Education
Ph.D. University of California-Berkeley, English (1981)
Areas of Expertise
American literature, American modernism, American postmodernism, the world novel, death theory, comedy.
Courses
ENGL 210 SEM
American Modernism (not offered 2024/25)ENGL 272 / AMST 272 SEM
American Postmodern Fiction (not offered 2024/25)ENGL 305 SEM
The American Modernist Novel (not offered 2024/25)ENGL 322 SEM
Borges, Nabokov, Beckett (not offered 2024/25)ENGL 327 SEM
Autofiction (not offered 2024/25)ENGL 336 SEM
Escape, Escapism, Escapology, and the Contemporary American Novel (not offered 2024/25)ENGL 339 SEM
William Faulkner (not offered 2024/25)ENGL 354 SEM
Contemporary American Fiction (not offered 2024/25)Scholarship/Creative Work
Death’s Following: Mediocrity, Dirtiness, Adulthood, Literature (Fordham: 2012).
“The Second World War in American Fiction,” in The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century British and American War Literature (2012: Edinburgh UP).
“Addie in Non Man’s Land,” in As I Lay Dying: Norton Critical Edition (Norton: 2010).
“American Humor in History,” American Literary History, vol. 21, no. 2, summer 2009.
I am John J. Gibson Professor of English and chair of the English Department. I teach courses almost entirely in American Literature—including courses on modernism, postmodernism, and Faulkner—although for several years I taught a course in the world novel. A couple of my books are dedicated to putting American literature in relation to extrinsic forms of history: The Place of Fiction in the Time of Science: A Disciplinary History of American Literature (Cambridge: 1990) and Writing After War: American Writing from Realism to Postmodernism (Oxford: 1994). (The former book engages the philosophy of science of Kuhn, Feyerabend, Popper, and others; the latter, with the war philosophy especially of Clausewitz and Elaine Scarry.) A third book, on the other hand, has almost nothing to do with American literature (it features chapters on Stoppard, Sebald, and Thomas Bernhard): Death’s Following: Mediocrity, Dirtiness, Adulthood, Literature (2012: Fordham). (It’s a theory of death.) And one book has almost nothing to do with literature at all, but centers on the comedy of Lenny Bruce, Nichols and May, Brooks and Reiner, David Letterman, Richard Pryor, Ellen DeGeneres, and Paula Poundstone: Stand-up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America (2000: Duke). In progress, possibly, is an article on Orhan Pamuk; and a book on escapism, with articles on American classic film comedies, The Sound of Music, and much, much more.