Background
Mrs. Conger was born in Waterloo, Louisiana, United States, on October 14, 1942. She is a daughter of Harold G. (an upholsterer) and Juva (an office manager; maiden name, Turner) McMillen.
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- Works
- Photos
- Works
book
Mary Wollstonecraft and the Language of Sensibility
(Wollstonecraft's public attitudes toward sensibility unde...)
Wollstonecraft's public attitudes toward sensibility underwent the familiar shifts of a discipline during her lifetime: naive acceptance, critical rejection, mature return. In her youth she demonstrated a willingness to believe many of its myths, and she used its metaphors and discourses without much self-consciousness. The ethical discourse of sensibility dominated her early fictions. Midcareer Wollstonecraft turned a new critical, self-consciously feminist eye on sensibility. She then deployed the medical discourse of sensibility against the notion itself by insisting that the cultivation of sensibility created women who might be attractive to men but who were intellectual, psychological, and physical cripples. The last active years before her death marked a measured return to the creed of sensibility; she rehabilitated it in a form compatible to her own mature political beliefs. Yet Wollstonecraft's public documents reveal only half of the truth about her romance with the language of sensibility. They rightly suggest that it was tempestuous; they wrongly suggest that it was an on-again, off-again affair, an impression given by her flamboyant renunciation of sensibility in the Rights of Woman. In private correspondence Wollstonecraft never strayed too far from her lexicon of sensibility, presumably because she found no alternative way to describe herself and others. For twenty years her private vocabulary of self-assessment remained steadily affective, curiously repetitive, even oracular. This was not a discourse of analysis but of cultic participation; even when she did, very seldom, find fault with sensibility, it was from inside the belief system and was generally directed at an abuser of that system.
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Iconoclastic Departures: Mary Shelley After Frankenstein : Essays in Honor of the Bicentenary of Mary Shelley's Birth
(The essays in this book discuss Mary Shelley's innovative...)
The essays in this book discuss Mary Shelley's innovative contributions to the literary forms she worked with during her lifelong career after the publication of Frankenstein: journals, letters, travelogues, biographies, editions, poems, dramas, tales, and novels. The image of Shelley that emerges is of one who is talented, intelligent, dedicated to her craft, and a nonconformist in idea and forms.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0838636845/?tag=2022091-20
Sensibility in Transformation: Creative Resistance to Sentiment from the Augustans to the Romantics - Essays in Honour of Jean H.Hagstrum by Syndy McMillen Conger (1990-05-31)
(Sensibility in Transformation: Creative Resistance to Sen...)
Sensibility in Transformation: Creative Resistance to Sentiment from the Augustans to the Romantics - Essays in Honour of Jean H.Hagstrum by Syndy McMillen Conger (1990-05-31) on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers.
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Syndy McMillen Conger
Edit ProfileEducation
Syndy Conger graduated from University of Iowa, obtaining Bachelor of Arts (English; with honors and highest distinction) in 1965, Master of Arts (German) in 1969 and Doctor of Philosophy (English) in 1976.
Career
Since 1972 Mrs. Conger worked at Western Illinois University, Macomb, as a professor of English, and director of graduate studies in English.
Works
book
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Iconoclastic Departures: Mary Shelley After Frankenstein : Essays in Honor of the Bicentenary of Mary Shelley's Birth
(The essays in this book discuss Mary Shelley's innovative...)
-
Mary Wollstonecraft and the Language of Sensibility
(Wollstonecraft's public attitudes toward sensibility unde...)
-
Sensibility in Transformation: Creative Resistance to Sentiment from the Augustans to the Romantics - Essays in Honour of Jean H.Hagstrum by Syndy McMillen Conger (1990-05-31)
(Sensibility in Transformation: Creative Resistance to Sen...)
-
Iconoclastic Departures: Mary Shelley After Frankenstein : Essays in Honor of the Bicentenary of Mary Shelley's Birth
Politics
Syndy Conger described her political views as “Left of center.”
Views
Quotations:
"My writing projects — usually inspired by invitations to speak, calls or conference papers, or lectures done in classes — inspire me (or give me a wonderful excuse) to research new topics in old books. I love imaging in libraries. Such research, in turn, invariably transforms and energizes my teaching. Another major Motivation to write, though, is to clarify and share beliefs and values — I have a definite predilection towards literary archaeology, a need to unearth lost or neglected literary treasures and place them in relationship with similar texts: Gothic texts earlier are now women’s texts, many (though not all) generally relegated to the category of ‘popular literature.’ I’m a compulsive explicator/teacher.
My influences have recently come from a variety of Poststructural critics, especially Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. But profound influences on my criticism come from Anglo-American feminism (from Germaine Greer to Susan Gubar) and German phenomenological criticism, and related reader-response or reception theory (Hans-Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser). I have always been interested in the question of literary influence, though my ideas have been radically altered by poststructural speculations on intertextuality by Barthes, Foucault, and Eco.
Cultural differences and cross-cultural influences began to fascinate me after a year abroad as an exchange student in Tuebingen, Germany. As I progressed in graduate school, this evolved into a fascination with one culture’s reception of another culture’s literature. More recently, I have begun to e*plore other kinds of extraliterary influences on Writing subjects: metaphors, myths, or parents, with examples all to be explored in my work now in Progress on Mary Shelley."
Interests
Connections
Mrs. Conger married James F. Conger (a lecturer) on August 7, 1967.
