Work Sighted is a monthly newsletter published by the Humanities divison that fosters and supports the literary culture at and around Norwich University.
Current Issue: April/May 2007
May 2nd Induction Marks Twenty Five Years of Sigma Tau Delta Honors at NU
The May 2nd induction of eighteen English majors and minors into Sigma Tau Delta (STD) will mark twenty-five years that the university has been affiliated with the international English honor society. Read more »
Writing Letters Without Words
In the pursuit of my undergraduate degree, I have written about a wide variety of topics, ranging from samurai armies to the bubonic plague. I have authored notes, essays, exams, and articles. More important, however, than all of the writing I’ve done to fulfill my degree requirements are the weekly letters I have written to my brother, Bradley, who is serving in Iraq. Read more »
English as Backdrop for Virginia Tech Massacre
While the sad reaction to what has become known as the Virginia Tech Massacre stretches across this country and raises questions about the safety of our educational institutions, another realization is also surfacing: that the relationship between English teachers or professors and students is much more profound than one where simply the study of reading and writing is exchanged. Read more »
New Class on “Vietnam War Writing” in Spring 2008 Also Offers Travel and Study Opportunity to Vietnam
A new course that will be offered during the spring 2008 semester will not only focus on the literature of the Vietnam War but will also offer students the opportunity to travel to Vietnam for two to three weeks once the semester is over to tour first-hand the country where the controversial war took place. Read more »
Four English Faculty Awarded Summer Honors and Prizes
Helen Caudill, F. Brett Cox, Kathleen McDonald and Lea Williams have all been awarded faculty honors and prizes for the scholarship they will conduct over the summer. Read more »
Dogged by the Dog: Rafting to the Capitol in a Pool Boat
Take the Dog River north from Northfield to Montpelier, a twelve-mile trip on Route 12, by water, who knows? It was already 11 am. There is nothing like having a friend who is more ambitious than you, suggesting a trip that we had been mulling over for months. Read more »
Friday Night Popcorn and Def Poetry Jam
In a lot of ways, my husband and I are exact opposites. For example, he can dance, but I can’t. He prefers to watch the movie, and I don’t bother because everyone knows the book is better. He doesn’t like to read for pleasure (unlike me, of course, who finds nothing finer), but he does have a passion for poetry. Converging over this one genre, we have created a Friday night routine of finding comfortable clothes, popping some popcorn, and settling down in front of the computer to watch YouTube. Read more »
Wayback Machine Allows World Literature Class Trip to London in 1810 to Meet Poet and Painter William Blake
While blizzards and ice storms pounded the Norwich campus this spring, a group of students enrolled in Gina Logan’s World Literature course (EN202) used the “newly-available technology of time travel” to escape the relentless Vermont weather and visit London during the year of 1810. While touring the city, several class members met William Blake, renowned eighteenth-century poet and painter, and interviewed him for Work Sighted. Logan reports that she was “delighted” that some of her students had the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to “sit down in William’s Blake’s living room and have a conversation with him.” As a result, Logan explained the “Wayback Machine” enabled the class to get beyond thinking of Blake as a “dead white male” and, instead, witness the “artist’s creative passions which produced work that resonates across the boundaries of time and space.” Read more »
A Grunt Staring Downrange: A Review of Jason Hartley’s Just Another Soldier
Take explicit rap lyrics and fuse them together with the cacophony of an orchestra and the product, of course in a literary sense, will be Just Another Soldier by Jason Hartley. Ostensibly, this is a military history book that describes combat, but because of his writing abilities, Hartley presents the harsh reality of staring downrange. From mindless boredom to intense fighting, Hartley depicts a year of deployment in Iraq through the eyes of a true-to-life grunt. Read more »
The “Credibility of An Unvarnished Image”
Go to the You Tube website, type “Iraq War” and over 32,000 hits pop up. A good percentage are videos made by United States soldiers serving in the war. Because a music soundtrack is so integral to the production, Ana Marie Cox, in Time Magazine last July, called them essentially music videos. Mainstream media, like Time, is often faulted by arm chair soldiers for not “showing the good” of the war. Given that the You Tube videos are shot by those on the ground in Iraq, it would seem a logical place to find “the good.” Many, however, depict a disjuncture, perhaps unintentional, between the platitudes of “duty” and the footage that unwinds. Since most You Tube productions are only about five minutes long, it’s difficult to discern “a point,” but, as Cox writes, there is value in their offering the “credibility of an unvarnished image” of the Iraq war. Read more »
Are We at War?
With some hesitation, I summarize the thesis of my recent Gauss Memorial Lecture, titled “Are We At War?” I know the views I express here, which are personal, political (and, frankly, angry) are bound to offend at least some of my readers. The classroom, especially the philosophy classroom, is the place for careful, fair-minded examination of all available points of view. I do not attempt that here; sometimes one must speak out, and all I can do is look forward to debating the issues with whoever wants to show me just how mistaken, in fact, I am. Read more »
Vietnam Writers Lend Insight into Writing a War Story
I remember practicing bomb threat routines in kindergarten in the slim chance the United States and New York were hit by the Soviet Union. The procedure was simple: when the air raid sounded, everyone got under their desks and put their heads between their legs and their fingers in their ears. We would stay in this position as long as the warning lasted. Read more »
Pegasus Players' Twelfth Night
Norwich University's own Pegasus Players featured a production of their own adaptation of Twelfth Night this past spring. Read more to view pictures from the production »
