Work in Progress

I am currently at work on three larger publication projects and a few shorter pieces: 

• With Tom Chadwick, I am working on a double special issue of the journal LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory entitled "Contemporary Literature and/as Archive." The double issue explores how recent technological and environmental developments are pushing the relation between literature and archiving beyond a focus on recovery-work and toward an engagement with the archive as a generative and productive site. The two issues will appear at the end of 2019 and early in 2020. 
• I have started work on what should eventually become a short book on the notion of "context collapse." A term originating in social media studies, "context collapse" names a situation in which messages and actions transcend their original context and accrue new meanings that are no less effective for being unintended. The particular affect and temporality of context collapse, I try to show, also throws new light on discourses on the Anthropocene (especially on the post-catastrophe imagination) and on the social ontology of neoliberalism (which, through its double focus on ignorance and compulsion, incessantly provokes situations of context collapse). 
• I am in the early stages of a larger book project on what I call "world literary value." This book aims to develop a new account of the way literary value is produced, articulated, and circulated in relation to non-literary value domains. The book focus on the dominant role of the USA, and especially of New York-based institutions, in the contemporary creation of world literary value. 
• For other occasions, I am also working on chapters on ontography and contemporary fiction; issue of population in post-catastrophe fiction; and Anthropocene monstrosity. Other forthcoming work includes chapters on critical theory and dementia and on the relation between nature and the welfare state in the novels of the British author Sarah Hall.