
James Noggle
Professor of English
Interested in 18th-century British literature and culture, literary theory, and Milton.
James Noggle is a professor of English specializing in British literature, thought, and culture of the long eighteenth century. He has taught at Wellesley College since 1995. He was born and raised in San Jose, California, where he graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School, and has a B.A. from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.
His most recent book is Unfelt: The Language of Affect in the British Enlightenment (Cornell UP, 2020). His other scholarly monographs include The Temporality of Taste in Eighteenth-Century British Writing (Oxford UP, 2012) and The Skeptical Sublime: Aesthetic Ideology in Pope and the Tory Satirists (Oxford UP, 2001). In support of research for these books, he received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (2014-15), the American Philosophical Society (2005-6), and the American Council of Learned Societies (1998-99). He also is an editor of the Norton Anthology of English Literature (2005-). His current book project, titled Magic Letters, discovers the surprising origins of our current understanding of the concept "literature" in the eighteenth century.
Education
- B.A., Columbia University in the City of New York
- Ph.D., University of California-Berkeley
Current and upcoming courses
The period known as the Enlightenment (roughly 1660-1789) promoted individual rights, attacked superstition and advanced science, dramatically expanded literacy and publishing, brought women as readers and writers into a burgeoning literary marketplace, and created the public sphere. Yet the era also massively increased the trans-Atlantic slave trade, devised new forms of racism and anti-feminism, and established European colonialism as a world system. This course will examine British literature that confronts these complexities. We’ll read novels like Behn’s Oroonoko, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels that portray encounters between Europeans and the non-European “Other”; poems by Alexander Pope and Mary Wortley Montagu that explore the nature of women and femininity; and texts that find the limits of Enlightenment reason in uncertainty, strong passions, and madness.
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“Evil be thou my good,” resolves Satan in Paradise Lost. This course will explore literary works that follow Milton’s lead in unleashing radical energies that invert or “transvalue” conventional values, whether their authors endorse such inversions or not. Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Shelley’s Frankenstein, Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Ellison’s Invisible Man all test the claims of darkness against light. We’ll also consider other examples, and theories, of the Gothic, and the sublime, that stage literature as an uncontrollable contest between irreconcilable forces. Theories of intention will suggest how such a lack of authorial control can seem a literary strength. Throughout we will assess the political potential of the Satanic principle—how it might inspire anti-capitalist, feminist, antiracist, and other oppositional modes of reading.