Castle, Gregory

views updated

Castle, Gregory

PERSONAL:

Education: California State University, Fresno, B.A. (summa cum laude), 1982; California State University, Los Angeles, M.A., 1985, Ph.D., 1990.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of English, Arizona State University, Box 870302, Tempe, AZ, 85287-0302. E-mail—gcastle@asu.edu.

CAREER:

Arizona State University, Tempe, assistant professor, 1992-98, associate professor, 1998-2007, professor of English, 2007—, department director of undergraduate studies and the M.A. literature program, 2007—. Served as secretary and chair of the Executive Committee of the Modern Language Association of America's Anglo-Irish Literature Discussion Group; evaluated manuscripts for Mosaic, James Joyce Quarterly, Victorian Studies, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, PMLA, and Modern Language Studies; reader for Blackwell Publishers, Broadview Press, Polity Press, Cambridge University Press, Fordham University Press, Palgrave MacMillan, and the University of South Carolina Press.

MEMBER:

International James Joyce Foundation, Modern Language Association, American Conference for Irish Studies, Modernist Studies Association.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Gerald Kahan Scholar's Prize, American Society for Theater Research, 1998, for "Staging Ethnography: John M. Synge's Playboy of the Western World and the Problem of Cultural Translation."

WRITINGS:

(Editor) Postcolonial Discourses: An Anthology, Blackwell (Malden, MA), 2001.

Modernism and the Celtic Revival, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 2001.

Reading the Modernist Bildungsroman, University Press of Florida (Gainesville, FL), 2006.

The Blackwell Guide to Literary Theory, Blackwell Publishers (Malden, MA), 2007.

Contributor to books, including Quare Joyce, edited by Joseph Valente, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 1998; Joyce: Feminism / Post / Colonial-ism ("European Joyce Studies" series), edited by Ellen Carol Jones, Rodopi (Atlanta, GA), 1998; Dracula ("Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism" series), by Bram Stoker, edited by John Paul Riquelme, Bedford Books (Boston, MA), 2002; Reading Irish History: Text, Contexts, and Memory in Modern Ireland, edited by Lawrence McBride, Four Courts Press (Dublin, Ireland), 2003; James Joyce in Context, edited by John McCourt, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, England), 2008. Contributor to scholarly journals and periodicals, including James Joyce Quarterly, Theater Journal, Twentieth Century Literature, Genre, Modern Fiction Studies, and Clio: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History. Member of editorial board, Queeries: An Irish Journal of Queer Studies.

SIDELIGHTS:

Gregory Castle is a professor of English literature at Arizona State University specializing in literary modernism, Irish studies, postcolonial studies, and the modernist bildungsroman (or coming-of-age novel). His dozens of published articles, reviews, and conference presentations have largely focused on the Irish authors James Joyce, John Millington Synge, and Bram Stoker and their works. Castle has written nonfiction books and edited Postcolonial Discourses: An Anthology.

Castle's first book, Modernism and the Celtic Revival, explores how authors from the Celtic Revival created the audience they wished to address. The Celtic Revival (or Irish Literary Revival) was a late-nineteenth-century movement to stimulate interest in traditional Irish literature and poetry, spearheaded by authors such as William Butler Yeats, John M. Synge, and James Joyce. According to Castle, these Revivalists formed the modern Irish cultural identity, and thus planted the seeds for the formation of the Irish Free State in 1922. Writing in the journal English Literature in Transition 1880-1920, Sebastian D.G. Knowles observed, "Castle reviews the history of recent anthropological readings of the modernist period, and at the same time provides an excellent overview of the last quarter-century's work on the Irish Revival."

Castle followed Modernism and the Celtic Revival, with Reading the Modernist Bildungsroman, which analyzes coming-of-age novels by Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. The novels discussed include Hardy's Jude the Obscure, Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. Castle argues that the modernist bildungsroman essentially deconstructs the classical bildungsroman, since the protagonists of the modernist novels fail to happily resolve their conflicting personal desires and social responsibilities, yet continue to seek that perfection. Laura Savu, writing for English Literature in Transition 1880-1920, noted that "Castle brings a sophisticated critical awareness to these texts and intellectual rigor to his exploration of the broader contexts—social, political, philosophical, religious, and aesthetic—surrounding them." She added that "both students and scholars of late-Victorian and modernist fiction are likely to find this study valuable not only for the provocative theoretical statements the author puts forth but also for his nuanced, sustained readings of primary texts. At times, his efforts are marred by theoretical jargon, but, overall, Castle succeeds in reconsidering key modernist texts as complex representations of the Bildung process."

In The Blackwell Guide to Literary Theory, Castle gives a broad history of twentieth-century literary theory, discussing sixteen major systems of thought. He includes short biographies of influential theorists and sample readings from several theoretical perspectives. With its timeline and substantial glossary, The Blackwell Guide to Literary Theory is intended as an introduction for undergraduates, new graduate students, and instructors with no background in theory.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, December, 2001, M.H. Kealy, review of Modernism and the Celtic Revival, p. 680; April, 2007, J.M. Utell, review of Reading the Modernist Bildungsroman, p. 1340.

English Literature in Transition 1880-1920, fall, 2002, Sebastian D.G. Knowles, review of Modernism and the Celtic Revival; summer, 2007, Laura Savu, "The Modernist Bildungsroman."

Irish Literary Supplement, spring, 2002, review of Modernism and the Celtic Revival.

Reference & Research Book News, May, 2007, review of The Blackwell Guide to Literary Theory.