Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, a memoir of his earlier life in Paris, was actually pieced together after his suicide by his then-wife Mary, and as Christopher Hitchens points out in a review of the newly published “restored” version, what was eventually redacted or included presumably had a lot to do with what his final wife thought about what he had...
Professor Lyn Hejinian recently delivered this year’s Gayley Lecture, an annual English Department event which showcases the current research of a distinguished faculty member. 
The text of Professor Hejinian’s lecture, which we’re delighted to reproduce below, continues her extensive body of celebrated poetic and scholarly work. Its particular style, linking poetic diction with critical analysis, might ring some bells with students who have taken one of Hejinian’s twentieth-century literature courses and encountered those writers she has most extensively studied, virtuosos in poetry and prose alike: William Carlos Williams, for one, or the subject of this lecture, Gertrude Stein.
Stein is a writer whose status as cultural icon—symbol of Parisian cosmopolitanism and open homosexuality, standard-bearer for difficult modernist writing, target of relentless parody—tends to overshadow her actual work. Hejinian admits that she doesn’t expect anyone in her 
audience to have read Lucy Church Amiably, the 1927 text which is the lecture’s centerpiece. In Stein’s own lifetime the situation was little different; she feared, Hejinian tells us, that her “identity,” the fixed public self that accompanied her celebrity, might overwhelm her “human mind,” the fluid, less definable self of everyday life. Yet Hejinian contends that Stein is important precisely because she is not alone in this predicament, and that Stein’s study of the relations between time and identity, labor and freedom, has much bearing on our own age. Her lecture recovers for us a bit of Stein’s human mind and offers a fine example of what literary scholarship can be.
READ MORE Professor Lyn Hejinian’s “Positions of the Sun: Latitudes and Lucy Church Amiably”
The English Department is delighted to announce that Professor Scott Saul is this year’s recipient of The American Cultures Innovation in Teaching Award. This campus-wide award, given by the American Cultures Center, “recognizes the use of pedagogical developments to enhance the students’ learning experience in the American Cultures classroom.” Professor Saul was awarded this distinction for the ENGL 166AC course he taught this past Fall, “Race and Performance in the 20th c. U.S.”
READ MORE Professor Scott Saul Wins American Cultures Teaching Award
In the Guardian, Martin Amis remembers J.G. Ballard, musing on how so orderly a life could produce work so unpredictable, savage, and sinister. In the New Statesman, John Gray writes that these two sides of the author were not unrelated, that “after experiencing the sudden disappearance of conventional existence he was never able to take the pretensions of civilised humanity...
John Pipkin’s first novel Woodsburner brings to life an incident that Henry David Thoreau, America’s greatest transcendentalist philospher/arsonist, left out of Walden, the time he accidentally burned down 300 acres of Maine birch and pine forest and earned the enmity of the locals. As Ron Charles writes in his review: “Over the course of this momentous day, Pipkin moves back...
Relations between Russia and Ukraine have deteriorated in recent years, but now we know the real root cause: on the 200th anniversary of literary giant Nikolai Gogol’s birth, both countries are attempting to claim him. As Tom Parfitt reports in the London Guardian, “While the two countries sprang from a common east Slavic civilisation centred around the proto-state of Kievan...
Young Jean Lee, Photo by Gene Pittman courtesy Walker Art Center On April 1, the English Department will be having its second event in its new series, “Conversations with Distinguished Alumni/ae.” Professors Catherine Gallagher and Scott Saul will be talking with playwright Young Jean Lee, who received her BA, with highest honors, in 1996. Young Jean went on to spend...
READ MORE Conversations with Distinguished Alumna Young Jean Lee, Wed April 1, 5 PM
The first volume of The Letters of Samuel Beckett has been published, and it was no small accomplishment. As Nicholas Lezard at the Guardian notes, “the breadth of allusion, and the allusive and elusive wordplay you might have expected between intimate and highly educated correspondents (“‘nastorquemada nyles’ has not been identified with certainty,” say the editors, and I can’t say...
On Thursday, March 12, 2009, Professor Robert Hass gave the first of this year’s Faculty Research Lectures, the full text of which follows here. AN OAK GROVE Thank you. It is an honor and a bit daunting to be here today. Since I don’t actually do research so much as read around to try to put my thoughts in order,...
Everyone is excited that we have a new picture of the Bard. And isn’t he a looker! As reported in the NYT: “His face is open and alive, with a rosy, rather sweet expression, perhaps suggestive of modesty…There is nothing superior or haughty in the subject, which one might well expect to find in a face set off by such...
In a TLS review, Jonathan Bate suggests that Milton has been a mirror which each era’s biographers have used to reflect their professional self-image. “For Masson,” he writes “it was sufficient to be clubbable around the Athenaeum. For William Empson in the following century, the professor of literature could be the naughty schoolboy throwing paper darts from the back row...
READ MORE Literature on the Web: “a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit…”
Every Wednesday, we’ll post a round-up of links which may be of interest to the larger Berkeley English community. Let us know if you see anything you think we should pass along! The great Sudanese writer, Tayeb Salih, passed away late last Tuesday. He’s best known for his 1966 novel Season of Migration to the North, which Edward Said called...
The Berkeley Poetry Review publishes poetry by UC Berkeley faculty, students, staff, and alumni. The deadline for the 40th issue is March 1. Those interested can submit up to four poems to berkeleypoetryreview at yahoo.com or leave them in our mailbox in 322 Wheeler. Detailed instructions can be found here.
PASSED FROM ONE MOUTH TO ANOTHER.* (a poetry event featuring UCB grad students) Cecil Giscombe’s English 243 class presents an evening of poetry and song along with food prepared by the poets. Graduate students Anthony Bello, Rachel Carden, Rebecca Gaydos, Nikhil Govind, Mariah Hamilton, Charity Ketz, Gillian Osborne, Samia Rahimtoola, Robert Reyes, and Rachel Wamsley will read, sing, and recite....
