Jean Wyatt teaches courses in contemporary American fiction, modern British literature, and race and gender studies. She is the recipient of the 2003 Sterling Award for outstanding scholarship and teaching.
Areas of research
- race and gender theory
- African American women writers
- contemporary American and British authors
- psychoanalysis and narrative theory
Selected Publications
Books
Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison's Later Novels. University of Georgia Press, 2017.
Risking Difference: Identification, Race and Community in Contemporary Fiction and Feminism. SUNY Press 2004.
Reconstructing Desire: The Role of the Unconscious in Womens’ Reading and Writing. University of North Carolina Press, 1990.
Articles
"The Economic Grotesque and the Critique of Capitalism in Toni Morrison's Tar Baby. MELUS 39.1 (Spring 2014). https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/melus/toc/mel.39.1.html
“Failed Messages, Maternal Loss and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy.” Modern Fiction Studies 58.1 (Spring 2012).
“Storytelling, Melancholia, and Narrative Structure in Louise Erdrich’s The Painted Drum.” MELUS 36.1 (Spring 2011).
“Love’s Time and the Reader: Ethical Effects of Nachtraglichkeit in Toni Morrison’s Love.” Narrative 16.2 (May 2008).
“Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Sexual Politics and the Genealogy of the Strong Black Woman.” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 9.1 (Winter 2008).
“The Impossible Project of Love in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, Dirty Hands, and “The Room.” Sartre Studies International 12.2 (November 2006).
“Thinking the Other-Centered Self with Jean Laplanche: The Enigmatic Signifier and its Political Uses.” Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society 11.2 (August 2006).
“Signifying Contortions: Disavowal, The Enigmatic Signifier, and George W. Bush’s Credibility After 9/11.” : Special Issue on “9/11, the Iraq War, and the Prospects for Peace.”
International Journal of Applied Psychoanalysis 3.2 (June 2006).
“Jouissance and Desire in Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher.” American Imago 62.4 (Winter 2005).
"Toward Cross-Race Dialogue: Identification, Misrecognition and Difference in Multicultural Feminist Community.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 29.3 (Spring 2004).
Invited papers presented on request.