Neil Kendricks' COOL Comics Class @ SDSU LIT, Fall 2009!!!

pacificREVIEW 2008-09 is Now IN PRINT!

Hit the image to be instantly transported to SDSU's greatest undergraduate/graduate west coast arts review annual!

literature.sdsu.edu proud to co-sponsor robert a. rosenstone at san diego state university, may 4, 2009 in gmcs 301

The Department of English and Comparative Literature, SDSU, is proud to co-sponsor with the Baron Fund for Ethics Education, Phi Alpha Theta, and the Departments of Africana Studies, and History the visit of Robert Rosenstone to Montezuma Mesa Monday! Here's the skinny:

If you study or teach about feature films, you should attend Robert Rosenstone's lecture:

"Why Directors Invent the Past to Tell the Truth: An Analysis of the Movie Glory"

May 4th at 3:00 PM in 301 Geology, Math, and Computer Science Building

Rosenstone is arguably the leading historian working in the field of film. His biography of John Reed was the basis of Warren Beatty's Reds.

Robert A. Rosenstone
Professor of History
Division of the Humantities & Social Sociences
California Institute of Technology (CalTech)
Pasadena, California, USA

Founding Editor, Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice
Associate Editor, Film Historia

My current research runs along two parallel lines, continuing the investigation of issues that have concerned me for the last two decades. One involves the intensely contemporary issue: what it means to construct works of history in a culture where the visual and the electronic media are not only supplementing but to a great extent replacing the written word as the chief means of communication. The other line has to do with creating alternative ways of presenting history (on the page, on the screen, on the internet), which of necessity involves questions of the relationship between historical data and argument, as well as that between fact and fiction. Robert A. Rosenstone

Publications

Books: AUTHOR

Crusade of the Left: The Lincoln Battalion and the Spanish Civil War - 1969 Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed - 1975 Mirror in the Shrine: American Encounters in Meiji Japan - 1988 Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History - 1995 King of Odessa - 2003 The Man Who Swam Into History - 2005 History on Film / Film on History - 2006

Books: EDITOR AND CO-AUTHOR

Protest from the Right - 1968 Seasons of Rebellion: Protest and Radicalism in Recent America - 1972 Los cantos de la conmocion: Veinte años de rock - 1974 Revisioning History: Filmmakers and the Construction of the Past - 1995 Experiments in Rethinking History - 2005

SDSU MALAS and literature.sdsu.edu Collaborate on a Cool Summer Class!

Joanna Brooks, our award-winning*, fab Americanist, is teaching a new class for graduate students into literature and cultural studies at SDSU--the course is inter-disciplinary and open to all majors! Click the image above to get the scoop! This is the first of hopefully many cross-pollenizations between literature.sdsu.edu and SDSU's MALAS program.


*American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American and Native American Literatures, William Sanders Scarborough Prize, Modern Language Association, 2004

Apply for the 2nd Annual Joe Gillis Internship in Hollywood Competition!

More information appears below the clickable image here:

Our 2009 Cool Summer Schedule is now ONLINE!

Click the image below to be instantly teleported to the literature.sdsu.edu mothership! Hit the beachball on the top of the page and you'll be looking at our Summer menu of literati delights!

CCC, NCCL & literature.sdsu.edu host GENE YANG @ SDSU, Wed. May 6, 2009

Stop the presses! Stop the presses! Gene Yang, comic book superstar extraordinaire, is coming to SDSU on Wednesday, May 6, 2009; hats off to Professor June Cummins-Lewis and the rest of the SDSU Children's Literature cohort for making this happen.  Hit this image for all the details {more below}:

For more on Yang and his work, go here.

ps: you may have heard we are going to have a Comics/Graphic Narrative class at literature.sdsu.edu this Fall 2009--it will be led by our cool, indy-film prof Neil Kendricks!

English and Comparative Literature Chair Invades the SDSU Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Wednesday, April 29, 2009

When not alligator-wrestling colleagues over departmental politics, Bill Nericcio tries to keep himself busy being a scholar and cultural studies writer. He's been invited by the generous graduate students in Spanish and Portuguese at SDSU to share his latest findings filed under the salacious working working title Eyegiene: Permutations of Subjectivity in the Televisual Age of Sex and Race--his follow-up book with UT Press to Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the "Mexican" in America. Go to Professor Nericcio's blog or click the image opposite for more details.

Logo Prototype | literature.sdsu.edu

Jericho Brown Reads and Talks to Students @ SDSU's literature.sdsu.edu

Crisis Carnival Recap

Now that two weeks have passed since this year's SDSU English Department sponsored graduate student conference, allow me to supply a rundown of the day's proceedings.  As organizer of this year's event, I was pleased by the quality and contrast of the presentations, and was glad to see so many people turn out in support.  

The title of the conference, "The Ecstasy of Speed," was selected due to its relevancy to current issues of study, and allowed for an array of presentation topics ranging from from crank addict surfers to Craigslist ad surfers; we saw Corpus Christi Pageants and Facebook fanatics, and had analyses on everything from Doctorow's  Ragtime to Danielewski's  Only Revolutions.  Since the panels were set up thematically in an attempt to simulate the debilitating effects of escalating speed, it came as no shock when the unexpected ending left many in attendance craving more.  

The event ended after keynote speaker Derek Pell captivated the crowd with anecdotes and satirical readings of his work ranging from "deconstructing" art to tips on how to write a successful suicide note, ending with a clip from his reworking of Plan 9 From Outer Space, aptly titled Plan 9b From Outer Space.

In a comment to a rousing presentation by Larry McCaffery, MFA graduate and author Kimball Taylor may have summed up the overall feeling of the day when by saying that the most dangerous effect of speed is not the acceleration but coming to a quick stop.  

As a result of my own confusion with the unexpected ending, I failed to thank the people I had meant to (besides Pam Fox Kuhlken for supplying us all Cracker Jacks), so allow me to use this space to thank everyone whose hard work went into making this conference happen:

 

Thank you Gaelan Gilbert for all your help in co-organizing the event; Bill Nericcio for running the Crisis Carnival website  and basically guiding us through the whole process; Nathan Leaman for helping in the transitioning from last year's amazing conference;  Larry McCaffery for all the arrangements with the keynote; Derek Pell for acting as keynote; Mark Young, Quentin Bailey, Joanna Brooks, and the other respondents already mentioned for giving your time; Annie Foral for reserving rooms; Adam Pike and everyone at Ponce's for supplying our lunch; Megan E. Gilbert for displaying her artwork; Charlie Yi of The Latent Print for help with the flier (see above); and thank you again to all of the panelists for sharing their work under the rigorous pressures of an academic conference.


 

I enjoyed the entire experience and look forward to seeing what comes of next year's conference after I pass the torch on to the next unsuspecting grad student.  Any volunteers?

Kevin Gossett

Carey Wall in Mississippi Quarterly

Our congratulations go out to Carey Wall, an SDSU professor and former department chair whose article "`The Burning' : Extreme Reversal to Meet Life's Obligations" will appear in this month's Eudora Welty Centennial Supplement. For subscription information click here.