Carol Colatrella

Undergraduate student

Matriculated in 1971 in Annapolis.

Author Profile

Dr. Carol Colatrella is professor of Literature and Cultural Studies in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication; Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and Faculty Development; and Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Women, Science, and Technology at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Colatrella received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Rutgers University in 1987. Her book Evolution, Sacrifice, and Narrative: Balzac, Zola, and Faulkner and articles in Nineteenth-Century French Studies and Comparative Literature and other journals analyze popular and scientific narrative representations of race, class, and gender. She has co-edited (with Joseph Alkana) and contributed to an anthology examining the influence of Sacvan Bercovitch's scholarship on American culture, Cohesion and Dissent in America. Her book Literature and Moral Reform: Melville and the Discipline of Reading provides an historically informed study of moral rehabilitation and reform in the nineteenth-century United States as well as analysis of Melville's narrative strategies; it was published in 2002 by the University Press of Florida. In 2011 Ohio State University Press published her book analyzing popular culture representations of women developing and engaging with science and technology, Toys and Tools in Pink: Cultural Narratives of Gender, Science, and Technology. Colatrella edited and contributed to the anthology Technology and Humanity (Salem Press, 2012). Since 1993, she has served as Executive Director of the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts and editor of the SLSA newsletter Decodings. In 2000 and in 2005-06, Colatrella held Fulbright fellowships based in Denmark.

List of Publications

  1. Evolution, Sacrifice, and Narrative: Balzac, Zola, and Faulkner (1990, 2017)
  2. Literature and Moral Reform: Melville and the Discipline of Reading  (2002)
  3. Toys and Tools in Pink: Cultural Narratives of Gender, Science, and Technology. (2011)
  4. Cohesion and Dissent in America (1993)
  5. Technology and Humanity (2012)

Evolution, Sacrifice, and Narrative: Balzac, Zola, and Faulkner (Book)

Year of publication: 1990, 2017

Publisher: New York: Garland. Reprint: Routledge Library Editions (The Nineteenth-Century Novel).

Description: Balzac, Zola and Faulkner all drew upon the principles of evolutionary theory to represent man’s place in nature and his struggle for survival in their major series La Comèdie humaine, Rougon-Macquart and the Yoknapatawpha fiction. This book focuses on the ‘first’ novels in each author’s series (La Père Goriot, La Fortune des Rougon and Flags in the Dust) and considers how each novel relates to its series and derives a definition of the naturalistic roman-fleuve. To describe this development, the issues of how a scientific idea becomes refracted in a literary genre and how the naturalistic novel developed out of the realistic novel are considered.

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Literature and Moral Reform: Melville and the Discipline of Reading  (Book)

Year of publication: 2002

Publisher: University Press of Florida

Description: This book offers an historically informed study of moral rehabilitation and reform, including discussion of penitentiaries, in the nineteenth-century United States as well as analysis of Melville's narrative strategies in his fictions.

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Toys and Tools in Pink: Cultural Narratives of Gender, Science, and Technology. (Book)

Year of publication: 2011

Publisher: Ohio State University Press

Description: Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) programs work collaboratively to connect education and research at the institutional, national, and global levels. But what role do women play in STEM? In this very timely book, Carol Colatrella responds to the under-representation of women in STEM by considering how gender inflects literary and media representations. In her analysis of fictional and cinematic texts that reference STEM, she investigates cultural tensions concerning sex roles—tensions that continue to be influential in today’s world.

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Cohesion and Dissent in America (Contribution)

Year of publication: 1993

Description: This book addresses one of the most important theories to arise in recent American literary scholarship. Developed over the past two decades, Sacvan Bercovitch's ideas about the relationship of American cultural institutions to voices of dissent have repeatedly posed challenges to pervasive assumptions about American culture and the methods used by cultural critics and literary historians. The contributors to this book respond to different aspects of Bercovitch's ideas by exploring a wide range of scholarly disciplines, including American, Chicano, Amerindian, African-American, Asian-American, feminist, comparatist, philosophical, legal, and critical studies. In addition to essays that focus on the theoretical backgrounds and implications of Bercovitch's concepts, this book interrogates the uses of those concepts in the study of American literatures. Works by a variety of American writers are analyzed: the Colonial poet Phillis Wheatly; nineteenth-century writers Hawthorne and Melville; modernists Pound and Eliot; contemporary authors John Barth, Norman Mailer, Arturo Islas, and John Yau; and philosophers William James and Stanley Cavell. This book offers new directions to students of American culture, while it participates in the ongoing reassessment of American cultural and literary scholarship.

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Technology and Humanity (Contribution)

Year of publication: 2012

Publisher: Salem Press

Description: Human engagement with technology has a deep history, as social progress and creative expression have long been connected with the development, deployment, and representation of what we recognize as technological products and processes. this volume explores the theme in such important works as Frankenstein, The Great Gatsby, The House of Seven Gables, and Neuromancer.

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