Faculty Biographies

Susan Mooney

Associate Professor, Comparative Literature
Director of the Graduate Certificate of Comparative Literary Studies

CONTACT

Office: CPR 301-N
Phone: 813-974-9504
Email: smooney@usf.edu
Spring 2023 Office Hours: via Teams, Tuesday and Thursday 12:00-1:30 pm; email in advance to set up an advising appointment or if you need the Teams link, or alt day/time.

Links

• Curriculum vitae

BIO

Greetings! My Ph.D. is in Comparative Literature, University of Toronto, 2001. I specialize in narratives, gender and sexuality, including LGBTQIA2S+, film and film theory and semiotics, psychoanalysis, contemporary and twentieth-century literatures and film in English (by Irish, English, American, African American, Canadian, and indigenous writers and filmmakers), Spanish (Peninsular and Latin American), French, and Russian.

Books

• The Making and Mirroring of Masculine Subjectivities: Gender, Affect, and Ethics in Modern World Narratives. Palgrave, 2022. Print ISBN 978-3030991456. eBook ISBN 978-3-030-99146-3

Despite some hype, men are not masters of master narratives. In this book, I show how, with the eclipse of the traditional male hero, modern world writers and filmmakers, feminist or not, provide diverse male-centered narratives that foreground intersubjectivity, affects, and ethics.

• The Artistic Censoring of Sexuality: Fantasy and Judgment in the Twentieth-Century Novel. Ohio State UP, 2008. ISBN 978-0-8142-1082-6.

Literature under censorship does not always get "repressed.” Certain landmark progressive World writers of the twentieth-century—Joyce, Nabokov, Martín Santos, Erofeev—channeled the forces of censorship to embed them thematically and in narrative forms in their novels. I examine four modernist and postmodernist novels that prompted in their day harsh external censorship because of their sexual content—Ulysses, Lolita, Time of Silence, and Russian Beauty. My study reveals the impact of censorship on literary creation, and shows how sexuality is always already politicized

Recent Publications

• “Blindly Paternal: Undoing a Male Gaze through Disability and Trauma in Almodóvar’s Los abrazos rotos.” Under review at Bulletin of Contemporary Hispanic Studies.
• “The Counter-Nostalgia Front against Spanish Censorship: Realism’s Affective Mirrors in Early Novels by Miguel Delibes and Ana María Matute.” Bulletin of Spanish Studies, vol 98, no 7 (2021): pp. 1133-1163. DOI: 10.1080/14753820.2021.1938830 ·
• "Interrupted Masculinity in Dubliners: Anxiety, Shame, and Shontological Ethics.” Joyce Studies Annual 2017: 220-255. E-ISSN: 1538-4241 Print ISSN: 1049-0809. ·
• "Women's Looking Relations after the Gaze: Maternal Ambivalence and Queerness in Notes on a Scandal."Quarterly Review of Film and Video 33.6 (August-September 2016): 529-49. Journal ISSN 1543-5326. DOI:10.1080/10509208.2015.1089090.

I’m currently writing a third monograph, Writing Resistance: Censorship and the Novel in Franco's Spain, examines comparatively the impact of censorship in Franco's Spain (1938-1975) and the transition (1975-1983) on Spanish literature through archival research of censorship files, interviews with prominent writers, and critical analyses of selected works. This project has been partly funded by Spain’s Ministry of Culture and USF’s Humanities Institute.

The project includes research I conducted in Spanish archives storing literary, theater and film censorship files kept by censors of Franco’s era:

• Archivo General de la Administración, Alcalá de Henares, Madrid, Spain
• Interviews with some 20 Spanish writers, editors, filmmakers, and intellectuals.

My book will show how, through authors’ oppositional stances to censorship, they devise multifaceted, creative ways, even in the most repressive years of censorship, to offer publicly challenging versions of Spain that defied the government’s monolithic view of the country and society.

Teaching and Advising

I teach advanced undergraduate and graduate courses, Honors seminars, and general education course.

I invite advising inquiries from current and prospective students whose research interests intersect in some way with my areas of expertise. I supervise work at the doctoral, masters, and honors levels. Drop me an email and let’s talk!

Dissertations, portfolios, and theses by students I’ve supervised have included studies on twentieth-century and contemporary Irish, British, American, African American, Latinx, Spanish, French, and Russian literatures and film, and topics have included masculinity, feminist theory, postmodernism, dystopias, emotions, totalitarian systems, slavery and slave narratives, asylums, mourning, beauty, place, postcolonialism, psychoanalysis, narrative theories, trauma, poetry, the novel, the Bildungsroman, and more. Authors of focus have included Joyce, Beckett, Goytisolo, Matute, Hurston, Nabokov, Yeats, Lady Gregory, Wilde, Woolf, Zamiatin, Platonov, Hurston, Morrison, Ellison, McCarthy, DeLillo, Atwood, Allende, Coetzee, Junot Díaz, and more.

In 2007, I received USF's Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award.

Graduate Certificate of Comperative Literary Studies

For information regarding the Graduate Certificate of Comparative Literary Studies, see the Graduate Comparative Literary Studies Certificate and USF’s Office of Graduate Certificates (for the forms and procedures), and contact me via email, where you can drop me a line to set up an advising time. I’m currently holding office hours and one-on-one student appointments using Teams.

I advise applicants to the Comparative Literature Graduate Certificate and all students registered in the program. Current USF graduate students in English and other disciplines (e.g., Philosophy; World Languages; History; School of Interdisciplinary Studies; Anthropology; Sociology, Psychology; Education and more) and non-degree seeking students who have completed an undergraduate degree may apply.