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Marianna TorgovnickMarianna Torgovnick  
Professor and Director, Duke in New York Program

Office Location: 304 Allen
Office Phone: (919) 684-2165, (919) 684-2110
Email Address: tor@nyc.rr.com

Office Hours:

Fall 2009 - teaching in NY
office hours by appointment

Education and Interests:

Ph.D., with distinction, Columbia University
British Literature; 20th Century/Modernist Studies
Marianna Torgovnick writes on the novel and novel theory, postcolonialism, modernism, and the twentieth century more generally, and especially on contemporary American issues. She specializes equally in British and American literature and culture. She has published Closure in the Novel (Princeton, 1981), and The Visual Arts, Pictorialism, and the Novel: James, Lawrence, and Woolf (Princeton, 1985), Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago, 1990), and Crossing Ocean Parkway (Chicago, 1994), for which she won an American Book Award. Her most recent book is Primitive Passions: Men, Women, and the Quest for Ecstasy (Knopf, 1997; paperback Chicago, 1998). Her most recent book is called The War Complex: World War II in Our Time, about memories and perceptions of the Second War World in the Twenty First Century. Professor Torgovnick is currently teaching in New York through the Duke in New York Program. For more information, visit her website www.duke.edu/~tor

Representative Publications   (More Publications)

  1.  Letting Loose in the Great Depression.  forthcoming. (Incorporating material from the 1930s in earlier project (now shelved) on New York destruction materials.)
  2. "Letting Loose in the Great Depression: Film, Radio, and Leisure Time in the 1930s." The Chronicle of Higher Education Review  (forthcoming)
  3. "Archive Fever." The Chronicle of Higher Education Review  (September, 2008)
  4. "The Lure of Urban Destruction: Targeting New York." The Chronicle of Higher Education Review  (May, 2008)
  5. "Sexy Things: Recent Novels that Embroider Artistic History." The Chronicle of Higher Education Review  (February, 2008)