Faculty Directory
Robert Burkholder
Associate Professor of English
Contact:
22 Burrowes Building
University Park, PA 16802
Office Phone: 814-865-7105
reb5@psu.edu
Office Hours:
Monday 2:30-3 and Wednesday 12:15-1:15
Robert E. Burkholder is associate professor of English at Penn State , University Park . He is the author, with Joel Myerson, of Emerson and Annotated Secondary Bibliography and Ralph Waldo Emerson: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism, 1980-1991 . He and Myerson co-edited Critical Essays on Ralph Waldo Emerson , and he edited Critical Essays on Melville's “Benito Cereno.” He is also an editor of English Traits , volume five in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson , and a member of the editorial board of the Emerson edition. He teaches experience-based courses at Penn State , and has taken literature students to the Grand Canyon, the Appalachian Trail , and various wilderness areas to enhance their understanding of the texts they read. In 2000 he began the Penn State Wilderness Literature Field Institute, a course that combines backpacking, white water rafting, and rock climbing with the reading and interpretation of literature. He is a member of the Advisory Board of the Penn State Center for American Literary Studies. He holds a B.A. from Washington College , Chestertown , Maryland , and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina .
Publications:
Books:
- Editor, with Joel Myerson, Critical Essays on Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983)
- Compiler, with Joel Myerson, Emerson: An Annotated Secondary Bibliography (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985)
- Editor, Critical Essays on Melville's “Benito Cereno,” (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1992)
- Editor, with Philip Nicoloff and Douglas E. Wilson, Ralph Waldo Emerson , English Traits , Volume V in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1994)
- Compiler, with Joel Myerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism, 1980-1991 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994)
- Editor, with Wesley T. Mott, Emersonian Circles: Essays in Honor of Joel Myerson (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1997)
Articles:
Refereed Journals
- “The Uses of Myth in Pat Conroy's The Great Santini ,” Critique , 21 (1979), 31-37; reprinted in Contemporary Literary Criticism , Vol. 30, ed. Jean C. Stine and Daniel G. Marowski (Detroit: Gale Research, 1984), pp. 78-79
- “Transcendental Re-Seeing: Teaching Revision Using the Works of Emerson and Thoreau,” Teaching English in the Two-Year College , 12 (February 1985), 14-21
- “Emerson, Kneeland, and The Divinity School Address,” American Literature , 58 (March 1986), 1-14; reprinted in On Emerson: The Best from American Literature, ed. Edwin H. Cady and Louis J. Budd (Durham: Duke University Press, 1988), pp. 263-276
- “The Radical Emerson: Politics in ‘The American Scholar,'” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance , 34 (4 th Quarter 1988), 37-57
- “Emerson and the West: Concord , the Historical Discourse , and Beyond,” Nineteenth- Century Studies , 4 (1990), 93-103
- “History's Mad Pranks: Some Recent Emerson Studies,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance , 38 (3 rd Quarter 1992), 231-263
- “The Appalachian Trail : An Environmental Classroom,” Academic Exchange Quarterly , 10 (Summer 2006), 221-225.
Contributions to Books
- “The Contemporary Reception of English Traits ,” in Emerson Centenary Essays , ed. Joel Myerson (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), pp. 156-172
- with Joel Myerson, “Ralph Waldo Emerson,” in The Transcendentalists: A Review of
- Research and Criticism , ed. Joel Myerson (New York: Modern Language Association, 1984), pp. 135-166
- “Moncure Daniel Conway,” “Franklin Benjamin Sanborn,” and “John Weiss,” in The Transcendentalists: A Review of Research and Criticism (New York: Modern Language Association, 1984), pp. 117-122, 253-259, 295-298
- “Early Nineteenth-Century American Literature,” in American Literary Scholarship 1994 , ed. David J. Nordloh (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 203-222.
- “Early Nineteenth-Century American Literature,” in American Literary Scholarship 1995 , ed. Gary Scharnhorst (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), pp. 207-233.
- “Early Nineteenth-Century American Literature,” in American Literary Scholarship 1996 , ed. David J. Nordloh (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 215-242
- “'To See Things in Their Wholeness': Consilience, Natural History, and Teaching Literature Outdoors, in Teaching in the Field: Working with Students in the Outdoor Classroom , ed. Hal Crimmel ( Salt Lake City : University of Utah Press, 2003), pp. 17-32.
- “(Re)Visiting ‘The Adirondacks': Emerson's Confrontation with Wild Nature,” in Emerson Bicentennial Essays , ed. Ronald Bosco and Joel Myerson, ( Boston : Massachusetts Historical Society [ University of Virginia Press ], 2006), pp. 247- 269.
