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Department of English

Recent Faculty Publications


 

“The Bourn Identity: Hamlet and the French of Montaigne’s Essais,” by Travis D. Williams

Notes and Queries 58:2 (2011): 254-58.

"'It All Does Come to Nothing in the End': Nationalism and Gender in Louise Erdrich's The Plague of Doves" by Gina Valentino

A collection of new essays by noted scholars of Native American Literature on three important novels that chart the trajectory of Erdrich's novelistic career, Tracks (1988), The Last Report on the Miracles At Little No Horse (2001) and The Plague of Doves (2007). The book illuminates Erdrich's multiperspectival representation of Native American culture and history. Focusing on such topics as humor, religion, ethnicity, gender, race, sexuality, trauma, history, and narrative form, the essays collected here offer fresh readings of Erdrich's explorations of Native American identities through her innovative fictions.

Feeling for the Poor (University of Virginia Press Victorian Literature and Culture Series, 2010), by Carolyn Betensky

What if the political work of Victorian social-problem novels was
precisely to make the reader feel as if reading them -- in and of
itself -- mattered? Surveying novels by Charles Dickens, Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and Henry James, Carolyn Betensky tracks the promotion of bourgeois feeling as a response to the suffering of the poor and working classes. Victorian social-problem novels, she argues, volunteered the experience of their own reading as a viable response to conflicts that seemed daunting or irreconcilable. Encoded at multiple levels within the novels themselves, reading became something to do about the pain of others.

Carolyn Betensky's review of A Dark Trace:  Sigmund Freud on the Sense of Guilt, by Herman Westerink, also recently appeared in Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society (2010) 15, 429–431.

Swallow: Foreign Bodies, Their Ingestion, Inspiration and the Curious Doctor Who Extracted Them by Mary Cappello (The New Press, January 2011)

A revelatory, poetic exploration of swallowing—and of a strange collection of objects preserved by a single-minded medical pioneer

Read a feature article on Swallow in The New York Times, an interview with Thomas Rogers about Swallow on Salon.com (December 18, 2010), and a conversation with LA Times journalist Carolyn Kellogg on the most interesting book Cappello was taught in school.

Poem "Don't Tell Me," by Instructor Talvikki Ansel, Poetry Magazine, Sept. 2010

Instructor Talvikki Ansel's poem "Don't Tell Me" appeared in the Sept. 2010 issue of Poetry Magazine, and can also be read on-line here.
Ansel was also recently honored with a grant from the Money for Women / Barbara Deming Memorial Fund to assist in the completion of a poetry manuscript.

Special Journal Issue: "The Sublime and Education" guest-edited by J. Jennifer Jones (Romantic Circles Praxis, August 2010)

Rooted in the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant, this diverse collection engages comparatively with Romantic-era literature and cultural theory of the 20th and 21st centuries. One underlying inspiration is the pedagogical theory of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who has thought widely about humanities-based training using Romantic-era texts as principal theoretical and literary tools, formative among them the aesthetic philosophy of Kant. Spivak's pedagogical theory can perhaps best be apprehended through the claim that proper pedagogy consists in "the uncoercive rearrangement of desires," which is to say a pedagogy founded on a notion of an immanent rather than a transcendental sublime. In complementary but nevertheless highly individuated ways, each contributor to this volume offers just this type of reformative work.

This volume of the Romantic Circles Praxis Series includes an editor's introduction by J. Jennifer Jones; essays by Christopher Braider, Frances Ferguson, Paul Hamilton, Anne McCarthy, Forest Pyle, and Deborah Elise White; and an afterword by Ian Balfour.

Recent poetry publications by Peter Covino include:

“Disappearance and Modulation,” The Yale Review 98.4 (2010): 55-56, “Built on the Foundation of What Isn’t True” and “Rain Delay” in Ph’atitude Literary Review 2 (2010):44, “High Tide in the Veins,” “Dispossession,” and “Millennial Wyoming in Popular Imagination with Codeine” in roger 5 (2010): 111-113, and a review of  Mairead Byrne’s Talk Poetry in Ph’atitude Literary Review 2 (2010): 21, 25-26.

