Sara Suleri

Sara Suleri Goodyear, born Sara Suleri (born June 12, 1953), is an American author and professor emeritus of English at Yale University, where her fields of study and teaching include Romantic and Victorian poetry and an interest in Edmund Burke. Her special concerns include postcolonial literature and theory, contemporary cultural criticism, literature and law.She was a founding editor of the Yale Journal of Criticism, and serves on the editorial boards of YJC, The Yale Review, and Transition.

Suleri was born in Pakistan, one of six children, to a Welsh mother, Mair Jones, an English professor, and a Pakistani father, Z. A. Suleri (1913–1999), a notable political journalist, conservative writer, author, and the Pakistan Movement activist regarded as one of the pioneer of print journalism in Pakistan, and authored various history and political books on Pakistan as well as Islam in the Indian subcontinent.

She had her early education in London and attended secondary school in Lahore. She received her B.A. at Kinnaird College, also in Lahore, in 1974. Two years later, she was awarded an M.A. from Punjab University, and went on to graduate with a PhD from Indiana University in 1983.

Suleri taught for two years at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, before she moved to Yale and began teaching there in 1983.

Suleri is a founding editor of the Yale Journal of Criticism. Her memoir, Meatless Days, is an exploration of the complex interweaving of national history and personal biography which was widely and respectfully reviewed . Her 1992 The Rhetoric of English India was well received in literary circles. One critic, for instance, said recent scholarship by Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gauri Viswanathan, and Jacques Derrida has "reformulated the paradigmatic assumptions of colonial cultural studies," and the book was as "important addition to such scholarship." The "unconventionality of some of her selections brings a breath of fresh air to a field prone to turn, time and again, to the same weary list of standard texts." However, an historian took Suleri to task for the "casual manner in which she forms important generalizations without benefit of hard data." As with other deconstructionists, he continued, there are "Pronunciamentos based on unstructured, undisciplined and unresearched observations about the past..." He concludes, that "This is not to say that Suleri's work is totally without substance or that all of her insights are without value. No doubt, she is a sensitive literary critic who would be bored with the kind of detailed monographs historians and ethnographic anthropologists do as a matter of course." Boys Will Be Boys : A Daughter's Elegy was published in October-15,2003.In Boys Will Be Boys, she returns—with the same treasury of language, humor, and passion—to her childhood and early adulthood to pay tribute to her father, the political journalist Z. A. Suleri (known as Pip), for his "patriotic and preposterous disposition".

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has described Suleri as "a postcolonial Proust to Rushdie's phantasmagorical Pynchon."

Published works

• Meatless Days. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989, ISBN 978-0-226-77981-2
• The Rhetoric of English India. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992, ISBN 978-0-226-77983-6
• Boys Will Be Boys: A Daughter's Elegy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003, ISBN 978-0-226-30401-4

In 1993, Suleri married Austin Goodyear (1923–2008) of the prominent Goodyear family. Goodyear had three children from his first marriage to Louisa Robins (1920–1992), the granddaughter of Thomas Robins Jr; the eldest, Grace Rumsey Goodyear (b. 1941), is married to Franklin Delano Roosevelt III (b. 1938), the grandson of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt.

Suleri and Goodyear remained married until his death in 2008.