Research

My main research areas are twentieth-century and contemporary literature, including especially modernism; cognitive science and narrative theory; and film and new media studies.

I am currently working on three book projects. The first and nearest to completion is Lost Time: Temporal Imagination in Interwar British Culture. In it, I discuss temporal distortion, messianic time, and mediaevalism as three British cultural reactions to the rapidly changing historical conditions of the interwar period. “Nationalism and Re-enchantment in John Cowper Powys’s A Glastonbury Romance,” published in the Powys Journal, and the forthcoming “Wyndham Lewis’s The Childermass and National Crisis” are two essays derived from this work. (I have also reviewed [Muse] Jed Esty’s A Shrinking Island, one book that has influenced my thinking about this project.)

The second project is tentatively entitled Narrative and Mind: Cognitive Science and Narrative Theory. I explore the consequences of the idea that narrative is a mental property analogous to language. One chapter examines the idea that the narrative property is a perfect, optimal, or complete system of representation. Another discusses the paradoxes and puzzles of fictionalism and mental representation. I argue that these concepts derived from cognitive science reveal new insights into the traditional sociological problems of literary criticism, especially how the sole artist can represent the whole of social reality. Related work includes a review essay on David Herman’s Story Logic and a brief review (Muse) of Rukmini Nair’s Narrative Gravity.

As an extension of my interest in mental representation in literature, I am also writing an as-yet-untitled book about the social discourse surrounding intelligence. I am particularly interested in the utopian dimensions of intelligence augmentation. Contemporary transhumanism, the sociology of the “genius,” and the problem of outsider science and art in an age of pyramidical advancement are three of the topics I consider in this project. Of equal interest is the problem of how varying levels of intelligence are represented fictionally. How do authors create characters more or less intelligent than themselves? And what do these narrative choices reveal about the social construction of intelligence at different historical moments? Texts I consider here include Olaf Stapledon’s Odd John, Stanislaw Lem’s “Golem XIV,” and Errol Morris’s interview series First Person.

Other work includes an essay on Shane Carruth’s time-travel film Primer and a note on the word “luculus” in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.