Loyola University Chicago

Department of English

J. Brooks Bouson

Professor Emerita

 

Offices Held

  • Assistant Department Chair, 2002-Present
  • Undergraduate Programs Director, 1998-2001

Degrees

  • PhD, Loyola University Chicago

Program Areas

  • Twentieth-Century Women's Literature
  • Feminist Theory
  • History of Feminist Criticism

Research Interests

  • Modern British Literature
  • Psychoanalysis and Literature
  • Emotions and Literature
  • Shame in Literature
  • Trauma and Narrative

Selected Publications

Books:

  • Shame and the Aging Woman: Confronting and ResSisting Ageism in Contemporary Women’s Writings. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
  • Embodied Shame: Uncovering Female Shame in Contemporary Women’s Writings. SUNY Press, 2009.
  • Jamaica Kincaid: Writing Memory, Writing Back to the Mother. SUNY Press, 2005.
  • Quiet As It’s Kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison. SUNY Press, 2000. 
  • Brutal Choreographies: Oppositional Strategies and Narrative Design in the Novels of Margaret Atwood.  University of Massachusetts Press, 1993.
  • The Empathic Reader: A Study of the Narcissistic Character and the Drama of the Self. University of Massachusetts Press, 1989.

Edited Books:

  • Critical Insights: Margaret Atwood. Salem Press, 2012.
  • Margaret Atwood: The Robber Bride, The Blind Assassin, and Oryx and Crake. Continuum Press, 2011.
  • Critical Insights: Emily Dickinson. Salem Press, 2010.
  • Critical Insights: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Salem Press, 2009.

Articles and Book Chapters:

