Continuing Teacher, Centre for English Teaching, University of Sydney
Adjunct Associate Lecturer, Centre for Modernism Studies in Australia, University of New South Wales, January 2014 to July 2015
Visiting Research Fellow, Department of English, University of Sydney, June 2012 to December 2012
Supervisor (Tutor) in English Literature, Queens' College and other University of Cambridge colleges, October 2009 to February 2012 and October 2006 to June 2007
This paper measures the consequences of accepting patient narratives of environmental hypersensit... more This paper measures the consequences of accepting patient narratives of environmental hypersensitivity: that is, of reading such narratives as surfaces rather than symptomatically.
This article considers differences between Ezra Pound's program for reading, as sketched in How t... more This article considers differences between Ezra Pound's program for reading, as sketched in How to Read (1931) and ABC of Reading (1934), and F. R. Leavis's institutional pedagogy as it was being developed in the early 1930s. I identify a difference between the use of quotation to illustrate the flavor of a work being discussed and quotation used as evidence in an argument about a work, and I locate Pound's use of quotation and excerpts as generally illustrative, even in the earlier context of the Little Review. But in the Little Review, at the same time, I note a shift in some reviews towards a more evidentiary style of quotation. F. R. Leavis's response to Pound's How to Read (1931) -- How to Teach Reading (1932) -- took issue with the eclecticism of Pound's reading lists. Pound's program for reading resonates with the version of modernism he helped to construct, but it differed from norms being established in the teaching of literary criticism in university settings, and Leavis's more evidentiary use of quotation is more recognizable to criticism now.
Shattered Objects: Djuna Barnes's Modernism (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019)
Shattered Objects: Djuna Barnes's Modernism is part of the Refiguring Modernism series with Penns... more Shattered Objects: Djuna Barnes's Modernism is part of the Refiguring Modernism series with Pennsylvania State University Press. It is the first collection of essays on Barnes since 1993. The book responds to recent expansions of literary modernism by reading Barnes’s full oeuvre and her artworks and by considering Barnes and modernism in relation to each other. As well as the editors, the contributors are Daniela Caselli, Bruce Gardiner, Alex Goody, Melissa Hardie, Tyrus Miller, Drew Milne, Rachel Potter, Julie Taylor, and Joanne Winning. Peter Nicholls has contributed an afterword.
Barnes wrote in a letter, "there is always more surface to a shattered object than a whole object": the surfaces of Barnes’s literary and art objects reflect in different ways in the chapters here. Essays consider Barnes’s work in relation to mass media; the promotion, publication, and reception of modernism; modernists as critics; wit; authorship, legitimacy, and genealogy; anachronism; late style; the reception of metaphysical poetry; the queer grotesque; the representation of humans, outcasts, animals, and selves;sovereignty; borders of nation and language; the book as object in film remediations; the affects involved in reading and criticism; and structures of queer community. The introduction surveys the relationship between Barnes criticism and criticism of modernist writing from the early twentieth century to the present, and the afterword reads Barnes’s style against Eliot’s modernism. Shattered Objects introduces a Barnes who is full of possibility for current and future work in the literary critical discourses of the twenty-first century.
Shattered Objects: Djuna Barnes's Modernism (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019)
This article considers how concepts of good modern writing changed between A Night Among the Hors... more This article considers how concepts of good modern writing changed between A Night Among the Horses (1929) and its revised and abridged version, Spillway (1962). The article reads selected prose from each book side by side to identify different concepts of prose fiction operating in the different versions of the book. Using new material from the Barnes archive, I summarize the revision process, which has not previously been summarized. I make a claim for the value of the shattered object, the earlier stories, to set against the polished wholeness of their revised versions.
Shattered Objects: Djuna Barnes's Modernism (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019)
This bibliography of Barnes's works provides a user's guide to the oeuvre. I list the main editio... more This bibliography of Barnes's works provides a user's guide to the oeuvre. I list the main editions of each title and the main features of those editions. The list provides a scholarly guide to editions and a history of reception and mediation of Barnes's work. As well as primary material published in book form in English, the bibliography lists details of existing bibliographies; previously uncataloged journalism by Barnes; archival and manuscript material; published correspondence; and translations of Nightwood into twenty languages.
