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Marianna Torgovnick grew up in Brooklyn, New York and received her Ph.D.
from Columbia University, where she specialized in the history and the
theory of the novel. She has published articles in SAQ, Art
Forum, Partisan Review, Novel, The New York Times,
and many other periodicals, and has edited a volume of cultural criticism
called Eloquent Obsessions. The author of six critical books,
Torgovnick has written extensively on twentieth century life and culture.
The critically acclaimed Gone Primitive and Primitive Passions
probe the obsessions, fears, and longings that motivate our fascination
with "the primitive." Crossing Ocean Parkway, an American
Book Award winner, explores insider and outsider boundaries in Italian
American and Jewish American life. Its lead essay, "On Being White,
Female, and Born in Bensonhurst," appears in many anthologies.
Currently a Professor of English at Duke University, Torgovnick has chaired
her department. She has also taught at Williams College and has been a
Visiting Professor at Princeton University, Tel Aviv University, and Emory
University. She lectures frequently and is now working on a project that demonstrates links between
writing and other media.
Professor Torgovnick is also the director of the Duke in New York Arts and Media Program.
Duke in New York is a unique program which incorporates a classroom setting, an internship, and the incredible New York Arts and Media experience into one jam-packed semester of fun, excitement, and learning. Students enroll in Duke classes which are offered in New York. These classes are taught by Duke professors who will be spending the semester in New York City. The Duke in New York program also requires that students enroll in one full credit course of their choosing at New York University. In addition to the classroom experience and the extraordinary number of tickets and admissions students receive, another key aspect of the Duke in New York program is the internship. Each participant in the program will arrange to take part in an internship which will run the length of the semester. Duke in New York is being offered in both the Summer and Fall terms.
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Books Published
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The War Complex: World War II in Our Time
In this book, Marianna Torgovnick argues that we have lived, since the end of World War II, under the power of a war complex-a set of repressed ideas and impulses that stems from our unresolved attitudes toward the technological acceleration of mass death. This complex has led to gaps and hesitations in public discourse about atrocities committed during the war itself.
Torgovnick shows how different events from World War II became prominent in American cultural memory while others went forgotten or remain hidden in plain sight. Thinking anew, then, about how we account for war to each other and ourselves, Torgovnick demonstrates how these anxieties and fears have prepared us to think about September 11 and our current war in Iraq.
See
Amazon.com book description. |
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Primitive Passions
The sequel to the critically acclaimed
Gone Primitive, Primitive Passions continues Torgovnick's
exploration of Western fascination with the primitive. The primitive
has become synonymous with a range of emotions and experiences thought
to be lost in modern life: reverence for the land; strong communal
bonds; sexual plenitude; and an ecstatic sense of connection to
the universe and life force. Torgovnick investigates the numerous
ways we have turned toward the primitive out of spiritual hunger
for such deeply human experiences.
See
Amazon.com book description. |
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Gone Primitive
Desiring an escape from modern life, Westerners
yearn to "go primitive." Torgovnick shows how anyone born
into Western society has already "gone primitive." The
primitive--a term that refers both to specific societies and an
image which has become a cultural cliche--permeates high and low
culture. Called by reviewers "superb. . .a kind of gift to
its own culture," Gone Primitive is addressed not just
to specialists but to anyone who has ever worn Native American jewelry,
been thrilled by Indian Jones, or considered buying an African mask.
See
Amazon.com description. |
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Crossing Ocean Parkway
Growing up as an Italian American in Bensonhurst,
Marianna DeMarco Torgovnick longed for college, culture, and upward
mobility. She associated moving up with Ocean Parkway, a street
that divides the working-class Italian neighborhood where she was
born from the middle-class Jewish neighborhood into which she married.
This is an unflinching account of crossing cultural boundaries in
American life and of what it means to be an Italian American women
who became a scholar and literary critic.
See
Amazon.com book description. |
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The Visual Arts, Pictorialism, and the Novel:
James, Lawrence, and Woolf
Torgovnick maintains that it is worthwhile
to think about novels in terms of the visual arts--in part because
major novelists like James, Lawrence, and Woolf did so, and did
so fruitfully, as they were influenced by their perceptions of artistic
movements.
Closure in the Novel
Drawing on a wide range of nineteenth
and twentieth-century English, French, American, and Russian novels,
Torgovnick demonstrates the variety and complexity of the process
by which a work reaches an appropriate conclusion. |
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Courses Taught
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Fall 2006
Marianna Torgovnick will be co-teaching the Duke in New York Arts program. Please visit
www.duke.edu/web/newyork/
for information on the Duke in New York program.
Spring 2006
Graduate Seminar. The Theory
of the Novel. The course surveys the history and theory of the novel,
with an emphasis on theories of modernity and technological change.
Reading and discussion of a variety of critics and theorists, with
an emphasis on Lukacs, the Russian Formalists, Bakhtin, Benjamin,
Said, Mehuhan, and Kitler. Reading and discussion of novels by authors
such as Defoe, Dickens, Flaubert, Conrad, Woolf, and Nabokov.
Undergraduate Seminar.
The Evolution of Narrative: Technology and the Novel. An exploration
of publishing as an influential technology and of the novel's interactions
with journalism, advertising, film, and digital video. Readings
from Laclos, Defoe, Fielding, Cooper, Dickens, Puzo, and others.
Screening and discussion of approximately 6-8 movies.
Fall 2007
Marianna Torgovnick will
be co-teaching the Duke in New York Arts and Media program.
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