Associate
Professor and
Graduate Coordinator
Department of English
West Chester University
West Chester, PA 19383
(610) 436-2745
e-mail: rfletcher@wcupa.edu
1992:
Ph.D., English,
Dissertation: "Thackeray and Pragmatism," Director: Alexander Welsh
1989:
M.A.,
English,
1983:
B.A.,
English,
Book Chapter
"`I leave a
page
half writ´: Narrative Discoherence
in Michael Field's
Underneath the Bough." Gender and Genre: Essays on
Women's
Poetry, Late Romantics to Late Victorians, 1830-1900. Eds. Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain.
Articles in
Refereed
Journals
"'Heir of
All the
Universe': Evolutionary Epistemology in Mathilde Blind's Birds of
Passage:
Songs of the Occident and Orient." Victorian Poetry
43.4 (Winter 2005): 435-54.
"Convent
Thoughts: Augusta Webster and the Body Politics of the Victorian
Cloister." Victorian Literature and Culture 31.1 (March
2003): 295-313.
"`Visual
Thinking´ and
the Picture Story in The History
of Henry Esmond." PMLA 113, 3
(May 1998): 379-94.
"`Proving a
thing even
while you contradict it´: Fictions, Beliefs, and Legitimation
in The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq.." Studies
in
the Novel 27, 4 (Winter 1995): 493-514.
"`The Foolishest of Existing Mortals´:
Thackeray, `Gurlyle,´
and the Character(s) of
Fiction." CLIO: A Journal of Literature, History, Philosophy of History 24 (Winter 1995):
113-125.
"`Mere Outer
Works´
and `Fleeting Effects´: Thackeray's Novelistic Art and the
Art of the
Novel." JEGP 91 (January 1992): 43-64.
"The Dandy and
the
Fogy: Thackeray and the Aesthetics/Ethics of the Literary
Pragmatist." ELH 58 (Summer 1991): 383-404.
Encyclopedia
Articles
Entry on
"Violet
Fane" (Mary Montgomerie Lamb, Lady Currie). An
Encyclopedia of British Women Writers. Eds. Paul and
June Schleuter
2nd ed.
Updated
entry on Emily Brontë. An
Encyclopedia of British Women Writers. Eds.
Paul
and June Schleuter. 2nd ed.
Book Review
Review of
Ruth Bernard Yeazell's Harems of the
Mind:
Passages of Western Art and Literature (Yale UP, 2000). Victorians
Institute Journal 30 (2002): 228-233.
Internet
Essay
"William
Makepeace
Thackeray: A Brief Biography." The Victorian Web (April
1996). Administered by George Landow
(
“Puppets,
Automatons and Avatars: Automating the Reader-Player in Electronic
Literature
and Computer Game.” To be
presented at “Playing the Past: Nostalgia in Video Games and Electronic
Literature.” The 1st Annual University of Florida Game
Studies
Conference.
“The
Post-Cyberpunk ‘Heterotopia’ of Cory Doctorow’s Down
and Out in the Magic Kingdom.”
Presented at “Haunted by the Future,” the
"'Recreant
Longings': Monastic Sequestration and Sexual Dissidence in Augusta
Webster's
Dramatic Lyrics. " Presented at the 2004 18th- and 19th-Century British Women
Writers
Conference. University of Georgia, Athens. March 27, 2004.
“Community, Dissent,
and the Teaching of English in a Time of
War.”
Organized and chaired panel for English Association
of the
Pennsylvania State Universities Conference.
“Gender, Mysticism, and
the Disruption of Mind-Body Dualism in
Augusta Webster’s ‘Sister Annunciata.’” Presented at
the 2003 18th- and 19th-Century British Women Writers Conference.
"'Heir
of All the Universe': Evolutionary
Epistemology in the
Colonialist Poetry of Mathilde
Blind." Presented at the 2002 18th- and
19th-Century British Women Writers
Conference. University of
Wisconsin-Madison.
April 18-21, 2002.
"'Soul-Drift': Mathilde Blind and the Passage to
"'A
Commonwealth in
Flight': Solidarity and Otherness in Mathilde
Blind's
Birds of Passage: Songs of the Occident and Orient."
Presented at "The Victorian World:
"WebTech
Meets the BritLit Survey."
Co-presented
(with LuAnn McCracken Fletcher) at the 2000 English Association of the
Pennsylvania State Universities Conference. East Stroudsburg
University,
October, 2000.
"Reframing
an 'unmitigated guidebook': Michael Field, Yeats, Berenson,
and the Sexual Politics of the Picture-Poem." The 1999
Victorians
Institute.
