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Terri J. Gordon


          










PhD, Columbia University
Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature
Division: 
The New School for General Studies
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Professor Gordon has been a full-time faculty member at The New
School since 2002. She has also taught at Barnard College and Columbia
University. She received her PhD in French and Comparative Literature
from Columbia University, where she specialized in French, German and
British literature of the modernist period. She has published on the
cabaret, post-war film, and performance art in the Third Reich, and her
translation of Jean Genet’s Elle was adapted for an
off-Broadway production in the summer of 2002. She received The New
School Distinguished University Teaching Award in 2003 and teaches
interdisciplinary courses in the areas of ethics and literature, gender
studies, urban studies, and the aesthetics of the body.
Courses:
The Body: Aesthetics, Culture, and Politics in the 20th Century
Evil in the 20th Century The Avant-garde
The Literature of Forgiveness
Before the Law: Trials in the European Imagination
Performing Gender: Paris in the Roaring Twenties
Urban Life: Social Justice and the Lived City
Poetics of Resistance
Personal Statement: 
The city has played a key role in the works of modern writers, artists, and thinkers.  It is a locus for chance encounters, for dreams and despair, for apocalypse and rebirth.  My courses often consider the role of the city in modern literature and art.  In Urban Life, for example, we examine the question of social justice in real and imaginary cities.  In Paris-Berlin Express, we travel from the nightmarish Berlin of the expressionists to the dreamy Paris of the surrealists, studying the love-hate relationship between France and Germany in the early twentieth century.  In my online course, Performing Gender: Paris in the Roaring Twenties, each student plays the role of a famous author or artist, meeting weekly in Gertrude Stein’s virtual salon to discuss the latest literary happening.  Through these experiences, we consider the ways in which we live cities, the ways in which we are fundamentally shaped by the cities we inhabit and the cities of which we dream.

 
Academic Record
Research Interests: 
Ethics and Literature

Gender Studies

Performance Art

Aesthetics and Politics
 
Publications: 
Terri J. Gordon | List of Publications
“Debt, Guilt, and Hungry Ghosts: A Foucauldian Perspective on Bigert’s and Bergström’s Last Supper,” Cabinet Magazine Online, June 2006, ed. Sina Najafi. 
Contact Details
Email: 
gordont@newschool.edu