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Caren Irr

Director of Graduate Studies
Professor
Ph.D., Duke University

Research Interests

American Literature and Culture since 1900, Theory, Media Studies. 

Selected Publications

Pink Pirates: Contemporary American Women Writers and Copyright, University of Iowa Press, 2010.

On Jameson: From Postmodernsim to Globalization, co-editor, State University of New York Press, 2005.

Rethinking the Frankfurt School: Alternative Legacies of Cultural Critique, co-editor, State University of New York Press, 2002.
 
The Suburb of Dissent: Cultural Politics in the United States and Canada during the 1930s. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998.

Articles and reviews in American Literary History, Global Ordering (UBC 2008), Profession, Genre, The Novel and the American Left (Iowa 2004), altx.com, American Quarterly, South Atlantic Quarterly, American Literature, Essays on Canadian Writing, Moderism/Modernity, Polygraph, Constructing Human Rights in the Age of Globalization (M.E. Sharpe 2003), World Bank Literature (Minnesota 2002), Leslie Marmon Silko: A Collection of Essays (New Mexico 1999), and other journals and collections.

Current Projects

Toward the Geopolitical Novel:  U.S. Fiction in the 21^st Century

This project describes, explains and evaluates the 21^st-century resurgence of the political novel.  I show how recent contributions to five major genres (the migration narrative, the Peace Corps thriller, the national allegory, the revolutionary novel, and the expatriate satire) point toward the emergence of a new literary form:  the geopolitical novel.  This form updates the political novel for the interconnected, global environment of the new millennium.   Of the more than 125 authors whose work I have examined for this study, some of my favorites are Helon Habila, Gary Shteyngart, Norman Rush, Madison Smartt Bell, Dinaw Mengestu, Aleksandar Hemon, Chloe Aridjis, and Pankaj Mishra. 

Green Politics and the Novel:  Eco-Fiction in English since 1980

This project tracks the migration of green concerns from genre fiction to the mainstream literary novel beginning in the 1980s.  I am interested in understanding how and why a distinctive contemporary rhetoric of perpetual crisis and political paralysis colors narratives treating subjects such as overpopulation, desertification, reliance on dirty fuels (especially coal), invasive species, and waste management. 

Awards

Fulbright Lecturer, Czech Republic, 2003-2004.

Selected Courses Taught

Cyber-Theory (ENG 101b)
The Rock and Roll Novel (ENG 177b)
American Fiction since 1945 (ENG 187a)
American Writers and World Affairs (ENG 187b)
American Literature After Television (ENG 217a)
Copyright and Contemporary American Writing (ENG 217b)
21st-Century American Literature (ENG 8a)