H05009 ANNOUNCEMENTS - 2/1/05 - HARDY FORUM ARCHIVES ____________________________________________________________________________
POTM STUDENT COMPETITION (2)
NEW ON THE REVIEWS PAGE
FEBRUARY AND MARCH 2005 POTM
GERBER-DAVIS BIBLIOGRAPHY (2)
PARTICIPATION IN STUDY REQUESTED
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From: wwmorgan@ilstu.edu
Subject: Announcing the First Winners in the TTHA Student Competition at the Poem of the Month Site
Date: February 1, 2005 3:23:52 PM PST
Dear Victoria and Hardy-L Forum Subscribers:
My co-judge Carolyn McGrath and I have awarded the first prizes in the TTHA Student Competition to Diana Ostrander, a doctoral student at the University of Minnesota, and Terry-Lynn Johnson, an Honours English major at Lakehead University in Ontario for their contributions to last month's Poem of the Month Discussion on Hardy's "The Impercipient." We were impressed with Ms. Ostrander's ability to connect her personal experience with her critical insights into the poem and with Ms. Johnson's steady firmness in explaining her own interpretation of the poem while taking those of others into account. Congratulations to both.
For February and March as well, we will continue to offer our small incentive prizes to students who make insightful contributions to the Poem of the Month Discussions. It is our hope that by so doing we will be able to bring more students, along with the other participants whom we seem already to have attracted, into the discussions. Thanks to the generosity of TTHA Member Eugene Davis and TTHA President Rosemarie Morgan, we will be able to offer again the same prizes to the most interesting and fruitful posting by students in February and March: either a copy of the VHS videotape, Thomas Hardy: Man of Wessex (donated by Gene Davis) or the poster's choice of one of the TTHA book publications (donated by Rosemarie Morgan).
My co-judge for the awarding of prizes is TTHA Member Carolyn McGrath, a UK-based teacher and a regular and insightful participant in the Poem of the Month discussions. There will be no set limit to the number of prizes to be awarded; Carolyn and I will reward all the student posters in February and March that we think are particularly interesting and fruitful. Either Carolyn or I will announce each award on Victoria and the Hardy Forum. (It would be helpful if students would indicate their academic affiliation in their postings.)
If you are a student and a subscriber to this listserv, I urge you to begin reading and following the 2005 discussions at the Poem of the Month site
http://webboard.ilstu.edu/~TTHA_POTM_DISCUSSIONS
If you are a teacher or professor who will be teaching Hardy in any of your courses in 2005, I hope you will encourage your students to participate--and perhaps win a tape or book for their efforts.
Sincerely,
Bill Morgan
Director, TTHA Hardy Poetry Page
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From: Rosemarie.morgan@yale.edu
Subject: Re: Announcing the First Winners in the TTHA Student Competition at the Poem of the Month Site
Date: February 1, 2005 8:30:39 PM PST
Bravo!
This is the very best of news.
The notion of a prizewinning student contribution to the POTM has been on the cards for some time now. TTHA been working on this idea for many, many months and everyone on TTHA's board of directors is now thoroughly delighted to see it take off.
Wonderful news!
Grateful thanks to Bill Morgan and Carolyn McGrath for all their good work behind the scenes and sincere congratulations to Diana Ostrander & Terry-Lynn Johnson for successfully contributing to the FIRST POTM project of this kind.
We look forward to many more such POTM "winners" in the future.
Cheers,
Rosemarie Morgan
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From: ROGERS@juniata.edu
Subject: New on the Reviews Page
Date: January 31, 2005 1:14:01 PM PST
Just posted to the Reviews Page is Sarah Dangelantonio's review of The Complete Critical Guide to Thomas Hardy by Geoffrey Harvey.
This is the second review of this title and it is interesting to read the two reviews in tandem.
If you are an author or a publisher with a book for review, please contact me at the addresses below. Also if you are interested in becoming a reviewer, please also contact me with your specializations/interests and experience. Other media, such as films, are also of interest for review.
The Reviews Page can be accessed via the Members Research Resources pages on TTHA's web site. If you are a member and have forgotten your membership number (required for access) or are interested in becoming a member, please contact Prof. Rosemarie Morgan at rosemarie.morgan@yale.edu
Cheers,
Shannon
Shannon L. Rogers,General Editor Reviews Page, TTHA
Assistant Professor of History
200 I. Harvey Brumbaugh
Juniata College
1700 Moore Street
Huntingdon, PA 16652
(814) 641-3638
rogers@juniata.edu
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From: wwmorgan@ilstu.edu
Subject: TTHA Poems of the Month for February and March
Date: February 1, 2005 3:04:44 PM PST
Earlier today I posted Hardy's "Channel Firing" as the TTHA Poem of the Month for February and "He Never Expected Much" as the TTHA Poem of the Month for March, 2005. (I will be travelling and away from my books on March 1; hence this early posting.) These discussions will be the second and third in a short series dedicated to some of Hardy's most frequently taught poems. These discussions will also continue TTHA's student competition at the Poem of the Month site. I will be sending a separate announcement about the competition later. Meanwhile, I invite your contributions to an on-line conversation about these two well-known Hardy poems over the course of the next two months.
