| David Sherman Assistant Professor Ph.D., New York University Rabb 136 office hours: T 2-3, F 10:45-12 davidsherman @ brandeis.edu 781-736-8214 |
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Research Interests
Modernism, Contemporary British, Narrative Theory, Ethical Philosophy, Elegy, Modern Deathways
Selected Publications
"Elegy under the Knife: Geoffrey Hill and the Ethics of Sacrifice." Twentieth Century Literature, forthcoming 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
In a Strange Room: Corpses, Sovereign Power, and the Modernist Imagination
An examination of the standardization of British and American burial practices in the early twentieth century as a critical element in the structuring of the modern state and fashioning of modern subjectivity. The shift away from traditional, locally idiosyncratic, religious burial rites to more secular, technologized, and institutionally impersonal ones (marked especially by increases in hospitalization, cremation, and embalming) created a conflict between the subject’s traditional ethical constitution and emergent state power. The state’s increasing regulation and even assumption of burial obligations impinged upon the ethicality of its subjects, alienating them from a responsibility to the dead that, since antiquity, has virtually defined ethics itself. I argue that these cultural and political shifts around corpses, shifts which attenuated the modern self’s ability to become a subject of its own ethical capacities, provoked modernism’s most adventurous formal experiments. I show how these narrative and poetic techniques are attempts to re-imagine the subject’s ethical agency in a new regime of death by performing readings of Owen’s wartime poetry, Woolf’s Jacob’s Room and To the Lighthouse, Joyce’s “The Dead” and the “Hades” chapter of Ulysses, Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Eliot’s The Waste Land, Barnes’s Nightwood, and Beckett’s The Unnamable.
Selected Courses Taught
Twentieth Century British Poetry(ENG 17b)
Literary Witnessing and the Poetics of Memory (ENG 107b)
this page updated August 26, 2008