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Henry Veggian

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, English and Comparative Literature, Associate Professor of Teaching

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As a teacher, I work in my primary field (20th century American Literature), but also instruct courses in contemporary literature, film, genre fiction, literary criticism and American literature from European colonization to the modern era. In addition, I enjoy teaching a number of courses in undergraduate writing as well as advising English majors in the UNC Honors program on their writing, teaching and research. Curriculum and course design are activities I pursue whenever possible; I most recently designed "Literature in a Digital Age" (ENGL 137) for the English Department at UNC.

While my teaching hours are primarily devoted to courses in American Literature and Composition, my scholarly research and writing is occupied with those fields as well as others. Scholarly journals (boundary 2, Modern Fiction Studies, American Studies, Reader and Quaderni d'Italianistica) have published my essays and reviews. Individual essays have also appeared in edited volumes.The University of South Carolina Press published my first monograph about the American writer Don DeLillo, in 2014.

I was raised in and around the editorial offices of Il Progresso Italo-Americano, the historic Italian language newspaper of New York City, and honor that memory by maintaining a steady editorial work of my own. I am an advisory editor for boundary 2 journal and website. I was also Series Editor of the Dialogue Series for Rodopi Editions (Brill)from 2011-2018, during which time I co-edited a volume on Steinbeck's East of Eden and during which time the pres published collections of essays on Marilynne Robinson, J.G. Ballard and Patrick McCabe, to name a few.

In my spare time, I am an outdoors writer, and my work has been published in Wildlife in North Carolina Magazine and Kayak Bass Fishing.
Supervisors: Jonathan Arac, Paul Bove`, Marcia Landy, and Eric Clarke
Address: Chapel Hill, United States

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Books by Henry Veggian

Henry Veggian CV

In Flight: Don DeLillo's The Silence

Ransom Center Magazine, 2020

This is a blog post I wrote for the Ransom Center Magazine (UT Austin), ruminating on DeLillo's l... more

Understanding Don DeLillo

Papers by Henry Veggian

Reflexivity. Critical Themes in the Italian Cultural Tradition: Essays by Members of the Department of Italian at University College London

Quaderni d'Italianistica, Jun 1, 2000

Profane Illuminations

Pynchon's California

Understanding Don DeLillo

Understanding Don DeLillo, 2014

Henry Veggian introduces readers to one of the most influential American writers of the last half... more Henry Veggian introduces readers to one of the most influential American writers of the last half- century. Winner of the National Book Award, American Book Award, and the first Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, Don DeLillo is the author of short stories, screenplays, and fifteen novels, including his breakthrough work White Noise (1985) and Pulitzer Prize finalists Mao II (1992) and Underworld (1998). Veggian traces the evolution of DeLillo's work through the three phases of his career as a fiction writer, from the experimental early novels, through the critically acclaimed works of the mid-1980s and 1990s, into the smaller but newly innovative novels of the last decade. He guides readers to DeLillo's principal concerns - the tension between biography and anonymity, the blurred boundary between fiction and historical narrative, and the importance of literary authorship in opposition to various structures of power - and traces the evolution of his changing narrative techniques. Beginning with a brief biography, an introduction to reading strategies, and a survey of the major concepts and questions concerning DeLillo's work, Veggian proceeds chronologically through his major novels. His discussion summarizes complicated plots, reflects critical responses to the author's work, and explains the literary tools used to fashion his characters, narrators, and events. In the concluding chapter Veggian engages notable examples of DeLillo's other modes, particularly the short stories that reveal important insights into his "modular" working method as well as the evolution of his novels.

East of Eden, 2013

Mercury of the Waves: Modern Cryptology and U.S. Literature

Thomas Pynchon Against the Day

boundary 2, 2008

Anachronisms of Authority: Authorship, Exchange Value, and David Foster Wallace's The Pale King

boundary 2, 2012

The cambridge companion to primo levi

From Philology to Formalism: Edith Rickert, John Matthews Manly, and the Literary/Reformist Beginnings of U.S. Cryptology

I. Two historical veins course through the study of modern military intelligence. The first deriv... more I. Two historical veins course through the study of modern military intelligence. The first derives from an anthropological model of history. The proponents of this school, which includes writers such as the historian David Kahn and the journalist/historian James Bamford, have argued that civilian men and women made the modem military intelligence agencies.1 In the United States, mese women and men (and the primary examples are nearly always William and Elizebeth Friedman) transformed the archaic U.S. military intelligence techniques that had stagnated since the Civil War; they did so primarily by lifting cryptology (the science of codes and ciphers) out from its amateur literary residence and adapting it to quantified methods and mechanized instruments of new military and industrial institutions. In both their rhetorical figures and their scientific models, the prime movers in these historical works are always human beings. A second school of thought favors the anonymous engineerin...

