School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 101-200 of 239 Results
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Nicholas Jenkins
Professor of English
Current Research and Scholarly Interests20th-century culture and literature, especially poetry; digital humanities; art
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Adam Johnson
Phil and Penny Knight Professor of Creative Writing
BioAdam Johnson is a Professor of English with emphasis in creative writing at Stanford University. Winner of a Whiting Award and Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Academy in Berlin, he is the author of several books, including Fortune Smiles, which won the National Book Award, and the novel The Orphan Master’s Son, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. His stories have appeared in Esquire, GQ, Playboy, Harper's Magazine, Granta, The Paris Review, The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy and have been recognized with the Story Prize, The Sunday Times Short Story Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. His work has been translated into more than three-dozen languages. He was born in South Dakota and is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. His teaching and research interests include the development of the novel, indigeneity, the oral tradition, counter narrative, trauma theory and speculative fiction.
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Gavin Jones
Frederick P. Rehmus Family Professor of Humanities
BioGavin Jones is the author of Strange Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America (U of California, 1999), American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in U.S. Literature, 1840-1945 (Princeton, 2007), Failure and the American Writer: A Literary History (Cambridge, 2014), and Reclaiming John Steinbeck: Writing for the Future of Humanity (Cambridge 2021). He has published articles on writers such as George W. Cable, Theodore Dreiser, W.E.B. DuBois, Sylvester Judd, Paule Marshall, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, and Zora Neale Hurston, in journals including American Literary History, New England Quarterly, African American Review, and Twentieth-Century Literature. Jones has edited a new version of a neglected classic of American literature, Sylvester Judd's "transcendental novel," Margaret: A Tale of the Real and Ideal, Blight and Bloom (1845), and is the coeditor (with Michael J. Collins) of The Cambridge Companion to the American Short Story (2023). He is currently working on two book projects: Zora Neale Hurston and the Art of Controversy and The Storytellers: The Work of Short Fiction in American Culture.
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Roanne Kantor
Assistant Professor of English
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsGlobal Anglophone literature and its relationship to other literary traditions of the Global South. The conditions for interdisciplinary research in the humanities, especially literature's relationship with medicine and the social sciences.
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Joshua Landy
Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French Language, Literature and Civilization, and Professor of Comparative Literature and, by courtesy, of English and of Philosophy
BioJoshua Landy is the Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French, Professor of Comparative Literature, and co-director of the Literature and Philosophy Initiative at Stanford, home to a PhD minor and undergraduate major tracks in Philosophy and Literature.
Professor Landy is the author of Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust (Oxford, 2004), How To Do Things with Fictions (Oxford, 2012), and The World According to Proust (Oxford, 2023). He is also the co-editor of two volumes, Thematics: New Approaches (SUNY, 1995, with Claude Bremond and Thomas Pavel) and The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age (Stanford, 2009, with Michael Saler). Philosophy as Fiction deals with issues of self-knowledge, self-deception, and self-fashioning in Proust's "A la recherche du temps perdu," while raising the question of what literary form contributes to an engagement with such questions. How to Do Things with Fictions explores a series of texts (by Plato, Beckett, Mallarmé, and Mark) that function as training-grounds for the mental capacities. The World According to Proust (now in paperback as Marcel Proust: A Very Short Introduction) is a reader's guide to "In Search of Lost Time."
Professor Landy has published essays in Critical Inquiry, New Literary History, Poetics Today, Narrative, SubStance, Arion, The Los Angeles Review of Books, the Wall Street Journal, and other venues, as well as chapters in The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Approaches to Literature, The Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Literature, and The Cambridge Companion to Proust.
Since 2017, Professor Landy has co-hosted the nationally syndicated public radio show "Philosophy Talk." He has also appeared on the NPR shows "Forum" and "To the Best of our Knowledge."
Professor Landy has received the Walter J. Gores Award for Teaching Excellence (1999) and the Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching (2001). As of Fall 2024, he is the Eleanor Loring Ritch University Fellow in Undergraduate Education. -
Ali Madani
Lecturer
BioAli Madani is Mellon Fellow in the Humanities and Lecturer in English at Stanford.
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Mark McGurl
Albert Guérard Professor of Literature
BioMark McGurl's scholarly work centers on the relation of literature to social, educational and other institutions from the late 19th century to the present. He is the author of The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Harvard), which was the recipient of the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism for 2011. His most recent book, Everything and Less: Fiction in the Age of Amazon (Verso 2021), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism.
