The English Department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Dr. Erwin offers both introductory and graduate courses in the English department. During Spring 2008 he will lead the graduate seminar “Jane Austen and Visual Culture.” Austen is among the most accomplished of early British novelists. Each of her six courtship novels from Northanger Abbey to Persuasion knows exactly where it is going, even if none of her heroines could be so certain of their direction in life, he says: “We’ll read the major novels in their order of composition largely but not exclusively for their visual interest, and we’ll also to turn to Austen’s letters and to Claire Tomalin’s recent biography for information about her inner life. Some of the topics we’ll be treating are: the landscape picturesque of Gilpin, Price, and Knight; the visual conventions of portraiture, the most important form of eighteenth-century painting in Britain; and the narrative play of the gaze as discourse.”
Prof. Erwin’s research centers in the relation of word and image from the eighteenth century to postmodernism. Recent articles describe an Enlightenment contest between continental formalism and nativist perceptualism in the arts. “Ut Rhetorica Artes: The Rhetorical Theory of the Sister Arts” (2007) and “The Immanent Image of History and Fiction” (2006) describe the cultural opposition of the discourse of design and the discourse of the image. “The Ecliptic of the Beautiful” (2004) traces the opposition through several major authors, while “Hogarth and the Aesthetics of Nationalism” (2003) shows how the artist separated himself from the linear tradition of the Carracci. From 1995-1998, Dr. Erwin served in the delegate assembly of the MLA. From 1996-2000 he served as an editor of Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture. He served as president of the Western Society for 18th Century Studies in 2000, as president of the Samuel Johnson Society of Southern California in 2004, and as program chair for the annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in 2005. Another recent essay, "L'extraordinaire langage de Robert Pinsky" (2005) compares the discursive lyric of postmodernism to the dramatic monologue of high modernism, and is found online at http://www.cercles.com/n14/erwin.pdf.