November 14, 2024

EagleEye

A Newsletter for UMW Faculty and Staff

Lorentzen Presents, Delivers Roundtable Discussion at Dickens Society Symposium

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Professor of English Eric Lorentzen

Professor of English Eric Lorentzen

Professor of English Eric G. Lorentzen presented a paper entitled “The Sights/Sites of Dickens in 2023: Literary Tourism, Cultural Studies, and the University Literature Classroom” at the recent Dickens Society Symposium in Rochester (RIT). The talk included research he conducted in museums and other literary sites across England, as well as the pedagogical methodologies involved with his recent new course on Dickens at UMW, “Dickens, Disney, and Popular Culture,” two sections of which ran for the first time during the fall 2022 semester. He was also one of six scholars to be invited to join the roundtable “Teaching Dickens,” at which he presented the talk “Wisdom of the Heart: Dickens and Cultural Studies.” Professor Lorentzen hopes to offer the course again during the fall 2024 semester.

Lorentzen Gives Talk on Dickens, Disney, Popular Culture and Social Justice

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Eric Lorentzen, Associate Professor of English

Eric Lorentzen, Professor of English

Eric G. Lorentzen, professor of English, recently gave a talk entitled “Interdisciplinary English as Social Justice: Dickens, Disney and Popular Culture,” at the Virginia Humanities Conference. The talk was based on a new class Lorentzen taught in fall semester of 2022, in which the goal was to mark, as an intellectual community, the tremendous ongoing, and often not readily perceived, influence that Dickens’ work has on a multiplicity of genres in the 21st century. The course included materials as diverse as:

*20th- and 21st-century literary texts, such as Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith, John Irving’s The Cider House Rules and the Harry Potter books.
*films/shows like Ridley Road, It’s a Wonderful Life, About Time, The Game, The Time Traveller’s Wife, The Last Tree and Disney’s Christopher Robin.
*literary societies, reading groups, social clubs and online serial novel projects.
*Dickens festivals, holiday fairs, walking tours and other elements of literary tourism that continue to celebrate Dickens’ works, life and association with Christmas.
*museum exhibits/journalism that attempt to demonstrate the ongoing importance of Dickens’ texts for the problems of poverty, homelessness, food insecurity and lack of social justice today.

Lorentzen Publishes Review in Victorians Institute Journal

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Eric Lorentzen, Associate Professor of English

Eric Lorentzen, Professor of English

Eric G. Lorentzen, Professor of English, published a review of Adam Grener’s new book, Improbability, Chance, and the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel, in the latest volume of the Victorians Institute Journal (48). Grener’s novelists (Austen, Scott, Dickens, Trollope, Hardy) were committed to a mode of fiction that primarily foregrounded chance and coincidence to “represent a historical and contingent world,” rather than creating a convincing tale of ordinary and conventional probability.

Lorentzen Presents a Paper at Dickens Society Symposium

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Eric Lorentzen, Associate Professor of English

Eric Lorentzen, Professor of English

Eric G Lorentzen, Professor of English, presented a paper as part of the “Dickens and Education” panel of the annual Dickens Society Symposium this week. His talk, “Happy Shepherd-Boys and Closing Prison-Houses: The Importance of Connection in Wordsworth, Dickens, and Tolstoy,” originated in a UMW Faculty Development Summer Grant, and detailed, in part, the creation of a new course that he is planning to offer at UMW during the 2022-2023 academic year. The course will examine a philosophical genealogy of the “continuity of the self” that begins with Wordsworth and other Romantic poets, continues through Dickens and other Victorian novelists, later spreads globally to writers like Tolstoy, extends to contemporary short stories of the late 20th and early 21st century, and finally permeates many forms of popular American culture, from Disney films to teen dramas. The course will also include aspects of popular culture in the form of literary tourism, a component about which Professor Lorentzen plans to continue to research, and about which he will present in a subsequent paper, in England during the summer of 2022.

Lorentzen Takes Part in Global Virtual Dickens Conference and Roundtable

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Eric Lorentzen, Associate Professor of English

Eric Lorentzen, Professor of English

Eric G. Lorentzen, Professor of English, was one of six international Dickens scholars who took part in a timely roundtable presentation and discussion on Dickens and Contagion. The roundtable was part of a virtual global conference which took place on June 9, which was the 150th anniversary of the Victorian writer’s death. #Dickens150 featured Dickens scholars from 10 different countries, and linked many participants around the world through synchronous time zone presentations that stretched from the London morning until evening in America. The specific roundtable on Dickens and Contagion, along with a few other selected parts of the conference, was filmed live, and will be forthcoming for global viewing on the #Dickens150 YouTube channel soon.

