Alexander Bove
Pacific University, English Literature, Faculty Member
- Boston University, English, Alumnusadd
- Victorian Literature, Critical Theory, Psychoanalytic Theory, Anthropocene, Film Theory, Queer Theory, and 85 morePsychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan, Postmodernism, Bicycles, Slavoj Žižek, Charles Dickens, Cinema Studies, English Literature, Romanticism, Gender Studies, William Blake, Film Studies, Victorian Studies, Gender Theory, Sigmund Freud, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, Marxism, Literary Theory, Cinema, Deconstruction, Literary Criticism, Nineteenth Century Studies, Adaptation (Film Studies), Narratology, English, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Characterization, Dream-Representations, The uncanny, Continental Philosophy, Death Drive, Post-Marxism, Climate Change, Victorian novel, Posthumanism, 19th Century British novel, Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, Gender, Gender and Sexuality, Visual Studies, Media Studies, Ecology, Anamorphosis, Environmental Humanities, Ecocriticism, Capitalocene, Telemorphosis, Illustration, Dreams (Psychology), Capitalism, Lacanian theory, Text And Image, Portraits, Literature and cinema, Alenka Zupancic, Biopolitics, Lacan, Hauntology, Slavoj Zizek, Marxist theory, Ghosts, Italian Cinema, Gilles Deleuze, Ontology, Michael Haneke, Gender and Media, Italo Calvino, Self Portraiture, Postcolonial Literature, Women and Gender Studies, Flann O'Brien, Irish Literature, European Cinema, Blade Runner 2049, Ecofeminism, Hegel, Karl Marx, Science Fiction, Comedy, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Fin de Siecle Literature & Culture, Jacques Derrida, Haunting and Spectrality, and Decolonial Thoughtedit
Drawing on the recent ontological turn in critical theory, Spectral Dickens explores an aspect of literary character that is neither real nor fictional, but spectral. This work thus provides an in-depth study of the inimitable characters... more
Drawing on the recent ontological turn in critical theory, Spectral Dickens explores an aspect of literary character that is neither real nor fictional, but spectral. This work thus provides an in-depth study of the inimitable characters populating Dickens' illustrated novels using three hauntological concepts: the Freudian uncanny, Derridean spectrality, and the Lacanian real. Thus, while the current discourse on character studies, which revolves around values like realism, depth, and lifelikeness, tends to see characters as mimetic of persons, this book invents new critical concepts to account for non-mimetic forms of characterization. These spectral forms bring to light the important influence of developments in C19th visual culture, such as the lithography and caricature of Daumier and J.J. Grandville. The spectrality of novelistic characters developed here paves the way for a new understanding of fictional characters in general.
Research Interests: Victorian Studies, Illustration, Victorian Literature, Slavoj Žižek, Lacanian theory, and 14 moreHauntology, Portraiture, Jacques Derrida, Psychoanalysis And Literature, 19th Century British (Literature), The uncanny, Psychoanalytic Theory, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Haunting and Spectrality, Marxist Literary Theory, Realism, Charles Dickens, Dickens, and Victorian era
Engaging Lacanian theory with recent work in New Materialism and Object Oriented Ontology, this paper explores Blade Runner 2049’s anxiety over technological birth as an expression of the anxiety-point of the capitalocene. That is, as New... more
Engaging Lacanian theory with recent work in New Materialism and Object Oriented Ontology, this paper explores Blade Runner 2049’s anxiety over technological birth as an expression of the anxiety-point of the capitalocene. That is, as New Materialism’s “flat ontology” that equates subjects and objects demonstrates, objects have taken on a more ambiguous and uncanny status in our modern era of the capitalocene (or anthropocene), when humans and their environment are more “intertwined.” This paper therefore interprets New Materialism as a symptom of the capitalocene and uses the psychoanalytic concept of the uncanny to interpret Blade Runner 2049 as an expression of capitalist power struggle and the antagonisms that define it in an age environmental collapse.
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In his chapter “David Copperfield’s Home Movies,” published in the book collection Dickens on Screen, John Bowen illustrates “how David Copperfield narrates scenes of memory in quasi-filmic ways, and how these ways are implicated in... more
In his chapter “David Copperfield’s Home Movies,” published in the book collection Dickens on Screen, John Bowen illustrates “how David Copperfield narrates scenes of memory in quasi-filmic ways, and how these ways are implicated in questions of male sexual identity, which it explores through various kinds of fetishism, voyeurism, sadism, and sexual transgression” (29). This paper takes Bowen’s essay as an invitation to explore another, more playful side of filmic/novelistic gender-construction, in part by reading the novel David Copperfield retrospectively via a film on which it had, I believe, a special influence: Neil Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto, based on the novel by Patrick McCabe. Jordan’s film, I will argue, both draws upon this already inherently filmic/novelistic play with gender in David Copperfield and also engages it in “queer interpretation and enquiry” in such a way as potentially to revise the way we read gender constitution in the Victorian novel.
