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
"Beastly Trumps: A Hypertext Fable": http://www.ucs.louisiana.edu/~jda8531/FableCover.htm.
"World-Lines." Louisiana Literature 22.1 (Spring/Summer 2005): 35-54.
"The Pound of Sinsemilla." Emergency Almanac. Winter 2004. http://www.emergencypress.org/.
"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
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English Department of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
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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: August 31, 2005.