Curriculum Vitae / Lebenslauf

 

Book Chappatis (:)
 

• "Veni, Vidi, Venice! Gun Island and the Climate of Homelessness" in Anna Fluegge, et. al., Eds.  Perspectives on Homelessness. Heidelberg: Winter, 2022: 251-272 (ca. 8,000 words)
  
  I want to examine these nodes of thought in Ghosh’s most recent novel Gun Island (2019) and combine them with a second concern that has accrued critical mass in his work over the years: climate change. Climate change became a major driver in The Hungry Tide (2004), Ghosh’s groundbreaking narrative chronicling the devastating effects of changing weather patterns, and a host of anthropogenic changes, on the fish, dolphins, and bipedal mammals inhabiting the Sundarbans, the great mangrove forest of the Bengal Delta. Climate change also became the focal point of The Great Derangement (2016), Ghosh’s extended essay on the failure of the contemporary imagination to adequately engage the environmental threats endangering the home shared by humans and nonhumans alike: Earth. Trying to resituate serious literature from the margins to the center of cultural activity, he urges to see climate change not as being “somehow akin to extraterrestrials or interplanetary travel,” but as the theme per se to ensure planetary health (Derangement 7). Storytelling and the earth, the deep time of (non)human habitation and migration—and, finally, home and homelessness—he argues, are all part of large, imbricated feedback loops which it is the ethical responsibility of fiction to portray. But whereas The Hungry Tide unfolds in Ghosh’s preferred narrative space, the watery spaces of Southeast Asia, Gun Island locates—or re-territorializes, if you will—these concerns to another shifting ground undergoing ecological crisis: the terra infirma of the Mediterranean. Italy, especially, becomes the site of migration for the refugees and sans papiers, now coming from Southeast Asia, that make up the itinerant labor pool of the global economy—a new species of homo migratio that has transformed Europe into a new frontier of both eco- and postcolonial studies. Gun Island offers itself as a case study of this new frontier, a narrative of ecological postcolonialism up to date.
  
   

• "Gogol + Nikhil = Nikon? -- Power, Place, and Photography in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake," The Place of Photography, Ed. Julia Faisst and Kerstin Schmidt, Leiden: Brill, 2019 (10,700 words ).

This essay offers a media-technological reading of photography in Lahiri’s work, centering broadly on The Namesake. (1) Through the lens of photography, Lahiri re-exposes the power differential between men and women. If trigger-happy males zoom in on female bodies, or any other subject, from behind the view finder, they not only assert their traditional agency through a technology of representation; they also reduce women to passive statu(e)s and the object of the male gaze, thus re-inscribing an age-old power dichotomy and bringing it up to date.  Similarly, as Lahiri’s Indian immigrants record, with camera in hand, their newfound life in the West, they also return to their country of origin as tourists, where snapshots of oddly-estranged environments give them a sense of (nostalgic) cultural grounding. (2) While ancestral portraits have served numerous cultures as a placeholder for the deceased, the Hindu practice of burning the body, and the subsequent dispersal of the ash, invests photographic verisimilitude with greater significance than in the West. Yet, if photography can be commemorative in a visual sense, words occupy a different value on the spectrum of recall and representation, often filling the gap where images and photographs fail.
 

• "City of God/City of Bits: Signs/Signals/Noise," in E. L. Doctorow Reconsidered, Ed. and Intro. Michael Wutz and Julian Murphet (UNSW Sidney), Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2019.
  
   In City of God, Doctorow . . . . probes the very nature of a sign and signification. In the opening part of this essay, “Signs Taken for Wonders,” I map the various signs and signals—material and spiritual, linguistic and electric, biologic and electronic—circulating within the narrative field, and how their signification is dependent on specific discourse communities. Information theory, in particular, here serves a useful heuristic to distinguish sense from non-sense, signal from noise. In part two, “Communicative Ground Zero,” I locate Doctorow’s metafictional reflections on meaning-making within the human sign system language itself, chiefly by juxtaposing the position of two of the novel’s most memorable personae—Ludwig Wittgenstein and Albert Einstein—on communication, and above all, on listening and decoding. If one ends in the despair of communicative silence because of insurmountable linguistic blockage—the infinitely regressive metaphoricity of human speech—the other embraces the sonorous noise of various sign systems to reconcile modern physics with metaphysics. Part three, “Negotiating the Terrain,” invokes Michel Serres’ notion of the Northwest Passage (a tutelary spirit for much of the essay) to pursue the novel’s focus on sound and noise into the domain of media culture. I suggest that Doctorow understands humanity as noise makers whose sophisticated media technologies have not only not facilitated global understanding, but instead helped produce the carnage of modernity. I suggest as well that Doctorow understands the novel as a productive noise-making machine embedded within the sound cloud of the present, a medial subset capable of translating the din produced within the larger culture into its own, however tenuous and tentative, system of order, a minor noise echoing within, and against, the echo chamber of the larger media ecology.  
  
   
• "Articulate Flesh – D. H. Lawrence and The Modern Media Ecology," Hybrid Multimedia Literature and Art in post-Cold War Europe, Ed. Marcel-Cornis Pope, Virginia Comonwealth University. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Press, 2014, 91-103.

