Bio

I work on post-1945 and contemporary North American and Euro-Atlantic literature and culture. I have published on topics in the following four areas: (1) contemporary poetry and poetics; (2) new media literary arts, especially in their antinomian aspect; (3) literary multilingualism; (4) literary and cultural theory, with a focus on media theory, translation theory, the theory of the avant-garde, the critical form of the essay, and the relationship between philosophy and literature.

Among other works, I am the author of In Babel's Shadow: Multilingual Literatures, Monolingual States, a research monograph study of literary multilingualism forthcoming in 2010 from the University of Minnesota Press, and City: An Essay (University of Georgia Press, 2002), a work of personal a/historiography.

I am currently working on a book on the legacies of literary and cultural theory, to be entitled Genrecide: Research and Temporality.

Short bio:

Brian Lennon is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of In Babel's Shadow: Multilingual Literatures, Monolingual States, forthcoming in 2010 from the University of Minnesota Press.

Long bio:

Brian Lennon is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Pennsylvania State University. His work focuses on post-1945 and contemporary North American and transnational literature and culture, with additional emphases in literary and cultural theory and new media literary arts. He is the author of In Babel's Shadow: Multilingual Literatures, Monolingual States, forthcoming in 2010 from the University of Minnesota Press, and articles on topics in media theory, new media art, literary multilingualism, the genre of the essay, and contemporary innovative poetry. His current project is a book on the legacies of literary and cultural theory, to be entitled Genrecide: Research and Temporality.

Selected representative publications

Research monograph:

Lennon, Brian. In Babel's Shadow: Multilingual Literatures, Monolingual States. Forthcoming, 2010, The University of Minnesota Press.

Composite of author's drafts of jacket/catalog copy:

In the study of twentieth- and twenty-first century literary multilingualism, it is easy to take for granted the availability of one's research objects to critical study, discounting or rationalizing the protest through which multilingual literary works challenge the constraint of the printed book, and thus the literary-critical archive, itself. In Babel's Shadow: Multilingual Literature, Monolingual States examines the material limit of multilingual literary expression in print-capitalist culture -- and therefore the limit, as well, of the literary journalism, criticism, and scholarship that analyzes and comments on multilingual literature. Suggesting that world literature is more a scene than it is a "system," and that literature and literariness are best grasped as antinomies, or paradoxes of publication, In Babel's Shadow describes a specific need for electronic literature, as a form of textual culture that book culture bars from literary history -- without reifying "new media," either, as a readily available alternative.

Focusing on the intersection of the critical space of U.S. literary studies with the material space of the transnational book publishing industry, In Babel's Shadow includes readings of works of postwar Indo-Anglian, Cold War U.S., British, and German, contemporary North American multiethnic, and contemporary Turkish and German Turkish literature, in relation to recent debates in global English studies, transnational and comparative U.S. literary studies, translation theory, and comparative and world literature. Together, they comprise a critical essay on the fate of literature in a world gripped by the crises of globalization.

Refereed articles:

  1. Lennon, Brian. "The Essay, in Theory." Forthcoming in diacritics 38.3 (2008), to appear 2009.

    In English, at least, essay-theory makes for a dialectically enlightening literature review. What one might, with perfect justice, call a vast wealth of work on the anarchival genre is now -- has always been quickly -- out of print, exclusive property of the scholarly archives through control of which we guarantee (less persuasively by the day, to be sure) our expertise. It is as though one were condemned to the archive by writing about the essay, that form so often and so vigorously imagined as a bridge linking university writing to what is left of the literary public sphere -- or more recently, to "creative writing," its institutional analogue. This article proposes for the figure or cipher of "essayism" three critical homologies: (a) as a name for the effect or intensity of "theory" in U.S. literary-critical and scholarly research practice; (b) as the object of a sometimes sincere and sometimes malicious mourning, in pronouncements of theory's death; (c) as a mark of the indiscipline of "creative writing," understood as a space into which English studies and U.S. literary studies have diverted the disruptively writerly energies of imported Continental thought.

  2. Lennon, Brian. "New Media Critical Homologies." Forthcoming in Postmodern Culture 19.2 (2009).

    New media studies, we might say, has discovered temporality. After fifteen years in which its cultural dominant was presentist prognostication, even a kind of bullying, the field has folded on itself with such new guiding concepts as the "residuality," the "deep time" or "prehistory," and the "forensic imagination" of a new media now understood as after all always already new. This essay rereads the legacy of hyperfiction pioneer and demiurge Michael Joyce through Fredric Jameson's call, twenty years ago, for a "deeper comparison" than new media studies is yet ready to make, even today. It argues that new media studies, as a disturbance in both the practices and production regimes of humanistic discipline, is and always has been best thought less as an emergent field than as a site of such double vision. If we still want to consider Joyce's work a founding moment in new media literary studies in the U.S., it suggests, we will have to recognize the radical untimeliness of, and at, that foundation: the extent to which the negativity of Joyce's secession from this emergent field must be understood not as the end of his influence in it, but in antinomian fashion, as its beginning again.

  3. Lennon, Brian. "distance@." Forthcoming in symplokē 17.1/2 (2009).

    The global village, the world imploded in a caul of socialized electricity, is privatized in the home-bubble, a nut or seed-pod of data, the personal-professional archive whose exponential growth in life online, this essay suggests, shunts modernist critical practice (ours) into reverse. In this closure of critical distance, down the longue durée of the library shelf, we see our own work on the "junk-pile of critical history," "instructive as a hyperbolic interaction of critical desire with the modes of production" of our time (Willmott). There is no more necessary perspective than this; for scholarly production, today, no less than less rigorous forms of ubiquitous capture, compulsive diarism, and self-archiving, is an abject embrace of the surveillance state -- as much as its self-study, in what we might have to call our "telepathy": the pathos of (critical) distance, of distance which is always already "at" place. In nowness, in newness, the need to be "Herr von Vorsicht," der Fernseher, tele-visor, seer and broadcaster, prophet, fortune-teller, astrologer, historian -- scholar -- are we not precisely archiving ourselves, growing what Adorno termed "herbaria of artificial life," archives and anarchives whose endurance, whose beginnings and ends, as archives, cannot be known?

