Faculty

My interest, in teaching and in research, is to make Literary Studies itself an object of study. Historically a bastion of supremacist and exclusionary thought and practice, Literary Studies luckily offers tools for its own deconstruction. The practice of meta-literary studies engages: questions of epistemology, in particular, what counts as scholarly knowledge; disciplinary protocols and interdisciplinary alternatives; canon building and critiques of canons and canonization; the history and present of literary taste-making, and the pathways of cultural taste more broadly; deep exploration of Western literary values such as originality, genius, “timelessness,” and aesthetic quality. Maybe most importantly, I study how power and identity work through academic institutions, publishing, and literary channels of literary distribution – how institutional hierarchies and values establish and preserve inequality along lines of race, gender, class, sexuality, national origin, linguistic origin, and more. My interest is, at root, in how social values are expressed as literary values. The study is meaningful with respect to other cultural domains too, like film, music, “fine” arts, and more.

I’m also interested in very creative nonfiction – or ways of researching and representing the world that comment on and even reject disciplinary modes, and move beyond personal subjectivity as the logical substrate of such representations. How do artists use – and manipulate – documents, archives, found text, inherited symbolism – in order to present an analysis of social phenomena... in order to move or persuade readers/viewers/listeners to understand old things in a new way, to change minds, to bring just futures into being?

MFA, Fiction Writing, Vermont College 2002 PhD, Modern Thought and Literature, Stanford University, 1993 BA, European Cultural Studies, Brandeis University, 1984

Assassin of Youth: A Kaleidoscopic History of Harry J. Anslinger's War on Drugs     University of Chicago Press, 2016 Brief. Jaded Ibis Press, 2012 [app/novel] Kissed By. Fiction Collective 2, 2007 Selling Out: The Lesbian and Gay Movement Goes to Market. St. Martin's, 2000

Please see www.alexandrachasin.us for more information