Keynote Speaker

Announcing the Keynote Speaker for the Fall 2019 Convention: Jerry Hogle!

“The Gothic and the Doppelgänger: A Symbiotic Relationship”

Although the marriage of the Doppelgänger as an especially symbolic character and the Gothic as an avowedly hybrid kind of fiction became powerfully complete by the time of E.T.A Hoffman’s The Devil’s Elixer (1815) and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), it would seem that they were on separate trajectories for most of the later eighteenth century.  Jean Paul Richter's famous first use -- and pointed definition -- of Doppelgänger in his novel Siebenkäs (1796-97) is accompanied by very few established Gothic elements, and Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764-65), the first piece of fiction to call itself "Gothic," has never been treated as containing Doppelgänger figures.  The same can be said of the famous Gothic successors to Walpole in the England of 1790s, even in Matthew Lewis's lurid use of the German Gothic in his English novel The Monk (1796).  But this talk argues that the Doppelgänger figure, both as Jean Paul defined it and as it came more fully into its symbolic possibilities in the nineteenth century, was really gestated by the specifically "Gothic" kind of symbol-making that Otranto and his successors produced by combining elements of "ancient" (including medieval) and "modern” (Fielding- and Smollett-esque)” romance.”  The very "nature" of the Doppelganger that grew out of Gothic modes of characterization, in fact, gained its ongoing suggestiveness (as well as its attractiveness for Freudian psychoanalysis) precisely from the contradictions in its Walpolean foundations, so much so that it is these conflicted Gothic roots that enable the many layers that the Doppelgänger is able to manifest in the most famous examples of its use in literature of the nineteenth century (including, but by no means limited to, the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1886).  It turns out that the relationship between the Gothic and the Doppelgänger is even more symbiotic from the beginning than we have understood up to now.

 Jerrold E. (Jerry) Hogle, whose Ph.D. is from Harvard University (where he won the Howard Mumford Jones Thesis Prize), is Professor Emeritus of English and University Distinguished Professor at the University of Arizona. The winner of Guggenheim, Mellon, and other fellowships for research and the Distinguished Scholar Award of the Keats-Shelley Association of America, he has published extensively (books, essays, and reviews) on English Romantic literature, literary and cultural theory, and the many different forms of the Gothic. His books include, among others, Shelley’s Process from the Oxford UP, The Undergrounds of The Phantom of the Opera from Palgrave Macmillan, and The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction from the Cambridge UP, which has recently been succeeded by The Cambridge Companion to the Modern Gothic and by The Gothic and Theory, co-edited with Robert Miles, in the Edinburgh UP Companions to the Gothic series.  

He is also a winner of multiple teaching awards for his outstanding classroom work, advising, and mentoring of students, both undergraduate and graduate.  These honors include the University Distinguished Professorship, which he has held since 1996, and the Burlington Northern Foundation Faculty Achievement Award (a national honor) for Excellence in Teaching.  He has even held many important positions at the College, University, and State of Arizona levels, including Associate and Acting Dean in the College of Humanities, the elected Chair (and thus chief representative) of the entire University Faculty, the Chair of the Arizona Faculties Council for the state university system, the Chair of the Strategic Planning and Budget Advisory Committee for the U of A, and Vice Provost for Instruction (with central oversight over all aspects of education) in the University’s central administration.  Outside the University, he has served as the elected President of the International Gothic Association and on the Executive Committee of the North American Society for Study of Romanticism.  From 2009 through December 31, 2014, he was Director of Undergraduate Studies and Honors in English in charge of all the English Department’s undergraduate programs, including the advising, planning, and curriculum connected to them.  Now he continues very active research and work with graduate students and honors undergraduates after retiring from full-time teaching in May of 2018.  For his services to the Arizona Alumni Association, for which he represented the UA faculty on the National Board, he has received the Honorary Alumnus designation. 

He now lives with his spouse of over forty-eight years, Pamela Hogle, in Los Angeles, and they are the proud parents of two married daughters who are themselves summa cum laude graduates of the University of Arizona and now have careers of their own in Hawaii and in California, where Pam and Jerry Hogle now enjoy helping to raise their new grandchild.