Faculty Member, English
Professor
Arts and Sciences
Thesis Title: The Intelligibility of Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads
Wayne C. Booth
Stuart Tave
About
Having serially professed since 1975 the British Romantics (especially Wordsworth), literary theory, and rhetoric and composition in different academic positions at the Universities of Utah, Washington, and Toledo and at Stony Brook and Penn State Universities, I have found curricular space and administrative encouragement at the University of Pittsburgh to teach in all these areas and cultivate connections among them.
Hired into the group in Composition: Literacy, Pedagogy, Rhetoric, which admits a small number of doctoral students each year, I have taught the required graduate History of Criticism course with an emphasis on the place of rhetoric in that history and the required Seminar in Pedagogy with some attention to theory and literature as well as to composition pedagogy. I teach a seminar on Bakhtin School Rhetoric and Poetics that exploits that school’s appropriation in theory, literary criticism, and rhetoric and composition and draws on my essays on the school’s work over the past twenty-five years. I am currently revising those essays for publication with fresh attention to parallel's between Bakhtin's and Heidegger's work in the '20's. I have also taught a graduate seminar on the History of Tropes and Figures that grows out of my work on recuperating rhetorical criticism, especially the figures of thought. I also teach a seminar in Classical Rhetoric and Romantic Writers that brings rhetorical history and theory into contact with poets and prose writers of the early nineteenth century and draws on the collection I co-edited on that topic with Lawrence Needham.
To undergraduates, I have taught Seminar in Composition in both honors and regular sections and Introduction to Critical Reading, our gateway course to the major. My work in the latter course draws on early work on did on reading Wordsworth’s poetry and has led to teaching strategies I hope to elaborate in a book I am working on about the teaching of poetry. I teach a graduate seminar entitled “Poetry as Utterance: Theory and Pedagogy” that shares these strategies and puts them in the context of recent criticism. I also teach senior seminars on Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads and his Prelude in relation to the literary criticism written about them—an offshoot of my books on his narrative experiments mainly in Lyrical Ballads and on the criticism of his lyrical and autobiographical poems.
I served in a number of administrative posts in previous positions, including Head of the English Department at Penn State for six years. At Pitt I am finishing a term as Co-Director of the Western Pennsylvania Writing Project, for which I have co-taught the Summer Institute for Teachers for the past four years. I remain interested in working with teachers on good ways of teaching writing and reading.
I have been actively engaged at various times with the Modern Language Association, the Conference on College Composition and Communication, the Society for Critical Exchange, the international Bakhtin community, the Association of Departments of English, and the Rhetoric Society of America—my current favorite. I have enjoyed working on English department review committees in colleges and universities in the U. S. and abroad.
July 2009
Contact Information
http://www.english.pitt.edu/people/faculty/bialostosky.html
526 Cathedral of Learning
Pittsburgh, PA 15160
412-624-6506
FAX: 412-624-6639