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There's something about Emily

Christopher Benfey, associate professor of English, wrote a lengthy review of three books about Emily Dickinson's life and work in the April 8 issue of the New York Times Book Review. "The Mystery of Emily Dickinson" considered The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition; Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson; and The Emily Dickinson Handbook.

Birkerts's book beckons

A review of Lecturer in English Sven Birkerts's new book Readings (Graywolf, 263 pp.) appeared February 21 in the Boston Sunday Globe. Readings examines, in a specific way, works ranging from the poetry of Keats to DeLillo's Underworld, but also uses these authors to "read the tea leaves of the culture today," according to reviewer Melvin Jules Bukiet. In the book, Birkerts laments the state of a world dominated by technology and the loss of self and human connection precipitated by the information age. "Birkerts, however, does more than describe the state of affairs. He notes the subtle shifts that technology effects in the very manner in which we read, think, and are," says Bukiet. "[S]omething in the nature of time--or in our experience of it--has changed radically," Birkerts writes in Readings. "[T]he shape of the very frame of things has altered...this is the first time, ever, that the perceptions of events and the transmission of the perceptions have become as important as the events themselves." Bukiet is ebullient in his recommendation of Readings, closing his review with, "...Heed should be taken. It won't. There's too much money, too much speed, too much hubris at stake. After Birkerts, the deluge, and perhaps the best we can hope for is refuge. Fortunately--if terrifyingly temporarily--we still have books and with them the likes of this gloriously impassioned defender of their worth, their beauty, their undying necessity."

First annual public-speaking contest coming up

MHC's Speech and Debate Society, with the support of The Weissman Center for Leadership, the Alumnae Association, and several academic departments, has organized MHC's first public-speaking contest. Preliminary rounds will be held April 10, and the grand final round is scheduled for April 15. Participants, who were required to attend special training sessions provided by SAW, will be delivering impromptu speeches, for which they will have ten minutes to prepare. Contestants were required to preregister by April 5. Faculty members will serve as judges, and prizes will be awarded.