Contributions to Reference Works
- “Books Received,” in Studies in the American Renaissance 1977 , ed. Joel Myerson (Boston: Twayne, 1978), pp. 405-409
- “Books Received,” in Studies in the American Renaissance 1978, ed. Joel Myerson (Boston: Twayne, 1979), pp. 473-489
- “Louis Agassiz,” “Washington Allston,” “Richard Henry Dana, Jr.,” “Horatio Greenough,” “Isaac Hecker,” “Charles Eliot Norton,” “John Gorham Palfrey,” “Sampson Reed,” “Franklin Benjamin Sanborn,” “William Wetmore Story,” “George Ticknor,” in The American Renaissance in New England, The Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 1 , ed. Joel Myerson (Detroit: Gale Research, 1978), pp. 1-2, 6-7, 32-33, 77, 102, 141, 142, 158, 160-161, 183-184
- “James Agee,” and “William S. Burroughs,” in American Novelists Since World War II, The Dictionary of Literary Biography , vol. 2, ed. Geoffrey Helterman and Richard Layman (Detroit: Gale Research, 1978), pp. 3-7, 70-75
- “Ralph Waldo Emerson,” in First Printings of American Authors: Contributions Toward Descriptive Checklists , ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli, et al. (Detroit, Gale Research, 1978), pp. 143-161
- “Books Received,” in Studies in the American Renaissance 1979 , ed. Joel Myerson (Boston: Twayne, 1979), pp. 489-506
- “Park Benjamin,” in Antebellum Writers in New York and the South, The Dictionary of Literary Biography , vol. 3, ed. Joel Myerson (Detroit: Gale Research, 1979), pp. 12-16
- “Books Received,” in Studies in the American Renaissance 1980 , ed.Joel Myerson (Boston: Twayne, 1980), pp. 445-474
- “Benjamin Edes and John Gill,” in Boston Printers, Publishers, and Booksellers: 1640- 1800 , ed. Benjamin Franklin V (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980), pp. 117-135
- “William Clyde Fitch,” in Twentieth-Century American Dramatists, The Dictionary of Literary Biography , vol. 7 , ed. John MacNicholas (Detroit: Gale Research, 1981), pp. 178-188
- “William S. Burroughs,” in The Dictionary of Biography Yearbook 1981 , ed. Karen L. Rood, Jean W. Ross, and Richard Ziegfeld (Detroit: Gale Research, 1982), pp. 24- 29.
- “Jim Harrison,” in The Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook 1982 , ed. Richard Ziegfeld (Detroit: Gale Research, 1983), pp. 266-275
- “James Crumley,” in The Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook 1984 , ed. Jean W. Ross (Detroit: Gale Research, 1985), pp. 245-253
- “Ralph Waldo Emerson,” in Biographical Dictionary of Modern Peace Leaders , ed. Harold Josephson, et al. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), pp. 258-260
- “James Agee,” in The New Consciousness, 1941-1968, The Concise Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit: Gale Research, 1987), pp. 3-10
- “George Willis Cooke,” in American Literary Critics and Scholars, 1880-1900, The Dictionary of Literary Biography , vol. 71 , ed. John W. Rathbun and Monica Grecu (Detroit: Gale Research, 1988), pp. 50-57
- “James Agee,” in Facts on File Bibliography of American Fiction , 1919-1978, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (New York: Facts on File, 1991), pp. 47-50
- “Moncure Daniel Conway,” and “Franklin Benjamin Sanborn,” in Biographical Dictionary of Transcendentalism , ed. Wesley T. Mott (New York: Greenwood Press, 1996), pp. 53-54, 229-231
- with Daniel Nadenicek, “ Concord , Massachusetts ,” in The Encyclopedia of Transcendentalism , ed. Wesley T. Mott (New York: Greenwood Press, 1996), pp. 39-41.
- “Franklin Benjamin Sanborn,” in American National Biography , ed. John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 19: 237-238
- “Ralph Waldo Emerson,” and “Transcendentalism,” in Encyclopedia of American Literature , ed. Steven R. Serafin (New York: Continuum, 1999), pp. 328-332, 1154-1156
- “ Concord , Massachusetts ,” in American History Through Literature, 1820-1870 , ed, Janet Gabler-Hover and Robert Sattlemeyer ( New York : Charles Scribner's Sons, 2005), pp. 262-268.
Recent Selected Book Reviews:
- Review of Ronald A. Bosco, ed., The Topical Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson , vol. 2, in Nineteenth-Century Prose , 21 (Spring 1994), 115-119
- Review of Lewis Perry, Boats Against the Current: American Culture Between Revolution and Modernity, 1820-1860 , in American Literature , 66 (June 1994), 370-372
- Review of Robert M. Greenberg, Splintered Worlds: Fragmentation and the Ideal of Diversity in the Work of Emerson, Melville, Whitman, and Dickinson , in Journal of American History , 81 (March 1995).
- Review of Don Scheese, Nature Writing: The Pastoral Impulse , in Environmental History , 4 (January 1999), 108-109
- Review of Lee Rust Brown, The Emerson Museum , in Emerson Society Papers , 10 (Fall 1999), 6-7
- Review of Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth , and James C. McKusick, Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology , in Comparative Literature Studies , 39.3 (2002), 253-256
- Review of Michael Bryson, Visions of the Land: Science, Literature, and the American Environment from the Era of Exploration to the Age of Ecology , in Environmental History , 8 (July 2003), 501-503
- Review of Kimberly A. Smith, Wendell Berry and the Agrarian Tradition: A Common Grace ,” in Environmental History , 9 (January 2004), 151-152.
