Loose Canons Volume 4, Issue 2•Emory University English Department•July 2001
2001 Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature
David Lodge to be Featured in October Series
C
onsciousness and the Novel” will be the theme of the
2001 Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature, Oct. 7-
10, featuring British critic and novelist David Lodge.
The Oct. 7 lecture will be held at 4 p.m. in the auditorium
of the Woodruff Health Sciences Administration Building; the
Oct. 8 & 9 lectures, will be held at 8:15 p.m. in Goizueta
Business School Auditorium, Room 130;
the reading on Oct. 10 will be held at Photo by Isolde Ohlbaum
8:15 p.m. in the Glenn Memorial
Auditorium.
Lodge retired from a 27-year career
as professor of modern English literature
at the University of Birmingham in
1987, to pursue writing full-time. He is
the author of numerous novels: The
Picturegoers (1960); Ginger, You’re
Barmy (1962); The British Museum is
Falling Down (1965); Out of the Shelter
(1970); Changing Places (1975), for
which he was awarded both the
Hawthornden Prize and the Yorkshire Post Fiction Prize; How
Far Can You Go? (1980), which won the Whitbread Award
for book of the year; Small World (1984), which was nominated
for the Booker Prize; Nice Work (1988), which won the
Sunday Express Book of the Year Award; Paradise News
(1991), and Therapy (1995). His work has been translated into
more than 20 languages.
Lodge’s works of literary criticism include Language of
Fiction (1966), The Novelist at the Crossroads and Other Essays
on Fiction and Criticism (1971), The Modes of Modern Writing
(1977), Working with Structuralism (1981), and After Bakhtin:
Essays on Fiction and Criticism (1990). He has also edited
Modern Criticism and Theory (1988), Scenes of Clerical Life, and
Lucky Jim. In addition, Lodge wrote Write On (1986), a
collection of occasional essays, and The Art of Fiction (1992), a
selection of articles originally published in the Sunday
Independent.
Small World, a parody of academic life, was adapted as a
television series in 1988 and Lodge himself adapted his Nice
Inside: Bauerlein’s Book•Gruber’s Bakeless•Erben’s Ecocriticism•Quinn’s Construction
Work for television, which won a Royal Television Society
Award for the best drama serial of 1989 and a Silver Nymph at
the International Television Festival in Monte Carlo in 1990.
In 1994 he adapted Charles Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit for a
six-part BBC series. His first stage play, The Writing Game, was
produced at the Birmingham (England) Repertory Theatre in
1990 and adapted for television in 1995. His latest publication,
the novella Home Truths, is based on a play of the same title,
which premiered at the Birmingham
Repertory Theatre in 1998.
Lodge was the recipient of the CBE
(Commander of the British Empire) in
1998 for services to literature, and is a
Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des lettres.
The biennial Ellmann Lectures,
inaugurated by Seamus Heaney in 1988,
were endowed in honor of the literary
achievement of Richard Ellmann (1918-
1987), who served Emory University as
Lodge the first Robert W. Woodruff Professor
from 1980 to 1987.
The Department of English is the home of the Ellmann
Lectures, chaired and directed by Ronald Schuchard, Goodrich
C. White Professor of English. The lectures aim to perpetuate
the tradition of Ellmann’s writing, which set the highest
standards of critical inquiry and humanistic scholarship, and
his public lectures, which were unparalleled in the appeal to a
worldwide audience of readers. In addition to Heaney, Ellmann
past lecturers include Denis Donoghue, Helen Vendler, Henry
Louis Gates Jr., and A.S. Byatt.
The 1999 Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature,
featuring A.S. Byatt, are now available in the collection, On
Histories and Stories, published by Harvard University Press
(2001) www.hup.harvard.edu.

Alumni Reception Planned
An alumni reception will precede the David Lodge lecture
on Oct.10. Please feel free to drop by the Kemp-Malone
Library, third floor, North Callaway Center, 6:30-8 p.m.
Natalie Angier Delivers Women’s History Month Lecture

Wrestling With the Subject of Beauty

T
hey are barbarians who mistake
their own customs for human
nature,” George Bernard Shaw
once observed. Natalie Angier,
Pulitzer Prize-winning author of
Woman: An Intimate Geography and
The Beauty of the Beastly: New Views
on the Nature of Life, explored and
exposed such confusion of custom and
nature in her recent keynote address
for Emory’s celebration of Women’s
History Month. Citing sources as
disparate as the Kahun Papyrus and
19th-century catalogues of women’s
medical complaints, Angier took aim
at the popular neo-Darwinian,
evolutionary psychological posture
that maintains beauty as a universal,
rather than arbitrary, perception and
that resuscitates “all the old clichés
about human behavior.”
Beauty is neither wholly appeal-
ing nor benign, insisted Angier; in
fact, it can be downright dangerous.
Take, for example, the elaborate
striations of the poison dart frog or the
bold tesserae of the monarch butterfly,
both of which employ beauty as a
warning mechanism. Worse still,
beauty often aligns itself with awk-
wardness and even discomfort, as in
the case of the peacock, whose tail
feathers remain a heavy, ungainly,
Loose Canons
Loose Canons is published three times a year by the Department of English
Photo by Annemarie Poyo
almost ridiculous appendage. As such,
fashion becomes a self-imposed handi-
cap: the wearer (or victim, depending on
your perspective) advertises implicitly,
“I’m willing to endure the pain of
piercings and tattoos and Manolo
Blahnik stilettos in the interest of self-
expression; it’s indicative of my alert-
ness, stamina, resourcefulness, cash,
and–most importantly–my willingness to
keep up with fashion.” So, ultimately,
the excruciating becomes exquisite.
This cultural attention to fashion,
meanwhile, makes Angier even more
suspicious of conventions of evolution-
ary biology that find unassailable
universals in both beauty and health.
For example, recent studies have
purported a (nearly) unanimous male
predilection for women with waist-to-
hip ratio of one to two; trotting out a
parade of contemporary beauty icons
from Marilyn Monroe to Kate Moss, the
study indicated that, regardless of
cultural or geographic provenance, the
one-to-two ratio broadcasts an image of
health, fertility, sexual viability, and, by
extension, evolutionary advantage.
However, further studies revealed that
men from certain Peruvian communi-
ties unexposed to western culture
perceived the one-to-two ratio as
unhealthy, and instead preferred
women with a substantially thicker
build. The venerable ratio, observes
Angier, remains a cultural construction
that–while profound–lacks a legitimate
biological origin; in short, the scientific
community has allowed custom to
masquerade as human nature.
Briefly put, though, how are
Angier’s comments relevant to our
literary enterprises–or even to the
humanities at large? Given the
campus’s recent attention to reconcilia-
tion, to what extent do the scientific
and the literary communities intersect,
inform, and temper one another?
Angier (who, incidentally, abandoned a
dissertation in medieval literature to
launch Discover Magazine) declares
biology a “feminist tool” with which to
excavate the persistence of both
scientific and cultural myths. Her
stance, finally, is a relativistic, inher-
ently postmodern one that does more
than simply perforate what she calls the

Department Chair/Cristine Levenduski, Ph.D. “rigid, cocksure, [and] archaic” structure
Director of Graduate Studies/Richard Rambuss, Ph.D. of sociobiology; rather, it weds the rigor
Director of Undergraduate Studies/Deepika Bahri, Ph.D. of the scientific method to an ideologi-
Director of Creative Writing/Lynna Williams, M.F.A. cal relativism that pervades literary,
cultural, and gender studies. Hers is an
Editor/Designer/Mary Alma Durrett
effort that owes as much to Derrida as
to Darwin.

