Marshall Alcorn
Title — Professor of English
Office — Rome Hall, Room 672
Phone — (202) 994-8434
E-mail — alcornma@gwu.edu
Current Research
My research focuses upon relations between discourse and social practice. I am interested in instances of rhetoric, information circulation, narrative construction, and teaching. I have a particular interest in concepts such as group identity, affect, unformulated experience, persuasion, identification, trauma, mourning, and fantasy.
Education
Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin, 1981
M.A., Vanderbilt University, 1976
Graduate, Washington Psychoanalytic Institute, 2006
Publications
Changing the Subject in English Class: Discourse and the Constructions of Desire. Southern Illinois U.P., 2002.
Narcissism and the Literary Libido: Rhetoric, Text, and Subjectivity. New York University Press, 1994.
Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure, and Society. Editor, with Mark Bracher, Ron Corthell, and Franciose Massardier-Kenney. New York University Press, 1994.
“The Desire Not to Know as a Challenge to Teaching” (forthcoming) Psychoanalysis, Culture, Society, 15 (2010).
“Three Stories of Three Stories of Laughter in the Classroom: Toward a Literature of Critical Emotion Studies” (forthcoming) JAC.
“Laplanche,” The Columbia History of Twentieth Century French Thought. Lawrence D. Kritzman, Ed. Columbia University Press, 2006.
"Ideological Death and Grief." JPCS: Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, 6 (2001): 172-180.
"Rhetoric, Projection, and the Authority of the Signifier." College English, 49 (1987), 137-157.
Literature, Psychoanalysis, and the Re-formation of the Self: A New Direction for Reader Response Theory," (coauthored with Mark Bracher). PMLA, 100 (1985), 342-354.