Assistant Professor
6135 Helen C. White Hall
608-263-3796
mortizrobles@wisc.edu
Ph.D. English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
A.B. Comparative Literature, Dartmouth College
19th-Century Comparative Literature; Literary Theory; the Novel
“Local Speech, Global Acts: Performative Violence and the Novelization of the World.” Comparative Literature 59.1 (Winter 2007): 1-22; “Being Jacques Derrida.” Postmodern Culture, 15.3 (May 2005) Rev. of Jacques Derrida’s Without Alibi. [www3.iath.virginia.edu/pmc]
I am completing a book manuscript entitled Subject Events: Linguistic Practice and the Materiality of the Novel, a critical reconsideration of the historical role of the novel in the construction of subjectivities in Victorian England. I am also co-editing with Caroline Levine a volume of essays on the significance of the middle to formal, cultural and institutional accounts of the novel. We have called it Narrative Middles: Navigating the Nineteenth-Century Novel. In addition, I am serving as guest editor for a special issue of Romantic Circles Praxis entitled “Bertha Mason Afterlives” that explores Brontë’s character as a figure of/for theoretical and critical reflection. Articles on Dickens, Buñuel, Darwin, and Derrida are in the pipeline. My next book project will trace the figure of the animal in late Victorian fiction.
My work is situated at the intersection of literature and theory, with an emphasis on the question of the “literary” and its historicity.
“Literary Speech Acts,” “Other Victorians/Victorian Others,” “Literary Labor and the Global Literary Marketplace”
“Dickens and the Secret,” “Theories of the Subject,” “Reading the Victorian Novel,” “The Novel Before Theory,” “Utopia”