I am a scholar and teacher of, primarily, American literature from 1800 through the present day, although I have also written essays on critical method as well as on the novel more broadly and on some contemporary British novelists such as Ian McEwan and Claire-Louise Bennett. I have a special interest in the turn into the twentieth century, the period often associated with the rise of American modernity, and, hence, with many of the phenomena, both social and intellectual, that continue to engage us today. Overall, I have a commitment as a critic to taking works of the past seriously as living resources for our own thought in the present, but which challenge us precisely because they are not simply precursors of the ways we think now. This not simply historicist relation to history, in my view, is crucial to the importance of humanistic scholarship.
My first book, Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism (Chicago 2004) intervened into largely critical accounts of American modernization (industrialization, urbanization, the rise of consumer culture, etc.) by asking how we could understand these developments' concurrence with the rise of the “New Woman.” This entailed a rereading of a literary genre, naturalism, often associated with a pessimistically determinist account of human agency, as central to a larger and more ambivalent turn-of-the-century project of thinking futurity through the figure of the modern woman.
My second book, Maladies of the Will: The American Novel and the Modernity Problem (Chicago 2022) has both a literary-critical vector and a more philosophical one. It aims to situate the nineteenth-century American novel more centrally within novel studies, a field within which it has remained surprisingly marginal. It does so by reorienting the novel's engagement with modern subjectivity around the idea of the will, a concept that links American writers from Melville, Hawthorne, and James to Elizabeth Stoddard and Charles Chesnutt to European novelists from Goethe to Balzac to Eliot. More broadly, the book argues for a new genealogy of the concept of will that runs counter to our standard association of it simply with rational agency—one that can account for its importance for Romantic philosophy and vitalism as well as for, more familiarly, liberalism. Thus reframed, I argue, the will can offer a gateway into a lost context—albeit one still relevant to the contemporary novel—in which still-pressing debates about modernity, individualism, and personhood played out across a much more heterogeneous, interdisciplinary or, better, pre-disciplinary ground.
I am currently working on two projects. The first explores the literary and philosophical history of repetition, as a progressive modernity’s abjected other (or uncanny double). The second is titled The Human Thing, an idea that interests me in several senses: the human-like things all around us in the form of artificial intelligence; the kinds of automatism arguably endemic to the human as such; and the question of what is meant when scholars in the present-day humanities refer, mostly skeptically, to “the human” (“that ‘human’ thing...”). Through an exploration of contemporary fiction’s engagement with a lineage of generic modes (from surrealism to satire) that make their object the human in nonidealized form, I argue that we can continue to think with this concept outside its usual associations with an apotheosized self-sovereignty, and that doing so might help us explore how to live in an era of proliferating human-like things.