Rate My Professor Laura DiPrete

About Laura

Laura DiPrete is a scholar in contemporary American literature, specializing in trauma theory, corporeality, and textuality. She received her PhD in English from the University of South Carolina in 2003. Her research examines how trauma manifests in the body and is represented through literary forms. DiPrete's key publication is the book Foreign Bodies: Trauma, Corporeality, and Textuality in Contemporary American Culture, published by Routledge in 2006. This monograph explores the notion of trauma as an intrusive 'foreign body' within the text and the corporeal dimensions of traumatic narration in works by authors such as Don DeLillo and others.

In 2005, DiPrete published the article “Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist: Performing the Body, Narrating Trauma” in Contemporary Literature (Volume 46, Number 3, Fall 2005, pp. 483-510). The essay analyzes DeLillo's novel, focusing on the protagonist Lauren's performance of the body as a means to confront and narrate personal trauma following loss. DiPrete argues for the centrality of corporeality in DeLillo's tale of mourning and recovery. As of that time, she had most recently been teaching business English in Rome. Her scholarship on the intersections of trauma and the body has been cited extensively in academic literature on literary theory, influencing studies of embodiment, phantom limbs, and narrative responses to catastrophe.

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