Jaclyn Geller

Jaclyn Geller was born in New York City and corralled by two well-intentioned adults into the suburban exodus. She grew up in Southern Westchester, whose manicured tranquility seemed to betoken the deranged slashers one sees in films. (These never actually materialized.) College in Eastern Ohio provided a stark contrast as did Jerusalem, with its cultural diversity and luminous beauty. There she taught English and studied Hebrew, advancing to the point where she spoke like a nefarious toddler and then a savvy eight-year-old. She returned to New York City and studied literature, writing her doctoral dissertation on domestic satire and becoming embroiled in debates about eighteenth-century literary culture. These include the following questions: Why is the most intellectually anarchic, generically experimental period in English Literature still known for moral consensus, order, and conventional genre restrictions? Why do its scholars document the evolution of poetry and fiction separately when these forms evolved together? How can Edmund Burke, a champion of lost causes, whose dogged work toward impeaching the Governor General of India represented the first major salvo against Empire, live on as an icon for public conservatives? Why do experts overlook differences between classical and early modern satire when undergraduates see them clearly? Did the idea that marriage represents the gold standard of emotional maturity (and a timeless civic good) originate in early modernity, and if so, why? How can so many Americans both inside and outside academia view this ideal as traditional? Why are Jane Austen’s sentences so stellar that it hurts to read them? Did Samuel Johnson have anything close to a literary critical method or was he a genius of improvisation? Impelled by such queries, she has unwisely ping-ponged between academic, general audience, and crossover writing.

Driving Professor Geller’s teaching is a belief that literature is the most profound mimetic reflection of life, and reading it is the best and most enjoyable way to sharpen one’s critical faculties. Her favorite word is “hope.” Her least favorite word is “folks.” She does not understand the expression, “my bad,” but that may be her limitation. Recently she’s been enjoying the adjectives “saurian” and “circumjacent” as well as the noun “vagary.”