CURRICULUM VITAE

Harold K. Bush, Jr.

bushhk@slu.edu

Office: Dept. of English Saint Louis University Saint Louis, MO 63103 phone (314) 977-3616

Home: 3229 Shenandoah Ave. St. Louis, MO 63104 phone (314) 771-6795 fax (314) 771-6729

EDUCATION

 

• Ph. D. in English, October 1994, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN.

Dissertation Director: Professor David J. Nordloh.

• Master of Arts in English, May 1991, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN.
• Master of Science, Aug. 1986, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN.

Major : Secondary Education. Indiana State Teaching Certificate, June 1986.  

• Bachelor of Arts, Dec. 1982, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN.

 

 

PUBLICATIONS

 

 

Books :

American Declarations:
Rebellion and Repentance in American Cultural History.
(University of Illinois Press, 1999)

 

 Significant moments in American literary history, such as public speeches which generate considerable reaction, are widely publicized precisely because they strike a powerful resonance within the American public sphere as manifestations of key cultural conflicts. Moreover, such public performances have frequently drawn upon such key mythic models as the Declaration of Independence and the act of Christian repentance. American Declarations clarifies how public debate has served to define, defend, and reshape the regnant myths of America and considers how both major and minor literary figures have participated in such debate. Figures studied include Nathaniel Hawthorne, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Abraham Lincoln, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain, Sinclair Lewis, and Robert Frost.

 

Mark Twain's Pastor:

The "Joe Twichell Effect," with Selections from his Letters and Journals

(projected for publication by 2004)

 

 This book will focus on Twain's deep friendship with the Bushnellian disciple Joseph Twichell--a topic of the utmost concern (though generally neglected) in any attempt to come to terms with Twain's views of the Bible, religion, and the Christian life throughout the Hartford years. This book will constitute a major addition to recent work on Mark Twain, particularly in its close attention to historicizing Twain's achievement with respect to the religious milieu of the period. The volume will include lengthy selections from Twichell's personal papers, thus making available to scholars heretofore unpublished documents that will greatly change the way we conceive of both the Twichell-Twain connection and also, more broadly, Twain's immersion in, and often sympathy with, the religious cultures of his era.

 

 

Articles & Review Essays:

 

"'Broken Idols': Mark Twain's Elegies for Susy and a Critique of Freudian Grief Theory," Nineteenth-Century Literature 57.2 (Sept. 2002): 237-68.

 

"'A Moralist in Disguise': Mark Twain and American Religion," chapter for The Oxford Historical Guide to Mark Twain, ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin (Oxford University Press, 2002): 55-94.

 

 "The Outrageous Idea of a Christian Literary Studies: Prospects for the Future & A Meditation on Hope," Christianity & Literature 51.1 (Autumn 2001): 79-103.

 

Review Essay on books by Delbanco, Tinder, Grey, Hegeman, and Fiddes in Religion & Literature 33.2 (Summer 2001): 97-110.

 

"Emerson, John Brown, and 'Doing the Word': The Enactment of Political Religion at Harpers Ferry, 1859," in The Emerson Dilemma: Essays on Emerson and Social Reform, ed. T. Gregory Garvey (Univ. of Georgia Press, 2001): 197-217.

 

"Demythologizing Adam: Mark Twain and the Nature of Man," in Critical Essays on the Myth of the American Adam, eds. Viorica Patea and Maria Eugenia Diaz (University of Salamanca Press, 2001): 147-62.

 

"Politics," in The Robert Frost Encyclopedia, ed. Nancy Lewis Tuten and John Zubizarreta (Greenwood Press, 2001). 283-87.

 

"The Declaration of Independence and Uncle Tom's Cabin: A Rhetorical Criticism Approach," in Approaches to Teaching Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, ed. by Elizabeth Ammons and Susan Belasco (MLA, 2000). 172-83.

 

"Our Mark Twain? or, Some Thoughts on the 'Autobiographical Critic.'" The New England Quarterly 74.1 (March 2000): 101-22.

 

"Remembering the Bomb: Hiroshima, Enola Gay, and the Culture Wars." Mars Hill Review 15 (1999): 57-66.

 

"'Invisible Domains' and the Theological Turn in Recent American Literary Studies." Christianity & Literature 49.1 (Autumn 1999): 91-109.

