Not Your Parents' English Department

When Susan Bowers, associate professor and head of the Department of English and Creative Writing at Susquehanna University, came here 20 years ago, she entered a world vastly different than the one she knew in Eugene, Oregon, "the hippy capital of the world," where she grew up. This night and day contrast also is definitive of the department – indeed English academia as a whole – then and now.

Associate Professor Susan Bowers discusses a text with English major Renee DeCoskey '05.

Given that the foundations of western literature and its study were based on the interpretations of white males, the discipline has been taught from that perspective throughout most of history, Bowers said. A look at the transformation of Susquehanna's Department of English is a microcosmic examination of the transitions occurring in the field.

"This is not your parents' English department. The faculty were teaching very traditional texts when I came here, but now we're teaching from a much broader perspective," Bowers says.

When Bowers first joined the faculty in 1984, a key goal was simply to balance the sexes in the department. In fact, Bowers helped found the Women's Studies program at Susquehanna and was its coordinator for 10 years. As the decade progressed, the department began hiring faculty from diverse backgrounds. Bowers took the lead in that movement as well. She was one of the founders of the Diversity Studies program and now serves as its coordinator.

Now English students explore everything from Jewish, women's, gay and lesbian literature to slave, Native American and Middle Eastern texts, in addition to more traditional works. "What has changed is, today, we're a department with great attention to diversity. What has always been true is we're a department of very good teachers," Bowers said.

Laurence Roth, associate professor of English and coordinator of the Jewish Studies program, believes the department's transformation is related to the influences of the faculty's teachers. "I'd argue that changes in teaching strategies in our department are a direct result of many of us bringing the teaching strategies of our favorite college professors to SU," Roth said.

"I remember feeling terribly lost in my senior seminar at UC Berkeley when…my professor introduced us to Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic reading of Edgar Allen Poe's The Purloined Letter," he recalls. "He took me to lunch and talked with me at length about…Lacan's theorizing…he very kindly said to me that it wasn't important that I get Lacan at that moment or even in his class. The point of such abstract knowledge would come home to me when I was ready to assimilate it and when my own thinking about literature had created a need for it – maybe tomorrow, maybe next year, maybe in five years, it didn't matter," Roth said.

"That lunch had a profound impact on my understanding of thinking. Now I see theory as a kind of lever with which to widen our intellectual, artistic and cultural horizons, and teaching as incitement to explore such horizons of the possible," he said.

Drew Hubbell, assistant professor of English, explored such horizons with a group of students in London this summer when Susquehanna expanded programming there to disciplines in addition to business. Hubbell taught his "London Underworld" class there.

"The classroom is the perfect place to think out loud, and often what one person hasn't been able to articulate is taken up by others and given the proper formulation. I find this kind of investigative intellectual work incredibly exciting and satisfying. Every day potentially brings a new discovery – a new line of thought, a new connection, a new interpretation, a new insight into the symbolic movement of our culture," Hubbell said.

The broad hypothesis for Hubbell's "London Underworld" class is that the literature of 19th-century Londoners both reflects and helps create the modern notion of humanity. "The real twist for this course is that I taught it in London this summer, so students were able to not only read about London, but also explore the actual places detailed in the literature," he said.

"London Underworld" is an example of how the Department of English has specialized courses to fit the tastes of a variety of students and provide them with specific literary concentrations. Other such courses include classes on wilderness literature, travel literature and Jewish detective fiction.

In addition, the department offers students editing and publishing opportunities in: Stance, a journal featuring freshman writing essays; Transformations, featuring their literary critical writing; and Modern Language Studies, the academic literary journal produced at Susquehanna which is affiliated with the Northeast Modern Languages Association.

The department also has a very successful creative writing program. (See related story). "That program has done so wonderfully. It's really unusual for an undergraduate program, and I credit Gary (Fincke) with the leadership for its development," Bowers said.

Despite the changes in the department, the core benefits of an education in English or creative writing remain the same. Simply put, the department epitomizes what an undergraduate liberal arts education is all about.

"An English department is a wonderful place for anyone who wants both the freedom to explore ideas and the challenge of having to express those ideas effectively," says Catherine Pierce '00, who is now a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Missouri.

"There is rarely a clear right or wrong in English studies," she continued. "This lack of an answer key is alternately frustrating and exhilarating. Ultimately, though, I think what an English professor does best is ask you to form your own thoughts and opinions, taking into account the wisdom of writers, history, and the faculty and students around you, and then learn how to express those ideas successfully," Pierce said.

It is also a track of study that prepares students for virtually any profession, as demonstrated by paralegal Julie Maeyer '94 Baker, of Camp Hill, Pa. Having had no formal training in her profession, she attributes her career success to the skills she learned as an English major at Susquehanna. "The working world is looking for people that have solid educational backgrounds and good reading, writing and analytical skills," she said.

Bowers says graduates from the English program have gone into everything from government and business to law and education. "The purpose in a literature course is to teach students to engage all kinds of texts, and everything is a text, so an undergraduate English degree is one of the best degrees to have," she said.