Ali Chetwynd
I'm associate professor and chair of English at the American University of Iraq, in Sulaymaniyah. I finished my PhD at the University of Michigan in 2016, and before that taught language and literature in high-school in Bulgaria. I came to Iraq a week after dissertation defence, became chair that year, and got promoted in 2022. I've coorganized conferences on Thomas Pynchon, American Pragmatism&Literature, and William Gaddis, I co-edited Thomas Pynchon, Sex, and Gender (Uni Georgia Press 2018) with Joanna Freer and Yorgos Maragos, and am now in the process of co-editing two projects on Gaddis. I also used co-edit the Book Reviews section of Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, since I think book reviews are important, and open access publishing even more so.
Research-wise (and really waking-mind-wise), I'm interested above all in the constructive argumentative capacities of anti-realist fiction, which is usually understood to have a purely negative range of rhetoric - DEconstructing, UNdoing, DISrupting, blah blah blah.
My book project makes the case for non-realist fiction's ability to make constructive, even conservative, but entirely coherent arguments by examining the importance of deliberation and acts of calculative judgement to the novels of the first generation of American postmodernists, who tend at the moment to get read solely as anti-rational, anti-deliberative acolytes of continental theory. I'll demonstrate that there are certain models of 'rationality' that they endorse, precisely because such models allow them to more effectively critique rationalism and rationalisation. Part of my doing so is to establish the continuity, rather than the rupture, between this generation's engagement with rationality/doubt-questions and those of earlier American authors.
In each case, I examine the ways that my authors relate their treatments of doubt, deliberation and choice to the unintuitive encounter with their experimental form. At the core of the project are a set of novels I call 'Postmodern Project Fictions', engaged in the isomorphic attempts to A) work out warrants for deliberating and acting in a world whose givens seem to make this implausible, and B) to work out ways for anti-mimetic fiction to tell readers something coherent about their world. My fundamental question is how the kinds of deliberative cognition experimental fiction demands relate to the kinds of deliberative thought prompted by the conventions of the fiction against which it sets itself. Competing conceptions of rationality have a lot to do with the answers, I suspect.
I've published work on Thomas Pynchon, Ben Jonson, and William Gaddis (published stuff should all be available below in prior-to-final versions), The Gaddis and Pynchon projects reveal that I seem, rather grandiosely, to work in triptychs: (articles apiece on the Ethics, Metaphysics, and Epistemology of Late Pynchon, for example). Now that Pynchon and Gaddis things are just about done (I hope everything I have to say about either will be in print by 2024), I'm looking forward to moving on to writing about other people: I'm working toward organising a conference on experimental writers of the postwar era that have gone unstudied for whatever reason - lots of them (William S Wilson, Marguerite Young, Carlene Hatcher Polite, just to name some Americans) are more interesting than many of the Canonical Postmodernists.
I'm interested in various more abstract questions within theories of novel, lyric, text and analytical aesthetics. Most of my ponderings on such issues come down to how literature relates to simultaneity: in what ways does it make us think or process multiple beliefs/worlds/ideas at once? Do different genres do so differently? How might a treatment of literature based on simultaneity refine the 'oscillation'-centric models of literary experience currently in favour? Is there something about the nature of text that makes printed literature work with different mental simultaneities than film or music, say? I think the answers are generally 'yes' but obviously this demands demonstration. I'm working on it.
Finally, I have ongoing self-contained single-article projects on William Cowper, on alliterative longline poetry, and on Mathilde Blind. These take an indefinite back-seat to the work I do on book-project stuff, to teaching and to general ruminant conjecture, but if anyone's interested in conferring on either of these grimly under-rated people, or agrees that you can alliterate on the second consonant in a cluster, then do get in touch.
Research-wise (and really waking-mind-wise), I'm interested above all in the constructive argumentative capacities of anti-realist fiction, which is usually understood to have a purely negative range of rhetoric - DEconstructing, UNdoing, DISrupting, blah blah blah.