This essay maps Lawrence's relationship to modern media and suggests that he saw in new(-fangled) technologies of communication another threat to the growing disembodiment he had been lamenting since his early days as a writer. Much in keeping with his concern about human self-estrangement—and notwithstanding their promise of greater authenticity, immediacy, and communicability—Lawrence understood the technologies of visual and acoustic storage as instruments of distancing and alienation, not togetherness and approximation.  In the second part of the argument, I offer a media-oriented reading of Lady Chatterley's Lover and suggest that the canonical view of Lawrence as a conservative reactionary ought to be complicated.
 

• "Federman's Body Literature or, The Unbearable Lightness of Being," Federman's Fictions, Ed. Geoffrey Di Leo.  Albany, NY: SUNY-Press, 2010: 257-275.

This essay suggests that Federman's extraordinary display of linguistic skill has tended to obscure what Federman himself has always fully acknowledged: namely, that the body ought to be seen as the elemental ground of being enabling the experience of living, and along with it the experience of writing. Behind the verbal and cerebral pyrotechnics of Federman's postmodernist surfiction, I argue, lies the body as the primary and primordial horizon of experiential value. Seeing the way Federman reflects on his corps allow us to understand that, for him, life, and with it, art, begins with the physical, not verbal, awareness of the self.

 

• "Writing From Between the Gaps: Agape Agape and Twentieth-Century Media Culture," Paper Empire: William Gaddis and the World System, Ed. Joseph Tabbi and Rone Shavers. Tuscaloosa: The Univ. of Alabama Press, 2007: 185-210.

This essay argues that Gaddis' posthumously published novel Agape Agapecan be seen as a reprise of the themes orchestrating his oeuvre, such as entropy, plagiarism, the pressures of capitalism, the threat of mass culture to artistic authenticity, and the continued viability of literature, among others.  By weaving these themes into the evolution of the player piano—-for Gaddis a symbolic register for the modern-day rush toward mechanization and rationalization and a key link in the development of data processing technologies—-he suggests that the cultural marginalization of the arts has been in process since the Industrial Revolution.  More specifically, through recourse to some of the insights of contemporary media theory, the essay seeks to show how some of Gaddis' lifelong concerns intersect with two links that are particularly germane to Agape Agape: the links between authentic art, mechanized music, and the threat of technological disembodiment; and between the media ecology of the 20th-century and the cultural import of literary narrative.

• "Introduction:  Media — Models, Memories, and Metaphors," together with Geoffrey WinthropYoung, Configurations, vol. 10, no. 1 (Winter 2002): pp. 1-10.
   
• "Translator's introduction," Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, together with Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, Stanford Univ. Press, 1999: xi-xxxviii.
   
• "Introduction," Reading Matters: Narrative in the New Media Ecology, together with Joseph Tabbi, Cornell Univ. Press, 1997: 1-25.
   
• "Archaic Mechanics, Anarchic Meaning: Malcolm Lowry and the Technology of Narrative," in Reading Matters, Cornell Univ. Press, 1997: 53-75.
   

Essays

 

• "Reading with the Grain. The Ecologies of The Lowland,"  MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, April 2023 (ca. 13,000 words, https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlad008)
  
  Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland, much like her earlier Unaccustomed Earth, is informed by large-scale ecological and evolutionary considerations that enfold the stories of two brothers, their aspirations, politics and families that populate the novel’s surface texture. Section one, “Empire and Ecologies," layrs bare how, in Lahiri's telling, British control of the Bay of Bengal involved the substantial weaponization of the environment whereby immense efforts of terraforming led, over the course of centuries, to enormous resource contraints for the native population and the exacerbation of religious tensions within the the Muslim and Hindu communities.  Imperial conquest, in that sense, almost always inevitably involves ecocide: a slow-motion form of genocide. Section two, “(R)evolutionary Science,” traces how political agency and ecological stewardship are embodied in the novel’s discourse of science and its major players. Representative of the conflicting energies of a post-independence India, Subhash and his younger brother, Udayan, are trained in chemistry and physics at elite institutions, respectively. But while a radicalized Udayan ratifies his politics with scientific law, Subhash’s training makes him an ecologist avant la lettre and connects him with the ontological synergism of pioneering Indian scientist, Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose. Section three, “The Narrative Rhizome,” advances a model for The Lowland as a rhizome (Deleuze + Guattari) by carrying its ecological focus onto the level of narrative form, involving a notion of time that stretches from human to nonhuman (pre)history and further to the geologic time of the earth. The paradoxical result, I suggest, is an essentially diachronic notion of the rhizome, a layered notion of (modernist) spatial form which folds human history into the geological record and urges readers to apprehend this record momentarily in all its spatiotemporal extendedness.
  
   

• "À Propos the Puppeteer – Jean Vigo and the Cinema of Automata," Mise au Point, No. 11, November 2018, the online journal of Association Française des Enseignants et Chercheurs en Cinéma et Audiovisuel, AFECCAV, France; 9,300 words)

This essay focuses on two elements of the cinema of Jean Vigo that have received little attention to date: Vigo’s use of puppets, manikins, and automata as a central part in his mise-en-scène, and Vigo’s status as a transitional film maker negotiating the threshold from silence to sound.  I argue that Vigo’s puppets often function as suggestive figurations of desire, capitalist consumption, and automated thinking, and hence variously comment on the behavior of their human counterparts and the political and economic system they inhabit. Secondarily, Vigo inflects these associations with a strong anti-colonial subtext of repression and exploitation by laying bare the unspoken political dimensions of French colonial rule and the modernist cult(ure) of primitivism and sexual liberation en vogue in 1920s France. The symbolic surcharge of Vigo’s puppets is, further, reinscribed in the audio-visual synergies of his films. Situated on the cusp of film’s transition from silence to sound, Vigo develops a complex register of intonation that engages the modernist media ecology and, in effect, interrogates the status of cinema as a synch-sound spectacle. His puppets and automata can be understood not as convenient leftovers of silent-era film-making, but as dumb dummies resisting the emerging commercialization of sound and its perceived narrowing of aesthetic possibilities (certainly among the avant-garde).  Bodies without voice, they vocalize their inherent cinematicity not through the detour of sound, but through their contorted materiality, facial grotesqueness and jerky mobility.
 

