• Academics
• BRANDEIS HOME

David Sherman

Assistant Professor
Ph.D., New York University

Research Interests

Modernism, Contemporary British, Narrative Theory, Continental Philosophy, Elegy, Trauma and Witnessing

Selected Publications

In a Strange Room: Modernism's Corpses and Mortal Obligation
Oxford University Press, forthcoming

"Is Narrative Fundamental? Beckett's Levinasian Question in Malone Dies." Journal of Modern Literature 32.4 (summer 2009).

"Elegy under the Knife: Geoffrey Hill and the Ethics of Sacrifice." Twentieth Century Literature, 54.2 (summer 2008.)

"A Plot Unraveling into Ethics: Woolf, Levinas, and 'Time Passes.'" Woolf Studies Annual 13 (2007).

"Burial Plots, Inoperative Community, and Faulkner's As I lay Dying." Theory@Buffalo 11 "Aesthetics and Finitude" (2007).

Poems and creative non-fiction in The Iowa Review, The Minnesota Review, The Dalhousie Review, and The Threepenny Review. 

Current Projects

Literature Lab
A podcast series of interviews with literary critics and scholars, "discussing the questions and concepts that drive their work."  Literature Lab is available for free subscription and download from the iTunes Store. 

In a Strange Room: Modernism's Corpses and Mortal Obligation
A study of modernism as an ethical response to the modernization of dying and corpse-disposal in the first part of the twentieth century.

"Faith, Second-Hand: Modernism and the God of the Other"
Traces modernist representations of secularism as a mediated, vicarious, and projected experience of religious faith.

"Hardy and the Untaming of Chance"
An essay on the place of Hardy's poetry in the epistemic shift from chance to risk, which is to say, in the cultural transformation of concepts of contingency and fortune into programs of statistics and insurance.

Selected Courses Taught

Twentieth Century British Poetry (ENG 17b)
Literary Witnessing and the Poetics of Memory (ENG 107b)
Magical Realism and Modern Myth (COML 117a)