As usual, you can find the TTHA Poem of the Month Discussion by following the links from the main TTHA page at
http://www.yale.edu/hardysoc/Welcome/welcomet.htm
or by going directly to
http://webboard.ilstu.edu/~TTHA_POTM_DISCUSSIONS
Whichever route you take, when you arrive at the Poem of the Month site, you will encounter a program called WebBoard, which will give you the opportunity to read the poem as well as any comments it may have generated, compose a response, preview your response, edit it further if you wish, and then post it by using the button labeled Post. If you are composing an intricate or long response, you may want to prepare your message in a word processing program, then copy it to your clipboard before pasting it into the message area of WebBoard. And if you prefer, feel free to send me your contribution as an e-mail, and I will post it for you:
wwmorgan@ilstu.edu.
Besides the recent series on Hardy's autumnal poems (October 2004--"Autumn in King's Hintock Park," November 2004--"The Later Autumn," and December 2004--"An Autumn Rain-Scene"), and a series devoted to epigraphs, epigrams, epitaphs, and other pithy sayings in verse (May through September, 2004), there are eight discussions from 2003 and 2004 that are concerned with the poems that appear last in Hardy's volumes of verse available at the site: September ("I Look Into My Glass"), October ("Agnosto Theo"), November ("A Young Man's Epigram on Existence"), December ("A Poet" and "In the Moonlight"), January ("Afterwards"), February
("Surview"), March ("Why Do I?"), April ("He Resolves to Say No More"). And the first in the current series, January ("The Impercipient") is of course also available at the site.
Likewise, all twelve discussions from 2003 are posted: January ("Winter Night in Woodland"), February ("Ice on the Highway"), March ("A Light Snow-Fall After Frost"), April ("The Sheep-Boy"), May ("A Sheep Fair" and "Last Look round St. Martin's Fair"), June ("A Backward Spring," "Last Week in October," and "Shortening Days at the Homestead"), July ("No Buyers" and "An East-End Curate"), August ("Life and Death at Sunrise"), September ("I Look Into My Glass"), October ("Agnosto Theo"), November ("A Young Man's Epigram on Existence"), December ("A Poet" and "In the Moonlight"), January ("Afterwards"), February ("Surview"), March ("Why Do I?"), and April ("He Resolves to Say No More"), a full year of conversations in 2002 about some of Hardy's sonnets are available at the site: April ("Hap"), May ("At a Lunar Eclipse"), June ("She, to Him, I-IV"), July ("Her Reproach" and "Her Confession"), August ("To an Actress" and "To an Impersonator of Rosalind"), September ("In the Old Theatre, Fiesole," "Rome: On the Palatine," and "Rome: Building a New Street in the Ancient Quarter"), October ("Embarcation" and "Departure), November ("The Pity of It" and "Often When Warring"), and December ("We Are Getting to the End" and "Thoughts from Sophocles").
The discussions of Hardy's memorial and holiday poems from August 2001 ("The Last Signal"), September ("Rome: At the Pyramid of Cestius" and "Shelley's Skylark"), October ("At a House in Hampstead" and "At Lulworth Cove a Century Back,"November ("To Shakespeare: After Three Hundred Years"), December ("Lausanne: In Gibbon's Old Garden" and "George Meredith"), January 2002 ("A New Year's Eve in War Time"), February ("The Oxen"), March ("A Drizzling Easter Morning") are also posted at the site and open for contributions.
The discussions of poems with female narrators ("The Dark-Eyed Gentleman," "She At His Funeral," "Her Confession," "Tess's Lament," "The Pine-Planters," "The Pink Frock," "The Beauty," "I Rose and Went to Rou'tor Town," "An Upbraiding," "The Chapel-Organist," "A Sunday-Morning Tragedy," and "A Trampwoman's Tragedy") have been published in *The Hardy Review*, V (Winter 2002).
All of the older discussions will remain posted at the site until such time as they are moved to the Members' Resource section of the TTHA website or edited and published in either *The Hardy Review* or in one of TTHA's Occasional Papers.
