James Phelan is Distinguished University Professor and
Arts and 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, to Humanities Distinguished Professor in 2004, and to Distinguished
University Professor in 2008. In 2004 he received the University’s
Distinguished Research Award and in 2007 the Alumni Distinguished Teaching
Award. Phelan 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. Much of his research has
been devoted to developing a comprehensive rhetorical theory of
narrative. 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 progression
(again) and reader judgments in Experiencing
Fiction. His forthcoming book,
Reading the American Novel, 1920-2010,
offers rhetorical readings of ten canonical novels written across this ninety year period. Phelan has contributed a new chapter on “Narrative Theory,
1966-2006 for the 40th Anniversary edition of Robert Scholes and
Robert Kellogg’s landmark book, The Nature of Narrative. In addition, he collaborated with David
Herman, Peter J. Rabinowitz, Brian Richardson, and
Robyn Warhol on Narrative Theory: Core
Concepts and Critical Debates (Phelan and Rabinowitz
co-authored the sections of that book on rhetorical theory.) Phelan has published well over a hundred
essays and the autobiographical journal Beyond
the Tenure Track. Phelan’s editorial work is also extensive. He has edited or co-edited seven volumes in
narrative studies: Reading Narrative, the Blackwell Companion to Narrative
(with Peter J. Rabinowitz), Joseph Conrad (with Jakob Lothe and Jeremy
Hawthorn), Teaching Narrative Theory (with Brian McHale and David Herman),
Fact, Fiction, and Form: Selected Essays of Ralph W. Rader (with David
Richter), and After Testimony: The
Ethics and Aesthetics of Holocaust Narrative for the Future (with Jakob Lothe and Susan
Suleiman). In addition, 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.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||
