Patricia Waugh

Last updated

Professor

Patricia Waugh

FBA
Born25 April 1956
NationalityBritish
Alma materUniversity of Birmingham
OccupationProfessor of English
Organization Durham University
Known forwork on literary theory, metafiction, intellectual history, literature and neuroscience and postmodernism
Notable workMetafiction: the Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction

Professor Patricia Waugh FBA (born 25 April 1956) is a literary critic, intellectual historian and Professor of English Literature at Durham University. She is a leading specialist in modernist and post-modernist literature, feminist theory, intellectual history, and postwar fiction and its political contexts. [1] Along with Linda Hutcheon, Waugh is notable as one of the first critics to work on metafiction and, in particular, for her influential 1984 study, Metafiction: the Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. [2] [3]

Contents

Waugh completed her PhD at the University of Birmingham under the supervision of David Lodge. She joined the Department of English Studies at Durham University in 1989, became a Professor in 1997, and was Head of the Department of English Studies between 2005 and 2008.

In 2014, Waugh gave the first lecture, entitled "Fiction as Therapy: Towards a Neo-Phenomenological Theory of the Novel", in the British Academy's Lecture on the Novel in English series. [4]

Waugh was invited, in 2015, to contribute to the Chief Scientific Adviser's Report to the Government on Science arguing the case for the importance to scientific development of the humanities. [5]

In 2016, she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. [6]

Waugh has won over £5 million in research funding and has been the external examiner of over 90 PhD theses. [7]

Current work

Waugh is completing a monograph entitled, The Fragility of Mind in Modernism and After: Voices in the Risk Society , examining the relationship between literary cultures and texts and theories and philosophies of mind since 1900.

With Marc Botha, she is completing a book project entitled Critical Transitions: Genealogies of Intellectual Change arising out of her work as PI on a collaborative Leverhulme funded project at Durham University on Tipping Points which examines issues around modelling complex dynamic systems from a humanities and science perspective with respect to climate change, social behaviours, and economic tips. [8] The project is an investigation of radical change: how the new comes into the world. [9]

Waugh is also known for her work on literature and science. Her current work includes a collaborative Wellcome Trust-funded project, on which she is PI, with neuroscientists entitled Hearing the Voice. As part of this, she is developing a new monograph on voices in literature, focusing on Virginia Woolf and examining Woolf's experiments with voice in relation to narratological and aesthetic, psychological and philosophical theories of voice and hearing voices and her own experiences as a voice hearer with the medicine of her day.

Bibliography

Monographs

Edited works

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">English novel</span> Novel as a concept in English-language literature

The English novel is an important part of English literature. This article mainly concerns novels, written in English, by novelists who were born or have spent a significant part of their lives in England, Scotland, Wales, or Northern Ireland. However, given the nature of the subject, this guideline has been applied with common sense, and reference is made to novels in other languages or novelists who are not primarily British, where appropriate.

Metafiction is a form of fiction that emphasizes its own narrative structure in a way that continually reminds the audience that they are reading or viewing a fictional work. Metafiction is self-conscious about language, literary form, and story-telling, and works of metafiction directly or indirectly draw attention to their status as artifacts. Metafiction is frequently used as a form of parody or a tool to undermine literary conventions and explore the relationship between literature and reality, life, and art.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fredric Jameson</span> American academic and literary critic (born 1934)

Fredric Jameson is an American literary critic, philosopher and Marxist political theorist. He is best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends, particularly his analysis of postmodernity and capitalism. Jameson's best-known books include Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) and The Political Unconscious (1981).

Postmodern literature is a form of literature that is characterized by the use of metafiction, unreliable narration, self-reflexivity, intertextuality, and which often thematizes both historical and political issues. This style of experimental literature emerged strongly in the United States in the 1960s through the writings of authors such as Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, Philip K. Dick, Kathy Acker, and John Barth. Postmodernists often challenge authorities, which has been seen as a symptom of the fact that this style of literature first emerged in the context of political tendencies in the 1960s. This inspiration is, among other things, seen through how postmodern literature is highly self-reflexive about the political issues it speaks to.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elizabeth Bowen</span> Irish writer (1899-1973)

Elizabeth Bowen CBE was an Irish-British novelist and short story writer notable for her books about the "big house" of Irish landed Protestants as well her fiction about life in wartime London.

Robert E. Scholes was an American literary critic and theorist. He is known for his ideas on fabulation and metafiction.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jennifer Egan</span> Novelist, short story writer

Jennifer Egan is an American novelist and short-story writer. Her novel A Visit from the Goon Squad won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. As of February 28, 2018, she is the president of PEN America.

Linda Hutcheon, FRSC, O.C. is a Canadian academic working in the fields of literary theory and criticism, opera, and Canadian studies. She is a University Professor Emeritus in the Department of English and of the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, where she has taught since 1988. In 2000 she was elected the 117th President of the Modern Language Association, the third Canadian to hold this position, and the first Canadian woman. She is particularly known for her influential theories of postmodernism.

The academic discipline of women's writing is a discrete area of literary studies which is based on the notion that the experience of women, historically, has been shaped by their sex, and so women writers by definition are a group worthy of separate study: "Their texts emerge from and intervene in conditions usually very different from those which produced most writing by men." It is not a question of the subject matter or political stance of a particular author, but of her sex, i.e. her position as a woman within the literary world.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jay Clayton (critic)</span>

Jay Clayton is an American literary critic who is known for his pioneering work on the relationship between nineteenth-century culture and postmodernism. He has published influential works on Romanticism and the novel, Neo-Victorian literature, steampunk, hypertext fiction, online games, contemporary American fiction, technology in literature, and genetics in literature and film. He is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English and Director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University.