• "Tracing The Modernist Roots of Ecological Thinking  – Reflections on Conversations with W. S. Merwin," co-authored with Hal Crimmel, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 24, no. 2, Spring 2017: 181-195 https://academic.oup.com/isle/article/24/2/181/3813357

The eminent poet W. S. Merwin has been on the forefront of the environmental movement and articulated concerns about ecology and sustainability long before they became fashionable. “Tracing the Modernist Roots of Ecological Thinking” explores the deep contours of Merwin’s ecological consciousness as found in our interview collection, Conversations with W. S. Merwin (Mississippi, 2015), and provides insight into the organic evolution of the collection itself, along with an account of the challenges of compressing half a century’s worth of conversations with a literary giant. The essay also seeks to remind ecocritics of the importance of Merwin’s writing and illuminating literary interviews, which is an often overlooked genre of criticism valuable for their insights into the thought processes of writers in general and Merwin specifically.
 

• "The Archaeology of the Colonial - Un-earthing Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth," Studies in American Fiction, vol. 42, no. 2, 2015: 243-268.

This essay argues that Lahiri articulates a comprehensive theory of (post)coloniality through the geophysical energies traversing Unaccustomed Earth. It argues that the geological upheaval in the novel encodes the geopolitical upheaval that has divided global populations—at any point in their history—into dominators and dominated, colonizers and colonized.  It argues, further, that geological energy grounds Lahiri’s literary practice of seeing her own narratives as one building block within a tectonic archive. It, finally, claims that geological rupture intimates a radical change in agency with regard to humans and their global habitat.  Beginning with the Industrial Revolution and the European colonial projects, humanity has evolved into a collective force with a planetary impact so vast in scale that geologists have coined the term “Anthropocene."  While sympathetic to this anthropogenic perspective, Lahiri is more concerned with cosmic rhythms and natural forces than human purpose or historical teleology.  She suggests that the seismic energies in Unaccustomed Earth signify a planet with the capacity for perpetual reconstitution, that humanity may only be a transitional sojourner on the diasporic space that is the earth, and that change is the one large bio-geological constant in the age-old game of migration and transplantation.
 

• "Remembering E. L. Doctorow - The Conscience of America," The Conversation, 22 July 2015, reprinted in the online edition of Newsweek as "The E. L. Doctorow I Remember," also on 22 July 2015.

A brief tribute (by invitation) to one of the most influential contemporary American writers on the occasion of his passing.

• "Doing More With Less," Inside Higher Ed (21 April 2010)

"Intellectual Affairs: A small humanities journal survives deep budget cuts. Scott McLemee finds out how its editor manages to maintain the publication — and his own optimism."

• "E. L. Doctorow," The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction, ed. Patrick O'Donnell, David W. Madden, and Justus Nieland. London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010 (print and online).

This brief overview essay discusses E. L. Doctorow's literary achievement, in particular his (recurring) thematic concerns as a novelist and the literary tradition from which he writes. Even as Doctorow is a contemporary writer, the essay locates his work between postmodernist and classically modernist sensibilities.

• "From Salt to Struts and Flats to Fenders—An Unnaturally Natural Combination," Weber—The Contemporary West, vol. 24, no. 3 (Spring/Summer 2008), pp. 96-107.

This rather personal essay, including a set of photographs, centers on the (American) fascination with speed and cars, especially as it expresses itself in the annual gathering of car buffs and speedophiles, professional design teams and autodidactic automobilers, on the Bonneville Salt Flats in August. Written from the point of view of an automotive landlubber, it reflects on the unusual convergence of cutting edge technology with the barren desert of northwestern Utah, and how the delirium of mechanic velocity and geographic vastness have formed an intriguing alliance.

• "The Politics of (Post)modern Form: Tradition, Language, and Narrative Coherence in Good Scent from a Strange Mountain," Amerikastudien/American Studies, vol. 52, no. 4 (2007):  495-516.

Rather than assigning Good Scent to any one particular narrative or theoretical camp (as has been done), this essay argues that Robert Olen Butler's thematic and formal preoccupations evidence his keen awareness of postcolonial issues as well as his affinity for the both modernist and postmodern concern with language, mediation, and signifying slippage. His location within a more broadly 20^th-century tradition of short fiction writing is, perhaps, most visible in Good Scent's various forms of narrative cohesiveness and his understanding of the reciprocities between form and content. Blending conventional realism with a mode of magic realism into a formal hybrid that yields a kind of narrative parallax, Butler foregrounds not only the various forms of cultural schizophrenia of the collection's inhabitants, but also the unresolvable tension between complementary modes of narrative experience, oscillating, as they do, between political reality and dreamlike ideality.

