Namwali Serpell, Assistant Professor
Office: 464 Wheeler
Phone: 510-642-4333
Email: serpell@berkeley.edu
Areas of Interest
Ethics and literature; aesthetics; theories of reading.Current Research
Uncertainty: A Literary Phenomenology This project compares the narrative structures of uncertain texts by James, Pynchon, Morrison, Ellis, Beckett, McEwan, and others. In it I classify three structures that create uncertainty: multiplicity, repetition, and mutual exclusion. I argue that these structures afford modes--affective, ethical, and aesthetic experiences--of reading.Selected Publications and Papers Delivered
“The Ethics of the Adjoining: Reading Multiplicity in Beloved.” On the Turn: The Ethics of Fiction in Contemporary Narrative in English (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008).
“Mutual Exclusion, Oscillation, and the Ethics of Projection.” Narrative (Autumn, 2008).
“Muzungu.” Callaloo (Winter, 2007). Selected to be in The Best American Short Stories 2009 (forthcoming).
“Repetition and the Ethics of Suspended Reading in American Psycho.” Critique (forthcoming).
Office Hours
Fall 2009: W 3-5pm
