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Thomas Simons
Professional Details
| Title: | Visiting Lecturer |
| Office: | 35 Loring Ave-106 |
| Phone: | 978-542-2424 x1375 |
| Email: | thomas.simons@salemstate.edu |
| Resume: | Thomas Simons [PDF 119KB] |
Spring Courses
| Cat. # | Term | Course # | Title |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2717 | 11 | ENL102 | Composition II |
| 2771 | 05 | ENL161 | Literature II: Reading Closely |
| 2801 | 02 | ENL261 | World Literature II |
| 4139 | D1 | ENL161 | Literature II: Reading Closely |
Professional Biography
Thomas R.Simons. I received my Ph.D. from Boston College in 2009, with a dissertation entitled Being and the Imaginary: An Introduction to Aesthetic Phenomenology and EnglishLiterature from the Eighteenth Century to Romanticism. My dissertation investigates the dynamic relationshipbetween human being, the aesthetic, and the imaginary. The work is concerned with the moral (in the sense defined by Carlyle and Arnold) dimension of the aesthetic and its role in disclosing new ways of, and possibilities for, human being. The principles developed in the first part are applied to readings of Samuel Johnson and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who each undergo a personal crisis brought on by undesired intrusions of theimaginary.
Professional Interests
My research and teaching interests are centered in 18th and 19th-century British and German literature and focus on aesthetics/poetics and theories of the imagination and the imaginary. I generally employ an interdisciplinary approach, exploring connections between literature and philosophy—in particular British Empiricism, German Idealism, and Martin Heidegger.
Responsibilities
Selected Publications
“Venus Offering Psyche the Waters of the Styx,” “Padova: Sunday Afternoon,” and “Response to the Bowmen of Shu” (poems). Sextant 20.1 (2012): 18-20.
Review of Joel Harter’s Coleridge’s Philosophy of Faith, Religion and the Arts 16.3 (2012): 275-277.
“Coleridge Beyond Kant andHegel: Transcendent Aesthetics and the Dialectic Pentad.” Studiesin Romanticism 45 (2006):465-481.
“Prometheus and the Processof Individuation: A Jungian Reading of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound.” JUNG: The e-Journalof the Jungian Society for Scholarly Studies 2.5 (2006): 20pp. April 11, 2006. http://www.thejungiansociety.org/Jung%20Society/ejournal/Volume-2/Simons-2006.pdf.
“Santa Teresa di Avila in Ecstasy” and “In-vocation” (poems). faitaccomplit: The Literary Miscellany of the ComparativeLiterature Association of the University of Alberta (Winter 2002): 68; 97-98.
Selected Presentations
"Rejection,Dis-illusion, and Dissolution in Coleridge's 'Constancy to an IdealObject,’" MMLA Convention, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Nov. 11, 2005.
Personal Interests
My personal interests include: listening to jazz (anything sincere from Bix to Brötzmann) and the Grateful Dead; film (especially black-and-white); and travel (particularly Italy and going home to Wisconsin).