Summary
Paul H. Fry is the William Lampson Professor of English and has taught at Yale since 1971. He received his BA from the University of California, Berkeley and his Ph. D. from Harvard. His primary areas of specialization are British romanticism, the history of literary criticism, contemporary literary theory, and literature in relation to the visual arts. The Poet's Calling in the English Ode (Yale, 1980) received the Melville Cane Award of the Poetry Society in America. Subsequent books are: The Reach of Criticism: Method and Perception in Literary Theory (Yale, 1984), William Empson: Prophet Against Sacrifice (Routledge, 1990), A Defense of Poetry: Essays on the Occasion of Writing (Stanford, 1996), The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (ed.; Bedford-St. Martins, 1999), and Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are (Yale Studies in English, 2008). He was Director of Graduate Studies in the English department for nine years and Master of Ezra Stiles College for seven. Since 2008 he has been Director of Graduate Studies in English again. He served as member and Chair of the Region II Committee for the Mellon Fellowships in the Humanities for twenty-five years. Among his more unusual publications are numerous short essays on painting and exhibition reviews for ArtNews and an article on aesthetics in the Philoctetes Journal, a periodical for the study of the imagination sponsored by the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. He is the 2011 winner of the Stephen Sondheim Inspirational Teaching Award offered by the Kennedy Center for the Arts. His lecture course, "Introduction to Literary Theory," can be viewed on OpenYale. He is Executive Co-Chair of the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute and its national counterpart, the Yale National Initiative, in whihc he has led summer seminars for seven years. He began life as a painter and hopes to come full circle.
Paul H. Fry is the William Lampson Professor of English and has taught at Yale since 1971. He received his BA from the University of California, Berkeley and his Ph. D. from Harvard. His primary areas of specialization are British romanticism, the history of literary criticism, contemporary literary theory, and literature in relation to the visual arts. The Poet's Calling in the English Ode (Yale, 1980) received the Melville Cane Award of the Poetry Society in America. Subsequent books are: The Reach of Criticism: Method and Perception in Literary Theory (Yale, 1984), William Empson: Prophet Against Sacrifice (Routledge, 1990), A Defense of Poetry: Essays on the Occasion of Writing (Stanford, 1996), The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (ed.; Bedford-St. Martins, 1999), and Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are (Yale Studies in English, 2008). He was Director of Graduate Studies in the English department for nine years and Master of Ezra Stiles College for seven. Since 2008 he has been Director of Graduate Studies in English again. He served as member and Chair of the Region II Committee for the Mellon Fellowships in the Humanities for twenty-five years. Among his more unusual publications are numerous short essays on painting and exhibition reviews for ArtNews and an article on aesthetics in the Philoctetes Journal, a periodical for the study of the imagination sponsored by the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. He is the 2011 winner of the Stephen Sondheim Inspirational Teaching Award offered by the Kennedy Center for the Arts. His lecture course, "Introduction to Literary Theory," can be viewed on OpenYale. He is Executive Co-Chair of the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute and its national counterpart, the Yale National Initiative, in whihc he has led summer seminars for seven years. He began life as a painter and hopes to come full circle.
Current Institution | Yale University |
Department | English |
Disciplines | |
Geographical Focus | |
Address | LC 424 New Haven Connecticut 06520 United States Phone: 203-432-2235 |
Office Hours | W 11-1 & 2-4 LC 107 |
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- Awarded Provostial Research Fund (2008)
- A. Whitney Griswold Research Grant (1989)
- A. Whitney Griswold Research Grant (1978)
Publication Summary
Publications
Books
- Words worth and Poetry of What We Are,Yale Univ. Press, May 2008
- Ed.,“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner ”with Contemporary Critical Essays (Bedford- St.Martin’s,1999)
- A Defense of Poetry:Reflection son the Occasion of Writing (Stanford Univ. Press,1995)
- William Empson: Prophet Against Sacrifice (London:Routledge,1991)
- The Reach of Criticism:Method and Perception in Literary Theory (Yale Univ.Press,1983).
- The Poet’s Callingin the English Ode (Yale Univ.Press,1980).
ForthcomingBooks
- IntroductiontoLiteraryTheory(Fall2011)
- OnIsland:TheInventionofNantucket
- ThreeRomanticisms:Byron,Shelley,Keats
ArticlesandReviews
- “Time to Retire? Coleridge and Wordsworth Go to Work,” in three publications: Grasmere 2009: Selected Papers from the Summer Wordsworth Conference; The Wordsworth Circle; The Yale Review (shorter version), all 2011.