My book project makes the case for non-realist fiction's ability to make constructive, even conservative, but entirely coherent arguments by examining the importance of deliberation and acts of calculative judgement to the novels of the first generation of American postmodernists, who tend at the moment to get read solely as anti-rational, anti-deliberative acolytes of continental theory. I'll demonstrate that there are certain models of 'rationality' that they endorse, precisely because such models allow them to more effectively critique rationalism and rationalisation. Part of my doing so is to establish the continuity, rather than the rupture, between this generation's engagement with rationality/doubt-questions and those of earlier American authors.
In each case, I examine the ways that my authors relate their treatments of doubt, deliberation and choice to the unintuitive encounter with their experimental form. At the core of the project are a set of novels I call 'Postmodern Project Fictions', engaged in the isomorphic attempts to A) work out warrants for deliberating and acting in a world whose givens seem to make this implausible, and B) to work out ways for anti-mimetic fiction to tell readers something coherent about their world. My fundamental question is how the kinds of deliberative cognition experimental fiction demands relate to the kinds of deliberative thought prompted by the conventions of the fiction against which it sets itself. Competing conceptions of rationality have a lot to do with the answers, I suspect.
I've published work on Thomas Pynchon, Ben Jonson, and William Gaddis (published stuff should all be available below in prior-to-final versions), The Gaddis and Pynchon projects reveal that I seem, rather grandiosely, to work in triptychs: (articles apiece on the Ethics, Metaphysics, and Epistemology of Late Pynchon, for example). Now that Pynchon and Gaddis things are just about done (I hope everything I have to say about either will be in print by 2024), I'm looking forward to moving on to writing about other people: I'm working toward organising a conference on experimental writers of the postwar era that have gone unstudied for whatever reason - lots of them (William S Wilson, Marguerite Young, Carlene Hatcher Polite, just to name some Americans) are more interesting than many of the Canonical Postmodernists.
I'm interested in various more abstract questions within theories of novel, lyric, text and analytical aesthetics. Most of my ponderings on such issues come down to how literature relates to simultaneity: in what ways does it make us think or process multiple beliefs/worlds/ideas at once? Do different genres do so differently? How might a treatment of literature based on simultaneity refine the 'oscillation'-centric models of literary experience currently in favour? Is there something about the nature of text that makes printed literature work with different mental simultaneities than film or music, say? I think the answers are generally 'yes' but obviously this demands demonstration. I'm working on it.
Finally, I have ongoing self-contained single-article projects on William Cowper, on alliterative longline poetry, and on Mathilde Blind. These take an indefinite back-seat to the work I do on book-project stuff, to teaching and to general ruminant conjecture, but if anyone's interested in conferring on either of these grimly under-rated people, or agrees that you can alliterate on the second consonant in a cluster, then do get in touch.
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Books by Ali Chetwynd
contributors - Jennifer Backman, Simon de Bourcier, Simon Cook, Inger H Dalsgaard, Catherine Flay, Marie Franco, Doug Haynes, Luc Herman and John M Krafft, Molly Hite, Kostas Kaltsas, Christopher Kocela, Angus McFadzean, Richard Moss, and Jeffrey Severs
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Blurb - Thomas Pynchon's fiction has been considered masculinist, misogynist, phallocentric, and pornographic: its formal experimentation, irony, and ambiguity have been taken both to complicate such judgments and to be parts of the problem. To the present day, deep critical divisions persist as to whether Pynchon's representations of women are sexist, feminist, or reflective of a more general misanthropy, whether his writing of sex is boorishly pornographic or effectually transgressive, whether queer identities are celebrated or mocked, and whether his departures from realist convention express masculinist elitism or critique the gendering of genre.
Thomas Pynchon, Sex, and Gender reframes these debates. As the first book-length investigation of Pynchon's writing to put the topics of sex and gender at its core, it moves beyond binary debates about whether to see Pynchon as liberatory or conservative, instead examining how his preoccupation with sex and gender conditions his fiction's whole worldview. The essays it contains, which cumulatively address all of Pynchon's novels from V. (1963) to Bleeding Edge (2013), investigate such topics as the imbrication of gender and power, sexual abuse and the writing of sex, the gendering of violence, and the shifting representation of the family. Providing a wealth of new approaches to the centrality of sex and gender in Pynchon's work, the collection opens up new avenues for Pynchon studies as a whole.
