Dr Paul Crosthwaite

Dr Paul Crosthwaite - BA, MLitt, PhD (Newcastle)

Overview

Position: Lecturer Email: CrosthwaitePJ@cf.ac.uk
Telephone: +44(0)29 208 70317
Fax: +44(0)29 208 74647
Extension: 70317
Location: Humanities Building, Colum Drive, Cathays, Cardiff, CF10 3EU.

Research Group

English Literature

Research Interests

Modernist and postmodernist fiction; psychoanalysis; literary and cultural theory; culture and financial markets.

Selected Publications

Monograph:

Trauma, Postmodernism, and the Aftermath of World War II (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

Edited collection:

Ed. and intro. [5,000 words], Criticism, Crisis, and Contemporary Narrative: Textual Horizons in an Age of Global Risk (New York: Routledge, forthcoming 2010) [12 x 7,000-word chapters].

Journal articles:

‘Blood on the Trading Floor: Waste, Sacrifice, and Death in Financial Crises’, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 15.2 (forthcoming 2010) [9,500 words].

‘Anticipations of the Accident: Modernist Fiction and Systemic Risk’, Textual Practice 24.2 (2010), 331-52.

‘Speed, War, and Traumatic Affect: Reading Ian McEwan’s Atonement’, Cultural Politics 3.1 (2007), 51-70.

Book chapter:

‘Clockwork Automata, Artificial Intelligence, and Why the Body of the Author Matters’, in Minds, Bodies, Machines, 1790-1920 (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture), ed. by Deirdre Coleman and Hilary Fraser (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2011) [8,000 words].

Publications

Monograph:

Trauma, Postmodernism, and the Aftermath of World War II (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

Edited collections:

Ed. and intro. [5,000 words], Criticism, Crisis, and Contemporary Narrative: Textual Horizons in an Age of Global Risk (New York: Routledge, forthcoming 2010) [12 x 7,000-word chapters].

Ed. and intro. (23-34) with John Beck, Velocities of Power, special section (four articles) of Cultural Politics 3.1 (2007).

Journal articles:

‘Blood on the Trading Floor: Waste, Sacrifice, and Death in Financial Crises’, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 15.2 (forthcoming 2010) [9,500 words].

‘Anticipations of the Accident: Modernist Fiction and Systemic Risk’, Textual Practice 24.2 (2010), 331-52.

‘Fiction in the Age of the Global Accident: Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis’, Catastrophe, special issue of Static: Journal of the London Consortium 7 (2008) [9,000 words].

‘Speed, War, and Traumatic Affect: Reading Ian McEwan’s Atonement’, Cultural Politics 3.1 (2007), 51-70.

Chapters in books:

‘Fiction and Trauma from the Second World War to 9/11’, in The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Vol. 7: British and Irish Fiction since 1940, ed. by Peter Boxall and Bryan Cheyette (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2012) [7,000 words].

‘The Accident of Finance’, in Virilio Now: Current Perspectives in Virilio Studies, ed. by John Armitage (Cambridge: Polity, forthcoming 2011) (Chinese translation: Beijing: Beijing University Press, forthcoming 2011) [7,000 words].

‘Phantasmagoric Finance: Crisis and the Supernatural in Contemporary Finance Culture’, in Criticism, Crisis, and Contemporary Narrative: Textual Horizons in an Age of Global Risk, ed. by Paul Crosthwaite (New York: Routledge, forthcoming 2010) [7,000 words].

‘“Children of the Blitz”: Air War and the Time of Postmodernism in Michael Moorcock’s Mother London’, in Bombs Away!: Representing the Air War over Europe and Japan, ed. by William Rasch and Wilfried Wilms (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006), pp. 233-47.

‘Time Bombs: Pynchon, Postmodernism, and the Temporality of Total War’, in Tales of the Great American Victory: World War II in Politics and Poetics (European Contributions to American Studies, vol. 62), ed. by Diederik Oostdijk and Markha G. Valenta (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2006), pp. 167-75.

‘Supermodern Science, Postmodern Time, and Gravity’s Rainbow’, in Beginnings: Critical Perspectives on English Studies, ed. by Angela Brüning (Stirling: Department of English Studies, University of Stirling, 2005), pp. 9-15.

Entries in reference works:

‘Postmodernist Fiction’, in The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Fiction, ed. by Brian W. Shaffer (Oxford: Blackwell, forthcoming 2010) [3,000 words].

Entries on Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History by Ian Baucom and The Coiners of Language by Jean-Joseph Goux, AHRC Culture of the Market Network Annotated Online Bibliography (University of Manchester, 2010) [500 words each].

Book reviews:

Review of I Do I Undo I Redo: The Textual Genesis of Modernist Selves in Hopkins, Yeats, Conrad, Forster, Joyce, and Woolf by Finn Fordham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), Modern Language Review 106.1 (forthcoming 2011) [700 words].

Review of Five Strands of Fictionality: The Institutional Construction of Contemporary American Fiction by Daniel Punday (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010), Modern Language Review 106.1 (forthcoming 2011) [700 words].

Review of Consumer Culture and Personal Finance: Money Goes to Market by Jacqueline Botterill (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), European Journal of Cultural Studies (forthcoming 2010) [1,000 words].

Review of Modernism and the Marketplace: Literary Culture and Consumer Capitalism in Rhys, Woolf, Stein, and Nella Larsen by Alissa G. Karl (New York: Routledge, 2008), Space and Culture (2010) [800 words].

Review of The University of Disaster by Paul Virilio (Cambridge: Polity, 2009) and The Catastrophic Imperative: Subjectivity, Time, and Memory in Contemporary Thought ed. by Dominiek Hoens, Sigi Jöttkandt, and Gert Buelens (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), Sociological Review 58.3 (2010), 497-502.

Research

I recently completed a monograph entitled Trauma, Postmodernism, and the Aftermath of World War II for Palgrave Macmillan. The book is the first sustained study of the relationship between Anglo-American postmodernist fiction and the Second World War. Against readings of the postmodern as ‘depthless’ and dehistoricized, I argue that postmodernism has not abandoned history but has rather reformulated it in terms of trauma, trauma that is traceable, time and again, to the catastrophes of the 1940s.

I am currently writing a book on the interrelationship between literature, culture, and financial markets in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This project predates the global ‘credit crunch’ that began in the summer of 2007, but has come to feel increasingly timely in the wake of recent events. Projected topics include: financial crashes, and their representation in ‘financial thriller’ novels, as expressions of an urge for waste and expenditure theorized by such thinkers as Georges Bataille, Jean Baudrillard, and Jean-François Lyotard; the notion, found in literature, film, visual art, and financial economics, of the stock market as a ‘text’ in which the rhythms of history are inscribed in encrypted form; intimations of impending financial disaster in modernist fiction; the migration of images of total war and nuclear conflagration into accounts of financial crisis in recent popular fiction, television drama, economic journalism, and cultural theory; and the pervasive alignment of the markets with the natural, the cosmological, and the divine.

My interest in this field led me to organize the international, interdisciplinary conference Literature, Art, and Culture in an Age of Global Risk.

I am also currently writing an essay on attempts to develop artificial intelligence programmes capable of producing literary texts, and their implications for theories of authorship.

Biography

I studied for my BA, MLitt, and PhD degrees at Newcastle University and joined Cardiff University in 2007.

I teach or co-teach modules on the history of the English novel, Joseph Conrad, contemporary American fiction, war and memory in contemporary British fiction, culture and the city, and, at MA level, literature and film after 9/11.

Cardiff School of English Communication and Philosophy