  4. Lennon, Brian. "Gaming the System." Review article: Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Harvard, 2009); David Golumbia, The Cultural Logic of Computation (Harvard, 2009). EBR: Electronic Book Review, September 2009 (16,164 words).

    It cannot be denied that the works here under review are saying something new, if by "new" we mean also that which, far from being discovered in uncharted territory, was all along hidden, as it were, in plain sight. Sometimes, it is a matter of the structural amplification of scale through which the matter (the material, and its mattering) of context itself thwarts the circumscription of the phenomenological object, by reorganizing it from within (its image, as it were, re-taken at higher resolution); at other times, it seems necessary to look through the plane of the real, with and at that other, imaginative world of remonstrantive interpretation called ideology critique. Both are flexible and adaptive forms of the scientism through which the literary humanities in the United States, in its retransmission of French intellectual struggle, mixes discourse-analytic tactics of parallel delineation with hermeneutic strategies of serial penetration, and through which both its Comtean and its Marxist positivisms express, as François Dosse has put it of their transatlantic progenitors, "a certain degree of [Western] self-hatred."

  5. Lennon, Brian. "The Antinomy of Multilingual U.S. Literature." Comparative American Studies 6.3 (September 2008): 203-224.

    After September 2001, among other effects that may or may not have been foreseen, the new direction of US national political imperatives revived support for foreign language learning as a component of human or cultural intelligence. Across the political spectrum, lack of competence in languages other than English is now acknowledged as a serious weakness of educational, economic, and military resources in the United States. In the critical study of contemporary literature, the multilingual spirit of this new emphasis collides with the monolingual letter of the publication industry that produces books. In the production of research objects for scholars of contemporary literature, language difference, the ground zero of multiple language acquisition, is displaced by translative representation of language difference. To the extent that scholars understand themselves as analysts of already given objects, regarding intervention in the process of literary production as beyond their practical or desired ability, the premium placed on language difference here is insufficiently theorized.

  6. Lennon, Brian. "Misunderstanding Media: The Bomb and Bad Translation." Criticism 47.3 (Fall 2005): 283-300. (Appeared 2007.)

    "Gadget," we are reminded by Nicolas Freeling's 1977 novel of that name, was in Manhattan Project jargon "a playful and harmless word for what we would call an atomic bomb." Freeling's novel turns the word over and over, linking the primitive device produced by America's best minds in the heat of a just war to the hacked-out contraption always already acquired by its most bitter enemies, and reflecting on the inversions of the age of insanity opened there: above all, on what can only be called the Bomb's satanic cuteness. In this essay, I examine the work of the gadget in an age of miniaturization: the molecular age of packs, bands, cells, all the social miniatures in the panorama of stateless (and indeed, headless) terror. My argument will be, first, that as a sign for inhuman efficiency, a form of the machine evolving by becoming more radically present-to-hand, the gadget is simultaneously a sign for the human value of inefficiency, of waste and expenditure. Second, I will argue that in the form of the portable translator, the gadget can tell us something about the human and the inhuman in language, that most artificial rose: about bad translation, or translation applied in spontaneous or calculated bad taste, and about the waste of translation.

  7. Lennon, Brian. "Screening a Digital Visual Poetics." Configurations 8:1 (Winter 2000): 63-85.
    Rpt.: Lennon, Brian. "Screening a Digital Visual Poetics." In Eduardo Kac, ed., Media Poetry: An International Anthology, (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2007): 251-270.

    Recent [2000] trends in digital media theory signal the absorption of initial, utopian claims made for electronic hypertextuality and for the transformation of both quotidian and literary discourse via the radical enfranchisement of active readers. The putative demise of textuality, inevitable or no, on the electronic network known as the World Wide Web is presently accompanied by a flourishing of poetry and text-based or alphabetic art that takes for granted not only its own dynamic, kinetic, virtual, and interactive visuality, but also --- contrary to alarmists' fears --- a real, material, bodily human "interactor." This essay offers an essay, a tentative gesture, at a digital visual poetics: a poetics that draws by necessity on an entire century's worth of language art and visual poetry, while at the same time formulating ways to read and to look at, to "screen," the new and seemingly newly ephemeral artifact of the electronic visual poem.

Other books

  1. Lennon, Brian. City: An Essay. Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 2002.

    I CONFESS THAT I HAVE NO IDEA what Kierkegaard (or his persona, Constantin Constantius) meant by "repetition." Here, however, I mean to say that successive iterations of one single event multiply its existing points of entry. I was born: on the eastmost fringe of the City, in an enclave at the foot of the Airport, and I learned to sleep through the scream of jets, which I knew traveled over the ocean. My earliest awareness of the City: at the station, where I waited with my mother, in the idling car, for my father. At one end of the block: "the creek" --- a tract of spongy undeveloped land, beyond which stretched the runways. From the creek: the frogs that filled our yards; Gina Ragazza, two doors down, pressed sharpened sticks through their bodies --- twitch, twitch --- as airliners floated roaring overhead.

  2. Lennon, Brian. Dial Series One. Elmwood, CT: Potes & Poets Press, 2000.

    The poem
    is our encounter
    with the procedure
    used to seize messages.

Non-refereed articles and essays:

  1. Lennon, Brian. "Lyric as Negation." Seneca Review 37.2 (Fall 2007): 65-70.

    The essay is negative, as "nonfiction," its genus, is negative: not a fourth genre, but the negation of genre. Where drama promises public spectacle, and poetry retains its cachet as the origin of the language arts, "nonfiction" offers only not fiction, the refusal or denial of fiction. Nonfiction refuses that with which we associate rapture and transport, the pleasures of the imagination in a world of regimented time. The very idea of it strikes one sometimes as boring and pitiable, like the figure of Bartelby the Scrivener, whose complete introversion is a monument to the death in meaningless work. Even the Encyclopaedia Brittanica concedes that "nonfictional prose seldom gives the reader a sense of its being inevitable, as does the best poetry or fiction." Nonfiction cannot answer the question, "Would I die if I were prevented from writing?"