- “How to Live with the Infinite Regress of Strong Misreading,” for a British anthology on Harold Bloom, Manchester Univ. Press, ed. Alan Rawes, 2009, and published also in an MLQ special issue on “Influence,” ed. Andrew Elfenbein.
- “The Lamplit Answer? Gjertrud Schackenberg’s Antiekphrases,” In the Frame: Women’s Ekphrastic Poetry from Marianne Moore to Susan Wheeler, ed. Jane Hedley, Nick Halpern, and Willard Speigelman (Newark: U. of Delaware Press, 2009), 55-71.
- “Romanticism as Theory,” Romanticism Today: Selected Papers from the Tübingen Conference of the German Society for English Romanticism, ed. Lars Eckstein and Christoph Reinfandt (Trier: WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2009), 41-51.
- Review of Leon Chai, Romantic Theory: Forms of Reflexivity in the Revolutionary Era, Modern Philology 106 (2008), 170-74.
- “The Experience of Art: Beyond the Agreeable, the Beautiful, and the Good,” Philoctetes: The Journal of the Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of the Imagination 2:2 (2008)
- “How to Live with the Infinite Regress of Strong Misreading,” Modern Language Quarterly 69:4 (2008), 437-59.
- “The History of the Yale English Department,” Yale University English Department Website, 2008
- Review of Susan Wolfson, Borderlines: The Shiftings of Gender in British Romanticism, MLQ 69 (2008), 303-06.
- “Hermeneutic Circling: Empson, Rosamund Tuve, and the ‘Wimsatt Law,’” Some Versions of Empson, ed. Matthew Bevis (Oxford: Clarendon, 2007)
- Review of Anthony Bailey, John Constable: A Kingdom of His Own, ArtNews 2007.
- “Progresses of Poetry,” The Wordsworth Circle 37:1 (2006), 22-27.
- Introduction, “Children’s Literature in the Classroom,” On Common Ground, 2006.
- Review: “Richard Hamilton, Metaromanticism,” Clio 2005.
- “Green to the Very Door? The Natural Wordsworth,” The Wordsworthian Enlightenment, ed. Helen Regueiro Elam and Frances Ferguson (Johns Hopkins, 2005)
- “Teaching with Fire: Poetry that Sustains the Courage to Teach, ed. Sam M. Intrator et al.” On Common Ground, 2004.
- “Time to Retire? Coleridge and Wordsworth Go to Work,” in three publications: Grasmere 2009: Selected Papers from the Summer Wordsworth Conference; The Wordsworth Circle; The Yale Review (shorter version), all 2011.
- “How to Live with the Infinite Regress of Strong Misreading,” for a British anthology on Harold Bloom, Manchester Univ. Press, ed. Alan Rawes, 2009, and published also in an MLQ special issue on “Influence,” ed. Andrew Elfenbein.
- “The Lamplit Answer? Gjertrud Schackenberg’s Antiekphrases,” In the Frame: Women’s Ekphrastic Poetry from Marianne Moore to Susan Wheeler, ed. Jane Hedley, Nick Halpern, and Willard Speigelman (Newark: U. of Delaware Press, 2009), 55-71.
- “Romanticism as Theory,” Romanticism Today: Selected Papers from the Tübingen Conference of the German Society for English Romanticism, ed. Lars Eckstein and Christoph Reinfandt (Trier: WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2009), 41-51.
- Review of Leon Chai, Romantic Theory: Forms of Reflexivity in the Revolutionary Era, Modern Philology 106 (2008), 170-74.
- “The Experience of Art: Beyond the Agreeable, the Beautiful, and the Good,” Philoctetes: The Journal of the Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of the Imagination 2:2 (2008)
- “How to Live with the Infinite Regress of Strong Misreading,” Modern Language Quarterly 69:4 (2008), 437-59.
- “The History of the Yale English Department,” Yale University English Department Website, 2008
- Review of Susan Wolfson, Borderlines: The Shiftings of Gender in British Romanticism, MLQ 69 (2008), 303-06.
- “Hermeneutic Circling: Empson, Rosamund Tuve, and the ‘Wimsatt Law,’” Some Versions of Empson, ed. Matthew Bevis (Oxford: Clarendon, 2007)
- Review of Anthony Bailey, John Constable: A Kingdom of His Own, ArtNews 2007.
