Category: Research & Publications

Bursting Worlds Asunder: Doorways in Modernist Fiction (LSU Press, spring 2027) is my forthcoming scholarly book.

This work 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.

More on architecture and extensions of my new book, Bursting Worlds Asunder: Doorways in Modernist Fiction…

In “The Mirrors of Chartres Street,” his short fiction published in his New Orleans Sketches (1925) while living in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Faulkner describes the balcony as “Mendelssohn impervious in iron.”

In my article, “Vorticism and Iron: Faulkner’s Architectural Dialogue in ‘Mirrors of Chartres Street’” for the Mississippi Quarterly, I show the relationship between the movement of architectural lines and bodies in the text. Above are the drawings of New Orleans balconies by Faulkner’s roommate, William Spratling, an professor of architecture at Tulane University and an artist.

https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/921511

William Faulkner shows the objective and subjective world in intimate dialogue throughout his fiction. His pattern of representing bodies in conversation with buildings through movement and perception is integral to his vision of embodied experience. This article demonstrates how Faulkner employs competing romantic and modernist architectures in service of a descriptive ontology and a new theory of architecture. In “Mirrors of Chartres Street,” Faulkner offers a new mode of building that rejects the use of property or tools, heroizing the body itself as a means of building and dwelling.

In relation to my forthcoming book, Bursting Worlds Asunder: Doorways in Modernist Fiction, see my article in MIT’s architecture journal Thresholds. “The Paradox of Door-Keeping: Access and Absurdity, Then and Now” was included in No. 50 Before/After: https://direct.mit.edu/thld/article-abstract/doi/10.1162/thld_a_00766/110236/The-Paradox-of-Door-Keeping-Access-and-Absurdity?redirectedFrom=PDF

Check out this important new issue published in the spring of 2023 of The Faulkner Journal, William Faulkner and the Work of Antiracism. Included is my article, “Baldwin, Individualism, and the Means of White Self-Empowerment.”

James Baldwin states in Nobody Knows my Name that what he observed white Americans did not seem to know about Europeans was also what they did not know about African Americans. Critics still look to Baldwin’s presentation of Faulkner’s personal, literary, and intellectual contradictions as the prototypical identity of white Americans in Baldwin’s famous essay “Faulkner and Desegregation.” Baldwin vividly realizes the still unrealized trauma inflicted upon the white American psyche by the institution of slavery in other works, offering Faulkner as an exemplary model. I suggest in this essay that an even more productive concept of the conditions of racism exists between Faulkner’s works and Baldwin’s other writings on national identity. I query how the distinct values of individualism, collectivism, and transnationalism affect racial empowerment in critiques between Baldwin and Faulkner. Furthermore, I demonstrate how Baldwin’s newly acquired European perspective has essential bearing on his critique of Faulkner’s brand of racism, allowing him to identify individualism and isolationism as inherently antithetical to the goals of personal freedom for all Americans.

Many thanks to Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman for being our guest editor, and to Ahmed Honeini and Peter Lurie. This issue features Dr. Abdur-Rahmen’s essay as well as an essay by Thadious M. Davis entitled, “Spaces of Remembering and Forgetting: On Antiracism.”

My essay “Ritual Architectures: Doorless and Makeshift Boundaries in Faulkner’s Slave Quarters” is now available in the Faulkner and Slavery collection in the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Series. The University Press of Mississippi released this work in June 2021:

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/F/Faulkner-and-Slavery

“The Philosopher’s Truth in Fiction: An Interview with David Kleinberg-Levin” was also published in issue 21 of Chiasmi International. This interview with David Kleinberg-Levin, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at Northwestern University, concerns his recent trilogy on the promise of happiness in literary language. Kleinberg-Levin discusses the relationship between and among philosophy, phenomenology, and literature. Among others, he addresses questions regarding literature’s ability to offer redemption, its response to suffering and justice, literary gesture, the ethics of narrative logic, and the surface of the text.