Eve Sorum, Assistant Professor

General areas of teaching interest:

Modernism in fiction and poetry, World War I literature, modern elegy, narrative and poetic geographies, empathy in literature, Virginia Woolf.

Courses at UMass Boston:

• Engl 648 Modernism in Literature (graduate)
• Engl 645 Modern Poetry (graduate)
• Engl 628 Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster (graduate)
• Engl 463: Modernism and World War I (capstone)
• Engl 380 Virginia Woolf
• Engl 362 Modern British Poetry
• Engl 183G Literature and Society: Writing Modern War (freshman seminar)

Publications

• “‘The Place on the Map’: Geography and Meter in Hardy’s Elegies.” Modernism/Modernity 16.3 (September 2009): 543-64.
• “Mourning and Moving On: Life after War in Ford Madox Ford’s The Last Post.” Modernism and Mourning. Ed. Patricia Rae. Lewisberg: Bucknell University Press, 2007. 154-167.
• “Taking Note: Text and Context in Virginia Woolf’s ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.’” Woolf Studies Annual 13 (March 2007): 137-158.
• “Masochistic Modernisms: A Reading of Eliot and Woolf.” The Journal of Modern Literature 28.3 (Spring 2005): 25-43.

Work in Progress

The Terrain of Loss: Geography and Elegiac Modernism (book manuscript):  In The Terrain of Loss I argue that the turn-of-the-century emergence of a “New Geography” shaped the elegiac strain of British modernism.  I read the fiction and poetry of key modernist writers, including Thomas Hardy, Ford Madox Ford, T. S. Eliot, Wilfred Owen, David Jones, Virginia Woolf, and W. H. Auden, alongside the contemporaneous development of geography as a discipline.  I focus, in particular, on the debates about regional studies, which worked to describe the “personality” of a region through the synthesis of surveys of elements including topography, geology, land use, and watersheds.  Fusing different perspectives is at the center of these explorations; in geographic terms it gets connected to the project of citizenship: teaching people how to be good citizens of both their country and of the larger British empire. What stands out in my examination is the centrality of negative space—the empty spots, the uncharted territory, the terrain of loss—in these different genres of representation. When thinking in terms of negative space, the focus shifts from the geography of what is to the geography of what was, a move to an elegiac mode of writing. At the center of both these geographical and literary movements, I argue, is a search for spatio-temporal modes that can represent and delineate this sense of loss.

Office: Wheatley-6-02
Telephone: 617-287-6753
Email: eve.sorum@umb.edu