- “Progresses of Poetry,” The Wordsworth Circle 37:1 (2006), 22-27.
- Introduction, “Children’s Literature in the Classroom,” On Common Ground, 2006.
- Review: “Richard Hamilton, Metaromanticism,” Clio 2005.
- “Green to the Very Door? The Natural Wordsworth,” The Wordsworthian Enlightenment, ed. Helen Regueiro Elam and Frances Ferguson (Johns Hopkins, 2005)
- “Teaching with Fire: Poetry that Sustains the Courage to Teach, ed. Sam M. Intrator et al.” On Common Ground, 2004.
- “Ezra Stiles’s Idea of a University,” The Journal of Aesthetic Education 36 (2002).
- “Pop Goes Ulysses (Richard Hamilton’s Joyce Illustrations in Dublin),” ArtNews (July 2002).
- “Jeffreyism, Wordsworth, and the Nonhuman in Nature,” British Romanticism and the Edinburgh Review, Bicentenary Essays. Ed. Massimiliano Demata and Duncan Wu (London: Macmillan/Palgrave, 2002).
- “Narrative Privilege,” Yale Journal of Ethics (2001)
- “Ezra Stiles: An Interdisciplinary President?” Whitney Humanities Center Newsletter (February 2000)
- “Classical Standards in the Romantic Period,” Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 5, ed. Marshall Brown and Ernst Behler (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000)
- “I. A. Richards,” Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 7, ed. A. Walton Litz, Louis Menand, and Lawrence Rainey (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000).
- “Beneath Interpretation: Intention and the Experience of Literature,” The Arts and Sciences of Criticism, ed. David Fuller and Patricia Waugh (Oxford Univ. Press, 1999)
- “Beneath Interpretation: Significance and the Experience of the Literary,” Kulturwissenschaften: Positionen und Perspektiven. Ed. Johannes Anderegg and Edith Anna Kunz (Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 1999)
- Review, “The American Century: Art & Culture 1900-1950, Whitney Museum,” ArtNews (June 1999), 124.
- “Looking at Pictures: David’s L’Amour Quittant Psyche,” ArtNews (March 1999), 94-96.
- “Romancing the Poem: Delacroix’s Bride of Abydos,” ArtNews (December 1998), 128.
- Review, “Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 8, ed. Raman Selden,” Modern Philology 96 (1998), 287-90.
- “Introduction,” “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” with Contemporary Critical Essays, ed. Paul H. Fry (Bedford-St. Martin’s, 1999)
- “Wordsworth in the Rime,” “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” with Contemporary Critical Essays, ed. Paul H. Fry (Bedford-St. Martin’s, 1999)
- “Animal Speech, Active Verbs, and Material Being in E. B. White,” Animal Acts: Configuring the Human in Western History, ed. Jennifer Ham and Matthew Senior (London: Routledge, 1997)
- “Green to the Very Door? The Natural Wordsworth,” Studies in Romanticism 35 (1996), 535-51.
- Rpt.: “The Other Harmony of Dryden’s Preface to Fables,” John Dryden, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1989)
- “Non-Construction: History, Structure, and the Occasion of the Literary,” Yale Journal of Criticism I, 2 (1988), 45-64.
- Rpt.: “La Possessione del Sublime,” La Via al Sublime, ed. M. Brown, V. Fortunati, G. Franci (Firenze: Alinea, 1987).
- “The Possession of the Sublime,” Studies in Romanticism 26 (1987), 187-207.
- “The Scarlet Letter” (review of Rubem Fonseca, High Art), Review (Center for Inter-American Relations) 37 (1987), 77-79.
- “Ode,” The Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms, rev. ed.; ed. Alex Preminger (Princeton Univ. Press). Revision of existing article by S. F. Fogle.
- Rpt.: “Thomas Gray’s Feather’d Cincture,” Poets of Sensibility, ed. Harold Bloom, (New York: Chelsea House, 1987)
- “Afterword: Literary Criticism at Yale,” Yale Graduate Alumni Bulletin (1986).
- “History, Existence, and ‘To Autumn,’” Studies in Romanticism 25 (l986), 211-19.
- “Disposing of the Body: The Romantic Moment of Dying,” Southwest Review 71(1986), 8-26.
