Contact Information

Office: 4141 JFSB

Phone: 422-8103

E-mail: daniel_muhlestein@byu.edu

Daniel Muhlestein specializes in contemporary literary theory and in the literature and culture of the English Romantic period. He teaches contemporary literary theory, the Romantic period, cultural criticism, and, on occasion, theoretical discourse.

In literary theory Professor Muhlestein is what is sometimes called a cultural materialist, and his approach to literature has been heavily influenced by Gramsci, Althusser, Williams, Jameson, Greenblatt, and, to a lesser extent, Eagleton.

In his teaching he tends to focus more on depth than breadth. In contemporary literary theory, for example, he usually teaches only three critical approaches a semester: Marxism, feminism, and either deconstruction, reader-response, or (if he is in a particularly bad mood) post-Lacanian psychoanalysis. And in the Romantic course he generally teaches only five or six authors a semester in order to have the time to approach each text from a number of different critical perspectives.

He has published on topics ranging from Piers Plowman to Ulysses, and is presently working on a Chodorovian reading of Sons and Lovers.

Degrees