Laurie Langbauer

Professor of English

Right now I'm working on the intersection of ethics and children's literature. Reading post-structural theory over the last couple of decades has got me interested in ethics--"ethics," I think, best describes the work that Derrida, Agamben, or almost the entire range of feminist theorists do. And I've always been interested in children's literature. Children's books provide a good site to redefine ethics: children's books seem one place writers expressly react to an impoverished sense of ethics as moral tagline (the kind of morals we associate with Aesop's Fables, though they are already heavily ironized in those stories too). Nineteenth-century children's books especially try to move away from goody-goody primness to a subtle picture of intractable relations among fallible people. Locating ethics in the imagination opens an ethical grammar that concedes people's complicity in structures we did not form, in conflicts we cannot solve. This sense of ethical paradox÷with its resulting charity and forbearance, severity and vigilance÷may best be, may only be, available to us from literature. I've been writing on Alice in Wonderland, Winnie the Pooh, the Wizard of Oz, but also more recent books, such as the Lemony Snicket series. I teach a couple of undergraduate courses on children's literature every year.

I continue to teach and write about Victorian novels. My books include Novels of Everyday Life: The Series in English Fiction, 1850-1930, and Women and Romance: The Consolations of Gender in the English Novel; those books explore current debates in theory through an attention to the formal workings of narrative. In all my teaching, I encourage students to see the connections between recent critical writing and literary forms. 

Hire Date: 1995
Ph. D., Cornell University, 1985
M.A., Cornell University, 1982
B.A., Wesleyan University, 1976
llangbau@email.unc.edu
(919) 843-8154
Curriculum Vitae