Paula marantz cohen biography

Paula Marantz Cohen has spent most of her career as an English professor and has published several notable works of criticism.
Paula Marantz Cohen is Distinguished Professor of English and Dean of the Pennoni Honors College at Drexel University.
Paula Marantz Cohen is Dean of the Pennoni Honors College and Distinguished Professor of English at Drexel University.

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Talking Cure: An Essay on the Civilizing Power of Conversation

October 20, 2023

Several years ago, The New Yorker had an article about talking. It was by Jill Lepore and was named something like "The last time democracy almost died." It was about public gatherings in American communities and on the radio in the 1930s -- about the opportunity for people to share their political and social opinions under conditions of civil dialogue. So I might have thought this book would be something like that: about opinion sharing.

But it's not; it's about conversation. The author starts off riffing on Freud, from whose "talking cure" she takes her title, then the question of why we should converse and from there into what conversation is. The platonic ideal for conversation is that it should be between equals, should be mutual, is not merely patter "...In this book, I mostly speak of (conversation) as something more sustained, probing and challenging in nature, though not without moments of humor and lightness." She quotes somebody else calling it "...an unrehearsed intellectual adventur
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Jewish roots and values infuse writing of Drexel professor

AGE:
“Fiftysomething”
FAMILY:
Husband Alan
Penziner; children
Sam Penziner, 25,
and Kate Penziner, 21
FAVORITE BOOKS:
George Eliot’s
“Middlemarch” and
“Daniel Deronda”
FAVORITE MOVIES:
All Preston Sturges
movies, especially
“The Lady Eve,” and
romantic comedies
FAVORITE VACATION
SPOTS:
New York City and
Paris

When Drexel University English Professor Paula Marantz Cohen breaks from her academic pursuits to dabble in fiction, she never strays far from her Jewish roots.
Cohen, who lives, aptly, in an historic, Victorian-style circa-1887 Moorestown home, became a novelist eight years ago with “Jane Austen in Boca,” a reworking of “Pride and Prejudice,” focusing on life among Jews at a senior community. Two years later came “Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan,” set in Cherry Hill, which deftly intertwined a bat mitzvah plot— fueled by Cohen’s own adventures in planning her daughter’s
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Paula Marantz Cohen is Dean of the Pennoni Honors College and Distinguished Professor of English at Drexel University. She is the recipient of the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching and is a co-editor of jml: Journal of Modern Literature. She is also the host of The Drexel InterView, a TV show based in Philadelphia that is broadcast on over 350 stations, including 150 PBS stations, throughout the country. Cohen is the author of five nonfiction books and six novels, and is the producer of the documentary film, Two Universities and the Future of China. Her play, The Triangle, about John Singer Sargent, Henry James, and Edith Wharton, was a finalist in the Julie Harris Playwriting Competition. Her essays, stories, and reviews have appeared in The Yale Review, The American Scholar, The Southwest Review, the Times Literary Supplement, Raritan, The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Wall Street Journal, and other publications. Her weekly online column, "Class Notes," appeared in The American Scholar (and is still on the website: theAmericanScholar.org). Cohen holds a B.