Journal Articles by Ali Chetwynd
metaphysical preconditions necessary for any concrete political approach to succeed in an era in which capitalism’s destruction of possibilities alternative to itself seems like a fait accompli. Such a reading requires a broadened conception of ‘economy’, taking in affective and rhetorical structures as well as financial ones, all of which hinge on details of Pynchon’s metaphysical worldbuilding that recent ‘politics first’ criticism has downplayed. Pynchon grants existence to many worlds, but makes them all subordinate to our own. How, he asks, could we, in our world and timeline, recuperate the lost or cynically destroyed possibilities of the past such that they can become present again, and operate to improve that world? I use the non-fiction Pynchon published between Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) and Vineland (1990) to identify how Mason & Dixon (1997) and Against the Day (2006) frame and answer this question. I then show exactly how the specific metaphysical structures Pynchon generates lead to specific affective dynamics between text and reader that can be understood as economies insofar as they allocate energy to specific political imperatives.
Against such readings, this paper provides grounds for examining Pynchon’s post-Vineland work through preoccupations that differentiate it from, rather than yoking it to, the earlier novels. It takes as an exemplar the recent novels’ increasing focus on questions of obligation and competing duties, addressing how such a focus situates Pynchon’s work in relation to the dominant discourses in contemporary literary ethics, with their emphases on alterity and indeterminacy at the expense of decision-making.
The essay first shows how the relationship between paranoia and obligation shifted between Gravity’s Rainbow and Mason & Dixon, then demonstrates how acknowledging the centrality of obligation to the recent work allows a coherent and systematic cross-novel treatment of recurrent plot mechanics such as those relating to debt and patronage.
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I wrote this paper straight after graduating from undergrad, and there are all sorts of methodological things I would now, a few years into graduate school, do very differently. I stand by the textual readings though, and the overall claims about the nature of the play's tragedy that they lead to.
The copy here is the paper in proofs. For final printed version, please see the online copy linked to. The intellectual property rights of this paper are held by Edinburgh University Press, who publish the BJJ."
Book Chapters by Ali Chetwynd
For a much more in-depth treatment of these issues, read the book I co-edited with Georgios Maragos and Joanna Freer:
Thomas Pynchon, Sex, and Gender: University of Georgia Press, 2018
Fiction (for children) by Ali Chetwynd
Online here - http://birdsthumb.org/issue-02-15
Book Reviews by Ali Chetwynd
Online here - https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.3378
Online here - https://content.sciendo.com/view/journals/abcsj/33/1/article-p233.xml
Book review, sceptical of the book's reliance on trad pomo framework but finding it very useful for expanding the range of interpretation of women's experimental writing.
contributors - Jennifer Backman, Simon de Bourcier, Simon Cook, Inger H Dalsgaard, Catherine Flay, Marie Franco, Doug Haynes, Luc Herman and John M Krafft, Molly Hite, Kostas Kaltsas, Christopher Kocela, Angus McFadzean, Richard Moss, and Jeffrey Severs
-
Blurb - Thomas Pynchon's fiction has been considered masculinist, misogynist, phallocentric, and pornographic: its formal experimentation, irony, and ambiguity have been taken both to complicate such judgments and to be parts of the problem. To the present day, deep critical divisions persist as to whether Pynchon's representations of women are sexist, feminist, or reflective of a more general misanthropy, whether his writing of sex is boorishly pornographic or effectually transgressive, whether queer identities are celebrated or mocked, and whether his departures from realist convention express masculinist elitism or critique the gendering of genre.
