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Jean Wyatt
Photo by Lisa Wyatt
I approach literary works through two frames that, although they seem different, are interrelated. First, I am interested in the ways that fiction engages with history and with contemporary cultural contexts of race and gender. Secondly, I pay close attention to narrative form, using narrative theory to illuminate the dialogue between reader and text.
My book on Toni Morrison, Love and Narrative Form in the Toni Morrison’s Later Novels (2017), was awarded the Toni Morrison Society prize for the best single-authored book on Toni Morrison (2018).
Recently, I wrote three essays on the Black British author Helen Oyeyemi: “Reinventing the Gothic in Oyeyemi’s White Is for Witching: Maternal Ethics and Racial Politics” (2020), “Mirror Mirror: The Visual Economy of Race in Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird” (2022), and “Doublings and Dissociation in Nella Larsen’s Passing and Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird” (2022).
I am a professor emerita of English at Occidental College.
Books
NEW: Experimental Subjectivities in Global Black Women’s Writing: Race and Narrative Innovation
Essay collection edited by Sheldon George and Jean Wyatt
Bloomsbury Press, 2024
In what innovative ways do novels by Black diasporic women writers experiment with the representation of Black subjectivity? This collection explores the inventiveness of contemporary Black women writers – Black British, African, Caribbean, African American, – who linguistically remake traditional understandings of blackness. Fifteen well-known and respected scholars drawn from France, Britain, South Africa, Panama, the United States, Togo, Guyana, and Canada have contributed essays here. As the title word “experimental” signals, their essays foreground the narrative form and stylistic innovations of the Black-authored novels they analyze. Their essays also show how these experiments with form mirror the novels’ convention-breaking experiments with reimagining Black female subjectivities.
While each novel represents the complexities of diasporic experiences differently, some issues emerge that are broadly shared not just within a regional group, but across geographical borders. One section of the book’s introduction features a comparative look at such linking themes across borders, under the rubrics: a return to precolonial systems of belief; reinventions of mothering; relational subjectivities; memory, history, and haunting; and posthumanist revaluations. These themes take different shapes across the multitude of diverse cultures studied in this book. But together they establish a pan-global imaginative practice.
More by Jean
Articles
Scholarship
2020-2023
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“Mirror Mirror: The Visual Economy of Race in Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird.” Angelaki 27.6 (November, 2022).
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“Dislocating the Reader: Slave Motherhood and the Disrupted Temporality of Trauma in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Psychoanalysis. Edited Vera J. Camden (Cambridge University Press, 2022).
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“Doublings and Dissociation in Nella Larsen’s Passing and Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird.” Angelaki 27.3-4 Special issue on “After Modernism: Women, Gender, Race” (July 2022).
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Reprinted in After Modernism: Women, Gender Race (Routledge 2023).
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“Reinventing the Gothic in Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching: Maternal Ethics and Racial Politics.” Reading Contemporary Black British and African American Women Writers: Race, Ethics, Narrative Form. Edited Jean Wyatt and Sheldon George (Routledge, 2020).
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Sheldon George and Jean Wyatt at 2023 LACK conference (Burlington VT)
2004-2019
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“Freud, Laplanche, Leonardo: Sustaining Enigma.” American Imago 77.2 (2019).
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“Love in the Novels of Toni Morrison.” Angelaki 22/1. Special issue on “Women Writing Across Cultures: Present, Past, Future.” Edited Pelagia Goulimari.
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Reprinted in Women Writing Across Cultures. Edited Pelagia Goulimari (Routledge, 2018).
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"The Economic Grotesque and the Critique of Capitalism in Toni Morrison's Tar Baby.” MELUS 39.1 (Spring 2014).
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“Failed Messages, Maternal Loss and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy.” Modern Fiction Studies 58.1 (Spring 2012).
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“Storytelling, Melancholia, and Narrative Structure in Louise Erdrich’s The Painted Drum.” MELUS 36.1 (Spring 2011).
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“Love’s Time and the Reader: Ethical Effects of Nachtraglichkeit in Toni Morrison’s Love.” Narrative 16.2 (May 2008).
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“Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Sexual Politics and the Genealogy of the Strong Black Woman.” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 9.1 (Winter 2008).
