Gretchen Bartels Ray Image

Gretchen Bartels Ray, PhD

Professor of English

Office Phone: (951) 343-3974
E-mail: gbartels@calbaptist.edu
Office Location: Tyler Offices, Third Floor 69
Office Hours:

Degree Major Emphasis Institution Year
PhD English University of California, Riverside 2013
M.A. English University of California, Riverside 2008
B.A. English and Chemistry Wheaton College 2006
  • Courses Taught

    ENG 113, ENG 123, ENG 233, ENG 313, ENG 343, ENG 353, ENG 360, ENG 401/501, ENG 499

  • Academic Areas & Scholarly Interests

    English

  • Teaching Experience at Institutions Other than CBU

    Six years teaching experience in composition and literature at University of California, Riverside

  • Research, Presentations, & Publications

    DISSERTATION:

    In my dissertation project, I argue that editors in the nineteenth-century were pivotal in shaping literary culture and defining popular markets as I trace the trajectory of editing in the nineteenth century. My primary focus is the impact of celebrity author-editors in the mid-nineteenth century, the power they held, the professionalization and aestheticization of the role over the course of the nineteenth century, and how these author-editors shaped literary culture. By engaging author-editors’ fiction, periodicals, and letters, I reconstruct their editorial roles, the power accessible to and accessed by them in this role, how they represented editing in their fiction, and the influence beyond authorship editing gave them in the nineteenth-century literary scene. Overall, I claim that periodical editing gave authors more power in the literary marketplace and that periodical editing itself serves a type of authorial function that can complicate current theories of how authorship was viewed in the nineteenth century. By considering editing as a complex type of authorship that raises questions of collective authorship, I complicate the narrative of the rise of the Author, as described by Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes, which portrays the nineteenth century as a time when the cult of the Author as an individual genius and ultimate arbiter of a text’s meaning developed.

    PUBLICATIONS:


    Drafted “Chapter 8: Justifying an Evaluation.” St. Martin's Guide to Writing
    Instructor's Resource Manual. 9th Edition. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2010. 205-238. Print.

    CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS:

    “Conducted By”: Charles Dickens and Literary Magazine Author-Editors in Mid-Nineteenth Century England
    109th PAMLA Annual Conference
    Scripps College, Claremont
    November 5-6, 2011

    Prisoner or Slave: Metaphors for Opium and Hashish Eaters during the Nineteen Century in the Works of Charles Baudelaire and Thomas De Quincey
    126th MLA Annual Convention
    Los Angeles Convention Center
    January 6 – 9, 2011

    The Multiple Narrators of Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White
    (Dis)junctions: States of Crisis
    University of California, Riverside
    April 9 and 10, 2010

    Bella and Rokesmith’s Dark Fairy Tale in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend
    Dickens Universe Conference
    University of California, Los Angeles
    February 13 – 15, 2010

    Dickens’s Mystery of Edwin Drood: Reclaiming the Image through Visual Rhetoric
    PAMLA Conference
    San Francisco State University
    November 6 and 7, 2009

    Narnia Chronicled: C. S. Lewis’s Figuration of History and Myth in the Narnia Books (Dis)junctions: Brave New Worlds
    University of California, Riverside
    2009

    “This Shakespeare of Ours”: Victorian Shakespeare, Empire, and the Question of Englishness
    British Scholar Annual Conference
    University of Texas at Austin
    February 20 and 21, 2009

    Redefining WAC/Writing Center Connections
    PAMLA Conference
    Pomona College
    November 7 and 8, 2008

    Of Men and Mice: C. S. Lewis on Male-Female Interactions
    (Dis)junctions: Where the Streets are Re-named
    University of California, Riverside
    April 11 and 12, 2008

    “Will you let me lend you all I have? Will you let me give it you?”: Unacceptable Gifts and the Purging of Excess in the Marriage Market of Dickens’s Little Dorrit.
    Surplus/Excess
    University of California, Riverside.
    April 4 and 5, 2008

  • Church Membership & Activities

    Redeemer Baptist Church

    Working with Rebirth Homes

  • Community Service & Involvement

    olunteer And Research Experience:

    Reader at the Huntington Library, May 2011-current

    Rare Books and Manuscripts

    (dis)Junctions Conference
    Conference Co-chair, (dis)junctions 09
    Panel Committee Chair, (dis)junctions 2012
    Panel Committee, (dis)junctions 07 and (dis)junctions 08

    Graduate Students of English Association, Secretary, June 2007-February 2009