McGurl’s first book was The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James (Princeton). He has also published articles in journals such as Critical Inquiry, Representations, American Literary History, and New Literary History. He teaches a range of classes on American literature and related topics.
McGurl received his BA from Harvard, then worked at the New York Times and the New York Review of Books before earning his PhD in comparative literature from Johns Hopkins. He has held fellowships from Office of the President of the University of California and the Stanford Humanities Center. -
Franco Moretti
Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell Professor, Emeritus
BioAuthor of Signs Taken for Wonders (1983), The Way of the World (1987), Modern Epic (1995), Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900 (1998), Graphs, Maps, Trees (2005), The Bourgeois (2013), and Distant Reading (2013). Chief editor of The Novel (2006). Has founded the Center for the Study of the Novel and the Literary Lab. Writes often for New Left Review, and has been translated into over twenty languages.
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Paula M. L. Moya
Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell Professor of the Humanities and Professor, by courtesy, of African and African American Studies and of Iberian and Latin American Cultures
BioMoya is currently the Ellen Andrews Wright Internal Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, where she is on leave for AY 2025-2026.
She is the author of The Social Imperative: Race, Close Reading, and Contemporary Literary Criticism (Stanford UP 2016) and Learning From Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles (UC Press 2002). She has co-edited three collections of original essays including Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century (W.W. Norton, Inc. 2010), Identity Politics Reconsidered (Palgrave 2006) and Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism (UC Press 2000).
Her teaching and research focus on twentieth-century and early twenty-first century literary studies, feminist theory, critical theory, narrative theory, speculative fiction, interdisciplinary approaches to race and ethnicity, and Chicano/a and U.S. Latina/o studies.
At Stanford, Moya has served as the Faculty Director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE), Director of the Research Institute of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE), Director of the Program of Modern Thought and Literature (MTL), Vice Chair of the Department of English, and the Director of the Undergraduate Program of CCSRE. She has been the faculty coordinator of several faculty-graduate student research networks sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center, the Research Institute for the Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and Modern Thought and Literature. They include The Interdisciplinary Working Group in Critical Theory (2015-2016, 2012-2014), Feminist Theory (2007-08, 2002-03), Americanity / Coloniality / Modernity (2006-07), and How Do Identities Matter? (2003-06).
Moya was a co-PI of the Stanford Catalyst Motivating Mobility project, and team leader of the Perfecto Project, a fitness tracking app that combines narrative theory, social psychology, and UI/UX research to leverage culturally-specific narratives and artwork to encourage positive behavior change and healthier living in middle-aged and elderly Latinx populations. She was also a founding organizer and coordinating team member of The Future of Minority Studies research project (FMS), an inter-institutional, interdisciplinary, and multigenerational research project facilitating focused and productive discussions about the democratizing role of minority identity and participation in a multicultural society.
Moya has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, a Clayman Institute Fellow, a CCSRE Faculty Research Fellow, and a Ford Foundation posdoctoral fellow. She has also been the recipient of the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching and an Outstanding Chicana/o Faculty Member award. -
Alexander Nemerov
Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor of the Arts and Humanities and Professor, by courtesy, of English
BioA distinguished scholar of American culture, Alexander Nemerov explores our connection to the past and the power of the humanities to shape our lives. Through his empathetic, intuitive research and close readings of history, philosophy, and poetry, Nemerov reveals art as a source of emotional truth and considers its ethical demands upon us in our moment. Revered for his breadth of scholarship and celebrated for his eloquent public speaking, Nemerov inspires audiences with his belief in the affirming and transfiguring force of art.
An instinctive, nuanced author, Nemerov’s most recent book is The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s presenting tales of a visionary experience in the last years of America as a heavily forested land. His conjuring of a lost world of shade and sun has been praised by Annie Proulx ("deeply beautiful”, “astonishingly tender”, “one of the richest books ever to come my way") and Edmund de Waal (“moving and shocking and beautiful, an extraordinary achievement”).
Previous titles by Nemerov have gained further recognition: Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York was short-listed for the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Prize in Biography; Summoning Pearl Harbor, was praised by the novelist Ali Smith as "a unifying and liberating meditation”; Soulmaker: The Times of Lewis Hine, was short-listed for the Marfield Prize, a national award in arts writing; Wartime Kiss: Visions of the Moment in the 1940s was named one of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles in 2013; Acting in the Night: Macbeth and the Places of the Civil War was a Choice Outstanding Academic Book; Icons of Grief: Val Lewton and 1940s America was praised by The New York Review of Books as "superbly original." Nemerov’s initial books include Silent Dialogues: Diane Arbus and Howard Nemerov, a meditation on his father, the poet Howard Nemerov, and his aunt, the photographer Diane Arbus; The Body of Raphaelle Peale: Still Life and Selfhood, 1812-1824; and Frederic Remington and Turn-of-the-Century America.
