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Jayme Stayer

Professor

Affiliate Faculty, Catholic Studies Program

I specialize in 20th-century literature and music, and my most recent book, Becoming T. S. Eliot, focuses on the development of voice and audience in Eliot’s early poetry. I have also edited the first critical edition of Eliot’s Complete Prose, Vol. 5, which was awarded MLA's Prize for a Scholarly Edition. My co-editors and I are now working on additional volumes that will include his juvenilia, interviews, unsigned book blurbs, book reports for Faber and Faber, and other ephemera.

My theoretical inclinations, including my interest in the textual condition and digital humanities, have been shaped by Chicago School rhetoric, and to a lesser extent by discourse analysis, biographical criticism, and political criticism. My earliest publications applied discourse theory to music, poetry, and opera, and I continue to be interested in how music is represented in literary texts and how its forms and procedures have been adapted to literary ends.

The work that most excites me is historical research, especially archival work that digs up forgotten contexts, buried manuscripts, and lost ideas, restoring these contexts to the artistic texts from which they have been stripped by time and tide. History, of course, includes biography—which is history writ small. Surprisingly for such a popular genre, biography has long been snubbed by literature departments. But biography and biographical criticism—along with autobiography, memoir and autofiction—are being newly theorized, understood as central to aesthetic judgment. From minor quibbles with one stanza to wholesale rejections of an artist’s entire oeuvre, ethical judgments of art almost always rely on biography. In our current focus on ethical responsibility, literary critics are no longer only concerned with what literature means or even what its effects are in the world, but with the intentions, biases, and attitudes of the creator. Such necessary judgments call for a nuanced understanding of how biography can simplify or illuminate, how it can be used or misused.

For me, as teacher and researcher, the methodology that holds all of these unequal and vari-directional emphases together is rhetoric, with its perennial questions of: who is speaking? to which audiences? and for what purposes? While archival work, historical research, the textual condition, biography, poetics, and rhetoric are my preferred guideposts and methodologies, a harder-to-name impulse in my work moves near those edges where language fails and theory fears to tread: namely, a cathectedness towards those more vulnerable, interior forms of writing that draw on the personal, the affective, and the spiritual. Music and poetry have long been understood as the privileged domain of the unsayable. This space is where I invite my students and readers: not to master human experience, but to explore, without resolving, its contradictions and complexities, to edge closer to its mystery and diversity.

Appointments and Fellowships

  • Visiting Fellow in Literature and Religion, Campion Hall, Oxford University; academic year 2022-23
  • The Francis C. Wade Chair, Marquette University, WI; spring semester 2018.
  • Grauel Fellowship, John Carroll University; academic year 2015-16.

Education

  • BA, Music and English, University of Notre Dame 
  • MA & PhD, English, University of Toledo 
  • MDiv, Theology, Boston College

Research Interests

  • Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Music and Opera
  • British and American Modernism
  • History of Criticism and Theory
  • Rhetoric
  • Religious Poetry

Publications/Research Listings

Books:

Articles:

Reviews:

Awards

  • Sujack Family Award, Master Researcher, Loyola University Chicago, 2022
  • T.S. Eliot Foundation Grant, London, UK 2022
  • Modern Language Association Prize for a Scholarly Edition, 2019, for The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition. Vol. 5: Tradition and Orthodoxy, 1934-1939. Co-editor with Ronald Schuchard and Iman Javadi. 2017.
  • Hodson Trust funding, administered through Johns Hopkins University Press, for archival research at the Eliot Foundation, London, UK, 2016.
  • Catholic Press Association, First Place for Popular Presentation of Catholic Faith (contributing author to edited book collection, The Jesuit Post) 2015.