English Department Faculty
Laura Tanner
Professor
Laura Tanner
Ph.D.
Contact
Stokes Hall S425
Telephone: 617-552-2495
Email: tannerl@bc.edu
Education
- B.A., Colgate University
- Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania
Research Interests
Modernism; American fiction of the last century; theories of the body.
Department
Biography
Specializes in American literature of the last century, especially modernist narrative, African-American fiction, and contemporary women’s writing. She has written extensively on representations of grief, illness, violence, and the everyday in fiction and visual art. Recent courses include American Modernisms, Inhabiting Narrative, Contemporary American Women Writers, Bodies and Borders, and Everyday Fictions.
Selected Publications
Books
- The Elusive Everyday in the Fiction of Marilynne Robinson. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021.
- 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
- “Concrete Sensations: Imagining Feeling in A Farewell to Arms.” Modern Fiction Studies 62.3 (Fall 2016): 444 – 461.
- "Living Breast Cancer: The Art of Hollis Sigler" in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Spring 2014, Vol. 33, No. 1, 219-239.
- “Holding on to 9/11: The Shifting Grounds of Materiality.” PMLA: Journal of the Modern Language Association of America. 127.1 (January 2012): 58-76.
- "Uncomfortable Furniture: Inhabiting Domestic and Narrative Space in Marilynne Robinson's Home." Contemporary Women’s Writing. 2011; doi: 10.1093/cww/ vpr013.
- "Intimate Geography: The Body, Race and Space in Nella Larsen's Quicksand.”
- Texas Studies in Literature and Language. 51-2 (Summer 2009): 179-202.
- ’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.