Research
My most recent monograph is Unmaking The Making of Americans: Towards an Aesthetic Ontology (SUNY 2018) https://sunypress.edu/Books/U/Unmaking-The-Making-of-Americans, on Gertrude Stein’s monumental experimental novel The Making of Americans. I begin from the claim that Stein’s novel should be more widely read—it is on par with Proust and Joyce in that regard. I argue that by unmaking our habits of reading, this novel radically transforms our understanding of time, emotion, aesthetics, narrative, and representation. In this novel, Stein develops an expanded, nonlinear, layered sense of time that reverberates through the changing expressions of emotion over the course of the novel, makes us realize how aesthetic judgment also is a temporal, dynamic process, and enables Stein to invent a time-image long before Deleuze locates it in the crisis of mid-century Italian neo-realism. I argue that Stein’s novel is a work of theory, in the best sense: rigorously observing and extrapolating from those observations an account of how reality can be represented.
Beyond Stein, I have published a range of essays that examine how literature takes up other forms of media. One essay on verbal photographs,“Toward a Photography of Love: The Tain of the Photograph in Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red” appeared in Postmodern Culture, 17.3 2007. I wrote two reflections on telephony in literature: how Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth and William Gaddis’s J R parse the impact of telephony on narrative, identity, and culture https://tcjournal.org/vol3/mccallum/, and the the telephonic prescience of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables and Thomas Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49 in “Hawthorne and Pynchon on the Line.” Arizona Quarterly, Summer 2000.
A recent essay looks back to Judith Fetterly’s The Resisting Reader “The Desisting Reader” Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History. Spec. Iss. Revisiting, Rereading The Resisting Reader. Ed. Yung-Hsing Wu. 13 (2021): 84-92. doi: 10.5325/ reception.13.1.0001
My most recent essay, “Thinking through Queer Narrative Forms with Ben Marcus and Renee Gladman,” appeared in Narrative 30.3 (October 2022): 364-87. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/865621. doi: 10.1353/nar.2022.0052
Teaching
My teaching in literary studies has ranged across LGBTQ literature, modernism, 20th- & 21st-century experimental literature, literary theory and narrative theory. In teaching both literature and theory, I emphasize close reading and the cultivation of an empathetic and detailed observation of the text.
I have taught Stein’s The Making of Americans a number of times–including alongside Proust, or in dialogue with recent experimental American writers–and published on my practices for teaching the novel in “Americans Aloud.” Approaches to Teaching Gertrude Stein. Ed. Logan Esdale and Deborah Mix. New York: MLA, 2018.