• "Pinocchio's Piccolo, or How Tristram Shandy Got It Straight: Searching in Raymond Federman's Body Shards," Electronic Book Review. Writing under constraint, October 2006.

This essay offers a detailed reading of Raymond Federman's My Body in Nine Parts (Buffalo, NY: Stacherone P, 2005) along the lines of notions of embodiment and textual self-formation. It argues that, on the surface or "surfiction" of it, Nine Parts proposes itself as an idiosyncratic history of embodied recollection by chronicling how certain body parts have registered, inscribed, and/or contributed to crucial experiences in Federman's life. The essay also suggests how Federman's body comes to fore most forcefully when he is repressing the unnamable primal scenes in his life by displacing them onto his scarred (not charred) body: the extermination of his family at Auschwitz and the loss of his mother. The essay also delves into the reasons why Federman's contributions to experimental fiction have found a wide reception in Germany, much in contrast to his marginal status in the United States.

• "Literary Narrative and Information Culture—Garbage, Waste, and Residue in the Work of E. L. Doctorow."  Contemporary Literature,  vol. 44, no. 3 (Fall 03): 501-535.

This essay argues that Doctorow's fiction employs the trope of garbage or waste to demarcate a unique domain of knowledge for the novel in present day culture—a domain that is outside the boundaries of received disciplinary practices as well as the contemporary media landscape. Doctorow suggests that the serious novel can give itself important cultural legitimacy by locating itself at the interstices of contemporary knowledge and information production. What would go by cultural residue or waste in the established fields of formalized knowledge can be absorbed into the epistemological broth called the novel.

• "Modernist Discontinuities," Electronic Book Review 7, part II, image + narrative, Summer 1998

Based on a detailed discussion of William R. Everdell's wide-ranging and interdisciplinary study The First  Moderns: Profiles in the Origin of Twentieth-Century Thought (Chicago: The Univ. of Chicago Press, 1997), this brief review essay maps some of the conceptual and technological premises that, emerging concurrently in various fields, have produced the modernist configuration(s).

• "Narrative in the New Media Ecology," Amerikastudien/American Studies, special issue on Technology and American Culture, vol. 41, no. 3 (Fall 1996): pp. 445-464, co-authored with Joseph Tabbi.

How does written narrative respond to photography, the phonograph, and film—those visual and auditory recording technologies that, beginning in the latter half of the nineteenth century, could process and store information more efficiently than print. This essay, adapted from the introduction of Reading Matters, argues that print narrative has shown an extraordinary generic resilience and reclaimed for itself a distinctively literary and imaginative ground of being inaccessible to these newer media. This essay also appeared in the inaugural issue of the electronic journal NODE9 (no longer online)

• "The Thermodynamics of Gender: The Case of D. H. Lawrence." Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, vol. 28, no. 2 (Summer 1995): pp. 83-108.

By drawing on the theoretical concepts of the French philosopher of science, Michel Serres, this essay argues that the protocols and theorems of thermodynamics operate as organizational models in the work of D. H. Lawrence, and further, that these principles become a paradigm for Lawrence's gender relationships.

• "The Energetics of Tarr: The Vortex-Machine Kreisler." Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 38, no. 4, (Winter 1992): pp. 845-869.

This essay establishes the intersection of science, technology, gender (and politics) in the work of Wyndham Lewis, the founder of English Vorticism and one of the quintessential figures of high modernism in both the literary and the visual arts. Through a close "scientific" reading of Lewis's autobiographical novel, Tarr (1918), I argue that Lewis's conception of narrative and character largely derives from the emergent theories of the electromagnetic field that were articulated by James Clerk Maxwell and Lord Kelvin in the second half of the nineteenth century.

• "The Word and the Self in The Ambassadors." Style, vol. 25, no. 1 (Spring 1991): pp. 89-103.

By juxtaposing two of the most widely influential forms of contemporary critical practice—(Derridean) deconstruction and (Husserlian) phenomenology—this essay suggests that Henry James was highly attuned to the limits of verbal representation. While making a living writing, he acknowledged that—broadly speaking—words are an only insufficient vehicle to contain such human constants as truth, identity, and self.

• "Hawthorne's Drowne: Felix Culpa Exculpated." Studies in American Fiction, vol. 18, no. 2 (Fall 1990): pp. 99-110.

Through a comparative analysis of several of Nathaniel Hawthorne's well- and lesser known short stories, this essay argues that the notion of felix culpa—the positive effects of humankind's archetypal fall from innocence—is present in Hawthorne's early work (a claim not seriously entertained up to this point) and that, in Hawthorne's world, desire operates as the driving impetus for the creation of genuine art.

 

Interviews
 

• "On Memory & Media, Memoirs & Mentoring. A Conversation with Viet Thanh Nguyen,"Weber - The Contemporary West, vol. 40, 1 (Fall 2023), 28-42.  This interview has been reposted on Mr. Nguyen's homepage on 19 Nov 2023, https://vietnguyen.info/2023/weber-state-university-a-conversation-with-viet-thanh-nguyen-on-memory-media-memoirs-mentoring

• "Painting Matters and the Undoing of Erasure and Silence.  A Conversation with Monica Lundy," Weber - The Contemporary West, vol, 39, 2 (Spring/Summer 2023), pp 67-78. 

