Rivky Mondal

Rivky Mondal
Teaching Fellow
mondal@uchicago.edu
Cohort Year: 2016
Research Interests: late 19th and 20th century American and British literature | modern and contemporary novel | aesthetics | affect theory | feminist and queer studies | translation | cultural studies | critical theory and hermeneutics

Biography

I am a Humanities Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago with appointments in the English Department and Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. I research and teach the 19th- to 21st-century novel, minoritarian aesthetics, gender studies, and social theory. A praxis in archival and sociological research also informs my teaching in tandem with my scholarship.

​I am currently working on two books with a shared agenda: to (1) create a language via literature for articulating forms of underhanded behavior in everyday scenes of difference and (2) explain these forms’ surprising pro-social function for coping with systemic inequality. How can manipulation, slow texting, tact, and flat affect be understood as strategies for manifesting and managing unequal power relations in liberal culture?

​My first book, Subtle Distinctions: Microsocial Encounters in the Modern Novel is a study of subtlety’s functions and ramifications in the novel from Henry James to the present. The project analyzes a penchant for narrative indirection in a range of twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels that render difficult-to-articulate feelings, situations, and consequences of gender, race, and class. Readings examine this through the “microsocial,” a small scale of encounter comprised of affects, speech, and norms that lay outside the field of common vision. Each chapter identifies an imperceptible sub-style appearing in encounters that require subterfuge and maneuvering: from affective management in Henry James, tact in Nella Larsen, and opacity in William Faulkner, to symbol in Toni Morrison, flat style in Sally Rooney, and qualifications in Raven Leilani.

 My second project, A Modern History of Introversion: 20th- and 21st-Century Aesthetics of Social Attrition examines the unexpected popularity of the introvert today as a social type and habitus countenanced by corporate culture and the self-care industry. The project returns to the transgressive root of the introvert: that is, their ability to shine an unflinching light on American individualism and its unsettled relationship with loneliness despite neoliberalism’s obsession with making the social more seamless. Introverts serve as a fount of socially insightful negativity in Western fiction (Franz Kafka, Toni Morrison, and Kazuo Ishiguro), psychology (Carl Jung), queer studies (Audre Lorde and José Esteban Muñoz), and other realms of social deprogramming in the long-twentieth century.

 Writing related to both projects has appeared or is forthcoming in Textual Practice, Camera Obscura, The Henry James Review, and Post45 Contemporaries.

You can read more about my work on my website.

Publications

  • “Too Literal Translation: Some Poems of Roger Fry.” Modernism, Theory and Responsible Reading: A Critical Conversation. Edited by Stephen Ross (Bloomsbury, 2021). 
  • “For Inscrutability.” Post45 Contemporaries. Cluster on “Interpretive Difficulty” edited by Johanna Winant and Dan Sinykin.
  • “Henry James and the Device of the Observer: A Study on Microexpressions.” Henry James Review 41, no. 1 (Winter 2020). Special issue: “Emotion, Feeling, Sentiment in James: ‘Sorrow comes in great waves.’”
  • “‘Killers and killed all’: Luis Felipe Fabre’s Sor Juana y otros monstruos.” 3:AM Magazine.
  • “Malfunctioning Machines: Replaying The Plays of Samuel Beckett by Katherine Weiss.” Journal of Modern Literature 38, no. 2 (Winter 2015). Special Theme: “Irish Modernism.”