Research Interests: Irish Studies, Gender Studies, Portraits, Victorian Studies, Film Studies, and 50 moreFilm Theory, Nineteenth Century Studies, Queer Theory, Literature and cinema, Deconstruction, Gender and Sexuality, Lacan, Victorian Literature, Literary Theory, Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, Lacanian theory, Portraiture, Queer Theory (Literature), Victorian studies (Literature), Julia Kristeva, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Slavoj Zizek, Psychoanalytic Film Theory, Psychoanalysis And Literature, 19th Century British novel, Zizek, Victorian novel, Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, The uncanny, Psychoanalytic Theory, Queer Cinema, Lacanian Theory (Culture), Lacanian psychoanalysis, Cinema Studies, Charles Dickens, Psychoanalysis and Film, Neil Jordan, Film and Literature, Psychoanalytical Criticism, Cinema and Media Studies, Characterization, Literature and Film, Jaques Derrida, Lacanian psychoanalysis and film, Uncanny, Lacan and cinema, Jaques Lacan, Slavoj Zizek Film Theory, The Gaze, British Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, Jacques Lacan and Film, David Copperfield, and Rosa Dartle (David Copperfield)
What happens to a culture in which the death drive has been totally repressed and turned into a narcissistic desire to consume? Alexander Bove’s response to A. Kiarina Kordela’s first book, $urplus: Spinoza, Lacan (2007), puts ethics,... more
What happens to a culture in which the death drive has been totally repressed and turned into a narcissistic desire to consume? Alexander Bove’s response to A. Kiarina Kordela’s first book, $urplus: Spinoza, Lacan (2007), puts ethics, psychoanalysis, Marxism, and biopolitics in conversation with each other. Drawing out a gap in Kordela’s logic, Bove concludes that the insertion Levinas’s concept of the face allows us to conceptualize the role of the death drive in ethics in late capitalism. (Jen Hedler Phillis)
Research Interests: Ontology, Ethics, Psychosis, Marxism, Posthumanism, and 46 moreCultural Theory, Post-Marxism, Jacques Lacan, Émmanuel Lévinas, Sigmund Freud, Lacanian theory, Capitalism, Critical Discourse Analysis, Marxist theory, Ethical Theory, Neoliberalism, The Other, Levinas, Freud and Lacan, Biopolitics, Environmental Humanities, Spinoza, Karl Marx, Psychoanalytic Theory, Lacanian Theory (Culture), Lacanian psychoanalysis, Otherness, Alterity, Crtitical Theory, Death Drive, Anthropocene, The Real, Commodity Fetishism, Jouissance, Surplus Value, Marxist Literary Criticism, Pscychoanalysis, Stiegler, Berhard Steigler, Marxist Theory, Jaques Lacan, The Gaze, Enjoyment/jouissance, Freud, Capitalocene, Letter and jouissance, Bernard Steigler, The Symbolic the Imaginary and the Real, Real Symbolic Imaginary, biopolitical criticism , and Telemorphosis
From: ELH Volume 74, Number 3, Fall 2007 (pp. 655-679). On portraits in the Victorian novel, mimesis and caricature, Lacanian theory and characterization.
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Visual Studies, Portraits, Victorian Studies, Mimesis, and 32 moreVictorian Literature, Jane Austen, Jacques Lacan, Lacanian theory, Portraiture, Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Freud and Lacan, Psychoanalysis And Literature, 19th Century British novel, Dreams, Victorian novel, Psychoanalytic Criticism, Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, The uncanny, Interiority, Caricature, Marxist Literary Theory, G.K. Chesterton, Realism, Charles Dickens, Bourgeoisie, Victorian Literature and Culture, Repetition, Characterization, Dreams and Literature, Nineteenth Century novel, Jaques Lacan, David Copperfield, 19th Century Novel, Dream-Representations, Counter Representation, and Rosa Dartle (David Copperfield)
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Engaging Lacanian theory with recent work in New Materialism and Object Oriented Ontology, this paper explores Blade Runner 2049’s anxiety over technological birth as an expression of the anxiety-point of the capitalocene. That is, as New... more
Engaging Lacanian theory with recent work in New Materialism and Object Oriented Ontology, this paper explores Blade Runner 2049’s anxiety over technological birth as an expression of the anxiety-point of the capitalocene. That is, as New Materialism’s “flat ontology” that equates subjects and objects demonstrates, objects have taken on a more ambiguous and uncanny status in our modern era of the capitalocene (or anthropocene), when humans and their environment are more “intertwined.” This paper therefore interprets New Materialism as a symptom of the capitalocene and uses the psychoanalytic concept of the uncanny to interpret Blade Runner 2049 as an expression of capitalist power struggle and the antagonisms that define it in an age environmental collapse.
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This is a link to my film theory podcast with Thomas Radke. Each week we pair one film with one text to inspire a critical discussion and a fun conversation--ex. They Live w/ Capitalist Realism, (Jordan Peele's) Us w/ Capitalism and... more
This is a link to my film theory podcast with Thomas Radke. Each week we pair one film with one text to inspire a critical discussion and a fun conversation--ex. They Live w/ Capitalist Realism, (Jordan Peele's) Us w/ Capitalism and Desire, etc.... Hope you listen and enjoy
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The V21 Collations: Book Forum welcomes Alex Bove, Racheal Fest and Nathan Hensley in conversation about Bruce Robbins’s most recent publication The Beneficiary (Duke, 2017). (See link for full forum)
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Book review of Tom Cohen's collection, Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change on Open Humanities Press
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Syllabus: ENGW 180 "Art in the Anthropocene: Extraterrestrial Perspectives." This is a second version of the writing/research course that centers on representations of the Anthropocene and creative and theoretical approaches to climate... more
Syllabus: ENGW 180 "Art in the Anthropocene: Extraterrestrial Perspectives." This is a second version of the writing/research course that centers on representations of the Anthropocene and creative and theoretical approaches to climate change. (updated 2019)
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Syllabus: ENGL 201 03 "Art in the Anthropocene: Extraterrestrial Perspectives." This is a rhetoric / composition course that centers on representations of the Anthropocene and creative and theoretical approaches to climate change.