- Associate Professor of English
Rose-Hulman, Dept. of Humanities and Social Sciences
Maître de langue, Université d’Orléans, 2015-16
- Université d'Orléans (Loire Valley University), English, Faculty Memberadd
- Arabic Literature, Caribbean Literature, Class, Politics and Literature, Edward Said, The City in Literature and Culture, and 21 moreElegy, Zadie Smith, postwar British literature, Mahmoud Darwish, Monuments & Memorials, Im/migrant narratives, Lebanese Civil War narratives, Danielle Arbid, Migration Narratives, Hanif Kureishi, Literature set in Beirut, Film set in Beirut, Servants in Literature, My Beautiful Laundrette, Film Studies, Film Adaptation, Jean-Luc Godard, Everyday Life Studies, Israel/Palestine, Gayatri Spivak, Post-Colonial Theory, and Work and labour in art and literatureedit
- I’m a Professor of English at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, where I have taught literature and film since 2002... moreI’m a Professor of English at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, where I have taught literature and film since 2002. As a Fulbright recipient, I spent the Fall 2007 semester teaching and researching at Lebanese American University in Beirut. In 2015-16, I taught language, culture, and film courses as well as 20th and 21st century British and commonwealth literature at the Université d’Orléans in France. I returned to Rose-Hulman for AY 2016-17. I have a book in the works and am a strong advocate of shared governance after having served as the chair of the Faculty Affairs Committee.edit
In ‘Masters and Servants, Class, and the Colonies in Graham Greene’s 1940s Fiction,’ Rebecca Dyer demonstrates how some British authors writing in the 1940s used servant characters to comment on shifting class dynamics within Britain and... more
In ‘Masters and Servants, Class, and the Colonies in Graham Greene’s 1940s Fiction,’ Rebecca Dyer demonstrates how some British authors writing in the 1940s used servant characters to comment on shifting class dynamics within Britain and on the race and class hierarchies of the British Empire. After briefly examining servant portrayals in novels by P.G. Wodehouse, Ivy Compton-Burnett, and Robin Maugham, she focuses on the striking servants in the fiction of Graham Greene, who, she argues, blends references to Africa with a form of class travel for his upper-class white characters. Dyer analyzes a London manservant’s repeated stories of Africa in “The Basement Room” (1936), which Greene adapted with Carol Reed into The Fallen Idol (1948), adding in a reference to an African anticolonial rebellion. She analyzes as well the close, antihierarchical interactions of a British master and his African servant in The Heart of the Matter (1948), which Greene set in Sierra Leone.
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In ‘Masters and Servants, Class, and the Colonies in Graham Greene’s 1940s Fiction,’ Rebecca Dyer demonstrates how some British authors writing in the 1940s used servant characters to comment on shifting class dynamics within Britain and... more
In ‘Masters and Servants, Class, and the Colonies in Graham Greene’s 1940s Fiction,’ Rebecca Dyer demonstrates how some British authors writing in the 1940s used servant characters to comment on shifting class dynamics within Britain and on the race and class hierarchies of the British Empire. After briefly examining servant portrayals in novels by P.G. Wodehouse, Ivy Compton-Burnett, and Robin Maugham, she focuses on the striking servants in the fiction of Graham Greene, who, she argues, blends references to Africa with a form of class travel for his upper-class white characters. Dyer analyzes a London manservant’s repeated stories of Africa in “The Basement Room” (1936), which Greene adapted with Carol Reed into The Fallen Idol (1948), adding in a reference to an African anticolonial rebellion. She analyzes as well the close, antihierarchical interactions of a British master and his African servant in The Heart of the Matter (1948), which Greene set in Sierra Leone.
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"Critics of The Servant (1963), based on the 1948 novel by Robin Maugham, have not examined the London-set film’s many allusions to the global South. However, the screenwriter’s and director’s archives as well as many aspects of the... more
"Critics of The Servant (1963), based on the 1948 novel by Robin Maugham, have not examined the London-set film’s many allusions to the global South. However, the screenwriter’s and director’s archives as well as many aspects of the film—including wardrobe, set design, music, and dialogue—reveal the significance of these references. Departing from Maugham’s novel, Pinter and Losey portray the master as an African plantation owner’s son with a plan to “clear the jungle” in Brazil. These additions to the narrative connect domestic servitude and abuses of power within Britain to the international division of labor established during colonial conquest and align the film’s class commentary with the anticolonial movements underway in the 1960s."
