John V. Knapp is a professor of English, Emeritus, at Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, and for more than forty years enjoyed a joint appointment in modern literature and English teacher education. He has published eight books, dozens of articles and reviews, and remains editor of the literary journal, STYLE, (since 2007). Knapp recently (Jan 2019, June 2021, January 2022) published three co-authored books (with Prof. Tom McCann) on secondary English education theory and practice: the first is titled *Teaching on Solid Ground: Knowledge Foundations for the Teacher of English* (Guildford P). The second is titled *Learning to Enjoy Literature* (Rowman and Littlefield); the third is "Teaching High School Literature," Rowman and Littlefield (2022). Knapp is also finishing last edits on a double issue of "Style" (58.3), guest edited by Patrick Colm Hogan. Phone: (608) 345-0509 Address: Reavis Hall Dept of English Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, Illinois 60115 USA
"LEARNING FROM SCANT BEGINNINGS: ENGLISH PROFESSOR EXPERTISE
Although teaching is perhaps the ... more "LEARNING FROM SCANT BEGINNINGS: ENGLISH PROFESSOR EXPERTISE
Although teaching is perhaps the central public activity of most university English professors, there is surprisingly little research in the specifics of expert professorial practice. Many previous studies describe, recipe-like, the end products of successful teaching, while others conflate expertise in this subject matter with pedagogical expertise. This study focuses on the moves the expert professor makes in a semester-long process of literary teaching----of a literature far removed in time and space from most undergraduates' experience----and discusses a day-to-day case study of an advanced undergraduate literature course in the writings of John Milton. By employing a "situated learning" model explaining the incremental growth of students' knowledge and critical skills, the author details how an expert professor teaches complex works to undergraduates with no previous exposure to an author's writings. This process is generalized to describe literary learning in its particulars and the paths students must take from possessing scant knowledge about an author or historical period to their developing mastery.
John V. Knapp is professor of English at Northern Illinois University, and Editor of the literary journal, Style.
University of Delaware Press, June 2008
ISBN: 978-0-87413-026-3 "
"*Reading the Family Dance: Family Systems Therapy and Literary Study*
Edited by John V. Knapp ... more "*Reading the Family Dance: Family Systems Therapy and Literary Study*
Edited by John V. Knapp and Kenneth Womack
The development in recent years of the intersections between the family and literary study continues to emerge as one of the most productive and illuminating arenas of contemporary critique. As an interpretative mechanism, family systems therapy (fst) provides scholars and readers alike with a revelatory social psychology for evaluating the nature of the
familial structures that often mark our textual experiences. In addition to addressing the family dynamic through which a given literary character develops a fully realized sense of self, family systems therapy allows readers to examine the patterns by which characters function in their larger intimate systems, whether those systems be social, institutional, or even global.
*Reading the Family Dance: Family Systems Therapy and Literary Study* offers a collection of original essays that reflects both the substantial critical interest in this important contemporary field of inquiry, as well as its wide range of forays into such disciplines as feminism, gender studies, ethnicity, race, and cultural studies. Divided into three
descriptive sections, Reading the Family Dance includes interdisciplinary essays that address various literary works in terms of family systems therapies respective approaches to our understandings of the self, the family, and the world. The essays in this volume range through much of the imaginative literature in English, including British works, ethnic and
canonized American texts, and even the translation of a Brazilian novel; although many of the works analyzed in this collection were published in the twentieth century, Reading the Family Dance features essays devoted to Shakespeare and to various works of nineteenth-century fiction as well.
The volume begins with John V. Knapp's comprehensive and wide-ranging introduction to family systems therapy and literary study. In addition to providing readers with an intellectual history of the discipline, Knapp establishes a contemporary scholarly foundation for the ensuing collection. The essays by Kenneth Womack, Rosemary Babcock, Gary Storhoff, and Lee Ann De Reus included in the volume's first section, "The Self:
Family Systems Therapy and the Quest for Identity," examine a host of issues related to the development of the self, including the onset of personal identity, sibling differentiation, and interpersonal communication.
In the volume's second section, "The Family: Family Systems
Therapy and the Discourse of Community," the essays by Joan I. Schwarz, Steven Snyder, Jerome Bump, Sara Cooper, and John V. Knapp discuss the vocabularies of community that assist families as they develop into functional units or, conversely, into dysfunctional factions. In Reading the Family Dance's final section, "The World: Reading Family Systems Therapy in Extremis," the essays by Todd F. Davis, James M. Decker, Marco Malaspina, and Denis Jonnes explore the ways in which our culture often manifests itself in larger family systems. The essays in this section examine the ethics of these larger communities through their analyzes of Hollywood's entertainment culture, Renaissance-era family dynamics, and America's postwar family system.
University of Delaware Press, 2003.
978-0874138238 "
"Striking at the Joints: Contemporary Psychology and Literary Criticism
Knapp, John V.
ISBN... more "Striking at the Joints: Contemporary Psychology and Literary Criticism
This is a book of psychological literary criticism. The various psychologies I employ in these readings would be immediately recognizable by both clinical and experimental psychologists; they are not, emphatically not, based on Freudian and/or Lacanian metatheories. I propose in this book, then, a trio of psychological approaches to six literary texts, preceeded by a priliminary discussion, in chapter one, of the current state of psychological criticism, analyzing the conceptual and procedural difficulties with Freudian-based metatheories by examining briefly the recent history of Freudian metatheory as it has been employed by literary critics.