  2. Lennon, Brian. "Sentimental Education." Bookforum, Summer 2004: 31-34. (Editorial retitle of "Critique and No Time.")

    The true pathos of the creative writing programs (and this is why they have an inverted political value) is that they are filled with aspirants partly in flight from something---growth and profit-obsessed American business culture---without necessarily being fully in flight toward something: not toward a knowledge of literature, either low or high, historical or contemporary, and sometimes not even really toward reading at all. The dream, particularly in the fiction and nonfiction divisions of such programs, tends to be one or another variation on winning the lottery, on never having to work again in one's life, except in the euphemistic sense with which an actor paid millions of dollars to act in a film might refer to "my work." It is another version of the dream of rock stardom: to escape and live above it all, the measly two weeks of vacation per year, the being bossed around all your life or else having to plant a knife in someone else's back to get a leg up. It's a selfish dream, but viewed dialectically, it reveals an intense antipathy to overwork and to meaningless work in our culture. Who wouldn't want to escape?

  3. Lennon, Brian. "Cary Peppermint's 'Curiously Strong' Americana." 2001. Distributed via Nettime, March 16, 2001.

    How much would you pay for something real? This question is posed by "An American Work of Art in Progress," playing Zwischenology within the new+/-old commodity aesthetic of what one might, with a semicolon-wink to Teilhard, now term "noömedia." Everything's up for sale, yes. But that's too easy. Each component fashions itself from the D.I.Y. machine of mid-tier services (Evite, Ebay, Mp3.com, Zing) offering prepackaged experiential formats for the vox populi to adopt at its leisure. "An American Work of Art in Progress" lives in that interior public sphere accessed via the dual mode of "home privacy" plus logged invasion and governed by the social contract including sincerity.

  4. Lennon, Brian. "Literature and the Transposition of Media." American Letters & Commentary 12 (2000): 72-76.

    Hypertext utopism has had its day, and creativity in the electronic arts is concentrated, for the moment [2000], in practices of programmed visual and kinetic poetry that have their roots in the experimental typography of the historical avant-gardes and European modernism, as well as the internationalist Concrete poetry of the 1950s. Programmed "code poetries," the forms of the moment, will suffer a similarly pained relation to utopia (and/or apocalypse) as did hyperfiction, which has been hyped and debunked, and hyped and debunked again, at dizzying net-speed. Meanwhile, print culture and electronic media continue to interact, crossbreed, surge and ebb across and through each other in patterns that are mutually repressive and stimulating at the same time. What happens when a work created in and for the electronic medium then evolves "backward" onto the page? The task here is not only to notice proto-cybertexts, but also to think about what it means to produce a version of digital art for plain old paper.

  5. Lennon, Brian. "Please, Use Your Browser's 'Back' Button." Poetry Project Newsletter 180 (June-July 2000): 26-27.

    New forms of Internet-dependent writing/coding are flourishing, and a good deal of it is important and extraordinary. Not merely an incitement to brave new poetries, however, Internet is also -- and perhaps more significantly, thus far -- an inexpensive distribution system for "old" ones as well. In the gift economies of "otherstream" poetry, it is perfectly forgivable, I think, simply to transfer one's operations from the print medium to the Web, without feeling -- yet -- any ethical imperative to program.

  6. Lennon, Brian. "Techne -- nostos -- physis: The procedural poetries of Joan Retallack." EBR: Electronic Book Review 10 (Winter 1999-2000).

    The formalist writer today is, like the postmodern urban planner, an architect of rubble: everything has, in the most basic sense, been posited already; there are no "new" sensibilities, no "original" voices (though there are certainly voices that have historically been suppressed); now it is a matter of suggesting dialectics of access and retrieval, for archive (data bank) and research (recombination), that will lead us to specific provocations of that notion of "new." But if "pure practice" -- known in the trade as "craft" -- can be codified and reproduced like any other technique, if a computer can be programmed to compose traditional sonnets, or sestinas, or terza rima, or Dickinsonian or Trakl-esque lyric, or Jamesian hypotaxis, or a hostile critic's version of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing, or the gnarly jargon of postmodern academic prose, then perhaps the computer's encroachment on human uniqueness is most meaningful in its specific historicity: everything has been posited already, yes, only not in this particular way, at this very moment. It is incumbent on the writer not to mourn the loss here (of her or his exclusive control of language), but instead to notice the specific new possibilities that loss indicates. It is in this sense that the procedural poet is the ghostwriter of genres.

Other works:

  1. Lennon, Brian. "RE_WORKINPR: WORKSHEET." Antennae 1 (2001): 67-74.

    wire all night electric vex / speeding apart & over & through the neck

  2. Lennon, Brian. "AUFSCHREIBESYSTEMEGREENGHOSTECHO." Cauldron & Net 1.2 (2000).
    Repub.: Trace Incubation Gallery, 2002.

    Nostos sprouts, like a weed, in the new garden. Each successive epoch must startle itself for the first time with this truth. But History means nothing else than that everything which may occur, certainly has.

  3. Andrews, Jim, Mez Breeze, Tom Bell, Akenaton Docks, Brian Lennon, Diane Ludin, Kevin Magee, Talan Memmott, Free the Radical, Everdeen Tree, and others. "RE_WORKINPR: Recombinant/ Code Poetry." BeeHive, 2000.

    -- elements disappear; poetry does not affect that; I was once the person I used to be; poetry does not affect that --