 

 "'Absorbing' the Character: James Whitcomb Riley and Mark Twain's Theory of Performance." American Literary Realism 31.3 (Spring 1999): 31-47.

 

"'Our Great Confused West': Redefining Mark Twain." College English (Feb. 1998): 192-201.

 

"Richard Henry Dana, Jr." Dictionary of Literary Biography: Travel Writers, 1800-1865. (Detroit: Gale Research, 1998): 79-89.

 

"Acting Like Mark Twain: Performance in Nineteenth-Century American Culture." American Quarterly (June 1997): 404-13.

 

"Structural America: The Persistence of Oppositional Paradigms in American Literary Theory." College Literature 23.2 (June 1996): 181-88.

 

 "The Mythic Struggle Between East and West: Mark Twain's Speech at Whittier's 70th Birthday Celebration and W. D. Howells's A Chance Acquaintance." American Literary Realism 27.2 (Winter 1995): 53-73.

 

"Re-Inventing the Puritan Fathers: George Bancroft, Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Birth of Endicott's Ghost." ATQ: American Transcendental Quarterly 9.2 (June 1995): 131-52.

 

"Robert Frost Writing the Myth of America: Rereading 'The Gift Outright.'" The Robert Frost Review (1995): 45-55.

 

"A Brief History of PC, With Annotated Bibliography." American Studies International (Apr. 1995): 42-64.

 

"'Beating Back the Monsters': George Orwell and the Morality of Fictions." Christianity & Literature 42.2 (Winter 1993): 333-41.

 

 "The Rhetoric of Remembering the Big One: John Hersey's Hiroshima, the Enola Gay Exhibition, and the Cultural Response, 1945-1995," in The Atomic Age Opens, Bowling Green, OH: Center for Popular Culture Studies, 1997 [microfilm].

 

"Poststructuralism as Theory and Practice in the English Classroom." ERIC Digest (1995).

 

"Reader Response Theory: Reading, Writing, and Literature Practices in Classrooms." Reading Research and Instruction 33.4 (Summer 1994): 326-30.

 

"Using Television Commercials To Help Students Discover Their Audiences." Exercise Exchange 39.1 (Fall 1993): 9-13.

 

Forthcoming:

 

"Harriet Beecher Stowe." Commissioned essay for the Biographical Dictionary of Evangelicals. Ed. Timothy Larsen. Forthcoming from Intervarsity Press (2002).

 

"Christ as Telos: 'The End' of the Christian University," ," forthcoming in The Heithaus Forum. 19 pages.

 

"Achieving What?: The Sublime Object of American Hope," forthcoming in collection edited by Roger Lundin, press to be determined, funded by the Pew CharitableTrusts.

 

 

Book Reviews, Abstracts, and Notes:

 

Notes for Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis. Modern Library edition, 2002. Researched and co-written by Janet Garrard-Willis, summer 2001.

 

Review of American Palestine: Melville, Twain, and the Holy Land Mania, by Hilton Obenzinger. Christianity & Literature 50.2 (Winter 2001): 362-3.

 

Review of Celebrating the Fourth: Independence Day and the Rites of Nationalism in the Early Republic, by Len Travers. Cultural Studies 14.2 (April 2000): 361-4.

 

Review of Democratic Personality: Popular Voice and the Trial of American Authorship by Nancy Ruttenburg. Nineteenth-Century Prose 27.1 (Spring 2000): 128-31.

 

Review of The Trials of Anthony Burns, by Albert von Frank. The New England Quarterly 72.2 (June 1999): 333-6.

 

Review of Dangerous Waters: A Biography of the Boy Who Became Mark Twain, by Ron Powers. The Mark Twain Forum. (August 1999).

 

Review of Mark Twain: A Study of the Short Fiction, by Tom Quirk. The Mark Twain Forum. (April 1999).

 

Review of Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography, by Peter Conn. Resources for American Literary Study 24.2 (1998): 285-88.

 

Abstract of "'Be Yourselves Declarations': Emerson's Defense of John Brown," in Emerson Society Papers 9.2 (Fall 1998): 4.

 

Review of Biographies of Books: The Compositional Histories of Notable American Writings, ed. by James Barbour and Tom Quirk, in American Literary Realism 30.1 (Fall 1997): 93-4.

 

Review of "Doers of the Word": African American Women Speakers and Writers in the North, 1830-1880, by Carla L. Peterson, in Modern Language Quarterly 58.3 (Sept. 1997).

