A Feast of Words - Fall 2006 - Department of English - Virginia Tech

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From the Chair by Carolyn Rude Carolyn Rude assumed the position of department chair in May, when Lucinda Roy stepped down to pursue her creative writing and outreach projects. Carolyn joined the Virginia Tech faculty in 2003, after 22 years at Texas Tech University. At Virginia Tech, she served as the Director of Graduate Studies in English from 2004 to 2006, and she led the development of the PhD proposal in Rhetoric and Writing, which was approved in May 2006. The English Department has been expanding its identity over the past several years as it has defined specializations within the undergraduate English major, launched an MFA in Creative Writing, and proposed a PhD in Rhetoric and Writing. The PhD program will admit students for fall 2007. This expansion makes it clear that “English” has a complex identity. We have recognized and affirmed the traditional study of literature and language, but we have also embraced cultural studies, creative writing, composition, professional writing, and rhetoric. We seem to know intuitively that English is important in aesthetics and academics, but those interests, which seem at odds with business and politics, are now yoked to them within our department. Our specializations within English Studies represent quite a lot of diversity, but to add to the complexity, they are also interdisciplinary. We study literature in its historical and political contexts and draw from psychology and philosophy to explain specific texts and to understand the role of literature in individual lives and in the world. Rhetoric, developed to enable citizens to participate in a democracy, inherently connects to the political and social world. Professional writing moves English into business and the work of nonprofits and government. Creative writing and composition know no limits for topics for stories, poems, plays, and essays. Our reach is wide. On the one hand, it is reassuring that English touches and influences all parts of our lives. That’s better than being on the margins as the world races on. But what is our center? What connects all these uses of English? What do we contribute to the university and its students, to the state and the public who help to fund the university, and to the world? How do we represent ourselves as we develop in multiple ways? These are questions we will ponder as we implement our programs. One thing that binds us is our common commitment to teaching and to our students. That value has not changed as we have moved in new directions. I have been reading the spring teaching evaluations. Across specializations, students are enthusiastic about course content, and they admire the knowledge of the faculty. They appreciate the interest and attention of the faculty. This excellence characterizes our department throughout all the teaching ranks, including our beginning teachers, the GTAs. In this department, excellence is average. Our use of words connects us. Whether we write stories or appeals, whether we read poems or proposals, we are engaged by our craft. We love using words well, we are charged and moved by exquisite, sometimes surprising, uses of words by others, and we admire the revelation of a fresh perspective on a problem as represented in a text. We are engaged by the power of words to articulate and shape feelings, beliefs, values, and actions. We use words - in the senses of creating great metaphors, getting at something inexpressible, discovering something we had not known before writing or reading, calling attention to a problem that had not been recognized, directing the energies of decision makers. Sometimes we use words by writing them, sometimes by invoking them, sometimes by reading and interpreting them. Our expansive directions confirm that our work, whatever the specialization, matters in the world. The stories we write define our culture and make it cohere. Because people study these stories in our classes, there’s a shared sense of values. The whole culture nods at a quotation from Shakespeare and understands, in a kind of shorthand, the meanings that it invokes. Our essays and proposals have the same kind of power in other contexts. We find our common roots in the liberal arts and the humanities, the studies that enable informed people to live together in freedom. Language allows us to explore nuance, ambiguity, and diversity, passion as well as rationality, the human experience on the most intimate and most grand scales. Language allows us to reason and to persuade. Our comprehensive English Department embraces all of these purposes. Before I became chair, the faculty and its leaders set the department on an ambitious course by imagining what “English” could mean in this university and beyond. We are moving in new directions while holding on to our common values. I celebrate our expansion, and I am optimistic about our future as a department as we declare the reach and power of English Studies in the world and in our lives. I am honored by the trust of the faculty in choosing me to be chair, and I am committed to continuing the work that has been started with such energy and vision. The world is a text. Read it. Write it. 2 A Feast of Words
