Research & Innovation

Looking at a variety of cases--from Montaigne’s descriptions of bad reading in the Essais to Shakespeare’s portrayals of characters who make much of little--I show how and why, in early modern culture, the habit of making “anything of anything” calls questions of ontology to mind.

Katherine Clay Bassard takes up this dichotomy in line with questions of literacy when she opines that “[i]n speaking of gender and genre, then, [she works] from the assumption that form is not merely a matter of free choice or appropriate models but a function of how a writer perceives her/himself in the social order.”1 This conflation suggests that whenever deployed, the context is never not haunted by the subtext as well as by the social location in which the usage finds utterance. In this same manner, when one speaks about “race,” one could imagine that for some bodies of color, black ones in particular here, “[t]he fastest runner doesn’t always win the race, and the strongest warrior doesn’t always win the battle. The wise sometimes go hungry, and the skillful are not necessarily wealthy.

Fall 2015- Spring 2016.

In Insurrections, Rion Amilcar Scott's lyrical prose authentically portrays individuals growing up and growing old in an African American community. Writing with a delivery and dialect that are intense and unapologetically current, Scott presents characters who dare to make their own choices -- choices of kindness or cruelty -- in the depths of darkness and hopelessness. Although Cross River's residents may be halted or deterred in their search for fulfillment, their spirits remain resilient -- always evolving and constantly moving.

Had Hemingway continued with the narrative of the duck shoot—the novel returns to it in chapter 40—the Colonel would soon be dead, and a novel would have contracted into a short story. Faced with a character’s bad heart (the Colonel finesses a check-up in chapter 2), Hemingway adopts a digressive form. During the swerve into Venice, the Colonel is then allowed to engage in “acts of presence”—looking, eating, making love, and above all talking, especially to himself. In In Our Time, such talk had been deemed “mental conversation,” and Hemingway cut it out. In Across the River, as Hemingway dives deep into the inner voice, he completes his movement away from an art of omission even as he continues to display his skill in the management of narrative time.

On the one hand, everyone recognizes the consequentiality of these years, as a matter of watershed historical events as well as seismic shake-ups of literary and artistic practice.

Along the way, irony was absorbed into postmodern theory and ultimately became a target of recent writers who have sought to create a practice of “postirony” that might move beyond its limitations. As a concept, irony has been theorized from countless angles, but Cool Characters argues that it is best understood as an ethos: an attitude or orientation toward the world, embodied in different character types, articulated via literary style. Lee Konstantinou traces five such types—the hipster, the punk, the believer, the coolhunter, and the occupier—in new interpretations of works by authors including Ralph Ellison, William S. Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, Kathy Acker, Dave Eggers, William Gibson, Jennifer Egan, Jonathan Lethem, and Rachel Kushner.

Leinwand builds detailed accounts of these writers’ experiences through their marginalia, lectures, letters, journals, and reading notes. We learn why Woolf associated reading Shakespeare with her brother Thoby, and what Ginsberg meant when referring to the mouth feel of Shakespeare’s verse. From Hughes’s attempts to find a “skeleton key” to all of Shakespeare’s plays to Berryman’s tormented efforts to edit King Lear, Leinwand reveals the palpable energy and conviction with which these seven writers engaged with Shakespeare, their moments of utter self-confidence and profound vexation. In uncovering these intense public and private reactions, The Great William connects major writers’ hitherto unremarked scenes of reading Shakespeare with our own.

The school offers postgraduate programmes and summer schools, hosts major collaborative research projects, provides essential research training in book history and palaeography; and facilitates scholarly communities in all areas of English studies.

Chico has given lectures drawn from her work on 18th-c literature and science at the University of Oxford, the University of Warwick, Birkbeck College-University of London, Queen Mary University of London, the Foundling Museum (UK), Chawton House Library, and the University of Illinois.