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“The Impossible Project of Love in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, Dirty Hands, and The Room.” Sartre Studies International 12.2 (November 2006).
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“Thinking the Other-Centered Self with Jean Laplanche: The Enigmatic Signifier and its Political Uses.” Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society 11.2 (August 2006).
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“Signifying Contortions: Disavowal, The Enigmatic Signifier, and George W. Bush’s Credibility After 9/11.” International Journal of Applied Psychoanalysis 3.2. Special Issue on “9/11, the Iraq War, and the Prospects for Peace.” (June 2006).
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“Jouissance and Desire in Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher.” American Imago 62.4 (Winter 2005).
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"Toward Cross-Race Dialogue: Identification, Misrecognition and Difference in Multicultural Feminist Community.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 29.3 (Spring 2004).
1993-1996
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“I Want to Be You: Envy, the Lacanian Double, and Feminist Community in Margaret Atwood's The Robber Bride.” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 17.1 (Spring 1998).
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“Hazards of Idealization in Cross-Cultural Feminist Dialogues: Abel, Cisneros, Gallop, McDowell, and Moraga.” Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society (1996).
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“The Violence of Gendering in Angela Carter's The Magic Toyshop, The Passion of New Eve, and ‘Peter and the Wolf.’” Women’s Studies (1996).
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“Giving Body to the Word: The Maternal Symbolic in Toni Morrison's Beloved.” PMLA (1993). Reprinted in:
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Barbara H. Solomon, ed. Critical Essays on Toni Morrison's Beloved. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998.
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M. Keith Booker, ed. A Practical Introduction to Literary Theory and Criticism. New York: Longman, 1996.
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Solomon O. Iyasere and Marla W. Iyasere, eds. Understanding Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Sula. Troy, New York: Whitston Publishing, 2000.
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“On Not Being La Malinche: Border Negotiations of Gender in Sandra Cisneros's ‘Never Marry a Mexican’ and ‘Woman Hollering Creek.’” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature (1993).
1980s and 1970s
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“Avoiding self‐definition: In defense of women's right to merge (Julia Kristeva and Mrs Dalloway).” Women's Studies (1986).
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“A Patriarch of One's Own: Jane Eyre and Romantic Love.” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature (1985).
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Reprinted in Barbara Timm Gates, Critical Essays on Charlotte Bronte. Boston, G. K. Hall, 199-216.
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“Art and Allusion in Woolf’s Between the Acts.” Mosaic (1978).
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“The Celebration of Eros: Greek Concepts of Love and Beauty in To the Lighthouse.” Philosophy and Literature (1978).
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“Mrs. Dalloway: Literary Allusion as Structural Metaphor.” PMLA (1973).
Awards
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Contributed to the Cambridge Companion to Literature and Psychoanalysis, which won the American Psychoanalytic Association Book Prize for 2024. Edited by Vera Camden, the 2002 included Jean's essay, “Dislocating the Reader: Slave Motherhood and the Disrupted Temporality of Trauma in Toni Morrison's Beloved.”
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Toni Morrison Society Book Prize for the best single-authored book on Toni Morrison’s work. The Toni Morrison Society awards the Book Prize every five years. 2018 winner.
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Appointed Visiting Scholar, English Faculty, Oxford University, UK, for fall (Michaelmas) semester 2018.
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Appointed Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Summer Multicultural Institute, University of Kansas in 2007.
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Occidental College Sterling Award for Scholarship and Teaching in 2003.
Invited Talks
2017-2023
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Keynote speaker at Simmons University’s annual Robert M. Gay Memorial Symposium: Toni Morrison, Ethics and Social Justice on “History, Trauma, and Resilience in Morrison's Home.” Simmons University, Boston, MA (April 2021).
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Invited speaker in online University of Oxford TORCH workshop “After Modernism: Women, Gender Race, Workshop 3” on “Doublings and Dissociation in Nella Larsen’s Passing and Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird.” University of Oxford, UK, convened by Pelagia Goulimari (December 2020).
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Invited speaker on “Slave Motherhood and The Disrupted Temporality of Trauma in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” Morrison’s Song of Solomon: Two Generations Later conference. Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France (September 2020).