In Memoriam: Dr. Charles Modlin by Hilbert H. Campbell Probably the thing that most people will remember about my good friend and colleague Charles Modlin, who died on January 1, 2006, is his ability to make and keep friends. Although he was about as far from being a gladhander or backslapper as one could get, Charlie genuinely exemplified the term “good-natured.” Without any tint of condescension, flattery, or insincerity, he simply met people where he found them and treated them as equals and friends. I used to kid him about being the “friend to the friendless,” meaning that he would find a way to form friendships with people who otherwise had no friends. For example, I had a colleague at Marshall University in the 1960’s who was notorious for either pointedly ignoring or insulting his colleagues. I plead guilty to disliking him thoroughly. So I was quite surprised to learn, years later in talking to Charlie, that not only had he been the man’s friend when they both taught at West Virginia University but that they also had remained friends and correspondents through the intervening years. This is but one example of his determination to hold onto friends once made. I’ve never known anyone who tried harder to keep up contacts with friends from the past, ranging from his fourth-grade teacher to schoolmates, college friends, former neighbors or colleagues. Charlie’s friends also agree that he was completely unpretentious and that he reserved his contempt – and privately it could be fairly fierce – for any kind of pretentiousness. Charlie was born January 23, 1937, at Sistersville, W. Va. His father, Rev. H. Eugene Modlin, was a distinguished Methodist minister who was reassigned periodically to new locations, so Charlie grew up in various West Virginia cities and towns, including Fairmont, Montgomery, Clarksburg, and Huntington. He began college at Marshall in Huntington but soon transferred to West Virginia Wesleyan, where he not only completed his undergraduate studies (1958) but also met his wife of almost 48 years, Marjorie McCullough of the Bronx, New York. He completed a Master’s degree at Michigan State University (1959) and began his doctoral work at Brown University. The responsibility for a young family, however (son Andy, daughter Greta), meant that his further graduate studies would be interrupted by periods of teaching as an instructor at West Virginia University and at Western Kentucky University before he completed his Ph.D. in English at the University of Tennessee (1968). In 1968 Charlie began a long teaching career in the English department at Virginia Tech, continuing even after his normal retirement date to serve the department as scheduler and also to conduct for several years the department’s Study Abroad program, carefully planning each year to insure that the summers in England and Scotland would be exciting and enriching for his students. As an instructor of American literature and other subjects, such as folklore, Charlie was knowledgeable, personable, and approachable; but he was also an exacting teacher who did not seek an easy popularity. His greatest satisfaction as a professor came mainly, I believe, from his contacts with the occasional undergraduate or graduate student who was willing to engage genuinely with a subject and wanted to go further with it. It was not unusual for such students to seek him out for independent study. Although Charlie’s dissertation area was Early American literature, he soon shifted his principal scholarly interest to Twentiethcentury American literature, and particularly to the seminal Ohio author Sherwood Anderson. I, of course, shared this keen interest in Anderson with Charlie over many years. We had the unparalleled advantages not only that Anderson lived in Southwest Virginia for the last fifteen years of his life but also that we met and became friends with his widow, Eleanor Copenhaver Anderson, who was an unfailing source of inspiration, information, and support for our studies over many years prior to her death in 1985. Going about his work without fanfare, Charlie became one of the two or three key Anderson scholars of our generation. In addition to publishing a great many informative articles, he edited two separate (and superb) collections of Anderson’s correspondence, published a wellreceived edition of the author’s short stories and three additional books in collaboration with other Anderson scholars, and for sixteen years was the principal editor of the journal/newsletter devoted to Anderson, called The Winesburg Eagle and later The Sherwood Anderson Review. Among numerous other contributions, he was for twenty years the treasurer and most active trustee of the Sherwood Anderson literary estate; served for twenty-five years as a judge for the annual Sherwood Anderson short story contest; planned and administered an international conference on Anderson at Virginia Tech in 1991; organized programs and panels devoted to Anderson at meetings of the American Literature Association and elsewhere; and for several years was one of the directors of the Sherwood Anderson Foundation. Appropriately enough, Charlie spent much time during the last year of his life helping the University of Wisconsin Press get Professor Walter Rideout’s definitive biography, Sherwood Anderson: A Writer in America, ready for publication, a task that illness prevented Rideout himself from doing. Volume One, with Charlie’s introduction, was published earlier this year, and Volume Two is soon to be published. Certainly one of the most prominent and meaningful strands of my own life has been my long, close, and productive association with Charlie. His affability and his tendency to “compartmentalize” some main aspects of his life caused many people to think of him, I believe, as something of a one-dimensional personality. Those who knew him better, including myself, realized that he was much more complicated, truly remarkable – among other attributes – for intellect, humanity, and integrity. His relish for the Carter family or the Grand Ole Opry coexisted with a passion for Metropolitan Opera broadcasts. Through the years of my friendship with him, I was aware there were aspects of his character and personality that I was only glimpsing, if that. His family wrote in his obituary that he was a good man, and I certainly agree. But all I really know for sure about Charles Modlin is that he was the best friend I ever had. Fall 2006 3
Page 1: The Department of English Newslette
Page 5 and 6: sional life. Inquiry, the first nav
Page 7 and 8: think of numerous reasons to take t
Page 9 and 10: Graduate Student Conference: With P
Page 11 and 12: A Celebration of Students, March 30
Page 13 and 14: All Write @Virgnia Tech 2006 by Enn
Page 15 and 16: From the Distinguished Alumni Board

A Feast of Words - Fall 2006 - Department of English - Virginia Tech

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