Nemerov, an engaging, eloquent speaker, gave the 2007 Andrew Wyeth Lecture at the National Gallery of Art, and in 2017, he delivered the 66th Andrew W. Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art, becoming the first scholar to deliver them with a focus on American art. He has also published two exhibition catalogues: To Make a World: George Ault and 1940s America, the companion to a National Museum of American Art exhibition of that name and Ralph Eugene Meatyard: American Mystic.
After receiving his B.A. in Art History and English with Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa honors from the University of Vermont and his Ph.D. in the History of Art from Yale University, Nemerov began his teaching career at Stanford University in 1992. Returning to Yale in 2001, Nemerov chaired the Department of the History of Art from 2009 to 2012 and in 2010 was named to the Vincent Scully Professorship. Nemerov returned to Stanford in 2012 as the Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities and served as chair of the Department of Art and Art History from 2015 to 2021. The Stanford Daily has named him one of the university's top ten professors. -
Stephen Orgel
Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor of Humanities, Emeritus
BioStephen Orgel has published widely on the political and historical aspects of Renaissance literature, theater, art history and the history of the book. His work is interdisciplinary, and is increasingly concerned with the patronage system, the nature of representation, and performance practice in the Renaissance. His most recent book is Imagining Shakespeare (2003), and he is the author of The Authentic Shakespeare (2002), Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare's England (Cambridge, 1996), The Illusion of Power (Berkeley, 1975), Inigo Jones (London and Berkeley, 1973, in collaboration with Sir Roy Strong), and The Jonsonian Masque (Cambridge, Mass., 1965). He has edited Ben Jonson's masques, Christopher Marlowe's poems and translations, the Oxford Authors John Milton, The Tempest and The Winter's Tale in The Oxford Shakespeare, Trollope's Lady Anna, and Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country, The Age of Innocence and The Reef in the Oxford World's Classics. He is the general editor of Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture, and of the new Pelican Shakespeare. He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, NEH Fellowships, and ACLS Fellowships; he has been a Getty Fellow, a visiting fellow at New College, Oxford, and most recently the Clark Lecturer at Trinity College, Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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David Palumbo-Liu
Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor and Professor, by courtesy, of English
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsHuman Rights, Social Justice, Ethics, Race and Ethnicity
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Patricia Parker
Margery Bailey Professor of English and Dramatic Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature
BioPatricia Parker received her M.A. in English at the University of Toronto and taught for three years in Tanzania, whose President Julius Nyerere also translated Shakespeare into Kiswahili. After teaching at the University of East Africa, she completed her Ph.D. at Yale, in Comparative Literature, and taught for 11 years at the University of Toronto. First invited to Stanford as a Visiting Professor in 1986, she came to Stanford permanently in 1988 as a Professor in both English and Comparative Literature. She has also taught as a Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley and as a member of the core faculty at the School of Criticism and Theory (Cornell University, 1998). She is the author of four books (Inescapable Romance, a study of romance from Ariosto to Wallace Stevens; Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property; Shakespeare from the Margins; and Shakespearean Intersections) and co-editor of five collections of essays on criticism, theory, and cultural studies, including Shakespeare and the Question of Theory and Women, Race and Writing in the Early Modern Period. She has lectured widely in France, Germany, Spain, Australia, New Zealand, the Czech Republic, and other parts of the world, as well as at Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, Chicago, Oxford, Cambridge, the Sorbonne, and other universities; as Gauss Seminar lecturer at Princeton, Shakespeare's Birthday lecturer at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Northrop Frye Professor lecturer at the University of Toronto, and Paul Gottschalk lecturer at Cornell University; and has served on the Advisory Board of the English Institute. In 2003-4, she organized an international conference and public festival at Stanford devoted to “Shakespeare in Asia.” She has also worked with students to create performance-based programs in the community. She currently teaches courses on Shakespeare (including Global Shakespeares), the Bible and Literature, Epic and Empire and other topics. In addition to books-in-progress on Shakespeare, rhetoric, race, and gender, she is the General Editor of the Stanford Global Shakespeare Encyclopedia, which will be released online as a global reference work free to anyone in the world with access to the internet.
