About

Louise Schleiner passed away in February of the year 2000. She is survived by family, friends, former colleagues, and former students who miss her deeply.  The information below is transcribed from her website as it was in 1999.

April, 1999

Vita

Louise Schleiner, Lewis F. & Stella E. Buchanan Distinguished Professor of English, Washington State University, Pullman, WA 99164-5020.

Education

  • Ph.D., English, Brown University, 1973
  • M.A., Comparative Literature, Emory University, 1965
  • B.A., summa cum laude, Queens College (N.C.), 1964

Experience

    • Washington State University, Director of Graduate Studies, English Dept. 1995-
      • Professor, 1994-
      • Associate Professor 1987-94
      • Assistant Professor, 1984-87
    • U. C. Davis, Lecturer, 1980-84
  • St. Mary’s College of California, Instructor, 1977-80
  • Sacramento City College, Instructor, 1975-77
  • Kiel University (Germany), Lecturer, 1969-70

Publications

Books

Cultural Semiotics, Spenser, and the ‘Captive Woman’: London & Toronto: Lehigh UP/ Associated University Presses, 1995.
Reviews: Lawrence Manley, “Recent Studies in the English Renaissance,” SEL 36 (1996): 245-46; Raphael Falco, SN 27.3 (1996); and Stephen M. Buhler, RenQ 50, 3 (1997): 901-03.

Tudor and Stuart Women Writers. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994. Reviews: Mary Ellen Lamb, Sidney Newsletter & Journal 13 (1995); Lawrence Manley, “Recent Studies in the English Renaissance,” SEL 36 (1996): 215-16; Mary Papazian, SCJ 27 (1996); Rosemary Kegl, TSWL 15 (1996); brief notice, Anne LeCercle, Etudes Anglaises 49 (1996); Janet Clare RES 48 (1997); Margaret Arnold RenQ 50, 2 (1997); and Carolyn D. Williams, MLR 93.2 (1998): 471-72.

The Living Lyre in English Verse from Elizabeth through the Restoration. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1984.
Reviews: in RenQ (twice), GHJ, JEGP, Music and Letters, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Eighteenth Century: an Annual Review (1985), and Style, respectively by Derek Attridge, Eugene Cunnar, Diane McColley, Hallett Smith, Christopher Wilson, Alan Shaw, Betty Rizzo, and Susanne Woods. Plus paragraphs in the SEL annual ‘Renaissance’ review essay, for 1985 (R. Helgerson), & in Virginia Quarterly Review 61, #3 (1985). Continued favorable notice, e.g. in Linda P. Austern, review of Winifred Maynard, Elizabethan Lyric Poetry and its Music, in MP 86 (1989): 294-96.

Forthcoming Work

“Voice, Gendered Subjects, and Ideology in Shakespeare’s Early Plays” [primarily a theoretical essay], accepted for Shakespeare Quarterly, millenium issue, fall 1999.

Commissioned replacement entry “Edward Kelley,” New Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: OUP.

“Elizabeth Weston, Neo-Latin Poet: A Woman among Humanists,” co-authored with Winfried Schleiner, for a Festschrift in honor of Barbara Lewalski, ed. Amy Boesky and Mary Crane, in press, U of Delaware P.

“Placing Elizabethan Poetry: Some Classroom Ideas,” Approaches to Teaching Shorter Elizabethan Poetry, ed. Patrick Cheney & Anne Lake Prescott, MLA “Approaches” volume, in press.

“Voicing and the Subject: Early Modern Women’s Strategies within Discourse Domains,” forthcoming in the Proceedings of the Conference Met of zonder Lauwerkrans (Without or without Laurels), on historiography & women’s writings, sponsored by the Netherlands Royal Academy of Sciences, Amsterdam, Sept. 11, 1998.

Review of Elizabeth Hanson, Discovering the Subject in Early Modern England, and Megan Matchinske, Writing, Gender, and State in Early Modern England: Identity Formation and the Female Subject, for Quidditas.

Submitted Or In Progress

“Spirit Colors Wrinkled in Time: Tales and Meditations,” a book of meditations and poems.

