Jack Lynch
Assistant Professor in the English department
of the Newark
campus of Rutgers
University, specializing in English
literature, especially of the eighteenth
century. This home page has now almost completely superseded
my older one at Penn, where I
completed my dissertation in summer 1998.
Those with too much time on their hands can peek at my CV.
Winter Break
I've just finished with two classes: English 313, "The Art of Satire," and English 379, "Computers and Literature." Coming up in
January 2000: English 349, "The 18th-C.
English Novel," Monday and Thursday 1:00, and English 503,
"Introduction to Graduate Literary
Study," Monday 5:30.
As always, I work as Joint Editor on The Age
of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual (vol. 10 came out,
mirabile dictu, almost on schedule in late June 1999 --
look for the major motion picture -- and vol. 11 is under way
now), and I'm serving on the editorial board of c18, for which I've
recently launched a project called c18 Bibliographies
On-Line. Oh, yeah -- I maintain the English department's events
calendar, and welcome notice of events relevant to the
department.
Course Materials
Syllabi, readings, and other materials from the courses I've
taught are preserved here for posterity:
There's also a syllabus for a planned-but-canceled course on Orientalism.
All my classes (and anyone who's curious) are encouraged to
consult my guide to grammar and style,
and my very rough and incomplete guide to literary terms.
Research
A few chunks of my dissertation are
available on-line. And as I find the time to post papers I've delivered, they'll appear here.
- "Preventing
Play: Annotating the Battle of the Books," my maiden voyage,
delivered 13 October 1994 at EC/ASECS, Penn State (which appears,
in a longer version, in Texas Studies in Literature &
Language 40, no. 3);
- "Babel
and Empire in Paradise Lost" from the 1994 CMERS
meeting in Binghamton;
- "Authorizing
Ossian" from the 1995 MWASECS meeting;
- "Studied
Barbarity: Johnson, Spenser, and Literary Progress," from the
1995 ASECS meeting in Tucson (an expanded version appears in
The Age of Johnson 9);
- "Brave
New Worlds: A Brief History of Twenty-First Century
Literature," a 1996 address to the Cum Laude Society of
Chestnut Hill Academy;
- "The
Ground-Work of Style" from the 1996 NEASECS meeting;
- "Workshop
of Filthy Creation, Cyberspace Division," from the 1996 NASSR
meeting;
- "Hideous
Progeny, Version 0.4 Beta," from Alan Liu's Canon and the
Web panel at the 1996 MLA;
- "False
Refinement and Declension: Johnson on the History of the
Language," from the first annual conference of the Johnson
Centre, Birmingham, UK;
- "Samuel
Johnson and the Revival of Learning," from EC/ASECS at
Ursinus College, October 1997;
- "The
Web of Disorderly Erudition: Electrifying the
Eighteenth-Century Classroom," from ASECS in Notre Dame, 3 April
1998.
- "Orientalism
as Performance Art: The Strange Case of George Psalmanazar,"
CUNY Eighteenth-Century Studies Group, 29 January 1999.
- "Splendide
Mendax: Fakes and Fakers in the Age of Johnson," Providence
College's Eighteenth-Century Semester, 16 March 1999.
- "Horry,
the Ruffian, and the Whelp: Three Fakers of the 1760s,"
Columbia University Seminar on Eighteenth-Century Europe, 20 May
1999.
Home Pages of Friends More Talented than
Me
Among my favorite home pages:
Raphael Carter's AngelHome is a delight.
I met him, along with Pamela
Dean Dyer-Bennet, Mason West, Rebecca J. Bohner,
and Rachel
Veraa on the Fido WRITING
echo. (It was on Fido that I came to know Dennis Havens,
whose novels
I'm glad to promote.) Don't miss the home pages of Lawrence
Warner, Dan
White, Lana
Schwebel, and Dan Traister.
Personal Stuff
I've collected some miscellaneous links, some
of them as close to fun as a downtrodden assistant professor is allowed to
get.
Please send questions, comments, requests, and recommendations to jlynch@andromeda.rutgers.edu.
Short-cuts to pages I maintain: