Geoffrey Gilbert

Geoff Gilbert has been invited to give a paper entitled "The Meaning of Contemporary Realism: The amortissement of idiom in Daewoo", to the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, London. The paper is the second part of an ongoing project on contemporary fiction, idiom, and political economy; the first part, in the form of a paper called "In a lover's idiom (I do not know what women know)," was presented last year to the Department of English at Berkeley.

Geoff Gilbert has been at AUP since Fall 1999. Before that, he spent five years researching and teaching in England, at Cambridge University. Within the Comparative Literature major he teaches courses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century European literature (with special focus on modernism, literature and politics, and writing and sexuality), and he also teaches in the European Cultural Studies program, in History and Social Sciences, and in the EN writing program. His book, Before Modernism Was: Modern History and the Constituency of Writing, was published by Palgrave-Macmillan in 2004. It considers the innovative stylistic energies of modernist writing as part of a set of convolutions of behaviour and social organisation: among the areas he explores there are the British love of dogs and fears of rabies; Polish migrants and anthropologists; the criminalisation of adolescence; the difficulty of stopping smoking; and our tortured relation to property prices.

All of his writing and teaching is informed by an interest in the relations between literature and culture: rather than imagining literature as a kind of representation or a particularly fabulous and problematic kind of object, he is interested in thinking writing as an impacted instance of human behaviour, neither transcending culture and history nor fully determined by it. To read literature in its finest moments is to begin adequately to imagine human action. Currently, he is exploring these questions through a discussion of relations between writing and sexuality, for a book to be published by Polity Press.

Before Modernism Was: Modern History and the Constituency of Writing (London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2004).

“Words, Flies, Jews, Joyce, Joint: Wyndham Lewis and the Unpublishing of Obscenity”, Critical Quarterly 86.4 (December 2004): 1-21.

‘The Origins of Modernism in the Haunted Properties of Literature’. In The Victorian Supernatural. Ed. Nicola Bown, Carolyn Burdett, Pam Thurschwell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

“Les Queer Critics.” Trans. David Rabouin. Magazine littéraire. Dec. 2003: 60-63.

‘The Manufacture of Inefficiency: Blast and Other Youth Groups’. In Modernist Sexualities. Ed. Caroline Howlett and Hugh Stevens. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001.

‘Can Fiction Swear? James Kelman and the Booker Prize’. In An Introduction to Contemporary Fiction. Ed. Rod Mengham. Cambridge: Polity, 1999.

‘Shellshock, Anti-Semitism, and the Agency of the Avant-Garde’. In Wyndham Lewis and the Art of Modern War. Ed. David Peters Corbett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

‘Wyndham Lewis and the Critical Poetics of the Modernist Career’. Critical Quarterly 36.3 (Autumn 1994).

‘Patrick Hamilton and the Sound of Politics’. Core: International Journal of the Humanities 1.2 (Fall 2001).

  Recent talks and papers:

'The Meaning of Contemporary Realism: "The Amortissement of Idiom in Daewoo"'. Goldsmiths, University of London, April 2007.

‘In a Lover’s Idiom (“I do not know what women know”)’. Berkeley, March 2006.

‘Language Sex Change’. The Dean’s Faculty Research Seminar. AUP. October 2005.

‘Modernism : Very Little Magazines, Very Big Sociological Fantasies’. ‘Les revues modernistes anglo-américaines : lieux d’échanges, lieux d’exil’. Paris III. June 2005

‘“Ma maison, vous ne l’ignorez pas, est la maison des artistes”: Naturalism, modernism, and the domestic place of art.’ Literature and The Domestic Interior. Victoria and Albert Museum. December 2004. Invited speaker.

‘What Men Did Together: Literature, Sexuality, Politics’. Cambridge, July 2004.

‘Modernism and Cultural Studies’, Plenary Panel, Modernist Studies Association Annual Conference, Birmingham, September 2003. Invited speaker.

‘Exposition internationale: Jean Rhys, Paris, 1937’, Parisian Cultural Topographies Conference, University of Glasgow, September 2003.

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