Kent Puckett, Associate Professor

Office: 473 Wheeler

Phone: 510-642-4140

Areas of Interest

19th-Century British Literature. Critical Theory. Narrative & the Novel.

Current Research

I recently published a book on social mistakes (saying the wrong thing, wearing the wrong thing, eating peas with your knife, etc.) in the nineteenth-century novel. I'm at work at two other projects. The first, "Interminable: Reading Literature and Psychoanalysis," examines the psychic and economic stakes involved in close reading. I am also at work on a book that looks at ways in which difficult arguments about war are embodied in the cinematic style of some British war films.

Professional Statement

I did my graduate work at the University of Virginia and Columbia University and joined Berkeley's English Department in 2002. I teach courses on nineteenth-century British literature, the novel, literary theory, psychoanalysis, and narrative theory.

Selected Publications and Papers Delivered

Bad Form: Social Mistakes and the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Oxford University Press, 2008).

Against Oligarchies, Against Bosses: A Conversation with Richard Rorty, with Derek Nystrom (Charlottesville: Prickly Pear Pamphlets, 1998). Reprinted by Prickly Paradigm Press in 2002.

Contra os chefes, contra as oligarquias, with Derek Nystrom and with a new preface by Paulo Ghiraldelli Jr. and Alberto Tosi Rodrigues (Rio de Janeiro : DP&A, 2001): the above translated into Portuguese.

"The Life and Death and Death of Colonel Blimp," Critical Inquiry, Vol. 35, No. 1. (2008), pp. 90-114.

"Stupid Sensations: Henry James, Good Form, and Reading Middlemarch Without a Brain," The Henry James Review, Vol. 28, No. 3 (2007), pp. 292-298

"Narrative," The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature, ed. David Kastan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

"Twentieth-Century Novel Theory," Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Novel (Oxford: Blackwell, forthcoming 2009).

"Make No Mistake: Getting it Right in The Princess Casamassima," Novel: A Forum on Fiction (forthcoming).

"The Dictionary of Sensibility," with Corey Brady, Virginia Cope, Michael Millner, Ana Mitrić, Danny Siegel: http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/dictionary

Office Hours

MW 3:15 pm - 4:15 pm