Mitchell Breitwieser

Title: 
Emeritus
Specialties: 
20th- and 21st-Century American
Early American
19th-Century American
Biography: 

B.A. in English, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1975.

Ph.D., State University of New York, Buffalo, 1979.

Faculty, UC-Berkeley, English, since July, 1979.

Current Research: 

I am currently completing a book entitled Walden and the Spirit of Capitalism: Presence, Damage, and Cultural Revival.

Role: 
Emeritus Faculty

Books

National Melancholy: Mourning and Opportunity in Classic American Literature

Mitchell Breitwieser
Monograph, 2007

Selected Publications

Publications and work in progress:

Books:

  1. Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin: The Price of Representative Personal­ity (Cambridge University Press Studies in American Litera­ture and Culture, 1984), 325 pages.
  2. American Puritanism and the Defense of Mourning: Religion, Grief and Eth­nology in Mary White Rowlandson's Captivity Narrative (Madison: The Uni­versity of Wisconsin Press, 1990) 223 pages.
  3. National Melancholy: Mourning and Opportunity in Classic American Literature, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 322 pages.
  4. Walden and the Spirit of Capitalism: Presence, Damage, and Cultural Revival (ms. in progress).

Articles and Reviews (in order of composition):

  1. "Cotton Mather's Crazed Wife," Glyph: Johns Hopkins Textual Stud­ies #5 (Summer, 1979), pp. 88-113.
  2. "Cotton Mather's Pharmacy," Early American Literature XVI, # 1 (Spring, 1981), pp. 42-9.
  3. "Thoreau and the Wrecks on Cape Cod," Studies in Romanticism 20, #1 (Spring, 1981), pp. 3-20.
  4. "False Sympathy in Melville's Typee," American Quarterly 34, # 4 (Fall, 1982), pp. 396-417.
  5. Review of Annette Kolodny, The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Ex­peri­ence of the American Frontier, 1630-1860, in Criticism.
  6. "Who Speaks in Whitman's Poems?" The Bucknell Review XVIII, #1 (1983), pp. 121-43.
  7. "Jefferson's Prospect," Prospects: An Annual Journal of American Cul­tural Studies 10(1985), pp.
  8. "Concluding Remarks," Politics as Art, Art as Politics: Literature of the Early Republic, spe­cial issue of Early American Literature 22, #2 (Fall, 1987), pp. 213-9.
  9. Review of Albert Furtwangler, American Silhouettes: Rhetorical Iden­tities of the Founders, in Eighteenth Centuries Studies (Summer, 1988), pp. 547-51.
  10. Review of Ormond Seavey, Becoming Benjamin Franklin: The Au­tobi­ography and the Life, in William and Mary Quarterly (Oct., 1989), pp. 816-819.
  11. "Early American Antigone," in Joseph Kronick and Bainard Cowan, eds., Theo­rizing American Literature: Hegel, the Sign, and History (Louisiana State Uni­versity Press, 1991), pp. 125-62.
  12. "The Great Gatsby: Grief, Jazz and the Eye-Witness," Arizona Quar­terly vol. 47, #3 (Autumn, 1991), pp. 17-70. (excerpted in Harold Bloom, ed., F. Scott Fitzgerald: Comprehensive Research and Study Guide (Broomall, PA: Chelsea House, 2000), pp. 38-40.)
  13. "Afterthoughts," invited commentary on "The New Eighteenth Cen­tury," a special issue of American Literary History, vol. 5, #3 (Fall, 1993), pp. 588-94.
  14. "False Sympathy in Melville's Typee," (rewritten ver­sion of #4 above), in Myra Jehlen, ed.,Herman Melville: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1994), pp. 15-26.
  15. "The Vagaries of Historical Reading," invited essay review of Sac­van Bercovitch, The Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. 1, Modern Language Quarterly vol 56, #2(June, 1995) pp.197-207.
  16. “Fitzgerald, Kerouac, and the Problem of Inherited Mourning,” Peter Homans, ed., in Symbolic Loss: The Ambiguity of Mourning and Memory at Century’s End (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000), pp. 43-61.
  17. “Jazz Fractures: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Epochal Representation,” American Literary History, vol. 12, # 3 (Fall, 2000), pp. 359-82. Reprinted in Linda Pavlovski, ed., Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism: Criticism of the Works of Novelists, Poets, Playwrights, Short Story Writers, and Other Creative Writers Who Lived between 1900 and 1999, from the First Critical Appraisals to Current Evaluations, vol. 157 (New York: Thomson Gale, 2005), pp. 215-25.
  18. “Materializing Calloway: The Sorrows of Occupation in Graham Greene’s The Third Man,” The Hopkins Review (new series), vol. 1, #3 (Summer, 2008), pp. 437-68.
  19. “Pacific Speculations: Moby-Dick and Mana,” Arizona Quarterly, vol. 67, #1 (Spring, 2011), pp.1-46.
  20. Review essay, David Wyatt, Secret Histories: Reading Twentieth Century American Literature, The Hopkins Review (new series), vol. 4, #4 (Fall, 2011), pp. 598-602.
  21. "The Third Man: Zone/ Frontier; Gangster Films and Westerns," The Hopkins Review(new series), vol. 5, #1 (Winter, 2012), pp. 13-47.
  22. Review essay, Morris Dickstein, Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression, The Hopkins Review(new series),vol.  5, #2, (Spring 2012)(New Series), pp. 290-295.
  23. “All on an American Table: Cotton Mather’s Biblia Americana,” American Literary History, (Spring, 2013), pp. 2-25.
  24. “Hawthorne: Mortmain,” Arizona Quarterly, vol. 71, #3 (Autumn, 2015), pp. 27-57.
  25. Review of Christopher N. Phillips, Epic in American Culture: Settlement to Reconstruction, Early American Literature, vol. 49, #3 (2014), pp. 787-791
Mitchell Breitwieser

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