Following this discussion of theoretical matters, I then focus, in chapters three, four, and five, on practical readings of six literary texts, each analyzed with the help of a particular psychological system. In the third chapter, I employ family systems therapy to analyze problems of theme and characterization in D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers and in Henry Roth's Call It Sleep. In the fourth chapter, I borrow insights from writings in the philosophy of science and in personality theory to examine two characters who happen to be scientists: the first from John Steinbeck's short story, "The Snake" (from The Long Valley); the second character I investigate is the narrator in Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
In the fifth chapter, I discuss first the seedy "anti-hero" of George Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying and second, the major female character in John Fowles's The Magus, both in the light of a neo-Piagetian theoretical framework (from Robert Kegan's The Evolving Self and Aaron Beck's Treatment of Depression) concerned with the development of adult emotions. In the last chapter, I investigate the process of disciplinary expansion: How do new idea, alien methods, & foreign concepts gain admission to our discipline and ultimately get promoted by literary critics and scholars? Understanding how ideas become part of the tacit knowledge in literary study may help us understand why Freudian metatheory has taken such possession of our discipline to the exclusion of almost all other psychologies.
Readers of this book include psychologists interested in the uses of narrative to analyze character, both real and fictional, and literary critics and scholars who might wish to learn what their psychological sisters and brothers are doing when members of both disciplines look at literary texts. Generally speaking, many literary people have long since rejected the basic premises of classical Freudian dogma while still cheerfully employing concepts and vocabulary reflecting late nineteenth century "science." Thus, for those who automatically look for the clues to intrapsychic behavior by investigating first childhood antecedents of adult personality, for those who wish to examine a character's (singular) "unconscious," looking for real motives, for those who think psycho-sexual conflict forms the root of all or almost all of a literary character's neuroses--for all such readers this book offers several contemporary alternatives to these ancient Freudian metatheoretical assumptions
"
"Literary Character. Editor, with introductory essay, special
issue of Style (24.3) Fall 1990. ... more "Literary Character. Editor, with introductory essay, special
issue of Style (24.3) Fall 1990. Rpt as Literary Character, University Press of America, 1993.
0-8191-8885-9
Introduction by John V. Knapp, and Essays by
1) Kenneth J. Gergan;
2) Richard J. Gerrig and David W. Allbritton
3) Baruch Hochman and Ilja Wachs
4) James Phelan
5) David Fishlov
6) Gerald Mead
7) Uri Margolin
8) Okey Goode
9) Ineke Bockting"
For almost a hundred years, psychologically oriented literary criticism has been largely dominate... more For almost a hundred years, psychologically oriented literary criticism has been largely dominated by varieties of Freudian, neo-Freudian, or, more recently, Lacanian paradigms. At the same time, mainstream psychology itself has gone through several major shifts in thinking, ...
I. Introduction As I write, highly respected critics are claiming the demise, over the last 15 ye... more I. Introduction As I write, highly respected critics are claiming the demise, over the last 15 years or so, of high "THEORY" - so dominant in the 1980s and early '90s (Eagleton 2003) - and a concomitant critical turn toward the real (or mimetic) world, however "real" is defined (Boyd 2009; Carroll 2008; Gottschall 2008a; 2008b; Palmer 2004; Zunshine 2006; 2007). This critical "back to the future" includes a growing interest in human psychology as a useful tool for literary critics who have developed a renewed concern for, among other things, literary character. Witness, for example, the large increase in critical studies in Family Systems Theory (FST) analyses (Cooper 2004; Davis and Womack 2002; Knapp 1996; 2004; 2006; Knapp and Womack, 1997; 2003; Sadowski 2003; Womack 2000). Literary criticism has been even more explosive with new studies in cognition and literature (Gerrig 1993; Gerrig and Allbritten; Hogan 2003; Richardson and Spolsky 2004; Zunshine 2006; 2007), bio-evolutionary psychology (Carroll 1995; 2004; 2008), neuropsychology (Holland 2004; 2009; Miall 1995), as well as in socially situated cognitive psychologies (Herman 2002; Howe 2007; Sawyer 2005). Indeed so many new directions have emerged in these last few years that merely cataloging them would take us far beyond the scope even of this double issue. What the editors intend here instead is a sampling of essays employing cognition, Family Systems Theory (FST), studies in temperament, empirical analyses of literary problems, and bio-evolutionary criticism - approaches that have moved well beyond the hitherto dominant psychological critical paradigmata associated with Freud, Jacques Lacan, and psycho-analytic criticism generally. While the dominant topic will be literature, we also include an essay each on film and on music, in the hopes that they provide interesting models for future research in those two fields. To begin understanding the differences between the older psychological models associated with Freud, Horney, and Lacan, for example, and the newer psychologies, one needs to think in patterns very different from the past and to employ vocabularies more commensurate with discourses often found in the sciences from which these critical tools are derived. Detractors might query whether some basic ideas shared by each - borrowing from the social sciences, employing linguistic research, looking at human cognition, or thinking about human beings in their social world rather than as semi-isolated monads - really comprise new ideas or are merely "terminological variants" (Mellard 2; Smith 769; Weber 517). And while such may still appear alien to some, literary critics have already done this before: taken disciplinary elements (such as Freudian psychology, for example) that are external to the reigning critical model and by adapting it, familiarizing it, and thereby making the formerly uncanny its own. The most obvious example: from the 1920s to almost the present, criticism and psycho-analysis have blended into one for the purposes of examining literary texts (Skura 368ff.). Even a brief summary of the difficulties and limitations of psychoanalytic theory and its off-shoots in Lacan and other neo-Freudian critical models would take up some valuable space here to cover well-ploughed ground, when our primary interest is in the future. For those practicing literary critics not previously versed in psychological criticism, look among other venues to essays by Knapp (1996, chapters 1 & 2; 2004), and Knapp and Womack, (1997; 2003). While it is quite clear that many human behaviors may not always be reflected in the fictional behaviors of characters - who may be created for several reasons other than simply mimetic reflection - there are good arguments to suggest that each of these new psychologies for literary study has become a valuable tool for readers and critics nonetheless (Phelan 1989; Rabinowitz 1987, 128ff). Many readers of essays and books devoted to the newer psychologies (several discussed in this volume) have often asked if one could specify, both in theoretical and in practical terms, how these new paradigmata differ from the assumptions employed in Freudian and neo-Freudian criticism. …
ABSTRACT: In this essay, I will sketch the research in the (mostly college) teaching of imaginati... more ABSTRACT: In this essay, I will sketch the research in the (mostly college) teaching of imaginative literature in two somewhat different domains: in the familiar area of literary study but also in education research. In a mildly tendentious survey, I cannot be exhaustive -- so much is being ...