Teckyoung Kwon is a literary critic, translator and professor in English literature at the School of English, Kyung Hee University, Seoul, South Korea. Her research interests are psychoanalysis, ecology, American and British fiction, narrative theory, neuro-humanities, Korean literature and Dao.

Josephine Donovan is an American scholar of comparative literature who is a professor emerita of English in the Department of English at the University of Maine, Orono. Her research and expertise has covered feminist theory, feminist criticism, animal ethics, and both early modern and American literature with a special focus on American writer Sarah Orne Jewett and the local colorists. She recently extended her study of local color literature to the European tradition. Along with Marti Kheel, Carol J. Adams, and others, Donovan introduced ecofeminist care theory, rooted in cultural feminism, to the field of animal ethics. Her published corpus includes ten books, five edited books, over fifty articles, and seven short stories.

Ankhi Mukherjee is an academic specialising in Victorian and Modern English literature, critical theory and postcolonial and world literature. In 2015, she was appointed a Professor of English and World Literatures by the University of Oxford.

Bonnie Zimmerman is an American literary critic and women's studies scholar. Her works explore women's roles, lesbian history and criticism, and women's literature. She has received numerous prestigious awards. Zimmerman retired from teaching in 2010. Her contributions to academia include classes, articles, and several books.

In literary criticism and cultural studies, postcritique is the attempt to find new forms of reading and interpretation that go beyond the methods of critique, critical theory, and ideological criticism. Such methods have been characterized as a "hermeneutics of suspicion" by Paul Ricœur and as a "paranoid" or suspicious style of reading by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Proponents of postcritique argue that the interpretive practices associated with these ways of reading are now unlikely to yield useful or even interesting results. As Rita Felski and Elizabeth S. Anker put it in the introduction to Critique and Postcritique, "the intellectual or political payoff of interrogating, demystifying, and defamiliarizing is no longer quite so self-evident." A postcritical reading of a literary text might instead emphasize emotion or affect, or describe various other phenomenological or aesthetic dimensions of the reader's experience. At other times, it might focus on issues of reception, explore philosophical insights gleaned via the process of reading, pose formalist questions of the text, or seek to resolve a "sense of confusion."

Maren Tova Linett is a literary critic and Professor of English at Purdue University. Her research focuses on modernist literature and Jewish studies, disability studies, and bioethics, and her major works include Modernism, Feminism, and Jewishness (2007), Bodies of Modernism (2017), and Literary Bioethics (2020). She has also published work in academic journals such as the Journal of Modern Literature, Twentieth-Century Literature, Disability Studies Quarterly, and the Journal of Medical Humanities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bruce Robbins (academic)</span> American literary scholar and academic

Bruce Robbins is an American literary scholar, author and an academic. He is the Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Francesca Coppa</span> American scholar of literature

Francesca Coppa is an American scholar whose research has encompassed British drama, performance studies and fan studies. In English literature, she is known for her work on the British writer Joe Orton; she edited several of his early novels and plays for their first publication in 1998–99, more than thirty years after his murder, and compiled an essay collection, Joe Orton: A Casebook (2003). She has also published on Oscar Wilde. In the fan-studies field, Coppa is known for documenting the history of media fandom and, in particular, of fanvids, a type of fan-made video. She co-founded the Organization for Transformative Works in 2007, originated the idea of interpreting fan fiction as performance, and in 2017, published the first collection of fan fiction designed for teaching purposes. As of 2021, Coppa is a professor of English at Muhlenberg College, Pennsylvania.

Faye Hammill FRSE is a professor in the University of Glasgow, specialising in North American and British modern writing in the first half of the twentieth century, what is often called 'middlebrow'. Her recent focus is ocean liners in literature. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2021).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Brian Stonehill</span> American media studies scholar

Brian Stonehill was an American media studies scholar. He was a professor of English at Pomona College in Claremont, California, where he founded the college's media studies department. He was the author of the book The Self-Conscious Novel: Artifice in Fiction from Joyce to Pynchon.

References

  1. "English Studies".
  2. Holmesland, Oddvar (1 January 1985). "Patricia Waugh: Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction". American Studies in Scandinavia. 17 (2): 94–96. doi:10.22439/asca.v17i2.1681. ISSN   0044-8060.
  3. Nadel, Alan (1 January 1985). "Fictional Space in the Modernist and Postmodernist American Novel, and: Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction, and: The Post-Modern Aura: The Act of Fiction in an Age of Inflation, and: IN FORM: Digressions on the Act of Fiction (review)". MFS Modern Fiction Studies. 31 (4): 759–763. doi:10.1353/mfs.0.1321. ISSN   1080-658X.
  4. "Fiction as therapy: Towards a neo-phenomenological theory of the novel".
  5. "Professor P N Waugh - Durham University". www.dur.ac.uk. Retrieved 25 June 2017.
  6. "Two New British Academy Fellows from Hearing the Voice | Hearing the Voice".
  7. "Professor P N Waugh - Durham University". www.dur.ac.uk. Retrieved 25 June 2017.
  8. "Prof Patricia Waugh | History of Distributed Cognition". www.hdc.ed.ac.uk. Retrieved 25 June 2017.
  9. "Patricia Waugh - The White Review". The White Review. Retrieved 25 June 2017.