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THOMAS WORTHAM
Ph.D., Indiana Univ., 1970.
Professor. Chair of the Department.
Fulbright Lecturer, Univ. of Warsaw, Poland, 1976-1977; Grants-in-Aid of Research, American Philosophical Society, 1976 and 1981; Senior Fellow, American Council of Learned Societies, 1983-1984. Editorial Board Member, The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Harvard Univ. Press), 1996-present. Co-editor (with Joseph Bristow), Nineteenth-Century Literature, 1983-present.
Research interests:
Nineteenth-century American literature and culture; textual scholarship and criticism.
Courses English 80: Major American Writers
English 85: The American Novel
English 171A: American Literature, 1800-1865
English 171B: American Literature, 1866-1912
English 188: The American Worlds of Mark Twain
English 200: Introduction to Bibliography
Statement on teaching:
The classes that I teach are inevitably large in enrollment, necessitating a lecture format in the conduct of the course. Lectures are perhaps not the best method of instruction, but they can, on occasion, make students think. This is good. Most people would rather die than think (and perhaps more than a few do). What I do try is to design each course and its lectures in such a fashion as will acquaint the serious and attentive student with the writings of several important American Authors who flourished during the period the course covers. In lecture, I attempt to address the class's attention to historical problems--political, philosophical, religious, and geographic--that bear importantly on the writings under consideration and on our response to them. The act of reading literature is, in part at least, an historical exercise, doomed to defeat, but at the same time bolstered by its own aesthetic delights. The problems inherent in an individual's creative and conscious involvement with the past, both personal and cultural, are ones to which American authors have been keenly responsive and to which their works speak variously and eloquently. It is this eloquence that redeems these historical documents as works of art. As works of art, however, they are answerable to a complex set of inquiries other than the merely historical. These critical and aesthetic problems I also address in lecture, but only in the hope that my remarks will enable students to formulate, in as meaningful and economical way as possible, their own responses to the literary texts themselves. Critical inquiry may drift far and wide, but if it fails in the end to illuminate the common text in some important aspect of its vitality and significance for us all, it is invalid and, even possibly, irresponsible. It is essential, perhaps inevitable, that we share our insights: first in conversation and discussion; afterwards through the more precise medium of formal prose. The initial form of response I try to encourage, both in and outside of class; the second is of course required.
Statement on UCLA:
"Wisdom is knowing when you are already in paradise."
Prescription for sanity:
Selected publications:
The Poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, forthcoming.
Chapters from My Autobiography by Mark Twain (editor). New York: Dover, 2000.
Henry Thoreau as Remembered by a Young Friend by Edward Waldo Emerson (editor). New York: Dover, 1999.
My Mark Twain by W. D. Howells (editor). New York: Dover, 1997.
The Early Prose Writings of William Dean Howells. Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1990.
Letters of W. D. Howells: 1892-1901. Boston: Twayne, 1981.
James Russell Lowell’s The Biglow Papers [First Series]: A Critical Edition. De Kalb: Northern Illinois Univ. Press, 1977.
American Literary Manuscripts, Second Edition. Eds. J. Albert Robbins, et al. Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1977.