• "Narratives of Migration and Climate Change.  A Collective Conversation with Amitav Ghosh,”Weber - The Contemporary West, vol. 38, 2 (Spring/Summer 2022), pp.28-43.
  Ghosh was a Hurst Artist in Residence in Weber State’s Telitha E. Lindquist College of Arts & Humanities in Fall 2021, where he spoke with students, faculty, and staff, about migration, climate change, and the ecological/environmental crises facing the planet. The interview is an edited compilation of these conversations.
   

• “’The New Director of the Decade.’ A Conversation with Ramin Bahrani,”Weber - The Contemporary West, vol. 38., 2 (Spring/Summer 2022),  pp. 76-86.

  Ramin Bahrani is an Iranian-American director and screenwriter who gained international prominence with two recent feature films: the re-adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 (2018, HBO), and the adaptation of Aravind Adiga’s Man Booker-prize winning novel The White Tiger (2021, Netflix). For the latter, he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.  Bahrani is also widely known as one of the most innovative practitioners of independent and non-commercial cinema with an impressive filmography. His first feature film, Man Push Cart (2005), premiered at the Venice Film Festival and screened at Sundance the following year. Chop Shop (2007) premiered at the Cannes International Film Festival, before being screened in Toronto and Berlin. Goodbye Solo (2008), his third feature, was honored as an official selection in Venice, where it won the international film critic’s FIPRESCI award for best film. At Any Price (2013) was selected to compete for the Golden Lion in Venice, and his fifth feature film, 99 Homes (2014), too was shown in Venice and nominated for a Golden Globe Award. What unites his films are innovative camera work and sound design, and a sustained and empathetic attention to the plight of the underprivileged and the effects of the global market economy. For his work, Bahrani was recognized with the 2007 Independent Spirit “Someone to Watch Award”; he received a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship and was nominated for the 2008 Independent Spirit Best Director Award; in 2009, the late film critic Roger Ebert hailed him “the new director of the decade.”
   

• "Escaping Vietnam and Finding Refuge in the United States. A Conversation with Paul Dinh." Weber - The Contemporary West, vol. 36, 1 (Fall 2019), pp. 62-74.
  
  I was privileged to meet Paul Dinh in Hue, the former capital of Vietnam and the city close to the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) during the Vietnam War, in March 2018. Paul escaped Vietnam as a teenager in April 1975 on the proverbial “last boat,” and he was on his first visit back to his home country since his hasty departure 43 years ago. He kindly agreed to an interview via phone upon his return to the United States, his present home, which details the milestones of his and his family’s perilous journey: his memories of the final months of the war; the political situation in Vietnam at the time; his family’s fortuitous escape and journey across the Pacific; their warm reception in the United States; and his first reunion with his family members left behind in Vietnam almost half a century later.  Paul, in that sense, is a witness to two ends of a fluid historical spectrum: the escape of the first wave of Vietnamese survivors, before the mass exodus of an estimated 2 million refugees collectively known as the “boat people,” between 1975-1995; and the transformation of a war-torn country into a thriving regional economy.

• "From Idaho to Confucius, or, from the American West to the Far East.  On Explaining a Poet Misguided or Misunderstood." A Conversation with Mary de Rachewiltz on her father, Ezra Pound, Weber - The Contemporary West, vol. 35, 2 (Spring/Summer 2019, focus issue on China/Japan), pp. 117-133.
  
  In the conversation following, Pound’s daughter, Mary de Rachewiltz, is graciously giving us a glimpse into her father’s complicated politics, as well as into his role as a father, teacher, poet, and much more. An accomplished poet in her own right, with several volumes of poetry, in both Italian and English, and numerous translations to her name, she also authored the memoir Discretions—Ezra Pound, Father and Teacher (1971), in which she reflects on the complexities of Pound the person, her own experience as a witness to the twentieth century, and the complexities of Pound’s relationship with the historical moments he traversed, and indeed, helped shape. The tenor of Mary’s observations, articulated in at times nuanced insights, is clear: if my father may have misconstrued, and been misguided by, some of the darker implications of Il Duce, so has the critical community misconstrued, or misunderstood, his intentions. A deep and careful reading of The Cantos (which runs like a fugal counterpoint through many passages of Discretions), she suggests, reveals the true man behind his work. (from the Introduction)

• "On the Mongrelization of Art - A Conversation with Michael Ondaatje," Weber - The Contemporary West, vol. 33, 2 (Spring/Summer 2016), pp.  142-152.
  
  My conversation with Michael Ondaatje took place on the occasion of his visit to Weber State University as part of  the University's annual National Undergraduate Literature Conference in April 2015.  Our conversation ranged from Ondaatje's interest in jazz, painting and film, his writing habits, his use of photography, the mongrelization of art forms, and the possibly healing and redemptive power of art.
   
• "The Individual vs. the State - A Conversation with Ha Jin," Weber - The Contemporary West, vo.31 , 2 (Spring 2015), pp. 4-16.
  
  I had the privilege of conducting a substantive and sustained e-conversation with Ha Jin to be featured in the first Weber special focus on China. Our conversation touched on his recent fiction, esp. A Good Fall (2011), Nanjing Requiiem (2011) and A Map of Betrayal (2014), but often returned to the subject of language, power, and politics.
   
• "On the Craft of Fiction - E. L. Doctorow at 80," Weber - The Contemporary West, vol 29, 1 (Fall 2012), pp. 2-15.
  
  I had the privilege of having a second substantive exchange with E. L. Doctorow following our first published conversation in 1994.  This interview invited E. L. Doctorow to look back on his early career as an editor and on his novels City of God (2000) and Homer & Langley (2009); it also addresses the growing prominence of cognition and neuroscience in his more recent work.
   
