Visiting Assistant Professor
Department of English

Office: Walker 518
Phone: (773) 702-6968
ajmacdonald@uchicago.edu

My research and teaching, whether in foreign-language acquisition or cultural criticism, are concerned with the making of meaning: theories of, genres of, and particular practices of meaning-making. My work has mostly been engaged with the potency and potentiality of representation, with how it is that one thing stands for another, with how it is when one thing stands for another in specific generic conditions, and insisting on the integral role of representation in cultural effects of all kinds. I abide in the hope of showing how representation is a sheer miracle of humanity, but this is worked out in modest ways. In readings of theoretical writing from the French twentieth-century canon in cultural theory, I have been interested to describe the poetics of metaphor that takes theoretical texts beyond propositionality (e.g. ‘Ce qui va de soi: The Agonistics of Motility in Barthes’ Mythologies’). In analyses of television current affairs (with Anne Freadman, What is This Thing Called ‘Genre’?) and of the French graphic novel (‘In extremis: Hergé’s Graphic Exteriority of Character’), I’ve wanted to see how verbal and iconic systems interact in a multigeneric alchemy to answer certain representational challenges. In my current project to read a wide range of contemporary genres from indépendantiste New Caledonia, a politically fraught country where the stakes of cultural actions are indisputably real—race murders, ethnic survival, national sovereignty for the Kanak people—I am investigating not so much the Power of Representation as the potency of genre-specific representations to effect both ordinary and extraordinary human outcomes. I am increasingly interested in the potential agency of meaningful objects to perform politico-cultural actions that human subjects either cannot (for fear of repercussions) or will not (for lack of commitment) perform. Portraits and quasi-portraits figure a lot in this work.

As to teaching, in a former life, in a great south land, I taught a wide range of undergraduate courses in cultural theory and cultural studies, both from the French canon and the anglophone new-humanities canon, as well as a variety of courses in literary and word-image genres. These courses attended to the generic specificities of the texts under analysis, approached theory as a genre of writing, and were inclined to interrogate the assumptions of key new-humanities theories, for example theories of ‘the gaze’, of the knowing subject, and of the diagnostic turn in cultural studies. I like to proceed from a collective, close-reading effort that not only permits an appreciation of the text but permits the text to shape its readers as much as the reverse, with a view to fostering rigorous critical innovation. In the two courses offered in 2008, in the present great midwestern university, I will be proposing to students that they acquire a close knowledge of the workings of various critical texts—workings not confined to propositionality—and some critical-cum-theoretical issues raise therein, the better to exercise their own critical writing in relation to their own critical “here and now”. I look forward to learning a great deal about the “here and now” of U.S. mythologies, today, on the one hand, and of the portrait of the president, on the other.

Graduate: Roland Barthes, Today: The “Mythology” Legacy in Cultural Studies (Winter 2008).

Undergraduate: The Portrait of the President (Spring 2008).

Ph.D., Romance Languages, University of Queensland, 2000.