Barbara E. Will

Associate Professor of English

Ph.D.,  Duke University

207 Sanborn House
Dartmouth College
Hanover, NH  03755

barbara.will@dartmouth.edu

Curriculum Vitae

My interests are in American literature, modernism and postmodernism, and contemporary literary and feminist theory. I teach core courses in those subjects as well as advanced seminars on topics ranging from "American Writers Between the World Wars" to Virginia Woolf/Gertrude Stein ("Woolfenstein").

Selected Publications

• "The Great Gatsby and the Obscene Word," College Literature 32.4 (Fall 2005): 125-44.
• "Gertrude Stein and Zionism," Modern Fiction Studies 51: 2 (Summer 2005): 437-55.
• "Lost in Translation: Stein's Vichy Collaboration," Modernism/modernity 11:4 (November 2004), 651-668.
• Gertrude Stein, Modernism, and the Problem of "Genius." Edinburgh UP/Columbia UP, 2000.
• "The Nervous Origins of the American Western," in American Literature 70:2 (June 1998): 293-316.
• "Nervous Systems / 1880-1915," in American Bodies: Cultural Histories of the Physique, ed. Tim Armstrong (NY: NYU Press, 1997): 86-100.
• "Pound's Feminine Other: A Reading of Canto XXIX." Paideuma 19 (1990): 139-142.

Book in progress

Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma

A study of the intellectual "collaboration" between Gertrude Stein and Bernard Faÿ, director of the Bibliothèque Nationale under the collaborationist Vichy government and chief protector of Stein's interests in France during World War II. From the late 1920s-40s Stein and Faÿ shared a worldview marked by aesthetic radicalism and political conservatism, culminating in Stein's agreement in 1941, at the suggestion of Faÿ, to translate the speeches of Marshal Philippe Pétain into English. I read the Stein-Faÿ relationship as a case study through which to raise larger theoretical questions: about the role of prominent intellectuals in wartime France; about the place of America in the Vichy imagination; about the libidinal promise or threat of fascist ideology for homo/hetero- sexuality; and most importantly, about the intersection of modernism and fascism.