Associate Professor of English
Ph.D. and M.A., University of Chicago
B.A., Yale University
007 B Sanborn House
Colleen.G.Boggs@Dartmouth.edu
As a scholar of American Literature, I investigate how language affects our understanding of individuals, nations and species. While most of my work focuses on the nineteenth century, I am also keenly interested in contemporary literary theory, gender and cultural studies.
Because I am a bilingual speaker of English and German, I have always been intrigued by the relationship between multilingualism and national identity. In my book, Transnationalism and American Literature: Literary Translation 1773-1892 (Routledge, 2007), I ask how a work can be or become American absent a unifying mother tongue. Far from being a melting pot in which languages other than English vanish, the United States is now and has historically been an intensely multilingual country. Drawing on historical and contemporary language theory, I argue that the writers who founded American literature (such as Phillis Wheatley, James Fenimore Cooper, Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Harriet Beecher Stowe) embraced that multilingualism. They recognized that, to become “American,” a literary work had to be readily available in languages other than English. To circulate their works among the nation’s linguistically different readers, these writers actively promoted literary translation. Because such translation also allowed texts to be exported to other countries, it fulfilled these writers’ desire to create a “world literature” that reached beyond state boundaries. I argue that multilingualism is a hallmark of American literature, which we need to recognize as fundamentally and foundationally transnational.
The book I am currently researching recovers the buried history of nineteenth century animal representations on which modern notions of individual and collective identity are based. Animalia Americana: Animal Representation and Identity Construction in Nineteenth Century American Literature works thematically in that it looks at textual portraits of domesticated animals. But what’s driving this project are theoretical questions regarding the similarities and differences between animals and human beings, especially in regard to embodiment. By embodiment, I mean the social significance of physical attributes such as race and gender, and a range of physical experiences, such as pain, death, diet, growth, and nakedness. While my focus is on individual identity, I also ask how animal representations affect the collective, metaphorical body politic and American national identity.
The Classical Tradition (Humanities 1/2), Food and Culture (Writing 5), Representing the Past: Fact and Fiction from “Waverley” to “Titanic”(English 7), Introduction to Literary Theory (English 15), American Poetry (English 40), American Prose (English 41), American Fiction to 1900 (English 42), Of Nags, Bitches and Shrews: Women and Animals in Western Literature (English 62/ WGST 60), Whitman and Dickinson (English 66), Foreign Affairs: The Translation of Cultures in Nineteenth Century American Literature (English 72), Whitman (English 72).
* Transnationalism and American Literature: Literary Translation 1773-1892. London and New York: Routledge, 2007.
* “Translation in the United States.”Oxford History of Literary Translation in English: Volume 4: 1790-1900 (5 vols). Oxford and London: Oxford University Press, 2006: 20-33.
* "Margaret Fuller's American Translation," American Literature 76 (1), March 2004: 31-58.
* "Specimens of Translation in Walt Whitman's Poetry." Arizona Quarterly 58(3), Autumn 2002: 33-56.
