David Kurnick
Biographic Data
| ID | 286420 |
|---|---|
| NAME | David Kurnick |
| GIVEN NAMES | David |
| FAMILY NAME | Kurnick |
| SIGNATURE | KURNICK D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 12 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 12 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
The Beauty of Queerness: Notes on Sexuality and the Literary in the Long 1993
This essay argues that the idealization inherent in the academic concept of "queerness" bears a resemblance to the notion (prominent in interdisciplinary contexts) that "the literary" is an object of singular critical insight. I trace this resemblance to the centrality of literary thinkers in early queer theory, arguing that we live in the shadow of the definitions of queerness and the literary emergent around 1993. I examine essays by Eve Kosofs…
Critical Response II: Diamonds and Rust
Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815-1848
Jane Austen, Secret Celebrity, and Mass Eroticism
This essay argues first that we understand fictional characters as covertly “famous”: that is, known (via the distribution of print or other mass media) to cohorts of people far larger than the usual scale of human acquaintance. Second, it claims that there is an erotic component to this secret fame, one that reaches an unlikely pinnacle of self-aware power in Jane Austen’s last completed novel, Persuasion . I argue that the novel’s love plot der…
Calculus and Context
Review Article| March 01 2020 Calculus and Context Henderson, Andrea K., Algebraic Art: Mathematical Formalism and Victorian Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. xii 1218 pp. David Kurnick David Kurnick Rutgers University David Kurnick is associate professor in the English Department at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, where he teaches nineteenth-century literature, the history and theory of the novel, and gender and sexual…
Comparison, Allegory, and the Address of “Global” Realism (The Part about Bolaño)
Roberto Bolaño’s work repeatedly asks readers to compare various entities (continents, national literatures, ethnicities, the realms of culture and politics). The essay reads this obsessive comparativism as the first step in a totalizing aesthetic project, one tied to Bolaño’s preoccupation with the twentieth century’s supreme comparand of state crime, National Socialism. Bolaño’s seeming promotion of Nazism to mythical status in fact serves the …
Stages: Theatre and the politics of style in G reat E xpectations
Critical QuarterlyVolume 55, Issue 1 p. 94-111 THE STATE, OR STATELESSNESS, OF VICTORIAN STUDIES Stages: theatre and the politics of style in Great Expectations David Kurnick, David KurnickSearch for more papers by this author David Kurnick, David KurnickSearch for more papers by this author First published: 11 April 2013 https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.12034Citations: 2Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favorite…
Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel
According to the dominant tradition of literary criticism, the novel is the form par excellence of the private individual. This book challenges this consensus by re-examining the genre's development from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century and exploring what has until now seemed an anomaly—the frustrated theatrical ambitions of major novelists. Offering new interpretations of the careers of William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, H…
Unspeakable George Eliot
The very idea of Victorian cosmopolitanism might at first glance seem an oxymoron. Historically bracketed by a Romanticism that took political inspiration from France and intellectual cues from Germany and by a modernism whose most prominent “English” personnel were largely from overseas, the Victorians can look decidedly parochial. The most incisive recent attempts to link cosmopolitan thinking to specific formal or stylistic innovations have te…
The Uses of Abjection
Book Review| April 01 2009 THE USES OF ABJECTION What Do Gay Men Want? An Essay on Sex, Risk, and Subjectivity David Halperin Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007. 167 pp. David Kurnick David Kurnick Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (2009) 15 (2): 329–331. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2008-141 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation David Kurnick; THE USES OF ABJECTION. G…
The Novel (in Theory)
In a moment in which many critics are speaking of a new formalism, the recent appearance of three major anthologies of new and classic novel criticism bespeaks an unprecedented upsurge of interest in once‐unfashionable questions of genre. And though these new books leave it unclear whether the novel is in fact a genre, they show that novel theory is: a genre defined at its core by an orientation toward totality. This essay examines the image of t…
Empty Houses: Thackeray's Theater of Interiority
Empty Houses:Thackeray's Theater of Interiority David Kurnick (bio) The nineteenth century has long been justifiably regarded as the golden age of the realist novel, the period when long narrative fiction achieved undisputed cultural respectability and intellectual seriousness. But some of the most innovative recent critical work in Victorian studies has addressed the struggles and uncertainties attendant on the novel's quest for cultural hegemon…
Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel
According to the dominant tradition of literary criticism, the novel is the form par excellence of the private individual. This book challenges this consensus by re-examining the genre's development from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century and exploring what has until now seemed an anomaly—the frustrated theatrical ambitions of major novelists. Offering new interpretations of the careers of William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, H…
Comparison, Allegory, and the Address of “Global” Realism (The Part about Bolaño)