This article addresses ways in which Adolphe 1920 moves beyond contemporary practices of writing ... more This article addresses ways in which Adolphe 1920 moves beyond contemporary practices of writing and addresses the issue of taste in the reception of Rodker’s writing amongst his contemporaries.
This book responds to the New Modernist Studies by asking how an expanded canon of modernist lite... more This book responds to the New Modernist Studies by asking how an expanded canon of modernist literature might change what it means to read modernist fiction closely and to value it. I indicate major reorientations of ideas about reading around 1930, and I look at how strategies of reading that were developed in the 1950s for reading modernist fiction tended to work best for a narrow canon. By looking at how Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, John Rodker's Adolphe1920, and Mina Loy's Insel resist strategies of reading developed for reading more familiar modernists, I make a claim for the value of modernist fiction that falls outside that narrow canon. I find other ways of reading these novels critically more interesting, and I make the claim for close reading not as a tool for maintaining a narrowed canon, but as itself a site of disciplinary change. This book offers insights and tools that may be useful for reading other new modernist novels written further from the cultural, geographical, and temporal centers of a familiar modernism.
Shattered Objects: Djuna Barnes's Modernism is part of the Refiguring Modernism series with Penns... more Shattered Objects: Djuna Barnes's Modernism is part of the Refiguring Modernism series with Pennsylvania State University Press. It is the first collection of essays on Barnes since 1993. The book responds to recent expansions of literary modernism by reading Barnes’s full oeuvre and her artworks and by considering Barnes and modernism in relation to each other. As well as the editors, the contributors are Daniela Caselli, Bruce Gardiner, Alex Goody, Melissa Hardie, Tyrus Miller, Drew Milne, Rachel Potter, Julie Taylor, and Joanne Winning. Peter Nicholls has contributed an afterword.
Barnes wrote in a letter, "there is always more surface to a shattered object than a whole object": the surfaces of Barnes’s literary and art objects reflect in different ways in the chapters here. Essays consider Barnes’s work in relation to mass media; the promotion, publication, and reception of modernism; modernists as critics; wit; authorship, legitimacy, and genealogy; anachronism; late style; the reception of metaphysical poetry; the queer grotesque; the representation of humans, outcasts, animals, and selves;sovereignty; borders of nation and language; the book as object in film remediations; the affects involved in reading and criticism; and structures of queer community. The introduction surveys the relationship between Barnes criticism and criticism of modernist writing from the early twentieth century to the present, and the afterword reads Barnes’s style against Eliot’s modernism. Shattered Objects introduces a Barnes who is full of possibility for current and future work in the literary critical discourses of the twenty-first century.
This paper measures the consequences of accepting patient narratives of environmental hypersensit... more This paper measures the consequences of accepting patient narratives of environmental hypersensitivity: that is, of reading such narratives as surfaces rather than symptomatically.
This article considers differences between Ezra Pound's program for reading, as sketched in How t... more This article considers differences between Ezra Pound's program for reading, as sketched in How to Read (1931) and ABC of Reading (1934), and F. R. Leavis's institutional pedagogy as it was being developed in the early 1930s. I identify a difference between the use of quotation to illustrate the flavor of a work being discussed and quotation used as evidence in an argument about a work, and I locate Pound's use of quotation and excerpts as generally illustrative, even in the earlier context of the Little Review. But in the Little Review, at the same time, I note a shift in some reviews towards a more evidentiary style of quotation. F. R. Leavis's response to Pound's How to Read (1931) -- How to Teach Reading (1932) -- took issue with the eclecticism of Pound's reading lists. Pound's program for reading resonates with the version of modernism he helped to construct, but it differed from norms being established in the teaching of literary criticism in university settings, and Leavis's more evidentiary use of quotation is more recognizable to criticism now.
