My research and teaching activities concentrate on modernist literature, film and media studies, philosophy, critical theory, visual culture, and aesthetics.\u00a0 As a scholar of literature and film, I focus on how problems of expression and sensibility are reimagined through analogy and antagonism with other arts.\u00a0 For this reason, I find myself drawn to works of conflicted ambition with respect to their form, medium or genre: novels that would not like to be novels, poems obsessed with becoming images, films that indulge their impatience with narrative in order to revel in a fascination with pure showing.\u00a0 I think about the ways that storytelling has changed in response to the developments of technological modernity.<\/p>\n
In the case of modernism, I am interested in how the character and task of literature was redefined in response to the emergence of cinema.\u00a0 My book,\u00a0The Novel After Film: Modernism and the Decline of Autonomy<\/em>, explores this by looking at the work of writers who sought to transform our understanding of the novel\u2014among them Virginia Woolf, H.D., Aldous Huxley, and Henry Green\u2014and who were also members of the first generation to address the challenge to aesthetic conventions posed by narrative film-making.\u00a0 Connecting the public discourse about film as an art to the experiments of modernist fiction, I show how basic literary notions of subjectivity, language, irony, and omniscience were reconfigured in the shadow of a medium that seemed to make those categories at once obsolete and newly urgent.\u00a0 The Russian critic Viktor Shklovsky once wrote that making literature in the style of film would be absurd, akin to making \u201cice-cream out of lilacs.\u201d\u00a0 This strikes me as a taunt and a caution, but also as a kind of thinking that is surprisingly desirous of the bad form it disavows.\u00a0 I want to understand how this kind of drift in aesthetic value might refocus our understanding of how literature has remade itself in the last hundred years or so.<\/p>\n I have published work on the experimental novels of Virginia Woolf and H. D.; the \u201cmistakist\u201d cinema of Harmony Korine; the Hollywood novels of Aldous Huxley; the rise of film novelizations in the silent period; I. A. Richards\u2019s television shows; W. H. Auden\u2019s lyrical documentary work; the \u201clate style\u201d of Twin Peaks: The Return; <\/em>as well as the films of Carlos Reygadas.\u00a0<\/em>I have written book and film reviews for the\u00a0Los Angeles Review of Books<\/em> and other venues. I currently teach courses on modernist literature, avant-garde cinema, global film history, film noir, and the aesthetics and theory of film and media.<\/p>\n Teaching and Research Interests<\/strong><\/p>\n Selected Publications<\/strong><\/p>\n Book<\/strong><\/p>\n Book in progress<\/strong><\/p>\n Articles\/Chapters<\/strong><\/p>\n Work in Progress<\/strong><\/p>\n Awards and Honors<\/strong><\/p>\n\n
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