R. Clifton Spargo

Associate Professor

I work as both a fiction writer and critic. I received my Ph.D. in English and American Literature and Language from Yale University, and I hold Master's degrees from Yale University, Yale Divinity School, and Edinburgh University. My scholarly work and teaching integrate a number of fields within the discipline of English and American Literature, including post World War II American literature and culture; ethics; critical theory and cultural criticism; Holocaust studies; and genre studies (especially lyric, elegy, and narrative).

   

I have authored two literary critical monographs. The Ethics of Mourning (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004) is a transhistorical study of the facets of anti-commemorative mourning embedded as ethical complaint within the tradition of elegy. And Vigilant Memory: Emmanuel Levinas, the Holocaust, and the Unjust Death (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006) explores the impact of the Holocaust on poststructuralist ethics by examining central figures of injustice in Levinas's work and calculating the necessary function of the "memory of injustice" in our cultural and political discourses on the characteristics of a just society. My research has been supported by fellowships from the Whiting Foundation and the Mellon Foundation, and in 2000-2001 I was the Pearl Resnick Fellow at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Short stories of mine have been published in Glimmer Train, SOMA, Fiction, The Connecticut Review, Green Mountains Review, and other journals. I was awarded Glimmer Train's Short Story Award for New Writers in 2001 and won Glimmer Train's Fiction Open Contest in 2004. I am currently completing a novel and a collection of short stories.

Teaching Fields

• Twentieth-Century Studies
• Holocaust Studies
• Ethics

• American, African American and Ethnic Literature and Studies

• Contemporary Fiction

Office Location & Contact

• Coughlin Hall, 251
• 288-6865
• clifton.spargo@mu.edu

Office Hours

• SPRING 2008
• TUTH - 3:45-5:15

Teaching Schedule

• SPRING 2008
• 005/1005  TUTH   12:35-1:50
• 156/1001  TUTH     2:00-3:15
• 265/1701  TUTH     5:45-7:00 PM
  

Research Interests

• Modern and Contemporary American Literature and Culture
• Ethics
• Theory and Cultural Criticism
• Holocaust Studies

Selected Publications

• Vigilant Memory: Emmanuel Levinas, the Holocaust, and the Unjust Death. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.
• The Ethics of Mourning: Grief and Responsibility in Elegiac Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.
           
• “The Ethical Uselessness of Grief: Randall Jarrell’s ‘The Refugees.’” PMLA 120:1 (2005): 49-65.
• “Second Sorrow.” The Connecticut Review. (Spring 2006): 85-92.
• “Bluefish, South of Plymouth,” Glimmer Train Stories 54 (Spring 2005): 135-56.

Honors/Awards

• Finalist (one of three), Hiett Prize in the Humanities, 2005.
• First Place Winner, Fiction Open, Glimmer Train Press, 2004.
• Winner, Short Story Award for New Writers, Glimmer Train Press, 2001.
• Pearl Resnick Fellow, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2000-01.
• Whiting Fellow in the Humanities, 1993-94.