Arts & Culture

Illustration from a Hans Christian Andersen story.What is “children’s literature?” As we pause between the perfect, all-ages storms of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and the upcoming Lord of the Rings: Return of the King film adaptation, the answer seems less clear than ever. In the current issue of Belle Lettres, a bi-monthly publication of Washington University’s International Writers Center in Arts & Sciences, a culture critic and a director of teacher education explain that the genre, always hard to define, remains poorly understood and frequently underestimated.

Workshops will be held weekdays from 9:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m. The teachers — John Dalton in fiction, Ruth Ellen Kocher in poetry and Rockwell Gray in creative nonfiction — will provide both instruction in the genre and constructive criticism of participants’ work.

Concerts are at 7:30 p.m. every Sunday night in July in Brookings Quadrangle.

Nationally speaking, high school-level courses in graphic design, as opposed to general art or special projects such as yearbooks or student newspapers, are surprisingly rare. So when venerable University City High School, 7401 Balson Ave., launched a new graphics class last year, a group of visual communications majors from Washington University’s School of Art readily agreed to help tutor students in the fledgling program.

Philip TidwellArchitecture junior Philip Tidwell has won the 2003 Berkeley Undergraduate Prize for Architectural Design Excellence. Tidwell’s essay was selected from a field of 130 entries by students representing 31 countries and 81 undergraduate architecture programs on six continents.

La Bottine Souriante, “the best band in the world!”Edison Theatre will celebrate its 31st season of exuberant dance, rich musical traditions and classic and cutting-edge theatre with the 2003-04 OVATIONS! Series. Highlights include performances by Julia Sweeney — best known as Saturday Night Live’s nerdy, androgynous Pat — and Un-Cabaret, the L.A.-based alternative comedy troupe, along with a special, one-night-only concert teaming avant-garde icons Philip Glass and Terry Riley with that rowdy postmodern ensemble, Bang on a Can All-Stars.

GassWilliam H. Gass, Ph.D., the David May Distinguished University Professor Emeritus in the Humanities and founder of the International Writers Center, both in Arts & Sciences, has won this year’s PEN/Spielvogel Diamonstein Award in the Art of the Essay category.

A page from *Selected Poems* by MorrisAmerican poet John N. Morris never achieved widespread public acclaim in his lifetime, but those who knew him well — including some of the nation’s most distinguished poets and critics — expect his star to rise with publication of two books showcasing both his life and his life’s work. “Read him and you cannot live your own life innocently again,” suggests Helen Vendler, one of the nation’s leading literary critics. Morris, who died in 1997, was a professor of English literature in Arts & Sciences for 30 years at Washington University in St. Louis.

Kastor is editor of *The Louisiana Purchase: Emergence of an American Nation*.The challenges faced by today’s U.S. government officials in Iraq are plentiful. Having ejected the government of Saddam Hussein, U.S. representatives must now spearhead the organization of a new system led by Iraqis to meet the needs of their country’s multi-religious and multi-ethnic population. This effort comes at the bicentennial of America’s first effort to govern foreign peoples. Two hundred years ago — with the end of negotiations for the Louisiana Purchase in Paris on April 30, 1803 — a fledgling U.S. government faced similar circumstances and even greater challenges, according to Peter J. Kastor, Ph.D., assistant professor of history and American Culture Studies in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.

Valencius unearths a common theme among early settlers in *The Health of the Country*.Poring over stacks of yellowed aging letters and other documents from the 19th century while researching American western expansion, Conevery Bolton Valencius, Ph.D., an environmental historian at Washington University in St. Louis, noted a common theme. Assessments of the “sickliness” or “health” of land pervade settlers’ letters, journals, newspapers and literature from that time. Valencius says that the numerous references throughout 19th-century writings to “healthy country,” “sickly” countryside, or “salubrious” valleys reveal the importance settlers placed on the connections between their bodies and their land. One of the main criteria for choosing where to farm and where to raise a family for the early settlers was whether or not the area would be a healthy place to live.