Department of English

Danny Byrne

B.A. English Language and Literature, University of Oxford, 2007., M.A. English: Issues in Modern Culture, University College London, 2009.
Daniel_Byrne@brown.edu
Research Interests Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, Literary and Cultural Theory, Studies in the Novel, Transatlantic Studies, 20th-Century and Contemporary
Dissertation Title Untimely Forms: Aesthetic Autonomy and the Literary World-System (1989-present)

Biography

Danny Byrne works on 20th and 21st century fiction. His dissertation, Untimely Forms: Aesthetic Autonomy and the Literary World-System (1989-present) seeks to reposition the concept of aesthetic autonomy as a key problem for the contemporary “global Anglophone” novel, via an examination of three novelistic forms: realism, autofiction and meta-culture. Contrary to periodizing accounts in which autonomy is synonymous with a bygone Western modernism, it reads each of these “untimely” forms in relation to a particular dimension of the problem of autonomy: that of the artwork (realism), of the artist (autofiction), and of art itself (meta-culture). The project considers novels by Chimimanda Ngozie Adichie, Valeria Luiselli, Teju Cole, Rachel Cusk, J.M. Coetzee and Kazuo Ishiguro, and intervenes in debates surrounding periodization, world literature, and the politics of form.

Courses Taught:

ENGL 0900 Critical Reading and Writing I: The Academic Essay, Fall 2016

ENGL 0200 A Brief History of Technophobia, Spring 2017