Department of English

I’m interested in the close relationship between criticism and the trope of “crisis”—an affinity that evokes such politically and psychoanalytically inflected notions as survival, remembrance, resistance, and repetition. I would argue that this relationship between criticism and crisis finds resonance in a discourse on autonomy that one finds primely in the literature associated with Romanticism. 

I’m also interested in the rhetorical appeals to structure and affect that animate the polemics of literary studies today—from “postcritique” to theoretical turns towards negativity in Black studies and queer theory. I’m particularly focused on how these polemics exist in the afterlife of deconstruction and “theory” more generally, as epitomized by the work of Paul de Man and its reception in the American institutional context of literary studies.