Send all inquiries or submissions to the editor, Department of English, Emory —Michelle Wallace is a graduate student
University, 302 N. Callaway Center, 537 Kilgo Circle, Atlanta, GA 30322, or call whose academic focus is on 20th-century
(404) 727-6420 or Fax: (404) 727-2605. Opinions contained within Loose Canons Southern literature, popular culture and
reflect the views of the writer and not necessarily those of the English Department representations of class. Contact her at
of Emory University. lmwalla@learnlink.emory.edu

E-mail your Canons submissions, address changes, job changes to mdurret@emory.edu

2/Loose Canons/July 2001
Beauty, Take Two
Miss Idaho Weighs in on the Subject
C
an beauty itself ever be fully
defined? I like to think of it as
a concept with contours in
constant flux. Having recently spent
17 days representing my home state of
Idaho at the Miss USA pageant in
Gary, Ind., I have witnessed a contem-
porary, commercialized notion of
external beauty, but since then have
begun to explore the concept of beauty
from a different perspective.
In the preface to The Picture of
Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde wrote, “The
artist is the creator of beautiful
things.... Those who find ugly mean-
ings in beautiful things are corrupt
without being charming. This is a fault.
Those who find beautiful meaning in
beautiful things are the cultivated. For
these there is hope. They are the elect
to whom beautiful things mean only
Beauty.” Wilde spends much of the rest
of the book detailing for the reader the
exact definition of this Beauty with a
capital “B,” but I am ultimately left
unsettled by his conclusion that Beauty
can exist in and of itself without
beautiful meanings. So let me proffer
my own personal definition at this
moment in time—with complete
GRADUATE STUDENT NEWS
Patrick Bixby presented his paper, “A
Crisis of Origins: Eliot’s The Mill on
the Floss and the Darwinian Revolu-
tion,” at the annual meeting of the
International Association for Philoso-
phy and Literature in May. He has also
organized a panel for the 2001 SAMLA
convention entitled “Postmodern/
Postcolonial: Intersections in Literary
Theory and Practice.”
Tony Cuda presented “Certain
Mischief and the Supplicating Voice:
The Indeterminate and an Ethics of
Criticism” at a conference entitled
“Reproductions: Literature, Theory,
and Cultural Studies in Transforma-
consciousness of its likeliness to
change—and admit up front that for
Wilde I am one with hope but not a
member of the elect.
Beauty is located in some inner
sense of oneself. This can often be
mistaken for confidence; in the
particular expression of a smile or a
certain detail of the gait of one’s walk.
The confusion is natural as Beauty is
made possible in part by precisely this
confidence—a lovely internal aware-
ness manifested through one’s actions.
Confidence alone is not enough to
ensure beauty and, in fact, if blurred
into egotism or self aggrandizement can
even turn ugly. To the recipe for
Beauty, then, must be added conscious-
ness of one’s faults and a graceful
acceptance of them.
Beauty cannot exist without
passion. This raw excitement for life
can take a variety of forms and be
centered in several different activi-
ties—art, interaction with people, a
thirst for adventure—or concentrated
in just one. I was with a friend recently
at a concert by one of his favorite
musical groups and when the band took
the stage his face glowed with passion
tion” held at the University of Califor-
nia at Irvine in May.
Rosslyn Elliott presented a paper
entitled “The Dramatic Art of the
Novels of William Dean Howells” at
the Northeast MLA Conference in
Hartford, March 30.
Katherine Ellison presented “ ‘If the
Arrow Flies Unseen’: Closing, Enclos-
ing, and Foreclosing the Witnessing
Narration in Defoe’s A Journal of the
Plague Year,” in the “Death as Closure”
panel of the Princeton Eighteenth
Century Society’s annual conference,
entitled “Closure in the 18th Century,”
held at Princeton on May 5. On May 24
and his smile was unabashedly, genu-
inely huge. He looked Beautiful.
An appropriate synonym for
Beauty, perhaps, is radiance. Radiance
is fluidity; it sparkles, it’s infectious.
Ultimately, I believe a person’s Beauty
is reflected in the impact that person
has on others. The magnetism of a
radiant person draws others to her and
allows her to touch their lives and forge
a true, Beautiful connection.
Critics of beauty pageants often say
they set women up to be judged on
superficial qualities. I disagree, and
perhaps that is why I competed at Miss
USA. I value
passion and
radiance and a
sense of myself,
and by my
definition of
Beauty, pageants
measure these
much deeper
qualities.
Barchas
—Elizabeth Barchas is a senior, majoring
in English and Russian Language and
Culture.
she traveled to Cambridge to present
“The Hard Girdle of History: Birth
Control and Eugenics in Faulkner’s As I
Lay Dying and the 1930s South” at the
American Literature Association
(ALA) Annual Conference.
Margaret Koehler presented her paper,
“Turns of Grammar in Pope’s ‘Epistle to
Dr. Arbuthnot’ and Swift’s ‘The Author
Upon Himself’,” at a meeting of the
Southeastern American Society for
Eighteenth-Century Studies held in
March in Huntsville, Ala.
Tom Lilly presented “Representing
Grad News continued on page 4
Loose Canons/July 2001/3
 Emory English Alumnus Named Board Chair
B
en F. Johnson III, managing
partner of the Atlanta-headquar
tered law firm of Alston and
Bird, and a 1965 alumnus of Emory, was
elected chairman of Emory University’s
Board of Trustees on Nov. 9 following
the retirement of Bradley Currey. A
member of the board since 1995,
Johnson has served as chairman of the
board’s Academic Affairs Committee
during his time as alumni trustee.
“At the heart of a great university
is an exciting undergraduate experi-
ence,” says Johnson. He recalls with
fondness his days as an undergraduate,
and notes the “remarkably durable
friendships that began in Harry
Rusche’s English Honors Program. I had
a wonderful experience in the English
Department. My most memorable
Graduate Student News Continued
Continued from previous page
American Nativism in Charles
Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798)” at
the Romantic Nationalisms 1750 - 1850
Conference at the University of Surrey-
Roehampton, July 1. Lilly has also
accepted a graduate fellowship through
Emory University’s Office of University-
Community Partnerships.
Jeff Massey presented a paper entitled
“The Monsters and the Critics: Teach-
ing Beowulf, The Hobbit, and Tolkien”
at “Beowulf in Our Time: Teaching
Beowulf in Translation,” a conference
held at Kennesaw State University,
March 23-24.
He presented “From Baggins to Beowulf
and Back Again: Teaching (via)
Tolkien,” at “Concerning Hobbits and
Other Matters: Tolkien Across the
Disciplines,” a conference held at the
4/Loose Canons/July 2001
professors were my two [Honors
Program] advisors. We had our weekly
seminar meeting at Harry Rusche’s
apartment; we would have afternoon
tea and immerse ourselves in Milton
and Spenser. I frankly was more into
Melville, Dreiser, Hemingway and
Fitzgerald than the Faerie Queene, but
Harry patiently got me through it, and
I’m sure I’m a better person for it.”
Johnson says his lifelong love of
O’Neill and the American Theater
grew from his association with senior
Honors Program advisors Al Stone,
who was an American Literature
scholar. “He became a particularly
important mentor to me,” notes
Johnson whose avocation for theater
helped nurture his son Armistead’s
vocation. Currently affiliated with the
University of St. Thomas in St. Paul,
Minn. on April 26.
Carol Newell presented a paper, “The
Dilemma of Home: Julia Peterkin’s
Bright Skin,” at a meeting of the South
Atlantic Modern Language Associa-
tion held in Birmingham, Ala., 10-12
November 2000.
Aimee Pozorski gave a seminar
presentation on Fascism and the
Avant-Garde at the 2000 New
Modernisms Conference held at the
University of Pennsylvania, 12-15
October 2000.
Natalie Prestwich presented a paper, “
‘Piece by Piece’: The Erotics of
Ornamentation in Robert Herrick’s
Hesperides” at the Eighth Annual
Meeting of the Group for Early
Modern Cultural Studies, held in New
Orleans, La., 16-19 November 2000.
Director’s Eye production company in
New York, Armistead plans to stage
O’Neill’s The Great
God Brown in
April and May,
reportedly the first
revival of the play
in over 50 years.
“One other
important impact
of the English Johnson
Honor Program on
my life was friendship that began there
with two of my fellow students: Ann
Estes (now Klamon) and Adair Roberts
(now Massey). They have continued to
be two of my closest friends and with
their husbands are part of a regular
travelling sextet with me and my wife
Ann.”

Gitanjali Shahani has been awarded a
Vernacular Modernities Fellowship
which will allow her to study the
personal accounts of women who
transgressed “the boundaries of the
‘inner domain’ during the nationalist
era and the Independence struggle [in
India],” as relayed through “autobiogra-
phies, family histories, religious tracts
. . . and other cultural artifacts that
speak of a struggle to negotiate the
dichotomies of home/world, traditional/
modern.” Shahani’s research will be
conducted in India.
Sean Wells presented a paper, “South-
ern Masculinity: Literary Invocations of
Nathan Bedford Forrest,” at the English
Graduate Organization conference
entitled “Souths Global and Local”
held at the University of Florida,
Gainesville in April.

