BROOKER, Jewel Spears 1940-

PERSONAL: Born June 13, 1940, in Jenkins, KY; daughter of William Burnside (in business) and Mae (Johnson) Spears; married Hampton Ralph Brooker (a physicist), December 21, 1962; children: Emily Hope Brooker Langston, Mark Spears. Education: Stetson University, B.S., 1962; University of Florida, M.A., 1964; University of South Florida, Ph.D., 1976.

ADDRESSES: Home—501 68th Ave. S, St. Petersburg, FL 33705. Office—Eckerd College, 4200 54th Ave. S, St. Petersburg, FL 33733. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: University of South Florida, Tampa, adjunct lecturer, 1978-80; Yale University, New Haven, CT, postdoctoral research fellow in English, 1980-81; Eckerd College, St. Petersburg, FL, began as associate professor, became professor of English, 1981—. University of Tampa, adjunct lecturer, 1966-71, 1975; University of South Florida, adjunct lecturer, 1972, 1974-75; St. Edmund's College, Cambridge, visiting scholar, 1987; Columbia University, visiting professor, 1988; Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan, visiting professor, 1992-94; Harvard University, Stanley J. Kahrl Fellow in Literary Manuscripts, 1999; University of London, John Adams fellow at Institute of United States Studies, 2000; Colorado School of Mines, Hennebach Professor in the Humanities, 2003-04; presenter at conferences and guest speaker at institutions in theUnited States and abroad, including Pepperdine University, University of British Columbia, University of Lund, University of Sussex, University of Glasgow, Drury College, and Amherst College. National Endowment for the Humanities, member of National Humanities Council, 2003-08; consultant to Florida Endowment for the Humanities and Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

MEMBER: International Association of University Professors of English, Modern Language Association of America (member of Delegate Assembly, 1993-96), National Council of Teachers of English, Conference on Christianity and Literature (president, 1992-93, 1994-95), American Association of University Professors, Association of Literary Critics and Scholars, T. S. Eliot Society (member of board of directors, 1984-91; president, 1985-88), Richard Wilbur Society (president, 1996-2000), Katherine Anne Porter Society, Society for the Study of Southern Literature, Asian Society for Literature and Religion, South Atlantic Modern Language Association (chair, Modern British Literature Section, 1982-83, and Christianity and Literature Section, 1988-89; member of executive committee, 1993-96; president, 1998-99).

AWARDS, HONORS: Fellow, National Endowment for the Humanities, 1980-81 and 1987; grants from Florida Endowment for the Humanities, 1983, Regional Arts Commission, Missouri Arts Council, and Southern Regional Educational Board, all 1987, Wilbur Foundation, 1988, and Knight Foundation, 1989; Teaching Excellence and Campus Leadership Award, Sears-Roebuck Foundation, 1989-90; essay prize, South Atlantic Modern Language Association, 1993-94, for "Transcendence and Return: T. S. Eliot and the Dialectic of Modernism"; outstanding service commendation, Conference on Christianity and Literature, 1995; honorary fellow, British Library, 1999—; Pew scholars fellow, 1999-2000; award from Distinguished Christian Scholars Lecture Series, Pew Charitable Trusts, 2001-03; distinguished service award, T. S. Eliot Society, 2002; Chapin Award for excellence in scholarship, 2002-03.

WRITINGS:

(Editor and contributor) Approaches to Teaching T. S.Eliot's Poetry and Plays, Modern Language Association of America (New York, NY), 1988.

(With Joseph Bentley) Reading "The Waste Land":Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation, University of Massachusetts Press (Amherst, MA), 1990.

(Editor and contributor) The Placing of T. S. Eliot, University of Missouri Press (Columbia, MO), 1991.

Mastery and Escape: T. S. Eliot and the Dialectic ofModernism, University of Massachusetts Press (Amherst, MA), 1994.

(Editor and interviewer) Conversations with DeniseLevertov, University Press of Mississippi (Jackson, MS), 1998.

(Editor and contributor) T. S. Eliot and Our TurningWorld, Macmillan (London, England), 2000, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2001.

(Editor and contributor) T. S. Eliot: The ContemporaryReviews, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 2003.

Also editor of T. S. Eliot, Cambridge University Press. Work represented in anthologies, including Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography, Volume 5: The Age of Maturity, 1929-1941, edited by Laura Ingram, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1989; T. S. Eliot: Man andPoet, edited by Laura Cowan, National Poetry Foundation (Orono, ME), 1990; Making Feminist History: The Literary Scholarship of Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, edited by William E. Cain, Garland Publishing (New York, NY), 1993; Author-ity and Textuality: Current Views of Collaborative Writing, edited by James S. Leonard, Christine E. Wharton, and others, Locust Hill Press (West Cornwall, CT), 1994; and Madison Jones: The Garden of Innocence, edited by Jan Norby Gretlund, 2003. Contributor of articles and reviews to professional journals, including Chattahoochee Review, Modern Schoolman, Southern Review, South Atlantic Review, College Literature, Massachusetts Review, Thalia, Centennial Review, Modern Philology, and Modernism/Modernity. Christianity and Literature, guest editor, summer, 1993, winter, 1999, and member of editorial board, 1995—; member of editorial board, Yeats-Eliot Review, 1986—, and South Atlantic Review, 2002—.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Editing Letters of Katherine Anne Porter and Mrs. Cleanth Brooks, for University of Missouri Press (Columbia, MO); editing The Waste Land: Case Studies in Contemporary Theory, Bedford Books (Boston, MA); Violence, Values, Imagination in Modern Literature (tentative title); Violence and Desire in Eliot's Poetry and Plays.

