Fourteenth Annual Conference 2008, Philadelphia, PA (PDF)

The 14th Annual Conference ofThe Association ofLiterary Scholarsand CriticsOctober 24-26, 2008Sheraton Society Hill HotelPhiladelphia, Pennsylvania

Literature Titlesfrom Oxford Journalswww.adaptation.oxfordjournals.orgADAPTATIONAdaptation provides aninternational forum totheorise and interrogate thephenomenon of literatureon screen from both aliterary and film studiesperspective.www.alh.oxfordjournals.orgAMERICAN LITERARYHISTORYCovering the study of USliterature from its originsthrough to the present,American Literary Historyprovides a much-neededforum for the various,often competing voicesof contemporary literaryinquiry.www.camqtly.oxfordjournals.orgTHE CAMBRIDGEQUARTERLYThe Cambridge Quarterlywas established on theprinciple that literature is anart, and that the purpose ofart is to give pleasure andenlightenment. It devotesitself to literary criticismand its fundamental aimis to take a critical look ataccepted views.www.cww.oxfordjournals.orgCONTEMPORARYWOMEN’S WRITINGCWW assesses writingby women authors from1970 to the present. Itreflects retrospectively ondevelopments throughoutthe period, to survey thevariety of contemporarywork, and to anticipatethe new and provocativewomen’s writing.www.english.oxfordjournals.orgENGLISHPublished on behalf ofThe English Association,English contains essayson major works of Englishliterature or on topics ofgeneral literary interest,aimed at readers withinuniversities and collegesand presented in a livelyand engaging style.www.eic.oxfordjournals.orgESSAYS IN CRITICISMFounded in 1951, Essaysin Criticism soon achievedworld-wide circulation, andis today regarded as one ofBritain’s most distinguishedjournals of literary criticism.Essays in Criticism coversthe whole field of EnglishLiterature from Chaucer tothe present day.www.litimag.oxfordjournals.orgLITERARY IMAGINATIONLiterary Imagination isa forum for all thoseinterested in the distinctivenature, uses, and pleasuresof literature, from ancient tomodern, in all languages.www.fmls.oxfordjournals.orgFORUM FOR MODERNLANGUAGE STUDIESFMLS publishes articleson all aspects of literaryand linguistic studies, fromthe Middle Ages to thepresent day, reflecting onthe essential pluralism oflanguage and literaturestudies and providing aforum for worldwidescholarly discussion.www.litthe.oxfordjournals.orgLITERATURE ANDTHEOLOGYLiterature and Theologyprovides a forum forinterdisciplinary dialogue,inviting both close textualanalysis and broadertheoretical speculation asways of exploring howreligion is embeddedwithin culture.www.fs.oxfordjour nals.orgFRENCH STUDIESFrench Studies publishesarticles and reviewscovering language andlinguistics, all periods andaspects of literature inFrance and the Frenchspeakingworld, thoughtand the history of ideas,cultural studies, film, andcritical theory.www.nq.oxfordjournals.orgNOTES & QUERIESThe primary intention ofNotes & Queries is theasking and answeringof readers’ questions. Itis devoted principally toEnglish language andliterature, lexicography,history, and scholarlyantiquarianism.www.fsb.oxfordjournals.orgFRENCH STUDIESBULLETINFrench Studies Bulletinsupplements FrenchStudies with a number ofadditional featuresincluding commentary onpublished articles, societynews, and upcomingconference details.www.res.oxfordjournals.orgALSO...www.library.oxfordjournals.orgTHE LIBRARYFor more than a hundredyears The Library hasbeen the pre-eminent UKscholarly journal for thestudy of bibliography andof the role of the book inhistory.THE YEAR’S WORK INENGLISH STUDIESwww.ywes.oxfordjournals.orgTHE YEAR’S WORK INCRITICAL & CULTURALTHEORYwww.ywcct.oxfordjournals.orgTHE REVIEW OF SCREENENGLISH STUDIESwww.screen.oxfordjournals.orgRES is the leadingscholarly journal in thefield of English literatureand language. Emphasisis on historical scholarshiprather than interpretativecriticism, though freshevaluation of writers andtheir work are also offered.2 2008 ALSC Conference ProgramLitJnlsSept08_RESEIZED.indd 1 6/10/08 10:49:38

Presenting Partnersfor 2008 ConferenceTable of Contents4 ALSC Featured Presenters5 Schedule of Events7 Hotel Map, PresentersMajor Conference SupportDaniel & Joanna S. RoseMajor GrantsThe Lynde and HarryBradley FoundationMajor In-Kind Donations ofFacilities and ServicesAssociation Legal ServicesCommonwealth Promotion/Betty FultonMcDermott, Will & EmeryVolunteer Lawyers for the Arts of Mass.Washington CollegeGrant to Support Designof Literary MattersBoston University Editorial Institute2008 Gift Membership DonorsChristopher Ricks a Rosanna Warren13 Dining and Entertainment in Philadelphia15 ALSC Council, Officers, and Committees2008 ALSC Fund DonorsLiterary Partner($1,000 to $2,499)James R. BridgelandDaniel RoseLeila E. B. LuceThe Louise TaftSemple FoundationTitan ($500-$999)Christopher RicksHero ($250-$499)Rosanna WarrenGuardian($100-$249)Anonymous Gift (1)Morris DicksteinJames EngellReginald GibbonsRachel HadasJanice P. and JohnH. HallDexter JeffriesMarnie PomeroyRudolph S. RasinWalter E. RexRoger H. SchultzFrederick T. SpeersMichael WoodHelper (Up to $99)Anonymous Gift (4)Brian J. BuchananSusan BullockKatherine ButlerChristina EmrickAnita FeldmanStephen MerriamFoleyJames GeisendorferSusan DorranceKopecekMary Anne O’NeilRoger L. ParsonsAdelaide RussoMatt D. UhlerJohn W. VelzWilliam Vesterman2008 Premium MembersPatron LevelMillicent BellMaxine HartleyLisa RodenskyMargaret SoltanDennis TaylorContributing LevelEileen AbrahamsAnnette AllenJohn BoeningHarold W. BrightmanKatherine ButlerPeter CampionClare CavanaghJames W. ChichettoJennifer ClarvoeDavid G. ClemensChris CoffmanClark DavisPamela DicksonMorris DicksteinStephen M. FoleyWilliam FleschEdwin FrankBruce M. GansThomas P. GardnerRobert A.D. GrantWilliam GreenRachel HadasGeorge HeldDexter JeffriesSung Ryol KimTimothy KirkJames LongenbachSara MackEdward MendelsonGary Saul MorsonLawrence E. OelschlegelMary Anne O’NeilElise PartridgeDan PatrickAnita PattersonMarjorie PerloffMarnie PomeroyDaniel RoseDavid J. RothmanAdelaide RussoJohn SitterJeffrey SmithMichael SnedikerFrederick T. SpeersStanley N. StewartLinda K. StillmanErnest SuarezMatt D. UhlerJoseph UrbasPatricia WallaceMarina WarnerRosanna WarrenDaniel WebsterJoshua WeinerMilton L. WelchSusan J. WolfsonMichael WoodJoint DomesticWarren Dwyer andJannett K. HighfillJohn and HelenSchoenhals HartJay L. Halio and DianeIsaacsRobert and JeanHollanderX. J. and Dorothy M.KennedyTeresa E. and JosephE. KneuerThomas R. and MaxineC. MarkJennifer and JosephPalladinoSid and Caren SilvesterMark and Anya TaylorPhiladelphia, October 24-26 3

