September
Shakespeare Troupe
For the seventeenth year in a row, actors from The American Shakespeare Center will visit Loyola’s McManus Theater, staging energetic performances of two Shakespearean plays: Twelfth Night and Love's Labor's Lost, and John Webster's The Dutches of Malfi. This young, innovative company performs fast-paced shows that recreate Shakespeare’s plays for modern audiences while remaining true to the original texts. The productions include original musical compositions, minimal stage props and costuming, attention to the complexities of Shakespeare’s language, and plenty of energy. The schedule for the ASC’s “Tempt Me Further” Tour follows:
Wednesday, Sept. 26: Twelfth Night
Thursday, Sept. 27: Love's Labor's Lost
Friday, Sept. 28: The Duchess of Malfi
All shows begin at 7:00 p.m. in McManus Theater. All are 2 to 21/4 hours long. All are free and open to the public. Questions may be directed to Dr. Giuseppina Lobo, Department of English, ext. 2025, gaiaconolobo@loyola.edu.
October
African and African American Studies Lecture
Emira Woods, codirector of Foreign Policy, Institute for Policy Studies, will speak on Monday, October 1, at 6:30 PM in the 4th Floor Programming Room. This event is free and open to the public.
Past AAAS Lecture:
The second annual fall lecture was “The Challenge of Building a National Museum,” delivered by Lonnie G. Bunch III, Ph.D., director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. Mr. Bunch delivered an interesting and fun talk to a full room and he provided a multimedia preview of the new museum, schedule to break ground on the National Mall in fall 2012.
December
The department will hold its annual Holiday Feast on Monday, December 10th, from 6 - 8:30 p.m. in the Refectory and Hug Lounge. Dr. Gayla McGlamery is directing the honors seminar this fall. The students in this seminar class will decide a theme inspired by their readings, design an invitation, plan a menu, and decorate creatively. Costumes, music, and games will all be part of this holiday affair. For the Department of English, the annual Literary Holiday Feast is probably the most anticipated event of the year. More than one hundred students and faculty participate and it's always a wonderful evening.
Past Feasts
On December 10th, 2011 about 100 students and faculty came together to perform, to dance, and, of course, to eat. This year’s theme was drawn from Dr. Osteen’s course, Modern Classic Revisions, which paired texts and their rewritings (e.g., Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea). The seminar’s students designed the invitation, program, events and menu, drawing food selections primarily from Southern US cuisine: red beans and rice, corn bread, barbecued chicken, and sweet potato pie, among other down-home goodies. The seminar students (and a few brave faculty) dressed in costumes adapted from the course texts: there was Mr. Rochester, disguised as a Gypsy (Bill Callis); here was the carbuncular Christopher Chubb, from Peter Carey’s My Life as a Fake (Thomas Johnson); yonder was ol’ Anse Bundren (Chris McCune), smiling broadly to show off his brand new teeth. And was that Prospero (Dr. Robert Miola) and his lovely daughter, Miranda (Rose Miola)? Two seminar students, Chris Taylor and Bill Callis, were also members of the Loyola Jazz Combo, and, along with Dr. Osteen, they played several jazz and blues numbers to begin the evening. These appetite-whetting performances were capped by an amusing short Christmas play written and performed by students in Dr. Crockett’s Tom Stoppard seminar. Then it was time to do the limbo! As the Combo played, students and faculty impersonated Elastic Man and Woman; Dr. Miller was the limbo-est pedagogue. No injuries were incurred. After dinner, the throng was further entertained by a student-faculty vocal group and by more music from the Combo. The evening ended with a blues shuffle called “Great Wheel” (from Suzan-Lori Parks’s Getting Mother’s Body) that had the whole crew singing and clapping along. To paraphrase the words of another modern literary luminary: it was all right; as a matter of fact, it was a gas.
- 2010: A Winter's Wasteland
This year’s Christmas Feast grew out of Dr. Nick Miller’s senior honors seminar on T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and took as its theme “A Winter Wasteland.” The result was a memorable event that several colleagues called among the best feasts ever. As in past years, the food was prepared entirely by teams of faculty and students. The members of the seminar, dressed in costume as characters from Eliot’s poem, performed ragtime and jazz music, taught a flapper dance (“The Bunny Hug”), and led teams of attendees in a Waste Land-inspired word game. Dinner included such Eliotic treats as “Dry Salvages Clam Chowder,” “Get-the-Beauty-of-It Hot Gammon” (fresh roasted ham), “That-Corpse-You-Planted-in-Your Garden Sprouts,” “Unreal Ziti,” and “I-Didn’t-Mince-My-Words Mincemeat Pies.” The evening was capped off by an appearance of T. S. Eliot himself (Prof. Miller), reading a decidedly dour Christmas poem, and a rousing rendition of the beloved carol, “Walkin’ in a Winter Waste Land,” with parody lyrics concocted by the seminar students. Just over 120 students and faculty attended the Feast. The Feast fosters community within the English Department and appreciation for diverse forms of literature. Support from the Center for the Humanities was gratefully acknowledged in the student-designed program.