Thomas Pynchon, Sex, and Gender reframes these debates. As the first book-length investigation of Pynchon's writing to put the topics of sex and gender at its core, it moves beyond binary debates about whether to see Pynchon as liberatory or conservative, instead examining how his preoccupation with sex and gender conditions his fiction's whole worldview. The essays it contains, which cumulatively address all of Pynchon's novels from V. (1963) to Bleeding Edge (2013), investigate such topics as the imbrication of gender and power, sexual abuse and the writing of sex, the gendering of violence, and the shifting representation of the family. Providing a wealth of new approaches to the centrality of sex and gender in Pynchon's work, the collection opens up new avenues for Pynchon studies as a whole.
metaphysical preconditions necessary for any concrete political approach to succeed in an era in which capitalism’s destruction of possibilities alternative to itself seems like a fait accompli. Such a reading requires a broadened conception of ‘economy’, taking in affective and rhetorical structures as well as financial ones, all of which hinge on details of Pynchon’s metaphysical worldbuilding that recent ‘politics first’ criticism has downplayed. Pynchon grants existence to many worlds, but makes them all subordinate to our own. How, he asks, could we, in our world and timeline, recuperate the lost or cynically destroyed possibilities of the past such that they can become present again, and operate to improve that world? I use the non-fiction Pynchon published between Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) and Vineland (1990) to identify how Mason & Dixon (1997) and Against the Day (2006) frame and answer this question. I then show exactly how the specific metaphysical structures Pynchon generates lead to specific affective dynamics between text and reader that can be understood as economies insofar as they allocate energy to specific political imperatives.
Against such readings, this paper provides grounds for examining Pynchon’s post-Vineland work through preoccupations that differentiate it from, rather than yoking it to, the earlier novels. It takes as an exemplar the recent novels’ increasing focus on questions of obligation and competing duties, addressing how such a focus situates Pynchon’s work in relation to the dominant discourses in contemporary literary ethics, with their emphases on alterity and indeterminacy at the expense of decision-making.
The essay first shows how the relationship between paranoia and obligation shifted between Gravity’s Rainbow and Mason & Dixon, then demonstrates how acknowledging the centrality of obligation to the recent work allows a coherent and systematic cross-novel treatment of recurrent plot mechanics such as those relating to debt and patronage.
-------
I wrote this paper straight after graduating from undergrad, and there are all sorts of methodological things I would now, a few years into graduate school, do very differently. I stand by the textual readings though, and the overall claims about the nature of the play's tragedy that they lead to.
The copy here is the paper in proofs. For final printed version, please see the online copy linked to. The intellectual property rights of this paper are held by Edinburgh University Press, who publish the BJJ."
For a much more in-depth treatment of these issues, read the book I co-edited with Georgios Maragos and Joanna Freer:
Thomas Pynchon, Sex, and Gender: University of Georgia Press, 2018
Online here - http://birdsthumb.org/issue-02-15
Online here - https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.3378
Online here - https://content.sciendo.com/view/journals/abcsj/33/1/article-p233.xml
Book review, sceptical of the book's reliance on trad pomo framework but finding it very useful for expanding the range of interpretation of women's experimental writing.
---------
The copy here is the review in proofs. For final printed version, please see the online copy linked to. The intellectual property rights of this paper are held by Edinburgh University Press, who publish the BJJ."
– Washington University in St Louis, Fall 2022 (2 day conference, dates tbc)
100 years of William Gaddis. Gaddis and his fiction were always self-conscious about the scope of their reception: the first two novels feature artist-characters concerned with being seen to compose for “a very small audience,” while a musician character’s epitaph is work “still spoken of, when it is noted, with high regard, though seldom played.” This (pessimistic, elite, ironic) self-conception has set the terms for much of Gaddis’ reception from both lay and academic readerships. But how might the next century of Gaddis look in the contrasting light of the last decade’s wider uptake?
We welcome proposals for presentations that might distinguish the next century of work on Gaddis from what has gone before.
See attached document for full details.
“The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “Bartleby” exemplify Melville and Poe’s shared interest in deriving a “creeping of the flesh” from characters who embody familiar, paradigmatically human qualities.
This was a talk about that.