Morrisson, Mark S.

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Morrisson, Mark S.

PERSONAL:

Married Laura Reed (an editor), 1993; children: Devin Francis, Ciara Eleanor. Education: University of Texas at Austin, B.A., 1988; University of Chicago, M.A., 1989, Ph.D., 1996. Hobbies and other interests: Hiking, playing guitar in a rock band, astronomy, foreign travel.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of English, 117 Burrowes Bldg., University Park, PA 16802. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Chicago Review, Chicago, IL, associate nonfiction editor, 1989-1991, nonfiction editor, 1991-94; University of Chicago, Chicago, B.A. project supervisor, 1993-94, instructor at Center for Continuing Studies, 1995-96; Columbia College, Chicago, instructor, 1994; Pennsylvania State University, University Park, assistant professor, 1996-2002, associate professor of English, 2002—, associate department head, 2004—.

MEMBER:

Modern Language Association, European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism, Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, Modernist Studies Association (founder, member of executive board member, treasurer), Phi Beta Kappa, Phi Kappa Phi, Golden Key.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Scholarships from the University of Texas, 1984, 1986, 1988; Stern Scholarship, 1989, English department grants, 1990-92, Waller Scholarship, 1991-92, Mellon Summer Grant, 1992, and Marcia Tillotson Travel award, 1993, all from University of Chicago; several grants and fellowships from Pennsylvania State University, 1997; research and graduate studies office grants, 2000 and 2004, grant from enhancement funds for summer sessions, 2002, Fund for Excellence in Learning and Teaching grant, 2002, Institute for the Arts and Humanities resident scholar, 2004, and Milton S. Eisenhower Award for Distinguished Teaching, 2004, all from Pennsylvania State University.

WRITINGS:

The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905-1920, University of Wisconsin Press (Madison, WI), 2000.

(Editor, with Jack Selzer, and author of introduction) Tambour: A Snapshot of Modernism at a Crossroads, University of Wisconsin Press (Madison, WI), 2002.

Modern Alchemy: Occultism and the Emergence of Atomic Theory, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2007.

Contributor to festschrifts (books honoring a respected academic presented during his or her lifetime) and collections, including Joyce and the City, edited by Michael Begnal, Syracuse University Press (Syracuse, NY), 2002; The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism, edited by Walter Kalaidjian, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, England), 2005; A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture, edited by David Bradshaw and Kevin J.H. Dettmar, Blackwell (Oxford, England), 2006; Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2006; The Modernist Journals Project, edited by Wyndham Lewis, Brown University/ University of Tulsa (Tulsa, OK), 2007; Little Magazines and Modernism, edited by Suzanne W. Churchill and Adam McKible, Ashgate (Aldershot, England); James Joyce in Context, edited by John McCourt, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY); and Modernist Magazines: A Critical and Cultural History, edited by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, Oxford University Press (New York, NY). Contributor to periodicals, including Journal of Modern Literature, Revue d'Art Canadienne/Canadian Art Review, Modernism/Modernity, Labour History, PMLA, The Gig, Twentieth Century Literature, ELH, and Modern Fiction Studies.

SIDELIGHTS:

English professor Mark S. Morrisson specializes in the study of the small publications of the early twentieth century, covering "nineteenth- and twentieth-century occultism, avant-garde theory, public sphere theory, and print culture," according to a biography on the author's Web page. In The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905-1920, Morrisson examines some of the vehicles through which the genre of modernism was presented to readers in the United States. Between about 1880 and 1940, authors such as Vladimir Nabokov, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Robert Frost, and Boris Pasternak helped launch and develop a new literary aesthetic. A great break in the movement came following World War I, when Modernists lost the faith they had originally had in progress. Instead, they saw the modernization of society as a destructive force, dehumanizing society and turning existence into a nightmare.

Particularly important in the spread of the Modernist movement were small-press magazines, and one of the most prominent of these was the Little Review, which was launched by Margaret Caroline Anderson in Chicago in 1914. Anderson became well known for exposing the public to some of the most innovative Modernist and radical writers, including Hart Crane, James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, Sherwood Anderson, Malcolm Cowley, Ford Madox Ford, Emma Goldman, Vachel Lindsay, Amy Lowell, Carl Sandburg, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams. In 1918 the Little Review editor made history by serializing Joyce's groundbreaking novel Ulysses. After the publication of a particularly prurient episode, U.S. censors seized copies of the Little Review and burned them, later arresting and fining Anderson and her coeditor Jane Heap on charges of obscenity. In The Public Face of Modernism, wrote Michael Nowlin in College Literature, "Morrisson reads the legal battle over the infamous ‘Nausicaa’ episode from Ulysses in light of widespread cultural anxiety about the erotic chaos waiting to be unleashed by the consumerist ethos of youth."

Morrisson also argues in The Public Face of Modernism that the small-press magazines were not primarily elitist institutions trying to impose an aesthetic on a philistine mass audience. Instead, stated Nowlin, "all hoped to sustain themselves commercially and provide a forum for a visible ‘counter-public’ sphere that might offset with genuine debate the homogenizing effects on public discourse of the mass-produced commercial press and the dominant political and economic conditions it represented." "The little magazines so crucial to literary modernism's emergence," the College Literature critic concluded, "in effect, appropriated the tools of the enemy in order to transform a public sphere they cared passionately about."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, June, 2001, M.S. Vogeler, review of The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905-1920, p. 1796.

College Literature, spring, 2002, Michael Nowlin, review of The Public Face of Modernism.

James Joyce Quarterly, spring, 2002, Lee Garver, review of The Public Face of Modernism.

Modernism/Modernity, September, 2001, Suzanne W. Churchill, review of The Public Face of Modernism, p. 531.