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Dr. Milton BatesProfessor Emeritus |
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Background Information Prior to retiring in 2010, I taught graduate and undergraduate courses in American literary modernism, including the work of writers such as Wallace Stevens, William Faulkner, Willa Cather, T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Richard Wright, and William Carlos Williams. In addition, I designed and taught courses in the literature of the Vietnam War, environmental literature, and narrative theory. These are also the fields in which I have done most of my research and publication. Since 2010 I have published chiefly poetry and a work of creative nonfiction, The Bark River Chronicles: Stories from a Wisconsin Watershed. Publications, Honors and Awards Publications
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Dr. Ed Block, Jr.Professor Emeritus |
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Background Information I came to Marquette as a Victorianist and reader-response critic. My early research and publication was on Victorian periodical literature and the intersection of Victorian science, literature and values. My interest in Robert Louis Stevenson and Gothic literature in the late nineteenth century yielded Rituals of Dis-Integration (1993) as well as articles in Victorian Studies and elsewhere. While in the department I taught all the British survey courses as well as individual author courses on John Henry Newman, Hopkins and Hardy, and Denise Levertov. My work on Newman culminated in a speakers' program and a collection of critical essays (1992) derived from it. From reader-response I moved to Gadamerian hermeneutical criticism and then the theo-dramatic theory of the late Swiss humanist and theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar. In the department I taught the graduate history of criticism as well as the undergraduate course in literary criticism. While working on Balthasar, my research and teaching interests shifted to drama. Since 2008 I have returned to a first love; lyric poetry. I taught the Introduction to Poetry and the Creative Writing (Poetry) courses for two years. I also co-taught a course on the Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz and Cistercian monk, Thomas Merton, whose friendship and correspondence provide a window on mid-twentieth century culture. In the early 90s I contributed to and guest-edited issues of Renascence: Essays on Values and Literature, the scholarly journal that has been published at Marquette for over sixty years. For Renascence I interviewed novelist Larry Woiwode and contributed essays on Hans-Georg Gadamer and G. K. Chesterton. From 1995-2012 I edited the journal. That made me, perforce, a generalist in my tastes, and increasingly committed to the relation of literature to spirituality, religion, and belief. Under my editorship Renascence did special issues on Denise Levertov (whom I interviewed), Balthasar, Rene Girard, Graham Greene, Gabriel Marcel, and most recently Owen Barfield. As Senior editor, I edited a special issue on the work of novelist and essayist, Marilynne Robinson. Courses Taught
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Dr. M.C. BoddenProfessor Emerita |
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Background Information My work centers on Middle English literature, with a leaning towards Early Modern English literature. I am very much engaged by the rich readings that result when the literature of the past is read through the lens of contemporary theories. For example, for the Middle Ages, 'truth' was never contingent; nevertheless the 'truth' of gender identification can be seen in medieval texts to be wickedly and comically negotiated. Perception, too, 'fixed' by Aquinas and Dante, proves to be shaped, rather, by institutional discourses, and can vary from community to community and period to period. Even meaning itself is constituted not by timeless truth but by language- itself a system of elusive and "excessive signification." As my interests have evolved, so, too, have my courses, which now take a theme-based approach rather than a chronological one, an approach which seems to elicit the best from my students. Courses which I have developed in the last six years include “Language, Gender, and Power,” “Women, Money, and Power in Medieval and Early Modern England,” “Gender and Crime in Late Medieval and Early Modern England: Literary and Archival Sources,” “Gender and Politics in Late Medieval and Early Modern Drama,” and “Violence in Representation and Representation in Violence in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature.” My evolving interests are reflected, likewise in my research. From my first book, The Old English Finding of the True Cross, I have crossed disciplines and have recently published a second book, Language as the Site of Revolt in Medieval and Early Modern England: Speaking as a Woman. There I show how medieval and early modern English women and women characters use certain linguistic strategies to de-'essentialize' the link between gendered practices and identity, and to invalidate knowledge systems that fail to account for women’s own subjectivities. Religious Language: Privileging Violence towards Women is a third book, completed in first draft, in which I examine the ways in which the discourse of worship, religious treatises, homilies and liturgies (unconsciously) promotes the subjugation and abuse of women and children. Courses Taught