Keywords: Harold Pinter / Joseph Losey / Robin Maugham / anticolonial politics / film adaptations
Keywords: Harold Pinter / Joseph Losey / Robin Maugham / anticolonial politics / film adaptations
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Essay in Rashid al-Daif and Joachim Helfer’s _What Makes a Man? Sex Talk in Beirut and Berlin_. Trans. Ken Seigneurie and Gary Schmidt. Austin: Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Univ. of Texas Press, 2015.
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Focusing on two films by Jean-Luc Godard that feature the work of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, this essay analyzes the rhetorical effects of Godard’s choice to subtitle, translate, or speak over Arabic speech and highlights... more
Focusing on two films by Jean-Luc Godard that feature the work of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, this essay analyzes the rhetorical effects of Godard’s choice to subtitle, translate, or speak over Arabic speech and highlights Godard’s decades-long working relationship with the translator Elias Sanbar, who also translated Darwish’s work from Arabic into French. It argues that both filmmaker and poet in Notre musique (2004) are engaged in auto-quotation in that Godard is alluding to his earlier films, particularly to Ici et ailleurs (1976), his extensive “rethinking” of his 1970 trip to film the Palestinian intifada, and in that Darwish restates his published commentary from the 1990s in a staged interview with an actress playing an Israeli journalist. It analyzes as well the political implications of Darwish’s poetry being recited in English translation by Native American actors in Sarajevo’s destroyed library.
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This essay considers a Lebanese novelist's and a Lebanese filmmaker's depiction of foreign maids living in Lebanon during the civil war of 1975-90. I argue that through their portrayal of complex maid characters, Barakat and Arbid draw... more
This essay considers a Lebanese novelist's and a Lebanese filmmaker's depiction of foreign maids living in Lebanon during the civil war of 1975-90. I argue that through their portrayal of complex maid characters, Barakat and Arbid draw the attention of their readers and viewers to the current plight of foreign-born maids in the country, the approximately 150,000 women--out of a total population of four million--who have neither political rights nor worker protections and who have long been a concern of local and international human rights organizations. Unlike many other novels and films set during the civil war, neither work examines sectarian divisions or considers who is to blame for military atrocities; rather, Barakat and Arbid have made family dramas the focus, and the figure of the live-in maid helps to complicate that emphasis. Despite many differences in terms of genre, tone, and degree of realism, Barakat's novel and Arbid's film both depict the employing family critically and present the central character, a dissenting member of the family, as developing a close relationship with the maid. These writers' development of maid characters could ideally have political effects resulting from readers' and viewers' growing recognition that the migrant workers in their midst are entitled to fair working conditions, enforceable contracts, and other human rights. Thus, Barakat and Arbid fulfill the authorial obligation to, as Edward Said put it in 1994, insist on "standards of truth about human misery and oppression" regardless of party affiliation or national background.
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This essay provides an analysis of “Tibaq,” an elegy written in Edward W. Said’s honor by the acclaimed Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. Noting that the poem exhibits aspects of a number of genres and demonstrates Darwish’s generally... more
This essay provides an analysis of “Tibaq,” an elegy written in Edward W. Said’s honor by the acclaimed Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. Noting that the poem exhibits aspects of a number of genres and demonstrates Darwish’s generally innovative approach to traditional literary forms, I consider how he has transformed the marthiya, the elegiac genre that has been part of the Arabic literary tradition since the pre-Islamic era. I argue that Darwish used the elegy-writing occasion to comment on Said’s politics and to make respectful use of his critical methods, particularly his interdisciplinary borrowing of counterpoint, a concept typically used in music analysis. By reworking the conventional marthiya to represent Said’s life in exile and his diverse body of work and by putting his contrapuntal method into practice in the conversation depicted in the poem, Darwish elegizes a long-lasting friendship and shores up a shared political cause. http://www.mlajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1632/pmla.2007.122.5.1447
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University of Texas at Austin Digital Repository.