Shattered Objects: Djuna Barnes's Modernism (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019)
Shattered Objects: Djuna Barnes's Modernism is part of the Refiguring Modernism series with Penns... more Shattered Objects: Djuna Barnes's Modernism is part of the Refiguring Modernism series with Pennsylvania State University Press. It is the first collection of essays on Barnes since 1993. The book responds to recent expansions of literary modernism by reading Barnes’s full oeuvre and her artworks and by considering Barnes and modernism in relation to each other. As well as the editors, the contributors are Daniela Caselli, Bruce Gardiner, Alex Goody, Melissa Hardie, Tyrus Miller, Drew Milne, Rachel Potter, Julie Taylor, and Joanne Winning. Peter Nicholls has contributed an afterword.
Barnes wrote in a letter, "there is always more surface to a shattered object than a whole object": the surfaces of Barnes’s literary and art objects reflect in different ways in the chapters here. Essays consider Barnes’s work in relation to mass media; the promotion, publication, and reception of modernism; modernists as critics; wit; authorship, legitimacy, and genealogy; anachronism; late style; the reception of metaphysical poetry; the queer grotesque; the representation of humans, outcasts, animals, and selves;sovereignty; borders of nation and language; the book as object in film remediations; the affects involved in reading and criticism; and structures of queer community. The introduction surveys the relationship between Barnes criticism and criticism of modernist writing from the early twentieth century to the present, and the afterword reads Barnes’s style against Eliot’s modernism. Shattered Objects introduces a Barnes who is full of possibility for current and future work in the literary critical discourses of the twenty-first century.
Shattered Objects: Djuna Barnes's Modernism (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019)
This article considers how concepts of good modern writing changed between A Night Among the Hors... more This article considers how concepts of good modern writing changed between A Night Among the Horses (1929) and its revised and abridged version, Spillway (1962). The article reads selected prose from each book side by side to identify different concepts of prose fiction operating in the different versions of the book. Using new material from the Barnes archive, I summarize the revision process, which has not previously been summarized. I make a claim for the value of the shattered object, the earlier stories, to set against the polished wholeness of their revised versions.
Shattered Objects: Djuna Barnes's Modernism (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019)
This bibliography of Barnes's works provides a user's guide to the oeuvre. I list the main editio... more This bibliography of Barnes's works provides a user's guide to the oeuvre. I list the main editions of each title and the main features of those editions. The list provides a scholarly guide to editions and a history of reception and mediation of Barnes's work. As well as primary material published in book form in English, the bibliography lists details of existing bibliographies; previously uncataloged journalism by Barnes; archival and manuscript material; published correspondence; and translations of Nightwood into twenty languages.
This article addresses ways in which Adolphe 1920 moves beyond contemporary practices of writing ... more This article addresses ways in which Adolphe 1920 moves beyond contemporary practices of writing and addresses the issue of taste in the reception of Rodker’s writing amongst his contemporaries.
This book responds to the New Modernist Studies by asking how an expanded canon of modernist lite... more This book responds to the New Modernist Studies by asking how an expanded canon of modernist literature might change what it means to read modernist fiction closely and to value it. I indicate major reorientations of ideas about reading around 1930, and I look at how strategies of reading that were developed in the 1950s for reading modernist fiction tended to work best for a narrow canon. By looking at how Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, John Rodker's Adolphe1920, and Mina Loy's Insel resist strategies of reading developed for reading more familiar modernists, I make a claim for the value of modernist fiction that falls outside that narrow canon. I find other ways of reading these novels critically more interesting, and I make the claim for close reading not as a tool for maintaining a narrowed canon, but as itself a site of disciplinary change. This book offers insights and tools that may be useful for reading other new modernist novels written further from the cultural, geographical, and temporal centers of a familiar modernism.
Shattered Objects: Djuna Barnes's Modernism is part of the Refiguring Modernism series with Penns... more Shattered Objects: Djuna Barnes's Modernism is part of the Refiguring Modernism series with Pennsylvania State University Press. It is the first collection of essays on Barnes since 1993. The book responds to recent expansions of literary modernism by reading Barnes’s full oeuvre and her artworks and by considering Barnes and modernism in relation to each other. As well as the editors, the contributors are Daniela Caselli, Bruce Gardiner, Alex Goody, Melissa Hardie, Tyrus Miller, Drew Milne, Rachel Potter, Julie Taylor, and Joanne Winning. Peter Nicholls has contributed an afterword.
