David Kramer

Retired Assistant Professor, Literatures in English
Specialty: Renaissance; Drama; Shakespeare; Contemporary Novel; Origins of the Novel

For years my teaching and research was centered in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century, and my books (The Imperial Dryden:  The Poetics of Appropriation in Seventeenth-Century England and France, [Athens:  University of Georgia Press, 1994]; "Onely Victory in Him:  The Imperial Dryden," in Literary Transmission and Authority:  Dryden and Other Writers, [Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1993]; and Fiction and Friction:  Sex, Text, and Envy in Dryden's Comic Drama) examine the ways English playwrights’ reading of French poetry and dramatic theory reflect and refract national modes of appropriation.   I also worked on and ran courses in the origins of the novel, and women writers of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century.

Yet after a Fulbright teaching American literature in Lima, Peru, my interests became more comparatist and less period-centered, and my teaching now ventures more widely across time, theme, and region. 

Recent courses include

  • “Sympathy for the Devil:  Genesis to Rushdie”
  • “Displacement, Artifice, Eros:  The Novels of Vladimir Nabokov”
  • “Ithaca:  The Art of Place”
  • “Around the Day in Eighty Worlds:  Magical Realism”
  • “Comic Novels of the Late Twentieth Century”

as well as single-author seminars on Milan Kundera, Don Delillo, and Laurence Sterne.  I also teach survey courses in Shakespeare, Dramatic Literature, Renaissance Literature, Enlightenment Literature, and introductions to the Short Story, Poetry, Fiction, and American Literature.