Brian D. Walter

 E-mail: bdwalter@artsci.wustl.edu

 

English Department, Box 1122

Washington University

St. Louis, MO 63130

(314) 935-5190

http://artsci.wustl.edu/~bdwalter

6016 Washington Avenue

                             St. Louis, MO 63112-1410

                                            (314) 725-6678

http://homepage.mac.com/bdwlecteur

 

Academic Positions

Lecturer, English & Film and Media Studies, Washington University, 1998-present

Assistant Professor of English, University of the Ozarks, 1996-98

Teaching Assistant, English Department, Washington University, 1990-5

Manuscripts Assistant, Special Collections, Olin Library, Washington University, 1989-90

 

Education

Ph. D., English and American Literature, Washington University, 1995

M. A., English and American Literature, Washington University, 1989

B. A., English, Reed College, Portland, Oregon, 1988

 

Honors, Awards, and Fellowships

Dial Grant for Professional Development, University of the Ozarks, Spring 1998

Bagwell Outstanding Teacher Award, University of the Ozarks, 1997

Dial Grant for Professional Development, University of the Ozarks, Spring 1997

Dial Grant for Professional Development, University of the Ozarks, Fall 1996

Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities, Boston University, 1996 (declined)

Postdoctoral Research Associateship, English Dept., Washington University, 1995-6

Hurst Assistantship, English Department, Washington University, 1991

 

Publications – Scholarly

“Life like a String.”  Translation of story by Shi Tiesheng.  With Manling Luo.  (In preparation.)

 

“Ride and Tie: The Transformations of Ekaterina.”  (In preparation.)

 

“Childhood’s End: War and Innocence in Harington’s When Angels Rest.”  Southern Quarterly, Vol. XL, no. 2 (Spring 2002).  51-65.

 

“Two Organ-Grinders: Duality and Discontent in Bend Sinister.”  Discourse and Ideology in Nabokov’s Prose, vol. 7 of Studies in Russian and European Literature, eds. Peter Barta, David Shepherd, and David H. J. Larmour.  London and New York: Routledge, 2002.  24-40.

 

“’A Forgotten Poet’: Nabokov’s Dostoyevskian Row.”  In Torpid Smoke: The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, ed. Kellman, Steven G. and Irving Malin.  Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2000.  203-17.

 

“The Whale and the Nymphet.”  Boulevard, Vol. 15, nos. 1 & 2 (Fall 1999).  11-38.  Excerpt.

 

“The Tao of Beavis and Butthead.”  Popular Culture Review, Volume 10, no. 1 (February 1999).  167-75.

 

Innocents at Home.”  Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.  September 27, 1998.  1J, 8J.

 

“[The Library of America’s Nabokov]” (review-essay).  American Studies International, June 1997.  92-5.

 

“Many a Pleasant Tussle: Edmund Wilson and the Nabokovian Aesthetic.  Nabokov Studies, vol. 3 (1996).  77-87.

 

“The Lolita Riddle.”  The Nabokovian‚ no. 36 (Spring 1996).  26-8.

 

“Romantic Parody and the Ironic Muse in Lolita.”  Essays in Literature, vol. 22, no. 1 (Spring 1995).  123-43.

 

Publications – Reviews (Unless designated otherwise, all reviews appeared in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette)

Donald Harington, Thirteen Albatrosses, or Falling off the Mountain (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 14, 2002)

Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why (August 20, 2000)

James Wood, The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief (September 5, 1999)

Jonathan Weiner, Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins

    of Behavior (August 15, 1999)

Horton Foote, Farewell (June 27, 1999)

Milan Kundera‚ Identity (June 28, 1998)

Stephen J. Gould, Questioning the Millennium: A Rationalist’s Guide to a Perfectly Arbitrary Countdown (December 7, 1997)

Andrew Delbanco‚ Required Reading: Why Our American Classics Matter Now (October 26, 1997)

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (audiobook version) (August 10, 1997)

Andrew Miller, Ingenious Pain (July 20, 1997)

Charles Baxter, Believers and Burning Down the House (May 4, 1997)

Erica Kates (editor), On the Couch: Great Stories about Therapy (March 9, 1997)

James Cowan, A Mapmaker’s Dream (January 1997)

Stephen J. Gould, Full House (November 1996)

William F. Gass,  Finding a Form (October 1996)

­­­­­­­­

Publications – Other

“Ancient Stones.”  (Under consideration for Vestal Review.)

 

“Hannibal vs. Humbert.”  (Under consideration for Conjunctions.)

 

“A Visit to the Museum.”  (Under consideration for Southern Quarterly.)

 

In Memoriam: Lawrence J. Ross.”  Eliot Review, Vol. XIV, no. 1 (Fall 1998).  56-60.

 

Professional Activities – Papers Presented

“The Camera Eye in Nabokov’s Pnin.”  American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies Conference, November 2000.

 

“The Hand that Sets off the Ring: Manual Imagery and the Irony of Civilization in Wharton’s Age of Innocence,” Twentieth-Century Literature Conference, February 1998.

 

At Play in the Primordial Cave: Childhood and Artistic Identity in Speak, Memory,” American Literature Association Convention, May 1997.

