Olivia Sutherland
Thesis title: The Vatic Mode: Literary Allusion and Imagining the Future in the Contemporary Novel
Supervisor: Professor Peter Boxall
Research interests: modern and contemporary literature; the novel; temporality; futurity; problems of contemporaneity; allusion, intertextuality and citation; autofiction; film; urban studies; critical theory.
Doctoral Research: My thesis examines how a group of contemporary novels depict the present and imagine the future, through a structure of literary allusion. This allusive method produces a vatic or ‘prophetic’ mode, in a contemporary period facing an aesthetic problem of self-articulation. I am intrigued by the particularities of allusive technique in contemporary fiction, and how the reworking of old texts in new contexts can be used to correct the collective amnesia of a seemingly depthless present. I deal primarily with two, apparently very distinct, kinds of novel: autofiction and epic, considering how genre inflects my questions of temporality and allusion. The key texts of my investigation include works by Ben Lerner, Ali Smith, David Mitchell, Colson Whitehead and Claire Louise Bennett.
Publications:
- ‘The novel ajar: literary allusion and the search for an open future in Claire-Louise Bennett’s Checkout 19’, Textual Practice (2025)
- ‘Under the Sign of Cliché: A Lover’s Discourse, A Lover’s Discourse, A Lover’s Discourse…’, Post45 (forthcoming)
Teaching: I have supervised undergraduate dissertations on New Journalism, feminist Gothic, the affordances of fishing in contemporary fiction, and Kazuo Ishiguro. I have taught classes and tutorials on Prelims Paper 4 (Literature in English 1910-present), and I was a graduate teaching assistant for Paper 6: Film Criticism. I was the primary supervisor for a visiting graduate student undertaking a year abroad at Queen's College, working on Shirley Jackson. I have devised, taught and assessed a module on Literature in English 1910–present day to visiting students at Mansfield College, and an independent study on Hollywood Melodrama for a visiting student at Worcester College.
I am open to teaching opportunities across a range of papers, especially in the period 1830-present.
