias Wolff’s short stories. And I see how the portrayal of resource extraction in Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness is not much different than what continues today. In a narrow view, it would be easy to create a simplified dichotomy between nature and culture. But studying both has taught me otherwise: each becomes a lens through which I can examine the other and enrich my understanding. My hope is that others might also adjust their sights for another look.

Read full post....

Undergraduate English Major Combines Literature and Medicine

Medical school is not necessarily the “traditional” career path of English majors, but department alumna Elana Shpall, who graduated in 2007, has found a program that allows her to combine her humanist interests with research in science and medicine. Unsurprisingly, this forward-thinking course of study is the Joint Medical Program at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health and the UCSF School of Medicine, where Elana is a first-year student.

Elana reports that she was always curious about the functioning of the body and used to page through her sister’s medical school books. But she found the draw to literature at Berkeley too difficult to resist. Though she had been considering a number of courses of study as an undergraduate, she said that reading Mrs. Dalloway in Professor John Bishop’s 45C course clinched her decision to major in English. It was reading Ulysses with Professor Bishop in his Fall 2005 course on the Modern Novel, however, when Elana began to perceive a way to connect what seemed to her like unbridgeable discourses. Joyce’s famous investigation of the body in his novel stimulated Elana to keep reading Ulysses (the “Lestrygonians” episode in which Joyce treats the digestive system is her favorite part) as it also made her enroll in science classes to investigate the subject from a different point of view.

As Elana combined her science classes with volunteering experiences in the immune-compromised unit at Oakland Children’s Hospital and began to foresee a fruitful career in medicine, she was not willing to give up her interests in literature. The Joint Medical Program was a perfect fit for her because, after an intensive summer course in gross anatomy, it offers its students a holistic, case-study approach to learning medicine. Rather than didactic lectures, Elana and her classmates receive a patient scenario which they are expected to investigate and recommend treatment for. She says the kind of flexible, creative thinking that she learned as an English major, along with the skills in research and critical reasoning, helps her immensely in this kind of learning. In the meantime, she is also pursuing a scientific research project that explores the relation of Vitamin D to the development of certain types of cancer. After three years of this kind of intellectual exercise in Berkeley, she will spend two years in the hospital at UCSF for her clinical experience. She will graduate in 2013 with an MD and a MS from UCSF and Berkeley, respectively.

Literature remains, however, one of her great loves and she said she has tried to follow Professor Bishop’s advice that everyone should re-read Ulysses before any major life event. So, this past summer, she picked it up again. The demands of a scientific approach to the body in her anatomy class proved daunting, however, and she only made it half-way through the book. She says, though, that she’s marked her place and is waiting for this coming summer to return to it.

Read full post....