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
• Film (Hitchcock, the woman's film, melodrama, horror, film noir, 1970s film, sci-fi, De Palma, contemporary Hollywood, queer film)
• Television and popular culture

An associate professor of English at Connecticut College, David Greven's areas of specialization are nineteenth-century American literature; cinema, television, and popular culture; psychoanalytic theory, queer theory, and gender studies; and the history of American literary and film criticism.

Greven’s 2009 book, Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush (University of Texas Press), examines masculinity in contemporary film from 1989 to the present. Also published in 2009, Greven’s book Gender and Sexuality in Star Trek (McFarland) considers the allegorical representation of queer sexuality in the Trek mythos. In his first book, Men Beyond Desire: Manhood, Sex, and Violation in American Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), Greven examines the recurrent figure of the isolate, emotionally and sexually unavailable male in Classic American literature. 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 essays have appeared or will appear in journals such as New Literary History, American Quarterly, Postmodern Culture, Cinema Journal, Genders, Jump Cut, Modern Psychoanalysis, The European Journal of American Culture, Refractory, Studies in American Fiction, Poe Studies: Dark Romanticism, and The Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, as well as the critical readers Reel Food, Action Chicks, and Reading Sex and the City.

He is the co-editor of a forthcoming special issue of The Nathaniel Hawthorne Review on the “Late Hawthorne,” and has a current book project under publisher’s review called "Oneness Inscrutable: Hawthorne’s Fiction and Freudian Theory."

Greven is on the advisory board for Genders and The Nathaniel Hawthorne Society, and reads essays and manuscripts for journals and publishers such as PMLA, College Literature, Northwestern University Press, and Peter Lang.

Greven is a winner of a Phyllis W. Meadow Award for Excellence in Psychoanalytic Writing for his essay “Rereading Narcissism: Freud’s Theory of Male Homosexuality and Hawthorne’s ‘The Gentle Boy,’” which will be published in Modern Psychoanalysis vol. 34(2), 2009.

The courses Greven teaches include Same-Sex Love in the American Renaissance; Empires of Selfhood: American Literature in the Age of Emerson and Thoreau; Hawthorne and Poe; American Women Writers; Gothic Romanticism; Hitchcock’s Films; Hollywood After the Sixties; English 220: Theory and Interpretation of Literature; and English 120: Seminar in Literary Interpretation.

View the English department site.