- “Back in Yale Again: A Reply to Charles Altieri,” Diacritics 15 (1985), 66-70.
- Rpt.: “Shelley’s Defence of Poetry in Our Time,” Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1985).
- “O Felix Crisis: The Curse of Cain’s Cures” (review of William Cain, The Crisis in Criticism), Virginia Quarterly (1985), 718-22.
- “Moving Van: The Neverland Veens of Nabokov’s Ada,” Contemporary Literature 26 (1985), 123-39.
- “Jean Jacques Rousseau,” European Writers: The Age of Reason and Enlightenment, vol. 4, ed. George Stade (New York: Scribners, 1984), pp. 449-74.
- “Literatures and Our Discontents” (review of books by Jerome McGann, Terry Eagleton, and Helen Vendler), Yale Review (Summer 1984), 603-16.
- “The Image of Walter Benjamin,” Raritan 2 (1983), 131--52.
- “Northrop Frye’s Myth of Concern” (review of The Great Code), Yale Review (Summer 1983), 605-12.
- Review,”John Reichert, Making Sense of Literature,” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 9 (1972), 87-89.
- “Dryden’s Earliest Allusion to Longinus,” English Language Notes 19 (1981), 22-24.
- “Made Men: A Review Article on Recent Shelley and Keats Studies,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 21(1979), 433-54.
- “Georgic Comedy: The Fictive Territory of Jane Austen’s Emma,” Studies in the Novel 11 (1979), 129-46.
- “Thought to the Second Power: A Romance,” Structuralist Review 2 (1979), 14-29.
- “The Absent Dead: Wordsworth, Byron, and the Epitaph,” Studies in Romanticism 17 (1978), 413-33.
- Review, “Murray Krieger, Theory of Criticism,” Structuralist Review 1 (1978), 110-15.
- “Oedipus the King,” Homer to Brecht: The European Epic and Dramatic Traditions, ed. Michael Seidel and Edward Mendelson (Yale Univ. Press, 1977), 171-90.
- “Phaedra,” Homer to Brecht (1977), 273-91.
Forthcoming Articles and Reviews
- “’A Modest Creed: Saving Skepticism in Shelley and Cavell,’” for an anthology on Cavell and romanticism edited by Eric Lindstrom (in Romantic Praxis online, gen. ed. Orrin Wang)
- “Paul Mellon’s Legacy,” ArtNews
- “The Intentional Fallacy,” The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory, ed. Gregory Castle
- “The Poetic Function in Jakobson,” Ibid.
Public Lectures and Symposia
- Fall 2011: “Hirsch or Gadamer: Are There Consequences?” Conference on “The Politics of Interpretation,” Oxford University.
- Spring 2011: “Constable and Wordsworth’s ‘Gleam that never was, on sea or land’: “Peele Castle,” “Hadleigh Castle,” Elizabethan Club, Yale.
- Spring 2011: “Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America,” Greenwich Book Club.
- Spring 2011: “The Cute.” Keynote address at the annual graduate student conference in Comparative Literature, Yale.
- Fall 2010: “’A Modest Creed’: Saving Skepticism in Shelley and Cavell,” International Conference on Romanticism, Lubbock, TX.
- Summer 2010: “Constable and Wordsworth’s ‘Gleam that never was, on sea or land’: “Peele Castle,” “Hadleigh Castle,” University of Munich.
- Spring 2010, “Conrad’s The Secret Agent,” Greenwich Book Club.
- July 2009: “Time to Retire? Coleridge and Wordsworth Go to Work,” Annual Wordsworth Conference, Grasmere
- Spring 2009: “Honourable Toil: Coleridge and Wordsworth Go to Work,” In the Company of Scholars, Yale University
- Spring 2009: “Darwin, Literature, and the British Art Center Darwin Exhibit,” Greenwich Book Club, April
- 2008. “Time to Retire? Coleridge and Wordsworth Go to Work,” International Conference on Romanticism, Rochester, MI, October
- 2008. “David Cox’s Watercolors,” North American Victorian Studies Conference, Yale University, October
- 2008. “Is Constable Wordsworthian? A Dissenting View,” Art in Context lecture, Yale Center for British Art, October.