  • “Atwood and Environmentalism.”  The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood. 2nd edition. Ed. Coral Howells. Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2019-2020.
  • "Jamaica Kincaid." In Twentieth Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context (4 vols.). Ed. Linda De Roche. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, forthcoming 2021.
  • “Mary Mason’s Life Prints: A Memoir of Healing and Discovery.” In Disability Experiences, 2 volumes.  Ed. G. Thomas Couser and Susannah Mintz. Farmington, MI: Macmillan Reference, 2019. Volume 1, 385−388.
  • “Glimpses of a Failed Marriage: Autobiographical Scenes of Shame and Revenge in Jamaica Kincaid’s See Now Then.”  Contemporary Women’s Writing 12:3 (November 2018): 357−374.
  • “Writing Shame and Disgust in Susan Gubar’s Memoir of a Debulked Woman.” Shame and Modern Writing. Ed. Barry Sheils and Julie Walsh. New York and London: Routledge, 2018.  184−97.     
  • “A ‘Joke-Filled Romp’ through End Times: Radical Environmentalism, Deep Ecology, and Human Extinction in Margaret Atwood’s Eco-apocalyptic MaddAddam trilogy.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 51.3 (2016): 341−57.
  • “‘I Like My Own Dirt’: Disinterested Violence and Shamelessness in Toni Morrison’s Sula.” Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 366. Ed. Lawrence Trudeau. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, 2015. 260−75. Originally published in Quiet As It’s Kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison. Albany: SUNY Press, 2000.
  • “‘Quiet as It’s Kept’: Shame and Trauma in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.”  Scenes of Shame: Psychoanalysis, Shame, and Writing.  Ed. Joseph Adamson and Hilary Clark.  Albany: SUNY Press, 1999.  207-236. Reprinted in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 363. Ed. Lawrence Trudeau. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, 2014. 91−106.
  • “I Had Embarked on Something Called Self-invention: Jamaica Kincaid’s Artistic Beginnings in “Antigua Crossings” and At the Bottom of the River.” Short Story Criticism: Criticism of the Works of Short Fiction Writers. Volume 80. Ed. Lawrence Trudeau.  Detroit: Gale-Cengage, 2013.  150−159.
  • “We’re Using up the Earth. It’s Almost Gone”: A Return to the Post-Apocalyptic Future in Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature  46.1 (2011): 9-26.  Reprinted in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 342. Ed. Jeffrey Hunter. Detroit: Gale, 2013. 137−46.
  • “On Margaret Atwood.” Critical Insights: Margaret Atwood. Pasadena, CA: Salem Press, 2012. 3-24.
  • “Beloved  Exposes the Psychological Traumas Caused by Slavery.” Social Issues in Literature: Slavery in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” Ed. Dedris Bryfonski. Farmington Hills, MI: Greenhaven Press, 2012. 103−117.
  • “The Special Impact of The Handmaid’s Tale on Female Readers.” Women’s Issues in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Ed. David Nelson. Farmington Hills, MI: Greenhaven Press, 2012. 87−97.
  • “Negotiating with Margaret Atwood.”  Margaret Atwood: The Robber Bride, The Blind Assassin, and Oryx and Crake.  London: Continuum Press, 2011. 1-17.
  • “On Emily Dickinson.” Critical Insights: Emily Dickinson. Pasadena, CA: Salem Press, 2010. 3−11.
  • “On Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.” Critical Insights: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Pasadena, CA: Salem Press, 2009. 3-9.
  • “Quiet As It’s Kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison” (on Song of Solomon). Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon: Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2009. 57-86.
  • “The Politics of Empathy and Self in Christa Wolf’s The Quest for Christa T. / Die Politik der Empathie und des Selbst in Christa Wolfs Nachdenken uber Christa T. Special edition of the European Self Psychology Journal—Selbstpsychologie: Europäische Zeitschrift für Psychoanalytische Therapie und Forschung: Selobstpsychologie und die Künste 35 (2009): 53-70.
  • “‘It’s Game Over Forever’: Atwood’s Satiric Vision of a Bioengineered Posthuman Future in Oryx and Crake.”  Margaret Atwood: Bloom’s Modern Critical Views.  Ed. Harold Bloom.  New York: Infobase Publishing, 2009. 93-110. Originally published in Journal of Commonwealth Literature 39.3 (2004): 139-156.
  • “Insect Transformation as a Narcissistic Metaphor in Kafka’s Metamorphosis.” Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.  Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations. Ed. Harold Bloom.  New York: Infobase Publishing, 2009.  35-46.
  • “Like Him and His Own Father before Him, I Have a Line Drawn through Me”: Imagining the Life of the Absent Father in Mr. Potter.”  Jamaica Kincaid: Modern Critical Views.  Ed. Harold Bloom.   New York: Infobase, 2008. 159-74.
  • “Uncovering ‘the Beloved’ in the Warring and Lawless Women in Toni Morrison’s Love.” Midwest Quarterly 49. 4 (Summer 2008): 358-373.
  • “‘A Commemoration of Wounds, Endured and Resented’: Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin as Feminist Memoir.”  Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 44.3 (Spring 2003): 251-69. Reprinted in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 246. Ed. Jeffrey Hunter. Detroit: Gale, 2008. 116−127.
  • “‘Teaching English Isn’t the Clean Work It Used to Be’: Satirizing the Plight of Token Professionals in Richard Russo’s Straight Man.”  Academic Novels as Satire: Critical Studies of an Emerging Genre.   Ed. Kimberly Rae Connor and Mark Bosco, S. J.  Lewiston: Mellen Press, 2007. 111-130.
  • “True Confessions: Uncovering the Hidden Culture of Shame in English Studies.” JAC 25. 4 (2006): 625-50.
  • “‘Speaking the Unspeakable’: Shame, Trauma and Morrison’s Fiction.” Toni Morrison: Bloom’s Modern Critical Views.  Ed. Harold Bloom.  Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2005.  121-148.
  • “‘Sethe’s ‘Best Thing.’” Toni Morrison’s Beloved.   Ed. Harold Bloom.  Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2004.  91-101.
  • “‘You Nothing But Trash’: White Trash Shame in Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina.” Southern Literary Journal  34. 1 (Fall 2001): 101-23.
  • “The Misogyny of Patriarchal Culture in The Handmaid’s Tale.” The Handmaid’s Tale: Modern Critical Interpretations.  Ed. Harold Bloom.  Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2001.  41-62.
  • “The Edible Woman’s Refusal to Consent to Femininity.”  Margaret Atwood: Modern Critical Views.  Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2000.  71-91.
  • “Poetry and the Unsayable: Edwin Muir’s Conception of the Powers and Limitations of Poetic Speech.” Studies in Scottish Literature 17 (1983): 23-38. Reprinted in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Vol. 87. Ed. Jennifer Blaise. Detroit: Gale, 2000. 275−81.
  • “The Repressed Grandiosity of Gregor Samsa: A Kohutian Reading of Kafka’s Metamorphosis.”  Narcissism and the Text: Studies in Literature and the Psychology of the Self.   Ed.  Lynne Layton and Barbara Schapiro.  New York University Press, 1986.  192-212. Reprinted in Short Story Criticism. Vol. 35. Ed. Anna Sheets-Nesbit. Detroit: Gale, 2000.  251−59.
  • “Narcissistic Vulnerability and Rage in Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground.” Short Story Criticism.  Vol. 33. Ed. Anna Sheets-Nesbit. Detroit: Gale, 1999. 221-228. Originally published in The Empathic Reader: A Study of the Narcissistic Character and the Drama of the Self.  Amherst, Mass: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989.
  • “Comic Storytelling as Escape and Narcissistic Self-Expression in Atwood’s Lady Oracle.”  DISCovering Authors 3.0 (on-line subscription database).  Detroit: Gale Group, 2000.  DISCovering Authors Modules (CD-ROM).  Detroit: Gale, 1996.  Contemporary Literary Criticism.  Vol. 84.  Ed. James Draper.  Detroit: Gale, 1995.  72-77.
  • “A Feminist/Psychoanalytic Approach in a Women’s College.”  Approaches to Teaching Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.  Ed.  Sharon Wilson, Thomas Friedman, and Shannon Hengen.  New York: Modern Language Association, 1996.  122-27. 
  • “‘Slipping Sideways into the Dreams of Women’: The Female Dream Work of Power Feminism in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride.”  LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory  6 (1995): 149-166.
  • “The Politics of Empathy and Self in Christa Wolf’s The Quest for Christa T.”  Mimetic Desire: Essays on Narcissism in German Literature from Romanticism to Post Modernism.   Ed.  Jeffrey Adams and Eric Williams.  Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1995.  187-204.
  • “Empathy and Self-Validation in Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day.”  The Critical Response to Saul Bellow.  Ed. Gerhard Bach.  Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1995.  83-99. 
  • “The Anxiety of Being Influenced: Reading and Responding to Character in Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman.”  Style 24 (Summer 1990): 228-41. 
  • “The Narcissistic Drama and Reader/Text Transaction in Kafka’s Metamorphosis.”  Critical Essays on Franz Kafka.  Ed. Ruth V. Gross.  Boston: G.K. Hall, 1990.  191-205. 
  • “The ‘Hidden Agenda’ of Winston Smith: Pathological Narcissism and 1984.”  University of Hartford Studies in Literature 18 (1986): 8-20.
  • “The Narcissistic Self-Drama of Wilhelm Adler: A Kohutian Reading of Bellow’s Seize the Day.”  Saul Bellow Journal 5 (Spring-Summer 1986): 3-14.
  • “A Poet ‘Taught by Dreams and Fantasies’: Edwin Muir’s Dual Vision of Man.”  The Scope of the Fantastic.  Ed. Robert A. Collins and Howard D. Pearce.  Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985.  115-125.
  • “The Survival of the Human Spirit in an Age of Crisis: Edwin Muir’s Vision of Modern History.”  Cithara 19 (1979): 26-39.
  • “Emily Dickinson and the Riddle of Containment.”  Emily Dickinson Bulletin (June 1977): 33-49.
  • “A Reading of Ted Hughes’s Crow.”  Concerning Poetry (Fall 1974): 21-32.