  4. Andrews, Jim and Brian Lennon. "Log." Ubuweb, 2000.

    I'd been aware -- I am not I -- I hit disconnect --

Complete publications list

  1. Lennon, Brian. In Babel's Shadow: Multilingual Literatures, Monolingual States. Forthcoming, 2010, The University of Minnesota Press. (>)
  2. Lennon, Brian. "The Essay, in Theory." Forthcoming in diacritics 38.3 (2008), to appear 2009.
  3. Lennon, Brian. "New Media Critical Homologies." Forthcoming in Postmodern Culture 19.2, 2009.
  4. Lennon, Brian. "distance@." Forthcoming in symplokē 17.1/2 (2009).
  5. Lennon, Brian. "(The True Story of Her Life)." Bombay Gin 35.2 (Summer 2009): 70-77. (>)
  6. Lennon, Brian. "Gaming the System." Review article: Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Harvard, 2009); David Golumbia, The Cultural Logic of Computation (Harvard, 2009). EBR: Electronic Book Review, September 2009 (16,164 words). (>)
  7. Lennon, Brian. "The Antinomy of Multilingual U.S. Literature." Comparative American Studies 6.3 (September 2008): 203-224.
  8. Lennon, Brian. "Untitled (Because We Hurry...)." The Seattle Review 1.1 (Summer 2007): 114.
  9. Lennon, Brian. "Untitled (As in Music...)." The Seattle Review 1.1 (Summer 2007): 113.
  10. Lennon, Brian. "Screening a Digital Visual Poetics." In Eduardo Kac, ed., Media Poetry: An International Anthology (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2007): 251-270. (Reprint)
  11. Lennon, Brian. "Misunderstanding Media: The Bomb and Bad Translation." Criticism 47.3 (Summer 2005): 283-300. (Appeared 2007.)
  12. Lennon, Brian. "Lyric as Negation." Seneca Review 37.2 (Fall 2007): 65-70.
  13. Lennon, Brian. "Giriş." New Ohio Review 2 (2007): 11-15. (>)
  14. Lennon, Brian. "Papillon." NowCulture 3 (2006). (>)
  15. Andrews, Jim and Brian Lennon. "Log." Electronic Literature Collection Volume One. Ed. N. Katherine Hayles, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, Stephanie Strickland. College Park, MD: Electronic Literature Organization, October 2006. (Republication) (>)
  16. Lennon, Brian. "Dome." Chicago Review 51.3 (Autumn 2005): 85-93.
  17. Lennon, Brian. "Before." Denver Quarterly 40.2 (2005): 63-67.
  18. Lennon, Brian. "Akşamüstü." The Iowa Review 35.1 (Spring 2005): 116-125.
  19. Lennon, Brian. "Some Stories Are Parables, But." Post Road 8 (2004): 51-52.
  20. Lennon, Brian. "Sentimental Education." Bookforum, Summer 2004: 31-34. (Editorial retitle of "Critique and No Time.")
  21. Lennon, Brian. "Sleep." The Next American Essay. Ed. John D'Agata. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2003: 425-434.
  22. Lennon, Brian. "Notes on a Hunger Strike." The Iowa Review 32.3 (Winter 2002/3): 51-55.
  23. Lennon, Brian. Review of Appendices, Illustrations and Notes by Terence Gower and Mónica de la Torre. American Letters & Commentary 13 (2002): 195-197. (>)
  24. Lennon, Brian. City: An Essay. Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 2002.
  25. Lennon, Brian. "Dial Series One." Perspektive: Hefte für Zeitgenössische Literatur 42 (Berlin/ Graz, 2001-2): 4-9.
  26. Lennon, Brian. "AUFSCHREIBESYSTEMEGREENGHOSTECHO." Trace Incubation Gallery, 2002. (Republication) (>)
  27. Lennon, Brian. "RE_WORKINPR: WORKSHEET." Antennae 1 (2001): 67-74.
  28. Lennon, Brian. "From Wind." American Journal of Print 1 (2001): 67-74.
  29. Lennon, Brian. "Against Autopoiesis." EBR: Electronic Book Review, December 2001.
  30. Lennon, Brian. "Cary Peppermint's 'Curiously Strong' Americana." Nettime.org, March 2001.
  31. Lennon, Brian. Review of Mongrelisme by Joan Retallack. Boston Review 25.3 (Summer 2000): 63. (>)
  32. Lennon, Brian. Review of The Character by Jena Osman and Polyverse by Lee Ann Brown. Boston Review 25.2 (April/May 2000): 60-61. (>)
  33. Lennon, Brian. Review of Make Love, Not War by David Allyn. US Weekly 268 (April 3, 2000): 48.
  34. Lennon, Brian. Review of Alphabets by Paul Vangelisti. Boston Review 25.1 (February/March 2000): 62. (>)
  35. Lennon, Brian. Dial Series One. Elmwood, CT: Potes & Poets Press, 2000.
  36. Lennon, Brian. "Text on the Weather." The Iowa Review 30.2 (Fall 2000): 101-113.
  37. Lennon, Brian. "Techne - nostos - physis: The procedural poetries of Joan Retallack." EBR: Electronic Book Review 10 (Winter 1999-2000).
  38. Lennon, Brian. "Screening a Digital Visual Poetics." Configurations 8.1 (Winter 2000): 63-85.
  39. Andrews, Jim, Mez Breeze, Tom Bell, Akenaton Docks, Brian Lennon, Diane Ludin, Kevin Magee, Talan Memmott, Free the Radical, Everdeen Tree, and others. "RE_WORKINPR: Recombinant/ Code Poetry." BeeHive, 2000. (>)
  40. Lennon, Brian. "RE_WORKINPR: 10612 SUNS." Pierogi Press, Fall/Winter 2000: 12-14. (>)
  41. Lennon, Brian. "Please, Use Your Browser's 'Back' Button." Poetry Project Newsletter 180 (June-July 2000): 26-27. (>)
  42. Lennon, Brian. "Nineteen Italian Days." Seneca Review 30.1 (Spring 2000): 157-173.
  43. Andrews, Jim, and Brian Lennon. "Log." Ubuweb, 2000. (>)
  44. Lennon, Brian. "Literature and the Transposition of Media." American Letters & Commentary 12 (2000): 72-76. (>)
  45. Lennon, Brian. "Ganzfeld." First Intensity 16 (2000): 85-93.
  46. Lennon, Brian. "Chromebox." Ubuweb, 2000. (>)
  47. Lennon, Brian. "Sets." Ubuweb, 2000. (>)
  48. Lennon, Brian. "AUFSCHREIBESYSTEMEGREENGHOSTECHO." Cauldron & Net 1.2 (2000). (>)
  49. Lennon, Brian. Review of Pierce-Arrow by Susan Howe. Boston Review 24.5 (October/November 1999): 62-3. (>)
  50. Lennon, Brian. Review of The Paradise of Forms: New and Selected Poems by Aaron Shurin. Publishers Weekly, February 22, 1999. (>)
  51. Lennon, Brian. Review of The Long View by Charles O. Hartman. Publishers Weekly, February 22, 1999. (>)
  52. Lennon, Brian. Review of The Lion Bridge: Selected Poems 1972-1995 by Michael Palmer. Boston Review 23.6 (December/January 1998/9). (>)