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Peggy Phelan
Ann O'Day Maples Professor of the Arts and Professor of English
BioPeggy Phelan is the Ann O’Day Maples Chair in the Arts Professor of Theater & Performance Studies and English. Publishing widely in both book and essay form, Phelan is the author of Unmarked: the politics of performance (Routledge, 1993); Mourning Sex: performing public memories (Routledge, 1997; honorable mention Callaway Prize for dramatic criticism 1997-1999); the survey essay for Art and Feminism, ed. by Helena Reckitt (Phaidon, 2001, winner of “The top 25 best books in art and architecture” award, amazon.com, 2001); the survey essay for Pipilotti Rist (Phaidon, 2001); and the catalog essay for Intus: Helena Almeida (Lisbon, 2004). She edited and contributed to Live Art in Los Angeles, (Routledge, 2012), and contributed catalog essays for Everything Loose Will Land: 1970s Art and Architecture in Los Angeles (Mak Center, 2013), Haunted: Contemporary Photography, Video, and Performance (Guggenheim Museum, 2010); WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (Museum of Contemporary Art, 2007); and Andy Warhol: Giant Size (Phaidon, 2008), among others. Phelan is co-editor, with the late Lynda Hart, of Acting Out: Feminist Performances (University of Michigan Press, 1993; cited as “best critical anthology” of 1993 by American Book Review); and co-editor with Jill Lane of The Ends of Performance (New York University Press, 1997). She contributed an essay to Philip Ursprung’s Herzog and De Meurron: Natural History (CAA, 2005).
She has written more than sixty articles and essays in scholarly, artistic, and commercial magazines ranging from Artforum to Signs. She has written about Samuel Beckett for the PMLA and for The National Gallery of Ireland. She has also written about Robert Frost, Michael and Paris Jackson, Olran, Marina Abramovic, Dziga Vertov and a wide range of artists working in photography, dance, architecture, film, video, music, and poetry. She has edited special issues of the journals Narrative and Women and Performance. She has been a fellow of the Humanities Institute, University of California, Irvine; and a fellow of the Humanities Institute, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. She served on the Editorial Board of Art Journal, one of three quarterly publications of the College Art Association, and as Chair of the board. She has been President and Treasurer of Performance Studies International, the primary professional organization in her field. She has been a fellow of the Getty Research Institute and the Stanford Humanities Center. She won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004. She chaired the Department of Performance Studies at New York University and the Drama Department at Stanford University. -
Patrick Phillips
Eavan Boland Professor
BioPatrick Phillips is the author of Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America, which was named a best book of the year by the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and Smithsonian, and received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. He is also the author of four poetry collections, including Elegy for a Broken Machine, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Song of the Closing Doors, published in 2022. Phillips has received support from the Guggenheim Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars, and the Carnegie Foundation, as well as a Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Copenhagen, and the Lyric Poetry Award of the Poetry Society of America. He is the Eavan Boland Professor of English and Creative Writing at Stanford.
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Ato Quayson
Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, Professor of English and of African and African American Studies and, by courtesy, of Comparative Literature
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsIn addition to an interest in comparative cultural traditions of tragedy, I also have a strong interest in comparative urban studies, diaspora and transnational studies, and interdisciplinarity, among others.
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Vaughn Rasberry
Associate Professor of English and of African and African American Studies
BioVaughn Rasberry studies African American literature, global Cold War culture, the European Enlightenment and its critics, postcolonial theory, and philosophical theories of modernity. As a Fulbright scholar in 2008-09, he taught in the American Studies department at the Humboldt University Berlin and lectured on African American literature throughout Germany. His current book project, Race and the Totalitarian Century, questions the notion that desegregation prompted African American writers and activists to acquiesce in the normative claims of postwar liberalism. Challenging accounts that portray black cultural workers in various postures of reaction to larger forces--namely U.S. liberalism or Soviet communism--his project argues instead that many writers were involved in a complex national and global dialogue with totalitarianism, the defining geopolitical discourse of the twentieth century.
His article, "'Now Describing You': James Baldwin and Cold War Liberalism," appears in an edited volume titled James Baldwin: America and Beyond (University of Michigan Press, 2011). A review essay, "Black Cultural Politics at the End of History," appears in the winter 2012 issue of American Literary History. An article, "Invoking Totalitarianism: Liberal Democracy versus the Global Jihad in Boualem Sansal's The German Mujahid," appears in the spring 2014 special issue of Novel: a Forum on Fiction. For Black History Month, he published an op-ed essay, "The Shape of African American Geopolitics," in Al Jazeera English.
