CULVER – Responding to an invitation from former student James Whippo ’11 (Lakeville, Ind.), Academies Humanities instructor Jacqueline Erwin, Ph.D., will be traveling to Virginia Military Institute on March 4 to speak about author Jane Austen.
As the vice president of the school’s chapter of Sigma Tau Delta (the English honor society), Whippo, a senior at the Lexington, Va., school, was tasked with scheduling an evening speaker. Since Austen is the subject of Whippo’s senior capstone project, “Dr. Erwin was the natural choice for my speaker block,” he said in an email.
Midn1/c Whippo is an English major with minors in philosophy and history. Upon graduation, he will be commissioned as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps, serving at least four years.
“I could not have been more profoundly touched,” Erwin said of the invitation. “It was a poignant moment.” A 20-year veteran of the Academies’ classroom, she remembers Whippo as “an earnest young man with a sense of humor.”
Erwin’s remarks are titled “Gossip and Jane Austen’s Narrative Voice: The Sense of a Non-ending in Happily Ever After.” She has been busy re-reading Austen’s novels and formulating a sense of their endings for her talk.
“The narrative voice Austen creates is the voice of a gossip,” Erwin said.
Erwin ponders why so many care about what happens to Austen’s characters after the novels; the parodies, the sequels, the analyzing, and movies with a new twist.
“Austen invites us to enter a world, look forward to what could happen and what it could mean,” Erwin said. “For some characters, it is not too happy,” though most of the main characters come out OK in the end, she added.
The speaking engagement also was an “an excuse to re-read Jane Austen,” Erwin said. She did her doctoral dissertation at Northwestern University on Austen, “but this is totally different.”
“It’s a refreshing experience to be on the writing side again and not on the critiquing side,” she said.
Erwin earned her bachelor’s degree from Wellesley College, a master’s from Simmons College, and a Ph.D. in English from Northwestern University. Joining the English faculty in 1994, she has taught British literature, Shakespeare, first-level English courses for international students, linguistics, and the AP English literature course. She currently teaches senior level courses including imaginative Writing (Devils and Dragons) and the AP English Literature course. Erwin is a Master Instructor and holds the W.A. Moncrief Jr. Chair of Humanities.
Her late husband, Lewis Erwin, is a 1969 Culver graduate. Two of their three children also graduated from the Academies.
