Books
| James
Phelan
Department of English Ohio State University 421 Denney Hall 164 West 17th Avenue Columbus, Ohio 43210-1370 (614) 292-6065 (614) 292-7816 (Fax) phelan.1@osu.edu |
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James Phelan is Humanities Distinguished Professor in the Department
of English at Ohio State University. Born
in Flushing, NY in 1951, he received his BA from Boston College (1972)
and his MA and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (1977). He began as
an Assistant Professor at Ohio State in 1977, was promoted to Associate
Professor in 1983, to Professor in 1989, and to Humanities Distinguished Professor in 2004. He served as Department Chair
from 1994-2002.
Rather than working in only one historical
period, Phelan gravitates toward theoretical issues or problems, most often
connected with the genre of narrative, and pursues them in texts from different
periods. His recent work, however, has focused primarily on twentieth-century
British and American narrative, and he now claims the twentieth-century
as a specialty. He has written about style in Worlds from Words, about
character and narrative progression in Reading People, Reading Plots, about
technique, ethics, and audiences in Narrative as Rhetoric, about character
narration in Living to Tell about It, and about reader judgments in Experiencing Fiction. He has also published the autobiographical
journal Beyond the Tenure Track and has edited, with Peter J. Rabinowitz,
Understanding Narrative, and the Blackwell Companion to Narrative Theory.
With Gerald Graff, he has edited Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Case
Study in Critical Controversy, which was awarded the 1997 Nancy Dasher
Award by the College English Association of Ohio as the best book on pedagogy
from an Ohio faculty member for 1994-96, and The Tempest: A Case
Study in Critical Controversy.
Since 1992, Phelan has been the editor of
Narrative, the journal of the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature
and winner of the 1993 CELJ Award for Best New Journal. Since 1993, he
has been co-editor, with Peter J. Rabinowitz, of the Ohio State University
Press series on the Theory and Interpretation of Narrative. He is
currently working on several manuscript projects and preparing for his 2008 NEH Summer Seminar for College and University Teachers on "Narrative Theory: Rhetoric and Ethics in Fiction and Nonfiction."
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Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative. Ohio State University Press, 2007. The Nature of Narrative. With Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg. 2nd Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Scholes has written a new preface and made minor alterations in the original text; I have written a substantial new chapter on developments in narrative theory since 1966. A Companion to Narrative Theory. Co-edited with Peter J. Rabinowitz. Malden: Blackwell, 2005. Living To Tell About It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. The Tempest: A Case Study in Critical Controversy. Co-edited with Gerald Graff. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2000. Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1996. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Case Study in Critical Controversy. Co-edited with Gerald Graff. Boston: Bedford Books, 1995. Understanding Narrative. Co-edited with Peter J. Rabinowitz. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1994. Beyond the Tenure Track: Fifteen Months in the Life of an English Professor. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991. Reading People, Reading Plots: Character, Progression, and the Interpretation of Narrative. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Reading Narrative: Form, Ethics, Ideology. Editor. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989. Worlds from Words: A Theory of Language in Fiction. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1981.
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| Department of English | The College of Humanities | Ohio State University |