STATEMENT OF RESEARCH

As a literary scholar, my research is driven by sustained inquiry into twentieth-century literature. The topics I work on include, but are not limited to, the following: Modernist Literature and Culture, the History and Theory of the Novel, the Ethics of Alterity, and Composition Studies. I explore the formal representation of otherness in the modernist novel in terms of ethical responsibility and interpretive undecidability. This concern bears on my inquiry into theories of composition and first-year writing with a view to matters of style and identity. I am continually drawn to problems associated with the crisis of representation, particularly those concerned with thresholds and limits determinative of genres. 

My current project involves an examination of D. H. Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod (1922) through the prisms of modernism, ethics, and style. This article-length study builds on literary scholarship that explores the intersections of Levinasian ethics and modernist literature. Scant attention, however, has been paid to Aaron’s Rod and the critical problems the novel raises about responsibility. The novel’s eponymous protagonist, in his meandering from northern England to Italy, seeks absolute autonomy yet persistently finds himself “in the company of others,” as Wayne C. Booth might describe his situation. The tension produced by Aaron’s mixed feelings about his responsibility (e.g., to himself, to others) results in the novel’s ambiguous and paradoxical conclusions about the very concept itself. Such undecidability is strikingly evident in the novel’s formal ambiguity, the source of early critical censure. To exploit this undecidability, I draw on Lawrence’s own critical essays about the status and development of the novel as such. Published in mid 1920s, these texts join the chorus of modernist writers seeking to “make it new”—that is, to push the boundaries of representation in the novel. I argue that the problems of ethics subtending Aaron’s Rod find their fuller conceptual articulation in the philosophy of Levinas and his interlocutors. (This project is still in progress and nearing completion.)

My work on ethics and Aaron’s Rod has ignited two interrelated projects. Namely, I have begun drafting a broader treatment of modernist responsibility involving early twentieth-century writers across the geo-political spectrum: Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf, Nella Larsen, Thomas Mann, and Elizabeth Bown (among others). The animating question of this study is to what extent the modernist impulse to break with the past can be construed as responsible. The second study that has emerged originates from Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2000). In this book, Solnit explores walking as a transgressive act—the very purview of modernism. Though in its earliest stages, my examination of modernist literature begins with Woolf’s “Street Haunting” (1930), a story wherein its protagonist ambulates the streets of London in search of a pencil. Her quest, however, is anything but linear and alone: she encounters multiple iterations of the socially and historically “other.” I aim to understand how walking, as reaction against the velocities and forces of modernity, can be ethical. 

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DISSERTATION

Forthcoming.