Barnes wrote in a letter, "there is always more surface to a shattered object than a whole object": the surfaces of Barnes’s literary and art objects reflect in different ways in the chapters here. Essays consider Barnes’s work in relation to mass media; the promotion, publication, and reception of modernism; modernists as critics; wit; authorship, legitimacy, and genealogy; anachronism; late style; the reception of metaphysical poetry; the queer grotesque; the representation of humans, outcasts, animals, and selves;sovereignty; borders of nation and language; the book as object in film remediations; the affects involved in reading and criticism; and structures of queer community. The introduction surveys the relationship between Barnes criticism and criticism of modernist writing from the early twentieth century to the present, and the afterword reads Barnes’s style against Eliot’s modernism. Shattered Objects introduces a Barnes who is full of possibility for current and future work in the literary critical discourses of the twenty-first century.
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Barnes wrote in a letter, "there is always more surface to a shattered object than a whole object": the surfaces of Barnes’s literary and art objects reflect in different ways in the chapters here. Essays consider Barnes’s work in relation to mass media; the promotion, publication, and reception of modernism; modernists as critics; wit; authorship, legitimacy, and genealogy; anachronism; late style; the reception of metaphysical poetry; the queer grotesque; the representation of humans, outcasts, animals, and selves;sovereignty; borders of nation and language; the book as object in film remediations; the affects involved in reading and criticism; and structures of queer community. The introduction surveys the relationship between Barnes criticism and criticism of modernist writing from the early twentieth century to the present, and the afterword reads Barnes’s style against Eliot’s modernism. Shattered Objects introduces a Barnes who is full of possibility for current and future work in the literary critical discourses of the twenty-first century.
Barnes wrote in a letter, "there is always more surface to a shattered object than a whole object": the surfaces of Barnes’s literary and art objects reflect in different ways in the chapters here. Essays consider Barnes’s work in relation to mass media; the promotion, publication, and reception of modernism; modernists as critics; wit; authorship, legitimacy, and genealogy; anachronism; late style; the reception of metaphysical poetry; the queer grotesque; the representation of humans, outcasts, animals, and selves;sovereignty; borders of nation and language; the book as object in film remediations; the affects involved in reading and criticism; and structures of queer community. The introduction surveys the relationship between Barnes criticism and criticism of modernist writing from the early twentieth century to the present, and the afterword reads Barnes’s style against Eliot’s modernism. Shattered Objects introduces a Barnes who is full of possibility for current and future work in the literary critical discourses of the twenty-first century.
Barnes wrote in a letter, "there is always more surface to a shattered object than a whole object": the surfaces of Barnes’s literary and art objects reflect in different ways in the chapters here. Essays consider Barnes’s work in relation to mass media; the promotion, publication, and reception of modernism; modernists as critics; wit; authorship, legitimacy, and genealogy; anachronism; late style; the reception of metaphysical poetry; the queer grotesque; the representation of humans, outcasts, animals, and selves;sovereignty; borders of nation and language; the book as object in film remediations; the affects involved in reading and criticism; and structures of queer community. The introduction surveys the relationship between Barnes criticism and criticism of modernist writing from the early twentieth century to the present, and the afterword reads Barnes’s style against Eliot’s modernism. Shattered Objects introduces a Barnes who is full of possibility for current and future work in the literary critical discourses of the twenty-first century.
Barnes wrote in a letter, "there is always more surface to a shattered object than a whole object": the surfaces of Barnes’s literary and art objects reflect in different ways in the chapters here. Essays consider Barnes’s work in relation to mass media; the promotion, publication, and reception of modernism; modernists as critics; wit; authorship, legitimacy, and genealogy; anachronism; late style; the reception of metaphysical poetry; the queer grotesque; the representation of humans, outcasts, animals, and selves;sovereignty; borders of nation and language; the book as object in film remediations; the affects involved in reading and criticism; and structures of queer community. The introduction surveys the relationship between Barnes criticism and criticism of modernist writing from the early twentieth century to the present, and the afterword reads Barnes’s style against Eliot’s modernism. Shattered Objects introduces a Barnes who is full of possibility for current and future work in the literary critical discourses of the twenty-first century.