Faculty and Staff Notes for the Week of February 19, 2001
	Warren Darcy Gary Kornblith Leonard Podis Leonard Smith		Warren Darcy '68, professor of music theory, presented a paper last week at a colloquium for faculty and graduate students of the Yale University Department of Music. His paper, "Rotational Form, Teleological Genesis, and Fantasy-Projection in the Slow Movement of Mahler's Sixth Symphony," attempts to ground a responsible hermeneutic reading of the piece in new principles of formal analysis that Darcy developed in collaboration with former Oberlin faculty member James Hepokoski, now professor of music at Yale. It also demonstrates how the new formal principles are compatible with other modes of analysis, such as Schenkerian theory. Darcy will deliver the paper next month as keynote speaker at a symposium on musical scholarship at the University of Minnesota, and in May at the University of Cincinnati. Eventually it will be published in the journal 19th Century Music. Darcy holds research status for the 2000-01 academic year, and is examining Mahler's use of rotational form in the composer's other symphonies. A book manuscript that Darcy and Hepokoski coauthored, "Elements of Sonata Theory," has been accepted for publication by Oxford University Press. Ray English, Root Director of Libraries, and Gary Kornblith, professor of history, were among the invited speakers at a Great Lakes Colleges Association (GLCA) symposium, Technology in the Service of the Liberal Arts, held at DePauw University February 9 and 10. English focused on how college libraries are employing information technology to improve access to scholarly materials and how they are addressing the growing need of college students for information literacy in a rapidly changing electronic environment. Kornblith discussed how the coming age of ubiquitous mobile computing will open up new pedagogical possibilities and pose new curricular challenges for liberal arts colleges. The audience included college presidents, administrators, faculty, and information-technology specialists from GLCA schools and a few representatives of the Associated Colleges of the Midwest. A 1986 essay by Leonard Podis, professor of rhetoric and composition, and JoAnne Podis, professor of English and vice president of academic and student affairs at Ursuline College, has been anthologized in a new book on writing pedagogy. The essay, "Improving Our Responses to Student Writing: A Process-Oriented Approach" appears in The Allyn & Bacon Sourcebook for College Writing Teachers, Second Edition, edited by James C. McDonald ( Allyn and Bacon, 2000). The article, originally published in Rhetoric Review, suggests that, rather than revile certain problems in student papers (for example, overuse of plot summary in critical essays), teachers consider the possibility that the weaknesses signal an earlier stage in the students' composing processes--and that they encourage appropriate revisions instead of simply responding by pronouncing the papers to be inadequate final versions. Leonard Smith, associate professor of history, has had two articles published recently. "Jean Norton Cru, Lecteur des Livres de Guerre," appeared in the Annales du Midi, Tome 112, No. 232, (October-December 2000). The article looks at the reading practices of war books from World War I through the perspective of one veteran-critic. It draws from research done in France in the summer 1999 thanks to a Powers Travel Grant from Oberlin College. Smith's "Narrative and Identity at the Front: Theory and the Poor Bloody Infantry," in in The Great War and the Twentieth Century, edited by Jay Winter, Geoffrey Parker, and Mary R. Habeck, (Yale University Press, 2000). The piece considers the role of narrative forms of tragedy and comedy in understanding how historians have interpreted World War I. Smith has been invited to spend a month as a visiting professor in this summer at the University of Paris VII-Jussieu in the DŽpartement Science Des Textes et Des Documents.
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