Description:
My background is in comparative literature, and my primary fields of interest are modern poetry from the romantic period through the present, twentieth-century and contemporary literature, and the relationships among literature, philosophy, and religion. Usually I teach courses in modernist or contemporary literature. In my first book, The Extravagant: Crossings of Modern Poetry and Modern Philosophy, I trace a history of attempts in modern poetry and philosophy to re-articulate, in secular terms, experiences of awakened life and widened vision once articulated in religious languages. The book includes detailed discussions of Kant, Wordsworth, Lyotard, Rimbaud, Nietzsche, Bataille, Kierkegaard, Dickinson, Mallarmé, and Derrida. My second book, In Dark Again in Wonder: The Poetry of René Char and George Oppen, is a study of two late modernist poets, one French and the other American, both of whom were fully engaged in the political upheavals of the 1930s and 1940s, both of whom turned time and again to old metaphysical questions that are still with us. I have also published a translation of a volume of Char's poetry, The Word as Archipelago.
Field Of Study:
Fields of Study:
Comparative literature
Modern poetry of Europe and the Americas
Modernism
Twentieth-century and contemporary literature
Theories of modernity
Relationships among literature, philosophy, and religion
Courses:
Courses Taught in Recent Years:
Modernist Poetry in an International Context
Contemporary Poetry
Literary Modernism
Samuel Beckett
Versions of Elegy
History of Criticism
Education:
Cornell University
Ph.D., Comparative Literature, 1997
M.A., Comparative Literature, 1993
University of Wisconsin, Madison
B.A., English, 1988
Universidad Complutense, Madrid, Spain (Fall 1986)
Selected Publications:
The Word as Archipelago, a translation of René Char's La Parole en archipel (Omnidawn, 2012)
In Dark Again in Wonder: The Poetry of René Char and George Oppen (University of Notre Dame Press, 2012)
"C. D. Wright's Deepstep Come Shining: A Wheeling Collage," Genre 45.1 (2012)
The Extravagant: Crossings of Modern Poetry and Modern Philosophy (University of Notre Dame Press, 2005)
Languages Known:
- Spanish - advanced proficiency
- French - advanced proficiency
- Italian - general intermediate
