spring M - Department of English - University of Minnesota

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTADepartment of English Language & Literature207 Lind Hall; 207 Church Street S.E.Minneapolis, MN 55455–0134Non Profit Org.US PostagePAIDMinneapolis, MNPermit #155F R O M T H E C H A I RATMINNESOTAHancher, continued from page 2dissertations so far, and still counting (seehttp://english.cla.umn.edu/graduateprogram/alumni/2000s.html).That begins toapproach the number produced during thedoctoral program’s first half-century-plus: 48dissertations from 1897 to 1949. A list ofthose dissertations, recently recovered fromlibrary records, is now posted at http://english.cla.umn.edu/graduateprogram/alumni/1897-1949.html.The complete set ofpages at our site now reports all of our dissertationsfrom 1897 to 2004—bridging threecenturies! The Department of English atMinnesota was one the few departments thatbegan to offer doctoral education late in thenineteenth century; others include Harvard,Yale, Chicago, and Michigan.Something of the history of the profession canbe gauged by reading the titles of our disserta-tions. Unfortunately not all the dissertationsthemselves survive. For example, VioletDeLille Jayne’s dissertation, “The Techniqueof George Eliot’s Novels” (1903), has disappeared.Just a trace remains in the synopsis,published in PMLA in 1901, of “TheTechnique of Adam Bede,” a paper that sheread in Chicago that year. Adam Bedeappeared in 1859: not exactly contemporaryfiction in Jayne’s day, but not ancient either.Charles Abbeymeyer’s dissertation, presentedin 1900, reached further back: “Old EnglishPoetical Motives Derived from the Doctrine ofSin.” The department’s first dissertation concernednot literature, modern nor ancient,but linguistics: E. Porter Chittenden, “TheLabial Series in English Sounds” (1897).In 1901 PMLA reported that the sameViolet D. Jayne, already a professor at theUniversity of Illinois, was nominated vice-presidentof the Central Division of the ModernLanguage Association. (Her advisor atMinnesota, Charles F. McClumpha, was amember of the nominations committee.) Twoyears later, having completed her dissertationon Eliot, Jayne became the first woman toearn a Ph.D. from our department. The secondwas Marie Caroline Lyle, who wrote“The Original Identity of the York andTownley Cycles” (1917). The third was MaryEllen Chase, author of “A Comparative Studyof Several Versions of Thomas Hardy’sNovels, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of theD’Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure” (1922). Fora thoughtful account of Chase’s career, atMinnesota and elsewhere, see the article byUniversity Historian Ann Pflaum, beginningon p. 10.ENGLISHATMINNESOTAENGLISH AT MINNESOTA