Willamette University

English

Stephanie DeGooyer

Stephanie DeGooyer

Stephanie DeGooyer received her Ph.D. in English literature from Cornell University in 2013. Her work and teaching focuses on the literature and philosophy of the long eighteenth century, with special interests in law and literature (especially human rights theory); politics and aesthetics; new formalism; Romanticism; and the history of the novel. She is currently at work on a book, The Sorrows of Anybody: Radical Sympathy and the Eighteenth-Century Novel, which theorizes an intrinsic relation between the exaggerated form of eighteenth-century sentimentality and the politics of radical equality associated with Romanticism. Exposing the arbitrariness at the heart of the classical model of pity, writers such as Richardson, Sterne and Smith, she argues, give rise to an expressive order in which anybody can be seen as a subject of feeling in art.

Before coming to Willamette, Professor DeGooyer taught at Cornell University and Auburn Correctional Facility. She is the director of Moonlighter Presents, a lecture-series based in New York City.

FIELDS: Eighteenth-century literature and drama; Romanticism; Law and Literature

Selected Publications

“Democracy, Give or Take?” Humanity: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Human Rights (University of Pennsylvania), forthcoming 2013. 

“A Monster’s Right to Have Rights,” Biblion: The Afterlife of Shelley and Frankenstein (New York Public Library), 2011. 

“Speech Act Theory,” The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Theory and Literary Criticism, ed Gregory Castle. (Mass: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). 

 “Richard Sheridan,” “Frederich Johann Schiller” and “Tobias Smollet,” 501 Great Authors (New York: Barron’s, 2008).

Courses

ENGL 353 – The Early Novel

ENGL 458 – The Politics of Literature

ENGL 319 – Sentimental Fiction

ENGL 202 – Literary Theory

ENGL 117 – Romanticism and Revolution