Department of English

My research focuses on the relationship between art and technology in the modernist period. More specifically, I am interested in how the conjugation of technical and aesthetic forms in modernist works produce new figurations of the human, the machine, and the environment. My dissertation approaches these problems by tracing the emergence of obsolescence as a technique of capitalist accumulation that overhauls our experience of the old, late, and outdated. In attending to the feelings of anxiety, shame, and disgust that come to circulate around the obsolete, my project rethinks the modernist break as an encounter with the obsolescence of the literary as such.