Johnson photo by Jon Rou
 Pulitzer, National Book Award Winner to Speak July 26-27
2001 Writers’ Festival to Feature Annie Proulx
E
. Annie Proulx, winner of the
1994 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
and the 1993 National Book
Award for Fiction, will be the featured
author for the 2001 Summer Writers’
Festival, to be held on campus, July 26
and 27.
Proulx, who attained her
bachelor’s and master’s degrees in
history at the University of Vermont
and Sir George Williams University,
Montreal, respectively, is “a writer
whose stories compel and startle us
with their rightness of music, their
closeness of observation, their render-
ing of hard truths in the lives they
inhabit,” notes Judson Mitcham, poet,
novelist and director of the Summer
Writers’ Institute and Festival.
Proulx’s second novel, The
Shipping News, won both the Pulitzer
Prize and the National Book Award,
and was described by the New York
Times as a work which “displays Ms.
Proulx’s surreal humor and her zest for
the strange foibles of humanity....Her
inventive language is finely, if exhaus-
tively, accomplished....almost an
encyclopedia of slang and lore.”
Postcards, Proulx’s first novel, won
the 1993 PEN/Faulkner Award for
Fiction. She was the first woman to be
Gruber wins 2001 Bakeless Literary Publications Prize
T
he Bread Loaf Writers’ Confer-
ence of Middlebury College
recently announced the winners
of the 2001 sixth annual Bakeless
Literary Publication Prizes. The
Bakeless Prizes, named for Middlebury
College supporter Katharine Bakeless
Nason, are an annual book series
competition for new authors of literary
Photo by Jim McHugh
Proulx
honored with the award. The New York
Times described Postcards as “...a meaty
stew of archetypal plots and characters,
their juices mingled in defiance of
convention....Story makes this novel
compelling; technique makes it
beautiful.”
More recent works by Proulx,
Accordion Crimes (1996) and Close
Range (1999), have demonstrated her
astonishing scope.
works in poetry, fiction, and creative
nonfiction.
Bill Gruber’s collection of essays,
“On All Sides Nowhere,” was chosen
by William Finnegan for the creative
nonfiction award. Gruber’s book-length
manuscript will be published by
Houghton Mifflin in its distinguished
Mariner Original Paperback line. In
Festival-goers will hear Proulx read
from her work, July 26, and talk about
her research techniques (“The need to
know has taken me from coal mines to
fire towers, to hillsides studded with
agate, . . to the sunny side of an
iceberg.”) as well as her methods of
writing (“I write anytime, anyplace—in
the middle of the night, by the side of
the road, on airplanes, at home,
anywhere.”). A reception and
booksigning will follow the 8 p.m.
reading in 208 White Hall.
A
highlight of the two-day
festival will be a conversation,
on July 26 at 4 p.m. between
Proulx and Jim Grimsley, an award-
winning playwright and novelist, who is
a senior resident fellow in Creative
Writing at Emory. The conversation
will take place in 207 White Hall.
On the final day of the festival,
July 27 at 10 a.m., Proulx will conduct a
public Master Class on the craft of
writing in 207 White Hall.
All festival events are free and
open to the public. For more informa-
tion, contact the Creative Writing
Program, Emory University, phone 404-
727-4683, or e-mail
creativewriting@emory.edu.

addition, he will receive a fellowship to
attend the Bread Loaf Writers’ Confer-
ence in August 2002.

E-mail your Loose Canons
submissions, address changes, job
changes to mdurret@emory.edu
Loose Canons/July 2001/5
 Bauerlein
Studies
1906
Atlanta Race
Riot
I
n his recent publication,
Negrophobia: A Race Riot in Atlanta,
1906, Professor of English Mark
Bauerlein explores the racial climate of
Atlanta before and after a pivotal race
riot. In the years leading up to 1906,
Atlanta achieved a progressive status
with regard to race relations. Atlanta’s
black and white, wealthy and poor, had
co-existed without major racial vio-
lence; however, in 1906, Atlanta
succumbed to the violence that marked
the rest of the South. Once known for
its progressive stance on race, Atlanta
became one of the major sites of racial
bias in the country.
In an interview with Rian Bowie, a
graduate student in English, Bauerlein, Photo of Marietta Street, circa 1906, courtesy of the Atlanta History Center
discusses the major public figures
involved in the riot, and the political,
economic, and cultural factors that ern history; the riot involved fatalities minimizes analysis.
marked Atlanta before and after the and required the assistance of the state
event. militia. Bowie: There is an abundance of
information on the North Carolina
Bowie: What sparked your interest in Bowie: How much scholarship has Race Riot of 1898. Why is there so
the Atlanta Race Riot of 1906? been published on this period in little historical documentation on this
Bauerlein: The immediate impetus was Atlanta history? riot?
my moving from downtown Atlanta to Bauerlein: Very little. There are no Bauerlein: Atlanta, from the time
Inman Park and just being interested in books on the riot, a few articles back that it was founded in the 1830s, was a
the area. I went to look up some in the ’60s, and a few dissertations on city of commerce. It always had a very
information on Booker T. Washington the riot that were never published. active Chamber of Commerce; it was
at the Auburn Avenue Library. On one really run by a plutocracy of powerful
of the panels displayed along the street, Bowie: How did you research for this families—railroad people, cotton
there was a reproduction of a cover of a publication? freight people, bankers, and factory
French newspaper that showed a street Bauerlein: It just came together over owners. From the beginning, they
scene of turmoil and pandemonium and four years of digging in archives, skillfully handled Atlanta’s PR
the caption translated as the “Massacre gathering pieces of letters, municipal machine. Race relations, in compari-
of Negroes in the Streets of Atlanta.” I documents, newspapers, magazines, son with other Southern environ-
learned that a race riot occurred in and composing them into an account ments, were pretty good for many
Atlanta, one that involved some of the riot, one that tries to focus on years.
important persons in U.S. and South- the people and the events, that

