• Ph.D., with distinction, Columbia University, 1975
• M.A., with distinction, Columbia University, 1971
• B.A., magna cum laude, New York University, 1970

Research Interests:  

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

Recent Publications   (More Publications)

Books

•  Crossing Back: A Classic Journey. Under revision .  [abs] [author's comments]
•  Why We Love Elephants. Elephants in books, films, nature, religion, and the human psyche.. under investigation .

•  "Representing Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Contemporary America."  2011.  [author's comments]
•  "The Text is Present." Fictions of Art History The Clark Art Instutute, forthcoming.  [abs]
•  "Dante, Mourning, Meditation and Me." How We Write: The Power of Scholarly Form Ed. Angelika Bammer and Ruth-Ellen Joeres. forthcoming.