John Rodden's The Politics of Literary Reputation is, in my opinion, one of the most interest... more John Rodden's The Politics of Literary Reputation is, in my opinion, one of the most interesting books about Orwell published during the decade of the 1980s. Rodden's work is not, however, a hermeneutical analysis of the meanings in Orwell's literary texts; the book begins by assuming, rather, that such interpretation is what Helmut Hauptmeier et al. call "an action to be studied by the researcher and not to be performed by him as a researcher" (Poetics Today 10.3 [Fall 1989]). Aimed at two specific time periods in Orwell's reputational career—the post-World War Two decade and the months surrounding 1984—Politics of Literary Reputation tries to make explicit the various sets of presuppositions intrinsic in any critical construction of Orwell's reputation rather than arguing "a specific case for its upward or downward revaluation."
"LEARNING FROM SCANT BEGINNINGS: ENGLISH PROFESSOR EXPERTISE
Although teaching is perhaps the ... more "LEARNING FROM SCANT BEGINNINGS: ENGLISH PROFESSOR EXPERTISE
Although teaching is perhaps the central public activity of most university English professors, there is surprisingly little research in the specifics of expert professorial practice. Many previous studies describe, recipe-like, the end products of successful teaching, while others conflate expertise in this subject matter with pedagogical expertise. This study focuses on the moves the expert professor makes in a semester-long process of literary teaching----of a literature far removed in time and space from most undergraduates' experience----and discusses a day-to-day case study of an advanced undergraduate literature course in the writings of John Milton. By employing a "situated learning" model explaining the incremental growth of students' knowledge and critical skills, the author details how an expert professor teaches complex works to undergraduates with no previous exposure to an author's writings. This process is generalized to describe literary learning in its particulars and the paths students must take from possessing scant knowledge about an author or historical period to their developing mastery.
John V. Knapp is professor of English at Northern Illinois University, and Editor of the literary journal, Style.
University of Delaware Press, June 2008
ISBN: 978-0-87413-026-3 "
"*Reading the Family Dance: Family Systems Therapy and Literary Study*
Edited by John V. Knapp ... more "*Reading the Family Dance: Family Systems Therapy and Literary Study*
Edited by John V. Knapp and Kenneth Womack
The development in recent years of the intersections between the family and literary study continues to emerge as one of the most productive and illuminating arenas of contemporary critique. As an interpretative mechanism, family systems therapy (fst) provides scholars and readers alike with a revelatory social psychology for evaluating the nature of the
familial structures that often mark our textual experiences. In addition to addressing the family dynamic through which a given literary character develops a fully realized sense of self, family systems therapy allows readers to examine the patterns by which characters function in their larger intimate systems, whether those systems be social, institutional, or even global.
*Reading the Family Dance: Family Systems Therapy and Literary Study* offers a collection of original essays that reflects both the substantial critical interest in this important contemporary field of inquiry, as well as its wide range of forays into such disciplines as feminism, gender studies, ethnicity, race, and cultural studies. Divided into three
descriptive sections, Reading the Family Dance includes interdisciplinary essays that address various literary works in terms of family systems therapies respective approaches to our understandings of the self, the family, and the world. The essays in this volume range through much of the imaginative literature in English, including British works, ethnic and
canonized American texts, and even the translation of a Brazilian novel; although many of the works analyzed in this collection were published in the twentieth century, Reading the Family Dance features essays devoted to Shakespeare and to various works of nineteenth-century fiction as well.
The volume begins with John V. Knapp's comprehensive and wide-ranging introduction to family systems therapy and literary study. In addition to providing readers with an intellectual history of the discipline, Knapp establishes a contemporary scholarly foundation for the ensuing collection. The essays by Kenneth Womack, Rosemary Babcock, Gary Storhoff, and Lee Ann De Reus included in the volume's first section, "The Self:
Family Systems Therapy and the Quest for Identity," examine a host of issues related to the development of the self, including the onset of personal identity, sibling differentiation, and interpersonal communication.
In the volume's second section, "The Family: Family Systems
Therapy and the Discourse of Community," the essays by Joan I. Schwarz, Steven Snyder, Jerome Bump, Sara Cooper, and John V. Knapp discuss the vocabularies of community that assist families as they develop into functional units or, conversely, into dysfunctional factions. In Reading the Family Dance's final section, "The World: Reading Family Systems Therapy in Extremis," the essays by Todd F. Davis, James M. Decker, Marco Malaspina, and Denis Jonnes explore the ways in which our culture often manifests itself in larger family systems. The essays in this section examine the ethics of these larger communities through their analyzes of Hollywood's entertainment culture, Renaissance-era family dynamics, and America's postwar family system.
University of Delaware Press, 2003.
978-0874138238 "
"Striking at the Joints: Contemporary Psychology and Literary Criticism
Knapp, John V.
