Minrose Gwin

Kenan Eminent Professor of English
Co-Editor of the Southern Literary Journal.
mgwin@email.unc.edu
919-962-4042
444 Greenlaw

Education: B.A., M.A., Ph.D. University of Tennessee  

I have lived and taught in the southeast, southwest, northeast, and midwest regions of the U.S.  Similarly, my writing, research, and teaching have tended to move across historical and geographic frames.  My interests in questions of race and gender, history and memory, location and cultural space have focused my work in American literature, women’s writing, and literature of the U.S. South.  In teaching and writing about the U.S. South, I think of the South as a representational space that authors from within and without the region have molded; on the other side of the coin, I have become increasingly interested in how writers from the U.S. South speak to global events of the contemporary period on matters of community, memory, history, and cultural trauma and their relations to an aesthetics of testimony and interpretation.  I also write creative nonfiction, poetry, and fiction.

My two most recent books are Wishing for Snow: A Memoir (2004) and The Woman in the Red Dress: Gender, Space, and Reading (2002).  The latter works at the intersections of identity, place, and history.  It brings to the reading of contemporary women’s literature those recent theories of space and gender that have flooded the fields of geography, anthropology, psychology, architecture and planning, environmental studies, history, and cultural and postcolonial studies.  Such thinking emphasizes that space is not an empty container that holds human activity but rather multiple fields of interaction created by shifting social and political arrangements among individuals, groups, and nations.  I argue that contemporary spatial theory in the social sciences can benefit by attending to the complex and mysterious act of reading literature and the relationship, even necessity, of imaginative encounter to social and political engagement. Joy Harjo’s “Deer Dancer,” from which I take my title, is a poem about shifting perspective and imaginative possibility.  Similarly,  I use the motif of space travel to describe reading as a form of dislocation which opens perspective and shifts identity, with powerful consequences for gender, racial, and sexual politics.

My Faulkner work includes The Feminine and Faulkner: Reading (Beyond) Sexual Difference (1990) and recent essays such as  “Racial Wounding and the Aesthetics of the Middle Voice in Absalom, Absalom!  and Go Down, Moses” (2005), “Whose Faulkner?” (2000),  “Did Ernest Like Gordon?  Mosquitoes and the Bite of Gender Trouble” (1996) and “Her Shape, His Hand: The Spaces of African American Women in Go Down, Moses” (1996).  I plan to collect these and some other Faulkner essays I’m working on in a book entitled “Faulkner and the Other."

I’m also engaged in two contiguous projects about racial violence, trauma, and cultural memory. The first is a scholarly book, situated in the multiple arenas of trauma studies, which investigates the function of aesthetics in placing, re-membering, or forgetting specific events of cultural trauma and the second a novel about a young girl’s complicity in her father’s act of racial violence.  Both projects are situated in the period of the Civil Rights Movement, and both are located in specific historical incidents and moments.

I enjoy teaching a variety of courses.  My courses characteristically bring bodies of literary texts and bodies of theory into conversation.

Recent Courses:
Southern Women Writers and Theories of Space and Gender
The Contemporary Memoir
Faulkner, Morrison, and Questions of Trauma, Memory, and History (Graduate)
Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor: The Art of the Short Story (Graduate)
Literature and Culture of the U.S. South
Teaching Southern Literature (Graduate)
Queer Texts: Literature and Theory (Graduate and Undergraduate)
Faulkner (Graduate)
Gender, Space, and Reading (Graduate and Undergraduate)
Creative Nonfiction Workshop (Graduate and Undergraduate)
Woolf, Faulkner, and 'Gender Trouble' (Graduate)
Toni Morrison (Graduate and Undergraduate)
Contemporary Women Poets and Space (Graduate and Undergraduate)
African American Women Writers
Contemporary American Women Writers and Feminist Theory (Graduate)
Woolf, Faulkner, Hurston (Graduate)
Women Writers and Nature (Honors)

Department of English and Comparative Literature | Greenlaw Hall, CB #3520 | University of North Carolina | Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3520
phone: 919.962.5481 | fax: 919.962.3520