Weinstein, Arnold L. 1940(?)-

PERSONAL:

Born c. 1940. Education: Princeton University, B.A., 1962; Harvard University, M.A., 1964, Ph.D., 1968; also attended University of Paris, 1960-61, the Free University, Berlin, Germany, 1962- 63, and the University of Lyon, 1966-67.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Providence, RI. Office— Department of Comparative Literature, Brown University, Marson Hall, Box E, Providence, RI 02912. E-mail—Arnold_Weinstein@brown.edu.

CAREER:

Brown University, Providence, RI, assistant professor, 1968-73, associate professor, 1973-78, professor of French studies and comparative literature, 1978-84, professor of comparative literature, 1984—, Henry Merritt Wriston Professor, 1991-95, Edna and Richard Salomon Distinguished Professor, 1995—. Member, Academy of Literary Studies, 1984—. Member, advisory council on comparative literature, Princeton University, 1982-88, chair, 1988-93; member of advisory council for West European grants, Fulbright Commission, 1983-86; member of selection panel for American Council of Learned Societies research grants in Humanities, 1989-90.

MEMBER:

Modern Language Association, American Comparative Literature Association, Society for Advancement of Scandinavian Studies.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Special Fellowship, Free University, 1962-63; Woodrow Wilson National Teaching Fellowship, 1963-64; Fulbright Scholar, University of Lyon, 1966-67; Younger Humanist Award, National Endowment for the Humanities, 1971-72; Salomon Incentive Grant, 1977, 1980; Fulbright Senior Lecturer Award, l983; Brown University Incentive Grant, 1983; John Rowe Workman Award for Best Teacher in the Humanities, Brown University, 1995; Professeur Invité, École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France, 1996; fellowship for university teachers, National Endowment for the Humanities, 1997.

WRITINGS:

Vision and Response in Modern Fiction, Cornell University Press (Ithaca, NY), 1974.

Fictions of the Self, 1550-1800, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1981.

The Fiction of Relationship, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1988.

Nobody's Home: Speech, Self, and Place in American Fiction from Hawthorne to DeLillo, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1993.

20th-Century American Fiction (sound recording), Teaching Co. (Springfield, VA), 1997.

A Scream Goes through the House: What Literature Teaches Us about Life, Random House (New York, NY), 2003.

Recovering Your Story: Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, Morrison, Random House (New York, NY), 2006.

Breaking Through: Power and Expression in Scandinavian Literature and Art, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 2007.

Contributor to periodicals, including Modern Fiction Studies, Symposium, Studies in Twentieth Century Literature, Faulkner Journal, Scandinavian Studies, Literature and Medicine, Brown Alumni Monthly, Providence Journal, New York Times Book Review, and Ibsen News and Comment, as well as to various essay collections.

SIDELIGHTS:

Arnold L. Weinstein is a university scholar whose primary areas of interest include the works of Marcel Proust, James Joyce, William Faulkner, Henrik Ibsen, and August Strindberg; Scandinavian literature; the fiction of relationship; and literature and medicine. He regularly conducts research in European and American narrative forms; Scandinavian literature; American fiction, literature, and medicine; and the theme of the city in literature. Weinstein has written extensively on these subjects, producing numerous journal articles and books, and has presented lectures for universities and organizations around the world.

Weinstein has pronounced his book Nobody's Home: Speech, Self, and Place in American Fiction from Hawthorne to DeLillo to be one of his more personal achievements. He states that the freedom of language provides a sort of foundation for the American way of life, and that this freedom is reflected in his own approach to both literature and literary criticism of the post-World War II era, when Americanism was at its height. Evan Carton pointed out in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology that Weinstein's declaration echoes those of earlier Americanists, such as Richard Chase, Leslie Fiedler, and Richard Poirier: "Nobody's Home so plainly resonates with the spirit of the works these critics published some thirty years ago that I was initially frustrated by Weinstein's choice not to examine or defend this resonance and not to differentiate his study, his arguments, from those of his predecessors." Carton went on to admit, however: "These omissions seemed less troubling as I proceeded." Weinstein does address the more modern, skeptical attitude toward current literature, which appears to have moved beyond this emphasis on the freedoms of the American ideal. In a review for Studies in Short Fiction, Paul Lukacs declared the book "simultaneously insightful and confused, penetrating in its analysis of individual texts but somewhat muddled in its larger claims about American life and literature."

A Scream Goes through the House: What Literature Teaches Us about Life offers readers a wide survey of literature, as Weinstein shows how not only the thought of life, but life itself, is held within the pages of the books he discusses. He suggests that when a reader closely studies a great work of literature and addresses the questions the narrative poses, it is possible for that reader to experience a life-altering revelation and to internalize the experience. While finding the book to be less than accessible to general audiences, a contributor to Kirkus Reviews remarked that Weinstein "writes most eloquently about Edvard Munch, whose paintings prove nearly every argument the author advances."

In Recovering Your Story: Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, Morrison, Weinstein focuses on the works of the authors in the title in order to illustrate how great literature can present the reader with the essence of life, its emotional questions of love and existence. He also encourages readers to tackle the more overwhelming modern works he discusses, while acknowledging that the literary experimentations of the period made those novels less accessible to the average reader who was not willing to work at reading a book. "Rarely has literary scholarship spoken more cogently to general readers," declared Bryce Christensen in Booklist. A Kirkus Reviews critic added that "Weinstein's lengthy exegeses and analyses are not for the casual reader, but those who share his taste for challenging fiction will be moved by his love for books." Anthony Pucci, writing in Library Journal, asserted that Weinstein's volume "demonstrates not just knowledge but wisdom and sensitivity."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, December 15, 2005, Bryce Christensen, review of Recovering Your Story: Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, Morrison, p. 14.

Journal of English and Germanic Philology, January, 1995, Evan Carton, review of Nobody's Home: Speech, Self, and Place in American Fiction from Hawthorne to DeLillo, p. 153.

Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 2003, review of A Scream Goes through the House: What Literature Teaches Us about Life, p. 798; January 15, 2006, review of Recovering Your Story, p. 79.

Library Journal, July, 2003, Carolyn M. Craft, review of A Scream Goes through the House, p. 83; January 1, 2006, Anthony Pucci, review of Recovering Your Story, p. 252.

Publishers Weekly, June 23, 2003, review of A Scream Goes through the House, p. 57; November 28, 2005, review of Recovering Your Story, p. 32.

Studies in Short Fiction, spring, 1994, Paul Lukacs, review of Nobody's Home, p. 275.

Studies in the Novel, summer, 1995, Rosemarie A. Battaglia, review of Nobody's Home, p. 240.

ONLINE

Brown University Research Web site, http://research.brown.edu/ (October 11, 2006), faculty profile on Arnold L. Weinstein.