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The Gender Studies Program at the University of Texas at Dallas will be sponsoring a lecture by Trysh Travis Assistant Professor of Women�s Studies and Consociate Professor of English at the University of Florida at Gainesville
�Trauma, Recovery, and Spirituality in Late 20th-Century American Women�s Literary Fiction (Or, Where Did Oprah�s Book Club Come From, and Why Should Anybody Care?)� The genre known casually as �the Oprah Book� did not spring fully-formed from the head of the talk show queen. This talk looks at the literary history that lies back of that popular genre, and locates its origin in the immediate aftermath of Second Wave feminism, when a new vocabulary for discussing trauma and recovery became available to women writers, and a new set of publishing practices helped to popularize stories about those issues. After laying that history out, the paper asks, how does knowing this (or knowing any literary or cultural history) change the way we look at the texts in question? Trysh Travis is Assistant Professor of Women�s Studies and a Consociate Professor of English at the University of Florida in Gainesville. She received an MA in English from the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College, and a PhD in American Studies from Yale University. Her research focuses on the gendered history of U.S. book publishing and reading in the 20th-century, and she has published articles on that topic in journals like Book History, American Literary History, and The Journal of Modern Literature. With funding this year from the National Endowment for the Humanities, she is completing (she hopes) work on a book entitled �The Persistence of Sentiment: Contemporary American Literature and the Culture of 12-Step Recovery.� The lecture will take place on Thursday 16 March from 5 � 6:15 p.m. in Room 1.110 in the School of Management (SOM) Building. It is free and open to the public. Information on parking and driving directions can be found at: http://www.utdallas.edu/visitors-index.html Questions? Contact Rebecca Wiser at (972) 883-2354 or [email protected]
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