“Innovation, Interdisciplinarity, and Cultural Exchange in Italian American Poetry” by Peter Covino also recently appeared in Teaching Italian American Literature, Film, and Popular Culture. Ed. Giunta, Edvige and Kathleen McCormack. New York: Modern Language Association, MLA P. 2010. 97-108.

“Donald Sutherland: The Politics and Erotics of Submission,” by Jean Walton in Hollywood Reborn: Movie Stars of the 1970s, edited by James Morrison, New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2010: 202-237.

“Modernity and the Peristaltic Subject,” by Jean Walton, Neurology and Modernity: A Cultural History of Nervous Systems, 1800-1950, Laura Salisbury and Andrew Shail, eds. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010: 245-266.

"Tycoon Medievalism, Corporate Philanthropy, and American Pedagogy," by Kathleen Davis

Special issue on American Medievalism. American Literary History 22:4 (2010): 1-20.

"Periodization and the Matter of Precedent," by Kathleen Davis

Medieval Cultural Studies 1:3 (2010): 1-7.

Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of “The Middle Ages” Outside Europe, (John Hopkins University Press, 2009), edited by Kathleen Davis


Professor Kathleen Davis is the co-editor with Nadia Altschul of Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of “The Middle Ages” Outside Europe, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Her introduction to the volume, co-written with Nadia Altschul, is titled, “The Idea of ‘the Middle Ages’ Outside Europe.” Professor Davis' recent publications also include “The Sense of an Epoch: Periodization and Sovereignty from Schmitt and Benjamin to Blumenberg and Koselleck" in The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages, ed. D. Vance Smith and Andrew Cole. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. Pp. 39-69, and “Boredom, Brevity and Last Things: Ælfric’s Style and the Politics of Time.” A Companion to Ælfric. Ed. Hugh Magennis and Mary Swan. Leiden: Brill Press, 2009. Pp. 321-344.

Bret Easton Ellis: American Psycho, Glamorama, Lunar Park, edited by Naomi Mandel

This collection of nine critical essays on U.S. novelist Bret Easton Ellis focuses on the writer’s mature period: American Psycho (1991), Glamorama (1999) and Lunar Park (2005). The volume is composed of three sections, each devoted to a key text, presenting newly-commissioned essays from scholars based in the U.S. and Europe; each section is accompanied by a short introduction.

The collection reflects Ellis' uneasy positioning between the literature of Generation X and Blank Fiction, and treats American Psycho as his definitive work. American Psycho elicited unprecedented public debate and remains one of the most controversial novels of the contemporary period. Ellis' subsequent novel Glamorama foreshadowed the centrality of terror and the ubiquity of cyberculture in the 21st century, and Lunar Park offers a retrospective, quasi-biographical account of the author and his work.

The objectives of the volume are to examine the alchemy of acclaim and disdain that accrues to this controversial writer, and to establish Ellis's centrality to scholarship and teaching of contemporary American literature in the U.S. and in Europe.

Professor Mandel won this year’s Graduate Mentoring Excellence Award from the College of Arts and Sciences


“Negotiating Gifts: Jefferson’s Diplomatic Presents” by Martha Elena Rojas

appears in The Old Word and the New: Exchanges Between America and Europe in the Age of Jefferson, ed. Leonard Sadofsky, et al. University of Virginia Press, 2010.

 

“Problematic Paradice: Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake,” by Karen Stein

in Margaret Atwood: The Robber Bride, The Blind Assassin and Oryx and Crake ed J. Brooks Bouson, Continuum Press, 2010:  210-233, and “Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin as a Modern Bluebeard” in 21st Century Gothic:  Great  Gothic  Novels  Since  2000, ed. Danel Olson, Scarecrow Press,  2010: chapter 4, pp. 32-41. Rachel Carson and the Web of Life by Karen Stein is currently under contract for the Challenging Authors series edited by Paul Thomas for Sense Press. Stein is this year’s judge for the best MA thesis on Margaret Atwood for the Margaret Atwood Society.
 

Instructor Kevin McLellan has recent poems in:

BLOOM, Dogs Singing (Salmon Publishing, 2010), Southern Humanities Review, and Spaces Between Us (Third World Press, 2010).  Kevin has forthcoming poems in: Diagram, EOAGH, Fringe, Horse Less Review, Like a Fat Gold Watch (Fat Gold Watch Press, 2011), Muse & Stone, Poetry East, and Sugar House Review.