Professional Statement
My first book, Bachelors, Manhood, and the Novel, 1850-1925 (Cambridge UP, 1999), considered the rise of British and American modernist narrative in relation to the history of masculinity. Over the past several years, my research and teaching have increasingly turned to contemporary fiction, with a particular interest in post-apocalyptic, post-traumatic, and post-9/11 novels.
Specialties
Books
| Title | Fields | |
|---|---|---|
|
Bachelors, Manhood, and the Novel, 1850-1925 Katherine Snyder's study explores the significance of the bachelor narrator, a prevalent but little recognized figure in premodernist and modernist fiction by male authors, including Hawthorne, James, Conrad, Ford, and Fitzgerald. Snyder demonstrates that bachelors functioned in cultural and literary discourse as threshold figures who, by crossing the shifting, permeable boundaries of bourg.... |
Selected Publications and Papers Delivered
RECENT ARTICLES
Forthcoming, “Gatsby’s Ghost: Post-Traumatic Memory and National Literary Tradition in Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland,” Contemporary Literature, 2013.
Forthcoming, "Screen Memories: Maternal After-Images in Margaret Atwood’s Dystopian Novels," in Women's Utopian and Dystopian Fiction, ed. Sharon Wilson, Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013.
“’Time to go’: The Post-Apocalyptic and the Post-Traumatic in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake,” Studies in the Novel, volume 43, issue 4, Winter 2011.
RECENT REVIEWS
Review of Roger J. Porter's Bureau of Missing Persons: Writing The Secret Lives of Fathers and Peggy Whitman Prenshaw's Composing Selves: Southern Women and Autobiography, in American Literature, volume 84, issue 3, September 2012.
“It’s the End of the World As We Know It,” review of Margaret Atwood’s The Year of The Flood, in Women’s Review of Books, volume 27, number 2, 2010.
RECENT PAPERS DELIVERED
"Ghosts in the Machine: Intertextuality in Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days," ALA, San Francisco, May 2012.
"The 'terrible gift': National Literary Tradition and Intertextuality in Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days," Consortium on the Novel, UC Berkeley, May 2012.
“Gatsby’s Ghost and the Melancholic National Past in Joseph O'Neill's Netherland,” MLA, Seattle, January 2012.
“Personal Trauma and Global Apocalypse in Atwood's Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood,” MLA, Seattle, January 2012.
“Returning from the Past: The Ghostly Presence of Modernist Trauma Narrative in Post-9/11 Fiction,” Rocky Mountain MLA, Scottsdale, 2011.
“The Post-Apocalyptic as Post-Traumatic in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake,” Contemporary Women’s Writing Network Conference, San Diego, 2010.
"Close Reading as Conversation," National Council of Teachers of English Conference, Philadelphia, 2009
Current Research
My current book project investigates the presence and uses of the literary past in post-9/11 fiction. I am particularly interested in post-9/11 novels that obliquely but nonetheless emphatically rewrite earlier canonical works of literature. I contend that these intertextual acts of rewriting sustain a melancholic or post-traumatic sense of national identity and of international relatedness, both acting out the historical and literary past while also gesturing toward the imperative to work through those pasts.
Recent English Courses Taught
Fall, 2013
| 203/1 | Graduate Readings: Post-9/11 Fiction |
Graduate Courses |
Fall, 2012
| 24/2 | Freshman Seminar: Margaret Atwood’s Dystopian Fictions |
Freshman Seminars |
||
| 302/1 | The Teaching of Composition and Literature |
Graduate Courses |
Spring, 2012
| 45C/1 | Literature in English: Mid-19th Through the 20th Century |
Introductory Surveys |
||
| 45C/101 -- discussion section |
Abramson, Anna Jones |
|||
| 45C/102 -- discussion section |
Le, Serena |
|||
| 45C/103 -- discussion section |
Vandeloo, David |
Spring, 2011
| 190/8 | Research Seminar: My Lost City: (Post)-Modernist and Post-9/11 Fiction |
Research Seminars |