SIDELIGHTS: A respected scholar of T. S. Eliot, Jewel Spears Brooker has written and edited several books on the poet and critic that view Eliot's works from a variety of perspectives. In Approaches to Teaching Eliot's Poetry and Plays, Brooker presents an overview of Eliot's place in the contemporary school curriculum and offers possible methods of teaching individual Eliot poems and plays. The collection is, according to Kinley E. Roby in Theatre Journal, "very thorough, very broadly based, and generous in its material." Although the critic believed more could have been said of Eliot's political and social beliefs, Roby nonetheless found the book to be "well argued, persuasive, intelligent, and sensitive. It is a valuable guide to anyone who teaches Eliot."

In Reading "The Waste Land": Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation, Brooker and coauthor Joseph Bentley provide "a genuinely fresh and insightful analysis of the most explicated modern poem," according to a critic for the Virginia Quarterly Review. Drawing on earlier criticisms of the poem, combining elements from Eliot's biography, and influenced by recent critical theories, the book argues that "The Waste Land" has become a creation of its reading audience as well as of Eliot himself.

The edited work T. S. Eliot and Our Turning World contains lectures of a 1996 conference on Eliot's intellectual interests in popular culture and the arts, philosophy, and contemporary literary theory. Noting that the volume "should find a special place on every Eliot scholar's bookshelf," Christianity and Literature reviewer Dominic Manganiello added that Brooker's contributions include a discussion of Eliot's interest in the work of German philosopher Immanuel Kant and the links between the writer's Harvard education and his later writings, as well as an "incisive critique" of Anthony Julius's controversial 1995 book T. S. Eliot, Anti-Seminism, and Literary Form. Noting that Brooker "is at her best when she is passionately engaged in explicating the historical and philosophical contexts that bear" on Eliot's poetry, Jayme Stayer added in the Journal of Modern Literature that T. S. Eliot and Our Turning World presents "thoughtful" articles that "reward study."

Brooker's Mastery and Escape: T. S. Eliot and the Dialectic of Modernism gathers together her critical essays on Eliot over a fifteen-year span. In his review of the book for America, James S. Torrens found that "Brooker weds intellectual history to literary study" in her essays focusing on the philosopher F. H. Bradley, the subject of Eliot's university dissertation. Bradley's view that all of the universe comprised a "living whole" influenced the structures of such Eliot poems as "Gerontion" and "The Waste Land." Brooker's three essays on Bradley's beliefs and how they affected Eliot's writings contain, according to Torrens, "a clarity and conciseness that one certainly will not find in Eliot's dissertation. It is the major contribution of this book." Reviewing Mastery and Escape for the Southern Review, Lee Oser noted that "Brooker brings a subtle light to Eliot's overanalyzed poems by respecting their elusive mystery." Oser concluded that "most happily, the book succeeds in bringing Eliot's intellectual contexts to bear on his poems. This is not to say that we can now firmly grasp The Waste Land; but in their sane and resourceful fashion, Brooker's readings delight and instruct."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

America, April 22, 1995, p. 29.

American Literature, March, 1991, Tim Redman, review of Reading "The Wasteland": Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation, pp. 158-159; September, 1995, Robert F. Fleissner, review of Mastery and Escape: T. S. Eliot and the Dialectic of Modernism, pp. 598-599.

Choice, December, 1990, p. 625; May, 1995, p. 1445; May, 2001, A. R. Nourie, review of T. S. Eliot and Our Turning World, p. 1631.

Christian Century, June 27, 1990, review of Reading"The Wasteland," p. 644.

Christianity and Literature, winter, 1996, Sanford Schwartz, review of Mastery and Escape, pp. 256-258; winter, 2003, Dominic Manganiello, review of T. S. Eliot and Our Turning World, p. 283.

College English, April, 1996, George S. Lensing, review of Mastery and Escape, pp. 460-469.

College Literature, February, 1991, p. 108.

English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, January, 1997, Richard Badenhausen, review of Mastery and Escape, pp. 89-92.

Journal of Modern Literature, summer, 2001, Jayme Stayer, review of T. S. Eliot and Our Turning World, p. 525.

Library Journal, December, 1989, p. 122.

Modern Schoolman, January, 1996, William Charron, review of Mastery and Escape, pp. 194-196.

Queen's Quarterly, summer, 1991, Edward Lobb, review of Reading "The Wasteland," pp. 463-464.

Review of English Studies, November, 2002, Ronald Bush, review of T. S. Eliot and Our Turning World, p. 578.

Sewanee Review, fall, 1991, Sidney Burris, review of Reading "The Wasteland," pp. 617-623; April, 1994, p. 291.

South Atlantic Review, January, 1992, Cleo McNelly Kearns, review of Reading "The Wasteland," pp. 129-132; September, 1995, Nancy Hargrove, review of Mastery and Escape, pp. 32-36.

Southern Review, October, 1991, Peter Quartermain, review of Reading "The Wasteland," pp. 949-952; winter, 1996, Lee Oser, review of Mastery and Escape, pp. 183-185.

Theatre Journal, December, 1990, Kinley E. Roby, review of Approaches to Teaching Eliot's Poetry and Plays, p. 531.

Times Literary Supplement, February 24, 1995, Roger Kojeckyá, review of Mastery and Escape, p. 24.

University Bookman, winter, 1996, p. 21.

Virginia Quarterly Review, winter, 1991, review of Reading "The Waste Land," p. 13.

Yeats-Eliot Review, summer, 1991, Lois A. Cuddy, review of Reading "The Wasteland," pp. 25-26; winter, 1997, Scott R. Christianson, review of Mastery and Escape, pp. 34-40.