• Evolution, Anthropology and the Narrative Deep Space of Contemporary Fiction - A Conversation with Russell Banks," Weber - The Contemporary West, vol 29, 1 (Fall 2012), pp. 24-45.
  
  This conversation centered on Russell Banks' recurrent concerns with children and child and child sexual abuse in his fiction.  It also probes the resounding subtexts — literary, cultural, and otherwise — from or out of which his narrative concerns and forms emerge.  While wide-ranging and touching on numerous novels, including his short stories, it focuses on The Reserve, Rule of the Bone, and The Darling, and speaks to the (little-acknowledged) evolutionary and biological dimension of his work It also addresses the role of print narrative within the larger ecology of (visual) narratives and updates readers on the various projects of translating his novels into film.
   
• "Riffing About a Century of Jazz: A Conversation with Joe McQueen at 88," Weber—The Contemporary West, vol. 24, no.1 (Fall 07): 6-25.
  
  Local jazz legend Joe McQueen reminisces about 75 years of jazz history, including his encounters with jazz greats Louis Armstrong, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Ray Charles and numerous others.  A skilled raconteur with a voice as smooth as the sound of his tenor sax, Joe McQueen is a witness to the century whose experiences read (or, better, sound) like an oral report on the cultural history of 20th century America.
   
• "The Reality of the Imagination—An Interview with Carlos Fuentes at 70." Weber Studies: Voices and Visions of the West, vol. 17, no. 1 (Winter 2000): pp. 4-21.
  
  This interview with Carlos Fuentes offers new perspectives on both his recent and early experimental fiction as well as his views on the craft of writing. In addition, Fuentes shared interesting insights into the evolution of the notion of magical realism as well as his own connections to the surrealist scene in Paris.
   
• "An Interview with E. L. Doctorow." Weber Studies, vol. 11, no. 1 (Winter 1994): pp. 6-15.
  
  This published version of a recorded interview with E. L. Doctorow sheds new light on his views of politics, literature, and culture. Combining a set of new questions with his responses given during previous conversations, this interview invited Doctorow to re-view his positions on a number of issues. (This interview is reprinted in Christopher Morris, ed., Conversations with E.L. Doctorow (U. Press of Mississippi, 1999: 191-200.)
   

Reprints

  

• Translation and reprint of the "Translator's introduction," Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, with Geoffrey Winthrop-Young (Stanford UP, 1999: xi-xxxviii) in the Polish journal Kronos, special issue on Technika i Totalitariyzm 3 (30), 2014: 110-137.
   
• Chapter 7 , "The Waterworks: Knowledge and Cognition in the Early Age of Data Storage" from Enduring Words - Literary Narrative in a Changing Media Ecology  (Univ. of Alabama Press, 2009) in Contemporary Literary Criticism, Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter, vol. 324.  Detroit: Gale/Cengage Learning, 2013.  Also availabe at Literary Criticism Online.
   
• "The Energetics of Tarr: The Vortex-Machine Kreisler." Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 38, no. 4, (Winter 1992): pp. 845-869. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism, Ed. Thomas J. Schoenberg and Lawrence J. Trudeau, vol. 216: pp. 277-291. Detroit: Gale/Cengage Learning, 2009.
   
• " An Interview with E. L. Doctorow." Weber Studies, 11, 1 (Winter 1994): pp. 6-15. Rpt. in Christopher Morris, ed., Conversations with E.L. Doctorow (U. Press of Mississippi, 1999): 191-200.
   
• Review of E. L. Doctorow, The Waterworks (1994) for Review of Contemporary Fiction 15 (1) 1995: 177-78. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism, #113 (Detroit: Gale Research, 1999): 179-180.
   

Translations

 

• These are Situationist Times! An Inventory of Reproductions, Deformations, Modifications, Derivations, and Transformations. Ed. Ellef Prestsaeter, a book on Jacqueline de Jong (Torpedo Press, 2019, Norway,  http://www.torpedobok.no/). The translations below appear on pp. 328-334.
  - Friedrich Kittler, "Pinball Machine" and "Nerves," from Baggersee (Eds. Tania Hron and Sandrina Khaled, Wilhelm Fink, 2015)
  - Friedrich Wolfram Heubach, "Essay on the Pinball Machine," from the journal Interfunktionen (Ed. Benjamin Buchloh)
  - Bernd Jürgen Warneken, "The Pinball Machine. An Essay on the Culture of Diversion" (excerpt)
• Sybille Krämer, Horst Bredekamp, "Culture, "Technology, Cultural Techniques — Moving Beyond Text," special issue of Theory, Culture & Society , vol. 30, No. 6, Fall 2013: 20-29.
• Thomas Macho, "Second Order Animals – Cultural Techniques of Identity and Identification," special issue of Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 30, No. 6, Fall 2013: 30-47.
• Daniel Zahno, "Whispers," from the short story collection Doktor Turban, for Weber—The Contemporary West, vol. 25 (2), Winter 2009: 66-72.
• Numerous translations for the special double issue on Young Swiss Writers of Dimension² 8 (2/3) February 2007, including the work of Lukas Bärfuss, Markus Bundi, Catalin Dorian Florescu, Zoë Jenny, Perikles Monioudis, Ruth Schweikert, Lukas Stuber, and others.
• Michael Giesecke, "Literature as Product and Medium of Ecological Communication," with Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, Configurations 10 (1), Winter 2002: 11-35.
• Friedrich Kittler, "The Perspective of Print," with Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, Configurations 10 (1), Winter 2002: 37-50.
• Hartmut Winkler, "Discourses, Schemata, Technology, Monuments: Outline for Theory of Cultural Continuity," with Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, Configurations 10 (1), Winter 2002: 91-109.
• Friedrich Kittler, "Media and Drugs in Pynchon's Second World War," together with Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, in Reading Matters (1997): 157-72.

