Al Filreis

Al Filreis

Faculty Director of the Kelly Writers HouseKelly Professor of English

(215) 573-9749

Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk

Website

Al Filreis is the Kelly Professor of English and the Faculty Director of the Kelly Writers House. He has published an edition of Wallace Stevens's correspondence with Jose Rodriguez Feo (Secretaries of the Moon, 1986), and articles on modern poetry and painting, and the literary politics of the 1950's. Stevens and the Actual World, a literary biography of Wallace Stevens, was published by Princeton University Press in 1991. Another book, Modernism from Right to Left, has been published by Cambridge University Press (1994), and he is currently writing a literary history of the American 1950's called The Fifties' Thirties. Aside from teaching modern American poetry, he has offered a series of courses on twentieth-century American decades, and another on the literature of the Holocaust. He is a winner of the Lindback Award, and describes his pedagogy as an obsession with oppositions. He has directed the funded departmental project that aims at integrating electronic text, electronic communications and the traditional missions of English literary study.

Courses Taught
  • ENGL 088: Modern & Contemporary American Poetry
  • ENGL 285: The Literature of the American 1950s
  • ENGL 103: The American Short Story: The Literature of Community
  • ENGL 592: Representations of the Holocaust in Literature and Film