  53. Lennon, Brian. Review of Noon by Cole Swensen. Boston Review 23.6 (December/January 1998/9): 62. (>)
  54. Lennon, Brian. Review of Nod by Fanny Howe. The Review of Contemporary Fiction XIX.1 (Spring 1999): 184. (>)
  55. Lennon, Brian. Review of How to Do Things with Words by Joan Retallack. Boston Review 24.1 (February/March 1999): 54. (>)
  56. Lennon, Brian. "Wedding of Birds and Stars." Gulf Coast 11.1(Winter 1999): 143.
  57. Lennon, Brian. "Two Novels by Arno Schmidt." The Iowa Review 29.1 (1999): 170-176. (>)
  58. Lennon, Brian. "Small Suite." Potepoetzine 13 (1999). (>)
  59. Lennon, Brian. "Sleep." The Gettysburg Review 12.1 (Spring 1999). (>)
  60. Lennon, Brian. "Reading Diane Williams." Context: A Forum for Literary Arts and Culture 1 (Fall 1999): 5. (>)
  61. Lennon, Brian. "POWER---BOOK---GENDER---MACHINE---ESSAY." Tripwire: A Journal of Poetics 3 (Summer 1999): 36-40. (>)
  62. Lennon, Brian. "Oot for England." Review of Billy and Girl by Deborah Levy. The Boston Book Review 6.5 (June 1999): 41. (>)
  63. Lennon, Brian. "Mid-List Blues." Review of Driving the Heart by Jason Brown. The Boston Book Review 6.3 (April 1999): 41.
  64. Lennon, Brian. "Autobiography." 5 Trope 5 (Summer 1999). (>)
  65. Lennon, Brian. Review of M and Other Poems by John Peck. Boston Review 22.6 (December-January 1997-98): 49-50. (>)
  66. Lennon, Brian. Review of It Is Hard to Look at What We Came to Think We'd Come to See by Michele Glazer. Boston Review 23.5 (October/November 1998): 54. (>)
  67. Lennon, Brian. Review of Grazing by Ira Sadoff. Publishers Weekly, 1998. (>)
  68. Lennon, Brian. Review of Dunce Cap by Alison Bundy. The Review of Contemporary Fiction XVIII.3 (Fall 1998). (>)
  69. Lennon, Brian. Review of Crimes of the Beats by The Unbearables. The Review of Contemporary Fiction XVIII.3 (Fall 1998). (>)
  70. Lennon, Brian. Review of Blizzard of One by Mark Strand. Boston Review 23.5 (October/November 1998). (>)
  71. Lennon, Brian. "What It's Like to Be Red." Review of Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson. The Boston Book Review 5.4 (May 1998): 42. (>)
  72. Lennon, Brian. "Their own middle passage." Review of The Pagoda by Patricia Powell. The Boston Book Review 5.9 (November 1998): 39. (>)
  73. Lennon, Brian. "The Hatchet Woman of Harvard." Review of Defiance by Carole Maso. The Boston Book Review 5.5 (June 1998): 42. (>)
  74. Lennon, Brian. "Postmodern Heroes." Review of Ghost Town by Robert Coover. The Boston Book Review 5.7 (September 1998): 42. (>)
  75. Lennon, Brian. "Paradise Relinquished." Review of Paradise by Toni Morrison. The Boston Book Review 5.2 (March 1998): 46. (>)
  76. Lennon, Brian. "Oystersauce." Coe Review 28 (1998): 26-31. [x]
  77. Lennon, Brian. "On Fire." 100 Words 5.5 (1998): 5.
  78. Lennon, Brian. "Notes to the Unwritten." Fence 1.2 (Fall/Winter 1998): 97-100. (>)
  79. Lennon, Brian. "From 'Nineteen Italian Days: An Essay'." Web Conjunctions, August 1998. (>)
  80. Lennon, Brian. "Entertainment and the Avant-Garde." Review of Memories of My Father Watching TV by Curtis White. The Boston Book Review 5.6 (July/August 1998): 41. (>)
  81. Lennon, Brian. "Algorithm." 100 Words 5.4 (1998): 24.
  82. Lennon, Brian. "'To ask about a word'." Review of The Novellas of Hortense Calisher. The Boston Book Review 5.1 (January/February 1998): 42. (>)
  83. Lennon, Brian. Review of The Odd Last Thing She Did by Brad Leithauser. Publishers Weekly, 1998. (>)
  84. Lennon, Brian. "Foreign Dispatches/ Writing From Abroad: 'The perfect music for cooking pasta'." Review of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. The Boston Book Review 4.10 (December 1997): 30. (>)
  85. Lennon, Brian. "'This lousy war'." Review of The Mad Dog, stories by Heinrich Böll. The Boston Book Review 4.9 (November 1997): 38. (>)
  86. Lennon, Brian. "From Tutuola to Tadjo." Review of Under African Skies: Modern African Stories, ed. Charles R. Larson. The Boston Book Review 4.7 (September 1997): 40. (>)
  87. Lennon, Brian. "'Like a bar of metal'." Review of Almost No Memory by Lydia Davis. The Boston Book Review 4.5 (June 1997): 50-51. (>)
  88. Lennon, Brian. "'Human frailty and God's grace'." Review of Salt by Earl Lovelace. The Boston Book Review 4.4 (May 1997): 46-47. (>)
  89. Lennon, Brian. Review of Harping On: Poems 1985-1995 by Carolyn Kizer. Boston Review 22.2 (April/May 1997): 46. (>)
  90. Lennon, Brian. "Alligators in the Sewers." Review of City in Love by Alex Shakar. American Book Review 18.3 (March-April 1997): 26. (>)
  91. Lennon, Brian. "A 'basso continuo'." Review of Petrolio by Pier Paolo Pasolini. The Boston Book Review 4.2 (March 1997): 46-47. (>)
  92. Lennon, Brian. Review of Minding the Sun by Robert Pack. Boston Review 22.1 (February/March 1997): 46. (>)
  93. Lennon, Brian. "Slouching Towards the Muse." Review of Western Electric by Don Zancanella and Hints of His Mortality by David Borofka. The Boston Book Review 4.1 (January/February 1997): 50. (>)
  94. Lennon, Brian. "Of Ducks and Fiends." Review of Free City by Eric Darton. The San Francisco Review 22.1 (January/February 1997): 20. (>)
  95. Lennon, Brian. "The Reward of Patience." Confrontation 60/61 (Fall 1996/Winter 1997): 336.
  96. Lennon, Brian. Review of Love Had a Compass: Journals and Poetry by Robert Lax. Boston Review 21.5 (October/November 1996): 46. (>)
  97. Lennon, Brian. "I Am Not Theroux." Review of My Other Life by Paul Theroux. The Boston Book Review 3.9 (October 1996): 34. (>)
  98. Lennon, Brian. "Fates Converge at a Haunted Ruin in Mexico." Review of The Hotel in the Jungle by Albert J. Guerard. The San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, July 7, 1996: 4. (>)

