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Madelon Sprengnether
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Academic background
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Academic work
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Madelon Sprengnether (born [xxxx]) is a poet, memoirist, literary critic, and Regents Professor Emerita of the University of Minnesota. Her recent publications include Great River Road: Memoir and Memory (New Rivers Press, 2015), Near Solstice: Prose Poems (Holy Cow! Press, 2015), and Mourning Freud (Bloomsbury 2018).

She is the author of three memoirs, Great River Road, Crying at the Movies, and Rivers, Stories, Houses, Dreams, and three collections of poetry, Near Solstice: Prose Poems, The Angel of Duluth, and The Normal Heart.

Through her monthly blog for Psychology Today, Minding Memory: On Building Stories and Making Meaning, Sprengnether contributes posts on the intersections of psychology with current events and popular culture.

Early life and education

Sprengnether was born [xxxx]. Her father was [xxxx] and her mother was [xxxx]. She grew up in St. Louis, MO. As she recounted in her memoirs Rivers, Stories, Houses, Dreams (1983), Crying at the Movies (2001), and Great River Road (2015), "her childhood was disrupted by her father’s death by drowning when she was nine years old and her stepfather’s death by suicide when she was 18."

Sprengnether received her BA at Bryn Mawr College in [year]. During these early years she worked as [xxxx] and was active in [xxxx--NOTE TO MIMI: here you may add biographical details that you think are important; however, we have to back them up with a source]. She later matriculated to Yale University where she earned her Ph.D. in English Literature in [year].

She is a graduate of the New Directions: Writing with a Psychoanalytic Edge Program in Washington, D.C. and is a member of numerous regional and national organizations including the Minnesota Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, the A"merican Psychoanalytic Association, the American Association of Psychoanalysis in Clinical Social Work, and Division 39 of the American Psychological Association.

Teaching career

After contract teaching at Middlebury College, Sprengnether was hired by the University of Minnesota in 1971 as an assistant professor in English specializing in Shakespeare. While at UMN, her interests expanded to include feminist psychoanalytic criticism. She taught courses for the English Department and the Creative Writing Program on Shakespeare, Freud, psychoanalytic theory, feminism, film, memoir, and creative writing for 46 years before retiring in 2017.

Feminist Studies in Literature

In 1981 [is this date correct? or is it 1982?] and in collaboration with Toni McNaron and Shirley Garner, Sprengnether co-organized the first symposium on Feminist Studies in Literature at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.[needs source] The symposium, which focused on [xxxx], drew [xxxx] scholars, critics, and community members from [xxxx]. As the keynote speaker, Adrienne Rich delivered a talk, "Toward a More Feminist Criticism," a previously unavailable speech [is this correct?] which is now available in the Hurricane Alice archive in Anderson Library at UMN-Twin Cities. The symposium was a significant [xxxx], as it occurred at a time when Feminist Studies in Literature was not established at the university as a formal program.

Sprengnether was a "core member" of the group of scholars who founded the Women's Studies Program and the Center for Advanced Feminist Studies. Upon her retirement, Sprengnether's contributions to the national movement to bring feminism to academia--and to UMN-Twin Cities, in particular--were noted by the university's College of Liberal Arts in a retrospective that describes the early years of her career:

The campus, like the nation, was in ferment; feminism had moved from the streets to the courts and the Capitol. Two women welcomed Sprengnether to the Department of English: Assistant Professor Garner and Associate Professor Toni McNaron. Together they would bring feminism firmly into the academy by helping to establish one of the nation’s first women’s studies programs and a feminist graduate program (united now as the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies) and by introducing women writers and feminist scholarship into the English curriculum.

For these and other efforts to develop Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at UMN-Twin Cities, Sprengnether, McNaron, and Garner were honored collectively by the College of Liberal Arts through the institution of the Garner-McNaron-Sprengnether Dissertation Fellowship.

Creating Writing Program

While Director of the Creative Writing Program, Sprengnether was "instrumental in developing the Creative Writing Program" at UMN-Twin Cities. In the early 1990s, the program was classed as an MA in Creative Writing rather than an Masters of Fine Art, which was the "standard in the field." At that time, the program received fewer than 50 applications for admissions per year, students had no funding, and completion time was "as many as six to eight years." Sprengnether "redesigned the curriculum, building an ambitious program of visiting writers, enhanced publicity, contacts with the Twin Cities literary community, full funding for incoming students, and opportunities for students to write reviews," which led to a significant increase in visibility and prestige for the program. The university's College of Liberal Arts noted in a retrospective on her career that

Sprengnether stepped up, first writing the proposal and then guiding it through a lengthy University approval chain, an intensive year-long process. She also helped set up the “architecture” of the program, including hiring additional faculty and staff and securing student funding. In 1996, the first MFA students entered the Creative Writing Program, which is now regularly ranked among the top 10 to 15 MFA programs in the country with more than 350 applications for its 12 annual student openings.

