Lisa Myobun Freinkel, Ph.D.

Director, Comparative Literature Program

Associate Professor of English

Profile

Lisa Myobun Freinkel received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California at Berkeley where she completed a dissertation with Stephen Greenblatt on Renaissance literature. Among the grants she’s received are awards from the Mellon Foundation, the Fulbright-Hays Foundation, and humanities centers at both Berkeley and the University of Oregon. Like her colleague Leah Middlebrook, Freinkel is a recipient of the UO’s Ersted Award for Distinguished Teaching. Her publications include Reading Shakespeare's Will: The Theology of Figure from Augustine to the Sonnets (Columbia, 2002), and articles on topics ranging from fetishism to usury, and addressing authors as diverse as Shakespeare, Dante, Luther, Immanuel Kant and the 13th-century Japanese monk, Dogen Zenji. Along with Renaissance literature, her ongoing interests include Shakespeare, psychoanalysis, theology, the philosophy of money, performance studies, and literary theory. She’s currently embroiled in two long-term and tangentially related projects: a book that situates Shakespeare’s work in the context of early modern encounters with Buddhist Asia, and a series of articles on the literary trope called “catachresis” (or, “the figure of abuse”).

~ the Sanders portrait (discovered 2001): a young William Shakespeare? ~

Education

• Dec 1993 Ph.D. Comparative Literature. U California, Berkeley.
• May 1989 M.A. Comparative Literature. U California, Berkeley.
• June 1987 A.B. summa cum laude. Literature. Harvard University.

Publications

Book

• Reading Shakespeare's Will: The Theology of Figure from Augustine to the Sonnets, ( New York: Columbia UP, 2002).

Refereed Journals

• "The Use of the Fetish," Shakespeare Studies 33 (2005). 115-122.
• "Shakespeare and the Theology of Will," Graven Images 2 (1995): 31-47.
• "Inferno and the Poetics of Usura," MLN 107 (1992): 1-17.
• "The Analogy of Form: Mourning and Kant's Third Critique," Qui Parle 4.2 (Sp 1991): 43-74.
• " Reading's Response" ( Stanley Cavell's Claim of Reason and Hamlet), Qui Parle 3.1 Sp 1989): 1-23.

Anthologies

• Shakespearean Fetish," in Spiritual Shakespeares, ed. Ewan Fernie, ( London: Routledge, 2005). 109-129.
• " Wittenberg 1522: Martin Luther and the Whole Man," entry on Martin Luther for The New History of German Literature, ed. David Wellbery ( Cambridge: Harvard 12/5/06 Freinkel - 1
• UP, 2005). (12 pp)
• "The Merchant of Venice: 'Modern' Anti-Semitism and the Veil of Allegory," in Modern and Postmodern Shakespeares, ed. Hugh Grady ( London: Routledge, 2000): 122-41. Accents on Shakespeare series.
• "The Name of the Rose: Christian Figurality and Shakespeare's Sonnets," in The Sonnets: Critical Essays, Ed. James Schiffer : (New York & London: Garland Publishing, 1999): 241-61.

Reviews

• Review essay: "Art Spiegelman's Art of the Fragment." Visual Communication Quarterly (forthcoming). 13 pp.
• Review of Patricia Berrahou Phillippy, Love's Remedies: Recantation and Renaissance Lyric Poetry in Spenser News Letter (Su 1997).
• Review of William Kennedy, Authorizing Petrarch in Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature (IUP: Bloomington, 1996).
• Review of Rosanna Camerlingo's From the Courtly World to the Infinite Universe: Sir Philip Sidney's Two Arcadias, in History of European Ideas, 19 (1995).
• Review of John Rajchman's Truth and Eros: Foucault, Lacan, and the Question of Ethics, in Qui Parle 5.2 (Sp/Su 1992): 143-7.

Recent Courses

COLT 608 Colloquium: What is World Literature

• This course will meet 6 times during the course of the quarter, and its content will to some extent be shaped by the interests of its participants. We will begin with a historical consideration of the topic, framing our conversation between Goethe's famous essay, "What Is World Literature?" and Gayatri Spivak's infamous The Death of a Discipline. From there, each course meeting will be shaped by a consideration of a particular problem in, or approach to, the study of world literature. Faculty and advanced graduate student guests will help lead us through these materials by sharing their own work and perspectives. Our final course meeting will be led by the participants in the course who will conduct a roundtable discussion on the topic, foregrounding their own research interests. Hopefully, our work together during fall term will form the basis for an ongoing Friday colloquium/works-in-progress series throughout the year.

COLT 608 Colloquium: Disaspora, Immigration and the Graphic Novel

•  This course will meet 6 times during the course of the quarter, and its content will be shaped by the interests of its participants. "Colloquium" etymologically means "a speaking together": I am no expert on the graphic novel, but instead an enthusiastic newcomer to the genre. So, all term we will be speaking together on these texts: your energy, insights, wisdom and guidance will form the heart of this class. To that end, I ask each member of the colloquium to come to each class prepared with three meaty, text-based questions per reading assigned. You will hand in these questions as a double-spaced, typed document at each class period.
  
  As some of you already know, this year COLT 608 (The COLT Colloquium) has taken as its subject matter the question "What Is World Literature?" This term, we will be switching gears dramatically to consider the genre of the graphic novel. Our reading will position the genre within what appear to be its recurring world-literary thematics of diaspora, racism, religious intolerance and immigrant life. On June 2-3, comics critic and guru Scott McCloud will be on campus. He will be lecturing on his current work, and will be participating in the first ever "Graphic Culture Triathalon": an event that COLT is co-hosting with AAA, and that will involve creative partnerships between literature students and art students. I am eager for members of this colloquium to be heavily involved in that triathalon, and will provide more details as we approach the event.

COLT 408/608 Colloquium: Witnessing Genocide

• This course will meet six times during the course of the quarter, and all colloquium participants will also be expected to attend the "Witnessing Genocide" symposium, sponsored by Judaic Studies and the Oregon Humanities Center (April 28-30). Our course readings should prepare us well for that symposium; thus we'll be reading Samantha Power's celebrated work on America and the Age of Genocide and Dominick LaCapra on Writing History, Writing Trauma as preparatory to hearing those authors speak on campus. We will also, however, study topics and media not related to the colloquium -- as, for example, comics artist Joe Sacco's work on Bosnia. This course can be taken for either upper-division or graduate credits.

COLT 613 Translation Pedagogy

• Courses designed with a broad-enough comparative focus inevitably encounter the problem of translation, because one can never assume that all students will share exactly the same foreign language expertise. And so, inevitably, one teaches texts in translation. But just what, precisely, is lost in translation? -- Such a question is inescapable within the pedagogy of Comparative Literature, but it is a question that is becoming increasingly important in other disciplines as well, since the drive to increase enrollments and improve accessibility has led to more and more literature-in-translation courses across campus. COLT 613 is designed to address this trend toward lit-in-translation. The seminar provides the training necessary to approach the pedagogy of lit.-in-translation responsibly. The course will deploy both practical and theoretical approaches. We will study theories of language, trope and translation, and will track the rise of a new discipline: "translation studies." We will also work collaboratively on issues arising in the classroom. We will learn how to devise and evaluate exercises designed to increase undergraduates' philological awareness. Finally, each member of the class will be responsible for constructing their own world lit syllabus, and will defend his/her choices to the rest of the class. In addition to the final syllabus project, students wishing to take the course for 5 credits will develop an individual research project and write a 12-15 pp final essay.