Dayana Stetco
Dayana Stetco is an Assistant Professor of Creative
Writing at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She was born in
Cluj-Napoca, Romania in December. Her grandmother once told her that a real
lady never drinks from a bottle, never drives a car, and never discloses her
age, so the year of her birth will remain a secret. In 1985 she earned a B.A.
in Comparative Literature and Drama from the University of Cluj-Napoca. The
same year she won the National Drama Award for her play, The Old Curiosity
Shop. In the following years she won awards for her work on the stage (Best
Director, Best Performance - National Festival of The Arts). In 1992,
disappointed in the Romanian Revolution (which, she still maintains, was a
poorly staged coup d'etat), she came to America with two suitcases, three
books, and a child. In 1994 she received an M.A. in Creative Writing and, four
years later, a Ph.D. in Literature and Film from Wayne State University,
Detroit. She has won awards for her work in fiction and drama, a Distinguished
Dissertation Award for her thesis, Death of the Reader: Theories of the
Hypergenre, and the Judith Siegel Pearson Award for her memoir, Fields
of Nothing.
BRIEF CURRICULUM
VITAE
Courses Taught
Introduction to Creative Writing; Introduction to
Film; Introduction to Playwriting; Graduate Creative Writing
Seminar-Playwriting; Film Noir; The Mystery Movie; Cinema and Semiotics; Modern
British and American Fiction; Drama: Modern to Postmodern; Film Theory and
Criticism Seminar.
Select Publications
“Tilting at Windmills in Peter Greenaway’s The
Cook, The Thief, Her Wife & Her Lover,” in Peter Greenaway’s
Postmodern Cinema, Scarecrow, forthcoming in 2001
“The Dragon,”
translation from Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu, in Lines of Fire: Women and WWI,
Penguin, 2000
Fiction and criticism in Echinox, Antract,
Steaua, Poesis, Dispatch, Metrotimes, Southwestern
Review
Editorial Activity
Film reviewer, Metrotimes, Detroit
Editorial Assistant, Criticism
Editor, Moving Out, Feminist Literary and
Arts Journal
Drama Critic, Echinox
Theatre
Dramaturge, Mad Forest
Writer and Director: Interview, Milena,
Stripping, Deep South Festival of Writers
Director: Unfinished Sketch for the Balcony
Scene, King Crypto and Enigel, Through the Looking-Glass, The
Housekeeper, The Jumpers, Accidental Middle Ages, Camino Real, No Exit, The
Dwarfs, The Physiscists, Uncle Vanya, The Picture of
Dorian Gray, Lear: A Study
Art Installations
“Serendipity and Other Moods”
“Stage fright”
ON TEACHING AND/OR WRITING
I am interested in the cross-fertilization between
disciplines, the hybridity of genres, discourses of performance and all the
other scholarly games the postmodern condition has to offer. I am also
interested in suture - the stitching together (as elegantly as possible) of
creative and critical writing. Where Frankenstein failed, we may succeed.
Here’s the thing: is the Critic a writer who has earned “the right to speak
deliriously?” Is he a performer of sundry theories? Are critical fictions and
fictional criticism “acceptable” genres? Do postmodern genres exist? Can theory
be the subject of creative writing? These are a few of my dilemmas, and I tend
to take them into the classroom. As I don’t believe in absolute truths and
inflexible literary boundaries, my seminar discussions are rather animated.
And, I must say, the best work I’ve done is a direct result of these pedagogic
negotiations. On a lighter note: all this talk about theory is not meant to
frighten the innocent. Theory doesn’t have to be depressing. The only
depressing thing is passionless scholarship which breeds rigidity of thought.
Read a Sample of Dayana Stetco’s Writing
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.