DR. CARL MALMGREN

Research Professor,
Coordinator of Graduate English
Ph.D., University of Oregon, 1979

Dr.Malmgren has taught at UNO since 1980.  In that time he has written three books of literary criticism and theory and more than 30 articles.  His fields of specialization are twentieth-century fiction and narrative theory, and most of his scholarship has combined these interests.  His first book, Fictional Space in the Modernist and Postmodernist American Novel (Bucknell UP, 1985).  proposed a theory of narrative capable of describing and explaining developments in twentieth-century American fiction, most particularly the transition from modernism to postmodernism. Fictional Space deals with the modernist works of authors such as Henry James, William Faulkner, John Hawkes, and William Gaddis and the postmodernist texts of authors such as Gertrude Stein, Vladimir Nabokov, John Barth and Thomas Pynchon.His next two books have been genre studies.  Worlds Apart: Narratology of Science Fiction (Indiana UP, 1991) articulates a comprehensive theory of the genre based on an anatomy of its worlds.  In it Malmgren takes the worlds of SF apart, in order to show how they differ from the real world and how that difference works cognitively for the reader.  Worlds Apart contains detailed examinations of more than a dozen SF texts, including classics such as H. G Wells's The Time Machine, Stanislaw Lem's Solaris, and Eugene Zamiatin's We.  Anatomy of Murder: Mystery, Detective, and Crime Fiction (Bucknell UP, 2003) describes and accounts for the various forms that murder fiction takes.  Malmgren argues that this kind of fiction acts out and interrogates the central drama in twentieth-century culture, the "crime of the sign."  Anatomy of Murder explores the extent to which the signs we use are motivated or unmotivated, the language we speak centered or decentered, the world in which we live orderly or chaotic.  The book analyzes more than twenty novels and devotes individual chapters to works by Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler.

     Malmgren has just finished his latest work of scholarship, a novel set in Paris in the 1920s.  Based on an intensive study of the period and featuring appearances by Hemingway, Stein, Fitzgerald and other luminaries, Paris Metro, a novel with footnotes, purports to “solve” the unsolved murder left over from Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night.

     The Fulbright Commission has, on three different occasions, acknowledged Malmgren’s expertise in American studies by awarding him grants to teach in Europe, first in France, then in Sweden, most recently in England.  In the spring of 1995 the British Library and the Fulbright Commission sent Malmgren to Hungary as the Eccles Lecturer in American Culture where he gave lectures on recent developments in literary theory and on multiculturalism and political correctness.  Malmgren was also invited to be Visiting Professor in American Literature at the University of Innsbruck in Austria.  He has served as Academic Director for the UNO-Innsbruck Summer School on three different occasions.

     Malmgren’s most impressive productions so far, however, are his two children, Katarina and Nicholas, of whom he is inordinately fond.   

Phone Number:
(504) 280-5415

Email Dr. Malmgren@
cmalmgre@uno.edu

Address: Liberal Arts Building 297

Office Hours:

Courses for Fall 2009:

Engl 4915-001:
The Modern Novel
MW 1:30-2:45pm