简介

Although I started out as a modernist interested in Irish and British fiction and poetry, 1890-1945, long ago I stumbled backwards and blindfolded into the nineteenth century, to explore literary modernism’s origins. And I staggered forward to Beckett and beyond, to trace modernism’s aftermath. The temporal expansion reflects my passionate engagement with particular authors (including Hardy, Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, and Beckett) and involves my interest in style and in the conceptual implications of literary form. In mid-career, I taught modern intellectual history in an interdisciplinary program. I now teach and write mostly about post-Romantic literature, all the genres, especially writing of the long twentieth century (1885-present) on both sides of the Atlantic, but also about the Gothic tradition (Ann Radcliffe to contemporary science fiction). I teach as well humanistic theory and literary criticism, with emphases on modernity, creativity, aesthetic response, narrative, post-colonialism, and anthropological issues. Film, animation, and modern art come up frequently in my courses and sometimes in my writing and lecturing. At the moment, my larger projects of research and writing focus on Oscar Wilde as a precursor of Modernism and on the Gothic. In addition, I am revising my edition of Dracula and writing an essay about Alison Bechdel’s graphic narrative, Fun Home, in relation to Joyce. My graduate seminars in the recent past have concerned James Joyce, Literature and Laughter, Modernist Authenticity, and Gothic Narratives of the long 19th-century. My advanced undergrad courses open to graduate enrollments focus on modern literature (20th-century British and Irish Poetry; Modern Irish Writers; Joyce & After–a course in transatlantic Modernism from Ulysses through Fun Home). My undergraduate class on the Gothic is a new offering, and I regularly teach a survey of British Literature after 1700 that fulfills a requirement for English majors. Among my professional commitments off campus, the primary local one is my co-chairing the Modernism Seminar at Harvard’s Mahindra Humanities Center.