Planned talk, by invitation

Plenary speaker on Shakespeare’s Jacobean period: The Anglistentag,
Mainz University, Sept. 1999.

By invitation, a 2nd commissioned replacement entry, New Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: OUP: “Margaret Tyler.”
Book project: “Discourse of Voicing in Early Modern Theater: Lyly and Shakespeare”–grant proposal in preparation for the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) for a collaborative book with Michael Steppat, Bayreuth University (sabbatical project, begun 1997). Theory chapter of fifty pp. already drafted, & extensive bibliographical work done.

Article draft: “John Donne and Virginia Woolf: Enunciative Subject, the Imaginary, and Woolf’s Allusions to Donne.”

Book project: “The Bible Translators and the Cultural Scene of James I at Royston/Cambridge as a Discourse Domain”–research well along.

Translation from French, collaborator Elwood Hartman, “On Ricardo Sanchez: Marginality and Excess in Chicano Poetry,” from Ecritures Hispaniques aux Etats-Unis: memoire et mutations, Yves-Charles Grandjeat et al. (Aix-Marseilles: U of Provence, 1990); to be submitted for a Chicano/a Studies journal.

Further Publications

Articles

“Discourse Analysis and Literary Studies: Aemilia Lanyer’s ‘Epistle’ as Sample Case,” Mosaic: a Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 30 (1997): 15-37.

“Lady Falkland’s Reentry into Writing: Anglo-Catholic Consensual Discourse and her Edward II as Historical Fiction,” in The Witness of Times: Manifestations of Ideology in Seventeenth Century England. Eds. Katherine Z. Keller & Gerald J. Schiffhorst. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1993: 201-217.

“Gendered Journeys in The Faerie Queene and Pilgrim’s Progress” in Women and the Journey: the Female Travel Experience. Ed. Bonnie Frederick & Susan H. McLeod. Pullman: Washington State UP, 1993: 144-169.

“Margaret Tyler, Translator and Waiting Woman,” ELN 29 (1992): 1-8.

“Elizabeth Weston, Alchemist’s Step-daughter and Published Poet,” CaudaP (1992): 8-16.

“Latinized Greek Drama in Shakespeare’s Writing of Hamlet,” SQ 41 (1990): 29-48.

“Spenser’s ‘E. K.’ as Edmund Kent (“kenned”/ of Kent),” ELR 20 (1990): 374-407.

“Pastoral Male Friendship and Miltonic Marriage: Textual Systems Transposed,” LIT 2 (1990): 41-58.

“Ladies and Gentlemen in Two Genres of Elizabethan Fiction,” SEL 29 (1989): 1-20.
Republished: in Literary Criticism (Gale Research, spring, 1998).

“Recent Studies in Poetry and Music of the English Renaissance.” ELR 16 (1986): 253-68.

“Spenser and Sidney on the Vaticinium.” Spenser Studies. A Renaissance Poetry Annual 6 (1985): 129-45.

“Providential Improvisation in Measure for Measure.” PMLA 97 (1982): 227-36.

Republished in Modern Critical Interpretations: Measure for Measure, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea, 1987).
–2nd republication: The Critical Temper, ed. Martin Tucker, 1989.
–3rd republication: Shakespeare: Measure for Measure, ed. John Andrews (London: J. M. Dent, 1994).

“Milton, G. B. Doni, and the Dating of Doni’s Works.” Milton Quarterly 16 (1982): 36-42.

“Seventeenth-Century Settings of Herbert: Purcell’s ‘Longing’,” in Too Rich to Clothe the Sun. ed. Claude Summers & Ted-Larry Pebworth (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh UP, 1980): 195-207.

“Song Mode in Crashaw,” in Essays on Richard Crashaw. ed. Robert M. Cooper (Salzburg: Institut fur Anglistik, 1979): 145-68.

“Jacobean Song and Herbert’s Metrics.” SEL 19 (1979): 109-26.

“Emerson’s Orphic and Messianic Bard.” ESQ 25 (1979): 191-202.

“Twain’s Use of Romance Motifs in Three Novels.” CLS 13 (1976): 330-47.

