Duke the Program In Literature

  • Marianna Torgovnick

  • Professor and Director, Duke in New York Program
  • Literature
  • 302E Allen Building
  • Campus Box 90015
  • Phone: (919) 684-2165, (919) 684-2110
  • Fax: (919) 688-0355
  • Homepage

  • Specialties

    • American Literature
    • Modern to Contemporary
    • Novels
    • Postcolonial Literature
    • British Literature

  • Research Summary

    British Literature; 20th Century/Modernist Studies

  • Research Description

    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

  • Teaching

    • ENGLISH 493.01
      • RESEARCH INDEPENDENT STUDY
      • TBA
      • 12:00 AM-12:00 AM

  • Education

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

  • Awards, Honors and Distinctions

      • Fulbright Distinguished Scholar,
      • July, 2010
      • "Talk of the Nation," NPR,
      • August 2005
      • Chair, Literature and the Other Arts, Modern Language Association,
      • 2005
      • Executive Boards,
      • Modern Language Association Anthropoligical Approaches to Literature, Autobiography, Visual Arts & Literature,
      • October 2003
      • International Invitations,
      • October 2003
      • Summer Seminar Grant,
      • National Endowment for the Humanities,
      • March 1997
      • Winner for 'Crossing Ocean Parkway',
      • American Book Award,
      • March 1994
      • Cohen-Porter Visiting Scholar,
      • Tel Aviv University,
      • 0 1993
      • John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship,
      • 1981
      • Other International Invitations,
      • n.d.
      • Mellon Reduced Teaching Award for Faculty Development,
      • Williams College,
      • 1980-81

  • Recent Publications

      • M. Torgovnick.
      • "Adventures in Digital Publishing."
      • Globalization: Appropriation or Hybridization? English Language and Literature in a Postcolonial Lobal World.
      • Cambridge Scholars,
      • Cambridge U Press,
      • 2012.
      Publication Description

      The title of the book will, I suspect, change:bot my call, though

      • M. Torgovnick.
      • "Cultual Criticism."
      • ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AESTHETICS.
      • 2012.
      • (Revised edition, Oxford University Press, forthcoming.)
      • M. Torgovnick.
      • FRIEDA'S TALE.
      • 2012.
      Publication Description

      A fact-based re-imagining of the life of a famous man's wife who was a woman with a racy and unforgettable story all her own.

      Under consideration.

      • M. Torgovnick.
      • PICNIC IN THE DARK: THE CLASSICS AT A TIME OF WAR.
      • 2012.
      Publication Description

      A meditation on the status of the classics today interlaced with a memoir on encounters with death and mortality.

      • M. Torgovnick.
      • ""The Artist is Present"."
      • FICTIONS OF ART HISTORY.
      • 2012.
      Publication Description

      Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA: 2013 Performance Art, Marina Abramovic, and the art of provocation.

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Marianna Torgovnick
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