Office of the Provost and Executive Vice President for Academics

Distinguished Lecture Series

Title: Biography and the Art of Teaching

Jay Parini, Ph.D.
D.E. Axinn Professor of English and Creative Writing, Department of English
Middlebury College

Monday, November 28, 2005 7:30 p.m.
Auditorium, Annenberg Presidential Conference Center
Texas A&M University

Abstract

This lecture will examine aspects of literary biography as an art, and discuss the uses of biography in the teaching of literature. The lecture will range widely over the fields of biography and criticism, arguing that since the advent of the New Criticism, biography has been too easily dismissed. It remains a useful element in teaching and in criticism itself. Parini will speak from a personal viewpoint, as a novelist, poet, and biographer, and he will refer in passing to his recent book, THE ART OF TEACHING, published by Oxford University Press.

About the Speaker

Jay Parini poet, novelist, and biographer of Faulkner, Steinbeck, and Frost -- was born in 1948 in Pittston , Pennsylvania . He attended West Scranton High School and graduated from Lafayette College in 1970, having taken his junior year abroad at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland . He went back to St. Andrews after graduation and stayed there until taking his Ph.D. in 1975. While a graduate student in Scotland he published his first book of poems, Singing in Time (1972) and began contributing essays and reviews to various journals, such as Lines Review and Scottish International. Parini taught at Dartmouth College from 1975 to 1982. During that period, he published Theodore Roethke: An American Romantic (1979), The Love Run (1980), his first novel, and Anthracite Country (1982), another volume of poetry. Parini co-founded New England Review in 1976.

In 1982 he moved to Middlebury College , where he is the Axinn Professor of English. His recent books include a textbook, An Invitation to Poetry (1988), a third book of poems, called Town Life (1988), and five further novels: The Patch Boys (1986 ) The Last Station (1990), Bay of Arrows (1992), Benjamin's Crossing (1997), and The Apprentice Lover (2002). John Steinbeck: A Biography appeared in 1995. A book of essays, Some Necessary Angels , and a book of poems, House of Days, appeared in 1998. Robert Frost: A Life, appeared in 2000 and won the Chicago Tribune-Heartland Award for the best work of non-fiction for that year. His biography of William Faulkner, One Matchless Time , appeared in 2004. The Art of Teaching appeared in January of 2005 and The Art of Subtraction: New and Selected Poems in April of 2005. Parini has edited many books, including The Columbia History of American Poetry (1993), The Columbia Anthology of American Poetry (1995), and The Norton Book of American Autobiography (March 1999), and The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature (2003).

His poems , articles, and reviews appear regularly in such journals as The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harper's, Poetry, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. His awards include honorary doctorates from Lafayette College and the University of Scranton, a Guggenheim Fellowship, ,a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Italian American Foundation, and the Hale Award for Literature. He is married to Devon Jersild, a writer. They live with their three sons in Weybridge, Vermont.