Research Interests for Marianna Torgovnick

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

Areas of Interest:

British Literature
19th-20th Century Novel

Recent Publications

1. Representing Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Contemporary America, Nanzan Review of American Studies, vol. XXXII (2011) [author's comments]
2. The Text is Present, in Fictions of Art History (forthcoming), The Clark Art Instutute, Williamstown, Massachusetts [abs]
3. Crossing Back: A Classic Journey, in Crossing Back: A Classic Journey (Under revision) [abs] [author's comments]
4. Dante, Mourning, Meditation and Me, in How We Write: The Power of Scholarly Form, edited by Angelika Bammer and Ruth-Ellen Joeres (forthcoming)
5. Why We Love Elephants. Elephants in books, films, nature, religion, and the human psyche. (under investigation)