J. Brooks Bouson, PhD
Professor of English
Loyola University Chicago
Faculty page: http://www.luc.edu/english/faculty/bouson.shtml
Email address: [email protected]
J. BROOKS BOUSON (pron. boo SAHN) is a Professor in the English Department at Loyola University of Chicago and she is also the Assistant Chair of the department. In her scholarship and teaching, she has focused on twentieth- and twenty-first century women’s literature and on feminist theory, especially the history of feminist theory. She also has a long-standing interest in the narcissistic character and the empathic dynamics of the reader/text transaction, which grows out of her application of Heinz Kohut’s psychoanalytic theory of narcissism to the study of literature in her book The Empathic Reader: A Study of the Narcissistic Character and the Drama of the Self. More recently, she has turned to the study of emotions in literature, shame in literature, and trauma and narrative. She has published ten books as well as essays, book chapters, encyclopedia entries, and reviews on a variety of authors, including Franz Kafka, Saul Bellow, Edwin Muir, George Orwell, Ted Hughes, Richard Russo, Emily Dickinson, Dorothy Allison, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, Jamaica Kincaid, and Christa Wolf. In addition to her book The Empathic Reader, she has published scholarly books on contemporary women writers: Brutal Choreographies: Oppositional Strategies and Narrative Design in the Novels of Margaret Atwood ; Quiet As It's Kept: Shame, Trauma and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison; Jamaica Kincaid: Writing Memory, Writing Back to the Mother; Embodied Shame: Uncovering Female Shame in Contemporary Women’s Writings (which contains chapters on recent women writers, including Alice Munro, Edwidge Danticat, Dorothy Allison, Marita Golden, Naomi Wolf, Anita Brookner, Fay Weldon, Lucy Grealy and Nancy Mairs); and Shame and the Aging Woman: Confronting and Resisting Ageism in Contemporary Women’s Writings (which includes discussions of a variety of recent women writers, including Barbara Macdonald, Baba Copper, A. S. Byatt, Doris Lessing, Marilyn French, P. K. Page, Eva Figes, Jo Spence, Christina Middlebrook, Susan Gubar, Thea Astley, Margaret Laurence, Pat Barker, Margaret Drabble, Penelope Lively, Carol Shields, Doris Grumbach, and May Sarton). She also is the editor of four recent critical collections: Critical Insights: Margaret Atwood ; Margaret Atwood: The Robber Bride, The Blind Assassin, and Oryx and Crake ; Critical Insights: Emily Dickinson; and Critical Insights: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
Education:
Ph.D., English, Loyola University of Chicago
Teaching and Research Interests:
Modern British Literature, Twentieth-Century Women's Literature, Psychoanalysis and Literature, Emotions and Literature, Shame in Literature, Trauma and Narrative, Feminist Theory, History of Feminist Criticism
Offices Held:
Assistant Department Chair, 2002-present
Undergraduate Programs Director, 1998-2001
Site last updated 02.2009