Book Reviews and Encyclopedia Entries:

  •  Daryl Cumber Dance. In Search of Annie Drew: Jamaica Kincaid’s Mother and Muse. Review. African American Review 51.1 (Spring 2018): 68−71.
  • Evelyn Jaffe Schreiber. Race, Trauma, and Home in the Novels of Toni Morrison. Review. Modern Fiction Studies 58.1 (Spring 2012): 155-58.
  • Jennifer L. Griffiths.  Traumatic Possessions: The Body and Memory in African American Women’s Writing and Performance.  Review. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 29.2 (Fall 2010): 496-98.
  • “Jamaica Kincaid.”  A Feminist Encyclopedia of African American Literature. Ed. Elizabeth Beaulieu.  Westport, Conn: Greenwood Publishing, 2006.Vol. 2: 517-23.
  • “Kincaid’s Annie John.” A Feminist Encyclopedia of African American Literature. Ed. Elizabeth Beaulieu.  Westport, Conn: Greenwood Publishing, 2006. Vol. 1: 18-20.
  • “Kincaid’s Lucy.” A Feminist Encyclopedia of African American Literature. Ed. Elizabeth Beaulieu.  Westport, Conn: Greenwood Publishing, 2006. Vol. 2: 584-85.
  • “Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother.” A Feminist Encyclopedia of African American Literature. Ed. Elizabeth Beaulieu.  Westport, Conn: Greenwood Publishing, 2006  Vol. 1: 30-32.
  • “Jamaica Kincaid.”  Encyclopedia of Women’s Autobiography.  Ed. Jo Malin and Victoria Boynton.  Westport, Conn: Greenwood Publishing, 2005.
  • Jean Wyatt. Risking Difference: Identification, Race, and Community in Contemporary Fiction and Feminism.   Albany: SUNY Press, 2004.  Review. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature  24. 1 (Spring 2005): 173-77.
  • “Psychoanalytic Approaches” to Toni Morrison. A Toni Morrison Encyclopedia.  Ed. Elizabeth Beaulieu.  Westport Conn: Greenwood Press, 2003.
  • “Shame” and Toni Morrison. A Toni Morrison Encyclopedia.  Ed. Elizabeth Beaulieu.  Westport Conn: Greenwood Press, 2003.
  • “Trauma” and Toni Morrison. A Toni Morrison Encyclopedia.  Ed. Elizabeth Beaulieu.  Westport Conn: Greenwood Press, 2003.
  • Mary Grimley Mason.  Life Prints: A Memoir of Healing and Discovery.   New York: Feminist Press at CUNY, 2001.  Review essay.  Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 24.4 (Fall 2001): 873-877.
  •  “Shannon Hengen’s Margaret Atwood’s Power: Mirrors, Reflections, and Images in Selected Fiction and Poetry” (Toronto: Second Story, 1993).   Review.  Arachne 1.2 (1994): 261-63.