Reviews

 

• Enns, Anthony and Shelley Trower, Eds. Vibratory Modernism.  London & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), for James Joyce Literary Supplement, vol. 28, No. 1, Spring 2014: 16-17.
• Punday, Daniel.  Writing at the Limit.  The Novel in the New Media Ecology  (Lincoln and London: The Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2012)  for Kritikon Litterarum, vol. 40, Fall 2013, No. 1-2: 144-46.
• Debra Rae Cohen, Michael Coyle and Jane Lewty, Broadcasting Modernism (Gainesville & Tallahassee: University Press of Florida, 2009) for Review of English Studies 62, No. 253, February 2011: 156-158, doi: 10.1093/res/hgq126.
• Juan A. Suárez, "All that Noise, Noise, Noise!" Pop Modernism: Noise and the Reinvention of the Everyday (Urbana and Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2007) for James Joyce Literary Supplement, 22 (1), Spring 2008: 24-25.
• Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1999) for Modernism/Modernity, 8 (1), Spring 2001: 188-190.
• Jody Blake, Le Tumulte Noir: Modernist Art and Popular Entertainment in Jazz-Age Paris, 1900-1930. (University Park: Penn State UP, 1999), for Modern Fiction Studies, 45 (4), 1999, pp. 1084-87. 
• Patrick A. McCarthy and Paul Tiessen, Joyce/Lowry: Critical Perspectives (Lexington: The Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1997) for English Literature in Transition 41 (4) 1998: 505-509.
• Bruce Clarke, Dora Marsden and Early Modernism: Gender, Individualism, Science (Ann Arbor: The Univ. of Michigan Press, 1996) for Electronic Book Review 4, Winter 1997.
• Joseph Tabbi, Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1995) for American Literature 68 (1) 1996: 278-9.
• Scott W. Klein. The Fictions of James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994) for Modern Fiction Studies 42 (1) 1996: 189-92.

Course Web Pals

 

Conference Papers

 

I have delivered about 50 papers at regional, national, and international conferences, including the annual meetings of the Society for Literature, Science & the Arts, the Modern Language Association, the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, and the Society for Cinema & Media Studies, among others. I also regularly organize panels and sessions at these conferences. I have spoken at the University of Pescara, Italy, the 2nd International Conference on Technology, Knowledge, and Society in Hyderabad, India (2005), and lectured at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in München, Germany and at the katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt (summer 2013) . Recent conference presentations:

• "Notes toward a Media History of Sound in Film," Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Boston, MA, March 2012
• "Literary Archaeology and Postcolonialism Up to Date. Lahiri, Hawthorne, and the Case of Unaccustomed Earth," Rocky Mountain MLA, Vancouver, WA, October 2013
• "Oceans of Empire," Colloque "Negotiating Waters": Seas, Oceans and Passageways in the Colonial and Postcolonial Anglophone World, MSH-Alpes, Université Grenoble Alpes, 15-16 February 2018
• "Photography and Commemoration in the Work of Jhumpa Lahiri," Rocky Mountain MLA, El Paso, TX, October 2019
• "The Activist Classroom/The Political Classroom? Reflections on Teaching in a Conservative State (of Mind)."  Symposium, "Bridging the Ivory Tower and the Street.  Academia and Activism in Times of Crisis Ordinariness," 8-10 June, 2023, Ca'Foscari, Venice, Italy.

Regional Academic Honors and Awards

 

• 17 RSPG, Hemingway Faculty Development, and Curriculum Revision grants in total for support in research and curricular design, 1993–present, including a 2009 Hemingway Faculty Excellence Award in support of Weber
• 5 Utah Arts Council grants in support of Weber Studies, 1994, 1995, 1996 (coauthored with late editor, Dr. Neila Seshachari), and Weber—The Contemporary West, 2007, 2008

 

Professional Service

 

Weber State University

University Committees

• Admissions, Standards, & Student Affairs
• First Year Experience Curriculum
• Scholarship (chair, Subcom.)
• Affirmative Action Advisory
• General Education
• Research & Professional Growth
• Faculty Board of Review
• Brady Presidential Selection 

English Department Committees (select)

• Chair's Advisory (numerous years)
• Rank & Tenure (numerous times, most recently 22-23)
• Hiring Committee (numerous times, including co-chair, most recently on Screen Writing search, 23-24)
• MENG Steering Committee (numerous years)
• Faculty Development,15, 16 (chair)
• Advisement, chair, 05
• Faculty Development (numerous years, chair 06)
• Peer Review, every year since 2000, repeatedly as chair
• Contract Faculty Three-Year Review, 2010, chair, 2011, 2014, 2015, 2016
• Curriculum, 2000-07; LTS 202-present
• Scholarship (numerous years)
• Recruitment & Retention
• Library; Technical Writing; Merit

