Lichtman, Susan A.

About the author: Susan A. Lichtman is a professor of English and author of Life’s Stages of Woman’s Heroic Journey: A Study of the Origins of the Great Goddess Archetype and The Female Hero in Literature and Poetry along with numerous articles and presentations on the subjects of literature, women’s studies, mythology, prison education, and film studies. She has taught in men’s maximum-security prisons, Indiana State Prison and Westville Correctional Center, and on university campuses for Purdue University North Central and Ball State University as well as Columbia College in Chicago, Illinois, where she now resides.

Conversations with Male Inmates at Indiana State Prison Concerning Education and Its Rehabilitative Effects

2004 0-7734-6493-X
The purpose for this collection of essays is to influence the development of prison education programs and to sway educators and researchers to see the possibilities of working together through consistent, rational public policy for successful rehabilitation. Opening educational opportunities for those people in prison has been proven successful, and yet our society and lawmakers refuse to see the corollary between recidivism rates and education. Without an effective dialogue, we cannot begin to address the problem. The men who have written for this book do so with the hope that they can participate in a national debate about the causes and the effects the prison culture has upon the incarcerated. They hope their experiences with education can speak for the hundreds of thousands of other prisoners who do not have access to a public forum, who are intimidated into silence by the prison machinery, who are not literate enough to express themselves. They hope that their offerings here can, in some small way, contribute to reducing the suffering and frustration that hamper the rehabilitation of others in the system and to educate the public community about the prison culture of America.

Female Hero in Women's Literature and Poetry

1996 0-7734-8796-4
This collection of essays about women's novels and poetry demonstrates the signs and symbol structures inherent in women's writings and what those systems can mean in identifying a mega-myth for women and women's psychological and physical development. Using Professor Lichtman's earlier book, Life Stages of Woman's Heroic Journey, as the theoretical basis for interpretation, it covers such diverse authors and poets as Christina Rossetti, Zora Neale Hurston, Ellen Glasgow, Dame Edith Sitwell, Virginia Woolf, and the Mabinogion

Life Stages of Woman's Heroic Journey: A Study of the Origins of the Great Goddess Archetype

1991 0-7734-9699-8
Traces the development of the female archetype as a heroic journey toward self-actualization for the individual woman. While identifying woman as hero of her own unique archetypal journey, this book explains how the journey can only be accomplished through the unification of the three major phases of a woman's life (virgin, mother, crone) into a full vision of feminine development through the signs, symbols, and images of woman as portrayed in mythology, literature, and popular culture. General readers as well as scholars in women's studies, literature, psychology, or history will find this book helpful in broadening their own range of interpretations about the image and impact of woman in society.