“Herrick’s Songs and the Character of Hesperides.” ELR 6 (1976): 77-91.

“The Composer as Reader: A Setting of Herbert’s ‘Altar’.” The Musical Quarterly 61 (1975): 422-32.

“The Angel and the Necessary Angel: Formalist Readings of Rilke and Stevens.” LWU 2 (1969): 215-37.

Translation: from German, Review of Leaves of Grass, Ferdinand Freiligrath, Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung, May, 1868; Critical Essays on Walt Whitman. ed. James Woodress (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983).

Book Reviews

Of Robert S. Miola, Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy: The Influence of Seneca. SQ 48 (1997): 480-82.

Of Bettie Anne Doebler, ‘Rooted Sorrow’: Dying in Early Modern England. RMRLL 49 (1995): 76-78.

Of Donna B. Hamilton, Vergil’s Aeneid and The Tempest, SQ 43 (1992): 493-96.

Of John Lilyat, Liber Lilliati: Elizabethan Verse and Song, ed. Edward Doughtie. JEGP, Winter, 1987.

Of W. Coburn Freer, Music for a King, in Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen 128 (1976): 186-89.

Poems

“Naomi and Ruth,” Daily Star “Literature,” page 6 of “Business,” Dhaka, Bangla Desh, Aug. 30, 1997.

“The Way in from the Suburbs,” Fugue 16, Winter, 1998 (Moscow, ID: U of Idaho P): 58-62.

“Poet Places,” In Other Words: an American Poetry Anthology, ed. Leslie James (Denver: Western Reading Services, 1998): 65.

“Solomon and the Queen of Sheba,” dis/content, 1:3, November 1998, Washington State University, English Department

“Words Renewed,” dis/content, 2:2, , February 1999.

Selected Conference And Other Presentations

“Voicing and the Subject: Early Modern Women’s Strategies within Discourse Domains,” given at the Conference Met of zonder Lauwerkrans (Without or without Laurels), on historiography & women’s writings, Netherlands Royal Academy of Sciences, Amsterdam, Sept. 11, 1998.

“Discourse Analysis and Masters/ Servants as Ideological Tag Figures in Lyly and Shakespeare,” Sonderforschungsgemeinschaft Conference, Schloß Thurnau, Bayreuth University, March 10, 1998.

Panel/Workshop Presentation, “Elizabeth Weston and Parlor Games” (a session of playing some of the games), “Bodies of Matter, Bodies of Light,” at the Conference Attending to Early Modern Women, University of Maryland, November 6, 1997.

“Virginia Woolf’s Donne: Inventive Gendering and Writerly Energies,” Pacific Northwest Renaissance Conference, Seattle University, March 30, 1996.

Presentation for a panel, “A Colloquium on Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure,” Commentary by panelists, with a student performance, an RMMLA event, Whitworth College, October 20, 1995.

Presentation, respondent for a panel, “New Books on Early Modern Women,” M.L.A., San Diego, 1994–convener Mary Moore.

“Aemilia Lanyer, Discourse Analysis, and the Status of Evidence,” Southwest Renaissance Conference, Huntington Library, May, 1994.

“Elizabeth Hoby/Russell: Funerary Verse Refigured,” Renaissance Society of America Conference, Huntington Library, May, 1992.

“Jacobean Court Ladies, their Writings, and the King’s Ideologeme of Male Self-Imaging as Government,” Pacific Northwest Renaissance Conference, Tacoma, April, 1992.

“Lady Falkland’s Edward II: her Religio-political Reentry into Writing,” Conference on 17th-Century Literature and History, Orlando, Fla., March, 1991.

“Orestes and Hamlet: Accidental Parallels or ‘Misreading’,” MLA, New Orleans, December, 1988; and Northern Calif. Renaissance Conference, May, 1988.
“Milton’s Pastoral Vision of ‘Sociable Perfection’,” Pacific Northwest Renaissance Conference, Eugene, April, 1988.

“E. K. as Ed. Kent,” PAPC Conference, Davis, November, 1987.

“Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ and Italian Musical Monody,” Northern California Renaissance Conference, April, 1982.

