Teaching Fellow
Cohort Year:
2018
Research Interests:
Modernism, Marxism, genre criticism, history of aesthetics, African-American literature, Hegel studies, literary impressionism, concrete art and poetry.
Biography
I study and teach Anglophone literature and art from the late nineteenth century to the present, with a transnational focus on modernism as an expansive artistic movement. I also teach the Media Aesthetics sequence in the University of Chicago’s College Core, which explores philosophical and aesthetic debates about media, including prose, poetry, film, photography, and painting from antiquity to the present. My work has been published in Nonsite and JMMLA and is forthcoming in Modernism/modernity and Mediations.
My book project, “The Market Architecture of Modernist Fiction,” argues that a distinct strain of Anglo-American modernism persists into the twenty-first century in a variety of works that have successfully internalized and turned to their own ends the market logic of capitalist modernity. The project first revisits how the principle of aesthetic autonomy gains traction during the fin-de-siècle period. Here, prior to the market-insulated modes of circulation that subtend the classical modernist canon, I examine how market-exposed works of fiction develop what I call “market architecture:” formal strategies that transform the external, instrumentalizing pressures of market demand into internal, aesthetic problems of self-legislating form. I then trace how these formal strategies prevail across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. I shift sociological and postmodernist critiques of aesthetic modernism out of their often abstract realm of theoretical generalization and rebut them on the concrete terrain of interpreting how works assert aesthetic autonomy through and against their commodification.
Publications
- “Mary Ellen Solt: Concretizing 1968,” nonsite, no. 39 (2022), https://nonsite.org/mary-ellen-solt-concretizing-1968/.