Associate Professor
608-262-2219
rwalkowitz@wisc.edu
www.wisc.edu/english/walkowitz
PhD, Harvard University, 2000
A.M., Harvard University, 1997
MPhil, University of Sussex, 1995
AB, Harvard-Radcliffe, 1992
My primary areas of interest are the twentieth- and twenty-first-century British, Irish, and Anglophone novel; the new world literature; modernism; narrative theory; and cosmopolitanism. Other areas of interest include postcolonial theory; critical and cultural theory; translation and print culture; Englishness and Jewishness; and U. S. literature and culture after 1945.
Author of Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (Columbia University Press, 2006) and co-editor of six books, including Bad Modernisms (Duke University Press, 2006), The Turn to Ethics (Routledge, 2000), Secret Agents: McCarthyism and Fifties America (Routledge, 1995), and Media Spectacles (Routledge, 1993). Articles and reviews in the fields of modernism, cosmopolitanism, contemporary fiction, and cultural theory have appeared in ELH, MLQ, Modern Drama, Contemporary Literature, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, The Women’s Review of Books, the Blackwell Companion to the British and Irish Novel, 1945-2000, and several of the edited volumes listed above.
I am currently at work on two projects. The first is After the National Paradigm: Translation, Comparison, and the New World Literature, a book about the effects of globalization on national paradigms of literary culture. This study argues for the emergence of a new genre of “comparative writing” in contemporary transnational literature. Chapters will include studies of novelists, translators, and anthologists such as Jamaica Kincaid, Kazuo Ishiguro, Caryl Phillips, and J. M. Coetzee. The second is Immigrant Fictions, a special issue for the journal Contemporary Literature, which examines the characteristics and varieties of transnational or “immigrant” fiction today and considers the challenges these works pose to methods of critical reading that are based on national models of literary culture. I am guest-editing the special issue and contributing an introduction tentatively entitled “The Location of Literature.”
Current and forthcoming courses include “Modernism, Translation, and the New World Literature,” which I will be teaching in Spring 2007; “Cultural Institutions of the British Novel: Nations, Readers, Forms,” which I co-taught with Professor Caroline Levine in Fall 2005; “Cosmopolitan Styles,” on the aesthetics of cosmopolitanism and twentieth-century fiction; and “The Late Henry James,” on late novels of Henry James, works of contemporary British fiction, and essays in social theory and the theory of the novel.
Current and forthcoming courses include seminar about literary theories of “critical and uncritical reading”; violence and creativity in the twentieth-century British novel; James Joyce and later British and American “vernacular fictions”; the legacy of Henry James in narrative theory and in contemporary narrative fiction; an honors seminar on literary and theoretical approaches to the concepts of civilization and culture; Jewishness in English literary and popular culture, including poetry, drama, fiction, film, television, and photography; Virginia Woolf and Ian McEwan; and the British novel from Henry James to W. G. Sebald.