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Welcome! » Faculty & Staff » Graduate Faculty » Amy J. Elias


Amy J. Elias

Professor Elias's research interests include theories of postmodernity, narrative theory, and the interdisciplinary relation of the contemporary arts; she also has teaching and research background in digital technologies and Native American literatures. Her book Sublime Desire concerned with the relation between narrative, historiography, and the historical romance tradition and won the George and Barbara Perkins Award from the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature. Her second monograph in progress focuses on the ethics and narrative import of dialogue to postmodern theory. She is the creator and chair of CAAS: Contemporary Arts and Society, an interdisciplinary UT faculty working group, is a member of the MLA Executive Committee for the Prose Fiction Division, and served on the MLA First Book Prize Committee.

Selected Publications

Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction (Parallax: Re-Visions of Culture and Society series). Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

Representative articles

  • “Postmodern Territories: Teaching Mason & Dixon and the Ideologies of Space,” in Approaches to Teaching The Novels of Thomas Pynchon, ed. Thomas Schaub (Modern Language Association Press, 2007)
  • “Critical Theory and Cultural Studies,” English Studies: An Introduction to the Discipline(s), ed. Bruce McComiskey (NCTA Press: 2006): 223-74
  • “Metahistorical Romance, the Historical Sublime, and Dialogic History,”Re-thinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice  9.2-3 (2005): 159-172
  • “Paranoia, Theology, and Inductive Style,” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 86.3-4 (2003): 281-313
  • “Historiographic Narratology,” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, ed. Marie-Laure Ryan et al. (Routledge, 2004): 216-7
  • “Postmodern Southern Vacation: Vacation Advertising, Globalization, and Southern Living,” Critical Survey 12.1 (2000): 82-110, rpt. and revised in South to a New Place, ed. Suzanne Jones and Sharon Monteith (Louisiana State UP, 2002): 253-82
  • “Hijuelos’ The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, and Coover’s The Public Burning,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction  41.2 (2000): 115-28
  • “Fragments that Rune Up the Shores: Pushing the Bear, Coyote Aesthetics, and Recovered History,” Modern Fiction Studies 45.1 (1999): 185-211
  • “Holding Word Mongers On A Lunge Line: The Postmodernist Writings of Vizenor and Reed,” in Loosening the Seams: The Writings of Gerald Vizenor, ed. Robert Lee (Popular Press, 1999): 131-66
  • “The Pynchon Intertext of LempriPre’s Dictionary,” Pynchon Notes 40-41 (Spring-Fall 1997): 28-40
  • “The Postmodern Turn On(:) The Enlightenment,” Contemporary Literature 37.4 (1996): 533-58
  • “Defining Spatial History in Postmodernist Fiction,” Postmodern Studies 11: Minor Genres and Narrative Turns in Postmodernism, ed. Theo D’haen and Hans Bertens (Rodopi, 1995): 105-14
  • “Meta-Mimesis?  The Problem of British Postmodern Realism,” Postmodern Studies 7: British Postmodern Fiction, ed. Theo D’haen and Hans Bertens (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994): 9-31
  • “The Composition and Revision of Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned,” The Princeton University Library Chronicle 51.3  (1990): 254-66
  • “Pygmalion and Puttermesser,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 6 (1987): 64-74.

Reviews published at American Book Review, Postmodern Culture, EBR: Electronic Book Review http://www.electronicbookreview.com, Rethinking History, Mississippi Quarterly, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Contemporary Literature, University of Toronto Quarterly.

Honors & Grants

  • Modern Language Association Prose Fiction Division Executive Committee 2007-11
  • George and Barbara Perkins Book Award 2002, for Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction
  • Hodges Research Grants, 2003, 2005
  • NEH Summer Seminar, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2001
  • School of Criticism and Theory, Cornell University, 1998
  • Penn State Summer Seminar in Theory and Culture, 1993
  • Penn State Summer Seminar in Theory and Culture, 1991

Contact Information

Amy J. Elias
Associate Professor
Department of English
414 McClung Tower
University of Tennessee
Knoxville, TN 37996-0430

Office: (865) 974-6964
Fax: (865) 974-6926
E-mail: aelias2@utk.edu
Website: http://web.utk.edu/~aelias2

Education

B.A., Wilkes University
M.A., Ph.D., The Pennsylvania State University

Research

Contemporary Literature, Literary Theory, Native American Literatures