Honors Program Committees

• Faculty Advisory, Chair 00
• Curriculum
• Search
• Phi Kappa Phi chapter, including president

Lindquist College of Arts & Humanities, and other Committees (select)

• Dean's Search Committee, 2020-21
• Matthew Shepard Scholarship, 2002-10
• NULC Advisory Board, 2015-2021
• Program Review Committee -- Dept. of Anthropology 2012; Foreign Languages 2015; Philosophy 2017; DOVAD NASAD Program Review, 2017;
• Rank & Tenure -- Dept. of Soc & Anthro, 01, 03; Communication, 07, 20; Foreign Lang, 08, 15
• Rank & Tenure -- College of Social & Behavioral Sciences, 03, 05, 06, 07, 09, 13, 16, 20; Arts & Humanities, 01, 02, 03 chair, 11, 14, 19, 24; College of Science, 09, 12; EAST 22, 23
• Peer Review -- COAST 06; Economics, 08, 09, 12 Foreign Languages 14, 15; Stewart Library 14, 15
• College of Arts & Humanities Hearings Board, 01
• New Faculty Mentoring (Lindquist College, 23-; Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, 22-)
• Browning Presents! 23
   
• Nontraditional Students Advisory, 03
• Electronic Portfolio Group, 06-7
• German Forum
• Organizing team (with Julia Panko and Mark Stevenson) of Colm Toíbín's visit to WSU as part of the Centennial of the Easter Rising, Spring 2016
• Organizer of E.L.Doctorow's visit to WSU, Fall 2011; Amitav Ghosh, Fall 2021 
• "Reaching New Heights," Wildcat, WSU Alumni Magazine, Fall 2022, Wildcat Inbox
• "Welcome to the Neighborhood," Wildcat, WSU Alumni Magazine, Fall 2015:  15-19.
• "In Learning We Trust: Teaching and Traveling in China," Weber State University Magazine, Summer 2013:  19-21.
• "Under Western Eyes: Impressions from a Trip to India," Weber State University Magazine, Winter 2006: 12-13.
• Editor, Weber - The Contemporary West (Summer 2007-present), Associate Editor, weber studies (1998-present), Assistant Editor (1992–98)
• Reader or (co-)director for 15 Honors and BIS senior thesis projects and 7 Master of Arts in English (MENG) theses. Samples:
  - Danna Ridge, "Resistant Identities. Second-Generation Immigrant Identities in Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth," Fall 2014
  - Anita Wahlstrom, "Ad's Wait - A Historical Novel," Spring 2015
  - Gary Lindeburg,"The Takarazuka Revue's Romeo & Juliette: The State Theatre's Response to Japan's National Crisis," Spring 2015
  - Soran Mustafa Hussein Kurdi, "Honor Killing in Elif Shafak's Honor.  An Analysis Behind the Factors of Hoor Killing," Fall 2015
  - Barbara Allyn Bernkopf, "How I Met My Rapist" (collection of poetry), Spring 2016
  - Chelsea June Adams,“Re-Creating the Mother of the Blues. Musical Presence in August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” Spring 2016
  - Daniel Cureton, “Utopian Identities in Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Mars Trilogy,” Spring 2018
  - Amy Pittman, "Hollywood and the Rewriting of the Myth of Fa Mu Lan," Summer 2019
  - Maria Garcia, "Eden's Inmates. The Inverted American Adam in Rachel Kushner's The Mars Room," Fall 2019
  - Kathryn Sullivan Abbott, "Phil Klay's Redeployment and War Rhetoric as Literature for Use," Spring 2023
  - Bailey Quinn, "Gaze of the Ghost" (collection of poetry), Summer 2023
  
• Organizer of College of Arts & Humanities Graduate School Fair, 1993-1999
• Executive Board of Phi Kappa Phi, the National Honor Society, 1995–2000, including position as chapter president (1999–00)
• Honorary Member, Golden Key International Honour Society, 2004
• Peer Review Committee 2007, 2009, and 2010 Fulbright Teacher Exchange Program

Other Professional Activities

• Manuscript referee for SUNY-Press (1996, 1997), U of Minnesota Press (1998, 2012), Cornell U Press (2000), U of Alabama Press, (2010, 2017), Fordham U Press (2011, 2015, 2016, 2017), U of Ottawa Press (2015), Palgrave Macmillan (2015), Amsterdam U Press (2018), Routledge (2018, 2023); Edinburgh U Press (2019), Bloomsbury (2019)
• Reader of Ph.D. Dissertation, Acharya Nagarjuna University, AP, India, 2014
• Manuscript reader for Style (2016), the Rocky Mountain Review (2003), Criticism (2007), symploke (2009), Studies in American Fiction (2011), Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature (2017), The Comparatist (2019), International Social Science Journal (2022); MELUS (2020, 2022), Twentieth-Century Literature (2022)
• External reviewer for tenure & promotion (at various universities; latest review: 2022)
• Editorial Board, Studies in the Novel, 1998–2005
• ETS Faculty Consultant for AP-English (San Antonio, TX; Daytona Beach, FL), 1995–2000; Table Leader, 2001–2007
• External Reviewers for the Council for the Humanities of the Netherlands Organization of Scientific Research (NWO, the Dutch Research Council), February 2014, February 2015

Memberships

• Deutsche Shakespeare Gesellschaft
• Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts
• Modern Language Association
• Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association
• Society for Film and Media Studies
  
  last updated, 17 February 2024