6/Loose Canons/July 2001

Bowie: How did Atlanta, at least for
a time, escape the hostile climate of
the South after Reconstruction?
Bauerlein: One reason was that the
business and political leaders had a
dialogue. They met frequently to
discuss the way things were going in
the city. The goal for the white
leadership was not to interrupt the
flow of capital. For the black leader-
ship, it was to cultivate a setting that
could serve as a base for political
protest. That extends throughout most
of Atlanta’s history, except in 1906
when radical negrophobia, which was
sweeping the South, finally hit
Atlanta.
Bowie: How did that type of animos-
ity take shape?
Bauerlein: The white leadership was
racist but it leaned toward a paternal-
istic racism, not negrophobia. In
1906, the white leadership started to
act differently. The politicians, the
police officers, even some of the
business leaders started to talk in
terms not just of white supremacy, but
white supremacy that regards African
American males as dangerous,
recidivist, as potential criminals, as
degenerates. Whereas for the paternal-
istic whites the question was how do
we lead blacks; for the negrophobe,
the question was how do we control
them. Politicians like Hoke Smith,
who ran for governor that year, saw
this as an opportunity to play the race
card, and he answered the question
with “we will control the Negro
peacefully if we can but with guns if
we must.”
Bowie: Would you talk a bit about
Atlanta’s black community in 1906?
Bauerlein: African Americans were
granted an inferior position in society.
However, the black community was
able to develop an intellectual class, a
business class, a middle class, and that
success gave to Atlanta a model of
progressive race relations. Atlantans
felt that race relations here were
better than they were anywhere else.
We had an active African American
Press. We had radicals like W.E.B.
DuBois, Max Barber, and Bishop
Turner, who when he saw negrophobia
rising told his congregation to “Buy
guns!” Turner said that 60 years before
Malcolm X said it, and he didn’t suffer
significant harassment for it.
Bowie: You talk about the Atlanta
paradox: The “black middle class, the
radical, the racist sheriff, the New
South economy, the white supremacist,
the black militant, and Jim Crow” all
working side by side. Do you think that
trying to mediate these paradoxical
relationships left Atlanta open for what
came about in 1906?
Bauerlein: I think up until that point,
those kinds of contradictions could co-
exist. You could have an African
American press that would mock the
city leaders, that would mock the white
mayor, that would make fun of the
Recorder’s Court Judge Broyles.
Somehow it was all kept together. That
does not mean that it was successful.
The very fact of the riot shows that it
wasn’t successful.
Bowie: How difficult was it to put all of
these paradoxical personae in a kind of
dialogue without overt commentary?
Bauerlein: First, you recognize that
you’re dealing with some controversial
and dismaying material, much of it with
its own ideological slant, and try to give
as honest an account of it as you can.
There are, of course, varying degrees of
selectivity but there are ways of
lessening bias. You test the language of
others’ descriptions for tendentiousness.
You examine the selections of evidence
and what people do with that evidence.
I sort of put it out there and let readers
decide.
Bowie: I found the way that class
played out in your book quite interest-
ing.
Bauerlein: Class markers are much
more distinct in 1906 Atlanta. You see
someone on the street with certain
modes of dress, speech, demeanor, and
those are very much mapped onto class
distinctions which are observed by
whites and blacks. Many of the distinc-
tions that whites applied to the black
community were adopted by black
moderates, whether strategically or
earnestly or with a mixture of the two.
Those distinctions carry over into the
general discourse, so that you often hear
the phrase “the better class of Negroes.”
You also hear the “better class of
whites” repeated over and over. I
mentioned that Atlanta was a plutoc-
racy, the Inmans, Candlers, Englishes,
Maddoxes, Woodruffs, being the
leading families of the city. In the wake
of the riot, many people said that it was
the lower class whites who were
responsible. They would also point to
the victims and say these weren’t lower
class blacks.
Bowie: I wanted to ask you about class
with regard to the hysteria surrounding
black men and their perceived threat to
white womanhood. You don’t hear
people, black or white, necessarily
talking about it as myth or exaggera-
tion.
Bauerlein: No, you don’t, and the
reason that you don’t hear that played
out is that if you did, you would have to
say that the Southern white woman is a
liar. If you’re a black man, you don’t
talk about the Southern white woman.
That’s off limits. Barber does it and he’s
run out of town. The amazing thing
about that Joe Glenn trial is that a
white woman on the witness stand is
declared to be a liar. In the Glenn trial,
the jury determined that she was
mistaken, and fortunately, they had
another suspect. One wonders what
would have happened if they had not
had another suspect. The Wilmington
Riot of 1898 was, in part, sparked by an
article by a black editor who wrote
about white women, and in that article,
I think he said that many cases of
alleged rape are white women surprised
with their black lovers [who] would
rather be known as being raped by a
black man than desiring a black man.
Bowie: Much of this, it seems to me,
goes back to Ida B. Wells and her early
anti-lynching efforts. She challenged
this idea of the black man as a threat by
proving that the vast majority of the
claims were feigned rather than real
crimes of sexual assault and that this
myth became the standard excuse for
lynching.
Bauerlein: Even Teddy Roosevelt, in
one speech, said look at the cases, only
25 percent of them were for charges of
Loose Canons/July 2001/7
rape. One wonders how many of those
were for real charges of rape or were
manufactured after the lynching. This
was the climate.
Bowie: In the Max Barber telegram,
which you place near the end of the
book, he talks about Hoke Smith
having white people go in black face
into the communities and perpetrate
these crimes. Did you find any
evidence to support Barber’s claims?
Bauerlein: There is one piece of
evidence in what David Howard, the
undertaker, said when he went down
to Lakewood and retrieved a body. He
goes and gets the body, begins to
prepare for burial, opens the shirt and
white skin is underneath. He stops
working and calls the white under-
taker to come get the body because
black undertakers couldn’t work on
white bodies.
Bowie: For me it seems that three of
the most colorful and/or representative
of the Atlanta paradox, were Max
Barber, Hoke Smith, and Booker T.
Washington.
Bauerlein: In a way, most of the
negrophobes were very easy to portray.
For one thing, they provide direct and
sensationalistic quotations. Senator
Ben Tillman, Governor Vardeman,
John Temple Graves, and Tom Watson
lay out, in the most disgraceful terms,
exactly what the negrophobic racist
feels and thinks. They’re saying it in
the newspapers for 100,000 people to
read, and on the Senate floor in
Washington D.C.
Bowie: Who were among the more
difficult figures to represent?
Bauerlein: Those who found them-
selves in a position of having to act
publicly in ways that countered their
beliefs. You can tell they have
different constituencies to deal with,
and they feel tremendous ambivalence
in how to convert their private
experience into public expression. A
figure like Reverend Procter is
complicated. He’s a moderate,
respected by whites, who testifies
before the city council, a couple of
weeks before the riot, if “you don’t do
something blood will flow.” If you are
8/Loose Canons/July 2001
a public figure in the black community,
you’ve got to retain the respect of the
black and white communities. That
requires savvy, and public contortions.
Bowie: Could you talk a bit more
about the public/private dimensions to
some of the other black leaders?
Bauerlein: A lot of the leaders’
statements have to be read as coded
statements. Booker T. Washington
spent 30 years making coded state-
ments. Behind the scenes, he could be
very direct and tactical, but in every
public statement he made he consid-
ered how it would play in the black
community and in the white commu-
nity. It is those figures, the black public
figures, who were the most difficult to
portray. Context for all of their
statements is crucial. DuBois was easy
because he didn’t compromise much in
his public statements. Barber is another
complicated figure. He didn’t have a
community base that DuBois, Turner,
Procter, and Bowen did. They had jobs
in universities or congregations, so they
had community ties beyond their
public speech. All Barber had was his
public speech; he was an editor with a
periodical. If he got into trouble, he
had no one to fall back on. I think that
this is why he disappeared. Washing-
ton destroyed him, and the city
authorities sent him out of town.
Bowie: Throughout the text, Washing-
ton emerges in very interesting and
complex ways. There’s a kind of
ambivalence to his character.
Bauerlein: One feels that ambivalence
reading the episodes in which he
appears. There’s that opening vignette
of Washington sitting at his desk,
writing a speech where he quotes from
the Bible, “Come to me and I will
teach you to be fishers of men.” I
picked that because there is Washing-
ton talking about leadership and about
how to gather people around him, and
what he’s doing at that moment is
trying to gather information about his
enemies so that he can discredit them.
That’s the difficulty in reading someone
like Washington. Ten years ago,
PMLA had an issue on African
American literature and history. I
think DuBois appeared in about every
article. Booker T. Washington’s name
did not appear in a single issue which is
odd since he was the most famous man
in the U.S. at the turn of the century.
Washington had charisma; he had a gift
of oratory that was stunning. He was a
master at courting favor and securing
assistance, and he was tireless at both.
His machinations are awe inspiring.
The underhandedness and the range are
intriguing. In another era, he would
have been a master politician and
would have gone very far. I think there
is a lot of dissertation work to be done
on Washington as an American myth
maker.
Bowie: Speaking of myth making,
would you talk about the role of the
media because their role in the riot
plays out in very clear ways in your text.
Bauerlein: You know it’s not much
different from the way it is now.
Whenever there is a big sensationalistic
story, the ratings go up. When it’s over,
then every one goes back and blames
the media for sensationalizing. The
media argues that they’re just giving
people what they want. You have that
same dynamic. Sensationalism sells.
In 1906 you had something parallel to
the CNN’s 30-minute updates; you had
the “extras.” The Atlanta Evening News
could put out “extras” every two hours.
What was interesting, though, was that
this may have been one of the first
campaigns in which the candidates used
the media. Hoke Smith had The
Atlanta Journal in his pocket. He would
give speeches, and he would make sure
they published them.
Bowie: You talk about English and
other white city leaders condemning
Hoke Smith, condemning the media,
condemning the rioters in this very
overt way. Could you talk about that?
Bauerlein: Three days into the riot,
there’s a meeting of the Chamber of
Commerce. Charles Hopkins gets up
and says “you know a few days ago, I
could have gone into any New York
bank and gotten us as much money as I
wanted. Today, we couldn’t get a dime.”
James English, president of Fourth
National Bank and the head of the
Chattahoochee Brick Company, says,
“These rioters have cost us money. To
hell with the race issues. We’re losing
cash everyday.”
Bowie: It’s somewhat depressing, albeit
not surprising, that it all boils down to
economics.
Bauerlein: The bottom line is that
Booker T. Washington was great
because he was encouraging a docile
black labor class, which was very good
for business.
Bowie: Right, economic prosperity but
no political disruption.
Bauerlein: Yes, they changed their tune
a few days after the riot started, for
sound business reasons.
Bowie: Interestingly, you end with
Griffith’s Birth of a Nation and a look at
FACULTY NEWS
John Bugge, professor, performed in a
production of David Kranes’s play,
“Beautiful Dreamer,” a play about
Stephen Foster, American music, and
American racism, held on campus,
April 1, as part of the Brave New
Works Marathon sponsored by Theater
Emory.
Pat Cahill, assistant professor, deliv-
ered a paper entitled “Calculating
Men” at the Tenth Annual Interdisci-
plinary Symposium in Medieval,
Renaissance, and Baroque Studies, held
at the University of Miami in February.
She presented the paper “Spare Men
and Great Ones” at Jonathan Crewes
seminar on “Normative Shakespeare”
at the Annual Meeting of the
Shakespeare Association of America in
Miami in April. In May she accepted
an invitation to discuss “Wound-Man
Walking,” a chapter of her book
manuscript, with the faculty and
graduate students who make up the
Medieval and Renaissance Group at
the University of Pennsylvania.
Walter Kalaidjian, professor, presented
a paper entitled “Work Zones:
Hypermedia and the Place of Poetry in
the Composition Community,” at the
Annual College Composition and
the formation of Atlanta’s negrophobic
thought, which would become en-
trenched for the next 40 years.
Bauerlein: [The movie] made normal
what in 1906 was radical. The Klan in
1906 was anathema to Atlanta. The
Klan was not good for business and
recalled secessionist sentiments and
night riders and this was not what the
New South was about. In 1915, the
Klan was reborn in Atlanta and
suddenly, the Klan occupied city hall
and the governor’s office. Black
militancy was stifled in the city.
DuBois was gone, Washington was
dead, Turner was dead, Herndon
devoted himself to business concerns,
and Barber disappeared. So it was, I
thought, a suitable conclusion.
Communication Convention, held in
Denver in March.
In March, Jim Morey, associate
professor, delivered a paper, “The
Summative Impulse in Old English
Studies,” at the “Beowulf in Our Time”
conference at Kennesaw State Univer-
sity in March.
John Sitter, Charles Howard Candler
Professor, edited and contributed two
chapters to a book just out from
Cambridge University Press, entitled
The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-
Century Poetry.
In March Rick Rambuss, professor, was
invited by the Hudson Strode Program
to the University of Alabama,
Tuscaloosa, where he presented a
lecture titled “The Least English of All
English Poets.” In April, he gave a
jointly sponsored English Department
and Art History Department lecture at
the University of Mississippi. His
presentation juxtaposed the poetry of
the 17th-century religious poet Richard
Crashaw with the works of the photog-
rapher Andres Serrano and painter
Chris Ofili. He also presented a paper
in April, titled “Non-Shakespeare
Shakespeare Films” in a seminar on
Bowie: Could you talk about this book
in the context of more recent racial
conflicts?
Bauerlein: If you look at riots, they are
often triggered by an event, [such as]
the Rodney King [brutality incident in
Los Angeles]. But riots take a long time
to happen, and you need to look at the
community situation to see why things
happen. In the 1906 Atlanta riot, the
reason I go back about a year is to try to
give this idea of moving forward to
what everyone knows is going to
happen. The lesson here is to recognize
a community situation that is getting
tense enough so that if something does
happen it will create a riot.

