CGS Professors Present at ALSCW Conference
Three College of General Studies professors made their way to Washington, DC for the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers conference, which was held from October 27th – 30th at the Catholic University of America. The organization helps ensure that literature thrives in scholarly and creative environments. The conference features panels and seminars with over 130 senior, junior, and independent scholars as well as creative writers. Among these individuals were CGS professors E. Thomas Finan, Meg Tyler, and Christopher K. Coffman.
E. Thomas Finan, lecturer of humanities, has had articles published in The Atlantic and The Emily Dickinson Journal among others. The stories in his short story collection, The Other Side, explore “our personal connections and disjunctions, our victories and defeats, our revelations and disappointments.” At the conference, Finan presented on a panel called “The Gesture of Opening in Literature.” His paper examined a couple of Virginia Woolf’s essays on the act of reading. He argued that, for Woolf, the enterprise of reading works of literature is open-ended. “Each time we read or re-read a work of literature, we come upon new interpretations and ideas. Reading is an endlessly incomplete activity of discovering new things about various texts and, Woolf suggests, about ourselves,” Finan says.
Meg Tyler is associate professor of humanities and director of the Poetry Reading Series. She spoke on a panel about Irish poetry after 1950, focusing on the later poems of Seamus Heaney. Tyler—who contributed an essay to the recently published book, The Soul Exceeds Its Circumstances: The Later Poetry of Seamus Heaney—says, “The afterlife of an image often sets not just a poem but also a feeling in motion for Seamus Heaney.” She considers poems that begin in deliberation on an image and how that can lead to a groundswell of association, to different effect: “Poems might include ‘In Iowa,’ where the unseen shine of gears beneath snow leads to a meditation on, among other things, absolution; ‘Out of Shot,’ which moves from a sun-inspired gleam on a gate to light on Wicklow Bay and the aftermath of an insurgent attack in Iraq.”
Christopher K. Coffman, senior lecturer of humanities, spoke on global literature and Anglophone fiction after postmodernism. Coffman’s paper considers instances of fictions from the past quarter century, which have taken shape at the intersection of two vital currents: the role of “the postmodern” in relation to contemporary avant-garde writing, and the exploration of tensions between the local and the global. Coffman argues that these two trends “converge in a pleasing number of remarkable fictions.” Coffman incorporates various texts to support his argument, including works by William Vollmann, Jonathan Franzen, Jennifer Egan, and more.