ISBN... more "Striking at the Joints: Contemporary Psychology and Literary Criticism
This is a book of psychological literary criticism. The various psychologies I employ in these readings would be immediately recognizable by both clinical and experimental psychologists; they are not, emphatically not, based on Freudian and/or Lacanian metatheories. I propose in this book, then, a trio of psychological approaches to six literary texts, preceeded by a priliminary discussion, in chapter one, of the current state of psychological criticism, analyzing the conceptual and procedural difficulties with Freudian-based metatheories by examining briefly the recent history of Freudian metatheory as it has been employed by literary critics.
Following this discussion of theoretical matters, I then focus, in chapters three, four, and five, on practical readings of six literary texts, each analyzed with the help of a particular psychological system. In the third chapter, I employ family systems therapy to analyze problems of theme and characterization in D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers and in Henry Roth's Call It Sleep. In the fourth chapter, I borrow insights from writings in the philosophy of science and in personality theory to examine two characters who happen to be scientists: the first from John Steinbeck's short story, "The Snake" (from The Long Valley); the second character I investigate is the narrator in Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
In the fifth chapter, I discuss first the seedy "anti-hero" of George Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying and second, the major female character in John Fowles's The Magus, both in the light of a neo-Piagetian theoretical framework (from Robert Kegan's The Evolving Self and Aaron Beck's Treatment of Depression) concerned with the development of adult emotions. In the last chapter, I investigate the process of disciplinary expansion: How do new idea, alien methods, & foreign concepts gain admission to our discipline and ultimately get promoted by literary critics and scholars? Understanding how ideas become part of the tacit knowledge in literary study may help us understand why Freudian metatheory has taken such possession of our discipline to the exclusion of almost all other psychologies.
Readers of this book include psychologists interested in the uses of narrative to analyze character, both real and fictional, and literary critics and scholars who might wish to learn what their psychological sisters and brothers are doing when members of both disciplines look at literary texts. Generally speaking, many literary people have long since rejected the basic premises of classical Freudian dogma while still cheerfully employing concepts and vocabulary reflecting late nineteenth century "science." Thus, for those who automatically look for the clues to intrapsychic behavior by investigating first childhood antecedents of adult personality, for those who wish to examine a character's (singular) "unconscious," looking for real motives, for those who think psycho-sexual conflict forms the root of all or almost all of a literary character's neuroses--for all such readers this book offers several contemporary alternatives to these ancient Freudian metatheoretical assumptions
"
"Literary Character. Editor, with introductory essay, special
issue of Style (24.3) Fall 1990. ... more "Literary Character. Editor, with introductory essay, special
issue of Style (24.3) Fall 1990. Rpt as Literary Character, University Press of America, 1993.
0-8191-8885-9
Introduction by John V. Knapp, and Essays by
1) Kenneth J. Gergan;
2) Richard J. Gerrig and David W. Allbritton
3) Baruch Hochman and Ilja Wachs
4) James Phelan
5) David Fishlov
6) Gerald Mead
7) Uri Margolin
8) Okey Goode
9) Ineke Bockting"
For almost a hundred years, psychologically oriented literary criticism has been largely dominate... more For almost a hundred years, psychologically oriented literary criticism has been largely dominated by varieties of Freudian, neo-Freudian, or, more recently, Lacanian paradigms. At the same time, mainstream psychology itself has gone through several major shifts in thinking, ...
I. Introduction As I write, highly respected critics are claiming the demise, over the last 15 ye... more I. Introduction As I write, highly respected critics are claiming the demise, over the last 15 years or so, of high "THEORY" - so dominant in the 1980s and early '90s (Eagleton 2003) - and a concomitant critical turn toward the real (or mimetic) world, however "real" is defined (Boyd 2009; Carroll 2008; Gottschall 2008a; 2008b; Palmer 2004; Zunshine 2006; 2007). This critical "back to the future" includes a growing interest in human psychology as a useful tool for literary critics who have developed a renewed concern for, among other things, literary character. Witness, for example, the large increase in critical studies in Family Systems Theory (FST) analyses (Cooper 2004; Davis and Womack 2002; Knapp 1996; 2004; 2006; Knapp and Womack, 1997; 2003; Sadowski 2003; Womack 2000). Literary criticism has been even more explosive with new studies in cognition and literature (Gerrig 1993; Gerrig and Allbritten; Hogan 2003; Richardson and Spolsky 2004; Zunshine 2006; 2007), bio-evolutionary psychology (Carroll 1995; 2004; 2008), neuropsychology (Holland 2004; 2009; Miall 1995), as well as in socially situated cognitive psychologies (Herman 2002; Howe 2007; Sawyer 2005). Indeed so many new directions have emerged in these last few years that merely cataloging them would take us far beyond the scope even of this double issue. What the editors intend here instead is a sampling of essays employing cognition, Family Systems Theory (FST), studies in temperament, empirical analyses of literary problems, and bio-evolutionary criticism - approaches that have moved well beyond the hitherto dominant psychological critical paradigmata associated with Freud, Jacques Lacan, and psycho-analytic criticism generally. While the dominant topic will be literature, we also include an essay each on film and on music, in the hopes that they provide interesting models for future research in those two fields. To begin understanding the differences between the older psychological models associated with Freud, Horney, and Lacan, for example, and the newer psychologies, one needs to think in patterns very different from the past and to employ vocabularies more commensurate with discourses often found in the sciences from which these critical tools are derived. Detractors might query whether some basic ideas shared by each - borrowing from the social sciences, employing linguistic research, looking at human cognition, or thinking about human beings in their social world rather than as semi-isolated monads - really comprise new ideas or are merely "terminological variants" (Mellard 2; Smith 769; Weber 517). And while such may still appear alien to some, literary critics have already done this before: taken disciplinary elements (such as Freudian psychology, for example) that are external to the reigning critical model and by adapting it, familiarizing it, and thereby making the formerly uncanny its own. The most obvious example: from the 1920s to almost the present, criticism and psycho-analysis have blended into one for the purposes of examining literary texts (Skura 368ff.). Even a brief summary of the difficulties and limitations of psychoanalytic theory and its off-shoots in Lacan and other neo-Freudian critical models would take up some valuable space here to cover well-ploughed ground, when our primary interest is in the future. For those practicing literary critics not previously versed in psychological criticism, look among other venues to essays by Knapp (1996, chapters 1 & 2; 2004), and Knapp and Womack, (1997; 2003). While it is quite clear that many human behaviors may not always be reflected in the fictional behaviors of characters - who may be created for several reasons other than simply mimetic reflection - there are good arguments to suggest that each of these new psychologies for literary study has become a valuable tool for readers and critics nonetheless (Phelan 1989; Rabinowitz 1987, 128ff). Many readers of essays and books devoted to the newer psychologies (several discussed in this volume) have often asked if one could specify, both in theoretical and in practical terms, how these new paradigmata differ from the assumptions employed in Freudian and neo-Freudian criticism. …
ABSTRACT: In this essay, I will sketch the research in the (mostly college) teaching of imaginati... more ABSTRACT: In this essay, I will sketch the research in the (mostly college) teaching of imaginative literature in two somewhat different domains: in the familiar area of literary study but also in education research. In a mildly tendentious survey, I cannot be exhaustive -- so much is being ...
