Xander Ryan
I am currently working on two digital editions of modernist texts, employed on both as a Postdoctoral Research Assistant. The first is an edition of Djuna Barnes’s New York journalism, published 1913 to 1923. This project is led by Alex Goody (Oxford Brookes University). The second is an edition of Samuel Beckett’s shorter prose (1954-76) in French and English, which will form a new module of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project. This work is directed by Mark Nixon (University of Reading) and Dirk Van Hulle (University of Oxford). Both projects involve assembling texts from across several archives, transcribing them with textual notes and scholarly annotations, and marking them up using the Text Encoding Initiative (a form of XML) so they can be published online.
I have taught as a sessional lecturer in the Department of English Literature, University of Reading, leading seminars on the undergraduate module ‘Genre and Context: Victorian Novel’ and at masters level on Beckett’s drama, fiction, and letters. At the University of Bristol, I taught on the undergraduate modules ‘Literature 1740-1900’, ‘Victorian Fiction: Art and Ideas in the Marketplace’, and ‘The Spanish Civil War in British and American Writing’.
My PhD thesis, defended April 2021, was entitled ‘Modernist Letters: The Epistolary Selves of Flaubert, Joyce, and Beckett’. By reading the correspondence of these three writers in connection to their fiction and drama, I argue for the integral role played by letters and letter writing within their experimental representations of self and subjectivity. I was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (SWW DTP) and supervised by Susan Harrow (Department of French, Bristol) and Mark Nixon.
Miscellaneous activities: three-month placement with Prisoners' Education Trust, writing short courses (distance learning) for prisoner learners in England and Wales (2019-2020); catalogued the Daiken Collection for the Beckett International Foundation Archive (2019); co-organised the Wake & Wine Reading Group at the University of Reading (2016-2019); two months as a Scholar at the Zürich James Joyce Foundation (2017); co-organised the Editing Modernist Letters Workshop at the University of Reading (November 2017).
My research interests include literary modernism, epistolarity, Irish studies, Anglophone and Francophone fiction, narrative form, prison literature, textual editing, TEI and digital editions, and the complex interaction between literature and other forms of cultural narrative and modes of expression.
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PhD, University of Reading (2021)
MA in English Literary Studies, University of York (2015)
BA in English Language and Literature, University of Oxford (2013)
I have taught as a sessional lecturer in the Department of English Literature, University of Reading, leading seminars on the undergraduate module ‘Genre and Context: Victorian Novel’ and at masters level on Beckett’s drama, fiction, and letters. At the University of Bristol, I taught on the undergraduate modules ‘Literature 1740-1900’, ‘Victorian Fiction: Art and Ideas in the Marketplace’, and ‘The Spanish Civil War in British and American Writing’.
My PhD thesis, defended April 2021, was entitled ‘Modernist Letters: The Epistolary Selves of Flaubert, Joyce, and Beckett’. By reading the correspondence of these three writers in connection to their fiction and drama, I argue for the integral role played by letters and letter writing within their experimental representations of self and subjectivity. I was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (SWW DTP) and supervised by Susan Harrow (Department of French, Bristol) and Mark Nixon.
Miscellaneous activities: three-month placement with Prisoners' Education Trust, writing short courses (distance learning) for prisoner learners in England and Wales (2019-2020); catalogued the Daiken Collection for the Beckett International Foundation Archive (2019); co-organised the Wake & Wine Reading Group at the University of Reading (2016-2019); two months as a Scholar at the Zürich James Joyce Foundation (2017); co-organised the Editing Modernist Letters Workshop at the University of Reading (November 2017).
My research interests include literary modernism, epistolarity, Irish studies, Anglophone and Francophone fiction, narrative form, prison literature, textual editing, TEI and digital editions, and the complex interaction between literature and other forms of cultural narrative and modes of expression.
* * * * *
PhD, University of Reading (2021)
MA in English Literary Studies, University of York (2015)
BA in English Language and Literature, University of Oxford (2013)
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Papers by Xander Ryan
Published in the James Joyce Quarterly 57: 1-2 (2019-2020), 'The Art of Joyce', guest-edited by Scarlett Baron, Ronan Crowley, and Dirk Van Hulle.
Abstract:
This article gives a close-reading of Beckett's letters to Barbara Bray, focusing on the years between their first meeting in 1956 and Bray's move to Paris in May 1961. In this correspondence Beckett grappled with the difficulties of "human conversation", as the letters raised questions regarding the construction of the self in dialogue and the (in)ability of language to bridge distance between two individuals. I propose that Happy Days, written between October 1960 and June 1961, emerged from this fraught epistolary process, and that the play can be read as a dramatization of the letter writer's address to their absent interlocutor. The connection is supported by Beckett's use of draft fragments of the play-text within the letter exchange itself.
Book Reviews by Xander Ryan
Flynn’s James Joyce and the Matter of Paris is the first book-length study
of his relationship to the city and its presence in his fiction, a welcome intervention
in Joyce studies and wider scholarship on modernist literature and urban
modernity. Joyce moved to Paris in December 1902, aged twenty and without
having yet written much to justify his considerable self-confidence. [...]
Copyright © 2022 Johns Hopkins University Press. This article first appeared in Partial Answers, Volume 20, Issue 2, June, 2022, pages 378-382.
https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2022.0023
Published in the James Joyce Quarterly 57: 1-2 (2019-2020), 'The Art of Joyce', guest-edited by Scarlett Baron, Ronan Crowley, and Dirk Van Hulle.
Abstract:
This article gives a close-reading of Beckett's letters to Barbara Bray, focusing on the years between their first meeting in 1956 and Bray's move to Paris in May 1961. In this correspondence Beckett grappled with the difficulties of "human conversation", as the letters raised questions regarding the construction of the self in dialogue and the (in)ability of language to bridge distance between two individuals. I propose that Happy Days, written between October 1960 and June 1961, emerged from this fraught epistolary process, and that the play can be read as a dramatization of the letter writer's address to their absent interlocutor. The connection is supported by Beckett's use of draft fragments of the play-text within the letter exchange itself.
Flynn’s James Joyce and the Matter of Paris is the first book-length study
of his relationship to the city and its presence in his fiction, a welcome intervention
in Joyce studies and wider scholarship on modernist literature and urban
modernity. Joyce moved to Paris in December 1902, aged twenty and without
having yet written much to justify his considerable self-confidence. [...]
Copyright © 2022 Johns Hopkins University Press. This article first appeared in Partial Answers, Volume 20, Issue 2, June, 2022, pages 378-382.
https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2022.0023