Gelley bio & publications

Professor of Comparative Literature
Department of English & Comparative Literature
agelley@uci.edu
Professor Gelley's web site

Professor Gelley provides expertise in the areas of narrative theory, philosophical aesthetics, and discourse analysis. In Narrative Crossings: Theory and Pragmatics of Prose Fiction (Johns Hopkins UP,1987) he argues that literary representation is guided by the assumption that its devices, its constructive work, may be foregrounded without canceling out the effects of illusion, for language is never wholly transparent but is continually exposing the grounds of ideation, of image formation, or representation. In a series of studies of literary works from the 18th to 20th centuries he seeks to exemplify this inherent reflexivity or self-explication in language.

Gelley has for some time worked on how (in Roland Barthes’ words) a “society produces stereotypes.” He has taught such courses as “Rhetoric, Image, Ideology,” and “The City in Modern Literature and Cinema,” courses which deal with implicit modes of image formation and language uses in our culture insofar as these can be deduced from quotidian social practices, public discourse patterns, and modes of mass communication. This work draws on theorists like Benjamin, de Certeau, Barthes, Raymond Williams, and Lotman.

His current work-in-progress includes “Against the Grain: Criticism and the Discontinuities of Tradition in Walter Benjamin.” Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), philosopher and critic in Weimar Germany, has been for the past 20 years one of the most discussed theorists in the field of modern literary studies and the philosophy of history. In “Against the Grain,” Professor Gelley plans to explore a central issue in Benjamin's work, namely, the effectivity of criticism, its capacity to diagnose and, what is more, to intervene in a historical moment.

During Jan.-June, 2003, Gelley will participate in a research group on Redress in Law, Literature and Social Thought at the University of California Humanities Research Institute. His project is “Historical Time, Deferral, and Justice: Benjamin's Counter-History and German National Identity since 1945.“

Selected Publications
“Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, Commodity Fetishism, and the Aesthetics of the City.” 2001 Summer Seminar for college and university teachers, supported by the NEH.
Narrative Crossings: Theory and Pragmatics of Prose Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,1987.
Unruly Examples: On the Rhetoric of Exemplarity. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995.
“Exemplarity.” The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. Ed. Michael Kelly. 4 vols. New York: Oxford UP, 1998. [v.4]
“City Texts: Representation, Semiology, Urbanism.” Politics, Theory and Contemporary Culture. Ed. Mark Poster. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. 237-260.
“Melville's Talking-Man: Rhetoric in The Confidence Man.” Rereading Texts/Rethinking Critical Presuppositions. Ed. S. Rimmon-Kenan, et al.Frankf/M., 1996.
“By og ‘Kleine Form': Kracauer og Benjamin.” Passage. Tidsskrift for litteratur og kritik 25 (1997). (Danish translation of “City Text and kleine Form: Kracauer and Benjamin.”)
“On the Myth of the German-Jewish Dialogue: Scholem and Benjamin.” Religion Between Culture and Philosophy. Spec. Issue of JOUVERT: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies 3.1-2 (1999).
“Contexts of the Aesthetic in Walter Benjamin.” MLN. 114.5 (December 1999): 933-35.
“Idle Talk: Scarcity and Excess of Language in Narrative.” Talk, Talk, Talk: The Cultural Life of Everyday Conversation. Ed. S.I. Salamensky. New York: Routledge, 2001.