 

Review of Thank You and OK! An American Zen Failure in Japan, by David Chadwick. Indiana Review 18.1 (Spring 1995): 195-96.

 

Review of Acts of Discovery: Visions of America in the Lewis and Clark Journals, by Albert Furtwangler. Western American Literature 29.1 (Spring 1994): 80-81.

 

Review of Habits of the Mind: Intellectual Life as a Christian Calling by James Sire, forthcoming in Books & Culture

 

Review of Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, by Glenn Hendler. forthcoming in The New England Quarterly .

 

Conference Papers & Lectures:

 

"Synthesizing Faith and Literary Studies," keynote session to be presented at the "Christianity and Culture" Conference, Sept. 29, 2002, Michigan State Univ., East Lansing, MI.

 

"'Double-Listening' to The Matrix: Icons of Eternity at the Movies," paper presented at "Oxbridge 2002." The Summer Insititute of the C. S. Lewis Foundation, July 22, 2002, Cambridge University, UK.

 

"Freud's Metaphors for Bereavement and the Cases of Mark Twain & C. S. Lewis," paper presented at "Oxbridge 2002." The Summer Insititute of the C. S. Lewis Foundation, July 16, 2002, Oxford University, UK.

 

"Mark Twain's Grief: A Critique of Freudian Grief Theory," paper presented at the Modern Language Association Convention, Dec. 30, 2001, New Orleans, LA.

 

"A Panel on Ken Burns's 'Mark Twain'," panel speaker (with prominent authors and scholars Roy Blount Jr., David Carkeet, and Wayne Fields, moderated by Bob Costas), part of the 10th Annual St. Louis International Film Festival, Nov. 10, 2001, Univ. of Missouri at St. Louis.

 

"Hope Against Hope: An Eschatological Approach to Culture" keynote session presented at the "Christianity and Culture" Conference, Sept. 28, 2001, Michigan State Univ.

 

"Mark Twain's Pastor: Joe Twichell and Gilded Age Christianity," plenary presentation at the "State of Mark Twain Studies" Conf. at Elmira College, Aug. 16, 2001, Elmira, NY.

 

"Teaching Literature; Teaching Myself," invited talk presented at the Western Faculty Forum of the C. S. Lewis Foundation at UCLA, March 31, 2001, Los Angeles, CA.

 

"Mark Twain's Pastor: Social Christianity in the Gilded Age," invited lecture presented at the English Department of Wheaton College, February 8, 2001, Wheaton, IL.

 

"Seinfeld, The Sixth Sense, Nirvana, Kurt Warner . . . and God," invited lecture presented at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX, Nov. 14, 2000.

 

"Against Postmodernism: 'Telos' and the Meaning of Life," plenary session presented at the "Christianity and Culture" Conference, July 20, 2000, Michigan State University.

 

"Mark Twain as Image of America," paper presented at the 2000 Association Francaise d'Etudes Americaines (AFEA = French Association for American Studies) Conference, May 27, 2000, Aix-en-Provence, France.

 

"Christ as Telos : 'The End' of the Christian University," paper presented at the "Christianity in the Academy" Conference, University of Memphis, March 24, 2000, Memphis, TN.

 

"Postmodernism and the 'Theological Turn' in Recent American Studies," plenary lecture presented at the "Christian Scholarship: Tensions and Contributions" Conference, October 22, 1999, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH.

 

"Rebellion, Repentance, and the Perennial Power of the American Adam," plenary lecture presented at the International "American Adam" Symposium, Mar. 11, 1999, Universidad de Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain.

 

"'Be Yourselves Declarations': Emerson's Defense of John Brown," paper presented at the American Literature Association Convention, May 29, 1998, San Diego, CA.

 

"Mark Twain and James Whitcomb Riley: Some Unpublished Letters and Some Thoughts on Twain's Theory of Performance," paper presented at the Modern Language Association Convention, Dec. 30, 1997, Toronto, Ontario.

 

"The "End" of Interdisciplinary Studies: Where Are We Going, and How Do We Get There?", paper to be presented at the annual meeting of the Michigan College English Association, Sept. 19, 1997, East Lansing, MI.

 

"Birth, Re-Birth, and the Birth of American Literary Culture," a lecture based on my forthcoming book presented at Kobe College, May 26, 1997, Kobe, Japan