Not yet published

    Active working papers and book manuscripts in development:

  1. Lennon, Brian. Review of Enda Duffy, The Speed Handbook: Velocity, Pleasure, Modernism (Duke, 2009). Completed for Modern Fiction Studies, November 2009.
  2. Lennon, Brian. "Astoria of America." 2009. Unpublished manuscript in progress.
  3. Lennon, Brian. Untitled essay on J. M. Coetzee's essay-novels. 2009. Unpublished manuscript in progress.
  4. Lennon, Brian. Genrecide: Research and Temporality. 2009. Unpublished manuscript in progress. (>)
  5. Lennon, Brian. Secession: Minima Memoria. 2009. Unpublished manuscript in progress. (>)
  6. Lennon, Brian. "Signer, Creature, Creator." 2009. Unpublished manuscript in progress.
  7. Lennon, Brian. "Autobiographies." 2009. Unpublished manuscript in progress.

    Biographically and archivally discrete works, temporarily or permanently inactive as working papers and book manuscripts (portions of many works listed here have been incorporated into existing publications and active working papers and book manuscripts in development, often in revised or otherwise different form):

  8. Lennon, Brian. "Multilingual Literatures, Monolingual States." 2009. Unpublished manuscript.
  9. Lennon, Brian. "Glass Houses." 2009. Unpublished manuscript.
  10. Lennon, Brian. The Evening of Cities. 2008. Unpublished manuscript.
  11. Lennon, Brian. "Untranslating Orhan Pamuk." 2008. Unpublished manuscript.
  12. Lennon, Brian. "Always Already Encode: Machine Translation and Multilingual Literature." 2008. Unpublished manuscript.
  13. Lennon, Brian. "Modernity in Time." 2007. Unpublished manuscript.
  14. Lennon, Brian. "Essayism, or Comparison in Time." 2007. Unpublished manuscript.
  15. Lennon, Brian. "Theory and the State (of Creative Writing)." 2007. Unpublished manuscript. (>)
  16. Lennon, Brian. "Language Memoir and Language Death." 2007. Unpublished manuscript.
  17. Lennon, Brian. "Unicode and Totality." 2006. Unpublished manuscript.
  18. Lennon, Brian. "Plurilingualism in Translation: Some Antinomies of Literature." 2005. Unpublished manuscript.
  19. Lennon, Brian. "The Jargon of Eigentlichkeit: Adorno's Theory of Foreign Words." 2005. Paper presented at the American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting, Pennsylvania State University, March 12, 2005. Unpublished manuscript. (>)
  20. Lennon, Brian. "Plurilingualism and Translation: Antinomies of Literature." Diss. Columbia University, 2005.
  21. Lennon, Brian. A Moving Crowd. 2005. Unpublished manuscript.
  22. Lennon, Brian. Points on a Vanishing Plane. 2005. Unpublished manuscript.
  23. Lennon, Brian. "My Work." 2005. Unpublished manuscript. (>)
  24. Lennon, Brian. Untitled work journal, August 2003 - June 2004. Unpublished manuscript.
  25. Lennon, Brian. "George Pataki Devours Saddam Hussein." 2003. Unpublished manuscript.
  26. Lennon, Brian. "Language Learning Hints." 2003. Unpublished manuscript. (>)
  27. Lennon, Brian. "Re: RE_WORKINPR." 2002. Unpublished manuscript. (>)
  28. Lennon, Brian. "Mass/Mediafic(a)tion." 2002. Unpublished manuscript. (>)
  29. Lennon, Brian. "Heidegger and Foucault (Reflections)." 2002. Unpublished manuscript. (>)
  30. Lennon, Brian. "Humanist Computing." 2002. Unpublished manuscript. (>)
  31. Lennon, Brian. "Some Points on a Vanishing Plane." 2001. Unpublished manuscript.
  32. Lennon, Brian. "The Ineffable in Negative Dialectics." 2001. Unpublished manuscript. (>)
  33. Lennon, Brian. "Multiple Modernities?" 2001. Unpublished manuscript. (>)
  34. Lennon, Brian. "distance@." 2001. Unpublished manuscript.
  35. Lennon, Brian. "(Power)Book +/- Machine: S|C|R|E|E|N|P|A|G|E|L|A|N|G|U|A|G|E." 2001. Unpublished manuscript. (>)
  36. Lennon, Brian. "Archaism in Tom Jones." 2001. Unpublished manuscript. (>)
  37. Lennon, Brian. "Ooof." 2000. Unpublished HTML document. (>)
  38. Lennon, Brian. Remote Sensing. 2000. Unpublished manuscript.
  39. Lennon, Brian. "New Media, New Poetics: A Zwischenology." MA thesis. Columbia University, 2000.
  40. Lennon, Brian. "Ecosophy and Textual Materialism." 2000. Unpublished manuscript. (>)
  41. Lennon, Brian. "Sunday Morning Silence and Noise." 2000. Unpublished manuscript. (>)
  42. Lennon, Brian. "Code, Bits, Furniture: Poe's Model Kit." 2000. Unpublished manuscript. (>)
  43. Lennon, Brian. "Plagiary and Code/x: Richard Powers's Galatea 2.2." 1999. Unpublished manuscript. (>)
  44. Lennon, Brian. "Site Reading: A Consideration of Milton's Sonnet 16." 1999. Unpublished manuscript. (>)
  45. Lennon, Brian. Dial Series One. 1999. Unpublished manuscript. (>)
  46. Lennon, Brian. "City: An Essay." MFA thesis. University of Iowa, 1999.
  47. Lennon, Brian. Review of Mudlark electronic journal. 1998. Unpublished manuscript. (>)
  48. Lennon, Brian. Review of Project X 1497-1999 by Damian Lopes. 1998. Unpublished manuscript. (>)
  49. Lennon, Brian. Review of The Debt to Pleasure: A Novel by John Lanchester. 1996. Unpublished manuscript. (>)
  50. Lennon, Brian. "From Aphonia to Dithyramb: Nietzsche's Typology of the Philosophic Life." BA thesis. Wesleyan University, 1993.

