March 8, 2015

Dear Provost Regehr,

We are faculty members in the Tri-Campus Department of English. We believe that the University of Toronto administration’s policies on graduate student funding have created a crisis, and have provoked the current strike by the members of CUPE 3902. We write in support of the union’s demand that the funding packages for graduate students be raised.

In our view, the guaranteed funding package is wholly inadequate. As has been widely noted, this sum is significantly below the poverty line for Toronto. Moreover, the sum has remained static since 2008. This has created real financial hardship for many of our students, and increasingly functions as an obstacle to the recruitment of excellent graduate students.

The members of Unit 1 of CUPE 3902 are our students and our future colleagues. We urge that you act quickly to settle this strike before it causes any more damage to the university, its students, and its reputation as a leading institution for teaching and research.

We would be happy to meet with you to elaborate on these points.

Sincerely,

Deirdre Baker

George Elliott Clarke

Paul Downes

Uzoma Essonwane

David Galbraith

Marlene Goldman

Audrey Jaffe

Daniela Janes

Smaro Kamboureli

Mark Knight

Katie Larson

Garry Leonard

Jennifer Levine

Victor Li

Roy Liuzza

Lynne Magnusson

Alice Maurice

Naomi Morgenstern

Andrea Most

Heather Murray

Mary Nyquist

John O’Connor

Julian Patrick

Carol Percy

Stanka Radovic

William Robins

Marjorie Rubright

Chester Scoville

Dana Seitler

Matthew Sergi

Philippa Sheppard

Paul Stevens

Cheryl Suzack

Larry Switzky

David Townsend

Daniel Scott Tysdal

Karina Vernon

Ira Wells

Dan White

Sarah Wilson

Brent Wood

* * *

(pdf version also available)

In preparation for our next GEA meeting (coming up this Thursday, Feb. 5), you may find the minutes of our December meeting here: GEA Meeting 4.12.14. Please note that there have been a couple minor corrections since the minutes which were distributed via the GEA listerv in December, which will be detailed in the secretary’s report. In the interests of saving paper, copies will not be made generally available at this week’s meeting.

The department is excited to introduce a new event this year. The Pre-Modern Research Symposium (PMRS) provides a venue in which medieval and renaissance scholars in our department can present and discuss works in progress.  PMRS aims to foster conversation across what was once conceived as a rigid period divide. In fostering this conversation, PMRS will highlight both the continuities and disjunctures between medieval and renaissance literature.

PMRS will occur four times throughout the 2014/15 academic year. Our first meeting will take place in JHB 719 at 4 pm on Thursday, 30 October, and will feature presentations by Professors Jeremy Lopez and Lynne Magnusson.

This past Sunday saw this year’s iteration of the annual faculty-student softball game, when under cloudy September skies the students won a glorious victory and much fun was had by all. Thanks to the good-natured faculty and friendly students who came out to join the Chapman’s Homers for this afternoon of community and camaraderie!

Graduate Students and Faculty are invited to attend the first Brown Bag Lunch of the year:

“Translation, Reductionism, and Iris Murdoch”

Joshua Gang

JHB 719

Wednesday September 24, 12-1pm

Abstract:

Typically we think about translation as a relation between texts in different languages. But can we also think about translation as a way of effecting scientific reductionism—or as a tool for eliminating metaphysics from philosophy? Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net (1954) asks us to think about translation both these ways. This talk uses Murdoch’s novel  to excavate theories of translation from early analytic philosophy and logical positivism. At a time when so much critical energy is invested in translatability and interdisciplinarity, these reductionist and anti-metaphysical ideas of translation—however antithetical they might seem to literary study—offer us an expanded notion of translation’s entailments and comprise an important precedent to contemporary critical debate.

“No Hostages Through These Doors”:
Thomas Bartlett Whitaker’s “Hell’s Kitchen” and the Politics of PEN

When: Wednesday, March 26, 12-1pm
Who: Professor Ira Wells
Where: JHB 719

Here is a brief abstract of Professor Wells’ talk, please join us for the final Brown Bag Lunch of the semester!

“PEN International, one of the world’s first human rights organizations, has long defended the free speech of persecuted artists. The PEN Prison Writing Program, however, has a slightly different agenda, which is to help convicted criminals become artists. The PEN Prison Writing Program ‘believes in the restorative and rehabilitative power of writing,’ and encourages ‘the use of the written word as a legitimate form of power.’

But what is the nature of the ‘power’ of the written word? And what, moreover, will this power restore and rehabilitate? When PEN proclaims the ‘power’ of the written word, are they honoring an important strand of America’s liberal intellectual heritage, are they pledging allegiance to a romantic coupling of art and freedom, are they inadvertently helping to bind prisoners ever more insidiously to the carceral regime, or are they claiming something that is actually true? This talk, part of a work in progress, addresses these questions through a discussion of Thomas Bartlett Whitaker’s prize-winning essay ‘Hell’s Kitchen.’ I’ll suggest that part of the power of Whitaker’s prison writing resides in its capacity to disrupt the place of the prison in the dreamlife of American power.”

Whitaker’s essay can be found here:
http://72.10.54.216/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5936/prmID/1641

“How Does Religion Fit Into Literary Studies?”

When: Friday, February 28, 12-1pm
Who: Professor Mark Knight
Where: JHB 719

Graduate students and faculty, please join the GEA and Professor Knight for another riotous Brown Bag Lunch:

“In this talk I will consider the challenges of understanding and speaking about religion in literary studies. I’ll do so with brief reference to some of the work I’ve written previously, and more detailed reflections on two current projects: a monograph on Evangelicalism and the Victorian Novel that I’ve almost finished writing, and a 40-essay Companion to Religion and Literature that I’m editing for Routledge. Although the current projects are quite different, they both face similar methodological challenges: how might we think about religion’s mediated forms, how does our literary scholarship make room for theological discourse, what traditions are we referring to when we speak about religion, and what are the limits of critical distance when it comes to our reading of belief?”

“Systems or Nothing”: Physiologia and the History of (Literature and) Science

 When: Thursday, February 6, 12-1pm

Who: Professor Liza Blake

Where: JHB 719

Graduate students and faculty, please join the GEA and Professor Blake for the first Brown Bag Lunch of 2014:

“This presentation will serve as a conversation about a larger book manuscript in progress, entitled ‘Early Modern Literary Physics,’ which argues that early modern literary texts systematically use literary means such as poetic translations, metaphors, plot structures, and dramatic motivation to fashion coherent scientific and philosophical cosmologies. I will articulate a historical and philological argument of the project, which finds a direct correlation between the decline of early modern physics-making and the rise of early modern science, and I will discuss the implications of this historical argument for the narratives we tell about literature and science in early modernity and modernity.”