Cheri Larsen Hoeckley

Professor of English
Phone: (805) 565-7084
Email: larsen@westmont.edu
Office Location: Reynolds Hall 103

Office Hours
Tuesday: 9:00-10:00 a.m.
Wednesday: 11:30-1:00 p.m.
Thursday: 1:15-3:00 p.m.

Specialization
Victorian Literature, Women Writers, The Novel

Cheri Larsen Hoeckley arrived at Westmont in 1997, and she found a home here, teaching, enjoying great company, and continuing to learn with this community of believers. Her favorite venues for gathering with students and colleagues outside the classroom include Tuesdays with Morals and Mesa Hispana. She has also been known to organize marathon readings of novels in Reynolds Hall. Because she is convinced that traveling with students offers teachable moments beyond what we find in the classroom, she has twice led Westmont’s Europe Semester and also the Sri Lanka Mayterm. In 2006, she and her husband Dr. Chris Hoeckley led England Semester.

Vita

Education

Ph.D., UC Berkeley, 1997.
M.A., UT, Austin, 1986.
B.A., UC Riverside, 1984

Selected Publications

“Victorian Poetics, Catholicism and Philanthropy in Adelaide Procter’s Chaplet of Verses.” in Sublimer Aspects: Interfaces Between Literature, Aesthetics and Theology, Natasha Duquette, Ed. Under review with Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007.
“’Must her own words do all?’ Domesticity, Catholicism and Activism in Adelaide Anne Procter’s Poems.” in The Catholic Church and Unruly Women Writers, Leigh Eicke, Jeana DelRosso, Ana Kothe, Eds. Palgrave Press, 2007.
“Learning the Language of God.” College Faith 3. Andrews University Press, 2006.
Editor and author of Introduction for Anna Jameson’s Shakespeare’s Heroines or Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical and Historical. Broadview Press: 2005.
“Unspeakable Ownership: Copyright and Coverture in Aurora Leigh.” Victorian Poetry, (36) Fall 1998: 135-161. Selected for reprinting in Poetry Criticism vol. 62, Gale Publishing Group, 2005.

Awards

Participant in The National Humanities Center Seminar in Literary Studies on Sentimental Education, 2004
Irvine Foundation Grant Recipient for Diversity in Teaching 2002, 2004
Westmont College Humanities Division Teacher of the Year, 2001
Mellon Fellowship Recipient, 1994-1995
Member Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society

Research Interests

Generally, Cheri’s research is in Victorian studies and gender studies, with an interest in women’s Christianity. Her current research explores Protestant-Catholic dialogue in Victorian women writers, and the draw of Catholicism in the nineteenth-century for Protestant women. Recently, she has focused on the poetry and activism of Adelaide Procter, and she is currently working on traces of early Catholic mysticism in Charlotte Brontë and the influence of the art historian Anna Murphy Jameson’s lives of the saints and monastics on George Eliot’s novels.
Courses

At Westmont I teach:

Composition in which I take advantage of the unique opportunity a writing course gives students to reflect on the role of the Christian college student and on the idea of intellectual stewardship. Class discussion and essays focus on writing for an audience and writing with a purpose and on using those skills in the college research process.

Introduction to Literature in which we look at novels, drama, poetry and short stories to explore a variety of questions: “How can I make sense of this poem?”; “What do I like about this novel?”; “What does this text have to say to me as a Christian?”; “What do I learn from the way the authors expresses that thought?”; “Why read literature?”

Survey of British Literature 1790-present which is a whirlwind tour through over 200 years of literary history. We begin with William Blake and finish with Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and Anita Desai. Because of the pace of reading, in this course I focus on brief introductions to traditional readings of major texts, with some consideration of how other texts in each period might influence those readings.

Women Writers in which we scrutinize the possibilities of connections between femininity and genre, style and theme, as well as variations in those connections through history. We begin with a reading of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, and move on to examine the tradition of British women’s writing that Woolf establishes there, and that feminist criticism followed for many years. We spend considerable time reading and discussing texts that Woolf leaves out of her fictional lectures. Individual class members also pursue independent research projects.

Victorian Literature in which we hit the highlights of Victorian texts and the culture from which they come and on which they comment. We divide most of our time between novels and poetry, but we also discuss nineteenth-century theatre and the Victorian genre of the “long essay.” We read one novel serially, following the month-by-month communal reading experience of Victorian novel readers. Individual class members also pursue independent research projects.

International Novels The International Novels section of English 44 encourages students to expand their understanding of other cultures by introducing them to contemporary novels from other countries, focusing on the literature of developing nations. Since the novel developed as a “Western” genre, and we read novels from “Non-Western” cultures, the course material inherently invites comparative culture studies. Novels are the primary content of this course, and lectures and discussions generally focus on literature. The course also relies on outside speakers, films, news items and the other arts to explore the cultural contexts of the novels we are reading.

The British Novel This course serves as an introduction to the British novel from its origins through the Victorian period-the period when the novel took a central place in British literature. Through the semester, as we discuss specific novels, we consider several core questions about the novel and its relationship to British literary tradition: What literary genres have contributed to the formation of the novel?; What distinguishes the novel from other genres, or from other cultural forms?; What characteristics make, or have made, a novel British?; What is the connection between national identity and literature?; How is the novel a genre of the middle class? Is it?

Victorian Novel Seminar The course aims to equip you to identify various traits of a Victorian novel, and to familiarize you with specific Victorian authors (and hopefully to entice you to read other Victorian novels). During the Victorian period, the novel evolved from a popular genre to one with a central place in British literature. In our age, the Victorian period is often looked to as a highpoint of realist fiction. Through the semester, as we read and discuss the pleasures of these five specific novels, we also consider what this position of privilege in the literary canon might mean for us as readers today, and what it might have meant for the nineteenth-century English reader who did not have our perspective on literary history.

Writers’ Corner Practicum which is open to students selected as tutors in Westmont’s Writer’s Corner. We work together as a community of writers, developing strengths in coaching writing, diagnosing writing problems, developing topics, collaborating and revising. We also read and discuss current theories in the teaching of writing. For more information about Writers’ Corner and the current schedule click here.

The world of books is still the world, I write,
And both worlds have God’s providence, thank God,
To keep and hearten: with some struggle, indeed,
Among the breakers, some hard swimming through
The deeps–I lost breath in my soul sometimes
And cried, ‘God save me if there’s any God,’
But, even so, God saved me; and, being dashed
From error on to error, every turn
Still brought me nearer to the central truth

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh,
Book One, 792-800