Jonathan Levin (NHC Fellow, 1998–99)

Fellowship Work Summary, 1998–99

Jonathan Levin continued his research and writing on his project "Cultivating Nature: American Literary Ecology." He proofread and indexed his book, The Poetics of Transition: Emerson, Pragmatism, and American Literary Modernism (Duke University Press, 1999); revised and adapted a chapter from his current project,"Coordinates and Connections: Self, Community, and World in Edward Abbey and William Least Heat-Moon " (forthcoming in Contemporary Literature); revised "Embracing the Contingent: A Pragmatist Defense of Literary Studies" (forthcoming in Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature); wrote "Between Science and Anti-Science: A Response to Glen A. Love" (forthcoming in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment); and contributed to the PMLA Forum on Literatures of the Environment. He gave a lecture, "Pragmatism, Theory, and the Practice of Literary Studies," for the English Department at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and "Cultivating Nature: American Literary Ecology," as part of the National Humanities Center's public lecture series. He served on the panel "Composition and the Future of English Studies," at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, held in San Francisco. He was a participant in the Triangle Intellectual History Seminar.