he/him
Robert Chodat studies post-WWII American fiction, the relation between literature and philosophy, and the intersection of these two areas. In particular he has been interested in how the language of agency and purpose survives in a reductively naturalistic culture, and how different authors, texts, and genres talk about varying levels of meaningful behavior—from particular utterances and acts to individual lives to collective projects and cultural practices.
His published work includes The Matter of High Words: Naturalism, Normativity, and the Postwar Sage (Oxford, 2017) and Worldly Acts and Sentient Things: The Persistence of Agency from Stein to DeLillo (Cornell, 2008), as well as articles on Richard Powers, Lorrie Moore, Philip Roth, Stanley Cavell, Wittgenstein, pragmatism, and evolutionary and cognitive theory.