Contact David Greven

David Greven Curriculum Vitae

B.A., Hunter College
Ph.D., Brandeis University

"Roderick Usher decries the narrator as a madman when it is he, Roderick, who inhabits a moldering realm of incestuous passions and live burials and supernatural death--Roderick interpellates the reader as madman, forcing us to acknowledge that to deny the reality of his situation by shuddering at its irrationality constitutes our madness, not his. The House of Usher looms like the antebellum asylum, as its perfervid, fun-house mirror reflection. It inverts the calm, rational, orderly design of utopian prisons, hospitals, asylums, and other institutions; within its walls, madness is bred, not treated, chaos is fostered, not halted. The unnamed narrator is not so much a patient as he is an inspector .... But in Poe, it is he who is diagnosed, he who is diseased, mad .... Unwelcomed, unneeded, and ejected, the unnamed narrator is the infective agent of normality in the Ushers' madhouse world, in which to be mad is normal, to be normal quite mad." - excerpt from a chapter on Edgar Allan Poe's story "The Fall of the House of Usher" in David Greven's 2005 book, Men Beyond Desire

Joined Connecticut College: 2004

• Antebellum American literature
• Television, popular culture
• Film (Hitchcock, De Palma, the woman's film, melodrama, horror, film noir, 1970s film, sci-fi)

David Greven's myriad intellectual interests extend to literature, film, television and pop culture. His forthcoming book, Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush (University of Texas Press), examines masculinity in contemporary film from 1989 to the present.

A specialist in nineteenth century American literature, Greven examines the recurrent figure of the isolate, emotionally and sexually unavailable male in Classic American literature in his first book, Men Beyond Desire: Manhood, Sex, and Violation in American Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). American Studies Today describes the book as “a refreshing and comprehensive study of the representation of gender and gendered relationships by authors such as Irving, Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and Stowe, among others.”

Greven's work on literature has appeared in journals such as Studies in American Fiction (“In a Pig’s Eye: Masculinity, Mastery, and the Returned Gaze of The Blithedale Romance”), American Quarterly ("Troubling Our Heads About Ichabod: 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,' Classic American Literature, and the Sexual Politics of Homosocial Brotherhood" ), Genders ("Flesh in the Word: Billy Budd, Sailor, Compulsory Homosociality, and the Uses of Queer Desire" ), and The Nathaniel Hawthorne Review ("Fear of Fanshawe: Intransigence, Desire, and Scholarship in Hawthorne's First Published Novel"). Greven’s study of Edgar Allan Poe’s novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket in terms of homosocial desire is forthcoming in Poe Studies.

Greven has written articles on film for such journals as Jump Cut (on Star Trek and neoconservatism), Cineaste ("Dude, Where's My Gender?: Contemporary Teen Comedies and New Forms of American Masculinity") and Cineaction ("The Most Dangerous Game: Failed Male Friendship in De Palma's Snake Eyes") and other essays on film and television appear in collections such as Reel Food (Routledge, 2004), Action Chicks (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), and Reading Sex and the City (I. B. Taurus, 2003); the latter, an essay subtitled "Male Freaks and Sex and the City," was excerpted in The Wall Street Journal and the British newspaper The Guardian.

Greven has also written on Hitchcock, food, and desire and the figure of the tough woman. His current book project, tentatively titled The Sorrows of the Eye: Nathaniel Hawthorne and Narcissism, discusses Hawthorne’s work in terms of visual culture and Freudian psychoanalytic theory.

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