- Home
- About the Faculty
- Introduction
- History
- Development Activities
- Our Research
- Externally Funded Projects
- Medieval
- Early Modern
- 18th Century
- Romantic period
- Victorian period
- 20th - 21st Century
- American Literature
- Postcolonial and world literatures
- Language and Linguistics
- Film and media
- Textual scholarship, bibliography, and book history
- Contemporary Writers at Oxford
- Travel Cultures
- Faculty Members
- Administrative Staff
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Research Centres and other Faculty Websites
- English Faculty Library
- Giving
- Prospective Undergraduates
- Prospective Graduates
- For Current Students & Staff
- News & Events
- Contact Us
Hayes, Dr Patrick
Job Title: CUF
College: St. John's
Period/ Subject: 20th-21st Century
Email address: patrick.hayes@sjc.ox.ac.uk
Research interests: 
As I see it the main question facing researchers in the field of post-war literature in English is how to move past the “cultural politics paradigm”, as Timothy Clark has called it: in this paradigm to understand a literary text is taken to mean “placing it within the various competing discourses of its time and (or) our own time, discourses being understood instrumentally as competing ways of representing or constructing reality, each reflecting or producing various kinds of identity, often defined in terms of ethnicity, nationality, religious affiliation, class or gender”. My first book, on J.M. Coetzee, explored this question by focusing on the situation of literature in one of the more turbulent late twentieth-century political contexts. Current work focuses on another dimension of the debate: the changing ways in which American intellectuals have connected literature to the project of cultural criticism – from the Arnoldian humanism of the post-war period through to the turbulent culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, and the highly politicised style of public moralising that has resulted both in the academy and beyond. My interest is not in writing an intellectual history of the period but in exploring the tension between the aims of public moralists and the aims of imaginative writers, and the book focuses on the singular case of Philip Roth, who stands out among his contemporaries for the sustained depth and ingenuity with which he has explored this tension in and through his fiction. Future work will focus on broader debates over the the relationship between literary expression and the nebulous realm of affective experience – the stimulation of feelings, moods and emotions. This is a dimension of literary experience that often tends to be made supplementary to ethics or politics – for example in the very different approaches taken by Martha Nussbaum and Sianne Ngai. My interest is in exploring post-Nietzschean arguments that are suspicious of the regulative claims of moral discourse, and the project will be structured around studies of differently-situated modern novelists whose work impacts upon this debate, with my starting point being D.H. Lawrence, John Updike, and V.S. Naipaul.
Teaching Areas:
My teaching interests encompass Literature in English from 1740 to the present day. I teach the first year papers on Victorian and Modern literature, and an introductory course of literary theory. For finalists I teach a paper on the Romantic period, and a range of optional courses on twentieth-century subjects, including American and postcolonial writing.
Recent Publications:
J.M. Coetzee and the Novel: Writing and Politics After Beckett (OUP, 2010)
‘Literature, History, and Folly’, in Context and Theory, ed. Boehmer, Eaglestone, Iddiols (Continuum, 2008).
‘Byron, Stavroguine, Lurie: comique et gravité dans Disgrâce’, in J.M. Coetzee et la littérature européenne: écrire contre la barbarie, ed. Jean-Paul Engélibert (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2007).
‘“An author I have not read”: Coetzee’s Foe, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and the Problem of the Novel’, in Review of English Studies 57, no. 230 (2006) 273-90.
Other Information:
Back to Faculty Members