I study thinking and belief as literary forms. I research and teach in feminist theory and 20th/21st century American literature. My work explores the 20th century intellectual history of concepts such as gender, race, and class as literary histories, and reads the forms and aesthetics of non-literary categories or the categories that demarcate literature's others: such as nonfiction, pornography, testimony, and propaganda. Read about my works in progress below.
Abstract, Literal, Reductive: How Feminism Thought
It has become as common to say that feminism has been resurgent as it is to say it is finished, even impossible. Neither the sense of its new urgency nor the claim that it has (finally) extinguished itself is new. For the last 50 years, there has been a metonymy for the vexed relationship we have to feminism, and through it, to gender, and that metonymy is the “Second Wave.” It floats up into our debates where it is not wanted, we have reached for it as an origin we might recuperate, it is what we banish to the past when we want to purge from ourselves those qualities we take to be metonymic of it – qualities, for example, that my title names. Being too abstract, too simple or literal-minded, making incredibly reductive, over- exaggerated claims: what these terms describe are what we take to be wrong with how nascent contemporary feminism, the “Second Wave,” thought; these judgments name what was mistaken about that feminism, feminists’ incapacity for sophisticated, nuanced, properly skeptical analysis, their immanent failure to see properly. Abstract, Literal, Reductive pries these terms from the cognitive critiques they imply and the meanings they therefore implicitly attribute to feminism, in order to hear them differently: as descriptions that name and respond to qualities of feminist style. It analyzes how that style works, arguing that feminist style is objective, formal: it can be practiced, and to practice it is to practice a mode of thought. In doing so, it identifies style as what is conceptually and theoretically shared across midcentury feminisms that were otherwise overtly ideologically different, even opposed, as well as a vector of shared thinking about problems across different categories of politicized identity, in order to reframe our sense what feminism was, how it conceptualized gender in relation to sexuality, class, and race, and how we might think with it now.
Nonfiction: Toward a Positive Concept of a Negative Term
I'm at work on a second project that will give a literary theory of the idea of “nonfiction” as such. Nonfiction is a term that implies its objects are both assertive and crafted (we talk about works of nonfiction) even as it delimits, precisely because of its claim to truth or factuality, the horizon of what it means to be literary. There are no literary critical accounts that explicitly address nonfiction as a concept, which is not surprising given the putative emptiness and negativity, its late 19th century arrival to the scene of literary history to describe a set of genres much older than it – but it is precisely because “nonfiction” is a term for our lack of better or more elaborated concepts for the aesthetics of knowledge that we need the literary critical account of it my project undertakes. Drawing on philosophical, narratological, and literary critical work on fictionality, as well as sociology of literature by critics such as Mary Poovey and John Guillory, and archival work in book history, and reception history, I draw out the operative concept of “nonfiction,” the one effected by its changes in use, and set its work beside that of other key twentieth century terms used to simultaneously delimit the literary and the true: obscenity, pornography, propaganda. I map this account of “nonfiction” as a tool for thinking against the literary history of the texts it purports to describe, to argue that nonfiction as a body of work has developed a set of shared aesthetic affordances not grasped by the term itself.