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- As a matter of custom, writers at the height of the Roman empire first
made their ideas "public" by reading their "papers" to small informal
gatherings of friends and colleagues. It was the easiest way to make their works
known--linking "publish" and "public"--and it was also the best way to
obtain advice for improvement. It seems that some, like Pliny the Younger, even went so
far as to arrange a whole series of readings in order to refine several related ideas.
In this spirit groups of students and teachers in the modern university still meet, in an
extra-curricular forum, to listen to presentations of ideas and to debate their merit and
force. This practice from old has been a part of our young department almost continuously
since it was formed in 1968 when the Virginia General Assembly chartered the
Commonwealth's university, Virginia Commonwealth University, by uniting two academic
institutions that traced their histories back as far as 1838. In its modest way our
current Faculty Symposium honors this ancient practice. It also builds on the earlier
departmental series, many of which featured faculty still in the department. Several of
these colleagues have also participated in the current series, and so are embodiments of a
contiuum which, this coming year, will round out our first thirty years of such public
engagement.
In the fall of 1973, a faculty member with training in African literatures established our
first series of presentations, a "brown bag luncheon symposium." Fresh from the
University of Texas at Austin, Richard Priebe, just one of the department's several new
faculty members with terminal degrees, took advantage of the young university's burgeoning
intellectual spirit and organized the series three times a semester to foster exchange
across a range of topics. Presentations were balanced, with teaching, including the
teaching of composition, and research equally stressed. One of the first presentations was
Professor Priebe's own, which centered on the question of non-Western literature in the
literary canon. By the mid-'70s and extending to 1978, the symposium was being
co-sponsored by the college and was renamed the College of Humanities and Sciences
Symposium. Still organized by Professor Priebe it had become university-wide in scope,
involving faculty in such disciplines as history, political science and the medical
sciences as well as in various areas within the English department. Regulars numbered
15-25 and included several other young department members--Charlotte Morse, Bo Berry and
Bryant Mangum. The meetings were in late afternoons and evenings, and benefitted from a
social hour with refreshments furnished by the college.
Four years earlier, in 1969, only one year after its founding, the department had begun to
publish a departmental newsletter, "The English Exchange." It appeared once a
semester more or less regularly, continuing into the mid-'80s, and from the outset it
served many of the same purposes as the first symposium series. Early on edited by
Professors Bo Berry and David Latané, it sometimes featured summaries of the symposium
discussions and reports on research of a general nature. Its regular focus, however, was
on teaching and on successes in the classroom using particular modes of interpretation
with specific literary works. It specialized in composition pedagogy and sophomore
literature. Occasionally these issues were highlighted by poetry written by colleagues in
the department's creative writing curriculum. A signal feature of the last few issues of
"The English Exchange" is that it was produced using the (then) state-of-the-art
mainframe computer text-editing program, WYLBUR.
Soon after the College of Humanities and Sciences Symposium ended, a few department
faculty launched a new series, highly informal in structure but more formal than ever in
content. Resident memory is that this series continued into the early '80s meeting on
Friday afternoons and that it had no collective title but was determinedly theoretical in
nature. By consensus these presentations were organized around a central theme each year,
like "realism" or deconstruction. Meetings were moderated by discussion leaders
who distributed in advance lists of selected readings for people to prepare for the lively
discussions that ensued.
Briefly, for two or three years in the mid- and late-'80s, a departmental discussion group
devoted to composition theory took shape. Without title or formal leader and meeting
irregularly, it drew features from some of its predecessors by focusing on an assigned
book each session. Participants informally prepared position papers on the theory and
application advanced by the author of each work.
In the fall of 1990 and continuing to the spring of 1996, Professor Marcel Cornis-Pop with
the help of Professor Bill Griffin, put together a "Theory Across the
Curriculum" faculty discussion group. As with its forebears its home was the English
department but it brought together colleagues from various other departments like
philosophy, foreign languages and literatures, history, sociology, and anthropology. In
monthly meetings, its participants addressed current theoretical approaches
(poststructuralism, postmodernism, new historicism, postcolonialism) that are encouraging
a rethinking of the boundaries and practices of traditional disciplines. Discussions were
in response either to a formal presentation or to a set of texts read by all, and they
included a healthy dose of practicality since an objective was to see how theory
influenced practice in the various fields. One year, 1995-6, the series opened its
discussion to a group from the nearby University of Richmond, and meetings alternated
between the two campuses.
Also around this time Professor Latané established two groups focusing on his special
interest, nineteenth-century British literature. In 1995 he organized a series of talks
with lectures by faculty from several other Virginia colleges--Hampden-Sydney, James
Madison, and the University of Richmond. He is planning a repeat of this for the coming
year with people from William and Mary and, crossing the state line, the University of
North Carolina--Chapel Hill. This past spring Professor Latané convened an eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century British literature reading group which featured, in addition to
himself, Professor Catherine Ingrassia from our department and advanced graduate students
from Indiana, Chapel Hill, and the University of Virginia.
In the fall of 1994 I initiated the current Faculty Symposium as a way of providing
department faculty with an opportunity to discuss their research and writing in
convocations open to the public. As soon as the series was announced in the spring of
1994, two-thirds of the full-time faculty of 36 asked to be included--more than three
years of presentations at the rate of three a semester. This broad department
participation has, naturally, produced presentations which are widely inclusive,
reflective of the interdisciplinary nature of English studies-- linguistics, literature,
rhetoric, bibliography, textual studies, pedagogy, literary theory. In its format, this
series draws upon all the previous departmental discussion programs--it meets during the
lunch hour and "brown bag" lunches are encouraged; usually a formal paper is
read, but not infrequently a presentation is "talked"; occasionally a handout is
distributed for close study; about twenty people attend usually, often including students
and colleagues from other departments. This website comprises a list of all who have
participated so far. Most of the faculty have been able to include abstracts of their
presentations, and many have supplied the full text of their talks and in some cases even
more, like a chapter of the book they are writing or a description of the project they are
working on. Most entries also include faculty members' email addresses and in a few cases
their websites, too, so please feel welcome to contact us about our work and your
interests.
Since our department's beginning, a scant few years here and there have passed without one
kind of public intellectual exchange or another. More than once, two series have succeeded
concurrently. Collectively, the current series and its predecessors amount to a
departmental symposium of the whole, virtually every faculty member presenting, attending
and discussing theory and practice within the broad field of English studies. Please
browse through our offerings, and enjoy.
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By the way, on a more personal note let me invite you to visit my own website, which features
materials for courses I've taught in the past few years including WWW components I've
designed for both parts of the sophomore survey of American literature which I regularly
teach.
Terry Oggel
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