Professional Interests:

 

Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama: Shakespeare is my first love, I must admit.  I was hooked as a junior in college (years ago) by the recently deceased Dr. Stephen Gray-Lewis, and I never looked back.  As I moved to graduate studies, I also came to love his understudied dramaturgical peers, especially Christopher Marlowe.  I thank my mentor and dissertation director, Dr. George Geckle, for introducing me to so many of Shakespeare’s fellows.  Renaissance dramatists continually reward re-readings, and scholarship continues to offer windows into their world.  I highly recommend Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World and James Shapiro’s A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (1599).  I’m currently reading Colin McGinn’s Shakespeare’s Philosophy.  Visit these Shakespeare links.  Not to sound too much like a liberal humanist or a Harold Bloom, but reading Shakespeare will make you a better person, no matter your goals in life.  I am also excited by the summer Shakespeare festival here at CSUS.       

 

Anglo-Saxon Literature: My second love, my dark mistress, is Anglo-Saxon Literature.  I studied Old English so that (let’s face it) I could read Beowulf in the original.  Those countless hours and late nights are worth the effort.  Study, read, learn from my mentor in this area, Dr. Scott Gwara.  The Anglo-Saxons—their struggle to come to terms with this transitory life, their political and martial conflicts, their stiff jaw in the face of the void, their love of riddles and word-play—are at once alien and familiar.  My love of the Old English language extends to Middle English, as well, and especially to its greatest practitioner, Geoffrey Chaucer.

 

Poetry and Poetics: Always loved it, never truly understood it.  Until I met Glover Davis, who sat across the desk from me in a poetry seminar he taught at San Diego State University.  When I entered the Ph.D. program at the University of South Carolina, the great James Dickey was in his waning years.  I was ignorant enough not to take a class with him.  But he was a guru on that campus until his dying day.  All professors deferred to his vast reading knowledge.  To paraphrase one of his oft-repeated comments, there are three English-language poets whose voices are so distinct that they can’t be imitated: John Donne, Dylan Thomas, and Gerard Manley Hopkins.  You should read them.  Glover implanted a love of the “valley” poets in me, and the father-poet of the central valley is Philip Levine, whose stuff I love.  Note that Jon Veinberg, a Fresno poet and student/friend of Levine’s, will be reading on campus here at CSUS on October 5th.  I hope to bring more area poets to campus in coming semesters.  I would like to believe, along with Shelley, that “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”    

 

Monster Studies and Horror Films: When I was a wean, I watched Chiller on Saturday mornings and Creature Feature on Saturday nights; I was mesmerized by Vincent Price, Lon Chaney, and Bela Lugosi; I carried a bag of plastic dinosaurs with me and memorized their Latin names and the English translations.  I haven’t outgrown horror and horror film, and academic studies in this area complement my own interest in Renaissance drama and medievalism.  After all, B-grade horror films and Renaissance blood tragedy are both included in Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp,” and studies such as John Block Friedman’s The Monstrous Races in Medieval Life and Thought and Andy Orchard’s Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf Manuscript show that our ancestors imagined and theorized the fantastic and the monstrous.  In addition, Carol Clover, a scholar in medieval Scandanavian Language and Literature at UC Berkeley, has written a great book about the slasher film genre entitled Men, Women, and Chainsaws.  I’m also an avid reader of the Marxist critic and pioneer commentator on the horror film, Robin Wood. 

 

Ecocriticism:  A new field for me.  But I became so dismayed over the way we’ve treated the earth, what Samuel Beckett referred to as “this old muckball,” that I was driven to learn more about and to apply green studies to my own reading of literature.  And I was surprised to find that even in Shakespeare’s day deforestation had caused the very air of London to blacken.  In 1596, William Cecil noted that “London and all other towns near the sea … are mostly driven to burn coal …for most of the woods are consumed.”  Beginning in the sixteenth century, fens and marshes—the wetlands—were mercilessly drained by order of the Crown, disrupting the early modern ecosystem.  Currently, I’m taking an ecocritical look at the world of King Lear in preparation for the upcoming meeting of The Shakespeare Association of America. 

 

Youth Sports:  I’ve got two young boys, and they are life itself to me.  For them, I’ve begun coaching youth soccer, and I’m loving it.  Any suggestions welcome—write me!

 

Feel free to browse these excerpts from my c.v. below.

 

Tony Perrello

 

Education

 

B.A.  1985, St. Bonaventure University (English)

M.A. 1988, The State University of New York at Albany (English)

Ph.D. 1998, University of South Carolina (English)

 

Teaching

 

I designed and taught the following courses here and at Angelo State University.

English Literary History (6301); Seminar: The Renaissance (5200); Monsters in Literature (4381); Shakespeare: Text and Performance  (4300); Shakespeare (4300); Later Renaissance Literature (3302); Early English Literature (3301); Medieval Literature (3209); Approaches to Literary Studies  (3150); British Literature I (2331); Introduction to Literary Studies (2329); Evil in Literature (HONR 2301); British Literature After 1800  (2110); Writing Across the Curriculum (1302); English Composition (1301); Critical Thinking (USTD 1201); Introduction to Literature (1010).  4990; 3210

Publications

 

“A Parisian in Hollywood: Ocular Horror in the Films of Alexandre Aja.” American Horror Film Today.  Ed. Steffen Hantke. University of Mississippi Press [forthcoming 2009].

 

“Themes in Beowulf.”  The Encyclopedia of General Themes in Literature.  Ed. Jennifer McClinton-Temple.  New York:  Facts on File.  [forthcoming 2009]

 

“Themes in Romeo and Juliet.”  The Encyclopedia of General Themes in Literature.  Ed. Jennifer McClinton-Temple.  New York:  Facts on File.  [forthcoming 2009]

 

“Gary Soto’s Simple Plan.”  Encyclopedia of Hispanic-American Literature.  Ed. Luz Elena Ramirez.  New York:  Facts on File, 2008.  315-316.