Research and publications

Sprengnether is best known for her work on Freud and Shakespeare. She is a feminist psychoanalytic critic whose collections of criticism, The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation, and Shakespearean Tragedy and Gender, have had a major impact in their fields through their [xxxx]. [needs source]

Her book The Spectral Mother: Freud, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis was the first to probe Freud’s phobic responses to the figure of the mother in his life and theory. [needs source]

Besides Shakespeare and Freud, she has published widely and influentially on contemporary female writers and feminist psychoanalytic theory. Her co-edited collection “The (M)other Tongue” was the first anthology to bring together essays in feminist psychoanalytic criticism and firmly established the field. Her book “The Spectral Mother: Freud, Feminism and Psychoanalysis” analyzed Freud’s avoidance of the figure of the mother in his writing, while offering a new theoretical position regarding the pre-oedipal period.

Her most recent book, Mourning Freud, analyzes Freud’s experiences and theories of mourning as the basis for exploring changes in psychoanalytic theories and practices over the course of the 20th century.

Hurricane Alice

In 1983, Sprengnether co-founded Hurricane Alice: A Feminist Review (1983-1998), a feminist journal edited by a volunteer group of academics, graduate students, university staff, and community members from 1983 to 1998. The journal was first housed at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, where it remained until it moved to Rhode Island College in 1996. An outgrowth of second-wave feminism, Hurricane Alice sought to address local, regional, and national audiences by publishing a variety of feminist perspectives on matters of social, political, and cultural concern. It included original essays, reviews, interviews, and creative writing by established and emerging writers, such as Jewelle Gomez, Susan Griffin, Alice Walker,and Nellie Wong, as well as original graphics by area artists.

Mother Journeys: Feminists Write About Mothering (Spinster's Ink,1994), a notable collection of early essays about feminist mothering, grew out of a collaboration among Maureen T. Reddy, Martha Roth, and Amy Sheldon as a result of their work on Hurricane Alice. To this collection Sprengnether contributed "Jessica's Poems," a series of poems written in collaboration with her four-year-old daughter, Jessica.

Awards and recognition

• Regents Professor, 2008
• Distinguished Women Scholar Award in the Humanities and Social Sciences, 2005
• Award for Outstanding Contributions to Postbaccalaureate, Graduate, and Professional Education, 2004
• Fessler-Lampert Chair in the Humanities, 2001 - 2002
• McKnight Research Award, 1999 - 2002
• College of Liberal Arts Scholars of the College, University of Minnesota, 1992
• National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, 1988
• The Loft Creative Nonfiction Award, 1987

Selected Bibliography

Sprengnether's curriculum vitae is available at [xxxx -- NOTE TO MIMI: only list this if your CV is available somewhere on the internet and you want to publicize it].

Criticism

• Mourning Freud (Bloomsbury, 2018)
• The Spectral Mother: Freud, Feminism and Psychoanalysis (Cornell University Press, 1990)

Memoir and Poetry

• Great River Road: Memoir and Memory (New Rivers Press, 2015)
• Near Solstice: Prose Poems (Holy Cow! Press, 2015)
• The Angel of Duluth, prose poems (White Pine Press, 2006)
• Crying at the Movies: A Film Memoir (Graywolf Press, 2002)

Edited Collections

• Shakespearean Tragedy and Gender. Ed. Shirley Garner and Madelon Sprengnether (Indiana University Press, 1996)
• Revising the Word and the World: Essays in Feminist Literary Criticism. Ed. V. Clark, R. Joeres and M. Sprengnether (Chicago University Press, 1993)
• The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation. Sprengnether, Madelon, Ed. Shirley Garner and Claire Kahane (Cornell University Press, 1985)

Personal life

Sprengnether married on [xxxx]; she and her husband, [xxxx], had their child, Jessica, at this time. Sprengnether currently lives in Minneapolis, MN. [needs source such as an interview, page on personal website, or blog post]

[NOTE TO MIMI: Only include information about your personal life if you are comfortable making these details public; usually, people indicate where they are currently living and sometimes include information about their spouse and children; sometimes they include information about personal interests and hobbies; again, we can't include it unless we can find a source for it, such as a blog post or something on your website].

External links

• Faculty profile, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
• Madelon Sprengnether, personal website
• Minding Memory blog at Psychology Today
• Madelon Sprengnether at Poets.org
• Psychology Today interview with Madelon Sprengnether regarding Mourning Freud

Category:1949 births Category:Literary critics of English Category:Living people