个人简介
I am a professor of English at California State University, Northridge, with special interests in Shakespeare, Milton, Biblical and Classical literature, and the history of European poetry and criticism from the classical through the postmodern eras. I am the author of four books to date:
-----1) The Humanist (Re)Turn: Reclaiming the Self in Literature (Routledge, 2019), argues for a renewed emphasis on humanism—against “the anti-humanism” of the last several decades of literary/theoretical scholarship, from the decentering of the author in Mallarmé, Barthes, and Foucault, to the fragmented—even disappearing—subject of Frederic Jameson, to the “posthuman” perspectives of critics like Donna Haraway, Richard Grusin, Rosa Braidotti, and others whose work emphasizes the decentering of the human in favor of a turn toward the nonhuman, whether understood in terms of animals, affectivity, bodies, organic and geophysical systems, materiality, or technology. It takes as its frame the idea of transcendence, specifically in terms of what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin calls a retournement dans l'Autre [return (in)to the Other], and what Carl Jung refers to as individuation. In each case, the dynamic is a turn toward the Other (without or within).
-----2) Love and its Critics (Cambridge: Open Book, 2017), written with Arpi Movsesian, is a history of love and the challenge love offers to the laws and customs of its times and places, as told through poetry from the Song of Songs to Ovid and Virgil, the Greek writers Longus and Musaeus, the Occitanian troubadours, the Italian poets of the thirteenth- and fourteenth-centuries, the poems and plays of Shakespeare, the poems of John Donne and Robert Herrick, and John Milton’s Paradise Lost. It is also an account of the critical reception afforded to such literature, and the ways in which criticism has attempted to stifle this challenge. The book argues that the poetry it explores celebrates and reinvents the love the troubadour poets of the eleventh and twelfth centuries called fin’amor: love as an end in itself, mutual and freely chosen even in the face of social, religious, or political retribution. Neither eros nor agape, neither exclusively of the body, nor solely of the spirit, this love is a middle path. Alongside this tradition has grown a critical movement that employs a 'hermeneutics of suspicion', in Paul Ricoeur’s phrase, to claim that passionate love poetry is not what it seems, and should be properly understood as worship of God, subordination to Empire, or an entanglement with the structures of language itself – in short, the very things the poetry resists.
-----3) The Atheist Milton (Ashgate, 2012 / Routledge 2016) makes a two-fold argument: based on his association with Arian ideas (denial of the doctrine of the Trinity), his argument for the de Deo theory of creation (the idea that the universe is created, not from nothing or ex nihilo, but from the essence of God, which puts him in line with the materialism of Spinoza and Hobbes), and his Mortalist argument that the human soul dies with the human body, Milton was an Atheist by the commonly-used definitions of the period. And as the poet who takes a reader from the presence of an imperious, monarchical God in Paradise Lost, to the internal—almost Gnostic—conception of God in Paradise Regained, to the absence of any God whatsoever in Samson Agonistes, Milton is the poet of the Atheists, pushing harder against that old “task-Master” than any poet before or since.
-----4) The Tyranny of Heaven: Milton’s Rejection of God as King (U. Delaware Press, 2004), focuses on issues of political authority and poetic representation, through a focus on John Milton and the English 17th century, a place and time in which questions of freedom and authority eventually brought a nation to revolution, civil war, and a failed attempt to permanently overthrow a centuries-old tradition of monarchical government.
教育经历
1996 - 2001, English, Northwestern University, PhD
1994 - 1996, English, Truman State University, MA
1992 - 1994, English, Truman State University, BA
工作经历
2014, English, California State University Northridge, Professor
2009 - 2014, English, California State University Northridge, Associate Professor
2004 - 2009, English, California State University Northridge, Assistant Professor
2003 - 2004, English, DePaul University, Visiting Assistant Professor
2001 - 2003, English, Northwestern University, Visiting Assistant Professor
