fall M - Department of English - University of Minnesota

GRADUATE STUDIES
VACUUMS ARE
DANGEROUS: THEY
SUCK EVERYTHING
TOWARDS THEM
Gerri Brightwell
Cold Country
Gerald Duckworth and
Company
By LYNN DEARDEN
Gerri Brightwell’s
first novel, Cold
Country, opens,
appropriately, with a vacuum
metaphor. In addition to its
literary purpose, it also symbolizes
the extraordinary
attraction Brightwell’s writing
possesses. Brightwell’s
central character, Sandra,
claims that “vacuums are dangerous”
because life itself can
become a vacuum, and
Sandra warns that if “you let
the pressure in your life
. . .one is left with graduate work that is an
individual endeavor conducted on an island in
the middle of a stagnant pond.
Behind all of the attractive advertisements and beautified inns
lurk the dangers of the wilderness and natural world, and
underneath the comfortable façade of easyliving also exists
the presence of danger, deception, sickness, and betrayal.
drop…the next thing you know it’s filling
up with dumb ideas, other people’s plans,
the sort of debris that comes loose because
it’s not nailed down.” Sandra’s life is a
train wreck without any direction or focus,
but it is this “debris” and the topsy-turvy
aspect of her life that holds our interest.
Brightwell pulls you into the confused
and chaotic interior world of the indecisive
Sandra, whose uneventful but stable
lifestyle becomes dismantled when she
encounters Fleur, a woman who holds
entirely different beliefs about life, love,
friendship, and trust than Sandra. The
contrast between Sandra and Fleur is striking
from the beginning: while Sandra
champions the importance of appearances
Brightwell—continued on page 15
THE MEMRG SUBGROUP
By ALEX MUELLER
As faculty positions in the
humanities become increasingly
scarce, many graduate
students have begun to operate in survivalist
mode, hiding their research and looking
for ways to outdo their competition and
move up the academic food chain. Such
paranoia often fosters isolated and unchallenged
work that defeats the university’s
vision of collaboration and open discussion
in order to produce innovative scholarship
and social change. Combine this
with students working to reduce the scope
of their study to achieve a specialized mastery
and remain safely within the agreedupon
disciplinary boundaries of their subjects
and one is left with graduate work
that is an individual endeavor conducted
on an island in the middle of a stagnant
pond.
In response, English graduate students
of the Medieval and Early Modern
Research Group (MEMRG) are working to
combine expertise with innovative work
that crosses geographic, periodic, and linguistic
boundaries in order to cooperatively
conduct research. They strive to make
arguments that transcend the safe haven of
“English literature and history” and traditional
studies of early English focused solely
on the well-known heavyweights such as
Geoffrey Chaucer and William
Shakespeare, within historical contexts
limited to the British Isles, and genre categories
such as Arthurian romance, tragedy,
and epic. In doing so, they have joined
recent movements in their field that recognize
the peripheral and previously ignored
elements that have shaped the English language.
In 1995, graduate students Candace
Lines and Eric Daigre branched off from
the Renaissance Subfield to create what
MEMRG--continued on page 16
ENGLISH AT MINNESOTA
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