Constructing Canons
Modern Literary Formations
Research In Literature Research Into Post-Holocaust Literature
Thesis Colloquium
Buster Brown's America (Chavagnes-en-Paillers, France: Odd Volumes of the Fortnightly Review)
(2018) Christopher Smart's Cat (Dos Madres Press)
(2010). Rereading the Nineteenth Century. Palgrave Macmillan.
(2007). Ideas Across Time. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.
(1984). Against Capitulation. London: Quartet Books.
(1981). From Custom to Capital. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
(2011), "Reza Says" (story). The Hudson Review, LXIII 4.
(2010), "Later" (story). The Hudson Review, LXIII.
(2010), "The Death Paintings" (poems). Notre Dame Review, 26.
(2009), "OMG". The Common Review, 8/2.
(2008), "Dickens in America: The Writer and Reality". Dickens Studies Annual, 39, 59-96.
"What is Great Literature: The Case of War and Peace?" In The Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers Conference. The College of the Holy Cross.
For Virginia Woolf he is “the greatest of all novelists—for what else,” she says, “can we call the author of War and Peace?” And as it happens John Bayley, in his unsurpassed Tolstoy and the Novel, tells us in a magnificent extended reading both how War and Peace is great and why that greatness matters: “No one who is not interested in himself can be interested in a great novel, and in Tolstoy we experience in greater measure than in any other novelist the recognition of ourselves that leads to increased self-knowledge.” Bayley’s reading of Tolstoy is essentially an expansion and exegesis of this subtle sentence, providing a kind of catalogue, at once general and particular, of what makes the novel great, of literary greatness, and of how we might judge a work of literature. I identify, illustrate, and interrogate the most important items in Bayley’s catalogue of greatness, to explore their viability as general criteria and to test their persuasiveness against our (necessarily) subjective reading of the novel. Among the qualities of the novel Bayley most admires, I discuss what he calls the “primitive vitality,” self-sustenance, and independence—from Tolstoy!—of Tolstoy’s characters; Tolstoy’s brilliant “imitation of [the physical] continuity” of his characters; his “unsurpassed descriptions” of intimate dialogue, especially in the family, especially between married couples; his representation of reality not as something preconceived but as an imaginatively persuasive rendering; his triumph over the artifice of art by the stratagem of including the reader in the family of the book’s characters, so that “at no point do we have to remember . . . that we are reading a novel.” Finally: is “increased self-knowledge” a sufficient goal of (great) art?
(2010). "The Sweetest Expression": Realism as Fact and Fiction. In Association of Literary Critics, Scholars, and Writers. Princeton University.
Essays and Reviews
2008 "The Twilight of Zuckerman." The Common Review, Vol 6, No. 3
2007 "Passaging is His Anchorage," a review/essay on John Peck's RED STRAWBERRY LEAF: SELECTED POEMS appeared in the Winter ediltion of Notre Dame Review.
2006 "Buster Brown's America" in The American Scholar
2005 "Reading Mary Barton" in Literary Imagination
2004 "Our Greatest Living Novelist," review-essay on Philip Roth in The Common Review
2003 "Born Again," in Philip Roth (Modern Critical Views) eds. Harold Bloom, Gabe Welsch (Chelsea House Publishers)
2002 "T.S. Eliot's Achievements," review-essay on Denis Donoghue's Words Alone: T.S. Eliot the Poet, Partisan Review Vol. 69, No. 2 (Spring)
Fiction and Poetry
2010 "Later." The Hudson Review.
2010 "The Death Paintings." The Notre Dame Review. No. 29
2008 "There Is No End To The Things We Can't Have." The Notre Dame Review. No. 25.
2007 "Schwermer in Paris" appeared in the Long Story issue of Notre Dame Review (Winter/Spring)
"On Longinus and Bread"--On the Pandemic, Fortnightly Review 2020
"Today in Portland," Hong Kong Review (Fall 2019)
"Letter to Louise Gluck," Notre Dame Review , No. 45 (Winter/Spring 2018)
"Horatio Hornblower". Hudson Review LXV Number 4 (Winter). January 2013.
"Reza Says," first published in The Hudeson Review (2011) was listed as a "Distinguished Story" in Best American Short Stories, 2012
Consultant, Council for Aid to Education/Gates Foundation: Project on Assessment for College Readiness, 2011
Member,2010 New York State Regents Comprehensive Examination in English Measurement Review Policy Committee
Reviewer, American Council of Learned Societies/Mellon Early Career Fellowship Program
Member, Associated Writing Programs
Member, American PEN
Member, Association of Literary Scholars and Critics