John Rodden's The Politics of Literary Reputation is, in my opinion, one of the most interest... more John Rodden's The Politics of Literary Reputation is, in my opinion, one of the most interesting books about Orwell published during the decade of the 1980s. Rodden's work is not, however, a hermeneutical analysis of the meanings in Orwell's literary texts; the book begins by assuming, rather, that such interpretation is what Helmut Hauptmeier et al. call "an action to be studied by the researcher and not to be performed by him as a researcher" (Poetics Today 10.3 [Fall 1989]). Aimed at two specific time periods in Orwell's reputational career—the post-World War Two decade and the months surrounding 1984—Politics of Literary Reputation tries to make explicit the various sets of presuppositions intrinsic in any critical construction of Orwell's reputation rather than arguing "a specific case for its upward or downward revaluation."
In an article in the New York Times (Nov 6, 2005), a reporter named T. J. Max asked the famous fo... more In an article in the New York Times (Nov 6, 2005), a reporter named T. J. Max asked the famous founder of sociobiology and author of Consilience, The Unity of Knowledge, Edward O. Wilson, to "assess the state of the revolution he helped touch off. How far had sociologists and psychologists gone in folding evolutionary principles into their work? Wilson laughed and said silkily, 'Not far enough, in my opinion.' Nonetheless, Max [reported, he looked] 'forward to seeing sociobiology dust the wings of the arts--especially literature--with its magic.'" What you have in your hands, readers of Style, is a double issue, exploring the evolutionary principles Wilson mentioned, beginning with the writings of Prof. Joseph Carroll (University of Missouri-St. Louis), the scholar who many consider to be the Prospero of adaptationist literary criticism. Carroll has summarized here in some 35 pages the basic issues of Darwinian literary criticism as it stood in the late spring of 2008. This synthesis was then mailed to a selected group of scholars around the world and more than half responded with brief essays (limited to 1,000 to 2,000 words), ready either to add on or to try to sweep away the magic dust from this most recent of literary critical movements. Following a summer of intellectual contestation, Carroll then wrote a rejoinder to each respondent, some individually, some as part of an aggregate, arguing with many, confirming the opinions of a few, and dismissive of those constructivists operating mostly out of the old hegemony of "theory." Unfortunately, many of those who consider neo-Darwinian criticism not worth doing, or irrelevant, stand in a long line of literary people uninterested in the relationships between the sciences and the arts. Although no magic wand has yet been able to pry open the eyes of those unconvinced, we hope that this new attempt at explaining consilience could be useful. For those reading for the first time about neo-Darwinian criticism and Joseph Carroll's role in it, I will be parsimonious here, letting the completed debate act either as the starting point for novices in the field or as information for stimulating further conversation among experienced disputants. Just a brief note first, however, about Prof. Carroll, with the quotations below taken from his own "intellectual autobiography." As a student some 30 years ago, Carroll asked himself a fundamental question: "What kind of knowledge am I ultimately supposed to produce?" His answers early on moved in one of two directions: "to seek expansive scholarly contexts in intellectual history and 'comparative literature,'" or to "delve into authors and texts that seemed particularly difficult or problematic." These twin foci yielded up his books Matthew Arnold's cultural history, and on the poets Wallace Stevens and later on Walter Pater. …
1. The genre contrasts between crime and detective fiction have been debated in considerable deta... more 1. The genre contrasts between crime and detective fiction have been debated in considerable detail (Brophy; Cawelti; Hilfer; Scholes), with most critics distinguishing between the almost novelistic-like crime novel (with a life of its own and that deviat[es] from the detective ...
Commonly used essay grading procedures are subjective and suffer from incon sistency and instabil... more Commonly used essay grading procedures are subjective and suffer from incon sistency and instability. An objective procedure, described here, involves regressing a computer's measurements on grades assigned by an expert judge. Results of using the procedure on college freshman themes indicate some success for it.
This is a book of psychological literary criticism. The various psychologies I employ in these re... more This is a book of psychological literary criticism. The various psychologies I employ in these readings would be immediately recognizable by both clinical and experimental psychologists; they are not, emphatically not, based on Freudian and/or Lacanian metatheories. I propose in this ...