 

“The Rapture of Endless Approximation: Nabokov and the Figure of the Scholar,” Modern Language Association Convention, December 1996.

 

“Don’t Drink the Water.”  Chapel Series, University of the Ozarks, November 1996.

 

“The Whale and the Nymphet: Anatomy and Narrative Strategy in Moby-Dick and Lolita,” Colloquium Series, Washington University, April 1996.

 

“Many a Pleasant Tussle: Edmund Wilson and the Nabokovian Aesthetic,” Modern Language Association Convention, December 1995.

 

“Sweetening the Ordeal: Nabokov’s Discontent in Bend Sinister‚” symposium on “Discourse and Ideology in Nabokov’s Prose,” Texas Tech University, April 1995.

 

“A Robust but Pliant Philistine: John Ray as Lolita’s Ironic Muse,” Modern Language Association Convention, December 1994.

 

“Exasperating Learned Readers: Humbert Humbert and the “So-Called ‘Sex’” of the Enchanted Hunters Episode,” Twentieth-Century Literature Conference, February 1994.

 

Professional Activities – Other

Panelist, “Stay More and Stay Morons: Donald Harington’s Comic Novels of the Arkansas Ozarks,” Society for the Study of Southern Literature, April 2000.

 

Chair, “Crime, Explanation, and Punishment,” session at American Literature Association Convention, April 1997.

 

Organizer, “Nabokov and Childhood,” session at American Literature Association Convention, April 1997.

 

Chair, “Nabokov’s Non-Fiction,” session at Modern Language Association Convention, December 1995.

 

Courses TaughtWashington University (with selected authors and texts taught)

Raising the Red Lantern: China’s Fifth Generation Film Directors

Children’s Literature on Film

The Lolita Phenomenon

Chief English Writers II

History of American Cinema

Introduction to Film Studies (Discussion Group Leader)

Chief English Writers I (Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton)

Chief American Writers (Irving, Hawthorne, Douglass, Whitman, Melville, Dickinson, Frost, Cather, Salinger, and Morrison)

Masterpieces of European Literature II (Cervantes, Moliere, Rousseau, Pushkin, Flaubert, Dinesen, Rilke, Calvino, and Woolf)

Practical Criticism (including Chekhov‚ Wharton, Coleridge‚ Swenson, and Richards)

Between the Lines: The Personality of Fiction (Laclos, Poe, Dostoevsky, Conrad, James, Wharton, Ford, Boyle, Nabokov, Banville, and Woolf)

Topics in 20th-Century American Literature (Frost, Bishop, Cather, Wharton, Faulkner, Nabokov, and Morrison)

The American Novel (Hawthorne, Melville, James, Twain, Cather, Wharton, Faulkner, Nabokov, Harington, and Morrison)

Introduction to Literature (Literature and Shuttlecock)

The Short Story (Calvino, Irving, Wharton, Joyce, Kafka, Cather, Nabokov, Beckett‚ Kundera‚ and Ozick)

The Novels of Vladimir Nabokov

Survey of American Literature since the Civil War (including Dickinson, James, Cather, Wharton, Frost, Stevens, Anderson, Hemingway‚ Faulkner)

Survey of American Literature before the Civil War (including Winthrop, Rowlandson, Mather, Edwards, Irving, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, and Whitman)

Major American Writers (including Hawthorne‚ Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, Stein, Eliot, Fitzgerald‚ Faulkner‚ and Morrison)

Introduction to Reading and Writing about Literature (including Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights)

Interdisciplinary Freshman Composition (Title: “Childhood, Adolescence, and Society”) (including More, Aries‚ and Freud)

Advanced Composition (The Language of Argument and Speak, Memory)

Composition I and Composition II

English Composition, INROADS St. Louis

Advanced Freshman Composition (including Gould, Sacks, Kuhn, Wylie, Nabokov, Welty, Pritchett, Trimble, and Morrison)

Freshman Composition (including Twain, Welty, O’Connor‚ Leopold, and Baker)

 

Languages

Spanish: good reading, speaking, and writing ability

French: reading knowledge

 

Recommendations and References

Naomi Lebowitz, Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Humanities, Washington University, (314) 935-4398 or 721-7547

Wayne Fields, Lynne Cooper Harvey Distinguished Chair in English and Director of American Culture Studies, Washington University, (314) 935-5216

William Paul, Professor, Film and Media Studies, Washington University, (314) 935-8485

D. Barton Johnson, Professor Emeritus of Slavic Literature and Languages‚ University of California at Santa Barbara

Donald Harington, Professor of Art History, University of Arkansas

Caroline Whitson, President, Columbia College

William F. Gass, David May Distinguished University Professor Emeritus in the Humanities, Washington University

Robert Milder, Professor of English, Washington University, (314) 935-4430

Stuart Stelzer, Director‚ Robson Library, University of the Ozarks, (501) 979-1381

Richard Ruland, Professor of English, Washington University, (314) 935-4408

Eric Pankey, Associate Professor of English, George Mason University, (703) 426-2985

Doreen Salli, Director, The Writing Center, Washington University, (314) 935-9817