Shakespeare and Film at the
Shakespeare Association of America
conference in Miami.
Gary Wihl, professor and dean of the
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences,
edited a missing manuscript of Walt
Whitman’s essay on Kant, Hegel, Fichte
and Schelling, entitled “Sunday
Evening Lectures,” for publication in
the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review,
Winter 2001 issue. In September, 2000,
Wihl delivered a lecture, “Individual-
ism and Liberalism in the Poetry of
Walt Whitman” at the National
Humanities Center in the Research
Triangle Park.
Lynna Williams’ short story, “Personal
Testimony” was read by Tony
Award-winning actress Cherry Jones
May 9 in the “Selected Shorts” series at
Symphony Space in New York. Her
essay, “Scenes from the Lorca Lounge”
was published in the spring 2001
Bellingham Review.

E-mail your Canons submis-
sions, address changes, job
changes to
mdurret@emory.edu
Loose Canons/July 2001/9
Uncompromising Undergraduate
Quinn on Mastering Language in the Service Sector
O
nce, I found myself working in an industrial freezer
just south of Rome, Italy, with four Italian technicians
and an interpreter. The temperature was somewhere
between 10 and 15 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, and my feet
no longer felt like feet. My Italian friends and I were trying
desperately to get some machinery to work. At a critical
moment we looked around to see that our skinny, and there-
fore cold-sensitive, interpreter had slipped out. The next
moments were spent with a flurry of gestures and frequent
consultations with an Italian-English dictionary. We found a
way to communicate, finished our work, and then went
outside to warm up and kill the interpreter. There have been
occasions in my construction career when my command of the
English language has been less than helpful. Those occasions
have been rare and have been limited to parts of Europe,
Canada, Philadelphia, and most of Rahway, New Jersey.
The type of construction that I am in now requires a great
deal more communication than my work in Italy. I remodel
people’s homes. How I ended up choosing remodeling as a
profession has a lot to do with my decision to buy a beat up old
house and renovate it. I did not, however, take it up because I
found sheetrocking fun. Nor was it because I suddenly
blossomed as a carpenter. I did not take delight in sanding
floors. God knows I did not take delight in sanding floors.
ALUMNI NEWS
Rand Brandes ’85, professor of English at Lenoir-Rhyne
College, spoke on Seamus Heaney’s new translation of Beowulf
at the Beowulf in Our Time conference at Kennesaw State
University in March.
Marshall Boswell ’97, has a short story collection, In Between
Things, that has just been accepted for publication by
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. The book is scheduled for
release in September 2002. Algonquin also has first-option
rights on his recently completed novel, Alternative Atlanta.
Finally, a new story of his entitled “How to Prosper During
the Coming Bad Years” is scheduled to appear in the fall 2001
issue of The Sun.
Laura Callanan ’99, visiting assistant professor at Mount
Holyoke College, presented “Reading as Revolution: Harriet
Martineau’s Rendering of Interpretive Dynamics in The Hour
and the Man (1841),” at the Narrative Conference, Rice
University, March 8-11. She presented “Plague Narratives and
the Fostering of Academic Dialogue: A Case Study in
Interdisciplinarity,” presented at the Teaching Literature
Conference, Rutgers University, March 24. She also served as
moderator and organizer or “Ruins in the Trans-Atlantic
Imagination,” a panel presented at “Space, Culture, Power: An
Interdisciplinary Conference,” University of Aberdeen,
Scotland, April 10-11.
E-mail your Canons submissions, address changes, job changes to mdurret@emory.edu
10/Loose Canons/July 2001
What I did enjoy was being involved in all facets of the work. I
found that I particularly enjoyed the design and planning
phases. I also enjoyed solving
the problems and pulling it all
together. And I liked seeing the
results.
Coming up with a design
and then managing my own
projects was one thing. I just
thought it up and did it. No
particular communication skills
required. When I started
working on other people’s
homes things changed dramati-
cally. No longer was it my Quinn
house, my vision, my result.
Now I found myself spending as much time in discussions with
my clients, understanding their needs, and defining the project
as I did in construction. The projects themselves grew increas-
ingly large and elaborate and I had to direct a small army of
craftspeople for weeks and months to get all the work done. I
quickly learned that extensive documentation and clear
communication were the key elements for the success of my
projects.
Katherine Clark ’93, assistant professor of English at Dillard
University in New Orleans, has compiled her second oral
autobiography, Milking the Moon. A Southerner’s Story of Life on
This Planet, which is scheduled to be published by Crown in
August. The text recounts the life and writings of Mobile, Ala.
native Eugene Walter as told by Walter near the end of his life.
Norman Finkelstein ’80, professor English at Xavier Univer-
sity in Cincinnati, has had a second book published by SUNY
Press, entitled Not One of Them in Place, Modern Poetry and
Jewish American Identity. His work, a volume in the SUNY
series in Modern Jewish Literature and Culture, explores “the
ways in which Jewish belief, thought, and culture have been
shaped and articulated in modern American poetry.”
Finkelstein stepped down last year after serving six years as
department chair.
Jane Hiles ’93 associate professor of English at Samford
University in Birmingham has been named director of the
university’s London Studies Program.
Jennifer Keith ’93, assistant professor at University of North
Carolina-Greensboro, contributed a chapter to a book recently
released by Cambridge University Press, entitled, The Cam-
bridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry, which was edited
by Charles Howard Candler Professor John Sitter.
M
ost people who choose to renovate their homes have
never been through the process before. They are
unfamiliar with the terminology and are often
intimidated by the whole idea of renovation. Most impor-
tantly, they will only see exactly what they purchased at the
end of a fairly long process. In a way, it seems almost un-
American. There is no instant gratification. This can be a
recipe for disaster in terms of mismatched expectations unless
there is clear and regular communication all the way through
the pre-construction phase. Then comes construction. That’s
the part where our clients have to live on the construction
site. Living on a construction site can be unnerving. Most
people who are unnerved want to talk about it. We have a lot
of “process” conversations with our clients during this phase.
I know it sounds cliché in this “information age” but at
my Atlanta-based company, SawHorse, we have come to see
ourselves as a communication company. We do an excellent
job of putting the sticks and bricks together. But the actual
construction is the last phase of a complicated process. It is the
culmination of months of discussions and meetings and
planning sessions with our clients. As we have grown, we find
that excellent customer service is as much a function of
constant communication as it is excellence in construction.
We spend the majority of our days collecting, organizing and
transmitting information on projects. By the time we start
construction on a project we will have created a “job book”
that’s three inches thick.
Our focus on improved communication is accelerating. In
the last three years our biggest expenditures by far have been
Jennifer Margulis ’99, penned an essay on Lucretia Mott
which appeared in the Dictionary of Literary Biography 239:
American Women Prose Writers, 1820-1870. Margulis’s review of
James Walvin’s biography of Olaudah Equiano was published in
the African Studies Review in September; another review is
forthcoming in the ASR on John Cullen Gruesser’s book, Black
on Black: Twentieth-Century African American Writing about
Africa. Her article “The Trickster Teacher: Encouraging Active
Learning in the Literature Classroom” (a version first appeared
in Loose Canons, November 2000) was accepted for publication
Humanities in the South.
Margulis has received a Faculty Research Grant from
Mount Holyoke College to write, direct, and produce a
documentary film on the writer Octavia Butler. She is
mentoring two WEED Scholarship students who will assist in
her film efforts this summer.
Diana Miles ’00, received a contract from Peter Lang Publish-
ing, Inc. to publish her book, tentatively entitled Women,
Violence, and Testimony in the Works of Zora Neale Hurston. She
begins work as an assistant professor of English at Morehouse
College, fall 2001.
Su Fang Ng MA ‘96 passed her Ph.D. oral defense at the
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and accepted a tenure-
track position in early modern studies at the University of
for technologies that increase our ability to communicate with
one another. This year we will link our clients through our
Website so that they can monitor and comment on the project
as it progresses through design.
When I left Emory with my Smith-Corona portable
typewriter I had no inkling that I would live through the
second coming of Gutenberg. I also had no inkling I would
become a construction worker. That’s what I like about the
future—you just never can tell.

