A Passion for Getting It Right: Essays and Appreciations in Honor of Michael J. Colacurcio’s 50 Years of Teaching

For 50 years Michael J. Colacurcio has been a leader in the criticism of early and antebellum American literature. In The Province of Piety, New Essays on The Scarlet Letter, Doctrine and Difference, and Godly Letters, as well as editions and often-reprinted reviews and essays, Dr. Colacurcio has continued to defend a rare vision of the political and intellectual depth of America’s serious fiction and the aesthetic power and charm of its religious poetry and prose. In light of many honors such as the Book of the Year Award from the Conference of Christianity and Literature and election in 2007 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, UCLA raised him to the rank of Distinguished Professor. Yet for all his dedication to research, his students know him as an unforgettable teacher, who has continued to win several teaching awards at both Cornell and UCLA. The present volume aspires to celebrate Dr. Colacurcio’s 50 years of transformative teaching through an exciting bounty of original and classic essays by some of his most talented students and eminent colleagues from his very first years at Cornell up to and including his current students at UCLA.

Table of Contents:
Contents: Carol M. Bensick: Two Puritans You May Not Know But Hawthorne Thinks You Should – Inna Blyakhman/Kevin C. Moore: Hawthorne’s Doctor Experiments: Medicine, Risk Culture, and the Development of Psychological Realism – Luke Bresky: Pro-Americans, Proto-Americans, and Un-Americans in Melville’s Israel Potter – Emily Budick: The Vanitas of Holocaust Painting: Audrey Flack’s World War II – Michael J. Colacurcio: Remembering the Puritans: Hawthorne and the Scene of History – Robert Daly: «Singularly Connected» in Septimius: Multiple Perspectives in Hawthorne’s Late Work – Robert Daly: What is the Custom-House? – Andrew Delbanco: Introduction to The Marble Faun – R. C. De Prospo: Michael J. Colacurcio’s (Un)Godly Letters – James Duban: Monoaxiate Tyranny in Koestler’s Darkness at Noon – Allan M. Emery: Melville’s Bachelors: Templars No More – John Gatta: The Beecher Trials – Lisa Gordis: Office Hours – Adam Gordon: The Critic on Main Street: Hawthorne and Critical Allegory – T. Austin Graham: Experience – Martin Griffin: Cassandra, Bartleby, and the Direction of Time: Some Thoughts on Unknowability – Alice Henton: Melville’s Comedy of Gender: The Battle for Domesticity in «I and My Chimney» – Allison Johnson: « Every Great and Small Thing»: Emerson and the Divine Particular – B. W. Jorgensen: «Awakened» by «the Sacred Whispers» in James Salter’s «Akhnilo» – Martin Kevorkian: Bartleby and the Prophet of Reality – Lawrence Krikorian: «I Have Stolen His Books»: Teaching the Colacurcio Syllabus in Community College – Maurice Lee: Notes on Aphoristic Genius – Phillip L. Marcus: Sea Changes in the American Crisis Poem from Walt Whitman to Campbell McGrath – John P. McWilliams: In Tribute – Richard Middleton-Kaplan: Deceptive Appearances: Anti-Romance and Anti-Travelogue Beneath the Surface in Melville’s Typee – Richard Middleton-Kaplan: Puritan Riffs: The Jazz Aesthetic in Michael J. Colacurcio’s Pedagogy – Andrew Rosenblum: The Gnomic Pronouncements of Michael J. Colacurcio – Mikayo Sakuma: Colacurcio, Teacher and Lecturer: A Transoceanic Perspective – Daniel R. Schwarz: Reconfiguring Nature After Darwin: Skepticism and Sexuality in Modern British and Irish Literature – Eric J. Sundquist: «A Song without Words»: Black Thunder – Gary Williams: Julia Ward Howe, the Travel Book, and the Public Lectern – Michael J. Colacurcio: Autobiography – Michael J. Colacurcio: Appendix: The Affect of Puritanism – Michael J. Colacurcio: Limerick.

About the Author :
Carol M. Bensick received her PhD in American literature to 1914 at Cornell University. She is the author of La Nouvelle Beatrice: Renaissance and Romance in «Rappaccini’s Daughter.» Her essays appear in New Essays on The Scarlet Letter, New Essays on Hawthorne’s Major Tales, and Hawthorne and Women. She has also published numerous articles in journals and reference publications. She has taught at the University of Denver, Cornell University, the University of Oregon, and the University of California – Riverside. For five years, Bensick was a research associate of the UCLA Center for the Study of Women. Her present focus is the status of women in nineteenth-century American philosophy, on which she has given papers at the Summer Institute for American Philosophy and the American Philosophical Association. Her current book-length project is on Julia Ward Howe.

Review :
«Michael J. Colacurcio stands as a monumental figure in American literary studies. The appendix to this volume, ‘The Affect of Puritanism,’ epitomizes why. Behind its sly wit and piercing angle of vision, one can discern a wealth of learning and decades of study. Very few scholars indeed can range so masterfully from nearly unknown seventeenth-century Puritan thinkers to nineteenth-century literary classics to twenty-first-century historiography. This kind of erudition is impossible to achieve in today’s accelerated and frazzled humanities. As Colacurcio notes in his little autobiography, it took him a long time to write a first book, yet Cornell tenured him long before it was done. It is wise and good that Carol M. Bensick and the other contributors have come together to honor his example.» (Mark Bauerlein, Professor of English, Emory University) «This is a bracing, bountiful display of the difference that a literary critic can make. Michael J. Colacurcio’s career as a teacher and scholar is celebrated here in ways that return the reader not only to Colacurcio’s extraordinary body of work, but to the discipline’s central subject: the absorbing, mysterious, infinitely rich life of the mind. It may be true that, as one of the contributors observes, you had to be there – that some aspect of Colacurcio’s live performances is untranslatable. But one can sense in these essays the spirit of those performances, the magical blending of seemingly antithetical qualities – restlessness and thoroughness, joyful play and forceful earnestness – with which Colacurcio brings his propositions home. We are lucky to have him; we are lucky to have this book.» (Geoffrey Sanborn, Professor and Chair, English Department, Amherst College)