Kevis Goodman

Kevis Goodman

Type
Assistant Professor Fellow
Department
English
1999-00

Kevis Goodman, an Assistant Professor in English, has received a Townsend Fellowship for Passionate Work: Georgics of the Feelings, 1746-1815. A “weird and hybrid form, a prose-like and deliberately prosaic poem,” part fact and part fiction, a combination of myth, history, agriculture, botany, and moral philosophy, the georgic, Goodman argues, uses epithets that originated in Virgil to question the notion of writing as “work” or “honorable toil.” What, asks Professor Goodman, distinguished the “literary” from other kinds of writing and conversely, what might be its power in rendering material that was coming to be regarded as inimical to it? Professor Goodman came to Berkeley in 1994 from Yale, where she also received her Ph.D.