Featured PresentersFeaturedSpeakerFriday Evening ReadersJhumpa LahiriJane HirshfieldJ.D. McClatchyJoyce Carol OatesEdmund WhitePhoto © 2007 Elena SeibertPhoto by Nick RoszaPhoto by James HamiltonPhoto by Marion EttlingerPhoto by Sophie Bassouls2008 Conference CommitteeChairJohn TalbotBrigham Young UniversitySaskia HamiltonBarnard CollegeJack KolbUniversity of California, Los AngelesChristopher RicksBoston UniversityRosanna WarrenBoston UniversitySusan WolfsonPrinceton UniversityMichelle YehUniversity of California, DavisALSC owes a great debt of gratitude to ourconference committee chairman, John Talbot,and the members of his committee. It is theirhard work, generosity, leadership, and visionthat made this year’s conference possible.4 2008 ALSC Conference Program

Schedule of EventsFriday, October 24, 200810:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.Registration................................................................Ballroom FoyerSaturday, October 25, 20088:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.Exhibits..............................................................................Cook Room11:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.Exhibits..............................................................................Cook Room2:00 p.m.–3:45 p.m.Sappho and Her Afterlife: Performance, Reception, andTranslation..................................................................Ballroom CDConvener: Ellen Greene (University of Oklahoma)Sarah Barnsley (University of London): “Sappho, Mary Barnard andAmerican Modernism”Andre Lardinois (Radboud University): “New Philology and the NewSappho”Holt Parker (University of Cincinnati): “Sappho on Stage”Diane Rayor (Grand Valley State University): “The New Sappho andIssues of Translation”Dimitrios Yatromanolakis (Johns Hopkins University): “Archaic Songmakingand Anonymous Lyric Compositions”4:00 p.m.–5:15 p.m.To Read or Not To Read: A Question of NationalConsequence..................................................................Ballroom CDConvener: Mark Bauerlein (Emory University)Discussant: Sunil Iyengar (National Endowment for the Arts)Warren Carson (University of South Carolina Upstate): “To ReadPoetry, Expansion, Excellence, and Enjoyment in the AP EnglishLiterature Program”Bruce M. Gans (Wright College): “Sans Words, Sans Ideas, SansMuch of a Chance”Joseph Levens (The Summerset Review): “Where the NEA ReportFalls Short, and Ideas on Improving the Reading Crisis”Susan Strehle (Binghamton University): “To Read Fiction:Expansion, Excellence, and Enjoyment in the Advanced PlacementLiterature Program”5:45 p.m.–6:45 p.m.Reception and Presidential Address.......................Hamilton RoomChristopher Ricks (Boston University)7:00 p.m.–11:00 p.m.Readings, Q&A, andBook Signings.............................................................Ballroom CDA conversation on literary biography (both fictional and factual)between Joyce Carol Oates and Edmund White, and readings bypoet-translators Jane Hirshfield and J.D. McClatchy8:30 a.m.–10:15 a.m.Concurrent SeminarsInterpreting the Shifting Texts of Dickinsonand/or Whitman..................................................... Shippen RoomConvener: Don Share (Poetry magazine)Jessica Beard (University of California, Santa Cruz): “‘Bound—atrouble—’: Literature, the Archive, the Canon, and the Classroom”Owen Boynton (Cornell University): “Omitting Ellipses: Whitman’sLosses from ’55”Archie Burnett (Boston University): “Editing Posthumously”James W. Chichetto (Stonehill College): “Editing Dickinson”Gabrielle Dean (Johns Hopkins University): “DIY Dickinson: FakeFascicles, or, A Teaching Edition”E. Thomas Finan (Boston University): “Visions and Re-Visions: TheWhole and the Part in Editing Dickinson and Whitman”Martin Greenup (Harvard University): “Title divine - is mine!”Marc Mancinelli (Sterling High School): “Whitman: Poet of The Merge”Paige Morgan (University of Washington): “I Read the Body Electric:The Importance of Size on the World Wide Web”Richard A. Nanian (George Mason University): “‘Too Much ofArticulation’: Whitman’s Long Retreat”Gillian Osborne (University of California, Berkeley): “Dickinson’sWriting as Enactment”Ethel Rackin (Princeton University): “EncounteringWhitman’s Ellipses”Beth Staley (West Virginia University): “Editing Dickinson -Inevitable Antinomy, Architextural Possibility”Emily Taylor Merriman (San Francisco State University): “‘TitleDivine is Mine!’:The Enlightening Challenges of Labeling EmilyDickinsons Verse Texts”Joyce P. Wilson (Suffolk University): “Emily Dickinson’s Poetry:Typographical Versions and Presentations”Literary Magazines: Meeting Places.....................Reynolds RoomConvener: Morris Dickstein (CUNY Graduate Center)Yaser Amad (University of Texas, Austin): “‘Notes & Comments’ inThe New Criterion”John Baxter (Dalhousie University): “Offspring of Scrutiny”Eric Bennett (Harvard University): “The Rockefeller Nexus”Zachary Bos (Boston University): “The Use of Campus Magazines”Peter Campion (Auburn University): “Literary Imagination”Nora Delaney (Boston University): “On the Editorial Personality”Travis Kurowski (University of Southern Mississippi): “In Exile andAgainst Criticism: The Paris Review and the Branding of ModernLiterature”Brian McDonald (Washington, D.C.): “The Hudson Review”Molly McQuade (New York, NY): “Rejecting the Editor: Aunt Harriet’sHate Mail”David L. Mikics (University of Houston): “The Literary Magazine asthe Imagination of Another Culture: The Cases of Partisan Reviewand Arion”Philadelphia, October 24-26 5

Schedule of Events, continuedLee Oser (College of the Holy Cross): “The Criterion”Willard Spiegelman (Southern Methodist University): “SouthwestReview”Cliff Thompson (Current Biography): “Threepenny Review: TheIndividual in the Wide World”Chris Walsh (Boston University): “The Literary Magazine as Ark”Valeri Whitmer (CUNY Graduate Center): “Urban Cheek: Smart Versein the Early Years of the New Yorker”Uniform Spines: Book Series................................... Flower RoomConvener: David Yezzi (The New Criterion)Peter Cortland (Quinnipiac University): “Modern Library and Everyman”Lewis Dabney (University of Wyoming): “Edmund Wilson in the SeriesHe Inspired: The First Volumes of the Library of America edition”Jennifer Formichelli (Boston University): “Bad Good Books”Edwin Frank (New York Review of Books): “Editing the New YorkReview of Books Classics Series”Ernest Hilbert (Bauman Rare Books): “Three Types of Uniformity”Alexis Kirschbaum (Penguin Classics): “You Call That a ModernClassic?”Jim McCue (London, U.K.): “The Faber Poets”Patrick Redding (Yale University): “Using the Library of AmericaSeries to Study Modern Poetry”Joseph Urbas (Universite Michel De Montaigne - Bordeaux III): “Howan American Author Becomes a French Classic: Herman Melville inthe Bibliothèque de la Pléiade”Rachel Wetzsteon (William Paterson University): “The PenguinClassics Interviews”Frances Whistler (Boston University): “Telling an Oxford English Textby its Binding”10:30 a.m.–12:15 p.m.Poetry and Song......................................................... Ballroom DEConvener: Stephen Burt (Harvard University)Brian Breed (University of Massachusetts, Amherst): “NothingMissing but the SongsFranklin Bruno (New York, NY): “Lower Limit Pop, Upper LimitPoetry”Thomas Sayers Ellis (Lesley University): “Modern Music and Poetry”Jennifer Lewin (Boston University): “How are Poetry and SongQuoted in Plays and Novels?”Robert von Hallberg (University of Chicago): “Money Honey”1:30 p.m.–3:15 p.m.Literary Biography...................................................... Ballroom DEConvener: Edward Mendelson (Columbia University)Alex Effgen (Boston University Editorial Institute): “Edward Dowden:Shelley’s scapegoat, as sacrificed by Matthew Arnold and MarkTwain”Lucy McDiarmid (Montclair State University): “Seven Poets, FiveHours, One Peacock”Emily Mitchell Wallace (Bryn Mawr College): “William CarlosWilliams and Women”3:30 p.m.–5:15 p.m.Exploring Samuel Beckett’s Radio Plays................ Ballroom DEConvener: Marcia Karp (Boston University)Session will begin with the playing of a recorded performance ofWords and Music (25 minutes)Joshua Pederson (Hofstra University): “Sniggering at God’s PoorestJoke: All that Fall and the Critique of Divine Omnibenevolence”Christopher Ricks (Boston University): “Embers”5:45 p.m.–7:00 p.m.ALSC Members’ Meeting.......................................... Ballroom DE8:00 p.m.–11:00 p.m.Banquet & Featured Reading............................. Grand BallroomBanquet and featured reading by Jhumpa Lahiri with subsequentdiscussion between Lahiri and Lisa Rodensky (Wellesley College)Sunday, October 26, 20088:00 a.m.–12:30 p.m.Exhibits..............................................................................Cook Room8:30 a.m.–10:15 a.m.Montaigne and the Shape of Opinion...................... Ballroom DEConvener: George Hoffmann (University of Michigan)Phillip Lopate (Hofstra University): “The Endlessness of Montaigne”Christi A. Merrill (University of Michigan): “Reading Montaigne’sCannibals through the Postcolonial: the Politics of Literary Mastery”Richard Regosin (University of California): “Montaigne and HisEssays: Why Writing Matters”Samantha Tomasetto (Roehampton University): “Self and Identity inMontaigne’s Essays and in Addison and Steele’s Spectator”10:30 a.m.–12:15 p.m.Avant-Garde Poetics.................................................. Ballroom DEConvener: Adelaide Russo (Louisiana State University)Mark Andrew Hall (Ithaca College): “Drinking Mirrors: Mara, Dada,and some Reflections on the Avant-Garde”Antonio Ochoa (Groton, MA): “Exquisite corpses,Exquisite Cannibals: the Remains of the Avant-Garde incontemporary Latin American Poetry”Adelaide Russo (Louisiana State University): “The Avant-Garde asInstitution?: The Status of Poetry in France Today”Steven Winspur (University of Wisconsin, Madison): “Space TimesColor (Reverdy, Romains, Pesquès)”6 2008 ALSC Conference Program