—Jerome Quinn ’69 is the founder of SawHorse, an Atlanta-based
construction company.
Congratulations to the following
students who received their doctorates
during Commencement ceremonies in
Kudos
May:
Laura Barlament
Sherrill Duchock-Diller
Anna Engle
Patricia King
Miriam Moore
Karen Poremski
Kristan Sarvé-Gorham
Vickie Taft
Shirley Toland-Dix
Oklahoma, Norman. Her spouse, Kenneth Hodges, a medieval-
ist and also a Michigan Ph.D., will join her at Oklahoma as a
visiting assistant professor.
Waisted Women: Anorexia Nervosa and Victorian Literature, a
book by Anya Silver ’97, has been accepted by Cambridge
University Press. Her poems, “Silent Night” and “A Mary”
where recently published in Many Mountains Moving and her
poem, “Stillbirth” appeared in The Madison Review.
Jessica Rabin ’00 has accepted a position as assistant professor
at Anne Arundel Community College in Maryland.
The Cumberland Poetry Review (Fall 1999) published David
Raney’s essay, “ ‘I have only my body for a voice’: Sex and
Silence in Louise Gluck’s Poetry.” His essay “House Divided:
Brothers and Balance in the Short Stories of John Cheever”
has been accepted by The Journal of the Short Story in English
(Spring 2001).
Matt Stewart ’88 , was promoted to associate professor with
tenure at Boston University. He published Modernism and
Tradition in Ernest Hemingway’s IN OUR TIME, in February.
Kristina Straub ’84 has been promoted to full professor at
Carnegie Mellon University.

Loose Canons/July 2001/11
Solomon Captures Coriolanus
Traversing the Space Between B.A. and M.A.
T
he fifth cut on David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane (1973) is a
little song called “Cracked Actor.” Throughout my year
enrolled in the English Department’s B.A./M.A. Pro-
gram, as I chipped away at the contours of my master’s thesis
on Shakespeare’s final tragedy, Coriolanus, Bowie’s chorus
whipped through my head: “Crack, baby, crack, show me you’re
real/Smack, baby, smack, it’s all that you feel,” Bowie screams.
The theatrical sado-masochism of “Cracked Actor” at first
provided a kind of relief from the insistence of the thesis, but I
quickly realized that “Cracked Actor” was precisely the point
for which I was searching.
Having enrolled as a College senior in the BA/MA Pro-
gram, I shouldn’t have been surprised in the least that David
Bowie sewed up the strands of my thesis. Perhaps the most
dynamic texture of the program became the way that my life
and my academics intermingled, so that the solitude of
incessant writing was contained by contact with professors,
friends, films and even David Bowie rewriting and being
rewritten by the thesis itself. For a time I only had conversa-
tions in which “performativity” was the key term, but those
conversations and the contexts in which they occurred
continually curled back into Coriolanus. When I brought
drawings by gay haut-pornographer Tom of Finland to my
thesis defense as handouts for my committee, I felt a sort of
glorious thrill--not only at the transgression of suffusing
Renaissance tragedy with contemporary pornography, but at
how intensely I felt that I had found a community of scholars
willing to engage and challenge my work, as well as a sense of
‘Probing Our Relationship to the World Around Us’
Greener Thinking and Acting in the Academy
I
n late March, I joined 90 people from across the
university at a workshop titled “Nurturing a Green
University” to discuss the relationship between Emory and
the natural environment. Participants who gathered for the
workshop already shared a deep concern for the scale of
environmental degradation, both at Emory and in the world at
large. From smog and urban sprawl to global climate change
and the extinction of species, the group acknowledged an
array of environmental problems that may eventually threaten
human existence, and felt compelled to carry this awareness
beyond the confines of the meeting and spawn concrete
changes. As an institution of higher education, we agreed,
Emory University bears the social and ethical responsibility for
E-mail your Canons submissions, address changes, job changes to mdurret@emory.edu
12/Loose Canons/July 2001
what “my work” might actually be.
The abstract nuances of a scholarly community was not,
however, the force that propelled me into the program. Two or
three weeks into September
1997, once I caught up with
the pace of my freshman year
at Emory, the B.A./M.A.
Program became a sort of
elusive conquest for me. The
idea behind the program
itself is rather simple: a
junior year student makes
formal application to the
Graduate School of Arts and
Sciences, and if accepted,
spends the senior year of
dually enrolled in Emory
College and the Graduate
Solomon
School. This enrollment
entails studying in a series of graduate classes and producing a
master’s thesis—all in a single year.
From a rather detached standpoint, it seemed like a pretty
hot program: I could complete two degrees without worrying
about the financial and temporal expenditure of graduate
school, and it would offer me a chance to explore whether to
pursue a Ph.D in English. In this sense, I first conceived of the
B.A./M.A. Program in terms of a concrete end: a master’s
degree and (perhaps even more valuable) an assurance of a
instilling a broad environmental consciousness and ecologi-
cally sound behavior both within its own realm and in society
in general. “Greener” thinking and acting, therefore, should
affect our operations, our research, our discourse, and our
teaching.
In the Department of English, we seem far removed from
questions of environmental health and sustainability. After
all, we study and teach the products of human culture and
imagination, not the “data” that constitute the physical world
around us. One of the most famous literary figures who
spurned such disciplinary division was Henry David Thoreau.
In his “Natural History of Massachusetts,” Thoreau relayed:
“Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower
future career. I do have the master’s degree if not exactly any
assurance, but what proved ultimately so worthwhile for me—
in Emory and in the B.A./M.A. Program in particular—was
the experience of working with some phenomenal professors
(among them Rick Rambuss, Cathy Caruth, Pat Cahill,
Michael Elliott, and Mark Jordan) and forcing myself to teach
myself—sometimes outside of any coherent structure.
In fact, the program produces a sort of odd disequilibrium,
in that its most valuable and rich textures are also bound up in
its weaknesses. I spent the year feeling not so much dually
enrolled in both Emory College and the Graduate School as
somehow stuck in a liminal space between the two—or, as Eve
Sedgwick might put it, kinda both and yet kinda neither.
Though this sort of interstice did produce in me its own forms
of confusion and aloneness, it also forced me to hone the
dimensions of what I wanted my experience to be, and in this
sense it provided me with a terrific preparation for the position
in which I find myself now as I leave Atlanta for New York,
trying to deal with an overwhelming influx of possibilities
without a sure sense of direction.
Writing this piece now, after I’ve just graduated from
Emory, I’m taken not so much by what I’ve materially gleaned,
but how much I already miss the communities I found and
joined through taking part in the program. I think now that
what remains with me is not so much the endless hours of
emptied packs of cigarettes and piles of Xeroxes strewn across
my room, but rather the end of those vivid experiences which
punctuated and shaped my classes, the thesis, and my life for
the past year. It’s a loss I hope never to lose.