- Fall 2008: “The History of the Yale English Department,” “Using Theory” Series,Yale University, September
- 2008. “Mansfield Park and the English Landscape Garden,” Greenwich Book Club, April
- 2008: Moderator, Round Table on Metaphor, Philoctetes Society, New York, March
- 2008: “Hoof After Hoof, Metric Time in Wordsworth,” Princeton University, March
- 2007. “Brooks Reads Wordsworth,” Symposium on Cleanth Brooks, Yale University, October.
- 2007. Moderator, Conference on Yehuda Amichai, Yale University, October
- 2007. “On Detective Fiction,” The Yale National Initiative, July.
- 2007. “Empson Using Biography,” Biography Colloquium, Yale Unversity, February.
- 2007. “Romanticism as Theory,” Freie Universität, Berlin, June; University of Tübingen, October.
- 2006. “Empson Using Biography,” Symposium: “William Empson at 100,” Harvard University, October.
- 2006. “Anselm Kiefer, ‘Velimir Chlebnikov and the Sea,” and Günter Grass, Crabwalk,” Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art (Ridgefield, CT), September.
- 2006. “Talking Animals in Children’s Literature,” The Yale National Inititiative, July.
- 2006. Moderator, “Literature and Psychoanalysis,” Philoctetes Society, New York, May.
- 2006. “Are All Islands the Same? Nantucket Musings,” Ezra Stiles College, March.
- 2006. “Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Greenwich Book Club, March
- Fall 2011: “Hirsch or Gadamer: Are There Consequences?” Conference on “The Politics of Interpretation,” Oxford University.
- Spring 2011: “Constable and Wordsworth’s ‘Gleam that never was, on sea or land’: “Peele Castle,” “Hadleigh Castle,” Elizabethan Club, Yale.
- Spring 2011: “Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America,” Greenwich Book Club.
- Spring 2011: “The Cute.” Keynote address at the annual graduate student conference in Comparative Literature, Yale.
- Fall 2010: “’A Modest Creed’: Saving Skepticism in Shelley and Cavell,” International Conference on Romanticism, Lubbock, TX.
- Summer 2010: “Constable and Wordsworth’s ‘Gleam that never was, on sea or land’: “Peele Castle,” “Hadleigh Castle,” University of Munich.
- Spring 2010, “Conrad’s The Secret Agent,” Greenwich Book Club.
- July 2009: “Time to Retire? Coleridge and Wordsworth Go to Work,” Annual Wordsworth Conference, Grasmere
- Spring 2009: “Honourable Toil: Coleridge and Wordsworth Go to Work,” In the Company of Scholars, Yale University
- Spring 2009: “Darwin, Literature, and the British Art Center Darwin Exhibit,” Greenwich Book Club, April
- 2008. “Time to Retire? Coleridge and Wordsworth Go to Work,” International Conference on Romanticism, Rochester, MI, October
- 2008. “David Cox’s Watercolors,” North American Victorian Studies Conference, Yale University, October
- 2008. “Is Constable Wordsworthian? A Dissenting View,” Art in Context lecture, Yale Center for British Art, October.
- Fall 2008: “The History of the Yale English Department,” “Using Theory” Series,Yale University, September
- 2008. “Mansfield Park and the English Landscape Garden,” Greenwich Book Club, April
- 2008: Moderator, Round Table on Metaphor, Philoctetes Society, New York, March
- 2008: “Hoof After Hoof, Metric Time in Wordsworth,” Princeton University, March
- 2007. “Brooks Reads Wordsworth,” Symposium on Cleanth Brooks, Yale University, October.
- 2007. Moderator, Conference on Yehuda Amichai, Yale University, October
- 2007. “On Detective Fiction,” The Yale National Initiative, July.
- 2007. “Empson Using Biography,” Biography Colloquium, Yale Unversity, February.
- 2007. “Romanticism as Theory,” Freie Universität, Berlin, June; University of Tübingen, October.
- 2006. “Empson Using Biography,” Symposium: “William Empson at 100,” Harvard University, October.
- 2006. “Anselm Kiefer, ‘Velimir Chlebnikov and the Sea,” and Günter Grass, Crabwalk,” Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art (Ridgefield, CT), September.
- 2006. “Talking Animals in Children’s Literature,” The Yale National Inititiative, July.
- 2006. Moderator, “Literature and Psychoanalysis,” Philoctetes Society, New York, May.
- 2006. “Are All Islands the Same? Nantucket Musings,” Ezra Stiles College, March.
- 2006. “Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Greenwich Book Club, March
Books
Other Publications