Hotel MapBallroom FoyerRegistrationCook RoomExhibitsBallroom CDPlenary Sessions (Friday)Readings and Q&ABallroom DEPlenary Sessions (Saturday & Sunday)Flower RoomReynolds RoomShippen RoomSaturday SeminarsHamilton RoomPresidential AddressGrand BallroomBanquet and Featured ReadingPresentersYaser Amad is a graduate student in English at The Universityof Texas at Austin. He focuses on English letters from Jonson toJohnson and especially on the relationship between scholarshipand literature during that period.Dr. Sarah Barnsley teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London,and is currently writing a critical biography of Mary Barnard.Mark Bauerlein teaches English at Emory University. His latestbook is The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age StupefiesYoung Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future; Or, Don’t TrustAnyone Under 30.John Baxter is a Professor of English at Dalhousie University.His primary focus is Renaissance Literature (Shakespeare,Renaissance Poetry and Rhetoric) and Literary Criticism, but healso has an interest in modern poetry, and he is a former editorof The Compass, the small Edmonton-based periodical. His ownpublications include Shakespeare’s Poetic Styles (Routledge1980; rpr. 2005), “J.V. Cunningham’s Shakespeare Glosses”(Essays in Criticism), and recent essays on the poetry of HelenPinkerton (Renascence), Yvor Winters and Janet Lewis (LiteraryImagination), and George Elliott Clarke (The Literary Atlas ofAtlantic Canada).Jessica Beard is a PhD student in the Department of Literatureat The University of California, Santa Cruz. She is currentlywriting a dissertation on Emily Dickinson tentatively titledBound—a Trouble: Emily Dickinson, the Canon, the Archive andthe Classroom. Her research interests include 19th centuryAmerican literature, experimental poetry and poetics, pedagogy,and continental theory.Eric Bennett is completing a dissertation in the Englishdepartment at Harvard on the rise of creative programs in theUnited States during the Cold War. Drawing on archival researchconducted at the University of Iowa, Stanford University, and theRockefeller Archive Center, the study argues that the first twentyyears of institutionalized creative writing entailed a theoreticallyuniversal and practically imperial view of fiction and poetry verydifferent from the emphasis on personal identity that emerged inthe 1960s and after. Eric received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’Workshop in 2000 and writes fiction as well as criticism.Zachary Bos is a founding editor of The Pen & Anvil Pressand coordinator of student publications at Boston University.He works currently with several literary publications, includingFulcrum: an annual of poetry and aesthetics; Hawk &Whippoorwill, a journal of nature poetry; Pusteblume, a journalPhiladelphia, October 24-26 7

of translation at Boston University; SUD, a European review;The Charles River Journal, a broadsheet literary miscellany; andSixty-Six The Journal of Sonnet Studies. His current projectsinclude an English-language redacted Koran; an erasure poetryedition of the Bible; and a translation of Vicente Huidobro’s1939 novel, Sátiro; o, El poder de las palabras.Owen Boynton is a graduate student in English at CornellUniversity. He hopes to work on Victorian Poetry.Brian W. Breed is Associate Professor in the Department ofClassics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and theauthor of Pastoral Inscriptions: Reading and Writing Virgil’sEclogues (London 2006).Franklin Bruno’s publications include the poetry chapbooksMF/MA (Seeing Eye) and Policy Instrument (Lame House), amonograph on Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces (Continuum Books),and articles in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism andListen Again: A Momentary History of Pop Music (Duke). As asongwriter and performer with the bands Nothing Painted Blueand The Human Hearts, as a solo artist, and in collaborationwith singer Jenny Toomey and John Darnielle of The MountainGoats, he has released over a dozen albums. He holds a PhDin Philosophy from UCLA, and has also taught at NorthwesternUniversity and Bard College.Archie Burnett is Co-director of the Editorial Institute andProfessor of English at Boston University. His major publicationsare: Milton’s Style: The Shorter Poems, Paradise Regained,and Samson Agonistes (1981), the Oxford English Texts editionof The Poems of A. E. Housman (1997), and a two-volumeOxford edition of The Letters of A. E. Housman. He has writtenthe introduction to Samson Agonistes for the revived VariorumCommentary on Milton’s poetry (Duquesne University Press,2008/9), and he is currently preparing a complete edition of ThePoems of Philip Larkin for Faber.Stephen Burt’s new book of literary criticism is The Forms ofYouth: 20th-Century Poetry and Adolescence. A collection of hisessays on contemporary poetry, Close Calls With Nonsense, willappear in spring 2009. He teaches at Harvard University.Peter Campion is the editor of Literary Imagination: the Reviewof the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. He’s theauthor of two books of poems, Other People (University ofChicago Press, 2005) and The Lions (University of Chicago Press,2009). He teaches at Auburn University.Dr. Warren J. Carson is Professor and Chair of the Departmentof English and Foreign Languages at the University of SouthCarolina Upstate in Spartanburg. He leads the scoring of thePoetry Essay Question at the Annual AP Literature ScoringSession and he is Chair of the AP English Literature TestDevelopment Committee.James Wm. Chichetto is an Associate Professor ofCommunications at Stonehill College and a priest. He has beenpublished over three hundred times, including in The ManhattanReview, The Boston Globe, America, Commonweal, The ColoradoReview, and The London Tablet, among others. Through hiswritings he has been a recipient of numerous benefits includingtwo NEA grants and three NEH stipends. He is a RenaissanceWeekend Scholar and is listed in the Directory of AmericanScholars, the Massachusetts Foundation of HumanitiesScholars, the Contemporary Authors Series, and 15 Who’s Who.Currently he is editing a seven volume epic poem on the UnitedStates, authored by him in 1990.Peter Cortland is an Associate Professor of English at QuinnipiacUniversity in Hamden, Connecticut, where he promotes thecanon, especially the Nineteenth century novel. Peter wasseduced by the old Modern Library list and by the regularity ofthe appearance of the jacketed volumes. He also appreciatedthe low prices. The Uniform Spines provide both a physical andintellectual support for the searcher’s education. They providea commonality for discussion of the novel; we’ve read the samebackground.Lewis M. Dabney, Editor, is the author of Edmund Wilson: ALife in Literature (2005) and the editor of Wilson’s last journal,The Sixties, as well as Edmund Wilson: Centennial Reflectionsand, for The Library of America, Edmund Wilson: Literary Essaysand Reviews of the 1920s & 30s and Edmund Wilson: LiteraryEssays and Reviews of the 1930s & 40s. He is a professor ofEnglish at the University of Wyoming.Gabrielle Dean studies nineteenth- and twentieth-centuryU.S. literature and culture, especially the influence ofnineteenth-century trans-Atlantic print culture on self-hoodand the emergence of modernism. Her work-in-progress is anexamination of this phenomenon with a focus on Emily Dickinsonand Gertrude Stein. She is also writing about postcards andpostcard collections. She has published articles on Dickinson’sfascicles, Stein’s notebooks, contemporary queer comic strips,and the relationship between photography and authorial identity.She has taught at the University of Washington and CornishCollege of the Arts, and is currently CLIR Postdoctoral LibraryFellow at Johns Hopkins University.Nora Delaney teaches writing at Boston University and theMassachusetts Institute of Technology. She is a foundingmember of The Pen & Anvil Press and editor of The CharlesRiver Journal. Her scholarly essays, poetry, and translations arepublished or forthcoming in Fulcrum, Absinthe: New EuropeanWriting, Subtropics, and the Bellevue Literary Review.Morris Dickstein is Distinguished Professor of English at theGraduate Center of the City University of New York and a seniorfellow of the Center for the Humanities, which he founded in1993. His most recent books are Leopards in the Temple: TheTransformation of American Fiction, 1945-1970 (Harvard, 2002)and A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World(Princeton, 2005; paper, 2007). His cultural history of the GreatDepression, Dancing in the Dark, will be published next yearby W.W. Norton. He served as president of the Association ofLiterary Scholars and Critics in 2006-07.Alex Effgen is not only a doctoral candidate in EditorialStudies at Boston University’s Editorial Institute, but also itsadministrative assistant. His primary study involves the lateressays of Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), annotating their trans-Atlantic socio-literary criticism within the context of Clemens’sfinancial bankruptcy. Mr. Effgen’s interest in textual studiesbegan with a course on Greek paleography at UCLA seven yearsago, and he continues to explore classical problems when theopportunity allows.Thomas Sayers Ellis was born and raised in Washington, D.C.His work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, andin Take Three: 1. He currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence Collegeand Lesley University.8 2008 ALSC Conference Program

