Joe Boone

A Portrait of the English Department

USC College’s English department is under renovation. A new library on the fourth floor of Taper Hall boasts a generous book collection and faculty publications. The walls of the graduate student lounge are freshly painted and plush new carpet lies underfoot. Department Chair Joe Boone not only drew up the blueprints for this overhaul, he was also spotted on his spare Saturdays scrupulously laying a tiled mosaic on the floor.

This facelift serves as a metaphor for what is transpiring in the department itself. Previous tracks are being streamlined. A new system of student-faculty advising is underway. Seven new professors have signed on with the department in the past eighteen months, including four senior scholars and two junior hires arriving in the fall. Two other senior scholars started teaching last fall, bring a 25 percent increase to the faculty in two years. There are three other senior initiative candidates in the pipeline, signifying the rapid pace of this transformation.

“Nationally, people are talking about us. They’re calling us a ‘hot’ department,” marvels undergraduate director Bill Handley. “We’re hiring rather than cutting back. There is the possibility of growth rather than ossifying lines between camps. It’s an exciting time.”

The Waves

With the arrival of new faculty, a natural sea change is underway. One cluster of interest is forming among 20th century scholars who deal with poetry and poetics. Another cluster of excellence is emerging in the “Long Early Modern” period that spans the Middle Ages to the 18th century, fueled by student interest in upper-division seminars. Feminist literary and cultural approaches now exist in tandem with faculty working on groundbreaking, gender-related issues. The traditionally strong Americanist following has been enhanced by a focus of issues of race, minority discourse, globalization, media, and postcoloniality—which fall under the rubric of “New American Studies.”

Though disparate in interests, the department has a strong reputation for being open and genial, which undoubtedly contributes to its allure to recent faculty hires. “I got the sense,” explains Bruce Smith, a Renaissance professor who was previously at Georgetown University for 30 years, “that despite its diversity all these people are part of a whole here.”

Overlapping Fields

It is difficult to pinpoint the respective specialties of the 33 professors who comprise the English department faculty. One of the tenets of the College’s Senior Faculty Recruitment Initiative was to bring in scholars who are typically expert in more than one discipline, or who are leaders in emerging intersections of several disciplines.

For example, David Lloyd, a new senior faculty, is a specialist in Romantic poetry, modern Irish literature and postcolonialism. Paul Alkon, holder of the Leo S. Bing Chair in English and American Literature, focuses on 18th century British and French literature, as well as Science Fiction. Susan Mc Cabe is a feminist literary critic in modern and contemporary poetry, a published poet and a creative writing teacher.

“The department will always maintain a strong foothold in traditional scholarship. There is great strength across the centuries,” says College Dean Joseph Aoun. “But we are also exploring new fields of inquiry that represent a more visionary approach to the college of the future.”

Tradition and Innovation

Judith Halberstam, a newly-hired specialist in media and film, and in gender and feminist studies, says she is no longer concerned with the distinction between the literary and visual. Her latest book deals exclusively with film, among other publications that deal with performance art and visual culture. Critiquing the tendency to divide English departments into specialized periods, centuries and genres, Halberstam argues, “Knowledge doesn’t come parceled up in periods. When you’re dealing with something like colonialism, it doesn’t just stop at the brink of the 20th century.”

Boone estimates that up to one-third of the department uses visual culture, sound or performance in their courses. Asked how such media fall under the rubric of English, Boone responds that film, lyrics and monologues are all forms of literary expression. “Interpretation,” which he explains as reading “texts” for their cultural, aesthetic and social meanings, “is precisely what we’ve been trained to do as literary scholars.”

The Metamorphosis

Another part of the departmental transformation is a complete revision of the undergraduate program. The current system of majors has been simplified to two tracks: literature and creative writing. The department isn’t becoming less stringent; it is becoming more deliberate in its offerings.

With more flexible requirements, the faculty is freer to design their courses and the students have a wider range in their course options. The result will be smaller classes, a variety of more interesting classes —such as single-author seminars— and co-taught lectures.

“The most exciting thing about USC College is its openness to new visions of knowledge and learning,” Boone muses. “English, because of its interdisciplinary bent, is a great site for such exploration. Reading a book, seeing a film, we enter unknown terrain, other minds, new spaces, diverse realities—all of which push us in directions we might otherwise never have gone.”