CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - It's harvest time in Illinois. But at the University of Illinois, members of the English faculty have been hard at work in their own field - cultivating words and growing the department's reputation - all year long.
At first blush, it may appear that the department's own seasonal harvest of new faculty books is resulting in a bumper crop of titles. Four professors - 2006 National Book Award winner Richard Powers, linguistics and grammar guru Dennis Baron, fiction writer and essayist Philip Graham, and medieval literary scholar Renée Trilling - have new books just out.
In the coming weeks, literary scholar Jim Hansen will bump up the count to five. More than half a dozen other books written or edited by English professors have been published in the past year.
While department head Curtis Perry is understandably proud of his publishing professors, he says it's really just business as usual for the English faculty at Illinois.
"We are a large and very productive department, so this number actually doesn't seem all that unusual to me," Perry said. "In fact, we are also publishing articles, poems, edited special editions to journals and stories all the time, too.
"What is unusual, maybe, is having a blog as a site where these things get recorded and which makes visible the scale on which we publish," said Perry, whose own book, "Shakespeare and the Middle Ages" (Oxford University Press), a collection of essays co-edited with University of Minnesota's John Watkin, also was published earlier this year.
Perry began writing the blog last fall, shortly after he became department head. He uses the blog, in part, as a vehicle for promoting the achievements of his faculty.
Judging by traffic-tracking statistics, Perry mused that the blog may be more widely read than anything else of his that has been published.
"It's fascinating. ... It gets about 50 views per day from all over the world," he said.
Perry is pleased to know that the Illinois English faculty members - tenured professors and more recent hires alike - are grabbing the attention of such a diverse and global audience.
"The department brings together terrific, energetic scholars working with cultures and texts from all over the English-speaking world and for the entirety of the language's history," he said. That includes "scholars who work on language, rhetoric and writing in its social and pedagogical settings, and creative writers who contribute poems, stories, essays and novels for the enrichment of our own literary moment.
"Because of this extraordinary range, a strong English department like ours also is an important hub for strong, interdisciplinary humanities scholarship on campus."
The recently published and soon-to be released works by Illinois English professors:
• "Generosity: An Enhancement" (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux), by Powers, is his first novel since winning the National Book Award in 2006 for "The Echo Maker." In his latest work, about a mysterious and inexplicably blissful Algerian student/refugee at a fictitious Chicago art school and the intrigue that swirls around her, Powers again takes readers deep into familiar territory, mining the often parallel yet sometimes interconnected universes of science and the humanities to explore a flood of questions that arise from the possibility of a genetic determinant for happiness.
• "A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers and the Digital Revolution" (Oxford University Press), by Baron, provides insights and perspectives on the act of writing as well as the cultural fears and anxieties associated with the ever-evolving tools used by writers to communicate.
From clay tablets to pencils, from the printing press to Facebook, Baron reports that nearly all emerging communications methods and tools have had detractors with surprisingly similar convictions: that the new-fangled instruments would bring on the downfall of the English language. He begs to differ.
• "The Aesthetics of Nostalgia: Historical Representation in Old English Verse" (University of Toronto Press), by Trilling, explores Anglo-Saxon literary and cultural history, most notably, the form of expression known as heroic poetry, from the age of the biblical scholar Bede to just after the Norman Conquest.
• "The Moon, Come to Earth: Dispatches From Lisbon" (University of Chicago Press), by Graham, is an expanded edition of reports that appeared on the Web site of the popular literary journal McSweeney's. The book chronicles the author's day-to-day musings, observations and explorations on a sabbatical trip to Portugal. Graham will give a reading from the book at 4:30 p.m. Nov. 9 in the Authors Corner of the Illini Union Bookstore, 807 S. Wright St., Champaign.
• "Terror and Irish Modernism: The Gothic Tradition From Burke to Beckett" (State University of New York Press), by Hansen, is part of the SUNY series "Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century." In the book, Hansen surveys two centuries of literary works and offers new perspectives on canonical works by such authors as Oscar Wilde, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, placing them all within the tradition of the Irish Gothic.
Also published in 2009:
• "A Democracy of Ghosts" (Wordcraft of Oregon, LLC), by John Griswold, is a love story set in Southern Illinois in 1922 against the backdrop of a bloody conflict between striking miners and out-of-town scab laborers.
Griswold, who writes a blog published in Inside Higher Ed under the nom de plume Oronte Churm, will give a public reading from the book at 4:30 p.m. Oct. 26 in the Illini Union Bookstore's Authors Corner.
• "Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization" (from Stanford University Press's "Cultural Memory in the Present" series), by Michael Rothberg.
• "Sex Expression and American Women Writers, 1860-1940" (University of North Carolina Press), by Dale Bauer.
• "Next of Kin: The Family in Chicano/a Cultural Politics" (Duke University Press), by Richard Rodriguez.
• "What America Read: Taste, Class, and the Novel, 1920-1960" (University of North Carolina Press), by Gordon Hutner.
• "Cary Nelson and the Struggle for the University," edited by Rothberg and Peter Garrett, professor emeritus of English, features a collection of essays by cultural studies scholars who explore how Nelson, a long-time English professor at Illinois, has merged his passion for scholarship and activism to further the goals of greater democratization of the academy and the promotion of knowledge of American culture.
Another book, published in the final days of 2008, "just barely missed the 2009 cut," Perry said. "In the Anteroom of Divinity: The Reformation of the Angels from Colet to Milton" (University of Toronto Press), was written by Feisal Mohamed.