Catherine Keyser
Assistant Professor
Office: 502 Humanities Office Building
(803) 777-2900
KeyserC@mailbox.sc.edu
Education
Ph.D. Harvard University, 2007
Specialization Areas
- Modern American literature
- Gender studies
- American women writers
- Playwriting
Recent Courses
See Course Descriptions for detailed information.
- ENGL 287 American Literature
- ENGL 423 Modern American Literature
Current Research Project(s)
“Girls Who Wear Glasses”: New York Women Writers and the Gender of Smartness
During the early twentieth century, the word “smart” designated variously and together wit, chic, practical intelligence, and keeping up with the times. The aspiration to smartness in the 1920s and its recantation in the civic-minded 1930s shaped the careers of the influential women writers in my study: Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, Jessie Fauset, Mary McCarthy, and Dawn Powell. I argue that their work, responding in part to the magazines that gave them their early livelihood, confronts the problematic gender stereotypes and elite attitudes that accompany the wit of their era. These writers thus represent prescient cultural critics of mass media and gender roles as well as literary proponents of satire.
Publications
“The Macabre Magazine: Dorothy Parker, Humor, and the Female Body.” Death Becomes Her: Cultural Narratives of Femininity and Death in America. Ed. Sheri Weinstein and Elizabeth Dill. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press. (forthcoming)
“Edna St. Vincent Millay and the Very Clever Woman in Vanity Fair.” American Periodicals 17.1 (2007): 65-96.
“Jane Eyre, Bondwoman: Hannah Crafts’ Rethinking of Charlotte Bronte.” In Search of Hannah Crafts: Critical Essays in the Bondwoman’s Narrative. Ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Hollis Robbins. New York: Basic Books, 2004. 87-105.
Selected Plays
Under Fire. Winner of America’s Best Playwriting Competition. Staged reading by the feminist performance collective “the estrotribe” in New York City, April 2001. Full production at the University of Central Florida, November 2001.
Finding A Chord. Published at Playscripts.com, 2001. Produced at Leavenworth High School in Leavenworth, KS; King Edward College, Nuneaton, the United Kingdom; Unionville High School in Ontario, Canada, among several other productions.
Welcome Home, Virginia Woolf. Winner of the National Young Playwrights Festival Competition. Reading at the Miranda Theatre, New York City, November 2000.