Daniella Gáti
PhDMA in English, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland, 2014
MA in Economics, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland, 2013
BA in Economics with a Minor in English, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland, 2011
dgati@brandeis.edu
https://dgati.github.io/
Office Location: Rabb 252
Co-director 2016 English Graduate Conference
Mellon Dissertation Year Fellowship
Research Interests
American literature of the 20th century to the present, queer theory, contemporary literature and popular culture, digital humanities, narrative theory across media, intersection between literature and economics.
Dissertation Abstract
My dissertation argues that in the technologically saturated post-truth age, when traditional social critique literature is no longer possible, contemporary novelists use vignettes, short descriptions of static situations, to represent urgent social, economic and environmental concerns. Embracing both social media's activist forms and book historical marginalia, these writers respond to the proliferation of minute visual and textual digital media by representing the world in fragments. In so doing, they insist on the continued importance of depicting the conditions of racial, economic and environmental precarities while resisting over-generalizing explanatory narratives. My dissertation thus allows us to understand the forms that politically committed fiction can take in a world increasingly paralyzed by competing truth-claims, informational overload and alternative facts.
Publications
"Reading Reading: Faulkner’s Queer Exercise in Reader Complicity in Light in August.” The Faulkner Journal, vol. 31, no. 2, Fall 2017, 153-174.
Review of Nick Levey’s Maximalism in Contemporary American Literature. ASAP/J. January 2019.
“Pabst Blue Ribbon and the Rise and Fall of Hipster Anti-Consumerism.” Hipster Culture: A Reader. Ed. Heike Steinhoff. Forthcoming: Bloomington, 2020.
"Poems as Specters: Revenant Longing for Roots in Jean Toomer's Cane." aspeers 7 (2014), 17-39.
Presentations
"#LitCrit: Literature and Critique in the Age of Twitter." #HCTwitterConf19, the Twitter Conference of the MLA Humanities Commons. July 18, 2019.
“Drawing the Self, Erasing the Other: Oppressive Reality Effects in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” Brandeis Novel Symposium, Waltham, MA. April 12, 2019.
“Glimpses of the World: The Vignette in 21st Century American Literature.” Faculty Lunch Seminar, Brandeis, Waltham, MA. March 18, 2019.
“The Situation in European Neo-Realisms.” ACLA 2019, Georgetown University, Washington, DC. March 7-10, 2019.
“Is There a New Cultural Dominant?” ACLA 2018, UCLA, Los Angeles. March 29-April 1, 2018.
"The Curious Case of PBR and Hipster Melancholia." PCA/ACA Annual Conference, San Diego. 12-15 April, 2017.
Organizer of "'Queer and Now:' Queerness in the Mainstream." NeMLA Annual Conference, Baltimore. March 23-26, 2017.
"Becoming my own ghost: Spectral circularity as queer stance." ACLA 2016, Harvard, Cambridge. March 17-20, 2016.
"Capitalism as the public negotiation of the private?" MLA Subconference, Austin. January 6-7, 2016.
"Lana del Rey and the Many Facets of One-Dimensional Consumer Culture." Thinking Serially Conference, CUNY, New York. April 23-24, 2015.
"People, Places and Stores:" Yuppie Non-Spatiality in Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho," Literary Exteriors: Boston College's Biennial English Graduate Conference, Boston. February 21, 2015.
Courses Taught
UWS 24A: From the Margins to the Mainstream: Questions of Belonging in Contemporary American Literature, Spring 2017
"The Aesthetics of Commercial Culture", Tufts University Experimental College, Fall 2016
University Writing Seminar, "From the Margins to the Mainstream: Questions of Belonging in Contemporary American Literature", Fall 2016
(TF) "The Tale", Professor Mary Baine Campbell, Spring, 2016
(TF) "Literatures of Global English", Dr. Roanne Kantor, Fall 2015
Favorite Work
"Orlando"