173 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1971.U of I OnlyRestricted to t... more 173 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1971.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD
Palmer's important essay deals with two related subjects, the second probably a sub-category ... more Palmer's important essay deals with two related subjects, the second probably a sub-category of the first: 1) Social minds, which he defines as "those aspects of the whole mind that are revealed through the externalist perspective" (what is revealed through this perspective, I simplify for the sake of a preliminary presentation, are "interpersonal relationships" or "social interactions"); 2) Intermental thought "which is joint, group, shared, or collective thought, as opposed to intramental, or private, individual thought" Palmer himself seems to agree that the second issue is an aspect of the first: "An important part of the social mind is our capacity for intermental thought." His essay offers a rich model for analyzing both phenomena in novels--"neglected," "left out of account," according to him. His model combines concepts and tools from theory of mind, attribution theory, cognitive studies, and neuroscience. I know little about theory of mind, cognitive studies, neuroscience, and the like, nor have I read most of the bibliography on which Palmer's model is based. So why was I asked to respond to his stimulating essay? I suppose for three reasons: 1) I am conceived of as a representative of "mainstream (or 'classical') narratology," although I moved on a long time ago (or so I would like to believe). 2) In Narrative Fiction, I said that extradiegetic narrators are endowed with the privilege of knowing the characters' innermost thoughts and feelings (96). The comparison with the absence of such knowledge in real life is only implied in my statement, but--as Palmer notes--has become a truism in literary studies. Palmer's formulation of the position he sets out to attack is not limited to extradiegetic narrators and does include the comparison I only imply: "It is a cliche of literary studies that, whereas novels can give us direct access to the minds of characters, by contrast, in reality, we can never really know what other people are thinking." 3) A whole chapter of my above mentioned book deals with characterization, focusing on that of individuals, not of groups. Palmer is clearly right that it is important to add "the social nature of cognition" to the theory of character. The desire to amend narratology's emphasis on individual minds and intramental processes (stream of consciousness, FID, interior monologue) at the expense of intermental cries, is a strong motivation behind Palmer's essay. So is his impassioned attempt to establish "the study of fictional minds ... as a clearly defined and discrete subject area in its own right within the discipline of narratology." From the point of view of an ex- mainstream narratologist, it seems to me that Palmer's quarrel with that discipline is unnecessary for the presentation of his own approach, or at least in excess of it. It may be true that classical narratology has not paid sufficient attention to social minds and intermental thought, but haven't these been explored by other branches of "literary studies" or by criticism of specific works of fiction, even if the apparatus used is different? Is narratology the only valuable approach to novels? And if not, why is it so important for Palmer to present his theory of social minds as an innovative approach within (postclassical) narratology? Palmer does have an answer to these questions beyond what history shows as the need of most new theories to stage a polemic with earlier ones. Here is the way he positions his view: To talk of a cognitive approach to literature can be rather misleading I fit gives the impression that it is simply one alternative among a range of others: historical and cultural, Marxist, feminist, rhetorical and ethical criticism, and so on. I do not see it like that. In my view, the cognitive approach is the basis of all the others. It does not stand alongside them; it sits underneath them ... In fact, I would go further and argue that, from my perspective, all serious students of literature are cognitivists, whether they like it or not. …
Professor Gerald Graff has published several landmark books on the study of literature, compositi... more Professor Gerald Graff has published several landmark books on the study of literature, composition, and teaching. A couple of those highlights are the well-received Literature Against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society (1979), and his Poetic Statement and Critical ...
Notes for teaching Shakespeare's sonnets to a middle school or early HS class. Audience is antic... more Notes for teaching Shakespeare's sonnets to a middle school or early HS class. Audience is anticipated to be struggling readers of early modern English (i.e., Shakespeare), and the goal is to help them enjoy poetry while they read the sonnets out loud. JVK
Essay-Review of the MLA's book *Preparing a Nation's Teachers* (1999). I argue that the traditi... more Essay-Review of the MLA's book *Preparing a Nation's Teachers* (1999). I argue that the traditional separation of literary study plus theory from its practical application in teaching both at the secondary-school and university levels is itself a theoretical model whose reconsideration is long overdue'
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Books Teaching on Solid Ground: Knowledge by John V. Knapp
Although teaching is perhaps the central public activity of most university English professors, there is surprisingly little research in the specifics of expert professorial practice. Many previous studies describe, recipe-like, the end products of successful teaching, while others conflate expertise in this subject matter with pedagogical expertise. This study focuses on the moves the expert professor makes in a semester-long process of literary teaching----of a literature far removed in time and space from most undergraduates' experience----and discusses a day-to-day case study of an advanced undergraduate literature course in the writings of John Milton. By employing a "situated learning" model explaining the incremental growth of students' knowledge and critical skills, the author details how an expert professor teaches complex works to undergraduates with no previous exposure to an author's writings. This process is generalized to describe literary learning in its particulars and the paths students must take from possessing scant knowledge about an author or historical period to their developing mastery.
John V. Knapp is professor of English at Northern Illinois University, and Editor of the literary journal, Style.
University of Delaware Press, June 2008
ISBN: 978-0-87413-026-3 "
Edited by John V. Knapp and Kenneth Womack
The development in recent years of the intersections between the family and literary study continues to emerge as one of the most productive and illuminating arenas of contemporary critique. As an interpretative mechanism, family systems therapy (fst) provides scholars and readers alike with a revelatory social psychology for evaluating the nature of the
familial structures that often mark our textual experiences. In addition to addressing the family dynamic through which a given literary character develops a fully realized sense of self, family systems therapy allows readers to examine the patterns by which characters function in their larger intimate systems, whether those systems be social, institutional, or even global.
