Andrew Goldstone

I am a scholar of twentieth-century literature and the author of Fictions of Autonomy: Modernism from Wilde to de Man, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. In spring 2012 I am teaching at Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts. I have taught at the Gallatin School, New York University and been a member of the Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities at Stanford, where I also taught in the English Department. My research interests include modernism in English and French, the sociology of literature, literary theory, aesthetics, the problem of world literature, the history of genre fiction, Indian literature in the English and American languages, computational approaches to literary study, and historical poetics. I also have a long-standing interest in systems for digital documentation preparation and typography.

I hold a doctorate in English and American literature from Yale and a bachelor’s in physics and mathematics from Harvard.

I write in a more informal vein in a blog on Arcade. My posts range over topics like Jeeves and evidence, TV tropes and the humanities, Nobel Literature laureates, close reading as a genre, and Google n-grams.

My other interests include classical music (I play the piano), the non-violent martial art of Aikido, and the accumulation of trivia about languages.

Announcements

My Forthcoming Book

My book, Fictions of Autonomy: Modernism from Wilde to de Man, will be published by Oxford University Press. It will be part of the Modernist Literature & Culture Series. Look for the hardback at the end of this year.

Fall 2012 Courses at Rutgers

The descriptions of my course offerings for the fall—my first semester as a member of the Rutgers English faculty!—are now online on the English department website. I am teaching 350:355 Twentieth Century Fiction I, an introductory course on early-twentieth century novels and stories from James to Hurston to Anand. I also teaching a seminar, 350:437 Popular Reading: Low to Middling Genres, 1890–1945, which surveys the key genres—like mystery and thriller—of that period of widespread pleasure reading.

I am hoping some interested students may find this page. I’ve added descriptions of these upcoming courses to my teaching page, which shows what kinds of courses I’ve taught in the past. I invite any interested student to contact me at my personal e-mail address with questions about my courses.

Twentieth-Century Studies / Modernist Studies Without Modernism

The project of developing new and better frameworks for the study of twentieth-century literature continues! I have been part of a number of events related to this project; most recently Colin Gillis and I co-organized a seminar at the American Comparative Literature Association conference on Institutions of Periodization more generally. In the past we have also convened two panels at MSA 12 on “Modernist Studies Without Modernism,” as well as a 2009 MSA seminar under the same title. If you are interested in joining an electronic mailing list for twentieth-century studies or in participating in future work on this subject, please contact me.

03/10/2012

I’ll soon be updating this site with some preliminary information about my courses for the next academic year, when I’ll be joining the Rutgers English Department. I’ll be developing syllabuses and course websites through the spring and summer.

03/10/2012

Anyone attending the ACLA 2012 conference in Providence at the end of this month is warmly invited to come join some or all of the seminar I have organized with Harris Feinsod on Bad Reception, Missed Connection, Clogged Circulation. We will be meeting at the invigorating hour of 8 a.m. from March 30 to April 1 in the Roberts Center, Room 225. The presentations are:

Friday, March 30

Katherine Mannheimer, University of Rochester

“The Rash Dexterity of Wit: Genre-Hopping Verbal Patterns in Restoration Drama and Poetry”

Molly Swift Metherd, Saint Mary’s College of California

“The Great Canal Race: US and Japanese Imperialism in James Weldon Johnson’s El Presidente, or The Yellow Peril”

Anne DeWitt, Princeton University

“Reading Reception of the Theological Romance”

Harris Feinsod, Northwestern University

“Modernism Aship: Recirculating Transnational Poetics”

Saturday, March 31

Andrew Goldstone, Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts

“The Song of Misrecognition: Indian Love Lyrics in Yeats, Tagore, and Edith Hull” 

Sonam Singh, Cornell University

“The Bad Reception of the 1930s Anglophone Indian Novel: Politics, Aesthetics, and the Frameworks of Postcolonial and Modernist Studies”

Gabriele S. Hayden, Reed College

“Performing Blackness in Weimar Germany”

Sunday, April 1

Luke Parker, Stanford University

“Emigration, Backwardness, and the Search for an Alternative Present: Russian and American Writers in Interwar Europe”

Lee Konstantinou, Princeton University

“Bad Attitude: William S. Burroughs at the Birth of Punk”

Meredith Ramirez Talusan, Cornell University

“Negritude Without Filitude: Form, Language, and Possibilities of Reception in Modern Filipino Poetry”

Daniel R. Mintz, University of Michigan

“Bildung Towards the End: Kermode’s Mythic Temporality and Doctorow’s Book of Daniel”

01/14/2012

After a satisfying experience building my spring 2012 course site using jekyll, I’ve converted this site over to jekyll too. I took the opportunity to make some minor changes and updates to the site content here and there. Please contact me if you find problems on the site.

12/10/2011

I am organizing a seminar for ACLA 2012 (March 29–April 1 at Brown) with Northwestern’s Harris Feinsod on Bad Reception, Missed Connection, Clogged Circulation. This seminar is devoted to the ships in the night of literary history: the near misses, the affinities that should have formed but didn’t, the treacherous reception contexts that betrayed the promise of circulation. How can focusing on these blockages and (to use a term of Roland Greene’s) obversals enrich and complicate comparative literary study? As for my own paper, in a cross-over between two research interests of mine, the role of popular genres in the early twentieth century and the history of Indian writing in English, I’ll be discussing “Indian Love Lyrics” from Yeats to Tagore to E.M. Hull. I may or may not learn to sing the “Kashmiri Song” by Amy Woodforde-Finden.

12/09/2011

The website for Literary Foundations II, my Spring 2012 course at Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts, is now online with a preliminary syllabus: http://webspace.newschool.edu/~goldstoa/lf2/.

10/15/2011

I made some updates to my LaTeX page. Then I realized I had so many notes on the subject that I decided to start a little side blog on the subject of TeX and digital document preparation in the humanities. I’ll add entries there occasionally as I make discoveries and encounter problems of a technological kind.

09/01/2011

Over on Arcade I wrote an introduction to a Colloquy on Autonomy: we’ve collected a long series of posts connected to problems of literary, cultural, and other kinds of autonomy. Comments are welcome on the Colloquy page, and keep an eye out for new entries in the series!

08/30/2011

This website has moved to http://andrewgoldstone.com (and is now hosted in the cloud!). Please update your bookmarks accordingly.

07/30/2011

My double review of two provocative modernist studies books is now out in Studies in the Novel 43, no. 2. I discuss Elizabeth Outka's Consuming Traditions and Enda Duffy's The Speed Handbook. Reading the two together gave me a chance to reflect on what you might call the Standard Model of modernist studies. Lots of good work happens within the Model, but is it time for a new paradigm?