Student Profiles: Neil Norman
Currently
my research interests are in eighteenth-century prose and, in particular, literary
nonfiction. I am interested in text as a social construction,
that is, how it informs and responds to its readers. My thesis work examines The
Gentleman's Magazine as a social construct and, using Jürgen Habermas’ model
of the bourgeois public sphere, looks at the ways in which the magazine grew
out of communication with its sphere of readers and how it, in turn, shaped
the values of its readers. To this end, I plan to focus on the role of
obituary and biography in shaping the magazine’s readers by providing
models for their behavior and success. I also hope to examine how the
visual rhetoric of the magazine portrayed this dialog between reading sphere
and text.