So far most of my published work has been on Nabokov: I’m the author of Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Play (Oxford University Press, 2011), the editor of Nabokov’s Selected Poems (Penguin UK and Knopf USA, 2012), and the co-translator (with Anastasia Tolstoy) of Nabokov’s Shakespearean verse-play, The Tragedy of Mister Morn (Penguin 2012; Knopf 2013). I’ve also written on a number of other subjects, though, including Ivan Bunin, ‘evolutionary criticism’, and Wyndham Lewis’s portraits, have published a couple of longer review-essays in the London Review of Books (on John Updike and Nicholson Baker), and have written for the TLS, Frieze, and another journals.

I’m now working on a book called Undelivered Letters, about the figure of the undelivered or undeliverable letter in modern literature. This is a central image of Finnegans Wake, but I find many instances of it prior to and after Joyce, in which it carries a similar programmatic charge: from Carroll, Poe, Melville, Mallarmé and Hopkins, through early Auden, Woolf, and Nabokov, and later in Bishop, Larkin, Pynchon, Ashbery, Günter Grass, Orhan Pamuk, L. P. Hartley, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Derrida, and Lacan, to give only a short list of instances. I take the undelivered letter as the definitive image for modernism’s resistance to message-oriented writing and thinking, and I am interested in how the modernist disruption of the communicative picture of language restores texture to language and makes a space for otherwise difficult to articulate portions of experience: childhood, illicit desire, faith, conspiracy, madness, and useless grief. By following instances of this image, I am able to trace modernism back to origins in nineteenth-century children’s literature and forward to postmodernism and modern theory, while retaining a sharp focus throughout.

This book was originally conceived as one of the articles in a larger ongoing project, a book of interlocking essays tentatively titled Literature through the Looking-Glass: Seven Essays on Inversion, which I am also currently working on. These essays aim to demonstrate how important themes in postmodernism and contemporary theory were prefigured in modernism, and in turn how a series of dominant cultural expectations are subverted in modernism and postmodernism: sense, didacticism, work and professionalism, success, taste, attack, and solid forms.

I am also co-editing, with Kathryn Murphy, a volume, Of Essays, which will consist of roughly 20 essays of 8,000 words each, on the literary essay from Montaigne to the present. Confirmed contributors include Gillian Beer, Scott Black, Warren Boutcher, Gregory Dart, Markman Ellis, Stefano Evangelista, Ophelia Field, Felicity James, Kathryn Murphy, Adam Phillips, Bharat Tandon, Jeremy Treglown, Michael Wood, and Tom Wright.

Lastly, alongside academic projects I am also working on an essayistic book intended for a broad audience, entitled A Dictionary of Modern Life, about how our lives are shaped by the ambiguities of a series of words in contemporary language - a book roughly in the territory of Raymond Williams’s Keywords, though more specifically focussed on current usage.

I teach on a range of undergraduate and postgraduate modules. These include:

First Year:

Reading Texts I

Reading Texts II

Literature in History II

Second Year:

Modernism
 

From 2012 on, I will also be offering two new modules.

One is a third year module, Through the Looking-Glass: Nonsense, Make-Believe, and Modern Literature, exploring the relation between linguistically experimental twentieth-century writers such as Joyce, Auden, Stein, Stevens, cummings, Crane, Nabokov, Koch, Muldoon, Ashbery, and nonsense and fantasy writers such as Lewis Carroll and Mervyn Peake.

The other is an MA Module, Ludism, on the playful element in literature after 1945 that derives from Borges and Nabokov: we will be reading such authors as Calvino, Queneau, Perec, Barthes, Barthelme, Pynchon, Carter, Rushdie, Muldoon, Simic, and Ashbery.