Richard Begam

Associate Professor
608-263-2804
rjbegam@wisc.edu

Degrees and Institutions

PhD, University of Virginia, 1989

Research Interests

Twentieth-century British, Irish and Anglophone literature; modernism and modernity; literary theory and aesthetics, philosophy and literature; Beckett and Joyce.

Selected Publications

Co-editor with Michael Valdez Moses, Modernism and Colonialism: British and Irish Literature, 1899-1939 (forthcoming, Duke University Press); Samuel Beckett and the End of Modernity (Stanford University Press, 1996); editor of The Beckett Circle (1996-1999); articles on modern British and Irish literature, postcolonial literature and literary theory in such journals as Modern Fiction Studies, SAQ, Clio, Studies in the Novel and others.

Current Projects

Beckett’s Philosophical Levity. This book traces Beckett’s engagement with a variety of philosophical thinkers and systems; chapters on de Sade, Kant, Schopenhauer and Murphy; Mauthner, Wittgenstein and Watt; Sartre, Heidegger and the trilogy; Austin, Searle and Beckett’s drama; Berkeley and Film; Beckett and postfoundationalism; Beckett and contemporary French thought (Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari, Badiou).

“Ulysses” and the Technologies of Modernity. Drawing on modern theories of technology, this study examines how Ulysses developed a radically new conception of art in articulating its response to modernity; chapters on Time and Space, Speed as Style, Ineffable Identities, Eros and Abjection, Nation as Art, System and Antisystem.

I am also working on essays on Beckett and performativity (invited, Modern Drama), modernism and opera (invited, Modernist Cultures) and Joyce and Sacher-Masoch.

Graduate Teaching

• "Joyce, Beckett and Modernity" (Jameson, Lyotard, McHale, Nietzsche, Rorty, Ulysses and Beckett's two trilogies)
• "The Place of Modernism" (Augé, Bachelard, Benjamin, Lefebvre, Heidegger, Moretti, Simmel, Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Beckett)
• "Twentieth-Century Fiction" (Conrad, Ford, Forster, Lewis, Joyce, Lawrence, Woolf, Barnes, Beckett, Achebe, Coetzee, Rushdie)

Undergraduate Teaching

• "Literary Theory" (Barthes, Bourdieu, Carroll, Danto, de Man, Derrida, Eagleton, Foucault, Greenblatt, Herrnstein Smith, Hirsch, Marx, Nietzsche, Plato, Saussure)
• "British and Irish Modernism" (Conrad, Synge, Shaw, Yeats, Forster, Joyce, Eliot, Woolf, Beckett, Churchill)
• "Colonial and Postcolonial Fiction" (Montaigne, Rousseau, Defoe, Brontë, Haggard, Conrad, Forster, Rhys, Achebe, Coetzee, Rushdie)
• "Backgrounds to Modernism" (Descartes, Nieztsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Freud, Dostoevsky, Wilde, Mann, Proust, Conrad, Lawrence, Beckett).