Janet Gezari
Photo: Hans Glave

Lucy Marsh Haskell ’19 Professor of English, Connecticut College

Siemens Fellow - Class of Spring 2010

Janet Gezari is a specialist in the English novel, Victorian literature, and modern and contemporary fiction. She is the Lucretia L. Allyn Professor of Literatures in English at Connecticut College and received her BA from Cornell University and her PhD from Yale University. She is the author of Last Things: Emily Brontë’s Poems (Oxford, 2007) and Charlotte Brontë and Defensive Conduct: The Author and The Body at Risk (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992). Gezari has also edited Emily Brontë’s poems for the Penguin English Poets series (1991) and has published essays and book chapters on a wide range of writers including the George Eliot, Conrad, Nabokov, and Bob Dylan. In 2000 and 2008, she spent semesters in Mysore, India, co-directing Connecticut College’s program there and teaching colonial novels and post-colonial Anglophone Indian fiction.

Project Description

Late Work and Modern Times

At the Academy, Gezari began work on a book about late style in the work of four contemporary writers, three of them very much alive and still productive: Vladimir Nabokov, J. M. Coetzee, Philip Roth, and Bob Dylan. Rather than explaining late work as either a natural phenomenon (a consequence of biological aging) or a self-conscious construct (the artist’s or the critic’s), her book addresses how the work of mature artists differs from their own earlier accomplishment and from the work of the young. The focus is not on how old age or aging characters have been represented in literature but on what art has to say about its own aging (and about ours).

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