Faculty Directory
Robert Lougy
Professor of English
Contact:
224 Burrowes Building
University Park, PA 16802
Office Phone: 814-863-0283
rxl1@psu.edu
Office Hours:
Monday/Wednesday 1:30-2:30 and Friday 9-10
Research Interests:
19th and 20th-century literature, especially fiction and the theory of fiction. I am drawn again and again to Charles Dickens, finding in him a writer who pushes the envelope on just about everything he touches. Special research interests in narrative theory, intrigued by the question of why people tell stories and why they tell them as they do. I am also fascinated by Bakhtinian theories of the grotesque and representations of the body. And much of my work focuses on the intersection of psychoanalysis and literature, on the ways in which psychoanalytic theory, especially that of Freud and Jacques Lacan, has many implications for narrative theory and literary criticism.
Major Publications:
Martin Chuzzlewit: An Annotated Bibliography (Garland Publishing Co., 1990)
The Children of the Chapel (Ohio University Press, 1982)
Charles Robert Maturin (Bucknell University Press, 1975)
Inaugural Wounds: The Shaping of Desire in Five Nineteenth-Century English Narratives. (Ohio University Press, 2004)
Other Publications:
Has published numerous articles on various nineteenth century writers, such as Thackeray, Tennyson, Dickens, and Swinburne in journals such as PMLA, ELH, Dickens Studies annual, Victorian Poetry, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Modern Language Quarterly, Criticism, and Clio.
Teaching Statement:
I want my students to listen to the language of texts, not only to what they say, but also to how they say it. Small children bathe in the sounds of words as they babble and make noises, and although we lose some of this joy as we grow older, we can still find pleasure in the sounds that words make as they bounce against one another. If we are willing to open ourselves up to the power that words possess, we can come to realize that language can take us to strange and at times disturbing places. I want my students to be willing to visit such places. I am attracted to texts that dislodge my sense of things, and I try to show my students how literature asks us to take chances, to see things we have not seen, to ask questions we might prefer not to ask. Art, Robert Browning writes, makes us see things we have looked at before but have not noticed, "the shape of things, their colours, lights and shades, / Changes, surprises." Good literature acquaints us with those changes and surprises, good and bad, that life promises.
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