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Dr. John BolyAssociate Professor Emeritus |
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Background Information My research interests include modern British poetry and contemporary literary theory. I am the author of a book on W.H. Auden's poetry as well as various articles that deal with Auden's prose, modern poetry and the romantic tradition, Gerard Manly Hopkins, Derrida from a phenomenological perspective, deconstruction, and the application of performative theory to literary texts. I have recently contributed to the Cambridge Companion to W.H. Auden and am working on a study of Irish poet Seamus Heaney. My graduate teaching interests range over modern and contemporary British poetry, the rhetorical models of Kenneth Burke, critical formalism in its Russian, New Critical, and poststructuralist modes, cultural criticism, postMarxism, and semiotics. Besides these and other accomplishments, I regularly throw a tennis ball for a finicky golden retriever. Courses Taught
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Dr. Virginia ChappellProfessor Emerita |
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Dr. Ed DuffyAssociate Professor Emeritus |
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Background Information The poetry of the English romantic poets, in particular Shelley and Wordsworth, has been my central professional concern. The study of these poets has led me both backward and forward in time, backward through the centuries-long, polyglot tradition of Western poetry that they come out of and profoundly alter, and forward in time to such diverse continuers of their way with words as Seamus Heaney, Robert Frost, and Adrienne Rich. As suggested by its title, my Rousseau in England: the Context for Shelley’s Critique of the Enlightenment (1979) closes with a picture of Shelley’s poetry as the enactment of a way of thinking that was even then, in 1822, being repressed and marginalized by the dominant intellectual and epistemological assumptions of modern Western culture. Such philosophical preoccupations have led me to a cross-disciplinary engagement with the “ordinary language” philosophy practised in various ways by John Austin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Stanley Cavell. This lateral move into philosophy has eventuated into two recent books: The Constitution of Shelley’s Poetry: The Argument of Language in Prometheus Unbound (Anthem Press, 2009) and Secular Mysteries: Stanley Cavell and English Romanticism (Bloomsbury, 2013). Publications
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Dr. Thomas L. JeffersProfessor Emeritus |
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Background Information I have written a biography of Norman Podhoretz, a Jewish-American writer, editor, and controversialist, which Cambridge University Press will bring out as a 'featured book' in the spring of 2010. I teach classes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, Shakespeare, poetry, survey of American literature, you name it. Hobbies include painting with watercolor and pastel, listening to classical music, hiking and biking, and trying to keep my tennis game from deteriorating altogether. Courses Taught
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Dr. Diane Hoeveler |
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Dr. Christine L. KruegerProfessor Emerita |
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Background Information Dr. Krueger was interested in the "long nineteenth century" (c. 1780-1900) because the period faced so many of the same challenges we do today with such optimism and energy. That's one reason its writers, like Austen, Dickens, or Lewis Carroll remain popular. We're also prone to some of the long nineteenth century's vices—materialism, imperialism, sexism—and so can learn from the period's social critics, like Wollstonecraft, Gaskell, Hardy, and Wilde. Finally, nineteenth-century writers were the first mass-entertainers, providing generations of readers with Dr. Frankenstein, Sherlock Holmes, Count Dracula, Black Beauty, and Alice in Wonderland. In Dr. Krueger's various courses in Victorian Literature, Women and Literature, or Literature and Law, she wanted students to explore how and why a culture so close to our own turned to literature not only for entertainment, but social change as well. The questions that she found the most engaging, like this one, call for interdisciplinary responses. Dr. Krueger published on topics concerning gender, religion, law, and history in British culture, including The Reader's Repentance: Women Preachers, Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Social Discourse (Chicago, 1992) Reading for the Law: Gender Advocacy and British Literary History (Virginia, 2010) and Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time (Ohio, 2002). Dr. Krueger served as a director of the University Core of Common Studies, past president of the scholarly organization Interdisciplinary Nineteenth Century Studies, and recipient of the inaugural Way-Klingler Award for Interdisciplinary Teaching. Courses Taught
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