An Annenberg Faculty Fellow at Stanford (2012-14), he has also received fellowships from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the Humanities Center at the University of Pittsburgh.
Vaughn also teaches in collaboration with the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE) and the programs in Modern Thought and Literature, African and African American Studies, and American Studies. -
Judith Richardson
Senior Lecturer in English
BioJudith Richardson is a senior lecturer in English and associate director for the American Studies Program. After receiving her PhD from Harvard University, Judith began teaching at Stanford in 2001, offering a range of courses on American literature, including classes on women writers, early American literature, autobiographies, and the literature of cities. The author of Possessions: The History and Uses of Haunting in the Hudson Valley (2003) she continues to write and lecture—at Stanford and beyond—on the history and literature of New York, and on issues of place and cultural memory more broadly. She is currently working on a book about nineteenth-century America’s “plant-mindedness,” its multivalent obsession with vegetable matters.
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Nancy Ruttenburg
William Robertson Coe Professor of American Literature, Emerita
BioNancy Ruttenburg is the William Robertson Coe Professor of American Literature in the English Department at Stanford. She also holds courtesy appointments in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. She received the PhD in Comparative Literature from Stanford (1988) and taught at Harvard, Berkeley, and most recently at NYU, where she was chair of the Department of Comparative Literature from 2002-2008. Her research interests lie at the intersection of political, religious, and literary expression in colonial through antebellum America and nineteenth-century Russia, with a particular focus on the development of liberal and non-liberal forms of democratic subjectivity. Related interests include history of the novel, novel theory, and the global novel; philosophy of religion and ethics; and problems of comparative method, especially as they pertain to North American literature and history.
Prof. Ruttenburg is the author of Democratic Personality: Popular Voice and the Trial of American Authorship (Stanford UP, 1998) and Dostoevsky's Democracy (Princeton UP, 2008), and she has recently written on the work of J. M. Coetzee and on Melville’s “Bartleby.” Books in progress include a study of secularization in the postrevolutionary United States arising out of the naturalization of “conscience” as inalienable right, entitled Conscience, Rights, and 'The Delirium of Democracy'; and a comparative work entitled Dostoevsky And for which the Russian writer serves as a lens on the historical development of a set of intercalated themes in the literature of American modernity. These encompass self-making and self-loss (beginning with Frederick Douglass's serial autobiographies); sentimentalism and sadism (in abolitionist fiction); crime and masculinity (including Mailer's The Executioner's Song); and the intersection of race, religious fundamentalism, and radical politics (focusing on the works of James Baldwin and Marilynne Robinson). Her courses will draw from both these projects.
Prof. Ruttenburg is past president of the Charles Brockden Brown Society and has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Humanities Center Fellowship, a University of California President's Research Fellowship, as well as fellowships from the Social Science Research Council for Russian and East European Studies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council for Learned Societies. -
Ramon Saldivar
Hoagland Family Professor of Humanities and Sciences and Professor of English, of Comparative Literature and, by courtesy, of Iberian and Latin American Cultures
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMy current research is concerned with the relationships among race, form, genre, representing what Jeffrey T. Nealon has recently term the “post-postmodern.” In the latest version of this research presented at the John-F.-Kennedy-Institut für Nordamerikastudien, Freie Universität Berlin I use Sesshu Foster's "Atomik Aztex" as an example twenty-first century racial imaginaries. Part fantasy, part hallucinatory sur-realism, part muckraking novel in the grand realist protest tradition of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), part historical novel in the mode of Vassily Grossman’s great Stalinist era masterpiece, Life & Fate (1980) set during the battle of Stalingrad, part ethnographic history about religious, military, and social structure of the pre-Columbian Aztec (Nahua, Mexica) world, part LA noir, and wholly Science Fiction alternative and counterfactual history, it exemplifies many of the criteria of the “post-postmodern.” Moreover, in addition to this range of formal matters, Atomik Aztex is concerned with two other topics:
•a reconceptualization of the way that race affects the formations of history, and
•the reshaping of the form of the novel in order to represent that reconceptualization.
With eighty-two characters populating the story, itself a plotted compendium of at least two radically separate yet intertwined universes of action, in a continually shifting movement from past, present, and future times, Atomik Aztex is a radical experiment in novelistic form. Using the tools of quantitative formalism developed for literary use by the Stanford University Literary Lab, I wish to show how the work of the computational humanities, in conjunction with traditional hermeneutic methods of literary analysis can help us understand the radical turn of contemporary American fiction toward speculative realism.
