Dr Michael Snediker

PhD Johns Hopkins


Contact Information

Office: Watson 528
Office Hours:
Extension: 75726
E-mail: snediker@queensu.ca

Research Interests

Poetry/Poetics, 19th- and 20th-century literature, American Renaissance, modernism, aesthetics, Henry James, literature and temporality, queer theory, disability theory.

Recent Publications

  • “Is the Rectangle a Grave? Bersani, Rothko, and the Dream of Disability,” Collected Essays on Leo Bersani, ed. Mikko Tukkanen (SUNY Press, forthcoming).
  • “Pierre and the Non-Transparencies of Figuration,” ELH (2010).
  • “Subjunctivity,” Postmodern Culture 18.3 (2008).
  • Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
  • “Queer Optimism,” Postmodern Culture 16.3 (2006).
  • “Stasis & Verve: Henry James and the Fictions of Patience,” The Henry James Review 27.1 (2006).
  • Contingent Figure: Aesthetic Disabling and the Long American Renaissance (University of Minnesota Press, advance contract).

Poetry

  • Bourdon (White Rabbit Press, forthcoming 2010).
  • Nervous Pastoral (Dove/tail Press, 2008).
  • Poems published in journals including Beloit Poetry Journal, Blackwarrior Review, Court Green, Crazyhorse, Jubilat, Margie,Pleiades.

Remarks

Author of Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood & other Felicitous Persuasions (2008), which was nominated for the Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award, the Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize, and the MLA First Book Prize. It was reviewed in American Literature,Modernism/modernity, Postmodern Culture, The Feminist Review, The Gay & Lesbian Review, Essays in Criticism, and Textual Practice.

I welcome new graduate students with proposals for study in American Literature (from 18th through 21st centuries), especially on texts from the mid-19th century through modernism, or what I as of late am inclined to call the Long American Renaissance. I look forward to working with students interested in the optics of any one or more of the following: poetics, queer theory, disability theory, and psychoanalysis. For that matter, I happily shall consider working with students whose attachments are more keenly wedded to such latter rubrics, even if outside of the American corpus. I’m likewise interested and have served as a reader on theses engaged with questions of aesthetics, broadly conceived. The various relations between ontology and aesthetics—the ways persons can be imagined as aesthetic modes, as much as discursive ones—inform the thinking of many of my own favorite authors, including Hawthorne, Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and Henry James. Not to mention Eve Kosofksy Sedgwick and Sigmund Freud. I am most delighted by original insight, derring-do: students who understand that the rigors of graduate work are inseparable from the pleasures of an adventure the end of which one at outset won’t necessarily know.