Previous Research

My first monograph was a study of the work of the American critic Geoffrey Hartman, who operates at the intersection of literary theory, English Romanticism, and Holocaust memory. Apart from my publications in the fields of cultural memory studies and critical theory, I have mainly published on the ethics and politics of (especially Anglophone) contemporary fiction, with a special focus on the question of how contemporary novels implicitly or explicitly rethink the novel tradition, and especially the genre’s historical role in the construction and consolidation of modern forms of subjectivity and community.

Current Research

I am currently writing a monograph on the paradoxical productivity of discourses of the end of the novel in contemporary fiction. The monograph argues that, in some of the most interesting contemporary novels, intimations of the declining cultural importance of the genre serve as an occasion to look beyond the genre’s traditional culturally formative role, and design new forms of affect, agency, and subjectivity. I have also started working on a new project that explores the viability of the notion of biopolitics, which has become an important interdisciplinary tool for grasping the specificity of early twenty-first century life, for an understanding of the dynamics of contemporary literature.

Categories

Literary theory, comparative literature