Lorentzen Gives a Talk on Victorian Serial Fiction at George Mason University

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Eric Lorentzen, Associate Professor of English

Eric Lorentzen, Professor of English

Eric Lorentzen, Professor of English, was recently invited to George Mason University to speak about Victorian serial fiction, Dickens, and elements of popular culture that continue in that tradition today, such as film chronicles, soap operas, teen dramas, and the telenovela. He also discussed Dickens and Victorian literary traditions that survive beyond the realms of visual culture in the twenty-first century.

Lorentzen Presents Paper on Dickens and American Popular Culture

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Eric Lorentzen, Associate Professor of English

Eric Lorentzen, Professor of English

Eric G. Lorentzen, Professor of English, contributed a paper, “21st-Century ‘American Notes’: Charles Dickens and Popular American Culture” at the annual Victorians Institute conference this November in Charleston, SC. This year’s conference theme was Transatlantic Influence, and Lorentzen’s talk first surveyed quickly the multitude of modern-day Christmas festivals that are grounded in Dickens’ text across this country, before he turned to visual media. He made brief connections with some of the cultural manifestations that obtain on screen, from the fairly obvious A Muppet Christmas Carol, to the far more esoteric connections to be made with seemingly non-holiday fare such as films like The Game, Groundhog Day, and the more recent Disney blockbuster film, Christopher Robin. These connections led to a discussion of the ways in which Dickens’ somewhat Wordsworthian ideas of the crucial formative years of childhood, and the necessary project of philanthropy for social justice in A Christmas Carol, germinate into more fully-articulated and mature philosophies in latter novels like David Copperfield and Bleak House. The objective was to demonstrate how thoroughly (and extremely) these Dickensian archetypal tropes have permeated our own American zeitgeist in “texts” of popular culture that could not seem further away from the literary in general, or Charles Dickens specifically.  To that end, the final text Lorentzen took up for analysis was the once hugely “popular” teen soap/drama of the early 2000s, The O.C., a series which depended upon, admittedly in the most unlikely of ways, multiple Dickensian archetypes for its thematic (and didactic?!?) backbone.  Amidst the oversexed bikini-clad angst of Southern California, the Victorian dude of serial fiction abides, and our postmodern cultural studies theoretical methodologies can help us discover why the recognition of such an arcane connection remains crucially important, in terms of both individual and collective agency.

 

Lorentzen Presents on Wordsworth and Dickens at MLA Conference

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Eric Lorentzen, Associate Professor of English

Eric Lorentzen, Associate Professor of English

Eric Lorentzen, Associate Professor of English, gave the talk “‘Spots of Time’: Wordsworthian Spirits and Dickensian Hauntings” for the special Dickens Society panel at the 50th Annual Northeastern Modern Language Association Conference in Washington, D.C. Lorentzen examined this Romantic influence in Dickens’ work as a part of the panel “Dickens and the Influences of the Past.” In his paper, Lorentzen traced the ways in which Dickens’ incorporation of the Wordsworthian philosophies of time, memory, and continuity transformed over the length of the Victorian novelist’s career.  He detailed the many echoes of “We Are Seven” (Dickens’ favorite Wordsworth poem) in the early novels, and the darker cooptation of the poet’s ideas in moments of traumatic memory in the latter novels, as Dickens transformed Wordsworth from the poet of Nature, to a much more haunting figure that informs some of the more deeply psychological “spots of time” in Victorian fiction.

 

 

Lorentzen Publishes Article on Dickens and Education

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Associate Professor of English Eric G. Lorentzen published an article in Dickens Studies Annual on Dickens and education entitled “This Schoolroom is a Nation: Subverting the Catechistic Method in Dickens.”

The catechistic method was a popular form of the rote memorization pedagogy which dominated Victorian schools, and sought to keep at-risk learners content with their marginalized social positions.  In fact, this educational praxis became so popular that its tactics were embraced by many figures desiring social power beyond the schoolroom, a point upon which Dickens dwells at considerable length throughout his texts.  This essay surveys a few varieties of catechistic primers that were designed for these disciplinary functions, and examines some of the more infamous ways catechism was utilized in early nineteenth-century British literature.

Subsequently, the essay scrutinizes the almost overwhelming number of instances of the catechistic method in Dickens’s novels to demonstrate both his critique of this question and answer power dynamic, and the ways in which his characters deploy, evade, co-opt, and subvert the ideological directives of catechism, as they strive for their own liberation and agency.  By recognizing the evolution of Dickens’s critique of catechistic method, both in and beyond the arena of the Victorian classroom, Lorentzen argues that we can much better appreciate the extent of the novelist’s cautionary tales about the ways in which education functioned as a normalizing force of social control.