Fields of Interest: European and American avant-garde literary and artistic production, the history of aesthetics, performance theory, phenomenology, and postcolonial poetry and poetics.
I have taught undergraduate courses focusing on 19th- and 20th-century French poetry, Surrealism, Cubism, Literature by Women, Beckett and the Nouveau Roman, as well as more historically oriented courses situating literary and artistic works in the context of the rise of a consumer society in 19th-century France or the blossoming of technology at the beginning of the 20th. Graduate seminars offered include close studies of Rimbaud, Char, Césaire, Bataille, Artaud, and Merleau-Ponty. Recent courses on "Modernist Primitivism" and "Black Paris/Paris Noir" investigate the diasporic context of the avant-garde as a social formation.
My first book, Poetry at Stake: Lyric Aesthetics and the Challenge of Technology (Princeton UP, 1999), explores the poetry of Rimbaud, Cendrars, Char, and American performance poets Patti Smith and Laurie Anderson through the lens of cultural studies and the Frankfurt School critique of aesthetic autonomy. Currently, I am completing a second book, Gesture as Inscription: Movement, Writing, and the Prehistory of Poststructuralism, in which I approach the gestural as a non-discursive form of agency that both enables and challenges fixed cultural meanings. My next project will be a study of the politics of sound (as accent, creolization, noise) centered on the experimental, post-dada sound-works of Bernard Heidsieck, Caroline Bergvall, Rodrigo Toscano, and Tracie Morris. Following Wittgenstein's interest in "aspect-dawning," my work invariably focuses on the continuous exfoliation of resistant possibilities afforded, under certain conditions, by the materiality of signs.
BOOKS:
Poetry at Stake: Lyric Aesthetics and the Challenge of Technology, Princeton University Press, (1999).
Gesture as Inscription:Movement, Writing, and the Prehistory of Poststructuralism, (submitted for consideration).
The Migration of Gesture: Art, Film, Dance, University of Minnesota Press (forthcoming), co-edited with Sally Ness.
Diasporic Avant-Gardes: Experimental Poetics and Cultural Displacement, co-edited with Barrett Watten (submitted for consideration).
SELECTED ARTICLES:
"Miming Signing: Henri Michaux and the Writing Body" in The Migration of Gesture: Art, Film, Dance, eds. Carrie Noland and Sally Ness. University of Minnesota Press (forthcoming).
"Digital Gestures" in New Media Poetries, eds. Thomas Swiss and Adalaide Morris. MIT Press (2006).
"Cursive Dermisache" (on the Argentinian graphic artist Mirtha Dermisache) in New (no. 1, 2005).
"Phonic Matters: Julia Kristeva, Bernard Heidsieck, and French Sound Poetry" in PMLA, (January, 2005)
"Graffiti and the Reinvention of Space" in Word & Image, (Summer, 2005).
"Bataille Looking" in Modernism/Modernity, (March, 2004).
"Le Graffiti, la ligne, et la lettre chez René Char" in Pleine marge, (no. 35, June 2002).
"The Metaphysics of Coffee," in Modernism/Modernity, (Fall 2000).
"High Decoration: Blaise Cendrars, Sonia Delaunay, and the Poem as Fashion Design," in Journal X, (Spring 1998).
"Poetry at Stake; Blaise Cendrars, Cultural Studies, and the Future of Poetry in the Literature Classroom," in PMLA, (January 1997).
"Rimbaud and Patti Smith: Style as Social Deviance," in Critical Inquiry, (Spring 1995).
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