People
Faculty
Britton Harwood
Titles
- Professor of English
Education
- Ph.D. in English Language and Literature, State University of New York at Buffalo, 1970
- M.S. in Education, Canisius College
- B.A. in Philosophy, Hamilton College
Teaching Interests
- Middle English literature
- Theory of genre
- Theory of criticism
Research Interests
- Chaucer
- Epic and society in the Middle Ages
- Theory of genre
Selected Publications
- “Same Sex Desire in the Unconscious of Chaucer’s Parliament,” Exemplaria 13:1 (Spring 2001).
- “Piers Plowman and the Problem of Unbelief.” Speculum 69 (1994): 794-96.
- Class and Gender in Early English Literature: Intersections, co-edited with Gillian R. Overing. Indiana University Press, 1994.
- “Pearl as Diptych,” in Text and Matter: New Critical Perspectives of the Pearl-Poet, ed. Robert J. Blanch, Miriam Youngerman Miller, and Julian N. Wasserman (Troy, N. Y.: Whitson, 1991).
- “Psychoanalytic Politics: Chaucer and Two Peasants,” ELH, 2001
- “The Political Use of Desire in the Unconscious of Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls,” Exemplaria, 2001
- “The Political Use of Chaucer in America at the Present Time,” in Medievalism in the Modern World, ed. T.A. Shippey and Richard Utz (Brepols, 1998);
- “The Alliterative Morte Arthure As a Witness to Epic,” in Orality in the Middle English Period, ed. Mark Amodio (Garland, 1994);
- “Pearl as Diptych,” in Text and Matter, ed. R.J. Blanch et al. (Whitston, 1991);
- “Chaucer’s Pardoner: The Dialectics of Inside and Outside,” Philological Quarterly, 1988
Work in Progress
Dr. Harwood’s principal piece of work in progress is Pluralist Chaucer: Synthesis and Difference in Contemporary Critical Theory. In it, he attempts to dialecticize critical pluralism and political pluralism, arguing that only a pluralism of critical procedures can produce the historical specificity that political pluralism supposes. He is also working on two freestanding essays: an argument that the therapy employed by the narrator in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess in effect anticipates Freud’s point in the famous Fort-Da passage in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and a feminist reading of the Middle English Sir Orfeo.