Contact Information

Office: 4038 JFSB

Phone: 422-3205

E-mail: bruce_jorgensen@byu.edu

Bruce Jorgensen holds degrees from BYU (BA cum laude, 1966) and Cornell (MA, 1969; PhD, 1978). He has taught at Southern Utah State College (1968-71) and part-time at Ithaca College (1971-75), Cornell (winter 1975, summers 1985, 1986) and Syracuse (fall 1979); since 1975 he has taught full-time at BYU, with one year (1980-81) at BYU-Hawaii.

His dissertation, "'The True Madmen of This Nineteenth Century': Cases of Consciousness in Concord," dealt with the problem of subjectivity in American Romanticism. His recent teaching assignments at BYU have included creative writing, fiction writing, world literature, and the short story.

His interests range from the scriptures, Plato, Aristotle, and St. Augustine to Emmanuel Levinas and Raymond Carver, but most recently he has pursued studies of Reynolds Price and Gina Berriault, and he continues to write his own fiction. He has published poems, stories, critical essays, and reviews in Carolina Quarterly, The Ensign, Modern Fiction Studies, BYU Studies, Sunstone, Dialogue, Western American Literature, Wasatch Review, and High Plains Literary Review.

The main study of his life since childhood has been the hearing and telling of stories. His work focuses at the intersection of story, the ethics of agency, and the sacred. As an LDS literary critic, he would do the works of Abraham, who waited in the door of his tent to welcome strangers, and pled with Yahweh to spare the Cities of the Plain for the sake of even ten righteous persons. He now feels that all his writing is a long, intermittent, tentative exploration of the LDS scriptural teaching that "the spirit and the body are the soul of man."

He is married, the father of three daughters and five sons, the grandfather of four girls and five boys.

Degrees