Barbara Frey Waxman

Title: Professor
Office: Morton Hall 132
Phone: (910) 962-3334
e-mail: waxmanb@uncw.edu

• Ph.D., City University of New York
• M.A., City College of New York
• B.A., Douglass College (Rutgers University)

Teaching and Research Interests

19th Century British literature (especially Victorian); Women's Studies in literature; multicultural literature of the U.S.; Gothic literature (British and American); autobiography; memoirs of the cross-cultural experience; food memoirs; literature of aging; essay writing; literary theory.

Courses I'm teaching

Other Interests

Since I love cooking (and eating), I like to incorporate food into some of my classes: chocolate for sensory imagery in essay writing, ethnic treats for multicultural literatures, witches' brew for Gothic literature. . . . It's all part of my interdisciplinary approach to literary texts!

Philosophy on Literature

Literature, I believe, can change people's lives, make us more self-reflective and get us to examine our surroundings more too. I love to take important factors like aging and gender and use them as filters through which to view literary texts, exploring how these factors shape texts and influence readers' responses to texts. I want students to discover how literary theories can open up a novel like Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale or an autobiography like Lorene Carey's Black Ice and how literature can change our ways of constructing reality.

Courses Taught

Selected Publications
Books:

To Live in the Center of the Moment: Literary Autobiographies of Aging "To Live in the Center of the Moment is rich in insights and orginal interpretations. . ." --Carolyn Smith, University of Florida University Press of Virginia, 1997 ISBN 0-8139-1757-3

Multicultural Literatures throuqh Feminist/Poststructuralist Lenses University of Tennessee Press, 1993 ISBN 0-87049-619-0 (I edited a collection of 10 essays, contributed an essay on Morrison's Beloved, wrote a theoretical introduction and coclusion, and compiled a selected bibliography).

From the Hearth to the Open Road: A Feminist Study of Aginq in Contemporary Literature. Greenwood Press, 1990 ISBN 0-313-26650-6

Articles:

• "Frederick W.H. Myers." Dictionary of Literary Biography 190. British Reform Writers, 1832-1914. Ed. Gary Kelly and Edd Applegate. 216-23. Detroit: Bruccoli, Clark, Laymon, 1998.

• "Collaboration + Feminism = New Voices, New Truths, New
  Discourses." Co-Authored with Janet M. Ellerby. Women's Studies 26 (1997): 203-222.

• "Teaching Paul Monette's Memoir/Manifesto to Resistant Readers." Co-authored with Eleanor Byington. College Literature 24.1 (February 1997) :156-70.

• "Feeding the Hunger of Memory' and an Appetite for the Future: The Ethnic Storied' Self and the American Authored Self in Ethnic Autobiography." Cross-Addressinq: Resistance Literature and Cultural Borders. Ed. John C. Hawley. Albany, NY: SUNY P. 1996. 207-19.

• "Dancing Out of Form, Dancing into Self: Structure and Metaphor in Marshall, Shange, and Walker." MELUS 19, 3 (Fall 1994): 91-106. Appeared in January 1995.

• "Contextualizing the Structure of Evil: Holocaust Literature in the Classroom." North Carolina English Teacher 52, 2 (Winter 1995): 1316.

• "N. Scott Momaday's The Way to Rainy Mountain: Autobiography, Cultural History, and Personal Identity." North Carolina English Teacher 51 (Winter 1994): 10-11.

• "The Discourse of Aging: Linking Women Across Generations Through Journals and Letters." Women's Friendships and Communication:Parallels and Intersections of Literature and Life. Ed. Janet D. Ward and JoAnna Mink. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green UP, 1993.

• "The Catholic Church in a World of Masculine Violence: A Postmodern Feminist Response" (on Didion's Salvador). Reader: Essays in Reader-Oriented Theory, Criticism, and Pedagogy 29 (January 1993):

• "Postexistentialism in the Neo-Gothic Mode: Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire." Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 25 (Summer 1992) :79-97.

• "Feminist Theory, Literary Canons, and the Construction of Textual Meanings." Practicing Theory in Introductorv Literature Courses. Ed. Cahalan and Downing. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1991.

• "Canonicity and Black American Literature: A Feminist View." MELUS 14 (Summer 1987): 87-93; appeared in Fall, 1989.

• "Politics of the Survey Course: Feminist Challenges." Teaching English in the Two-Year College 16, 1 (February 1989): 17-22.

• "Widowhood Revised: The Adventures of Alice Adams's Middle-Aged Heroines." The Wilmington Review 1, 1 & 2 (1987): 93-100.

• "Jewish American Princesses, Their Mothers, and Feminist Psychology: A Rereading of Roth's 'Goodbye, Columbus.' "Studies in American Jewish Literature 7 (Spring 1988): 90-104.

• "A 'Young-Old' Widow's Journey to Self and Roots: Aging and Society in Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow." Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies IX (1987)- 97-105

• "Victor Frankenstein's Romantic Fate: The Tragedy of the Promethean Overreacher as Woman." Papers on Language and Literature 23, 1 (Winter 1987): 14-26.

• "Catching the Runaway Train: Computers and the Advanced Composition Class." The Computer-Assisted Composition Journal 1:3 (Spring, 1987): 208-14.

• "Literature Through the Life-Cycle: Fulfilling Our Social Function as Teachers of Literature."Works and Days: Essays in the Socio-Historical Dimensions of Literature and the Arts 4, 1 (Spring 1986): 57-68.

• "From Bildungsroman to Reifungsroman: Aging in Doris Lessing's Fiction." Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 68, 3 (Fall1985): 318-34.

