A Passion for Getting It Right

Essays and Appreciations in Honor of Michael J. Colacurcios 50 Years of Teaching

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• Publisher: Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781433128936
• eBook ISBN: 9781453914991
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Language
• Index: Literature

For 50 years Michael J. Colacurcio has been a leader in the criticism of early and antebellum American literature. In The Province of Piety, New Essays on The Scarlet Letter, Doctrine and Difference, and Godly Letters, as well as editions and often-reprinted reviews and essays, Dr. Colacurcio has continued to defend a rare vision of the political and intellectual depth of America's serious fiction and the aesthetic power and charm of its religious poetry and prose. In light of many honors such as the Book of the Year Award from the Conference of Christianity and Literature and election in 2007 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, UCLA raised him to the rank of Distinguished Professor. Yet for all his dedication to research, his students know him as an unforgettable teacher, who has continued to win several teaching awards at both Cornell and UCLA. The present volume aspires to celebrate Dr. Colacurcio's 50 years of transformative teaching through an exciting bounty of original and classic essays by some of his most talented students and eminent colleagues from his very first years at Cornell up to and including his current students at UCLA.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Two Puritans You May Not Know But Hawthorne Thinks You Should (Carol M. Bensick)
• Hawthorne’s Doctor Experiments: Medicine, Risk Culture, and the Development of Psychological Realism (Inna Blyakhman and Kevin C. Moore)
• Pro-Americans, Proto-Americans, and Un-Americans in Melville’s Israel Potter (Luke Bresky)
• The Vanitas of Holocaust Painting: Audrey Flack’s World War II (Emily Budick)
• Remembering the Puritans: Hawthorne and the Scene of History (Michael J. Colacurcio)
• “Singularly Connected” in Septimius: Multiple Perspectives in Hawthorne’s Late Work (Robert Daly)
• What Is the Custom-House? (Robert Daly)
• Introduction to The Marble Faun (Andrew Delbanco)
• Michael J. Colacurcio’s (Un)Godly Letters (R. C. De Prospo)
• Monoaxiate Tyranny in Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (James Duban)
• Melville’s Bachelors: Templars No More (Allan M. Emery)
• The Beecher Trials (John Gatta)
• Office Hours (Lisa Gordis)
• The Critic on Main Street: Hawthorne and Critical Allegory (Adam Gordon)
• Experience (T. Austin Graham)
• Cassandra, Bartleby, and the Direction of Time: Some Thoughts on Unknowability (Martin Griffin)
• Melville’s Comedy of Gender: The Battle for Domesticity in “I and My Chimney” (Alice Henton)
• “Every Great and Small Thing”: Emerson and the Divine Particular (Allison Johnson)
• “Awakened” by “the Sacred Whispers” in James Salter’s “Akhnilo” (B. W. Jorgensen)
• Bartleby and the Prophet of Reality (Martin Kevorkian)
• “I Have Stolen His Books”: Teaching the Colacurcio Syllabus in Community College (Lawrence Krikorian)
• Notes on Aphoristic Genius (Maurice Lee)
• Sea Changes in the American Crisis Poem from Walt Whitman to Campbell McGrath (Phillip l. Marcus)
• In Tribute (John P. McWilliams)
• Deceptive Appearances: Anti-Romance and Anti-Travelogue Beneath the Surface in Melville’s Typee (Richard Middleton-Kaplan)
• Puritan Riffs: The Jazz Aesthetic in Michael J. Colacurcio’s Pedagogy (Richard Middleton-Kaplan)
• The Gnomic Pronouncements of Michael J. Colacurcio (Andrew Rosenblum)
• Colacurcio, Teacher and Lecturer: A Transoceanic Perspective (Mikayo Sakuma)
• Reconfiguring Nature After Darwin: Skepticism and Sexuality in Modern British and Irish Literature (Daniel R. Schwarz)
• “A Song without Words”: Black Thunder (Eric J. Sundquist)
• Julia Ward Howe, the Travel Book, and the Public Lectern (Gary Williams)
• Autobiography (Michael J. Colacurcio)
• Appendix: The Affect of Puritanism (Michael J. Colacurcio)
• Contributors
• Limerick (Michael J. Colacurcio)