    Summaries, outlines, notes

  51. Lennon, Brian. Summary of Kant, Critique of Pure Reason. 2009. Unpublished manuscript. (>)
  52. Lennon, Brian. Epigrammatic summary of Husserl, Origin of Geometry. 2008. Unpublished manuscript. (>)
  53. Lennon, Brian. Summary of Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy. 2009. Unpublished manuscript. (>)
  54. Lennon, Brian. Epigrammatic summary of Benjamin, "The Storyteller." 2007. Unpublished manuscript. (>)
  55. Lennon, Brian. Summary of Adorno, Negative Dialectics. 2003. Unpublished manuscript. (>)
  56. Lennon, Brian. Summary of Heidegger, "The Anaximander Fragment." 2003. Unpublished manuscript. (>)
  57. Lennon, Brian. Summary of Heidegger, "Age of the World Picture." 2003. Unpublished manuscript. (>)
  58. Lennon, Brian. Summary of Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic. 2003. Unpublished manuscript. (>)
  59. Lennon, Brian. Summary of Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language (excerpt). 2003. Unpublished manuscript. (>)
  60. Lennon, Brian. Reading notebook of summaries of works on topics in globalization studies, translation studies, media theory, and the theory of the avant-garde. 2003. Unpublished manuscript. (>)

Recent papers and talks

"Astoria of America."
Panel: "Transnational Ameritopias."
MLA 2009, Philadelphia, December 29, 2009.

"Astoria, or, The Desublimation of Scholarship."
Panel: "Comparative Literature and Critical Discourse Beyond Europe: Institutions and Readings."
ACLA 2009, Harvard, March 27, 2009.

"New Media Critical Homologies."
Panel: "Comparative Literature and Media Studies: Convergence or Opposition?"
MLA 2008, San Francisco, December 28, 2008.

"Untranslating Orhan Pamuk."
Seminar: "Must We Speak Latin?, or, Of Literature: Institutions, Histories, Idioms."
ACLA 2008, Long Beach, April 27, 2008.

"Always Already Encode: Machine Translation and Multilingual Literature."
Department of Comparative Literature, Department of English, and Translation Research and Instruction Program, Binghamton University, SUNY, February 8, 2008.

"Always Already Encode."
Department of English, UCLA, February 5, 2008.

"Essayism, or Comparison in Time."
Panel: "New Comparative Methodologies: Rethinking Difference."
MLA 2007, Chicago, December 27, 2007.

"Modernity in Time."
Provost's Interdisciplinary Symposium: "Modernity and Locality: Discrete Spaces in Global Culture."
Binghamton University, SUNY, October 13, 2007.

"Language Memoir and Language Death."
Panel: "Multi-Ethnic Perspectives in 20th Century U.S. Literature."
Twentieth Century Literature and Culture Conference, University of Louisville, February 23, 2007.

"Unicode and Totality."
Seminar: "Human Language and Language Reform."
ACLA 2006, Princeton, March 26, 2006.

"Plurilingualism in Translation: Some Antinomies of Literature."
Panel: "Writing Europe in Multiple Languages."
MLA 2005, Washington, DC, December 29, 2005.

"The Jargon of Eigentlichkeit: Adorno's Theory of Foreign Words."
Seminar: "The Figure of the Translator and the Metaphorics of Translation."
ACLA 2005, Penn State, March 12, 2005. (>)

Courses

Contemporary Literary Theory and Practice: Media Theory and Literature (2010)
An introduction to media theory in liaison with literature, literarity, and literary study. We will consider the novelty of electronic screen media, in a print culture of newspapers, magazines, and books; the simulation and remediation of older by newer media, and of newer by older media; the residuality of literary modernist print culture in a "postmodern" technocratic society; and the broader questions of technology, temporality, and modernity that shape these concepts. We will also examine a selection of key historical and contemporary artifacts in genres of hypertext and hypermedia fiction and nonfiction, "code poetry," cybertext and "ergodic" literature, net art and Web art, and software and electronic installation art, along with the critical debates generated by (and in some cases producing) them. Core readings from Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Marshall McLuhan, and Raymond Williams; Tim Berners-Lee, Vannevar Bush, Theodor Nelson, Richard Stallman, Alan Turing, and Norbert Wiener; Espen Aarseth, Jay David Bolter, N. Katherine Hayles, Michael Joyce, Lev Manovich, Stuart Moulthrop, and Rita Raley, among others.

Senior Seminar: Genres of Migration and Displacement (2008; 2010)
Does the content or "experience" of migration and displacement place a certain pressure on the form of writing about it? Ought it to? In this seminar, we will explore the transcultural encounter in globalization as mediated in and by genres of writing. Examining literary figurations of Sephardic, Ottoman, and Maghrebi cosmopolitanism (Aciman, Pamuk, Djebar), North American aboriginal migration (Momaday), Caribbean diasporic return (Césaire), European civil war and unification (Sebald), and the production of the U.S. American West (Ondaatje), we will consider how memoir both serves and disserves authors' (and narrators') stories. We'll consider the relationship between linguistic and cultural translation, and the literary implications of a cosmopolitanism experienced from above and from below, in the knowledge of languages and cultures meaningfully distant from one's own. Finally, we'll think about "life writing" as autobiographical writing that exceeds, resists or fails the existing generic conventions of published or publishable autobiography (and as writing that perhaps resists or fails publication itself).