E. Thomas Finan is a PhD student of literature and philosophyin the University Professors Program at Boston University. Hisdissertation examines the role of “reality” in the works of RalphWaldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson.Jennifer Formichelli earned a BA from Boston University and aPhD from the University of Cambridge. She is currently Lecturerin the Core Curriculum at Boston University, and a co-editor ofThe Collected Prose of T.S. Eliot (Faber and Faber, forthcoming).Edwin Frank is the editor of the New York Review Books Classicsseries.Bruce Gans is a professor of English at Wright College in Chicagoand is the founder and director of its Great Books Curriculumas well as the director of the National Great Books CurriculumAcademic Community.Ellen Greene is the Joseph Paxton Presidential Professor ofClassics at the University of Oklahoma. She received her PhDfrom UC Berkeley in 1992. Greene has published five books onGreek and Latin love poetry: The Erotics of Domination: MaleDesire and the Mistress in Latin Poetry, Reading Sappho, Re-Reading Sappho, Women Poets in Ancient Greece and Rome,and Gendered Dynamics in Latin Love Poetry (with RonnieAncona). Two of her forthcoming books are: The New SapphoOn Old Age and Oxford Readings In Propertius. Currently she isworking on a study of Sappho for Blackwell.Martin Greenup is a third-year graduate student in the EnglishDepartment of Harvard University, working in the field ofnineteenth-century American literature with a focus on poetry,particularly that of Dickinson and Whitman. He took his BAin English from Wolfson College, Cambridge. He comes froma sheep-farming background in Cumbria, in the northwest ofEngland.Mark Andrew Hall is Assistant Professor of French at IthacaCollege.Ernest Hilbert is the editor of the Contemporary Poetry Review.He received his doctorate in English Language and Literatureat Oxford University, where he studied with Jon Stallworthy andJames Fenton, and edited the Oxford Quarterly. He later becamethe poetry editor for Random House’s magazine Bold Typein New York and edited the magazine nowCulture for severalyears. He reviews books for the New York Sun and the Academyof American Poets, and his poetry has appeared in The NewRepublic, American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, and TheAmerican Scholar. He works as an antiquarian book dealer inPhiladelphia.Jane Hirshfield is the author of six collections of poetry,including After (which was shortlisted for England’s T.S. EliotPrize, nominated for the Northern California Book Award inPoetry, and also chosen as one of the best books of 2006 by theWashington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the LondonFinancial Times) and Given Sugar, Given Salt (finalist for the2001 National Book Critics Circle Award, and winner of the BayArea Book Reviewers Award). Her work has appeared in The NewYorker, The Atlantic, The Times Literary Supplement (London),Poetry, and many other publications.George Hoffmann has taught as Associate Professor in theDepartment of Romance Languages and Literatures at theUniversity of Michigan since 2000, after ten years teachingat Boston University. His book, Montaigne’s Career (Oxford:Clarendon, 1998), won the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prizefor French and Francophone Literary Studies, awarded by theModern Language Association in 1999. He works on religiousculture and is currently completing a book on the mutualformation of secular and fundamentalist attitudes in Europeduring the Reformation, entitled To Make Believe: Literature,Religion, and the Reformation.Sunil Iyengar directs the Office of Research and Analysis atthe National Endowment for the Arts. In 2006, he oversawproduction of the NEA research brochure, The Arts and CivicEngagement: Involved in Arts, Involved in Life, and he hassince involved arts and civic groups in regional and nationaldiscussions of the study’s findings and implications. He alsorevised and updated the guide How the United States Funds theArts for its most recent edition (2007).Marcia Karp has published scholarly reviews, poems, andtranslations in Essays in Criticism, Partisan Review, TheRepublic of Letters, Literary Imagination, The Guardian(Beckett translation), Seneca Review, Agenda, Harvard Review,Ploughshares, Penguin Books’ Catullus in English and Petrarchin English, and the Times Literary Supplement, and forthcomingin The Warwick Review. She read her poems at Balliol College atthe invitation of the Oxford Professor of Poetry. She teaches atBoston University.Alexis Kirschbaum is Editor of Penguin Classics. She was raisedin San Francisco but now lives in London.Travis Kurowski is a visiting lecturer in English at the Universityof Southern Mississippi. He is also founding editor of LunaPark (www.lunaparkreview.com) and soliciting editor for Opiummagazine. Along with Gary Percesepe, he recently served asguest editor for an issue of Mississippi Review, “The Lit Mag at100,” which will come out fall 2008. His fiction and nonfictionhas been published in Ninth Letter, Southern Quarterly, andProduct.Jhumpa Lahiri received the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for Interpreterof Maladies, her debut story collection that explores issues oflove and identity among immigrants and cultural transplants.Her novel The Namesake was published in the fall of 2003to great acclaim, and her most recent book of short stories,entitled Unaccustomed Earth, received the 2008 Frank O’ConnorInternational Short Story Award.Alongside the Pulitzer Prize,she has also won the PEN/Hemingway Award, an O. Henry Prize(for the short story “Interpreter of Maladies”), and the AddisonMetcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters,among others.André Lardinois is Professor of Greek Language and Culture atthe Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands.Joseph Levens is editor of the literary magazine The SummersetReview. His own fiction has appeared in Florida Review, AGNI,Other Voices, New Orleans Review, Swink, Sou’wester, and otherplaces. He has taught fiction writing at Hofstra University andthrough his school district in Smithtown, New York.Jennifer Lewin is a visiting assistant professor at BostonUniversity. Her specialty is Renaissance poetry and poetics;she also publishes on Shakespeare and contemporary poetry.Several of her poems are forthcoming in Raritan.Phillip Lopate is the author of three personal essay collections(Bachelorhood, Against Joie de Vivre, Portrait of My Body), threebooks of fiction (Confessions of Summer, The Rug Merchant,Two Marriages), a collection of film criticism (Totally TenderlyTragically), an educational memoir (Being With Children), and anurban meditation (Waterfront). He has edited the anthologies Artof the Personal Essay, Writing New York, and American MovieCritics. He is a professor in the graduate division of ColumbiaUniversity.Philadelphia, October 24-26 9

