Marcel Decoste

Biography

Prof. Marcel DeCoste received his BA (Hons) in English and Philosophy from the University of Toronto in 1991 and his MA in English Literature from York University the following year. He was awarded his PhD by McGill University in 1997 and joined the English Department at the University of Regina in the summer of 2000. His area of teaching and research interest is the literature of the twentieth century, in particular British and American poetry and fiction of the period. His time at U of R has seen him offer courses in Anglo-American modernist verse, modernist short fiction, and the modernist novel, as well as in the works of the major women of transatlantic literary modernism. He teaches a single-author study of James Joyce, which allows for an intensive exploration of the greatest novel in the English language, 1922's Ulysses, as well as classes in British literature of the two World Wars, and of the 1930s. Further afield, he has mounted classes in African-American prose, literary theory, the Hollywood novel, the history of literary criticism, poetics and prosody, the fiction of Cormac McCarthy, twentieth-century literary transvestism, and modern literary renderings of death and dying. This protracted engagement with the twentieth century has yielded a number of articles which have appeared in such learned venues as Twentieth Century Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Journal of Modern Literature, Contemporary Literature, Style, Papers on Language and Literature, Renascence, and Religion & Literature. These periodicals have featured DeCoste’s work on such writers as Graham Greene, Malcolm Lowry, Ford Madox Ford, Graham Swift, Evelyn Waugh, Cormac McCarthy, and Richard Wright. He is presently at work on what he hopes will become a book-length study of the fiction of Flannery O’Connor.

Research Interest

20th-century British and American literature, particularly: modernist fiction and poetry, literature of the World Wars, mid-century British fiction, the fiction of Evelyn Waugh and Flannery O’Connor.