Roberto Bolaño’s work repeatedly asks readers to compare various entities (continents, national literatures, ethnicities, the realms of culture and politics). The essay reads this obsessive comparativism as the first step in a totalizing aesthetic project, one tied to Bolaño’s preoccupation with the twentieth century’s supreme comparand of state crime, National Socialism. Bolaño’s seeming promotion of Nazism to mythical status in fact serves the …
Unspeakable George Eliot
The very idea of Victorian cosmopolitanism might at first glance seem an oxymoron. Historically bracketed by a Romanticism that took political inspiration from France and intellectual cues from Germany and by a modernism whose most prominent “English” personnel were largely from overseas, the Victorians can look decidedly parochial. The most incisive recent attempts to link cosmopolitan thinking to specific formal or stylistic innovations have te…
Critical Response II: Diamonds and Rust
Empty Houses: Thackeray's Theater of Interiority
Empty Houses:Thackeray's Theater of Interiority David Kurnick (bio) The nineteenth century has long been justifiably regarded as the golden age of the realist novel, the period when long narrative fiction achieved undisputed cultural respectability and intellectual seriousness. But some of the most innovative recent critical work in Victorian studies has addressed the struggles and uncertainties attendant on the novel's quest for cultural hegemon…
The Novel (in Theory)
In a moment in which many critics are speaking of a new formalism, the recent appearance of three major anthologies of new and classic novel criticism bespeaks an unprecedented upsurge of interest in once‐unfashionable questions of genre. And though these new books leave it unclear whether the novel is in fact a genre, they show that novel theory is: a genre defined at its core by an orientation toward totality. This essay examines the image of t…
The Uses of Abjection
Book Review| April 01 2009 THE USES OF ABJECTION What Do Gay Men Want? An Essay on Sex, Risk, and Subjectivity David Halperin Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007. 167 pp. David Kurnick David Kurnick Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (2009) 15 (2): 329–331. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2008-141 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation David Kurnick; THE USES OF ABJECTION. G…
Unspeakable George Eliot
The very idea of Victorian cosmopolitanism might at first glance seem an oxymoron. Historically bracketed by a Romanticism that took political inspiration from France and intellectual cues from Germany and by a modernism whose most prominent “English” personnel were largely from overseas, the Victorians can look decidedly parochial. The most incisive recent attempts to link cosmopolitan thinking to specific formal or stylistic innovations have te…
Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel
According to the dominant tradition of literary criticism, the novel is the form par excellence of the private individual. This book challenges this consensus by re-examining the genre's development from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century and exploring what has until now seemed an anomaly—the frustrated theatrical ambitions of major novelists. Offering new interpretations of the careers of William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, H…
Stages: Theatre and the politics of style in G reat E xpectations
Critical QuarterlyVolume 55, Issue 1 p. 94-111 THE STATE, OR STATELESSNESS, OF VICTORIAN STUDIES Stages: theatre and the politics of style in Great Expectations David Kurnick, David KurnickSearch for more papers by this author David Kurnick, David KurnickSearch for more papers by this author First published: 11 April 2013 https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.12034Citations: 2Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favorite…
Comparison, Allegory, and the Address of “Global” Realism (The Part about Bolaño)
Roberto Bolaño’s work repeatedly asks readers to compare various entities (continents, national literatures, ethnicities, the realms of culture and politics). The essay reads this obsessive comparativism as the first step in a totalizing aesthetic project, one tied to Bolaño’s preoccupation with the twentieth century’s supreme comparand of state crime, National Socialism. Bolaño’s seeming promotion of Nazism to mythical status in fact serves the …
Calculus and Context
Review Article| March 01 2020 Calculus and Context Henderson, Andrea K., Algebraic Art: Mathematical Formalism and Victorian Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. xii 1218 pp. David Kurnick David Kurnick Rutgers University David Kurnick is associate professor in the English Department at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, where he teaches nineteenth-century literature, the history and theory of the novel, and gender and sexual…
Jane Austen, Secret Celebrity, and Mass Eroticism
This essay argues first that we understand fictional characters as covertly “famous”: that is, known (via the distribution of print or other mass media) to cohorts of people far larger than the usual scale of human acquaintance. Second, it claims that there is an erotic component to this secret fame, one that reaches an unlikely pinnacle of self-aware power in Jane Austen’s last completed novel, Persuasion . I argue that the novel’s love plot der…
Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815-1848
The Beauty of Queerness: Notes on Sexuality and the Literary in the Long 1993
This essay argues that the idealization inherent in the academic concept of "queerness" bears a resemblance to the notion (prominent in interdisciplinary contexts) that "the literary" is an object of singular critical insight. I trace this resemblance to the centrality of literary thinkers in early queer theory, arguing that we live in the shadow of the definitions of queerness and the literary emergent around 1993. I examine essays by Eve Kosofs…
Critical Response II: Diamonds and Rust
Art (9 works) · History (9 works) · Literature (9 works) · History (7 works) · Aesthetics (5 works) · Art history (5 works) · Computer Science (5 works) · Law (5 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Political science (5 works)