Marc Mancinelli is a teacher of English at Sterling High Schoolin Somerdale, NJ. He received his bachelor’s in English andpsychology from St. Joseph’s University in 2000, and a master’sin English from West Chester University in 2005. Concentrationsand research areas include 19th-century American literature,20th-century American literature, and creative writing. Otherpresentations include conferences at Texas Tech and Harvard.He is currently a doctoral student in education at the Universityof Pennsylvania. Teaching experience includes work as anadjunct instructor of English at St. Joseph’s University. Mancinellicurrently resides in Turnersville, New Jersey with his wife,Annmarie.J. D. McClatchy, librettist, is the author of six books of poems.His new collection, Mercury Dressing, will be published nextyear by Knopf. He has also written three collections of essays,including American Writers at Home (2004). He teaches at Yale,is editor of The Yale Review, and is a member of the AmericanAcademy of Arts and Letters. His first opera libretto was forWilliam Schuman’s A Question of Taste, which premiered in1989. His singing translation of Mozart’s The Magic Flutepremiered at the Metropolitan Opera in 2006, and will be revivedduring this coming Christmas season there.Jim McCue is helping Christopher Ricks to edit the poems of T.S. Eliot, having previously worked for The Times (of London). Heoccasionally publishes under the imprint of the Foundling Press.Lucy McDiarmid has just been appointed Marie Frazee-Baldassarre Professor of English at Montclair State Universityand is the author, most recently, of The Irish Art of Controversy(Cornell University Press).Brian J. McDonald holds a PhD in English Literature fromthe University of Edinburgh. His research interests includepost-WWII American and British fiction and the relationshipbetween imaginative literature and liberal political thought. Hisessays have appeared in periodicals such as Journal ofModern Literature and Gothic Studies, and he has recentlycompleted a stint with the Manuscripts Division of the PrincetonUniversity Library, organizing, archiving, and making available toresearchers, the extensive archives of The Hudson Review. Hecurrently lives in Washington, DC.Articles by Molly McQuade have appeared recently in the journalof the M/MLA and in Woolf Studies Annual, among others. Herbooks include Stealing Glimpses, Barbarism, and By Herself.Edward Mendelson is Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanitiesat Columbia University and the literary executor of the Estate ofW. H. Auden. His books include Early Auden, Later Auden, andThe Things that Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Sayabout the Stages of Life. He has prepared editions of poems andprose by W. H. Auden and novels by Anthony Trollope, GeorgeMeredith, Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, and Arnold Bennett.He is aContributing Editor of PC Magazine.Emily Taylor Merriman is an assistant professor of EnglishLiterature at San Francisco State University, where she teachesmodern British, American, and Caribbean Poetry. She holds anMA in Creative Writing and a PhD in Religion and Literature fromBoston University. Her publications include work on AdrienneRich, Geoffrey Hill, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and William Blake.She is currently working on a book entitled Poetry’s God, on thetheology in verse of Geoffrey Hill, Derek Walcott, and CharlesWright.Christi A. Merrill teaches South Asian literature and postcolonialtheory at the University of Michigan. In 2002 she was awardedan NEA fellowship to translate the oral-based stories of VijaydanDetha, now forthcoming from Katha Press and FordhamUniversity Press as A Straw Epic. In 2004 she was on fellowshipat Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities to write amonograph on translation (Riddles of Belonging) which isforthcoming from Fordham University Press. Currently she iswriting on genres of literary nonfiction (essay, aatmakatha,testimonio, baat) as they are translated into English.David Mikics is Professor of English at the University of Houston.He is the author, most recently, of A New Handbook of LiteraryTerms (Yale University Press), as well as books on Emerson andNietzsche, and on Spenser and Milton. His current project is TheArt of the Sonnet, a close reading of one hundred sonnets fromthe Renaissance to the present, co-written with Stephen Burt(Harvard University Press).Paige Morgan is completing a PhD in literature and textualstudies at the University of Washington, and is currently workingon a dissertation focusing on romanticism, economics, andaesthetics. She is the Assistant Editor of Modern LanguageQuarterly, and of the UK Blake Society’s Blake Journal.Richard Nanian received an MA in English with both Literatureand Creative Writing concentrations from Salem State College,and a PhD in English with a Literary Studies concentrationfrom the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He teaches bothliterature and writing courses at George Mason University.His interests include English and American Romanticism,poetics, and the effects of language on cognition. His mostrecent article—“Positive Ambiguity, or Why Keats’ ‘Lamia’ DidNot Become a Fragment”—was published in the 2008 issueof Prism(s): The Journal of the International Conference onRomanticism. He has been a member of ALSC since 1999.Versatile woman of letters (novelist, poet, playwright, reviewer,essayist) Joyce Carol Oates is Roger S. Berlind ‘52 Professor ofthe Humanities, and Professor of Creative Writing at PrincetonUniversity. From a working-class childhood in upstate New York,where she attended a one-room schoolhouse, she went onto write novels in high school, win a scholarship to SyracuseUniversity, and emerge from there on the launch of a majorcareer. From 1968 to 1978 she taught at the University ofWindsor in Canada; at Princeton, where she has been since,she is a vital presence in the campus community, and adoredteacher to generations of students, several of whom have goneon to sparkling careers as writers themselves.Born in Mexico City, Antonio Ochoa received his undergraduatedegree in Latin American Literature from the UniversidadIberoamericana. He then obtained a grant to study a Master ofLetters degree at the University of Edinburgh. While finishing hisMLitt he got involved in the Avant-Garde Research Group headedby the late Professor Dietrich Scheunemann, under whosesupervision he began a PhD in Avant-Garde poetry, completedearlier this year. His latest project was the translation of RobertDuncan’s book of poems Bending the Bow.Gillian Osborne received her BA in Comparative Literature fromColumbia University in 2006. These days, she is a graduatestudent in English at UC Berkeley, studying the poetry andpoetics of 19th and 20th century America. At Berkeley, she isalso pursuing a Creative Masters as part of her PhD, and her10 2008 ALSC Conference Program

