Mitchell Levenberg
[email protected]
Office Suite 5214
M.A. in English, Queens College
B.A. in English, Queens College
At the CUNY Graduate Center back in 1980’s, I considered myself an Americanist, my focus being mainly American Literature between the wars, and some before and after—Realism, Modernism, Contemporary, Post-Modernism, post-post Modernism etc. I studied Fiction, (Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, The James Family, God and Man in America) mostly American Renaissance with the great Alfred Kazin, and more contemporary fiction with the Americanist Morris Dickstein (The Gates of Eden). My dissertation (still pending) was to be on Hemingway and the Spanish Civil War.
Then came my teaching career, which, an expression usually reserved for students, expanded my horizons. My focus began to deepen and to spread globally—Our department even changed names from English to Literature, Writing, and Publishing, three areas which consumed my focus, as a teacher of writing and Literature, and as a published writer of fiction and autofiction.
My courses were comprised of the literature represented by specific literary and historical periods: British Romanticism, Victorianism, Modernism, Contemporary, Post-Modernism, which of course included poetry from Shakespeare to Keats to Tennyson to Eliot and Cummings, to O’Hara
Ginsberg, to Frost and Plath and Ocean Vuong. I was interested in researching and teaching not only the work of the periods themselves, but in particular the transitions between the periods, the changes in style, language and purpose and the historical reasons for those changes.
Other than Literary research and teaching, my main focus at the moment is Writing and Publication, which also includes several readings during the year such as readings at St. Francis College as part of school events as well as participating in the Brooklyn Book Festival. At the moment I am editing and revising an autobiographical collection of essays/stories about growing up in Queens, including going to college, getting married, and adopting my daughter from China. Five of these autofiction pieces have already been published in various literary journals.