Dr. Wendy Faris
Department Chair, Professor

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Carlisle Hall - 203 B
(ph):817.272.5484
(fax): 817.272.2718

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Years of Service at UT Arlington:

Full Professor (1989 - present)

Assistant Professor (1985 - 1989)
Associate Professor (1985 - 1989)

Visiting Assistant Professor (1984 - 1985)

Education:

Ph.D. (Comparitive Literature), Harvard University, 1975
                                   
M.A. (Comparitive Literature), Harvard University, 1970

B.A. (Spanish Literature), Stanford University, 1967
                                                       

Current Research:

Having finished her long-term commitment to Magical Realism with the publication of her book, Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative (Vanderbilt UP, 2004) and earlier, of the collection Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (edited with Lois Parkinson Zamora; Duke UP, 1995; rptd. 1998),Wendy Faris is currently working on a series of articles on modernist literature and painting, many of them concerning the move toward abstraction in that period. The first revisits the comparison between Proust and Monet as a seminal moment in the development of a modernist aesthetic. Among other issues, it investigates how Proust and Monet both focus on the way of seeing, painting almost without subject matter and writing almost without action.  Furthermore, both virtually attempt to reconfigure essential features of their respective media of space and time: in his late great waterlily paintings, Monet conflates the usually separate spatial realms of pond and sky in much the same way as Proust merges the usually separate times of present and past in his monumental text Remembrance of Things Past. Other comparisons waiting in the wings include one between Virginia Woolf and Kandinsky as proponents of a “spiritual” and abstract kind of modernism, and the sacred spaces of nature in the texts of Willa Cather and Georgia O’Keefe.  In addition to working on those new projects, she is contemplating how they might eventually be integrated with her earlier work on the advent of abstraction in J. M. W. Turner and Joseph Conrad, and on the exotic primitivism of Baudelaire, Gauguin, Gide, and Matisse, to form a monograph on modernist beauty. Combining that interartistic impulse with her longstanding interest in Carlos Fuentes, she recently presented a paper entitled “Of Stone and Water: Archeology and Narrative in Carlos Fuentes’ Distant Relations.” Another future project is an investigation of Octavio Paz and India. 

Recent Awards:

Record of Distinguished Research Achievement Award, UTA (2005)

Recent Publications:

Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative.  Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004.

Edited, with Lois Parkinson Zamora, Magical Realism:  Theory, History, Community.  Durham:  Duke University Press, 1995.  Reprinted 1998.

Articles:
"Larger than Life: The Hyperbolic Realities of Gabriel García Márquez and Fernando Botero."  Word & Image, 17, iv (2001), 339-59.
“Southern Economies of Excess: Narrative Expenditure in Faulkner and Fuentes.” In Look Away: The U.S. South in New World Studies, eds. Deborah Cohen and Jonathan Smith.  Duke University Press, 2004, pp. 333-54.

“Scheherazade’s Children: Magical Realism and Postmodern Fiction.” Reprinted in Essentials of the Theory of Fiction.  Ed. Michael J. Hoffman and Patrick D. Murphy. Third Edition.  Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. 

“Magical Realism.”  Entry for The Encylopedia of Narrative Theory. Eds.  David Herman, Manfred John, and Marie-Laure Ryan.  New York: Routledge, 2005.  Pp. 281-3.

"Bloomsbury's Beasts:  The Presence of Animals in the Texts and Lives of Bloomsbury." The Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 37 (2007), 107-115.

Co-authored (with Steven F. Walker), “Latent Icons:  Compensatory Symbols of the Sacred in Modernist Literature and Painting.”  In Modernism. Vol. XXI of the International Comparative Literature Association’s  The Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages.  Amsterdam and London: John Benjamins, 2007), vol 2, pp. 637-650.

 

 

Professional Memberships:

American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA)

Modern Language Association (MLA)

 

 

 

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