Alumni College Seminar
Saturday, March 20th

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Following up on last year's successful seminar, the Alumni College came back to the Los Angeles Club with two of Dartmouth's hottest professors-the team of Bill Cook (also chair of the English Dept) and Don Pease. The seminar was held at Occidental College in Eagle Rock. We spent a day in close contact with Dartmouth professors, made new and lasting friends, and hopefully learned something new.

Special thanks to Doug Morton '70 (1st picture on the below on the left) for his help in making this event such a success.

While at Dartmouth, Norman Maclean edited the Jack O'Lantern, excelled in the study of British and American Romantic poetry, and cultivated the literary skills he hoped would realize his desire to write the "Great American Novel." But after graduating with the Class of 1924, financial concerns forced Maclean to delay gratification of that desire for an additional fifty years.

After teaching Romantic Poetry to Dartmouth undergraduates for two years, Maclean received a University of Chicago fellowship to study the Romantic Poets formally. Maclean remained at the University of Chicago until his retirement in 1973.

Never completely abandoning his desire to write, Maclean invested his own considerable literary skills in the classroom lectures that became legendary among the undergraduates. After his retirement in 1973, Maclean began work on a book in which he aspired to conjoin his own literary vision to those of the Romantic Poets he taught, and in so doing to understand the life and the death of his brother.

In A River Runs Through It, Maclean repeatedly turns his focus to the art of fishing which bound him to his brother and father. In his words, "In the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise."

In this seminar, Professors William Cook and Donald Pease discussed the profound relationship between Maclean's own literary vision and the Romantics' he had taught for fifty years. Teaching the Romantic Poets Wordsworth, Shelley, Frost, and Byron did not impede Maclean's development as a writer; rather, his apprenticeship as a teacher of poetry enabled Maclean to complete the literary masterwork he had envisioned fifty years earlier.

Bill Cook, Professor and chair of English and Israel Evans Professor of Oratory and Belles Lettres, is a specialist in twentieth-century American and British poetry and drama. He taught public school in New Jersey for 20 years before coming to Dartmouth in 1973. In 1989 Cook won the Distinguished Teaching Award. He was the 1993 New Hampshire Professor of the Year, an award given by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education, and co-chair of the International Consortium of Teachers of English. His wide-ranging interests, energetic lecturing, and ability to draw together faculty colleagues have made him much appreciated in Alumni Colleges and alumni club seminars. He is author of a play, "Flight to Canada," has published his poems in Hudson Hornet and Other Poems, and edited Tapping Potential and Africa 2000.

Don Pease, Professor of English, Avalon Foundation Chair of the Humanities, and winner of the 1981 Distinguished Teaching Award at Dartmouth, is an authority on nineteenth and twentieth-century American literature and literary theory. In the summer of 1986 he brought the School of Criticism and Theory to Dartmouth, and he was Academic Director of Alumni College for 1997. Holding a University of Chicago Ph.D., he is the author of articles on figures in American and British literature, co-editor of American Renaissance Rediscovered, and the author of a book on American Renaissance. Don Pease is general editor of a series of books by Duke University Press called "The New Americanists." He recently received an NEH Directorship to teach college teachers about nineteenth-century American Literature