Books by Nicholas Hengen Fox
This is the prologue from Reading as Collective Action, out in Fall 2017, from the University of ... more This is the prologue from Reading as Collective Action, out in Fall 2017, from the University of Iowa Press.
Papers by Nicholas Hengen Fox
This essay engages the mass publication of poetry—ranging from W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939” ... more This essay engages the mass publication of poetry—ranging from W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939” to Lorna Dee Cervantes’s “Palestine” and Amiri Baraka’s “Somebody Blew Up America”—in the months after September 11, 2001. I label this set of texts linked together by near-simultaneous (re)publication a chronocanon. The chronocanon, I argue, can serve as a means by which an oppositional group articulates its position to a broadly construed public and, in so doing, deploys literature in an attempt to produce a new hegemonic formation. In particular, I focus on the way this chronocanon put forth antiracist and anti-imperialist arguments in an era when racist violence and imperialist tendencies were widely deployed, both by the US government and by many of its citizens. More broadly, I argue that for critics interested in the politics of literature, more attention to mass republication can help ground such claims in praxis.
The Radical Teacher, 2012
As much as we talk politics with our students, read political novels, and highlight the activism ... more As much as we talk politics with our students, read political novels, and highlight the activism of the past, the walls of the classroom present a problem for radical teachers. Our meetings host passionate discussions where students begin to tackle assumptions, dismantle ideas of privilege, even critique capitalism. But when class ends, what happens to the political fervor? Where does that revolutionary spark go? Does it spread out into the streets? Or does it end up at the bottom of backpacks, forgotten like last week’s homework?
New Literary History, 2012
Among literary scholars, Jürgen Habermas has never been the most popular Frankfurt School thinker... more Among literary scholars, Jürgen Habermas has never been the most popular Frankfurt School thinker. With his “communicative turn” in the early 1980s—a move that, for him, involved rejecting almost completely the political value of the aesthetic—he alienated what few allies he had left in the literary field. Despite this, “A Habermasian Literary Criticism” argues that Habermas's thinking holds serious value for literary studies today. The essay begins by drawing out an immanent critique of Habermas's arguments against the value of literature. Though Habermas does not see it, his later theory can help clarify literature's role as a means of enabling intersubjective communication. A focus on intersubjectivity allows critics to recognize books as part of an elaborate process by which texts make manifest changes: they shape public opinion, transform civil society, and ultimately exercise an impact on the juridical sphere. A Habermasian literary criticism, then, offers a new way to think about the relation between politics and literature, ranging from the fundamental encounter between readers and books to the way that a book—through its diverse readers and conditions of reading—can alter political practice. Unintentionally, Habermas has provided not only a methodological framework for a sociology of literature, but one grounded in the origins of critical theory.
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Books by Nicholas Hengen Fox
Papers by Nicholas Hengen Fox