|
          |
|
 |
Naomi Mandel
Associate Professor of English & Comparative Literature
Ph.D. University of California, Irvine (Critical Theory Emphasis)
M.A. University of California, Irvine
B.A., B.M., Tel Aviv University
Office: 149 Swan Hall
Phone: 401-874-4011
E-Mail: mandel@uri.edu
curriculum vitae Office Hours: TTh 2:00 - 3:00
|
Naomi
Mandel specializes in contemporary literature and critical theory. Her
intellectual interests revolve around distressing topics like
atrocity, horror, trauma, and pain, and her approach to these topics
is characterized by attention to what makes them distressing, who is
distressed by them, how, and why. She has published on slavery, the
Holocaust, and the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, and she
regularly teaches courses on extremity, violence, and war.
Mandel's first book, Against the Unspeakable: Complicity, the Holocaust, and Slavery in America
investigates the assumption that atrocity defies language,
comprehension, and thought. She examines the political and cultural work
that claims for unspeakability perform, the forms such claims take, the
sources of their appeal, and what happens when we resist them. With Professor Alain-Philippe Durand, Mandel has also co-edited
a collection of essays
titled Novels of the Contemporary Extreme. This
book investigates the contemporary phenomenon of "extreme fiction" and
explores its international dimension with essays on novels from North
and South America, Europe, and the Middle East. Her third book is an edited collection of essays on U.S. author Bret
Easton Ellis. Forthcoming from Continuum as part of their Studies in
Contemporary North American Fiction Series, the volume focuses on the
novels of Ellis's mature period: American Psycho, Glamorama, and Lunar Park. Mandel's current work focuses on the relationship between violence, reality,
and truth in contemporary fiction. She has published essays and reviews in boundary 2, Modern Fiction
Studies, SubStance, Novel, Criticism, Modernism/Modernity, Cultural Critique and the online Journal of Mundane
Behavior, where she edited a special edition on Atrocity, Outrage and
the Ordinary. Ongoing projects include trying to wake up earlier in the
morning and watching less T.V.
In
Spring 2010, Mandel will be a Visiting Professor at Hebrew University,
Jerusalem through the Halbert Centre for Canadian Studies. While in
Israel, Mandel will teach a course on "The Canadian Extreme" in the
Department of Comparative Literature. The course will include novels by
Québécoise authors Nelly Arcan and Hélène
Rioux, and Canadian authors Margaret Atwood and Douglas Coupland,
that participate in the current global phenomenon of the contemporary
extreme.
Mandel's
courses tend to be interdisciplinary in nature, with extensive use of
visual media and music. She teaches introductory undergraduate,
advanced undergraduate, and graduate courses, and is currently serving
in a limited joint appointment with the URI Honors Program through
which she has been teaching, most recently, an introductory-level
course in disability studies. Recent courses include:
Undergraduate:
HPR 107: Narratives of Ability and Disability
HPR 202: Novels of the Contemporary Extreme (co-taught with Alain-Philippe Durand)
ENG/HPR 265: Violence and the Novel
ENG 357: Literature and Medicine
Graduate:
ENG 660: Fictions of Extremity
ENG 514: Studies in Critical Theories
  
|
|
|
|