*Reading the Family Dance: Family Systems Therapy and Literary Study* offers a collection of original essays that reflects both the substantial critical interest in this important contemporary field of inquiry, as well as its wide range of forays into such disciplines as feminism, gender studies, ethnicity, race, and cultural studies. Divided into three
descriptive sections, Reading the Family Dance includes interdisciplinary essays that address various literary works in terms of family systems therapies respective approaches to our understandings of the self, the family, and the world. The essays in this volume range through much of the imaginative literature in English, including British works, ethnic and
canonized American texts, and even the translation of a Brazilian novel; although many of the works analyzed in this collection were published in the twentieth century, Reading the Family Dance features essays devoted to Shakespeare and to various works of nineteenth-century fiction as well.
The volume begins with John V. Knapp's comprehensive and wide-ranging introduction to family systems therapy and literary study. In addition to providing readers with an intellectual history of the discipline, Knapp establishes a contemporary scholarly foundation for the ensuing collection. The essays by Kenneth Womack, Rosemary Babcock, Gary Storhoff, and Lee Ann De Reus included in the volume's first section, "The Self:
Family Systems Therapy and the Quest for Identity," examine a host of issues related to the development of the self, including the onset of personal identity, sibling differentiation, and interpersonal communication.
In the volume's second section, "The Family: Family Systems
Therapy and the Discourse of Community," the essays by Joan I. Schwarz, Steven Snyder, Jerome Bump, Sara Cooper, and John V. Knapp discuss the vocabularies of community that assist families as they develop into functional units or, conversely, into dysfunctional factions. In Reading the Family Dance's final section, "The World: Reading Family Systems Therapy in Extremis," the essays by Todd F. Davis, James M. Decker, Marco Malaspina, and Denis Jonnes explore the ways in which our culture often manifests itself in larger family systems. The essays in this section examine the ethics of these larger communities through their analyzes of Hollywood's entertainment culture, Renaissance-era family dynamics, and America's postwar family system.
University of Delaware Press, 2003.
978-0874138238 "
Knapp, John V.
ISBN10: 0761802576
ISBN13: 9780761802570
Format: Paperback
Pub. Date: 5/1/1996
Publisher(s): Rowman & Littlefield Pub Inc
This is a book of psychological literary criticism. The various psychologies I employ in these readings would be immediately recognizable by both clinical and experimental psychologists; they are not, emphatically not, based on Freudian and/or Lacanian metatheories. I propose in this book, then, a trio of psychological approaches to six literary texts, preceeded by a priliminary discussion, in chapter one, of the current state of psychological criticism, analyzing the conceptual and procedural difficulties with Freudian-based metatheories by examining briefly the recent history of Freudian metatheory as it has been employed by literary critics.
Following this discussion of theoretical matters, I then focus, in chapters three, four, and five, on practical readings of six literary texts, each analyzed with the help of a particular psychological system. In the third chapter, I employ family systems therapy to analyze problems of theme and characterization in D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers and in Henry Roth's Call It Sleep. In the fourth chapter, I borrow insights from writings in the philosophy of science and in personality theory to examine two characters who happen to be scientists: the first from John Steinbeck's short story, "The Snake" (from The Long Valley); the second character I investigate is the narrator in Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
In the fifth chapter, I discuss first the seedy "anti-hero" of George Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying and second, the major female character in John Fowles's The Magus, both in the light of a neo-Piagetian theoretical framework (from Robert Kegan's The Evolving Self and Aaron Beck's Treatment of Depression) concerned with the development of adult emotions. In the last chapter, I investigate the process of disciplinary expansion: How do new idea, alien methods, & foreign concepts gain admission to our discipline and ultimately get promoted by literary critics and scholars? Understanding how ideas become part of the tacit knowledge in literary study may help us understand why Freudian metatheory has taken such possession of our discipline to the exclusion of almost all other psychologies.
Readers of this book include psychologists interested in the uses of narrative to analyze character, both real and fictional, and literary critics and scholars who might wish to learn what their psychological sisters and brothers are doing when members of both disciplines look at literary texts. Generally speaking, many literary people have long since rejected the basic premises of classical Freudian dogma while still cheerfully employing concepts and vocabulary reflecting late nineteenth century "science." Thus, for those who automatically look for the clues to intrapsychic behavior by investigating first childhood antecedents of adult personality, for those who wish to examine a character's (singular) "unconscious," looking for real motives, for those who think psycho-sexual conflict forms the root of all or almost all of a literary character's neuroses--for all such readers this book offers several contemporary alternatives to these ancient Freudian metatheoretical assumptions
"
issue of Style (24.3) Fall 1990. Rpt as Literary Character, University Press of America, 1993.
0-8191-8885-9
Introduction by John V. Knapp, and Essays by
1) Kenneth J. Gergan;
2) Richard J. Gerrig and David W. Allbritton
3) Baruch Hochman and Ilja Wachs
4) James Phelan
5) David Fishlov
6) Gerald Mead
7) Uri Margolin
8) Okey Goode
9) Ineke Bockting"
Papers by John V. Knapp
Although teaching is perhaps the central public activity of most university English professors, there is surprisingly little research in the specifics of expert professorial practice. Many previous studies describe, recipe-like, the end products of successful teaching, while others conflate expertise in this subject matter with pedagogical expertise. This study focuses on the moves the expert professor makes in a semester-long process of literary teaching----of a literature far removed in time and space from most undergraduates' experience----and discusses a day-to-day case study of an advanced undergraduate literature course in the writings of John Milton. By employing a "situated learning" model explaining the incremental growth of students' knowledge and critical skills, the author details how an expert professor teaches complex works to undergraduates with no previous exposure to an author's writings. This process is generalized to describe literary learning in its particulars and the paths students must take from possessing scant knowledge about an author or historical period to their developing mastery.
