User talk:JamesNohrnberg

Self-identification for a list of former Harvard Advocate members (by professional calling)
In the article on the Harvard Advocate there is a list of academics, critics, and scholars who have been on the Advocate masthead as undergraduates at Harvard. I am one of those (I published poems there-under as well), and think it appropriate for me to be listed (even if I am merely self-nominated for the honor). The criteria are presumably one's being "notable" or "distinguished" or something like that. Perhaps I could qualify, "in recognition of high attainments in liberal scholarship," in the words (on the certificate) of Harvard's 50th Reunion Class's membership in its φΒΚ chapter (in May 2012 three class members were chosen from the Class of 1962). Career: teaching in English Depts. at Univ. of Toronto, Harvard, Yale, and Univ. of Virginia (Prof. Emeritus). Recognitions: Kenyon Prize Scholar in English and American Literature and Robert Frost Poetry Prize (1958-60), American Academy of Poets Prize (Harvard 1961), Harvard φΒΚ and Woodrow Wilson Fellowship (1962), Harvard Soc. of Fellows (1965-68), Queen Elizabeth II Scholarship for Ontario (1963), Guggenheim (1981), Yale's Morse Fellowship (1974), Virginia Center for Advance Studies (1975-78), Princeton's Christian Gauss Seminars (1987), Indiana Institute for Advanced Study (1991), International Spenser Soc.'s 9th Colin Clout award (2009), "omaggio" conference at Purdue (2011), and a forty-year old book, even now in print, and nowadays sometimes kindly adjudged the most synoptic on Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene (& its Ren. literary milieu) [see James Kearney, "Certain Kinds of Ambition: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying about Early Modern Scholarship (with A Love Letter to James Nohrnberg’s The Analogy of The Faerie Queene)," Spenser Review 45.2.22 (Fall 2015): http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/spenseronline/review/item/45.2.22. To which I'd add a gratifying number of distinguished and widely published former students of mine in the professoriate; 50 or so articles, reviews, and review essays (some reprinted) -- on exegesis, allegory, myth, Bible, Homer, Dante, Boiardo, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Tennyson, Pynchon, and my teachers Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye. --And papers delivered in Canada, Ireland, Israel, UK, and USA (named lectureships included). Here is a fairly recent notice:

From David Mikics, A New Handbook of Literary Terms (Yale Univ. Press, 2007):

"¶ An ideal bibliography should include older, respected works that continue to shape our sense of what criticism can to. Auerbach’s Mimesis, first published in Switzerland in 1946, is still the indispensable book on realism. Mimesis is referred to repeatedly here, as is Northrop Frye’s definitive Anatomy of Criticism (1957), the best treatment of genre. Frye, like Auerbach, opened up a whole new world for criticism with his book, which continues to be central to literary study fifty years after it was written. A student who wants a sure grounding in literary history, and at the same time an exhilarating experience of criticism at the height of its powers, would do well to read Mimesis and An Anatomy of Criticism—along with other synoptic and original works like James Nohrnberg’s The Analogy of the Faerie Queene, Harold Bloom’s The Visionary Company, Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel, Geoffrey Hartman’s Beyond Formalism, Martin Price’s To the Palace of Wisdom, Martha Nussbaum’s The Fragility of Goodness, Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era, Irving Howe’s Politics and the Novel, Ronald Paulson’s Satire and the Novel, Frank Kermode’s Romantic Image, and William Empson’s Some Versions of the Pastoral. Curtius’ European Literature the Latin Middle Ages remains the essential guide to the topoi that engage medieval and Renaissance literature. These fourteen books, some of them published as long ago as the 1930s (Empson), provide the background and assumptions for much later work. Some more recent volumes, like Margaret Doody’s The True Story of the Novel, share the ambitions and innovative character of those I have just listed. The Handbook takes care not to slight younger critics—there are quite a few references from the new, twenty-first century—but I have emphasized those books that have already stood the test of time." – "Preface," p. ix.

I would like my listing to be something like this:

James C. Nohrnberg. Renaissance scholar and literary critic, in the Dept. of English at University of Virginia.

Thank-you, whoever you might turn out to be, for your attention. JamesNohrnberg (talk) 00:58, 2 March 2018 (UTC)