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Roundtable “Intersectional Narratology,” where I spoke on “The Intersectionality of Shame in Toni Morrison’s Paradise and Beyond.” International Conference on Narrative. University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY (March 2017).
2004-2019
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Special panel “Literary Narratives of Trauma,” where I spoke on “Childhood Trauma as a Crisis of Signifying in A Mercy: Toni Morrison and Jean Laplanche.” Listening to Trauma Conference, George Washington University, Washington DC (October 2016).
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Organized panel on “Race and Narrative Form,” speaking on “Dismembered Bodies, the Return of the Repressed, and Home in Toni Morrison’s Home.” Annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association, Harvard University, Cambridge (March 2016).
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Invited speaker on “‘Love Had a Thousand Shapes’: Varieties of Love in Toni Morrison’s Fiction.” Simmons University Annual Graduate English Colloquium. Simmons University, Boston, MA (October 2015).
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Invited speaker on "Love in the Novels of Toni Morrison." Gender, Literature and Culture Seminar. Wadham College, University of Oxford, UK (May 2015).
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Plenary speaker on “The Work of Victor Wolfenstein: Psychoanalytic Marxism and Reading Dubois’s The Souls of Black Folk.” University of California Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Consortium. Lake Arrowhead, CA (May 2012).
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Invited speaker on “Jean Laplanche and Toni Morrison: Enigmatic Signifying in Morrison’s Love and A Mercy.” Seminar in Psychoanalytic Practices. The Humanities Center, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (March 2011).
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Invited speaker on “Identification in Lacanian Theory.” Program in Experimental Critical Theory, “The Subject: Freud and Lacan.” UCLA, Las Angeles, CA (May 2010).
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Plenary panel speaker on “Novels by Women of Color and Contemporary Trauma Theory.” “Trauma: Intersections among Narrative, Neuroscience, and Psychoanalysis” Conference. George Washington University, Washington, DC (March 2010).
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Invited speaker on “Jouissance and Desire in Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher.” English Department Seminar. University of Vermont (September 2008).
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Invited speaker on “Broken Time in Toni Morrison’s Love.” English Department Colloquium Series. University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS (June 2007).
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Invited speaker, public lecture on “Circular Narrative, Cyclical Time in Louise Erdrich’s The Painted Drum.” Kansas Multicultural Summer Institute. University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS (June 2007).
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Invited speaker on “Signifying Contortions: Disavowal, The Enigmatic Signifier, and George W. Bush’s Credibility After 9/11.” Symposium on 9/11, The Iraq War, and the Prospects for Peace. University of South Carolina (March 2006).
Event Organization
I organized a set of four online University of Oxford TORCH seminars featuring fourteen scholars of contemporary global literature who explore the inventiveness of Black women writers from Britain, the Caribbean, Africa, and the U.S. All presentations are drawn from the forthcoming collection of essays, Experimental Subjectivities in Global Black Women’s Writing: Race and Narrative Innovation (Bloomsbury Press, 2024).
I organized a three-day workshop/panel series with Naomi Morgenstern and Cynthia Quarrie for ACLA’s 2019 annual conference. The panel was called “The End of (Racial) Innocence: The Ethics and Politics of Motherhood, Fatherhood, and the Child.” I presented a paper on “Monstrous Mothers, Their Daughters, and Yoruba Traditions in Helen Oyeyemi's White is for Witching.” Georgetown University, Washington, DC (March 2019).
I organized a three-day workshop/panel series with Sheldon George as part of ACLA’s 2018 annual conference. The panel was called “Narrative, Race, Ethics.” I presented the paper, “Ethical Dilemmas of Passing in Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi.” UCLA, Los Angeles, CA (March 2018).
I organized, with Sheldon George, a three-day workshop/panel series as part of ACLA’s 2016 annual conference. The panel was called “Race and Narrative Form.” I presented a paper on “Dismembered Bodies, the Return of the Repressed, and Home in Toni Morrison’s Home.” Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (March 2016).
Contact
Contact Jean Wyatt about speaking at your conference, visiting your university, or collaborating on a project by emailing her directly at jwyatt@oxy.edu.