“It is a truth universally acknowledged”: so begins Jane Austen’s most famous novel, Pride and Prejudice, recently voted the fourth most popular in PBS’s The Great American Read. Composed in the soporific Hampshire hamlet of Steventon during the years 179–, submitted and, with no little astonishment to the author, rejected under the title First Impressions, … Continue reading The Great American Read: Jane Austen
The autumn before I started grad school, I read Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman. I wasn't sure how to feel about the end of the novel, in which the protagonist bakes and eats a cake that looks like herself, so I searched databases to find what critics were saying. As I quickly realized, very few people have … Continue reading Grad Student Spotlight: Cailin Roles
Interdisciplinary teaching collaborations are intellectually engaging, rewarding for instructors and students, ... and challenging to execute. Below we feature a successful partnership between the Department of English, the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and the Department of Art -- a partnership that advances the land-grant mission of Kansas State and that helps our students … Continue reading Hungry Heartland
Every ten years, the Department of English surveys its alumni. We pride ourselves on maintaining close relationships with our alums and have a strong interest in what they — or you, if you’re an alum — did after leaving the hallowed halls of the English Counseling Services Building or Denison Hall (if you graduated before … Continue reading What Can You Do with an M.A. in English?: The 2017 Graduate Alumni Survey
On Monday, October 8th, K-State’s Indigenous Faculty and Staff Alliance hosted its third annual Indigenous Peoples’ Day event. Hundreds of folks, including tribal educators and professors from Nebraska, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Kansas, to students from our university and across the state came together to recognize that here in Manhattan, Kansas, we stand on Indigenous land … Continue reading Indigenous Peoples’ Day 2018
The last few weeks, leading up to Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation as a Supreme Court justice on Saturday, brought out a number of disturbing stories about his time at Georgetown Prep and Yale University. Here are a handful of books that examine the problems and the possibilities of similar elite institutions. E. Lockhart's 2008 novel The … Continue reading Books that Unlock the Doors and the Dirt of Elite Institutions
"I grew up in rural Kansas, and as a teen reader, I was always disappointed that books were rarely set in a place that was recognizable to me": This week, we feature an online interview with Miranda Asebedo (BA '07, MA '09), who has just published her first novel, The Deepest Roots, with HarperTeen. … Continue reading Alumni Spotlight: Miranda Asebedo
Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale has received many accolades. Among others, it was nominated for the Booker Prize and won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Now our Graduate Track in British and American Literature has selected it as our focus for the 2018-2019 academic year, following on last year’s celebration of the bicentenary … Continue reading “Blessed be the fruit”: Adaptations and Appropriations of The Handmaid’s Tale
Two writers who recently visited Kansas State made the 10-writer longlist for the 2018 National Book Award in Fiction. Hell yeah, I cheered. Rebecca Makkai visited Kansas State in March of 2012. At that point, I considered her one of the modern masters of the short story (I'm not alone in that assessment: her stories once … Continue reading The National Book Award’s Fiction Longlist
— Karin Westman, Department Head