—Jesse Solomon graduated with highest honors in May 2001 with a
B.A./M.A. in English.
in a truth.” What would be the repercussions of applying this
maxim to our life and work in the English department? To
begin as Thoreau did in “Economy,” the first chapter of Walden,
we would have to evaluate the ways in which we conduct our
daily lives. Although we all treasure the tangible qualities of
the printed word, we could reconsider the quantity and the
quality of the paper we use to teach, do research, and perform
our administrative duties. As individuals and as a department,
we need to join a campus-wide effort to recycle, use recycled
products, and conserve energy.
T
horeau’s objective in living at
Walden, of course, was not only
to promote an simpler life style but also to understand
the relationship between his mind and the world. As readers,
Ecocriticism continued on page 16
Solomon photo, page 12, and Erben class photo, page 16, by Mary Alma Durrett
Tally Places in Glascock Competition
I
had the privilege of representing Emory at the 78th Kathryn
Irene Glascock Intercollegiate Poetry Competition at
Mount Holyoke College in April where I placed second
among six contestants. Professors Lynna Williams and Jon
Loomis (in the Creative Writing program) recommended me
for participation in this event following the likes of Sylvia
Plath and Seamus Heaney. The experience was most memo-
rable for the contact I had with the competing undergraduates
from five other schools: Amherst, Bryn Mawr, Johns Hopkins,
Mount Holyoke, and Smith.
We spent an afternoon getting acquainted and comparing
notes on our respective Creative Writing programs. I antici-
pated feeling somewhat second-rate among students primarily
from northeastern liberal arts institutions. However, the
excellence of our school, and more specifically our department,
quickly made my apprehension disappear. I realized that I had
failed to fully recognize or appreciate the quality of the
program at Emory. Thankfully, an opportunity like the
Glascock furthered my pride in and my excitement over all the
scholarly resources at Emory. In four years, I have studied with
Ha Jin, James Flannery, Cathy Caruth, Ronald Schuchard, and
Jon Loomis, and I have attended readings and lectures by
Adrienne Rich, Louise Gluck, Charles Simic, Charles Wright,
and Frederick Busch. When I compared Emory’s liberal arts
programs to those of others in the Glascock competition (ones
that I expected would dominate the field) I discovered that
their programs do not hold a candle to ours.
Later we attended a colloquium featuring three poet judges:
April Bernard, John Peck, Alastair Reid. In the Glascock
room, surrounded by the works of past participants, we were
captivated by the judges’ discussion of the purposes, processes,
and products of poetry, and were thrilled with opportunity to
raise a few questions ourselves.
That evening, when Emma Christenson from Bryn Mawr,
the first reader and eventual winner, finished her first poem, I
wondered what on earth I was doing there. Her powerful
command of the language, ability to articulate sentiment
without sentimentality, and intense presentation overwhelmed
me. I read four poems from my honors thesis, entitled “The
Living,” which thematically swept from family, through travel
and humor, to mortality. In the time between readings, I
enjoyed hearing about other undergraduates’ works in contem-
porary poetry, which varied from narrative to lyricism, ro-
mance, political commentary, and meditation.
This experience affirmed my confidence in Emory Univer-
sity, exposed me to writers from around the country, and
allowed me access to famed poets who returned comments on
our poems and signed our books with special advice regarding
our current work. I was honored both to represent Emory and
to be runner-up, and when I returned home, I fell asleep
contemplating of all the weekend’s pleasure, discourse, and
edification.

—Meghan Sanders Tally graduated SUMMA CUM LAUDE in May
2001 with a B.A. in English and Creative Writing.
Loose Canons/July 2001/13
Alchemy
I.
Retiring,
under the doping
of unnatural fatigue, 2001 English Department and Creative Writing Program Awards
I, somnambulist,
declined hall lamps

A
and passed into the kitchen.
Stopping there to extinguish,
I was called to a crinkle
behind the stove.
Peering behind it, through shade and
wire
I saw you: gray, delicate,
epileptic, jerking your head
on a plastic wrapper.
ward Winners
Curiosity once dared
me to eat a pebble
of rat-poison—
headache, diarrhea ensued.
But you, tender pest, are brought to

T
spasm, he winners of the 2001 English Department and Creative Writing Program
pink limbs in protest, Awards received their awards from poet Charles Wright, currently a professor of
dentia exposed, English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Wright, who won the
wet. 1998 Pulitzer Prize for his collection of poetry, Black Zodiac, was on campus April 16
and 17 for a reading and colloquium, co-sponsored by the Hightower Fund and the
II. Friends of the Emory Libraries, and for the presentation of the student awards.
Suctioned to the plastic
pillows, the remote Anton DiSclafani, a creative writing major, won the English Department’s Under-
controlled bed, calling graduate Essay Award for “The Ambiguity of Love in Tess of the d’Urbervilles and The
with effort, your tongue Woodlanders.”
is dried hard—you sound deaf.
I still don’t know you’re dying, Lauren Gunderson received the Artistine Mann Award in Drama for her work, “Parts
drugged to schizophrenia. They Call Deep.”
A thinned finger indicates,
the window? Anton DiSclafani received the Artistine Mann Award in Fiction for her work,
the glass of water? “Tightness.”
that photograph?
I approach with water— Charles C. Carter’s poem, “Alchemy,” received the Artistine Mann Award in Poetry
you groan negative. and his “Modus Vivendi” received an Honorable Mention from the Academy of
Straw in the glass, American Poets.
a finger to vacuum,
I moisten your mouth— Lauren Cook received the Artistine Mann Award in Creative Non-Fiction for “The
improvised saliva. Portrait of a Southern Housewife.”
Still muted, you motion
to come close, navigate Gretta DesCamp was the winner of the Academy of American Poets prize for her
arms around my neck. “Sleep for two in a single bed.”
This is no hug—medicine
has mutilated your insides. Ariana Jakub’s poem, “What My Mom is Thinking,” received an Honorable Mention
You need help to sit up, in the Artistine Mann Award competition; Jared van Aalten received an Honorable
to breathe. Mention for his drama, “Sheer Time”; and Lauren Paige Giles received an Honorable
Mention in the Mann competition for her fictional work, “The Purple Heart High-
—Charles C. Carter way.”

