Joseph Andriano
BIOGRAPHY
Joseph Andriano is Professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He was born in Albany, NY, in 1948. He has a B.A. in English (with a minor in French) from SUNY at Stony Brook, an M.A. in English from SUNY at Binghamton (where he took fiction workshops with Robert Kroetsch), and a Ph.D. in English from Washington State University. He is the author of two books: Our Ladies of Darkness (Penn State Press, 1993) and Immortal Monster (Greenwood Press, 1999). He considers both books to be more mythopoetic than analytical: blends of "creative writing," criticism, and scholarship. He has also published short stories in Argonaut and The Chattahoochie Review, and has written several one-act plays, performed at Eavesdrop Theater in Lafayette, and one full-length play, Lucid Dreamers, which won a contest for local playwrights and was performed by Lafayette Community Theater.
BRIEF CURRICULUM VITAE
Courses Taught (Selected for relevance to
Creative Writing)
Intro. to Creative
Writing, Advanced Creative Writing (Fiction), Modern Fiction, Postmodern
Fiction, Science Fiction, Gothic Fiction, Science in Literature, American
Gothic, Fabulation & Fantasy in Postmodern American Fiction, The
Contemporary American Short Story, Vonnegut and Le Guin, Evolution and
Relativity in Modern Fiction
Select
Publications
"Double-Take."
The Southwestern Review. Spring 1998: 60–61.
"Strange Attractors." The Chattahoochee Review (DeKalb Univ.), 16.2 (Winter 1996): 87–100.
"AugMental." Short Story in Argonaut (Austin, TX), vol. 16 (Summer 1992): 2–15.
"Similes for the Beginning," poem, Argonaut (Austin, TX), vol. 15 (Summer 1991).
Lucid Dreamers. A Play in Two Acts. Performed at Lafayette Community Theater, June 1992.
Immortal Monster: The Mythological Evolution of the Fantastic Beast in Modern Fiction and Film. Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1999.
Our Ladies of Darkness: Feminine Daemonology in Male Gothic Fiction. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993.
"Behemyth Evolving: Whale/Ape/Rocket." Trajectories of the Fantastic. Ed. Michael Morrison. Westport, CT & London: Greenwood Press, 1997.
"Brother to Dragons: Race and Evolution in Moby-Dick." ATQ: 19th Century American Literature & Culture 10.2 (June 1996): 141–53. (Univ. of Rhode Island)
"The Masks of Gödel: Math and Myth in Gravity’s Rainbow." Modes of the Fantastic. Eds. Robert Collins and Rob Latham. Westport, CT & London: Greenwood Press, 1995.
"The Handmaid’s Tale as Scrabble Game." Essays on Canadian Writing 48 (Winter 1992–93): 89–96.
Honors and Awards
USL Foundation
Distinguished Professor Award, 1994
Finalist, Contemporary Arts Ctr. Drama Contest, New Orleans, 1991
Finalist, Midwest MLA Book Award Contest, 1987.
First Place for
Science Fiction Story, Deep South Writers Contest, 1980.
ON TEACHING AND/OR WRITING
Throughout my
academic career I have been dedicated to breaking down disciplinary and generic
boundaries, particularly those between the so-called “two cultures” of science
and humanities and those between “scholarly/critical” and “creative” works. I
also try to find connections between popular and “high” culture, eroding
distinctions between them as well whenever I can. Teaching and occasionally
writing science fiction and other fantastic genres has been for me the most
rewarding way to accomplish this goal. Moreover, in both of my books I
attempted a kind of mythopoetic approach to fiction and film, constructing
intertextual monomyths in each: post-Jungian in the first; post-Darwinian in
the second. Since I view literary criticism as an art, not a science, I try to
stimulate students’ imaginations, encouraging them even to play with classic or
canonical texts, adapting them to new media, treating them as evolving entities
rather than artifacts. In creative writing classes, I assign exercises that
result in a wide variety of texts, both critical and fictional, which are
always read aloud and discussed in the workshop. I also require students
occasionally to target specific audiences and to take several different points
of view, especially one they consider “alien” to themselves. In sum, I do
everything I can to get young aspiring writers to break out of the
romantic/solipsistic shells in which they often encase themselves and to
become, at least for the duration of a semester, part of a community of
writers.
Check out
Joe’s Personal Home Page
Read
Joe Andriano's Fiction
Go
to UL-Lafayette Creative Writing Anthology
This site designed and maintained by The Creative Writing
Concentration of the English Department of the University of Louisiana at
Lafayette.
To contact us by mail: Director of Creative Writing, English Department,
Box 44691, UL-Lafayette, Lafayette LA 70504-4691; by telephone, 337-482-5478;
by email, jlm8047@louisiana.edu.
Last updated: May 1, 2001.