Falling Short: Failure, Passivity, and the Crisis of Self-Fashioning in the European Novel 1830-1927
385 Canner Street
Apt 4
New Haven, CT 06511
Katie Trumpener, Maurice Samuels
My dissertation outlines a revisionist history of the European Bildungsroman, focusing on failure, inaction, and alienation. My project, the most comprehensive account of this vital genre of European modernity written in the past quarter of a century, analyzes in detail the impressive string of personal failures, untimely deaths, suicides, and withdrawals from the world in the novels of Stendhal, Dickens, Balzac, Eliot, Flaubert, James, and Samuel Butler. By locating this profound crisis of socialization in the heart of nineteenth century realism, I am able to thoroughly reassess the relationship between realist and modernist instances of the Bildungsroman: the novels of Joyce and Proust, I argue, offer not a breakdown of the genre, but novel solutions to inherited problems.
The Cinema of War (Professor Murray Biggs, Spring 2011)
Introduction to Theory of Literature (Professor Haun Saussy, Spring 2010)
Shakespeare: Histories and Tragedies (Professor David Kastan, Fall 2009)
Edited collection
The Politics of Tragedy, Ed. Aleksandar Stevic. Under contract with Sluzbeni Glasnik, to be published in early 2012. 350 pages. A selection, in Serbo-Croatian, of recent Anglo-American contributions to the theory and history of tragedy, including essays by Simon Goldhil, Froma Zeitlin, Richard Seaford and Edith Hall. My editing, translations, and introduction.
Articles
“Who Cares? Dickensian Bildungsroman and the Logic of Dependency.” Currently under review at ELH.
“Intimations of the Holocaust from the Recollections of Early Childhood: Childhood Memories, Holocaust Representation, and the Uses of Nostalgia in Danilo Kiš and Christa Wolf.” Currently under review at Comparative Literature Studies.
“Genealogical Fantasies: T.S. Eliot and the Limits of Intellectual Biography.” Yale Modernism Lab http://modernism.research.yale.edu/documents/Stevic-Eliot-Genealogical-F.... October 2008.
“Context as a Universal Excuse.” BKC 6 (2007): 162–176. [In Serbo-Croatian]
“Danilo Kiš, a Reader of Borges and a Realist Writer.” Knjizevna istorija 127 (2005): 529–551. [In Serbo-Croatian]
“Dialogism and the Construction of Literary History: an Essay in Bakhtin’s Rhetoric” in Proucavanje opste knjizevnosti danas, Eds. Adrijana Marcetic and Tanja Popovic. Belgrade: Filoloski fakultet, 2005. 303–315. [In Serbo-Croatian]
“Künstlerroman as Bildungsroman: What Genre Theory Can and Cannot Do.” txt 5/6 (2004): 40–54. [In Serbo-Croatian]
“Is there a Bloom in this text? Joyce’s Ulysses and the Recuperative Fallacy.” txt 3/4 (2004): 27–35. [In Serbo-Croatian]
Collaborative Work
Contributor. Yale Modernism Lab, Ed. Pericles Lewis.
Contributor. Tanja Popovic, A Dictionary of Literary Terms. Belgrade: Logos Art, 2007. 831 pages. Second Ed. 2010. I have contributed over 200 entries, mostly related to the history of criticism, narrative theory, and Classical Greek literature. [In Serbo-Croatian]
CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS AND INVITED TALKS
“Who Cares? Moral Sentimentalism, Care Ethics, and the Dickensian Bildungsroman,” British Studies Colloquium, Department of English, Yale University, October 7, 2011 (forthcoming).
“Cinema, Violence, and the Nation State,” Guest Lecture, Film 407 – The Cinema of War, Yale University, April 2011.
“Ideological Anxieties into Narrative Anxieties: A Tale of Two Cities and the Problem of Political Violence,” International Conference on Narrative, Washington University in St. Louis, April 2011.
“High Art after Bourdieu: Universal Classic, Aesthetic Ideology, and the Failures of Historical Materialism,” American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting, New Orleans, April 2010.
“Graphs, Maps, and Trees: The Birth of Narrative Grammar from the Spirit of Formalism,” Guest Lecture, Literature 300 – Introduction to Theory of Literature, Yale University, March 2010.
“Can We Have a Cultural History of Aesthetic Disinterestedness?” Panel on Literature, Aesthetics, and Economics in the Eighteenth Century, Department of French, Yale University, May 2008, and Crossroads Conference, University of Massachusetts Amherst, October 2008.
“Dialogism and the Construction of Literary History: an Essay in Bakhtin’s Rhetoric,” Comparative Literature Studies Today, University of Belgrade, May 2005.
Whitney Humanities Center Fellowship, Yale University (2011– 2012) John F. Enders Research Fellowship, Yale University (Summer 2011) Yale GSA Conference Travel Fund Award (Spring 2011) Yale Graduate School Fellowship for attending The School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University (Summer 2009) Yale University Summer Language Institute Fellowship (Summer 2008) Yale University Graduate Fellowship (2007–2011)