Professor of English Chris Foss just has published an article entitled “Individual Redemption through Universal Design; or, How IEP Meetings Have Infused My Pedagogy with an Ethic of Care(taking)” in the latest number of Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture.  Pedagogy is published by Duke University Press and describes itself as “an innovative journal that aims to build a new discourse around teaching in English studies.”

In this article Foss addresses how participating as a parent in the Individualized Education Program (IEP) process has helped to transform his approach to teaching by reinforcing how important it is to endorse a pedagogy that recognizes and values the individuality of students. In attempting to bring both format and delivery in line with the principles of Universal Design for Instruction, Foss relates how he has come to understand such a pedagogical orientation not simply as a generic model for “good teaching” but also more particularly as a reflection of a disability-inflected pedagogy of care(taking).

This summer, Professor of English Chris Foss published an article entitled “Fin-de-Siècle Indian English-Language Poetry: British Imperialism, India, and the Irish Question” in English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920.  Now in its 58th year, ELT is one of the most established venues for scholarly work on literature from the late Victorian, Edwardian, and early Modernist periods.

In this article, Foss details how three Indian English-language poets living and publishing in India during the 1890s—Avadh Behari Lall, Aurobindo Ghose, and Romesh Chunder Dutt—wrote in support of Irish Home Rule, and how their work meaningfully counters the orientalist assumption/insistence that Indian English-language poetry limit itself to exclusively Indian contexts/foci.  Such an international scope, while complementary to the more properly local focus of most Indian anti-imperialist agendas, significantly reveals the extent to which their poetry contained a cosmopolitan component that ultimately cannot be reduced to some sort of partial engagement with Irish nationalism merely as a means of co­vertly commenting on India.  Their work suggests the global reach of Indian English-language poetry, displaying a broad range of responses to the Irish Question while offering truly penetrating individual insights into the nature of imperial rule and the politics of British imperialism beyond the “borders” of the Indian subcontinent.

Professor of English Chris Foss presented a paper, “‘He is so ugly that he might have made the King smile’: Disability and Materiality in Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Birthday of the Infanta’” at the annual meeting of the Nineteenth Century Studies Association, held this year in Boston, Massachusetts on Saturday, March 27.

Foss explored how reading Wilde’s fairy tale as a critical rewriting of Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop invites readers to (re)experience littleness/disability from within the context of Victorian freak show dynamics. Dickens’s novel is the story of how a very beautiful and impossibly good 13-year-old girl, Little Nell, is hounded to her grave by the ugly, deformed dwarf Daniel Quilp; conversely, Wilde’s story is about an ugly, deformed dwarf whose tragic death is hastened by a very beautiful and surprisingly cruel 12-year-old girl, the Infanta.

Overall, in spite of his own aversion to sentimentality in general, and to Dickensian sentimentality in particular (Wilde once quipped, “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing”), Wilde encourages a sincerely sympathetic response to his dwarf, not only drawing him as a kind and gentle soul but actually positioning him in the role of true lover.  While the dwarf’s sad fate may seem to foster a sense of hopelessness about the general cultural detachment from (if not actual delight in) the dehumanization of freaks/human oddities, Wilde’s fairy tale remains a significant text for its powerful representation of the terrible cruelty inherent in the nondisabled abjection of the disabled body as an undesirable and, ultimately, disposable thing.  What is more, Wilde shows himself to be a writer fully aware of his own role as manipulator /showman/exploiter of his characters who asks readers both to recognize his authorial complicity in the consumption of pain but also to acknowledge their own complicity in this as readers/spectators/consumers.

Chris Foss, professor of English, has published a chapter entitled “Oscar Wilde and the Importance of Being Romantic” in Wilde Discoveries: Traditions, Histories, Archives.  The book is a collection of essays from the University of Toronto Press (Canada’s foremost university press) edited by Joseph Bristow (one of the most renowned Wilde scholars in the world today).  Foss’s chapter delineates how Wilde’s American lecture “The English Renaissance” establishes that, for Wilde, a properly Romantic aesthetics is antisystematic and disseminative in nature, emphasizing parody and process over self-realization and synthesis.  Casting Wilde as a Romantic Ironist rather than a Romantic Egoist productively illuminates how the insincerity that for many so defines the mature Wilde actually is an extension, rather than a rejection, of the Romanticism he emphatically embraced at the beginning of his career.

Chris Foss, professor of English, published “Toward a Transcontinental (or, InterEurasian) Canon,” a review of a set of companion texts by Mary Ellis Gibson–her scholarly monograph Indian Angles: English Verse in Colonial India from Jones to Tagore and her critical anthology Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India, 1780-1913–in the July 2013 number of English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920.  Now in its 56th year, ELT is one of the most established venues for scholarly work on literature from the late Victorian, Edwardian, and early Modernist periods.