Catherine L. Elick, Chair of the department, received a Ph.D. in English from Vanderbilt University and a B.A. and M.A. in English from James Madison University. As a doctoral student she specialized in modern British and American literature as well as comparative literature. Her dissertation, entitled Isherwood and his Critics: A Historical Reading of Goodbye to Berlin and its Adaptations, studies Christopher Isherwood's famous 1939 novel and the four adaptations based upon it as expressions of the culture and history which shaped their purposes and the genres (fiction, drama, film) which gave them form. The dissertation was prepared in part from research done at the British Museum Library. As an undergraduate she minored in Russian and German languages and won statewide awards for essays written in Russian.
Before coming to Bridgewater College in 1988, Dr. Elick served for five years as editor and business manager of The Tennessee Conservationist, a bimonthly magazine. There she supervised the work of freelance writers, photographers, art directors and staff personnel of this full-color magazine. She often wrote on conservation-related subjects, such as wildlife, historic preservation, and water conservation, and was named to Who's Who in U.S. Writers, Editors and Poets (1986-87).
At Bridgewater College Dr. Elick teaches courses in children's literature, British literature, modern literature, the novel, Russian literature and culture, and composition. Recently, her research interests have focused on children's literature. She has presented papers at a number of international conferences on children's literature and has published articles in several reference works, most notably in the Dictionary of Literary Biography.
In an article published in Style 35.3 (Fall 2001), she applies the theory of Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin to the work of P. L. Travers and C. S. Lewis. She argues that, in episodes of Mary Poppins and The Magician's Nephew in which animals characters are ascribed the power of speech, these novels become noticeably polyphonic and carnivalesque. The dissonant plurality of voices during interactions between animal and human characters at junctures in these texts results in the suspension of heirarchical barriers in which empowered humans lose authority and are made to acknowledge the subject status of animals. Travers and Lewis also challenge classist and anthropocentric assumptions by choosing representatives from typically oppressed groups--a working-class woman (Mary Poppins) and a wild animal (Aslan)--as their powerful central figures. (View article in PDF or HTML format.) |
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