Selected Talks

“Lady Falkland’s Edward II,” UC Davis Research Colloquium, Dec., 1990.

“Hamlet and Greek Dramas of Orestes,” Idaho-W.S.U. Faculty Colloquium, October, 1989

“Semiotics and New Historicism in Literary Study,” Interdisciplinary Colloquium, U. C. Davis, May, 1988.

Grants

Pending: Application with the American Philosophical Society for summer research support, 1999, $6000.00

Pending: Application with the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft for collaborative book project and other work, over 6 years, with Prof. Michael Steppat of Bayreuth University, DM. 19,000.

Folger Shakespeare Library, for one-month research stay, Sept., 1998: $1700.

Folger Shakespeare Library, travel for Workshop Participation, October, 1989, and October, 1991.

Dean’s Initiation/Completion Grants, W.S.U. fall, 1988, fall 1994. Summer Research Grants and Travel Grants from E. O. Holland Fund and from the W.S.U. Graduate School: 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988.

NEH summer seminar with Earl Miner, Princeton University, 1976

Teaching

Pedagogical Article Forthcoming

“Placing Elizabethan Poetry: Some Classroom Ideas,” Approaches to Teaching Shorter Elizabethan Poetry, ed. Patrick Cheney & Anne Lake Prescott, MLA volume in press.

Award

“Most Supportive Professor,” from the English Graduate Organization, WSU, 1991-92.

Statement of Teaching Goals

A Schleiner web-page is now on-line, including the syllabus for my spring class in seventeenth-century literature. For me the greatest challenge in current undergraduate teaching is the variety of modes of literacy that students bring to the classroom. English courses draw one contingent of lifelong readers, who are quite competent with the book as a technology for silent, self-invested reading and long-text perception. But other contingents of students in an average classroom bring various mixes of orality, visual literacy, and screen-bite and sound-bite literacy (mini-units of verbal text being the largest they are accustomed to grasping). I am working on ways to engage all of these groups in assignments working with visual and in some cases musical materials, game-like challenges with brief early modern texts, and group projects that involve coalescing searched information from diverse sources.

The aim is not only to acquaint students with early modern England and its modes of literary and cultural production, but to bring them to ask genuine questions out of their own encounter with the materials, and to pursue these in ways that let them learn to do more sustained, developed thinking, and long-text comprehension and writing. They are sophisticated in media of their own adolescent or young-adult culture (e.g., music videos, or fashion magazines), so I try, for example, to get them to transfer some of that sophistication to modes of early modern lyric, studied in the context of coterie interactions among acquaintances. This organizational approach makes it easy to integrate women’s writings with longer known canonical texts. So, e.g., “News” inventions and ‘metaphysical’ poems by Lady Anne Southwell can be studied with “characters” of Sir Thomas Overbury, lyrics of Donne, and masque lyrics of Jonson. I want to give them options in group assignments, so that each student can pick something relating to already existing interests–say planning the scenes for a hypothetical video based on a Donne lyric. Or deciding how the “Memorandum” of Martha Moulsworth, with its marginal, seemingly almost antiphonal, text additions, should be edited to a page layout and modern-spelling text, for best appreciation by modern readers. This lets students work on real, as opposed to artificial, tasks with course materials.

In graduate seminar teaching, I try to challenge students to work as broadly yet also pragmatically as they can with post-modern theory, even as they pursue close study of periods, genres, and texts. The profession needs new colleagues who are actively aware of the need to reposition literary and cultural study–politically with respect to ourselves and the public, and disciplinarily, with respect to other fields of the arts, humanities, and human sciences where new borders of the domains of study are being drawn.