poetry has appeared in the Threepenny Review.Lee Oser served on the Council of the ALSC from 2004 to2007. His books include The Ethics of Modernism, The Returnof Christian Humanism, and Out of What Chaos: A Novel. He iscurrently working on a book called Shakespeare’s Vision of Evil.He teaches English at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester,Massachusetts.Holt Parker is Professor of Classics at the University ofCincinnati. He has been awarded the Rome Prize, theWomen’s Classical Caucus Prize for Scholarship, a LoebLibrary Foundation Grant, and a Fellowship from the NationalEndowment for the Humanities. He has published on Sappho,Sulpicia, sexuality, slavery, sadism, and spectacles. His bookOlympia Morata: The Complete Writings of an Italian Heretic(Chicago 2003) was given the Josephine Roberts Award by theSociety for the Study of Early Modern Women. His translation(the first complete in English) of Censorinus’s curious work, TheBirthday Book, makes an attractive present.Joshua Pederson received his PhD in Religion and Literaturefrom Boston University in the spring of 2008 and currentlyteaches courses at Marymount Manhattan College and HofstraUniversity. His broader academic interests include 20th-centuryand contemporary American and British literature and theater,the Bible, and film studies.Ethel Rackin is a graduate student in English at PrincetonUniversity, where she studies nineteenth and twentieth-centurypoetry and poetics, British and American modernism, andmaterial culture. She is currently working on a dissertation onpoetic ornamentation, focusing on questions of baroque andminimalist tendencies from the fin-de-siècle to WWII. She hasalso taught creative writing at Penn State University’s DelawareCounty Campus, and at Haverford College. Her own poems haveappeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry East, ColoradoReview, and elsewhere.Diane Rayor is Professor and co-founder of the Departmentof Classics at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, whereshe teaches ancient Greek, translation theory, mythology,and classical literature. She has published four books oftranslations, including The Homeric Hymns (California, 2004)and Sappho’s Lyre: Archaic Lyric and Women Poets of AncientGreece (California, 1991). In summer 2008, she participatedin the Paros Symposium of Conversation and Translation whileworking on her current project, translating Sophocles’ Antigonefor performance.Patrick Redding lives in New York City. He is a PhD candidate inthe Department of English at Yale University, currently finishinga dissertation entitled “Modernism and the Fate of DemocraticPoetics.” This project argues that, contrary to a longstandingtheory of American literature that begins with Walt Whitman,there is no useful correlation between democratic commitmentand poetic form. This formal expectation has led critics tooverlook the democratic imagination at work in the modernistpoetry of Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, andWilliam Carlos Williams.Richard Regosin is Professor Emeritus of French at UC Irvine.He is the author of books on Montaigne and D’Aubigne and ofnumerous articles on Rabelais, Marguerite de Navarre, Ronsard,Du Bellay, De Fail, La Boetie, and others.Christopher Ricks is Warren Professor of the Humanities, andCo-Director of the Editorial Institute, at Boston University, andhe has one more year as Professor of Poetry at Oxford. Hiswritings on Beckett run from 1955, through Beckett’s DyingWords (1993), to a commentary on the little-known masterpiece“Ceiling” in the annual Fulcrum (2008) which devotes nearly twohundred pages to Beckett’s greatness.Lisa Rodensky is an Associate Professor of English at WellesleyCollege. She is the author of The Crime in Mind: CriminalResponsibility and the Victorian Novel (Oxford 2003), and iscurrently editing The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel.Adelaide Russo received her PhD from Columbia University. Sheteaches in the Department of French Studies and the Program inComparative Literature at Louisiana State University. Her latestbook, Le Peintre comme modèle: Du Surréalisme à l’extrêmecontemporain (Septentrion, Collection “Perspectives,” 2007) wonthe Prix Debrousse-Gas-Forestier from the French Académie desBeaux-Arts. Her current research focuses on poetry from 1850 tothe present, the relationship between the arts, and on Belgiumfrancophone literature and culture.Don Share is Senior Editor of Poetry magazine in Chicago. Hewas previously Poetry Editor of Harvard Review and PartisanReview, Editor of Literary Imagination, and Curator of Poetryat Harvard University. His books include Squandermania (SaltPublishing), Union (Zoo Press), Seneca in English (PenguinClassics), and a critical edition of Basil Bunting’s poems(forthcoming, Faber and Faber). His translations of MiguelHernández, collected in I Have Lots of Heart (Bloodaxe Books)were awarded the Times Literary Supplement TranslationPrize, the Premio Valle Inclán Prize, and the PEN/New EnglandDiscovery Award. He received his PhD from the Editorial Instituteat Boston University.Willard Spiegelman is the Hughes Professor of English atSouthern Methodist University, and the editor-in-chief of TheSouthwest Review. His forthcoming books are ImaginativeTranscripts: Selected Literary Essays (Oxford), and SevenPleasures: Essays on Ordinary Happiness (Farrar Straus Giroux).Beth Staley attends West Virginia University, where sheis pursuing a PhD in English with emphasis on late nineteenthandtwentieth-century American poetry, from Dickinsononward. She also writes poems; some of them have recentlyappeared in Kestrel, Hamilton Stone Review, and Crate, whichnamed her this year’s Tomas Rivera selection for her work as apoet and teacher.Susan Strehle is Professor of English at Binghamton University,part of the State University of New York. She is the author ofTransnational Women’s Fiction: Unsettling Home and Homeland(2008) as well as two other books and several articles aboutcontemporary fiction. She is Chief Reader for the AdvancedPlacement test in Literature and Composition and thusconcerned with high school reading and its intersection withachievement in college.For nearly a decade Clifford Thompson has contributed personalessays as well as pieces on books and jazz to The ThreepennyReview. In addition, he has published essays and reviews inCommonweal, The Iowa Review, Cineaste, Film Quarterly, BlackIssues Book Review, and The Best American Movie Writing1999, among other places. A graduate of Oberlin College, he isPhiladelphia, October 24-26 11

the editor of the reference journal Current Biography, publishedby the H. W. Wilson Company, Bronx, New York, and overseesWilson’s other print and electronic biographical articles. He livesin Brooklyn with his wife and two daughters.Samantha Tomasetto is the author of Joseph Addison: OnReligion, God and at Atheism: the Article taken from TheSpectator with an Introduction and Related comment (CLEUP,2004) and a doctoral researcher on “the mission of TheSpectator in the European world” at Roehampton University,London.Joseph Urbas teaches American literature at the University ofBordeaux and is Associate Editor of the French edition of theworks of Herman Melville (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade/EditionsGallimard).Robert von Hallberg is Helen A. Regenstein Professor ofComparative Literature at the University of Chicago. He is theauthor of the recent Lyric Powers (Chicago), a general study oflyric poetry, and of other books on recent U.S. poetry. He teachescourses in poetry in English and in German. He compiled a studyof East German Literary Intellectuals, Literary Intellectuals andthe Dissolution of the State (Chicago, 1996). He is writing a bookon love-songs, poems as well as popular songs.Emily Mitchell Wallace has a PhD in comparative literaturefrom Bryn Mawr, and has taught literature at the Universityof Pennsylvania, Swarthmore, Curtis Institute of Music, andan interdisciplinary seminar at Yale on “Painting, Poetry, andScience in the 20th Century: William Carlos Williams, A CaseStudy.” She compiled A Bibliography of William Carlos Williams(Wesleyan UP, 1968) with the help of Dr. and Mrs. Williams inRutherford and Donald Gallup at Yale. She traveled to Greecewith Mrs. Williams and visited her frequently. She is now aresearch scholar at the Center for Visual Culture at Bryn MawrCollege.Chris Walsh earned his doctorate in American Studies at BostonUniversity. After two years as a Fulbright lecturer at the Universityof Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso, Walsh returned to BU, wherehe is currently the Associate Director of the College of Arts &Sciences Writing Program. He has published in AGNI, Essays inCriticism, Raritan, and The Yale Review, and is now completing abook about cowardice, called Cowardice.Rachel Wetzsteon is the author of three collections of poems,most recently Sakura Park (Persea 2006), as well as a criticalstudy of W.H. Auden, and is Associate Professor of English atWilliam Paterson University.National Consensus, which explores cultural representationsof World War II on radio. She is particularly interested in howthe addition of sound, music and images influence reception oftexts. Most of her research revolves around the communicationstechnologies of the late nineteenth- through mid-twentiethcenturies. Ms. Whitmer was a panelist in April 2008 at theinterdisciplinary conference at Columbia University “TwentiethCentury Literature and the Weight of History.”Joyce Wilson teaches English at Suffolk University. She haspublished poems in Poetry Ireland, Cyphers, Ibbetson StreetMagazine, and on the Web site for formal women poets MezzoCammin (www.mezzocammin.com). One of her poems wonthe Daniel Varoujan Prize of the New England Poetry Club,and another won the Katherine Lee Bates award given bythe Historical Society of Falmouth, Massachusetts Her firstmanuscript of poetry is circulating. She is creator and editorof the online magazine, The Poetry Porch (www.poetryporch.com), which publishes poetry, essays, sonnets, and links to otherliterary sites. Wilson also reviews books regularly for HarvardReview.Steven Winspur is Professor of French at the University ofWisconsin and his most recent book is entitled La Poesie du lieu(Rodopi 2006).Dimitrios Yatromanolakis is Associate Professor in theDepartment of Classics and The Humanities Center at theJohns Hopkins University, and is currently a Visiting Professorat Harvard University. He has co-founded and co-chairs theResearch Program “Cultural Politics” at the WeatherheadCenter, Harvard University. He is the co-author of Towards aRitual Poetics (2003) and author of Sappho in the Making:The Early Reception (2007) and Fragments of Sappho: ACommentary (forthcoming). His current project is a monographon the sociocultural history of mousikoi agones. Trained as apapyrologist, he has worked extensively on literary papyri as wellas vase-inscriptions.David Yezzi’s books of poetry are The Hidden Model (TriQuarterlyBooks/Northwestern University Press) and Azores (SwallowPress/Ohio University Press). His libretto for a chamber operaby David Conte, Firebird Motel, received its world premiere in2003 and was released on CD last year. From 1998 to 2000, hewas a Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University. A formerdirector of the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, heis executive editor of The New Criterion. He lives in New York City.Frances Whistler is Director of Publications, and AssistantDirector, at the Editorial Institute, Boston University. Beforethat she worked at Oxford University Press, UK, for 23 years,mainly on the Academic Literature list (formerly distinguishedas the Clarendon Press, but then amalgamated with the otherdepartments as Oxford University Press).Edmund White, Professor of Creative Writing at PrincetonUniversity, is famous for his biography of Jean Genet, for whichhe won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is the authorof a trilogy of autobiographical novels─A Boy’s Own Story, TheBeautiful Room is Empty, and The Farewell Symphony─as wellas a novel about love in the AIDS era, The Married Man, a brieflife of Marcel Proust, and a book about unconventional Paris,The Flaneur. His most recent works of fiction are Chaos andHotel de Dream. He is currently at work on a brief life of ArthurRimbaud.Valeri Whitmer is a doctoral candidate in English at theGraduate Center of the City University of New York working onher dissertation, The Sounds of War: Aural Experience and12 2008 ALSC Conference Program

