
Often, that pattern of escape angles away from the political state. From nineteenth-century anarchist movements to Occupy Wall Street, anti-state sentiment and rhetoric persists in American politics and culture through varying, sometimes contradictory and electorally-opposed forms. Within this history of anti-state thought, American literature is often preoccupied with imagining political philosophy's unimaginable: exit from the state. I research escape as a thematic, formal, and political concern in American literature and culture spanning genres and political allegiances, examining how fiction, poetry, and adjacent cultural productions, such as graffiti and film, struggle to imagine a way out of the political state, constituting what I call the poetics of escape.
Scholarship:
"Unstate: Disarticulating State Knowledge and Joan Didion's Democracy"
"Beyond Protest: Voice and Exit in Contemporary American Poetry"
"'But one kind' of Life: Thoreau's Subjective Theory of Value in Walden"
Review of Contested Records: The Turn to Documents in Contemporary North American Poetry, by Michael Leong
"Cry criers: Jordan Scott's Night & Ox and Andrew Joron's The Absolute Letter"(review)
Journal of Modern Literature 43.3 (2020)
"Turbulent Democracy: A Closer Look at JML 43.3" (21 July 2020)
(introductory blog post)
"Turbulent Democracy: A Closer Look at JML 43.3" (21 July 2020)
(introductory blog post)
"Beyond Protest: Voice and Exit in Contemporary American Poetry"
American Literature 91.4 (2019)
"'But one kind' of Life: Thoreau's Subjective Theory of Value in Walden"
Nineteenth-Century Literature 70.4 (2016)
Review of Contested Records: The Turn to Documents in Contemporary North American Poetry, by Michael Leong
Resources for American Literary Study 43.1-2 (2021)
"Cry criers: Jordan Scott's Night & Ox and Andrew Joron's The Absolute Letter"(review)
Jacket 2 (26 March 2018)