John V. Knapp is professor of English at Northern Illinois University, and Editor of the literary journal, Style.
University of Delaware Press, June 2008
ISBN: 978-0-87413-026-3 "
Edited by John V. Knapp and Kenneth Womack
The development in recent years of the intersections between the family and literary study continues to emerge as one of the most productive and illuminating arenas of contemporary critique. As an interpretative mechanism, family systems therapy (fst) provides scholars and readers alike with a revelatory social psychology for evaluating the nature of the
familial structures that often mark our textual experiences. In addition to addressing the family dynamic through which a given literary character develops a fully realized sense of self, family systems therapy allows readers to examine the patterns by which characters function in their larger intimate systems, whether those systems be social, institutional, or even global.
*Reading the Family Dance: Family Systems Therapy and Literary Study* offers a collection of original essays that reflects both the substantial critical interest in this important contemporary field of inquiry, as well as its wide range of forays into such disciplines as feminism, gender studies, ethnicity, race, and cultural studies. Divided into three
descriptive sections, Reading the Family Dance includes interdisciplinary essays that address various literary works in terms of family systems therapies respective approaches to our understandings of the self, the family, and the world. The essays in this volume range through much of the imaginative literature in English, including British works, ethnic and
canonized American texts, and even the translation of a Brazilian novel; although many of the works analyzed in this collection were published in the twentieth century, Reading the Family Dance features essays devoted to Shakespeare and to various works of nineteenth-century fiction as well.
The volume begins with John V. Knapp's comprehensive and wide-ranging introduction to family systems therapy and literary study. In addition to providing readers with an intellectual history of the discipline, Knapp establishes a contemporary scholarly foundation for the ensuing collection. The essays by Kenneth Womack, Rosemary Babcock, Gary Storhoff, and Lee Ann De Reus included in the volume's first section, "The Self:
Family Systems Therapy and the Quest for Identity," examine a host of issues related to the development of the self, including the onset of personal identity, sibling differentiation, and interpersonal communication.
In the volume's second section, "The Family: Family Systems
Therapy and the Discourse of Community," the essays by Joan I. Schwarz, Steven Snyder, Jerome Bump, Sara Cooper, and John V. Knapp discuss the vocabularies of community that assist families as they develop into functional units or, conversely, into dysfunctional factions. In Reading the Family Dance's final section, "The World: Reading Family Systems Therapy in Extremis," the essays by Todd F. Davis, James M. Decker, Marco Malaspina, and Denis Jonnes explore the ways in which our culture often manifests itself in larger family systems. The essays in this section examine the ethics of these larger communities through their analyzes of Hollywood's entertainment culture, Renaissance-era family dynamics, and America's postwar family system.
University of Delaware Press, 2003.
978-0874138238 "
Knapp, John V.
ISBN10: 0761802576
ISBN13: 9780761802570
Format: Paperback
Pub. Date: 5/1/1996
Publisher(s): Rowman & Littlefield Pub Inc
This is a book of psychological literary criticism. The various psychologies I employ in these readings would be immediately recognizable by both clinical and experimental psychologists; they are not, emphatically not, based on Freudian and/or Lacanian metatheories. I propose in this book, then, a trio of psychological approaches to six literary texts, preceeded by a priliminary discussion, in chapter one, of the current state of psychological criticism, analyzing the conceptual and procedural difficulties with Freudian-based metatheories by examining briefly the recent history of Freudian metatheory as it has been employed by literary critics.
Following this discussion of theoretical matters, I then focus, in chapters three, four, and five, on practical readings of six literary texts, each analyzed with the help of a particular psychological system. In the third chapter, I employ family systems therapy to analyze problems of theme and characterization in D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers and in Henry Roth's Call It Sleep. In the fourth chapter, I borrow insights from writings in the philosophy of science and in personality theory to examine two characters who happen to be scientists: the first from John Steinbeck's short story, "The Snake" (from The Long Valley); the second character I investigate is the narrator in Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
In the fifth chapter, I discuss first the seedy "anti-hero" of George Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying and second, the major female character in John Fowles's The Magus, both in the light of a neo-Piagetian theoretical framework (from Robert Kegan's The Evolving Self and Aaron Beck's Treatment of Depression) concerned with the development of adult emotions. In the last chapter, I investigate the process of disciplinary expansion: How do new idea, alien methods, & foreign concepts gain admission to our discipline and ultimately get promoted by literary critics and scholars? Understanding how ideas become part of the tacit knowledge in literary study may help us understand why Freudian metatheory has taken such possession of our discipline to the exclusion of almost all other psychologies.
Readers of this book include psychologists interested in the uses of narrative to analyze character, both real and fictional, and literary critics and scholars who might wish to learn what their psychological sisters and brothers are doing when members of both disciplines look at literary texts. Generally speaking, many literary people have long since rejected the basic premises of classical Freudian dogma while still cheerfully employing concepts and vocabulary reflecting late nineteenth century "science." Thus, for those who automatically look for the clues to intrapsychic behavior by investigating first childhood antecedents of adult personality, for those who wish to examine a character's (singular) "unconscious," looking for real motives, for those who think psycho-sexual conflict forms the root of all or almost all of a literary character's neuroses--for all such readers this book offers several contemporary alternatives to these ancient Freudian metatheoretical assumptions
"
issue of Style (24.3) Fall 1990. Rpt as Literary Character, University Press of America, 1993.
0-8191-8885-9
Introduction by John V. Knapp, and Essays by
1) Kenneth J. Gergan;
2) Richard J. Gerrig and David W. Allbritton
3) Baruch Hochman and Ilja Wachs
4) James Phelan
5) David Fishlov
6) Gerald Mead
7) Uri Margolin
8) Okey Goode
9) Ineke Bockting"