Philadelphia Dining, Arts, and EntertainmentThe best source for information about concerts, plays, films,clubs, restaurants, and more is the Philadelphia City Paper, afree newspaper that comes out every Thursday. It is availablein hotel lobbies, bookstores, many restaurants, and otherplaces throughout the city. The paper’s Website (www.citypaper.net) features an excellent search tool that makes it easy tofind whatever one might want in the way of arts, dining, andentertainment in Philadelphia.The brief restaurant listing below is mostly limited toestablishments in the vicinity of the conference hotel. The artsand entertainment listing ranges further afield.Philadelphia DiningExpensive = $$$Moderate = $$Inexpensive = $Jim’s Steaks $400 South Street215-928-1911Authentic Philly cheesesteaks, excellent hoagies, distinctive ArtDeco storefront: perfect for a quick lunch.South Street Souvlaki $509 South Street215-925-3026Classic Greek and Mediterranean cuisine, including vegetariandishes.Sfizzio $$237 St. James Place215-925-1802Italian fare with an accent on Naples and southern Italy. Mosaicdécor with a postmodern flair.Mallorca $$$119 South Street215-351-6652Authentic Iberian cuisine with a dash of flamenco dancing.Specialties include garlic shrimp, mariscada, lobster, goat,paella. Tapas also served.Le Bec-Fin $$$1523 Walnut Street215-567-1000Philadelphia’s best and one of the country’s top Frenchrestaurants. Extensive wine cellar. Formal attire required.Moshulu $$$401 South Columbus Blvd.215-923-2500Fine dining aboard a restored, century old sailing ship mooredoff Penn’s Landing. Excellent river and skyline views.Philadelphia Arts and EntertainmentAlma de Cuba1623 Walnut Street215-988-1799Live Cuban music performances.Arden Theatre Company40 North 2 nd Street215-922-1122“Dedicated to bringing to life the greatest stories by the greateststorytellers of all time.”Forrest Theatre1114 Walnut Street215-923-1515Broadway shows—the city’s premier theatrical arts venue.Joseph Fox Bookshop1724 Sansom Street215-563-4184www.foxbookshop.comIndependent bookstore in Rittenhouse Square, featuringliterature, non-fiction, art, architecture, music, poetry, andchildren’s books.Kimmel Center for the Performing ArtsBroad & Spruce Streets215-790-5800Home to eight Resident Company performing arts organizations,including The Philadelphia Orchestra, Opera Company ofPhiladelphia, Pennsylvania Ballet, Chamber Orchestra ofPhiladelphia, American Theater Arts for Youth, PHILADANCO,Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, and the Philly Pops.Philadelphia Museum of Fine Art(Main Building)26 th Street and Benjamin Franklin Parkway215-763-8100The PMFA is the third largest fine arts museum in the U.S.,and home to over 225,000 objects, spanning the creativeachievements of the Western world since the first century ADand those of Asia since the third millennium BC.Pure1221 St. James Street215-735-8485The city’s prominent gay nightspot for more than 30 years.Rodin MuseumBenjamin Franklin Parkway at 22 nd Street215-568-6026Home to nearly 130 plaster, bronze, and marble sculptures,including The Burghers of Calais, The Gates of Hell, and TheApotheosis of Victor Hugo, the Museum houses the largestcollection of Rodin’s works outside Paris.Philadelphia, October 24-26 13

Rosenbach Museum and Library2008-2010 DeLancy Place at 20 th Street215-732-1600Collection features 30,000 books and 300,000 manuscripts,including letters from George Washington, some of Lincoln’sspeeches, and manuscript pages of Joyce’s Ulysses. Majorexhibits of the work of Marianne Moore and Maurice Sendak arealso housed here.Tin Angel20 South 2 nd Street215-928-0770Folk music.Warmdaddy’s4 South Front Street215-627-8400A popular night spot, featuring live Zydeco, blues, R&B, and soulmusic.Zanzibar BlueBroad & Walnut Streets215-732-4500Philadelphia’s most high-profile jazz club.TribeccaRichmond and Cumberland Streets215-423-7990After-hours club with a lounge, two DJ stands, pool tables, andfashionable décor.2009 ALSC New Membership Offer aIs this your first experience with ALSC? Would you like to become a member and accessdiscounted registration pricing for future conferences, and free subscriptions to our quarterlynewsletter, Literary Matters, and our renowned tri-quarterly review, Literary Imagination?Clip and mail or fax this form, along with yourpayment to:ALSC New Membership Offer650 Beacon Street, Suite 510Boston, MA 02215Fax: 617-358-1995.Please make checks payable to “Oxford Journals” Yes, I am pleased to accept your invitation tobecome a New Member of the Association ofLiterary Scholars and Critics for 2009. Enclosedis my contribution in the amount of $30 (normally$74).NameAddressCITYPostal CODEWork PhoneHome PhoneE-mailInstitutional AffiliationState/ProvinceCountry I am a student, and would like to join theALSC at the Student Rate of $25. I enclose aphotocopy of my student ID card, or my studente-mail address at my home institution.The Association of Literary Scholars & Critics is recognized by theInternal Revenue Service as a charitable, non-profit organizationwith 501(c)(3) designation. Your contribution is tax-deductibleto the full extent of the law.PAYMENT INFORMATIONc Check enclosed, payable to: “Oxford Journals”c I prefer to pay credit card (American Express, Discover, MasterCard or Visa)Credit Card Number__________________________Expiration Date ____________ / ____________Authorizing signature__________________________14 2008 ALSC Conference Program

