Faculty Directory
Linda Selzer
Assitant Professor of English
Contact:
119 Burrowes Building
University Park, PA 16802
Office Phone: 814-865-3548
lfs1@psu.edu
Office Hours:
Wednesday 3-5 and Thursday 1-2
Linda Selzer is Assistant Professor of English at Penn State University , with a specialization in African American literature and culture. Her areas of teaching include nineteenth and twentieth-century American and African American literature, and she has a particular interest in the intertextual relationships between diverse literary, artistic, and philosophical traditions. She has published on a variety of authors, including Alice Walker, Clarence Major, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Abraham Lincoln, and Charles Johnson in outlets such as African American Review, The Massachusetts Review, and Rhetoric Review, and scholarly collections on the African American fiction. In 2003, Linda received the Darwin T. Turner Award for best article of the year from African American Review. She has recently completed a book project on the fiction of Charles Johnson in relation to contemporary intellectual and social formations and is completing a manuscript for a co-edited collection of critical and theoretical essays on the African American novel. She is a member of the Awards Committee of the African American Literature and Culture Society and a member of the Executive Board of the Penn State American Women Writers Workshop.
Publications
Articles:
“The Genesis of Charles Johnson's Philosophical Fiction.” Charles Johnson: The Novelist as Philosopher . Ed. Marc Conner and Will Nash. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. 1-19.
“Clarence Major and Mark Twain Abroad.” The Heritage Series of Black Poetry, 1962-1975 Ed. Lauri Ramey. Ashgate Publishing: 2008. 71-82.
“Master-Slave Dialectics in Charles Johnson's ‘The Education of Mingo'.” African American Review 37 (2003): 105-114. Winner of the 2003 Darwin T. Turner Award for the best article of the year in African American Review .
“Signifying on Marx: Charles Johnson's ‘Exchange Value'.” The Massachusetts Review 42 (2001): 253-268.
“Reading the Painterly Text: Clarence Major's ‘View From the Middle Passage'.” African American Review 33 (1999): 209-229. Reprinted in Clarence Major as Artist , ed. Bernard Bell. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. 101-131.
"Historicizing Lincoln : Garry Wills and the Canonization of 'The Gettysburg Address.'" Rhetoric Review 16 (1997): 120-136.
"Race and Domesticity in The Color Purple ." African American Review 29 (1995): 67-82.
Reprinted in Alice Walker's “The Color Purple”: Modern Critical Interpretations , ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia : Chelsea House Publishers, 1999, 139-155; reprinted in Contemporary Literary Criticism , ed. Jeff Hunter. Vol. 167. Detroit : Gale, 2003. 232-241.
"Beyond Anxiety and Wishfulfillment: Hawthorne 's 'The Haunted Mind' and the Rhetoric of Meditation." The Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 16 (1990): 1-6.
Edited Collection:
New Essays on the African American Novel: From Hurston and Ellison to Morrison and Whitehead . Eds. Lovalerie King and Linda Selzer. New York: Palgrave (forthcoming, 2008).
Work in Progress :
Charles Johnson in Context
By analyzing Johnson’s fiction in contextin detailed historical and conceptual relation to the emergence of three black intellectual and cultural groupsthis project ties Johnson’s artistic achievements to the larger social projects of black philosophers who have worked since the mid 1960s to revitalize the field of American philosophy, black Buddhists who are currently articulating a new form of engaged western Buddhism from an explicitly post-civil rights location, and black public intellectuals who are using their recently achieved national prominence to redefine the conceptual borders of cosmopolitan thought. While Johnson’s characteristic fusion of literature, Buddhism, and philosophy may seem highly idiosyncratic, Johnson’s creative work, this study argues, vigorously participates in, advances, and helps to define larger directions in American cultural and intellectual life.
Recent Selected Presentations:
“Romancing Uplift in Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist,” African American Literature and Culture Symposium (ALA), St. Louis, MO, October 2007.
“Eastern Philosophy Goes West.” Western Literature Association, Tacoma, WA, October 2007.
“African American Poetry and Internationalism” Modern Language Association, Philadelphia , PA , December 2006.
“From the Egyptian to the New York Times : Charles Johnson as Newspaperman,” American Literature Association, San Francisco , CA , May 2004.
“Fictional and Philosophical Intertexts in the Work of Charles Johnson.” American Literature Association, Cambridge , MA May 2003.
“Charles Johnson, Wilhelm Reich, and Faith and the Good Thing .” American Literature Association, Long Beach , CA , May, 2002.
“Faith and Practice in Charles Johnson.” Society for the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literature in the United States , Seattle , WA , April 11-14, 2002.
“Charles Johnson and the Phenomenology of the Black Body.” AALCS 2000 (African American Literature and Culture Society, national area group of the American Literature Association), Salt Lake City , October 25-29, 2000.
