Violet Spurlock

My current research considers discourses of obviousness in literature and literary criticism alongside the development of the non-obviousness requirement in US patent law. I examine the parallels between law's assertion of the unique capacity of non-obvious ideas to serve as intellectual property and criticism's valorization of subtlety, difficulty, and ambiguity as stylistic qualities that mark genuinely distinctive authorship. Some of my other academic interests include film and new media, psychoanalysis, trans studies, Marxism, aesthetics, and ordinary language philosophy. In addition to my academic work, I am a poet. My first book of poems, In Lieu of Solutions, was the recipient of the Other Futures Award.