Perry Meisel

Perry Meisel, former Professor of English at New York University for over forty years, has written on literature, music, psychoanalysis, theory, culture, and himself since the early 1970s. His articles have appeared in The Village Voice, The New York Times Book Review, Partisan Review, October, The Nation, The Atlantic, and many other publications. His books include The Myth of Popular Culture from Dante to Dylan, The Literary Freud, The Cowboy and the Dandy, The Myth of the Modern, The Absent Father, and Thomas Hardy: The Return of the Repressed. He is co-editor, with Haun Saussy, of Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, and co-editor, with Walter Kendrick, of Bloomsbury/Freud: The Letters of James and Alix Strachey, 1924-25. He is also editor of Freud: A Collection of Critical Essays. He received his B.A., M. Phil, and Ph.D. from Yale. In 2016, he elected to resign from his position at New York University. He was denied emeritus status.

Born in Louisiana, Meisel grew up in New York, attending the Horace Mann School. He entered Yale in the late 1960s, where he received his BA in English and History in 1970. He taught at Yale the following year as a Carnegie Fellow. He received his PhD at Yale in English in 1975, writing on Virginia Woolf under the direction of J. Hillis Miller. In graduate school, Meisel taught at Yale and Wesleyan; he also wrote on rock and jazz for Crawdaddy! and The Boston Phoenix. In 1972, he published his first book, a study of Thomas Hardy's fiction.

Meisel came to New York University in 1975 and was an important champion of New York's downtown scene as well as of the structuralist and post-structuralist theory of Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, and Althusser. In 1975, he also began writing for The Village Voice, covering rock and jazz for music editor Robert Christgau and a variety of topics for arts editor Richard Goldstein. In 1978, Meisel was a charter Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities, co-ordinating a reading group on theory whose members included Rosalind Krauss and Susan Sontag. In 1980, he published The Absent Father, a study of Virginia Woolf's aestheticism and, in 1981, edited a collection of essays on Freud as literature. That year, Meisel was awarded tenure at NYU. In 1985, he co-edited, with Walter Kendrick, Bloomsbury/Freud, the letters of Freud's English translators, James and Alix Strachey. In the 1980s he also taught as a visiting professor at Columbia University. In 1987, he published The Myth of the Modern, and became full professor at NYU.

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