The discussions for February, 1998 through November 1999 have been "closed" and their contents edited and published in *The Hardy Review* [I:1 (July 1998) and 2:1 (Summer 1999)]. Likewise, the conversations from 1999 about the "Emma" poems have been published as the second of the TTHA Occasional Series. And those concerning "Channel Firing," "Satires of Circumstance in 15 Glimpses," "After the Visit," "To Meet, or Otherwise," and "A Singer Asleep" have been published in *The Hardy Review*, III (Summer 2000). The discussions of "Nature's Questioning," "The Mother Mourns," "The Subalterns," "The Lacking Sense," "In a Wood," "To Outer
Nature," "June Leaves and Autumn," "Wagtail and Baby," "On a Midsummer Eve," "Afterwards," "Shut Out That Moon," "The Last Chrysanthemum," "The Year's Awakening," and "The Night of the Dance" have been edited and published in *The Hardy Review*, IV (Summer 2001). All of these publications are available free or at a discounted price to TTHA members and may be ordered by others using an on-line form available at the main TTHA page (see the URL above).
Welcome to the TTHA Poem of the Month Discussions for February and March of 2005.
cheers,
Bill Morgan, Director, the Thomas Hardy Poetry Page
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From: Rosemarie.morgan@yale.edu
Subject: Re: New File on the Gerber-Davis Bibliography
Date: February 4, 2005 5:26:36 PM PST
Greetings all!
Just to say I have now completed editing and uploading the 1920s (1926-1929) decade of entries for the Gerber-Davis Bibliography on
http://www.yale.edu/hardysoc/Members/MRRHome.htm
(and surprised, in passing, to see Virginia Woolf's negative observations on FFMC.)
For Non members: you can gain a glimpse of what is involved if you go to :
http://www.yale.edu/hardysoc/Welcome/informationpageGene'sBibli.htm
I am still experiencing serious formatting problems with these files and would welcome tips!
With grateful thanks to Gene Davis for his invaluable assistance in preparing these files,
Cheers
Rosemarie
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From: Rosemarie.morgan@yale.edu
Subject: The Gerber-Davis Bibliography
Date: February 6, 2005 9:35:54 AM PST
Greetings all!
Thanks to feedback on these huge Gerber-Davis files (in *Members*) I have split the 1920s into smaller units -- Year by Year. I understand that users without a high-speed internet connection might have had to wait several minutes to download these files. I hope they are now more manageable.
Thank you for your input -
Cheers,
Rosemarie
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From: englishnovels@yahoo.com
Subject: PARTICIPATION IN STUDY REQUESTED
Date: February 10, 2005 7:01:20 PM PST
Dear Friends and Colleagues:
We would like to invite anyone who is interested in British novels of the longer nineteenth century to participate in a collective research project. We are a research team consisting of two literary scholars and two psychologists (Joe Carroll, Jon Gottschall, John Johnson, and Dan Kruger). We have put together a website questionnaire on about 2,100 characters from 202 novels-from Austen through Forster.
Here is the website address: http://survey.ehap.isr.umich.edu/carroll-intro.html
The novels are listed by author's name, in alphabetical order, and under the title of each novel we have listed a selection of characters-an average of about ten characters per novel. Participants can fill out questionnaires on as few or as many characters in as few or as many novels as they choose. Filling out a questionnaire on a single character usually takes less than five minutes. All participation is anonymous. Please feel free to distribute this URL to students, friends, and colleagues.
The questionnaire contains questions on each character's motives, personality, and agonistic status (protagonist/antagonist), on the criteria the character uses for selecting a spouse or romantic partner, and on your emotional response to the character.
The last ten questions on the questionnaire are designed to assess each character on five major factors of personality: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, and Openness to Experience. After you have filled out a questionnaire on a character, the program will provide a graph that displays the results of your coding on those five factors.
We have not set an ending date for the study. We are opening the website in January of 2005, and we anticipate that it will be open for at least a year. Once we have completed the study, we shall share our findings with anyone who asks for them. In the meantime, on the questionnaire itself we shall provide a link to a page on which we shall post the average results on all questions for all the characters in the study, and we shall periodically update these averages.
This study is a type of "census" of vital statistics about the population of "Victorian" literary characters-the first of its kind. The "census-taker" is you, the individual coder sitting at his or her computer. Anyone who Anyone over is over 18 and who has read a Victorian novel is qualified to participate.
We want to gather information that will allow us systematically to answer questions like the following: What features of characterization do males, females, antagonists, protagonists, and other character types tend to share? What exactly makes them different? Do these features change much as we cross historical boundaries? How do these features vary by sex of author? How about by sex or age of the interpreter? What can consistent differences between protagonists and antagonists tell us about the moral universe that gave birth to the novels? Do people generally agree about interpretation of character? Or are there large individual differences? Can we do a better job of answering certain literary questions by systematically gathering data about read er response? And, conversely, can literary works be mined as rich sources of data for formal psychological studies?
These are just some of the important questions we hope to address in our study. But we can't do it without your help. Thank you in advance for your assistance!
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