- Review of Lawrence Buell, Emerson , in Journal of American History . 92 (December 2005), 986-987.
Honors, Grants, and Awards:
- The Sophie Kerr Prize , Washington College , Chestertown, MD, 1972
- The Milton S. Eisenhower Award for Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching , Penn State University, 1992
- Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association: archival research support (1978)
- Graduate Council, University of South Carolina : archival research support (1979)
- Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies, Penn State : Faculty Research Fellowship to support archival research (1981)
- Schreyer Institute for Innovation in Teaching and Learning, Penn State : Teaching Fellowship to support experience based wilderness literature course (Spring 1998)
- Institute for the Arts and Humanities, Penn State : Team-teaching grant to facilitate work with Ken Tamminga of Landscape Architecture on interdisciplinary approaches to landscape and place (2005)
- Institute for the Arts and Humanities, Penn State : Grant (funded by the NEH) to offer the interdisciplinary Summer Institute for High School Teachers, “Exploring Place Through Writing and Photography,” 17-21 July 2006, at the University Park Campus.
Course Descriptions:
Professor Burkholder's adventure literature programs www.outreach.psu.edu/C&I/AdventureLit/
English 180—“Literature and the Natural World”
This is a course in literature about nature, and like most English courses, its general goals are to introduce the student to a particular kind of writing in a systematic way, to help her find ways to understand major ideas in the type of writing under consideration, and to help her speak and write in an informed way about that type of writing. The major question this course addresses is, What is the optimal human/nature relationship? That question is explored in three units within the larger course: first, an exploration of various versions of the pastoral, each of which presents its own answer to the question of the best way for humans to interact with nature; second, a sampling of nature writing in the United States from the nineteenth-century to the twenty-first century that includes selections from the work of some of this country's most important and well known nature writers; and third, an interrogation of the meaning of wildness and its place in a technologically advanced time.
In order to be as broad in our approach as possible, students consider various kinds of writing—fiction, non-fiction, and poetry—from several centuries. They also read works that portray a variety of physical environments--from hyper-urbanized New York City to the wilderness of the Northwest—as well as a variety of endeavors in which people interact with the land—from beekeeping and gardening to wilderness exploration and subsistence hunting. The goal is to be as suggestive as possible about the possibilities inherent in writing about the natural world.
English 297--Sailing the Chesapeake Bay : Cultural and Natural Landscape(s)
“Sailing the Chesapeake” is a 4.5 credit program that combines classroom study of the history, ecology, and cultural significance of the Chesapeake Bay and its watershed (including Central Pennsylvania) with outdoor experiences that will illustrate, supplement, and enhance classroom work. The course work will be devoted to reading accounts of the Chesapeake dating from the seventeenth-century, popular treatments of Bay history by writers like James Michener, environmental writing by William Warner and Tom Horton, and the treatment of the Chesapeake in the work of novelists like Gilbert Byron, Robert Day and John Barth. Enhancement activities include: exploration by canoe of the Chesapeake Bay watershed in Central Pennsylvania, exploration of the Susquehanna and Juniata Rivers in the Harrisburg Area by canoe or kayak, a weekend of public service arranged through the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, and a weekend of Bay Studies at the Echo Hill Outdoor School, on the Bay in Warton, Maryland, including crabbing, folk music, and a sailing trip on a rare Bay skipjack. All these activities will be conducted on weekends during the Fall Semester. As a whole, a student who enrolls in this program will know the Bay and its watershed in both an abstract and experiential sense.
English 430—American Renaissance
When the literary critic F.O. Matthiessen coined the phrase American Renaissance in 1941 as the title for his monumental study of antebellum American literature, he intended it to describe his "realization of how great a number of our past masterpieces were produced in one extraordinarily concentrated moment of expression" (that is, the years from 1850-1855). Matthiessen's phrase, however, has come to be used to describe the culture of Jacksonian America, roughly the period from 1825 to the Civil War. This was a period of self-definition and growth for American culture, the period in which the term Manifest Destiny was invented to supply a rationale for expansionism and nationalism. Perhaps because of this unprecedented growth, Americans of this era often had to confront worlds that--in their apparent chaos, savagery, or wildness seemed completely alien to them. The focus of this course is the literary treatment of that confrontation with the Other. The purpose of the course is to examine the ways in which some antebellum writers depicted wildness and to attempt to arrive at an understanding of what these depictions tell us about American culture, both then and now.
GOALS:
• To help you improve your critical reading and writing about literature.
• To systematically introduce you to the literature of pre-Civil War America .
• To historically situate that literature so as to understand how major ideas and issues of the time inform the work of important writers .