Courses Taught Since 1984

(most multiple times, one on interactive TV to WSU/Vancouver)

  • Engl 198 English Composition Honors
  • Engl 199 Introduction to Literature Honors
  • Engl 209 Early period survey
  • Engl 301 Advanced Composition
  • Engl 305 Early Shakespeare
  • Engl 306 Later Shakespeare
  • Engl 307 Milton
  • Engl 384 16th-Century Literature
  • Engl 407 Renaissance II (17th century)
  • Engl 492 Senior Seminar, Theory and Elizabethan Readings in Drama
  • Engl 506 Seminar, 16th Century
  • Engl 507 Shakespeare (Graduate level)
  • Engl 537 Topics in English Literature: Intertextuality/Renaissance Readings
  • Engl 537 Tudor and Stuart Women Writers Engl 547 History of Critical Theory
  • Engl 548 Topics in Post-Modern Theory
  • Hum 103 Mythology
  • Hum 335 Bible as Literature
  • UH 440 Honors Domain of the Arts (on pastoralism)

In progress or in preparation:

  • Engl 548: “Topics in Post-Modern Theory–The Gendered Subject and the Social Text: Readings from Bakhtin to Spivak and Butler”

Professional Service

MS. Reviewing: for PLL, Mosaic, LIT, TSWL, Garland Press, Frontiers: a Journal of Women Studies, Signs

Committee Work, Administration, University Service

Extra-departmental

Faculty Senate Graduate Studies Committee, 1995-96 (elected) Nominated to become Vice-Chair, then Chair of Faculty Senate Senator for English Department, 1994-5 (elected)

T.A. Excellence Award Review Panel, 1995-96

Graduate School Summer Dissertation Grant Review Panel, 1996, 1998

Faculty Summer Research Grant Review Panel, 1991-92

Faculty Senate Graduate Studies Ad Hoc Sub-Committee, Review of College of Education, 1988-89

Dean’s Search Committees for English Department Chair, twice, 1986-87; 1992-93 (responsible for recruiting women applicants)

Departmental

Director of Graduate Studies, 1995-1999
Search Committee, Shakespeare/drama position, 1995-96
Chair’s Advisory Committee, 1995-96
Search Committee for WSU/Vancouver, history of rhetoric position, 1994-95
Ph.D. Examination Sub-committee, 1994-95
Endowed Funds Committee, 1993-94
Search Committee for WSU/Vancouver Renaissance position, 1992-93 Ph.D. Curriculum Ad Hoc Review Committee, 1991 (information gathering, revision of requirements)
Foreign Language Exam Committee, 1988-93
Composition Committee, 1989-92
Department Graduate Studies Committee (admissions and policy), 1987-89; 1992-94
M.A./Literature Examination Sub-committee, 1984-87, 1991-92; Chair of Committee, 1985-87; 1991-92
Graduate Curriculum Ad Hoc Committee (information gathering, revision of M.A. and Ph.D. degree requirements, 1986-87

Graduate Students’ Committee Service

Todd Lundberg, Ph.D., Dec. 1994, directed dissertation, “‘Whereby my Lute and I Have Done’: an Analysis of Three Practices of Sixteenth-Century English Sonneteering”

Lysbeth Benkert-Rasmussen, Ph.D., Aug. 1994, directed dissertation, “Class, Gender, and Education in the Formation of The Epistemic Positions of Renaissance Narrative Versifiers”

Boris Beric, special assistance and committee service on dissertation, “Applied Emblematics in Shakespeare, Donne, and Herbert,” Ph.D., 1990, Director Stanton J. Linden.

Other Ph.D. students, committee service (besides M.A. students): Judith M. Rose (external reader for U. C. Davis); Joanne Knowles;
Marcus Tribbet; William Kamowski; Paul Willis.

Topics on which I have work in progress

  • Shakespeare and Lyly comedies
  • Gender and Ideology
  • Ideological Discourse Analysis:
    • Translators of the King James Bible, Later Writings & Networking
    • King James’s Royston Court (near Cambridge) as Discourse Domain Cambridge Academic Drama
  • Margaret Tyler
  • Tudor and Stuart Women Writers
  • Post-modern Theory/ Semiotics

Church Activism

Two Books of Meditations hopefully to publish (press suggestions appreciated):

  • Bible Stories for Grownups
  • Spirit Colors Wrinkled in Time: Tales and Meditations

Interests

  • Jubilee Justice Equality in Priesthood
  • Centering Meditation and Spirituality
  • Full Welcome of Gay/lesbian Catholics
  • Free Speech for Church Employees
  • Free Speech for the American College of Bishops
  • Free Speech for Catholic Presses