“Race and Capital.” Crossroads in Cultural Studies: Third International Conference. University of Birmingham , UK , June 21-25, 2000.
“Charles Johnson's ‘Exchange Value'.” American Literature Association, Long Beach , CA , May 25-28, 2000.
“The Tourist in Black and White.” Popular Culture Association, New Orleans , LA , April 19-23, 2000.
Honors, Grants, and Awards
Africana Research Center . With Lovalerie King, principal investigator. Grant to support an international conference on the African-American novel held at PSU, April 1-3, 2005. ($10,000).
2002-2003 Community Outreach Grant for the African American Read-In (co-authored with Elaine Richardson), Africana Research Center ($3,050).
2001-2002 Individual Research Grant, Africana Research Center, 2001-2002 (research travel, $650.00).
Course Initiation Grant for Am St 104: Women and the American Experience ($1,000).
Outstanding Faculty Advisor in the College of Liberal Arts , Penn State University , 1995.
College of the Liberal Arts Outstanding Teaching Award, Penn State University , 1992.
Outstanding Woman Faculty Member, Penn State University , 1994, 1993, 1991 1990. Awarded for "excellence in teaching and outstanding service to students."
Links to Selected Articles:
"Historicizing Lincoln : Garry Wills and the Canonization of 'The Gettysburg Address.'" Rhetoric Review 16 (1997): 120-136.
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0735-0198%28199723%2916%3A1%3C120%3AHLGWAT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-N
“Master-Slave Dialectics in Charles Johnson's ‘The Education of Mingo'.” African American Review 37 (2003): 105-114.
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1062-4783%28200321%2937%3A1%3C105%3AMDICJ%22%3E2.0.CO%3B2-M
"Race and Domesticity in The Color Purple ." African American Review 29 (1995): 67-82.
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1062-4783%28199521%2929%3A1%3C67%3ARADITC%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Z
“Reading the Painterly Text: Clarence Major's ‘View From the Middle Passage'.” African American Review 33 (1999): 209-229.
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1062-4783%28199922%2933%3A2%3C209%3ARTPTCM%3E2.0.CO%3B2-D
Course Descriptions
“Black Cosmopolitanism: Ellison and Johnson”
This course investigates the controversial status of black cosmopolitanism by examining several recent approaches to cosmopolitan thinking in relation to the work of two writers, Ralph Ellison and Charles Johnson. Recent critical debate on cosmopolitanism has centered upon its complex relationships to nationalism, ethnicity, and cultural hybridity. Does cosmopolitanism's revitalized appeal to universal human rights provide a basis for progressive social reform, or does it promote abstract loyalties at the expense of actually existing ethnic, geographical, and national communities? Does the new cosmopolitanism's rearticulation of world citizenship provide a position from which to criticize overzealous nationalisms, or doe it constitute, as Tim Brennan fears, an extension of western nationalism (and capital) on a global scale? Over the course of the semester we will consider such questions as we explore the conceptual boundaries of black cosmopolitanism by investigating several recent attempts to describe a situated, critical, or vernacular cosmopolitanism in relation to the work of Ellison and Johnson. Readings will include critical articles on cosmopolitanism; selections from the Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison; Trading Twelves: The Collected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray; Flying Home: and Other Stories; Invisible Man ; and selected short stories and three novels by Charles Johnson ( Dreamer , Middle Passage , and Oxherding Tale). Class requirements will include spirited participation and a paper of publishable length. (Charles Johnson has agreed to respond to inquiries from seminar participants writing papers on his work.)
“The Neo-Slave Narrative”
This course focuses upon the fictional slave narrative in the works of African American writers since the 1970s. As works of fiction that transform a politically-charged genre from an earlier century while responding to certain historical and political changes of the 1960s, neo-slave narratives are uniquely positioned to provoke an inquiry into issues concerning cultural production, textual authority and authenticity, genre, intertextuality, difference, and racial formation. Over the course of the semester we will read works by writers such as Olaudah Equiano, David Walker, Sherley Anne Williams, Ishmael Reed, Octavia Butler, David Bradley, Charles Johnson, Toni Morrison, Gayle Jones, and J. California Cooper. We will also consider recent critical interpretations of the literary and social origins of the neo-slave narrative: Rushdy's location of the “cultural logic” of the form in the changing historiography of slavery and the shift from civil rights to black power movements during the 1960s; Beaulieu's concentration on women's novels and on the origins of the neo-slave narrative in the search for a female precursor of literary and social authority; and Cox's focus on postmodern irony as the genre's defining narrative strategy. Requirements include spirited participation, a short annotated bibliography, and one paper of publishable length (15-20 pages).
