Indignant Reading
67 Ellery St., #3,
Cambridge MA 02138
Leah Price, Amanda Claybaugh, Elaine Scarry
"Indignant Reading" is the study of a form of reader response in which readers object to authors for mistreating fictional characters, as in the response to the death of Little Nell in _The Old Curiosity Shop_. Indignant reading emphasizes, one the one hand, authorial power and manipulation, and on the other hand, the independence of the fictional world and its inhabitants; these two perspectives on fiction are often understood to be entirely distinct. Indignation was a central component of Victorian critical and non-professional reading practices and remains a complex pattern of response that troubles many existing theories of reading.
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
Instructor, Department of English
Spring 2011 Reading in the Victorian Marketplace
Fall 2009 Jane Austen and Her Cultural Legacies
Teaching Fellow
Fall 2009 Literature and Sexuality (Professor Matthew Kaiser)
Spring 2009 The American Novel: Dreiser to the Present (Professor Philip Fisher)
Fall 2008 The Classic Phase of the Novel (Professor Philip Fisher)
Head Teaching Fellow
Spring 2010 Crime and Horror in Victorian Literature and Culture (Professor Matthew Kaiser)
W-Grader, Harvard Extension School, English Department
Spring 2011 Women Novelists of the Nineteenth Century (Professor Sue Lonoff de Cuevas)
PUBLICATIONS
“Rebellious Identification, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Arabella,” Narrative 18:2 (163-178), May 2010
CONFERENCE PAPERS
“Under the Sign of the Minerva: A Case of Literary Branding,” presented at the conference of The American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS), Vancouver, March 17-20, 2011.
“Dickens’ Living Coins: The Economy of People in A Tale of Two Cities,” presented at the conference of The Victorians Institute: By the Numbers, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, October 1-3, 2010
“Poetic Injustice,” presented at the conference of The Northeast Modern Language Association (NEMLA), McGill University, Montreal, April 7 – 11, 2010
“Narrative Unfairness,” presented at the conference of The International Society for the Study of Narrative Conference, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK, June 4 – 7, 2009
Harvard Graduate Society Merit Fellowship, Harvard University Certificate of Distinction in Teaching 2010
Co-Chair, British Literature Colloquium, Harvard English Department, 2008-2010, Graduate Writing Fellow, Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, Spring 2009