Greg Forter

Associate Professor
Office: 511 Humanities Office Bldg
(803) 777-8442

forter@sc.edu

Full Vita

Education

Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 1998

Specialization Areas

• Twentieth-Century American Literature
• Gender Studies
• Psychoanalysis
• Politics

Recent Courses

See Course Descriptions for detailed information.

• ENGL 423: Modern American Literature
• ENGL 429 (topics): Men, Women, and Freedom in Modern American Literature
• ENGL 490 (topics): Literature and War
• ENGL 752: The American Novel (1900-1950)
• ENGL 753: The American Novel (Post-1950)
• ENGL 842C: Psychoanalysis, American Radicalism, and the Politics of Literary Modernism

Current Research Project(s)

A central concern of my teaching and writing is how American authors responded to the loss of a secure sense of gender identity at the turn of the twentieth century. I explore this problem through a methodology that I encourage in my students as well: one that fuses a psychoanalytic approach to individual expression with a historical attentiveness to the social forces that shape such expression from "outside." Reading literary texts is always for me about negotiating these two imperatives; I try to illuminate the psychic, social, and political formations to which individual authors respond, and to trace how the idiosyncracies of each response gives rise to the complexities and contradictions of literary works. In doing this, my teaching and writing are drawn inevitably to put the category of gender into contact with those of race and class--and to explore how each of these categories inflects the other. Finally, and perhaps above all, I try always to ask (and help students to ask) why reading literature matters: in what ways do literary texts offer us strategies for recovering or perpetuating a vision of the world that we want to live in, and in what ways do they refuse or renounce such a vision, offering instead only a kind of political despair?

Work in Progress

"Melancholy Manhood: Gender, Race, and the Inability to Mourn in American Literary Modernism"

Publications

• “Freud, Faulkner, Caruth: Trauma and the Politics of Literary Form,” Narrative 15.3 (2007): 259-85. Winner of Narrative's Annual Best Essay Prize for 2007.
• Murdering Masculinities: Fantasies of Gender and Violence in the American Crime Novel (New York: New York UP, 2000)
•  “F. Scott Fitzgerald, Modernist Studies, and the Fin-de-Siècle Crisis in Masculinity,” American Literature 78.2 (June 2006): 293-323
• “Faulkner, Trauma, and the Uses of Crime Fiction,” The Blackwell Companion to William Faulkner, ed. Rick Moreland (New York: Blackwell, December 2006)
• “Against Melancholia: Contemporary Mourning Theory, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and  the Politics of Unfinished Grief,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 14.2 (2003): 134-70
• “Melancholy Modernism: Gender and the Politics of Mourning in The Sun Also Rises,” The Hemingway Review 21.1 (2001): 22-37
• The Desire of the Analysts: Psychoanalysis and Cultural Criticism, edited with Paul Allen Miller (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008)
• Guest editor, “Psychoanalysis and the Iraq War,” special issue of International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies 3.2 (April 2006)