Dr. Catherine R. Mintler is a scholar of literary modernism whose work focuses on the influence of sartorial aesthetics and practices upon identity construction in the late nineteenth-century and twentieth-century novel. Her interest in sartorial aesthetics and modernism, what she refers to as “sartorial modernism,” has culminated in two books currently in progress:
Fashioning Identity in the Modernist Novel explores connections between sartorial culture and formal innovation in the modernist novel in canonical works that represented modern identity. This project has produced two related publications: a chapter on Hemingway and the female writer published in the Kent State University Press series, Teaching Hemingway and Gender and an article on F. Scott Fitzgerald and dandyism published in the F. Scott Fitzgerald Review.
Modern “Man of the Crowd”: Ernest Hemingway’s Post-War Flâneur cites examples from Hemingway’s life and work to support the existence of a modern, post-war version of the nineteenth-century flâneur. Both Hemingway and his fictional avatars become what she calls post-war wounded flâneur figures, engaging in flånerie with a different kind of detachment than their predecessors, having witnessed the modern spectacle of war destroy the very cities that produced the original flâneur in the first place. As a person marked and changed by war, the post-war flâneur observes, perambulates, and writes about cityscapes and landscapes as places marked and changed by war.
During a time of transition, Dr. Mintler servied as Interim Director of the Expository Writing Program at the University of Oklahoma, where she teaches First-Year Writing courses influenced by her research in cultural studies, visual culture, popular culture, fashion and sartorial culture, modernism, theory, gender, class, work, and Modernist, British, American and African-American literature.