Deep South v.1 n.1 (February, 1995)
Deep South, the chosen title for this new Graduate Journal, invites speculation. That this publication issues from a place "having a considerable extension downwards" geographically is true in the sense that the University of Otago lies nearer the South Pole than any other university in the world (though whether this puts it at the symbolic top of the globe or the bottom depends on one's perspective).
Deep South, then, demonstrates the capacity of modern communications to link the remote centres of academic study with the rest of the world of learning. That its contributors, "coming from or extending to a depth", include former Otago students now working in Canada and the United States helps to make the same point.
The number of contributors (and potential contributors) to a journal such as this with, an electronic base and therefore a potentially unlimited contributor and audience base, is another reason for the title "Deep", though one needs to replace OED's militaristic image of serried ranks of soldiers with a mental picture of a crowd of young scholars eagerly thronging forward to present their wares to a waiting world. An opportunity, too, to remark that over the last few years this English department has seen a steady increase in postgraduate student numbers, to a point where a graduate culture capable of supporting a venture of this kind has come into being, a development to be welcomed enthusiastically.
As Head of the Department in which Deep South has been born, I naturally hope that some senses of the key adjective will not be appropriate: in particular, that it will not "[involve] heavy expenditure or liability", let alone indicate immersion or implication in "debt, guilt, ruin or drink, etc." Like most university enterprises these days it will have to run on a shoestring (whatever that outmoded item may be), but given the energy and goodwill characterising this enterprise, I am confident that we will be able to keep it running on at least a telephone wire.
Naturally, I expect Deep South will live up to another meaning of the term "deep"; that its articles, reviews and creative work will "[have] the power to enter far into a subject", that the work will be penetrating and on occasion profound, having "profound knowledge, learning, or insight". But surely there will be room also for something of the joie de vivre which ought to characterise graduate expression. Full adult solemnity will come soon enough.
So may this journal be lively, opinionated, various and accommodating, as well as playing the role of a new international forum for English Studies among graduate students. Only in that way will it reveal the full richness of the hidden life to be found in the Deep South.
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