"Learning By
Doing:
Using the Web, a MOO, and an Electronic Bulletin Board in ‘Introduction
to Literature'." Creative Computing Across
the
Curriculum Conference. Shippensburg University, May
1998. Electronic
Conference
Proceedings: http://www.ship.edu/~create/list.html#Fletcher.
"`To see things
from
their own centre´: `Ekphrastic
Hope´ in Michael
Field's Sight and Song. Presented at the
1997 Northeast
Modern Language Association conference,
"`I leave a
page
half-writ´: Narrative Discoherence
in Michael Field's
Underneath the Bough." Presented at an
international conference on "Rethinking Women's Poetry 1730-1930,"
"`The Foolishest of Existing Mortals´:
Thackeray, `Gurlyle,´
and the Character(s) of
Fiction." Presented at the NEMLA conference,
"Thackeray's
Art Criticism and his Art of the Novel." Presented at the
Dickens
Project Winter Conference, UC Riverside,
"Visions
and Revisions of Victorian Women in Painting and Poetry." Presented
for WCU Honors Program. February 27, 1996.
Discussions
of Jane Eyre and Wide
Article on Augusta
Webster's constructions of masculinity in her
dramatic monologues.
Article on
Cory Doctorow’s science fiction novel Down and Out in the
Conference presentation
on the figure of the automaton in selected electronic literature and
video
games.
Undergraduate
Eng 120:
Effective Writing I (3 sections)
Eng 121:
Effective Writing II (3 sections, including one themed around
“Researching and Writing Cyberspace”)
Lit 165:
Introduction to Literature (30 sections)
Lit 168:
Conventions of
Lit 231:
English Literature II (4 sections)
Lit 340:
The Romantic Movement (1 section)
Lit 341: The
Nineteenth-Century British Novel (5 sections)
Lit 342:
Victorian Literature (7 sections)
Seminars
Lit 400:
Irony, Ethics,
and the British Novel (1 section)
Lit 400:
Gender
Politics/Victorian Poetics; retitled as
Gender and
Sexuality in Victorian Poetry (2 sections)
Lit 400:
Dickens and
Thackeray (1 section)
Lit 400:
Victorian
Literature on the Internet (1 section)
Lit 400:
Murder,
Mystery, and Mayhem in Victorian Popular Fiction (1 section)
Lit 400:
Reading Cyberliterature, From Print to the
WWW (2
sections)
Lit 400:
Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Beyond the Love Story (1 section)
Lit 400:
Victorian Women Writers (1 section)
Graduate
Eng 500:
Introduction
to the Profession (5 sections)
Eng 534:
Victorian
Poetry (3 sections)
Eng 536:
Nineteenth-Century
British Novel (2 sections)
Eng 615:
Special
Topics--Victorian Women Writers (1 section)
Eng 620: MA
Essay (5
sections)
Standing
Committees
Ad Hoc
Committee
Standing
Committees
Ad Hoc
Committees
Attendance
at the Electronic Literature Symposium: The State of the Arts. UCLA.
Internet
and Text-Encoding Workshop Series. Sponsored
by the Center for Electronic
Texts in the Humanities.
Attendance at
Mid-Atlantic
Association for Computers and Writing Conference,
Faculty
Development Seminar
on Curriculum Integration (Spring 1995)
WCU-funded
(Faculty Development Grant) attendance at the
Spring 2004 PT3 Grant. Funded
scholarly study of digital poetry and training in Macromedia Flash.
Fall
2001-Spring 2002 PT3 (Preparing Tomorrow's Teachers with Technology)
Grant. $1500. To fund
the development of an electronic literature course for the general
education
curriculum.
Sabbatical
2000-2001 (Competitive).
Spring
2001 CASSDA Grant.
Funded archival research at the British Library,
Spring
1999.
USETECH Grant. Supported incorporation
of technology
into the teaching of Lit 231: English Literature II to facilitate
collaborative
work with a class run at
1995
Grant for Travel to International Meetings Abroad. American
Council of Learned Societies.
1995 WCU CASSDA
Grant for "`I leave a page half
writ´."
Funding supported research in the British Library,
Recipient,
1991-1992
Bradford A. Booth/ Majl Ewing Dissertation
Fellowship, UCLA
Teaching
Assistant,
Associate, and Fellow, UCLA 1984-1991
Electronic
Literature Organization
Modern
Language
Association
Northeast
Modern
Language Association
Victorians
Institute