Alumni

Alumni News:

A new publication from UW Comp Lit PhD program alumni!

Subversive Seduction
Darwin, Sexual Selection, and the Spanish Novel
Travis Landry (Ph.D. 2008)

More information is available here.

Travis Landry is assistant professor of Spanish at Kenyon College.

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News from Katy Masuga (Ph.D. 2007) included the following two new publications:

Henry Miller and How He Got That Way
Feb., Edinburgh University Press (distributed in the U.S. by Columbia University Press)
Identifying six significant writers – Whitman, Dostoevsky, Rimbaud,
Lewis Carroll, Proust and D. H. Lawrence – Katy Masuga explores their
influence on Miller’s work as well as Miller’s retroactive impact on
their writing. She explores four forms of intertextuality in relation to
each ‘ancestral’ author: direct allusions; unconscious style; reverse
influence; and participation of the ancestral author as part of the
story within the text. The study is informed by the theories of Bakhtin,
Barthes and Kristeva on polyvocity and of Blanchot, Wittgenstein and
Deleuze on language games and the indefatigability of writing.

By presenting Miller in intertextual context, he emerges as a noteworthy
modernist writer whose contributions to literature include the struggle
to find a distinctive voice alongside a distinguished lineage of
literary figures.

Key Features

*  Major contribution to rehabilitating an important and often
overlooked twentieth-century writer
*  Places Miller’s work in thought-provoking intertextual relationships
among a diverse range of writers
*  Provides an incisive critical approach to Miller’s writing

The Secret Violence of Henry Miller
April, Camden House Press (imprint of Boydell and Brewer)
Henry Miller is a cult figure in the world of fiction, in part due to
having been banned for obscenity for nearly thirty years. Alongside the
liberating effect of his explicit treatment of sexuality, however,
Miller developed a provocative form of writing that encourages the
reader to question language as a stable communicative tool and to
consider the act of writing as an ongoing mode of creation, always in
motion, perpetually establishing itself and creating meaning through
that very motion. Katy Masuga provides a new reading of Miller that is
alert to the aggressively and self-consciously writerly form of his
work. Critiquing the categorization of Miller into specific literary
genres through an examination of the small body of critical texts on his
oeuvre, Masuga draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of a minor
literature, Blanchot’s “infinite curve,” and Bataille’s theory of
puerile language, while also considering Miller in relation to other
writers, including Proust, Rilke, and William Carlos Williams. She shows
how Miller defies conventional modes of writing, subverting language
from within.

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Alexander Schlutz (Ph.D. 2003) won the International Conference on Romanticism’s Jean-Pierre Barricelli prize for best book published in Romanticism studies in 2009 for Mind’s World. Imagination and Subjectivity from Descartes to Romanticism, published by the University of Washington Press. An interdisciplinary study that reaches from Descartes to the aesthetic and philosophical systems of the Romantic period, Mind’s World demonstrates that modern, rational subjectivity is simultaneously dependent upon, and constructed in opposition to imagination and that the resulting ambivalence about the mental faculty is one of the fundamental conditions of modern models of subjectivity. For more information see the Mind’s World book page at http://www.washington.edu/uwpress/search/books/SCHIMA.html

Alexander Schlutz is now associate professor of English at John Jay College, CUNY.

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Congratulations to Fabrizio Cilento (Ph.D. 2010) one of our newest Ph.D. graduates! His dissertation project titled: “An Investigative Cinema: Politics and Modernization in Italian, French and American Cinema” traces for the first time the development of “investigative cinema.” Characterized by a questioning of the truth proposed by the media and institutions through a reconstruction of real events, “investigative cinema” stylistically blends a documentary approach with the fictional self-reflexive style typical of high modernism. Situating 1960s and 1970s cinema in relationship to the economic and geopolitical changes brought on by massive modernization allows for a retrospective tracing of the emergence of some pressing concerns in contemporary critical theory: the urban and national spaces, post-colonialism, and the validity of the image.

Fabrizio is now an Assistant Professor of Communication at Messiah College where he will teach the following courses:
Digital Poetics
Intro to Film
Film Theory
Contemporary Latin American Cinema
A Small, Good Thing: Perspectives on the Short Story

This page is for alumni affairs, outreach, etc. It is our hope to increase alumni involvement and foster a sense of community between our staff, our current and former students and our faculty. If you have news to share please send to Yuko Mera.

Thank you, and let’s stay in touch!