Ithaca College

 Jason Potel '16 and David Kramer, Assistant Professor of English, were featured in Saturday's Ithaca Journal for their work on a new edition of Grace Miller White's 1909 novel Tess of the Storm Country.

 Writing as a guest columnist for the Journal's monthly "Then and Now" feature, Potel describes White's book as a "best-selling novel," set in turn-of-the-last-century Ithaca.  Drawing inspiration from real-life events, such as the tragic Chi Psi fire at Cornell in December, 1906, Tess of the Storm Country constructs an intricate plot that centers around a murder and the effects of this crime on already-tense class and gender relations in the community.  An immediate success upon its initial publication, Tess was adapted into four different major motion pictures, including one in 1914 that starred Mary Pickford, one of the most influential actresses of the earliest days of American film.

The novel has long been out of print, but Prof. David Kramer included it on the syllabus for his Honors intermediate seminar Ithaca:  The Art of Place, which he taught in the spring of 2011.  Tess elicited such a tremendous response from the students that Kramer began to investigate the possibility of editing and publishing a new edition.  Assisted by Potel, Kramer hopes that an updated edition of the text will include an introduction, illustrations, and footnotes, which will allow readers to become better acquainted with the historical context in which the book was originally written.

Jason Potel  '16 is a Cinema and Photography major with a concentration in Screenwriting, who is planning to add a major in English.  Professor David Kramer joined the Department of English in 1997, and his research typically focuses on Restoration and Eighteenth-Century theater in England and France.  He teaches a wide variety of courses on drama, poetry, and the novel, as well as a number of thematically focused courses on topics as diverse as representations of the devil, madmen and fools, and twentieth-century magical realism.  His latest course, "Metamorphoses:  Ovid to Rushdie," explores the theme of transformation in literature from ancient Rome to twentieth-century England and will be offered in the spring of 2015.