Gretchen Woertendyke
Assistant Professor
Office: 303 Humanities Office Building
(803) 777-2115
Woertend@mailbox.sc.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Education
Ph.D., State University of New York, Stony Brook, 2007
Specialization Areas
- Early American Literature
- Studies of the Novel
- Transatlantic Romanticism
- Postcolonial Theory
Recent Courses
See Course Descriptions for detailed information.
- English 287: American Literature Survey
- English 384: Realism
- English 429: Special Topics: Violent Desires and Other Early Republican Anxieties
Current Research Project(s)
My current project is a book-length study, entitled ‘The Revolutionary Storm’: Haiti and the Rise of the American Gothic, 1789-1855, which traces the origins of the genre in British Romanticism to its transformation in Early Republicanism. Placing the Haitian Revolution, rather than the French or American Revolution, at the center of revolutionary studies remaps American literature. This new map, at base, features “blackness” and calls for investigation over the extent of its influence on the emerging American novel, particularly in its most ambiguous form: the gothic. My hunch is that the Haitian Revolution provides both a political subtext and a generic template for the novel, not only as it resonates with the specific concerns of the new nation, but also as it accounts for its temporality, one quite distinct from the British gothic. Drawing on a broad range of British and American materials, the project brings together Romanticism, genre theory, and postcolonial criticism in order to situate this new future-oriented novel.
Publications
“John Howison’s New Gothic Nationalism and Transatlantic Exchange,” Early American Literature. 44, 2 (2008).
“In The Cage,” A Critical Companion to Henry James, Eds. Eric Haralson and Kendall Johnson.
Clearmark Books, 2008. (forthcoming)
Work in Progress
“Haiti and the Early American Novel.” Early America and the Haitian Revolution: Essays on the Cultural History of Atlantic Colonialism and Modernity, Ed. Elizabeth Maddock Dillon and Michael J. Drexler.
Recent Presentations
“Violent Time.” Temporalities Panel. International Conference on Narrative. Austin, TX: May 2008.
“New Gothic Nationalism and Transatlantic Exchange.” Keats—Shelley Association. MLA Convention. Chicago, IL: December 2007.
“Insurrection Narrative and the Development of American Gothicism.” National American
Literature Association Conference. Boston, MA: May 2007.
“’The Cant of the Pickpockets’: William Cobbett and Charles Brockden Brown in 1790s.” Carolina Low Country and Atlantic World Conference. Charleston, SC: February 2007.
“From Revolution to Insurrection; or The Specter of Haiti.” American Studies Association,
Crossroads of Cultures, Washington D.C.: November 2004.
Awards
Morton E. Kahn Award, Best Dissertation, SUNY Stony Brook, 2007