 

“Foweles in the frith.” Companion to Pre-1600 British Poetry.  Ed. Michelle M. Sauer.  New York:  Facts on File, 2008. 192-193.

 

“Now goth sonne vnder wod.” Companion to Pre-1600 British Poetry.  Ed. Michelle M. Sauer. New York:  Facts on File, 2008. 290-291.

 

“’This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings’: England’s Female Body Politic.”  Images of the Body Politic.  Ed. Giuseppe Cascione, Donato Mansueto, and Gabriel Guarino.

 

            Milano: Edizioni ennerre S.r.1, 2007.  99-113.

 

 “Reflections While Teaching Henry IV, Part One.”  Faculty Voices, Vol. IV (2006):  39-44.

 

“An Undiscovered Riddle in Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale MS 1828-1830.” English Language Notes, 43: 2 (December, 2005): 8-14.

 

Hedges, Peter.  “An Interview With Peter Hedges.”  The Concho River Review, 18.2 (2004): 33-56.

 

“’These moors are changeable’: Using Film to Teach Racial Politics and Othello” Postscript, 20 (2003): 31-37.  

           

“Martin White’s Renaissance Drama In Action.”  In-Between: Essays and Studies in Literary Criticism.  10: 2 (2001).  279-283.

 

"Elizabeth Cecilia Clephane." The Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 199 (Victorian Women Poets).  Ed. William Thesing.  Detroit: Gale Research, 1999.  100-105.

 

"From Costiveness to Comic Relief: Purgation in The Alchemist."  Postscript, 15 (1998): 74-81.

 

"Anglo-Saxon Elements of the Gloucester Sub-Plot in King Lear." English Language Notes, 35:1 (September, 1997): 10-16.

           

"The Cosmic Dance: A Review of Ann Dunn's Olde Women," in Asheville Poetry Review, 4:1 (Fall/Winter, 1997): 111-114.

 

Eugene Hollahan, Hopkins Against History, in Victorian Studies, 39:4 (Summer, 1996): 600-602.     

 

Conference Papers

 

 

“Sustainability or Apocalypse?  The Zombie Film’s Eco-Conscience.”  Sixty-first Annual Meeting of the Rocky Mountain Language Association, Calgary, Alberta, Canada (2007)

 

Session Chair, Horror Film I:  Horror in Culture and the Environment.  Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, Calgary, Alberta, Canada (2007)

 

Session Chair, Horror Film II:  Horror, Terrorism, and Anxiety.  Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, Calgary, Alberta, Canada (2007)

 

Session Chair, Horror Film.  Sixtieth Annual Rocky Mountain MLA Convention, Tucson, Arizona (October 2006)

 

“Leave it to Cleaver: Dismembering the Nuclear Family in Contemporary Horror Films.”  Sixtieth Annual Rocky Mountain MLA Convention, Tucson, Arizona (October 2006)

 

“England’s Female Body Politic.”  Fifty-second Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, San Francisco, California (2006)

 

“Filmic Techniques in Teaching Early Texts.” Twenty-fourth Annual Lilly Conference on College Teaching, Oxford, Ohio (2004)

 

“Lawyers, Canons, and Money: From Eternal Law to Temporality in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale.” South Central Modern Language Association, New Orleans, Louisiana (2004)

 

“Grendel, Cain, and Geisel: Evil and the Principle of Loss in Christian Communities.” Philological Association of the Carolinas, Charlotte, North Carolina (2004)

 

“Shakespeare’s Slasher Film: The Strange Case of Hannibal.” Southwest Texas Popular Culture Association, Albuquerque, New Mexico (2003)

 

“Wolfram’s Cundrie.” South Central Modern Language Association, Austin, Texas (2002)

 

Session Chair, Realism and Revenge: Studies in Gascoigne and Dekker.  Sixteenth Century Studies Conference, San Antonio, Texas (2002)

 

“The Spanish Tragedy and the Rhetoric of Violence.” Sixteenth Century Studies Conference, San Antonio, Texas (2002)

 

Session Chair, Shakespeare and Film.  Philological Association of the Carolinas, Asheville, North Carolina (2002)

 

“’These Moors are changeable’: Using Film to Teach Racial Politics and Othello.” Philological Association of the Carolinas, Asheville, North Carolina (2002)

 

“Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf.” Beowulf in Our Time: Pedagogical Approaches.  Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, Georgia (2001)

           

Session Chair, Reading the Family.  Philological Association of the Carolinas, Charleston, South Carolina (2001)

 

“Scopophilia in The Faerie Queene.” Philological Association of the Carolinas, Charleston, South Carolina (2001)

 

“An Undiscovered Riddle from an Eleventh-Century Manuscript” Convocation at Lenoir-Rhyne College, Hickory, North Carolina (2000)

 

“’Dwarf, fool, and eunuch, well met here we be’: Physical Difference and Self-Identity in Volpone.” Popular Culture Association, New Orleans, Louisiana (2000)

 

“Moby Dick and Pascal’s Fearful Sphere.” Philological Association of the Carolinas, Florence, South Carolina (2000)

           

Session Chair, My Other/My Self.  Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Miami, Florida (1999)

           

“Freakish Interludes” Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Miami, Florida (1999)

           

"The Loathsome Lady of Wolfram's Parzival." South Atlantic Modern Language Association, Atlanta, Georgia (1997)

 

"From Costiveness to Comic Relief: Purgation in The Alchemist" Philological Association of the Carolinas, Greenville, North Carolina (1997)

 

"Edward the Martyr: Edmund the Villain in King Lear?" Southeastern Medieval Association, Charleston, South Carolina (1995)