My research is devoted to that elusive goal of sociology of literature: the combination of ‘external’ and ‘internal’ textual analysis. I focus on contemporary world literature, especially the global novel. My first book, The Literature of Compromise: How Novelists Adapt to the Politics of Global Publishing, is under contract at the University of Pennsylvania Press. The novelists I discuss in the book—J. M. Coetzee, Kazuo Ishiguro, Virginie Despentes, Roberto Bolaño, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Michel Houellebecq—have all, to different extents, run counter to the definition of the global novelist as a cosmopolitan intellectual and progressive cultural mediator. All of them, however, have had to make concessions to the prevailing idea of what world literature should be. Building on original fieldwork, interviews, archival research, and a thorough analysis of the totality of these authors’ writings, The Literature of Compromise reconstructs in detail their life trajectories within the relevant historical and institutional contexts.
Future research projects include a study of cosmopolitan and un-cosmopolitan online reading communities, and a study of creative writing programmes outside the US.
I currently teach courses within the MSt in World Literatures in English and convene the ‘Literary World, World Literature’ lecture circus.