Bio-Politics and the Institution of Literature: An Essay on East of Eden, its Critics and its Time

8. The Poetry of Exile: An Interview with Diego Bastianutti

From Philology to Formalism: Edith Rickert, John Matthews Manly, and the Literary/Reformist Beginnings of U.S. Cryptology

Reader, Apr 1, 2006

A Tragedy Revealed: The Story of the Italian Population from Istria, Dalmatia, and Venezia-Giulia, 1943-1956

Quaderni D Italianistica, 2006

In one of the largely forgotten chapters of twentieth-century European history, Tito's commu... more

Il cuore oltre l'Oceano

From Philology to Formalism

Reader: Essays in reader-Oriented Theory, 2006

This early essay examines the work of two early 20th century intellectuals from the University of... more This early essay examines the work of two early 20th century intellectuals from the University of Chicago. The first was professor and scholar Edith Rickert and the second was John Matthews Manly, a renowned Chaucer scholar and president of the MLA. Both had worked in the first modern "Black Chamber", an early Signal Intelligence branch of the U.S. Department of War, and both had ties to the cryptologists of the Riverbank Laboratories in Illinois. This essay hypothesizes that Rickert and Manly attempted to translate the intellectual practices of cryptology to literary methods, anticipating in some ways the turn to formalist reading practices in Anglo-American literary criticism.

J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual (review)

MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 2008

Barack Obama's Literary Legacy: Readings of Dreams From My Father

by Henry Veggian, Donald Pease, Lee Konstantinou, John Lowney, and James Fitzmaurice

President Barack Obama's Dreams of My Father (1995) and The Audacity of Hope (2006) have received... more President Barack Obama's Dreams of My Father (1995) and The Audacity of Hope (2006) have received positive and extensive critical attention from both professional reviewers and University scholars. While literary intellectuals have praised Obama's memoirs for the style in which he composed them, social scientists and partisan political analysts have thus far generally monopolized discussion of President Obama's writings. Yet there has been a recent surge of interest in the literary merits of Obama's writings. Our volume understands "literary" to indicate a host of a priori relationships that successful, artful writing brings to the surface of a written work. These are instantiated in narrative form, thereby revealing what Edward W. Said famously defined as the "worldliness" of the literary object. In the case of President Obama's writings, and Dreams from My Father in particular, those relationships are evident in the author's negotiation of literary tradition, rhetorical modes and historical narratives. By positioning the "literary" at this vantage, at the point where writing and the world converge, the volume's contributors assert the indispensable, and urgent, import of understanding the President not only in political terms, but, more importantly, in literary terms that place him within a long tradition of American literary-political authorship.

Henry Veggian CV

In Flight: Don DeLillo's The Silence

Ransom Center Magazine, 2020

This is a blog post I wrote for the Ransom Center Magazine (UT Austin), ruminating on DeLillo's l... more

Understanding Don DeLillo

Reflexivity. Critical Themes in the Italian Cultural Tradition: Essays by Members of the Department of Italian at University College London

Quaderni d'Italianistica, Jun 1, 2000

Profane Illuminations

Pynchon's California

Understanding Don DeLillo

Understanding Don DeLillo, 2014

Henry Veggian introduces readers to one of the most influential American writers of the last half... more Henry Veggian introduces readers to one of the most influential American writers of the last half- century. Winner of the National Book Award, American Book Award, and the first Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, Don DeLillo is the author of short stories, screenplays, and fifteen novels, including his breakthrough work White Noise (1985) and Pulitzer Prize finalists Mao II (1992) and Underworld (1998). Veggian traces the evolution of DeLillo's work through the three phases of his career as a fiction writer, from the experimental early novels, through the critically acclaimed works of the mid-1980s and 1990s, into the smaller but newly innovative novels of the last decade. He guides readers to DeLillo's principal concerns - the tension between biography and anonymity, the blurred boundary between fiction and historical narrative, and the importance of literary authorship in opposition to various structures of power - and traces the evolution of his changing narrative techniques. Beginning with a brief biography, an introduction to reading strategies, and a survey of the major concepts and questions concerning DeLillo's work, Veggian proceeds chronologically through his major novels. His discussion summarizes complicated plots, reflects critical responses to the author's work, and explains the literary tools used to fashion his characters, narrators, and events. In the concluding chapter Veggian engages notable examples of DeLillo's other modes, particularly the short stories that reveal important insights into his "modular" working method as well as the evolution of his novels.

East of Eden, 2013

Mercury of the Waves: Modern Cryptology and U.S. Literature

Thomas Pynchon Against the Day

boundary 2, 2008

Anachronisms of Authority: Authorship, Exchange Value, and David Foster Wallace's The Pale King

boundary 2, 2012

The cambridge companion to primo levi

From Philology to Formalism: Edith Rickert, John Matthews Manly, and the Literary/Reformist Beginnings of U.S. Cryptology

I. Two historical veins course through the study of modern military intelligence. The first deriv... more I. Two historical veins course through the study of modern military intelligence. The first derives from an anthropological model of history. The proponents of this school, which includes writers such as the historian David Kahn and the journalist/historian James Bamford, have argued that civilian men and women made the modem military intelligence agencies.1 In the United States, mese women and men (and the primary examples are nearly always William and Elizebeth Friedman) transformed the archaic U.S. military intelligence techniques that had stagnated since the Civil War; they did so primarily by lifting cryptology (the science of codes and ciphers) out from its amateur literary residence and adapting it to quantified methods and mechanized instruments of new military and industrial institutions. In both their rhetorical figures and their scientific models, the prime movers in these historical works are always human beings. A second school of thought favors the anonymous engineerin...

