About

Amy A. Foley

I teach modern fiction and critical theory as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Providence College. Much of my scholarship is in modernism, spatiality, architecture, movement, and phenomenology. Some of my scholarly articles can be found in Modern Language Studies, the University of Mississippi Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha book series, the Faulkner Journal, the Mississippi Quarterly, Chiasmi International, the James Baldwin Review, and MIT’s architecture journal, Thresholds. I also write fiction.

Bursting Worlds Asunder: Doorways in Modernist Fiction (LSU Press, spring 2027), my forthcoming scholarly book, recharacterizes literary modernism as a sensorial, spatial, and temporal relationship with doorways in fiction. I examine envelopment, hiddenness, transcendence, ecstasy, rhythm, and presence in the doorways of Faulkner’s Sanctuary, Wright’s Native Son, Woolf’s Between the Acts, Kafka’s Amerika, and Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The final chapters extend myths about depth and interiority to Dziga Vertov’s 1929 film Man with a Movie Camera and David Lynch’s Inland Empire. Written from an interdisciplinary perspective of architectural theory, material studies, and phenomenology, this book redefines modernism as our ability to rebuild space and materials through perception.

Grants include the American Fellowship in literature and philosophy from the American Association of University Women, an NEH summer scholarship in the virtual institute on Zora Neale Hurston, and a Northeast MLA scholarship for the Franz Kafka archives at Oxford University. My manuscript in progress, Making Moves: Literary Choreography as Ethics, contends that the movement of the body in modern fiction presents an ethic of will, intention, and choice.