14/Loose Canons/July 2001

 Sleep for Two in a Single Bed
From “The Ambiguity of Love in
Tess of the d’Urbervilles and The Woodlanders” I will never fall asleep
with you beside me

T
hough two separate novels, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and The Wooodlanders engage your hot breath tickling my cheek
with similar themes. Through comparing and contrasting the two novels, we your arm a skinny speed bump
will gain greater insight into Hardy’s philosophical views as relating to love, beneath the arch of my back.
sexuality, gender differences, and social struggle, among other topics. Let us begin,
I stare at the cracks in the ceiling
then, by examining Grace Melbury and Tess Durbeyfield, the female protagonists of
willing myself to hold still
their novels. Since the dilemma of social status seems to be involved in the outset of wanting instead to turn
each character’s conflict, this subject will be undertaken as well. back side stomach side
Love’s struggle is perhaps most violently represented in Tess Durbeyfield. At the the movement that lulls me to sleep.
core of Tess’s conflict is her name: Durbeyfield. Only when she learns of her true
name, d’Urberville, is she persuaded by her parents to visit her ancestors at Trantridge. And then I’m walking the halls
It is here that she meets Alec, her “cousin,” who will eventually (and indirectly) cause my bare feet carry me silent across the
her death. Alec’s social standing, of a higher status than Tess’s, plays a large role in her carpet
demise. Social standing and class-consciousness were extremely important during the tracing and retracing my steps
Victorian era, and his importance is easily detected in Tess of the d’Urbervilles. The until I can feel the darkness of sleep again
my shoulder brushing the wall as I drift
very title suggests the ambivalence Tess feels in regard to her indefinite status, and also
into dreams
the uncertainty with which society treats her. It is of the greatest irony that Alec and
his family are not really d’Urbervilles, and only adopted the name when they became Too soon I return
wealthy. Wealth, as evidenced, is directly tied to social standing. The “new” but so tired I could sleep anywhere
d’Urbervilles were able to “buy” their name. It is only because Alec is wealthy, and a even in the confines of your long arms.
d’Urberville, that he is able to retain Tess as his employee. More explicitly, it is only
because Alec is wealthy enough to own a horse that he is able to carry Tess into the When I wake, I find you gone

Excerpts from Winning Works

woods. Literally and figuratively, Alec stands above the peasants that walk with Tess. my body curved into a question mark
curled around the shadow of your
warmth.
—Anton DiSclafani
—Gretta DesCamp
From “The Portrait of a Southern Housewife”
From “Tightness”

A
s a child, Sally dreamed of having a large, “bubbly and happy” family, complete
with four children. She aspired to become a conductor of music, perhaps under “It’s not about size,” she says. “I would
the influence of her mother who was a trained opera singer. She wanted the never want you to think it was the size.
American dream and the All-American family. It’s about me, it’s about how I feel.” She’s
Her body had other plans. Sally was diagnosed with a tipped uterus early in her chopping a tomato as she tells me this.
marriage and was told it would be close to impossible for her to have children. When “Are you listening?”
she learned she was pregnant with Charlie, Sally counted her blessings and accepted “Yes.” The chopping sound is
that it was a miraculous occurrence that might never happen again. Charlie grew up as becoming louder and louder.
“So what do you think?”
an only child.
“I think I’m just here to help with
As a young couple, Allen and Sally spent their summer with two other couples dinner.” The chopping sound stops. She
they had befriended in college. They would pack up their belongings, Charlie, and the hands the cutting board to me and I lift
family dog, Winston, and live on Nantucket Island for a couple of weeks out of the the lid off the pot on the stove. The
year. These summer days and nights were filled with lobster bakes, long walks, steam rises toward my face.
lemonade stands, and philosophical debates. Sally watched her friends’ children grow “You know,” she says, “a lot of women
up with Charlie and especially loved to dress and diaper the baby of the bunch; a little do it. It’s a confidence issue. Your father
girl with blonde curly locks and a freckled face. and I both agree it’s a confidence issue.”
As Charlie grew older, Allen’s consulting work brought the family to many She folds a napkin and lays it on the
different places, including Mexico for five years. Then Allen was offered the position placemat. “You’re too young to know this,
of President of Egleston Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia and so the Gayers moved to the but breasts are very important. In some
ways, they define a woman. Of course,
South indefinitely.
women with small breasts can still be
When Charlie graduated from Westminister, a prestigious private school located happy, but I don’t think they’re so well
in the upper-class suburbs outside of Atlanta, Sally prepared to say goodbye to her only defined. As women, I mean. After all,
child. She accepted a job working for Young Audiences, a program dealing with the why would so many women be getting
overwhelming need for arts in the public school systems. Charlie left for Princeton breast implants if it wasn’t an issue?”
University in the fall of 1989 and Sally threw herself into her work.
—Anton DiSclafani
—Lauren Cook

Loose Canons/July 2001/15

Ecocriticism
continued from page 13
interpreters, and teachers of literature,
we are experts in analyzing how literary
artifacts reflect and influence the
encounter between human beings and
the world around them, now and in the
past. While Thoreau sought to find
correspondences between himself and
the natural world, our discipline has too
frequently limited the definition of “the
world” to human culture and society. In
recent years, then, ecocritical literary
scholarship and teaching has begun to
stress the idea that human culture is
inextricably connected to the physical
environment. According to Cheryll
Glotfelty, editor of the influential
Ecocriticism Reader, such a critical
stance “takes as its subject the intercon-
nections between nature and culture,
specifically the cultural artifacts of
language and literature.” An ecologi-
cally conscious reading of literature, in
other words, does not ask us to disregard
the crucial roles language and culture
play in the way writers and texts
mediate between the world and their
minds in favor of a supposedly “objec-
tive” external reality. Rather,
ecocritical scholars and readers ac-
knowledge that no literary work has the
power to completely disengage itself
from the environmental qualities of the
place where it was produced.
Ecocriticism, therefore, has often paid
special attention to those texts and
authors who espouse this
interconnectedness between the natural
environment and human subjectivity.
Reading and teaching authors such as
Wordsworth, Thoreau, Muir,
Borroughs, Leopold, Abbey, Oliver,
Momaday, Snyder, and Kingsolver can
remind us of the manifold ways in
which literature responds to the
powerful influence of the natural
environment.
While many ecocritics have focused
on nature writing, other scholars, such
We’re online: www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/news
16/Loose Canons/July 2001
Erben, left, and members of his Expository Writing class, “Environmental Issues in the
21st Century,” often take their discussion into the field.
as Robert Kern, now aim “to recover
the environmental character or
orientation of works whose conscious or
foregrounded interests lie elsewhere.”
From William Shakespeare to Toni
Morrison, we could try to understand
how literary figures whose work we do
not primarily associate with “nature”
are nevertheless grounded in and
affected by a specific place or environ-
ment. Both approaches combined
provide us with the tools to understand
how culture and literature have shaped
our perception of the natural world, and
how, in turn, the natural environment
can profoundly influence human
beings, art, and culture. Ultimately,
ecocritical strives to be more than
another theoretical/critical “school,”
but, by affecting our conscious involve-
ment of literature and culture, it
attempts to change our social and
institutional practices.
E
cologically conscious reading and
teaching, then, does not simply
ask us to understand the subjec-
tivity of writers and characters in
literature, but to probe our own
relationship to the world around us.
Even though we do not study the
scientific basis of the natural environ-
ment and do not publicize the latest
natural disaster, our work may ulti-
mately have a more lasting effect on the
ways our students and we think and act
in a world that consists of more than
the spheres of society and culture. As
readers and teachers trained in the
trivium of gender, race, and class, we
will find ourselves in relatively un-
known territory, asking questions more
frequently than answering them.
Ultimately, however, we may discover
the reward of saying with Walt
Whitman: “I am afoot with my vision.”
I would like to encourage everyone in
the department and outside to join in
discussing our relationship to and
responsibility for our natural environ-
ment. How can our discipline and our
teaching play an active role in forging a
deeper ecological consciousness in our
society? Let us talk about these ques-
tions on our listserves, in the depart-
ments, in our classrooms, and, I hope,
in the magnificent places that are part
of our campuses but not always part of
our minds.

—Patrick Erben is a graduate student
whose academic focus is on early Ameri-
can literature, German colonial writings,
and ecocriticism. Contact Erben at
perben@learnlink.emory.edu