Laura Tanner

Professor B.A., Colgate University Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania                     Carney Hall 467 Boston College Chestnut Hill, MA 02467 Phone: 617-552-2495 Fax: 617-552-4220 Email: tannerl@bc.edu http://www2.bc.edu/~tannerl

Academic Profile

Specializes in American modernism, twentieth-century American fiction and theories of the body. Her most recent book, Lost Bodies: Inhabiting the Borders of Life and Death, was published by Cornell University Press in 2006.

Courses

• EN143.01 - American Literary History III
• EN200.01 - The Body in Sickness and Health

Publications (selected)

Books

• Lost Bodies: Inhabiting the Borders of Life and Death. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006.
• Intimate Violence: Reading Rape and Torture in Twentieth-Century Fiction.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

Selected Articles

• "Intimate Geography: The Body, Race and Space in Nella Larsen's Quicksand.” Forthcoming in Texas Studies in Literature and Language. 51-2
  (Summer 2009).
• ’Looking Back from the Grave’: Sensory Perception and the Anticipation of Absence in Gilead.”  Contemporary Literature.  48.2 (Summer 2007).
• “Bodies in Waiting: Representations of Medical Waiting Rooms in Contemporary American Fiction.” American Literary History.  14.1 (Spring 2002):  115-130.
• “Haunted Images: Photographic Representations of People with AIDS.”  Genre.  29.1-2 (Spring/Summer 1997): 135-159.
• “Death-Watch: Terminal Illness and the Gaze in Sharon Olds’s The Father.”  Mosaic: A journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature.  29.1 (Spring 1996): 103-122.
• “Speaking with ‘Hands at our Throats’: The Struggle for Artistic Voice in The Blithedale Romance.”  Studies in American Fiction 21.1 (Spring 1993): 1-19.
• "Sweet Pain and Charred Bodies: Figuring Violence in The White Hotel.”  Boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture  18.2 (Summer 1991): 130-149.
• "Reading Rape: Sanctuary and The Women of Brewster Place.”  American Literature 62.4 (December 1990): 559-582.
• Reprinted in Gloria Naylor: Critical Perspectives, Past and Present.  Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K. Anthony Appiah.  Cambridge: Amistad Press, 1993.
  Reprinted in Douze Lectures de Sanctuaire.  Ed. Andre Bleikasten.  Rennes: PU de Rennes, 1995, 187-204.
• Exposing the Sacred Juggle: Revolutionary Rhetoric in Robert Rogers’ Ponteach” (co-authored with J. Krasner).  Early American Literature 24.1 (Spring 1989): 4-19.
• Uncovering the Magical Disguise of Language: The Narrative Presence in Richard Wright’s Native Son.”  Texas Studies in Literature and Language 29.4 (Winter 1987): 412-431.
  Reprinted in Major Literary Characters: Bigger Thomas.  Ed. Harold Bloom.  New York: Chelsea House, 1990.
  Reprinted in Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives, Past and Present.  Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K. Anthony Appiah.  Cambridge: Amistad Press, 1993.
• “Self-Conscious Representation in the Slave Narrative.”  Black American Literature Forum 21 (Winter 1987): 415-24.