Author: journalofnarrativetheory

  Dr. Sandra M. Leonard In my first year of teaching freshman English composition I had the following preconceptions about plagiarism: that it was fairly rare, rather malicious, and always indicative of poor writing. Ten years of teaching, a dissertation,…

Dr. David Stromberg Salinger: Pain and Abuse We sometimes hear talk about old tattered copies of our favorite paperbacks – but sometimes we also have them. In my case, this is true of Salinger’s Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters…

Paula Martín-Salván Joseph Conrad was my first love, academically speaking. I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on the metaphors of visibility and opacity in Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness, but then I moved on to pursue a PhD on contemporary…

Dr. Muna Abd-Rabbo I first read Chinua Achebe’s essay “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” about twenty years ago when I was still a BA student, and it really made me see Conrad and the whole…

Dr. Hannah Courtney For some time now, I’ve lived and breathed narrative trickeries. Twists that pull the storyworld rug out from under you, endings that frustrate your genre-formed expectations, messy crossovers between fiction and nonfiction, and the most dastardly form…

Professor Alexander Dickow I read Sylvie’s Neverending Quest after spotting an excerpt on the Women’s Poetry mailing list (WOMPO), and found the work compelling enough to invite Sylvie to Virginia Tech, where she presented her work in a reading and a lecture.…

Professor Eric Keenaghan While watching a documentary, my husband first heard the German-born philosopher Hannah Arendt express her love for an American truism, Stop and think. I was happy that he became just as thrilled as I was over Arendt’s…

Q&A with Professor Alex Vernon Prof. Alex Vernon is the author of the essay “Kinetoscope of War: Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.” He talked with JNT in 2018. JNT: Tell us a bit about the essay you wrote for…

Q&A with Professor Carol L. Yang Prof. Carol L. Yang, author of the essay “A Passage from Adam’s Dream to the Cessation of Desire: A Buddhist Reading of John Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale,'” spoke to JNT in 2018, JNT:…