Background
Kowalewski, Michael John was born on November 2, 1956 in San Francisco, California, United States. Son of Edward John and Suzanne Marie (Thome) Kowalewski.
( "Violent scenes in American fiction are not only brutal...)
"Violent scenes in American fiction are not only brutal, bleak, and gratuitous," writes Michael Kowalewski. "They are also, by turns, comic, witty, poignant, and sometimes, strangely enough, even terrifyingly beautiful." In this fascinating tour of American fiction, Kowalewski examines incidents ranging from scalpings and torture in The Deerslayer to fish feeding off human viscera in To Have and Have Not, to show how highly charged descriptive passages bear on major issues concerning a writer's craft. Instead of focusing on violence as a socio-cultural phenomenon, he explores how writers including Cooper, Poe, Crane, Hemingway, Faulkner, Wright, Flannery O'Connor, and Pynchon draw on violence in the realistic imagining of their works and how their respective styles sustain or counteract this imagining. Kowalewski begins by offering a new definition of realism, or realistic imagining, and the rhetorical imagination that seems to oppose it. Then for each author he investigates how scenes of violence exemplify the stylistic imperatives more generally at work in that writer's fiction. Using violence as the critical occasion for exploring the distinctive qualities of authorial voice, Deadly Musings addresses the question of what literary criticism is and ought to be, and how it might apply more usefully to the dynamics of verbal performance.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691069735/?tag=2022091-20
Kowalewski, Michael John was born on November 2, 1956 in San Francisco, California, United States. Son of Edward John and Suzanne Marie (Thome) Kowalewski.
Bachelor magna cum laude, Amherst College, Massachusetts, 1978. Master of Arts in English, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1982. Doctor of Philosophy in English, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1986.
Assistant professor Princeton University, New Jersey, 1986—1991. Assistant professor English Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota, 1991—1995, associate professor, 1995—2001, professor English, since 2001. Director American studies Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota, 2001—2004, chairman English department, since 2007.
( "Violent scenes in American fiction are not only brutal...)
Member Modern Language Association, Association for Study of Literature and Environmental (advisory board since 1994), Western Literature Association (Vice-President 1996-1997, president-elect 1997-1998, president 1998-1999), California Studies Association, Book Club of California.
Married Catherine Anne Oates, June 25, 1983. Children: Nicholas Edward, Sarah Marie, Kevin Eugene.
