Picture of Ella Ophir

Ella Ophir B.A., Hons.(Simon Fraser), M.A. & Ph.D. (Queen's)

Associate Professor of English, Undergraduate Chair

Faculty Member in English

Office
Arts 411a

Research Area(s)

  • British and American modernist literature
  • Modernist fiction, poetry, documentary, and life writing
  • Women's writing

About me

My writing and teaching focus primarily on British and American literary modernism. I have published essays on modernist fiction, poetry, and documentary in journals such as Modern Language Review, Twentieth-Century Literature, and Modern Fiction Studies. Recent work on life writing has appeared in Woolf Studies Annual, Biography, and the collection Virginia Woolf and Heritage. My critical edition of The Note Books of a Woman Alone -- the diary of a London employment agency clerk from the years 1914-34 -- was funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and is part of the Modernist Networks consortium of digital projects. I am currently pursuing a keen interest in the contemporary writer Rachel Cusk, whose experiments with memoir and the novel reach back to modernism. 

Publications

Editions

The Note Books of a Woman Alone: A Critical Edition of the 1935 Text (2016)

http://drc.usask.ca/projects/notebooks

Articles

"Neomodernism and the Social Novel: Rachel Cusk’s Outline Trilogy." Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, January 2022. 

"The Diary and the Commonplace Book: Self-Inscription in The Note Books of a Woman Alone." Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 38.1 (2015): 41-55. 

A Room of One’s Own, Ordinary Life-Writing, and The Note Books of a Woman Alone.” Woolf Studies Annual 20 (2014): 25-40.

“‘All Our Stammerings’: Two Kinds of Inarticulateness in Joseph Conrad.” American Notes and Queries 27.1 (2014): 23-27.

“Sincerity and Self-Revelation in Joseph Conrad.” Modern Language Review 107.2 (2012): 341-364. 

"Romantic Reverence and Modernist Representation: Vision, Power, and the Shattered Form of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men."  Twentieth-Century Literature (2007): 125-152.

 "Towards a Pitiless Fiction: Abstraction, Comedy, and Modernist Antihumanism." Modern Fiction Studies 52.1 (2006): 92-120.
 
"Modernist Fiction and the 'accumulation of unrecorded life." Modernist Cultures 2.1 (2006).
 
"The Laura Riding Question: Modernism, Poetry, and Truth." Modern Language Quarterly 66.1 (2005): 85-114.
 
"'The Mode of Common Dreams': Owl's Clover and the Social Imagination." The Wallace Stevens Journal (2000): 37-52.
 
Reference Work Entries

“Laura Riding and Robert Graves: A Survey of Modernist Poetry.” The Literary Encyclopedia. (litencyc.com) (2009).

“Laura Riding: Collected Poems.” The Literary Encyclopedia. (litencyc.com) (2007).

Book Reviews

Virginia Woolf and Poetry by Emily Kopely. Woolf Studies Annual 28, 2022. pp. 318-321.

Becoming Viriginia Woolf; Virginia Woolf’s Modernist Path; Virginia Woolf, The War Without, The War Within by Barbara Lounsberry. Life Writing 18.2, 2021. pp. 295-978.

Modernism and Autobiography. Eds. Maria DiBattista and Emily O. Wittman. Review of English Studies 66.26, 2015. pp. 795-97. 

Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings of Elsa Freytag von Loringhoven. Eds. Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo. Canadian Literature 219, 2013. pp. 163-64.

Writing the Lost Generation: Expatriate Autobiography and American Modernism by Craig Monk. English Studies in Canada 35.2-3, 2009. pp. 236-239.


Teaching & Supervision

ENG 113 - Reading Narrative

ENG 330 - British and Irish Literature 1900-1940

ENG 363 - Approaches to 20th- and 21st-Century Fiction

ENG 368 - Approaches to 20th- and 21st-Century Poetry

ENG 446 - Modernism

ENG 843 - Literary Modernism and Life Writing

Research

British literature United States fiction life writing literature poetry