Officers, Councillors, and Committee Members2008 2009Officers:PresidentChristopher Ricks, Boston UniversityVice PresidentClare Cavanagh, Northwestern UniversityImmediate Past-PresidentMorris Dickstein, CUNYSecretary-TreasurerWilliam Flesch, Brandeis UniversityOfficers:PresidentClare Cavanagh, Northwestern UniversityVice PresidentSusan J. Wolfson, Princeton UniversityImmediate Past-PresidentChristopher Ricks, Boston UniversitySecretary-TreasurerWilliam Flesch, Brandeis UniversityCouncil:Mark Bauerlein, Emory UniversitySusan Bullock, Boston, MassachusettsStephen M. Foley, Brown UniversityRachel Hadas, Rutgers UniversityJames Longenbach, University of RochesterDavid J. Rothman, University of Colorado, BoulderSarah Spence, University of GeorgiaSandra Stotsky, University of Arkansas, FayettevilleRachel Wetzsteon, William Paterson UniversityCurriculum Committee:James Kee, College of the Holy CrossKenneth Gross, University of RochesterLew Kamm, University of Massachusetts DartmouthNominations Committee:Rachel Wetzsteon, Chair, William Paterson UniversityJames Longenbach, University of RochesterPublications Committee:Marcia Karp, Chair, Boston UniversityJames Najarian, Boston CollegeDebra San, Massachusetts College of ArtMilton L. Welch, North Carolina State UniversitySpecial Liaison for Graduate Student AffairsJean Bocharova, University of California, RiversideCouncil:Mark Bauerlein, Emory UniversitySusan Bullock, Boston, MassachusettsRachel Hadas, Rutgers UniversityJay Halio, University of DelawareDavid Mikics, University of HoustonGary Saul Morson, Northwestern UniversityDavid J. Rothman, University of Colorado, BoulderSarah Spence, University of GeorgiaSandra Stotsky, University of Arkansas, FayettevilleCurriculum Committee:Jewel Spears Brooker, Eckerd CollegeJames Kee, College of the Holy CrossHelaine L. Smith, The Brearley SchoolSandra Stotsky, University of Arkansas, FayettevilleNominations Committee:Rachel Hadas, Rutgers UniversitySarah Spence, University of GeorgiaPublications Committee:James Earl, University of OregonJanet Gezari, Connecticut CollegeDebra San, Massachusetts College of ArtMilton L. Welch, North Carolina State UniversitySpecial Liaison for Graduate Student AffairsLeslie Harkema, Boston UniversityPhiladelphia, October 24-26 15

2008 Conference Attendees(as of program printing on October 16)Eileen AbrahamsUniversity of Texas, AustinEleanor CookUniversity of TorontoThomas KarshanLondon, United KingdomClare MortonOxford University PressCharles SwiftBrigham Young UniversityDonna M. AllegoLansdale, PennsylvaniaPaul S. AllisonIndiana Wesleyan UniversityYaser AmadUniversity of Texas, AustinL. Michelle BakerThe Catholic University ofAmericaSarah BarnsleyUniversity of LondonMark BauerleinEmory UniversityJohn BaxterDalhousie UniversityEric BennettHarvard UniversityZachary BosBoston UniversityOwen BoyntonCornell UniversityLewis DabneyUniversity of WyomingGabrielle DeanJohns Hopkins UniversityNora DelaneyCambridge, MassachusettsMorris DicksteinCUNY Graduate CenterAlex EffgenBoston University EditorialInstituteEdwin FrankNew York Review of BooksMarilyn GaullBoston UniversityRobert L. GeltzerNew York, New YorkEleanor GoodmanSomerville, MassachusettsEllen GreeneUniversity of OklahomaTimothy KirkBaptist Bible College &SeminaryAlexis KirschbaumPenguin ClassicsJoseph G. KneuerMontclair, New JerseyTeresa E. KneuerBrookdale Community CollegeClayton KoelbUniversity of North Carolina,Chapel HillJanice Hewlett KoelbUniversity of North Carolina,Chapel HillJee Leong KohThe Brearley SchoolJohn KulkaHarvard UniversityTravis KurowskiUniversity of SouthernMississippiMark MoskowitzChester Springs, PennsylvaniaColleen MullarkeyUniversity of ChicagoDissertation OfficeCassandra NelsonBrookline, MassachusettsJoyce Carol OatesPrinceton UniversityBrendan O’NeillCUNY Graduate CenterGillian OsborneUniversity of California, BerkeleyLee OserCollege of the Holy CrossSiobhan PhillipsYale UniversityWilliam H. PritchardAmherst CollegeDiane RayorGrand Valley State UniversityEmily Taylor MerrimanSan Francisco State UniversityPhilip TerzianThe Weekly StandardCliff ThompsonCurrent BiographySamantha TomasettoRoehampton UniversityJoseph UrbasUniversite Michel De MontaigneBordeaux IIIWilliam VestermanRutgers UniversityRobert von HallbergUniversity of ChicagoL.G. WalkerCharlotte, North CarolinaEmily Mitchell WallaceBryn Mawr CollegeChris WalshBoston UniversityBrian BreedUniversity of Massachusetts,AmherstCarol BreslinGwynedd-Mercy CollegeAlessandro BrisottoLondon, United KingdomFranklin BrunoNew York, New YorkSusan BullockBoston, MassachusettsArchie BurnettBoston UniversityStephen BurtHarvard UniversityPeter CampionAuburn UniversityWarren CarsonUniversity of South CarolinaUpstateJames W. ChichettoStonehill CollegeJennifer ClarvoeKenyon CollegeTom ClaytonUniversity of MinnesotaMichelle CohenUniversity of Maryland, CollegeParkMartin GreenupHarvard UniversityCaitlyn HaaseOxford University PressRachel HadasRutgers University, NewarkJay HalioUniversity of DelawareMark Andrew HallIthaca CollegeMark HallidayAthens, OhioSaskia HamiltonBarnard College, ColumbiaUniversityLeslie HarkemaBoston UniversityJane HedleyBryn Mawr CollegeErnest HilbertBauman Rare BooksJane HirshfieldMill Valley, CaliforniaGeorge HoffmannUniversity of MichiganSunil IyengarNational Endowment for theArtsMarcia S. KarpBoston UniversityJhumpa LahiriBrooklyn, New YorkAndre LardinoisRadboud UniversityJohn LeonardUniversity of Western OntarioRika LesserBrooklyn, New YorkJoseph LevensThe Summerset ReviewTod LinafeltGeorgetown UniversityEdward LockeCanton, MassachusettsPhillip LopateHofstra UniversityJ.D. McClatchyYale UniversityJim McCueLondon, United KingdomBrian McDonaldWashington, D.C.Molly McQuadeNew York, New YorkDavid L. MikicsUniversity of HoustonPaige MorganUniversity of WashingtonPatrick ReddingYale UniversityRichard RegosinUniversity of CaliforniaChristopher RicksBoston UniversityLisa RodenskyWellesley CollegeDavid J. RothmanUniversity of Colorado, BoulderAdelaide RussoLouisiana State UniversityDon SharePoetry magazineHelaine L. SmithThe Brearley SchoolThomas R. SmithPennsylvania State UniversityFrederick T. SpeersAddison Wesley HigherEducation / Pearson PublishingSarah SpenceUniversity of GeorgiaBeth StaleyWest Virginia UniversitySandra StotskyUniversity of Arkansas,FayettevilleSusan StrehleBinghamton UniversityRosanna WarrenBoston UniversityMarian O. WernickePensacola Junior CollegeRachel WetzsteonWilliam Paterson UniversityFrances WhistlerBoston UniversityEdmund WhitePrinceton UniversityValeri WhitmerCUNY Graduate CenterJoyce P. WilsonSuffolk UniversitySteven WinspurUniversity of Wisconsin,MadisonSusan J. WolfsonPrinceton University16 2008 ALSC Conference Program