Faculty
Goldberg, Shari
Assistant Professor , LIT/HUSL
Office: JO 3.924
Phone: 972-883-4470
Email: spg083000@utdallas.edu
Web Site: http://utdallas.edu/~spg083000
Areas of Specialization: Nineteenth-century American literature, early American literature, critical theory.
Education: BA Cum Laude, Vassar College, 1999
PhD, State University of New York at Albany, 2009
Shari Goldberg studies early and nineteenth-century American literature, focusing on how conceptions of self, speech, and truth have evolved from those periods.
Her current book project, Quiet Testimony: A Theory of Witnessing from Nineteenth-Century American Literature, argues that the conceptions of testimony familiar to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, and Henry James have largely been lost to today's readers, yet deserve to be revisited and reinvoked. Preceding psychoanalysis and semiology, these writers could conceive testimony without representation, without identity, without voice, and without an original, respectively. They thereby provide provocative and incisive approaches to key problems of critical theory and human rights discourse, such as how narrative may be preserved in spite of trauma, and what constitutes a text that effectively shifts its readers ethical obligations.
She is also working on articles about Thoreau's approach to violence and Poe's investment in the lie. Her courses on American literature have considered topics such as identity, memory, realism, and photography. Publications and more information are available on her web site.