• "Isaac Bashevis Singer." Entry in Dictionary of Literary Biography 28 Twentieth-Century American-Jewish Writers. Ed. Daniel Walden. Detroit Gale Research Co., 1984. 297-305.

• "Ethnic Heroism: Matthew Arnold's and George Eliot's Gypsies." in Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century Heroism. Ed. Putzell and Leonard. Potomac, MD: Studia Humanitatis Pub., 1982. 115-26.

• "Heart, Mind, Body, and Soul: George Eliot's Female Bildungsroman."Victorians Institute Journal 11 (1982-83): 61-82.

• "Isaac Bashevis Singer's Spirit of Play: Games and Tricks in Some of Singer's Short Stories." Studies in American Jewish Literature 1 (1981): 3-13.

Reviews:

• "A Re/Inter/View with Stanley Aronowitz and Henry Giroux," Postmodern Education: Politics, Culture, and Social Criticism.(U of Minnesota P. 1991)." Pre/Text 12: 1-2 (1991): 116-29. Collaborative review.

• Review of Subject to Negotiation: Reading Feminist Criticism and American Women's Fiction. Elaine Neil Orr. Charlottesville, Virginia: University Press of Virginia, 1997. South Atlantic Review 62:4 (Fall, 1997); appeared Spring, 1998) .

• "Dickens's Women and the Language of Subversion." Review of Patricia Ingham's Dickens, Women, and Language. Papers on Language and Literature 29, 1 (Winter 1993).  114-22.

• Review of Listening to Silences. Ed. Elaine Hedges & Shelley Fisher Fishkin (Oxford UP) for Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 15, 1 (Spring 1996): 167-70.

In Press

• A Brief Bibliography of Aging in Literature. with Anne Wyatt-Brown. Washington, DC: Association for Gerontology in Higher Education. 1999.

Selected Refereed Papers Delivered at Conferences:

• "The Partnership of Autobiography and Reader-Response Theory: Challenging Ageism and Reconceptualizing Later Life." Gerontological Society of America Convention, Philadelphia, November 20-23, 1998.

• "Nature, Spirituality, and Later Life in Literature." Association for Gerontology in Higher Education. Winston-Salem, February 20, 1998.

• "Anxiety, Loss, and Survival in an Adopted Language: Bicultural Autobiography in Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation and Alice Kaplan's French Lessons." SAMLA Convention, Atlanta, November 14, 1997.

• "Old and Young Women Together: American Communities in 19th and Early 20th Century Literature." Southern American Studies Association Conference, Seaside, Florida, March 1, 1997.

• "Crossing Over' and 'Turning It Out': Success and Its Ambivalences in Carey's Black Ice and Campbell's Brothers and Sisters." MELUS Convention, Greensboro, NC, April 4-6, 1996.

• "Adult' Utopian Visions in Doris Lessing's The Memoirs of a Survivor." SAMLA Convention, Atlanta, GA., Nov. 1995.

• "Collaboration + Feminism = New Voices, New Truths, New Discourses". co-authored with Janet M. Ellerby. Modern Language Association Convention. San Diego, Dec., 1994.

• "Jewish Folk Materials in Jo Sinclair's The Changelings and Philip Roth's Patrimony. South Atlantic Modern Language Association Convention, Nov. 12-15, 1992, Knoxville, TN.

• "Feeding the Hunger of Memory' and an Appetite for the Future: The Ethnic Storied' Self and the American Authored Self in Ethnic Autobiography." Modern Language Association Convention, New York City, Dec. 27-30, 1992.

• "Teaching College Students about Aging through Literary Texts/Criticism and Sociological Readings." Written and presented with E. Maxwell. Meeting of the Association of Gerontology in Higher Education, Baltimore, March, 1992.

• "Dialogic Encounters of the Close Kind: Feminism, Poststructuralism, and New Literary Critical Forms." South Atlantic Modern Language Association Convention,Atlanta, November, 1991.

• "Directions in Feminist Criticism of Ethnic Literatures: Creating New Syntheses and Engaging with Morrison's Beloved." Modern Language Association Convention, New York, December, 1989.

• Special Session on "The Literature of Aging," SAMLA Convention, November, 1993, Atlanta; B. Waxman chair and presenter, with other presenters: Anne Wyatt-Brown, Carolyn Smith, and Lindsay Pentolfe-Aegerter.

• "Exploding the Myths of Aging." Teleconference participant with E.Maxwell on literature and sociology of aging class. Southeastern Community College, Whiteville, NC, October, 1991.

• "From a Place by the Hearth to the Open Road: Women Writers on the Aging Woman's Place in Society." SAMLA, Atlanta, November 1985.

• "Remembrances of Sex Past: How Women Cope with Aging in Fiction by M.F K. Fisher, Alice Munro, and Gail Godwin." National Women's Studies Association Convention, New Brunswick, NJ, June, 1984.

Other Scholarly Activities:

• Referee for College English, March 1994; reviewed an article titled "Ludic Feminism, Critique-al Pedagogy and the Everyday."

• Referee for MELUS, September, 1994; reviewed an article titled "Anne Roiphe's Angst: A Jewish Feminist Looks at Israel."

• Referee for Reader, March, 1997 and July, 1997, "Can Metafiction Be Read Straight?"

• Referee for Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, July, 1998, essay on reading for the factors of class and the Cold War in Paule Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones.

• Referee for MELUS, January, 1999, "Cultural Politics and Chinese American Feminist Subjectivity: Rethinking Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior."