Michael J. Colacurcio | |
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 Colacurcio c. 1979 | |
| Born | July 2, 1939 Cincinnati, Ohio, United States |
| Occupation | Professor, scholar, educator |
| Genre | American literature |
| Subject | Puritanism, 19th century American literature, Hawthorne |
| Notable works | The Province of Piety, Doctrine and Difference, Godly Letters |
| Website | |
| www | |
Michael Joseph Colacurcio (born July 2, 1939) is a distinguished professor of English at UCLA. He specializes in American literature and literary history.
Michael Colacurcio studied at Xavier University (B.A., 1958; M.A., 1959) and the University of Illinois (Ph.D., 1963). He taught English literature at Cornell University from 1963 to 1976 (during the 1968-1969 academic year he taught at the Ohio State University). Since 1980, Colacurcio has taught in California, first at the University of California at Irvine, then at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he currently teaches in the Department of English.
Colacurcio's main interest is American literature of the colonial and Romantic periods. While he has written extensively on such subjects as Puritanism, Herman Melville, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, he is perhaps best known for his scholarship on the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne.
In The Province of Piety, Colacurcio argues against symbolist or psychologizing interpretations and maintains that Hawthorne's fiction ought to be understood primarily as historical literature, that is, as it reflects on the moral history of his native New England.
Hawthorne "possessed the mind of a modern intellectual historian," according to Colacurcio, who compares his subject to the American historian Perry Miller: "For like Miller, it may be suggested, Hawthorne carried on a life-long dialectic with the historical 'thesis' of American Puritanism; it was his 'flood subject,' exercising a tyranny that bent the mind and baffled choice." [1] And as a writer of fiction, "Hawthorne had a nearly flawless sense of the way some text always comes between the observer and the origins he would observe, making the historian's own tale twice-told at its very most original." [1]
Historian David Levin says, "Mr. Colacurcio's massive study, more powerfully than any other single work I know, advances our understanding of Hawthorne's development and practice as a historical writer," adding: "Whether or not we can read Hawthorne intelligently or profitably without knowing the history of colonial New England, Mr. Colacurcio proves that we will read Hawthorne more intelligently if we take the trouble to see the range and depth of his historical judgment." [2] Literary critic Merton Sealts, Jr. notes that "The Province of Piety has significant interdisciplinary implications," and that, "future critics of Hawthorne cannot ignore the impressive argument of this book." [3]
Colacurcio's Doctrine and Difference is a collection of writings that demonstrate the lasting influence of Puritan orthodoxy in the New England literary tradition, with essays on Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, and others.
His book, Godly Letters, a study of the Puritan tradition in American literature, is described by a reviewer in The New England Quarterly as "an illuminating and deeply searching compendium that embodies the culmination of a lifelong career in research and teaching." [4]
In 2015, a festschrift titled A Passion for Getting It Right: Essays and Appreciations in Honor of Michael J. Colacurcio’s 50 Years of Teaching was published in Colacurcio's honor. It includes contributions from former students and colleagues such as Andrew Delbanco and Eric J. Sundquist.
Colacurcio's most recent book is the magisterial two-volume Emerson and Other Minds (Baylor University Press, 2020-21).
Colacurcio is the recipient of several distinguished teaching awards from both Cornell University and UCLA. [5]
In 2007, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in recognition of his contributions to his field. [6]
Michael J. Colacurcio has supervised the doctoral dissertations of numerous individuals including Lauren Berlant and David Van Leer. [7] [8]
Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American novelist, dark romantic, and short story writer. His works often focus on history, morality, and religion.
The Puritans were English Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries who sought to purify the Church of England of Roman Catholic practices, maintaining that the Church of England had not been fully reformed and should become more Protestant. Puritanism played a significant role in English history, especially during the Protectorate.
Transcendentalism is a philosophical movement that developed in the late 1820s and 1830s in the eastern United States. A core belief is in the inherent goodness of people and nature, and while society and its institutions have corrupted the purity of the individual, people are at their best when truly "self-reliant" and independent. Transcendentalists saw divine experience inherent in the everyday, rather than believing in a distant heaven. Transcendentalists saw physical and spiritual phenomena as part of dynamic processes rather than discrete entities.
The Scarlet Letter: A Romance is a work of historical fiction by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne, published in 1850. Set in Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony during the years 1642 to 1649, the novel tells the story of Hester Prynne, who conceives a daughter through an affair and then struggles to create a new life of repentance and dignity. Containing a number of religious and historic allusions, the book explores themes of legalism, sin, and guilt.
Lauren Gail Berlant was an American scholar, cultural theorist, and author. Berlant was the George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English at the University of Chicago, where they taught from 1984 until 2021. Berlant wrote and taught issues of intimacy and belonging in popular culture, in relation to the history and fantasy of citizenship.
"Self-Reliance" is an 1841 essay written by American transcendentalist philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson. It contains the most thorough statement of one of Emerson's recurrent themes: the need for each individual to avoid conformity and false consistency, and follow his own instincts and ideas. It is the source of one of Emerson's most famous quotations: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines." This essay is an analysis into the nature of the "aboriginal self on which a universal reliance may be grounded." Emerson emphasizes the importance of individualism and its effect on an individual's satisfaction in life. In his essay, he focuses on seemingly insignificant details, explaining how life is "learning and forgetting and learning again".
Edmund Sears Morgan was an American historian and an eminent authority on early American history. He was the Sterling Professor of History at Yale University, where he taught from 1955 to 1986. He specialized in American colonial history, with some attention to English history. Thomas S. Kidd says he was noted for his incisive writing style, "simply one of the best academic prose stylists America has ever produced." He covered many topics, including Puritanism, political ideas, the American Revolution, slavery, historiography, family life, and numerous notables such as Benjamin Franklin.
Perry Gilbert Eddy Miller was an American intellectual historian and a co-founder of the field of American Studies. Miller specialized in the history of early America, and took an active role in a revisionist view of the colonial Puritan theocracy that was cultivated at Harvard University beginning in the 1920s. Heavy drinking led to his premature death at the age of fifty-eight. "Perry Miller was a great historian of Puritanism but the dark conflicts of the Puritan mind eroded his own mental stability."
The Old Manse is a historic manse in Concord, Massachusetts, United States, notable for its literary associations. It is open to the public as a nonprofit museum owned and operated by the Trustees of Reservations. The house is located on Monument Street, with the Concord River just behind it. The property neighbors the North Bridge, a part of Minute Man National Historical Park.
Cushing Strout was an American intellectual historian. He was Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters at Cornell University.
Sacvan Bercovitch was a Canadian literary and cultural critic who spent most of his life teaching and writing in the United States. During an academic career spanning five decades, he was considered to be one of the most influential and controversial figures of his generation in the emerging field of American studies.
The Ralph Waldo Emerson House is a house museum located at 18 Cambridge Turnpike, Concord, Massachusetts, and a National Historic Landmark for its associations with American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. He and his family named the home Bush. The museum is open mid-April to mid-October; an admission fee is charged.
Michael David Warner is an American literary critic, social theorist, and Seymour H. Knox Professor of English Literature and American Studies at Yale University. He also writes for Artforum, The Nation, The Advocate, and The Village Voice. He is the author of Publics and Counterpublics, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life, The English Literatures of America, 1500–1800, Fear of a Queer Planet, and The Letters of the Republic. He edited The Portable Walt Whitman and American Sermons: The Pilgrims to Martin Luther King, Jr.
Debora Kuller Shuger is a literary historian and scholar. She studies early modern, Renaissance, late 16th- and 17th century England. She writes about Tudor-Stuart literature; religious, political, and legal thought; neo-Latin; and censorship of that period.
The Puritan culture of the New England colonies of the seventeenth century was influenced by Calvinist theology, which believed in a "just, almighty God," and a lifestyle of pious, consecrated actions. The Puritans participated in their own forms of recreational activity, including visual arts, literature, and music. The Puritans were educated and literate, and their culture was broadly based in the arts and languages.
Patrick "Pat" Collinson was an English historian, known as a writer on the Elizabethan era, particularly Elizabethan Puritanism. He was emeritus Regius Professor of Modern History, University of Cambridge, having occupied the chair from 1988 to 1996. He once described himself as "an early modernist with a prime interest in the history of England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries."
Historians have produced and worked with a number of definitions of Puritanism, in an unresolved debate on the nature of the Puritan movement of the 16th and 17th century. There are some historians who are prepared to reject the term for historical use. John Spurr argues that changes in the terms of membership of the Church of England, in 1604–6, 1626, 1662, and also 1689, led to re-definitions of the word "Puritan". Basil Hall, citing Richard Baxter. considers that "Puritan" dropped out of contemporary usage in 1642, with the outbreak of the First English Civil War, being replaced by more accurate religious terminology. Current literature on Puritanism supports two general points: Puritans were identifiable in terms of their general culture, by contemporaries, which changed over time; and they were not identified by theological views alone.
Merton M. Sealts Jr. was a scholar of American literature, focusing on Ralph Waldo Emerson and Herman Melville. His most important works are the genetic edition of Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor, Pursuing Melville, 1940–1980 (1982) and Melville's Reading. He taught at Lawrence College (1948–1965), and became Henry A. Pochmann Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (1965-1982). He won both Ford Foundation and Guggenheim fellowships.
Harrison Mosher Hayford was a scholar of American literature, most prominently of Herman Melville, a book-collector, and a textual editor. He taught at Northwestern University from 1942 until his retirement in 1986. He was a leading figure in the post-World War II generation of Melville scholars who mounted the Melville Revival. He was General Editor of the Northwestern-Newberry The Writings of Herman Melville published by Northwestern University Press, which established reliable texts for all of Melville's works by using techniques of textual criticism.
David Van Leer was an American educator and LGBT cultural studies researcher.
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