Bio-Politics and the Institution of Literature: An Essay on East of Eden, its Critics and its Time

8. The Poetry of Exile: An Interview with Diego Bastianutti

From Philology to Formalism: Edith Rickert, John Matthews Manly, and the Literary/Reformist Beginnings of U.S. Cryptology

Reader, Apr 1, 2006

A Tragedy Revealed: The Story of the Italian Population from Istria, Dalmatia, and Venezia-Giulia, 1943-1956

Quaderni D Italianistica, 2006

In one of the largely forgotten chapters of twentieth-century European history, Tito's commu... more

Il cuore oltre l'Oceano

From Philology to Formalism

Reader: Essays in reader-Oriented Theory, 2006

This early essay examines the work of two early 20th century intellectuals from the University of... more This early essay examines the work of two early 20th century intellectuals from the University of Chicago. The first was professor and scholar Edith Rickert and the second was John Matthews Manly, a renowned Chaucer scholar and president of the MLA. Both had worked in the first modern "Black Chamber", an early Signal Intelligence branch of the U.S. Department of War, and both had ties to the cryptologists of the Riverbank Laboratories in Illinois. This essay hypothesizes that Rickert and Manly attempted to translate the intellectual practices of cryptology to literary methods, anticipating in some ways the turn to formalist reading practices in Anglo-American literary criticism.

J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual (review)

MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 2008

Barack Obama's Literary Legacy: Readings of Dreams From My Father

by Henry Veggian, Donald Pease, Lee Konstantinou, John Lowney, and James Fitzmaurice

President Barack Obama's Dreams of My Father (1995) and The Audacity of Hope (2006) have received... more President Barack Obama's Dreams of My Father (1995) and The Audacity of Hope (2006) have received positive and extensive critical attention from both professional reviewers and University scholars. While literary intellectuals have praised Obama's memoirs for the style in which he composed them, social scientists and partisan political analysts have thus far generally monopolized discussion of President Obama's writings. Yet there has been a recent surge of interest in the literary merits of Obama's writings. Our volume understands "literary" to indicate a host of a priori relationships that successful, artful writing brings to the surface of a written work. These are instantiated in narrative form, thereby revealing what Edward W. Said famously defined as the "worldliness" of the literary object. In the case of President Obama's writings, and Dreams from My Father in particular, those relationships are evident in the author's negotiation of literary tradition, rhetorical modes and historical narratives. By positioning the "literary" at this vantage, at the point where writing and the world converge, the volume's contributors assert the indispensable, and urgent, import of understanding the President not only in political terms, but, more importantly, in literary terms that place him within a long tradition of American literary-political authorship.

Adjunct Professors and the Myth of Prestige

A reflective essay on adjunct labor, U.S. higher ed, and William Carlos Williams' "Paterson." O... more

Italian Journalism in America Oggi

This is a selection of articles I published in the Italian-American newspaper America Oggi over t... more This is a selection of articles I published in the Italian-American newspaper America Oggi over the course of roughly one decade (1997-2006). Articles of literary note include an interview with Bunny Kuiken, granddaughter of Pietro Botto, regarding the Botto House and the National Labor Museum, and an article about the Italian-American novelist Helen Barolini.

Profane Illuminations: Postmodernism, Realism and the Holytail Marijuana Crop in Thomas Pynchon's Vineland

Review of The Secret of Bald Island (El Boletin 195, Sept 2023)

El Boletin, 2023

This review was published in El Boletin, the journal published by the Julian-Dalmatian Community ... more

Bibliotaphy 1: Thoughts on an edition of Kathy Acker’s novels

This essay is the first in a series on the material history of print culture in the present time.... more

A Note on the Type, or Two American Editions of Michel Houellebecq

This essay is second in a series that posits that print culture is embedded in persistent and vit... more

A Review of Ethnic Modernism by Werner Sollors

Book Review: The Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi

Understanding American Literature

Professor Jennifer Larson and Professor Henry Veggian read from their books for the Understanding... more Professor Jennifer Larson and Professor Henry Veggian read from their books for the Understanding American Literature series at the Bulls Head Bookstore on November 19, 2014, at 3:30 pm. Professor Jennifer Larson reads from Understanding Suzan-Lori Parks (1:00), and Professor Veggian reads from Understanding Don DeLillo (14:20). Both professors answer questions at the end of the presentation (42:30).

Two Film Reviews: Guillermo del Toro and Ang Lee

This file contains two film reviews I wrote during the early 1990's for an film industry newspape... more This file contains two film reviews I wrote during the early 1990's for an film industry newspaper that no longer exists (its name was NY/LA Casting). While I was not the most inventive writer at that time in my career, I post them because they represent a prescient view of early films by two young foreign directors who would later achieve great influence and success, and thus the reviews have some historical value with regards to first notices of the two cinematic works. A third review, of Spike Lee's Crooklyn, has been lost.