English Department Faculty
Mark L. Parker
Professor of English
Educational Background:
B.A. University of Alabama
M.A., Ph.D. Harvard University
Recent courses:
ENGL 351, Romantic Literature in England
ENGL 354, 19th Century British Novel
Research Areas:
My training is in British Romantic Literature, but my research addresses questions related to forms of media. My book, Literary Magazines and British Romanticism (Cambridge, 2001), sought to bring attention to the shaping force of magazines such as Blackwood’s, the London, the New Monthly, and Fraser’s in the first thirty years of the nineteenth century in Britain. In it, I argue that such magazines were not simply prestigious outlets for occasional work by essayists of the Romantic period, but a medium that gave a distinctive form to the period’s literature and literary consciousness. Given the ways in which magazines inflect the meaning of individual contributions, both in soliciting certain kinds of texts and putting them into dialogic relation with others in their pages, they should be objects of study in their own right.
This proved to be a rich topic, and in 2001-2002, I was awarded a fellowship at the National Humanities Center to work on another book on periodicals. Where my earlier book had sought to examine several magazines of a single era, this project sought to follow one magazine, Blackwood’s, through the entire nineteenth century. Again my focus was on the relations between the institution of the magazine and the individual contributions to it, but I also sought to examine the ways in which this intensely partisan magazine pursued a resolutely aestheticized version of politics.
This fellowship gave me the chance to work on more than one project at once, and while I completed a draft of the manuscript I projected, I began two other book-length projects: a two-volume edition of an early nineteenth century magazine serial, the Noctes Ambrosianae, and a book (in collaboration with Deborah Parker) on DVDs and film. The Noctes, a collaborative work that surveyed the literary, political, and social scene in Britain, mingled these discourses in prescient ways, often locating one within the other or applying one critically to another. The conversations in this serial are as likely to discuss public hangings as Walter Scott’s novels, and they connect literature and spectacle in ways that provide a much richer picture of the time. My other project, under contract at Duke University Press, proposes to examine the DVD as a significant new form for film. This book explores how special features (audio commentaries, documentaries, visual essays, deleted scenes) as well as standard features such as menus inflect the meaning of the film and solicit a certain kinds of viewing.
While Romantic literary magazines and DVDs may seem far removed, I find the deeper continuities engaging. In each case a medium—periodical or digital form—offers ways of connecting a text with other discourses. Both literary magazines and DVDs deliver, with a particular orientation, a work of art, and each forms a dynamic but often unconsidered context for that work. Viewed critically, each medium prompts many of the same questions about intention and significance, and the collaborative nature of each medium also provokes important questions about form and content.
Recent publications and presentations:
BOOKS:
Noctes Ambrosianae, (Volumes 3 and 4 of Blackwood’s Magazine 1817-1825). London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006.
Literary Magazines and British Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
BOOKS IN PROGRESS:
“Blackwood’s Magazine and the Aestheticization of Knowledge.”
“Film School in a Box: The Special Edition DVD and the Study of Film” (under contract, Duke University Press)
RECENT ARTICLES:
“The Battle of Algiers,” Film Quarterly 60 (Summer 2007): 62-66.
“Directors and DVD Commentary: the Specifics of Intention,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 62 (2004): 13-22. (With Deborah Parker) (Reprinted in The Philosophy of Film: Introductory Text and Readings. Eds. Thomas Wartenberg and Angela Curran. London: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.)
FORTHCOMING ARTICLES:
“Something to Declare: History in Egoyan’s Ararat,” forthcoming, University of Toronto Quarterly.
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