Lisa Rodensky
Professor of English
Research and teaching focuses on the 19th-and 20th-century British novel.
In my scholarly work, I have focused on the Victorian novel. My book, The Crime in Mind: Criminal Responsibility and the Victorian Novel, attends to the interdisciplinary study of law and literature. Currently, I am working on a manuscript entitled "Novel Judgments: Critical Terms of the 19th- and 20th- Century Novel Review," that explores the vocabulary of reviewing. I received a Guggenheim Fellowship in support of this project, one chapter of which has recently been published in Victorian Literature and Culture. In addition, I am editing The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel as well as Sir James Fitzjames Stephen's The Story of Nuncomar and the Impeachment of Sir Elijah Impey. The latter work is a late Victorian legal history describing the 18th-century trial (and execution) of Nandakumar and the subsequent impeachment proceedings for judicial murder brought against Elijah Impey. I have also edited an anthology of Decadent poetry for Penguin.
I teach courses at all levels of the curriculum. At the 100-level, I teach the writing-intensive course that introduces students to the critical interpretation of poetry. At the 200-level, I teach courses on the Victorian novel and the modern novel (my two main areas of interest). I have taught advanced seminars on various topics related to the 19th- and 20th-century novel (for instance, one on George Eliot and her readers and one on Charlotte Bronte and Virginia Woolf ). In Fall 2007, I introduced a seminar entitled "The Victorian Novel: Inside and Out," which responded to a need for a course that prepared students for thesis work and also provided an opportunity for students not pursuing theses to do independent work. I look forward to teaching this course again. I would also like to create a course on literary editing.
I am a member of the Northeast Victorian Studies Association (the NVSA's 2009 conference—The Victorian Everyday—was held at Wellesley) and a trustee of the Dickens Society.
Education
- B.A., Wellesley College
- LL.D., Harvard University
- Ph.D., Boston University
Current and upcoming courses
Documentary film makes an implicit promise to its viewers to present reality. In this course, we explore the complexities of this promise by examining the interplay between objective fact and the documentarian’s subjective presentation of fact. Such an exploration will take us into questions concerning how we think about the ‘real’ and the ‘fake’ on film and beyond. We will also consider what documentarians owe to those who appear in their films and what ethical standards should apply to documentarians. Films (documentary and otherwise) may include Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line, Albert and David Maysles’ Grey Gardens and its fictional feature film offspring (starring Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange), Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, Jian Fan’s Still Tomorrow, Nicole Lucas Haimes’ Chicken People, Jennie Livingston’s Paris is Burning and Sara Jordenö and Twiggy Pucci Garçon’s Kiki.
This class requires active and sustained participation from each student and will be speaking intensive; students will be supported in developing participation skills and guided to additional resources as needed.
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The Nineteenth-Century Novel
ENG272
In this course, we will explore the changing relationships of persons to social worlds in selected English novels of the nineteenth century. The English novel’s representation of imperialism and industrialization, its engagement with debates about women's roles, social mobility, class conflict, and its assertion of itself as a moral guide for its readers will be among the themes we will discuss. The assigned novels will probably include Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, and Henry James's Daisy Miller.