Introduction to Critical Reading (2009)
A course in reading both literature and literary criticism as a thinker, or a reader interested in the conflict of ideas. We will consider a foundational theory of literariness, in the work of Viktor Shklovsky; extended definitions of tragedy, epic, the essay, and the novel (in works by Friedrich Nietzsche, Georg Lukács, and Robert Musil); Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theory of literary creativity; and two classic works of Anglophone Euro-Atlantic literary modernity (Brontë, Jane Eyre, and Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea) as read, re-read, and re-written through and by feminist and postcolonial literature and literary criticism (in the work of Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak).

Language Memoirs (2007)
This course will introduce you to a new genre of contemporary U.S. prose literature: the language memoir, or memoir of language acquisition. We'll read memoirs by (1) U.S.-born, English-speaking authors who learned languages other than English while living abroad; (2) authors born in the United States who grew up in bilingual or multilingual families; (3) authors who emigrated to the United States and learned English as a second (or third, or fourth) language; (4) authors who settled in the United States after growing up multilingual in their home cultures. We'll look at how the generic conventions of memoir both serve and disserve these authors' stories, paying special attention to the experiences of spatial mobility (in travel, migration, and displacement) they record. We'll also examine the social mobility acquired with a new language, as one crosses the line of economic class or (or and) ethnic/national identification. We'll consider the relationship between linguistic and cultural translation, and what it means to be cosmopolitan and/or post-colonial, possessing knowledge of languages and cultures meaningfully distant from ones own. And we'll look at the politics and ethics of multilingualism, in controversies over language rights and language policy. Finally, we'll consider just what is at stake in discovering --- or creating --- a new genre of contemporary literature. Readings from Aciman, Alhadeff, Anzaldúa, Dorfman, Hoffman, Kaplan, Kazin, Mencken, Moraga, Ogulnick, Rodriguez, Said, Stavans.

Introduction to Critical Reading (2006, 2007)
We'll have three goals here. The first is to develop an understanding of critical concepts essential to the study of literature. The second is to establish working definitions of key terms for literary studies and to trace their emergence from different critical approaches or "schools" of literary theory. The third is to learn to read for, and to reproduce, literary-theoretical argument. If one of the questions literary theory asks is "What is literature?," the other, obviously, is "What is theory?" -- or, at a deeper level, "Why theory?" A working assumption here will be theory's everydayness -- its presence everywhere in both public and private conversation. That means, for example, that we can identify ordinary and often simple problems (problems that are easy to understand, if not necessarily to solve) in the most abstruse theoretical arguments. Still, we'll be reading primary sources in literary theory, which are often difficult, so we'll need to develop that acumen. We'll also read commentary placing different theoretical approaches in a wider context. In learning from theory tactics for reading literature critically -- reading form, reading for critical contrast, for argument, and for the tension between common sense and counterintuition -- we'll also be learning to read theory itself. (>)

Honors Seminar: Writing Across Genre (2007)
In this course we will read closely works of twentieth century U.S. and world literature that combine or cross fictional, nonfictional, and poetic genres, considering how generic boundaries are defined, as well as what it means to "write across" them. Among the questions we'll ask ourselves are: How does the system of disciplines in the university (English studies, comparative literature, creative writing) reflect or produce distinct genres of writing? What is the proper relation of writing to knowledge? How does one properly narrate, or "essay," or lyricize personal and collective trauma in war, or in the colonial encounter? Do writers write freely, or are genres structures that constrain or determine the practice of writing? Is "writing across genre" itself a genre? In structured experimental writing assignments, you will (a) respond critically (analytically) to these readings, and (b) create texts of your own (poetic, fictional, autobiographical or autoethnographic, and/or literary-critical) which cross genre. Readings from Agee, Anzaldúa, Berger, Césaire, Djebar, Kumar, Momaday, Ondaatje, Sebald, Toomer.

Essayism (graduate; 2006)
In practical tension with the scholarly article and research monograph, the treatise, and the nonfiction narrative, we could say, the essay form both articulates and tests the act of discipline by which knowledge is divided and through which it disseminates. Accordingly, we'll focus our work in two areas: the theory of genre and the practice of writing. Our method will be comparative: we'll consider the essay as form, anti-form, and nostalgia for form; as genre, anti-genre, and law of genre; as constellation, piece work, defacement, life writing, art de faire, Bruchstück, sur-vivre. "Essayism" marks this concurrent, comparative emphasis on theory and practice, science and art, philosophy and poetry (...literature ..."creative writing"). Our project here is to use the tension between those terms to develop an understanding of the real boundaries of our disciplines, and of real possibilities for cross-border relations. Think of this, then, as an attempt to lend substance to the often empty (yet exigent) rhetoric of interdisciplinarity, by restoring to it a perpetually missing link: writing practice. Format should be equally useful to M.F.A. candidates working in literary forms of nonfiction prose and to M.A./Ph.D candidates in literature or related humanities disciplines with interests in genre studies, rhetoric, poetics, literary and critical theory, or philosophy and literature. Readings from Adorno, Badiou, Bruss, Deleuze, Derrida, Fish, Guillory, Hartman, Hesse, Howe, Lukács, Lyotard, McGurl, Musil, Obaldia, Perloff, Rancière, Siskin, Viscusi. (>)

Broken Pieces (2006)
Most writing remains unfinished, "living on" in the form of notes, sketches, and drafts. This course examines writing's "broken pieces," with focus on short forms of nonfiction prose: aphorism, maxim, sketch, vignette, feuilleton, pensée, prose poem, fragment, and essay. Along the way, we will consider how larger units of writing, including books, are constructed (through collage, montage, mosaic, constellation, counterpoint or dialectic, and other methods of composition) from accumulations of smaller ones. Course format combines structured experimental writing with close reading and analysis. Readings from Adorno, Artaud, Barthes, Baudelaire, Beckett, Benjamin, Blanchot, Borges, Djebar, Hejinian, Howe, Jabès, Kafka, Lichtenberg, Lévi-Strauss, Mallarmé, Maso, Michaux, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Novalis, Pascal, Pessoa, Ponge, Rimbaud, Rochefoucauld, Roubaud, Schlegel, Stein, Trakl, Wittgenstein, Woolf.

American Nonfiction Prose (2005)
Works of prose nonfiction dramatizing "the American scene": the partly observed, partly imagined America of both native- and foreign-born citizens. We'll read Americans who went abroad (Emerson, Baldwin, Settle, Kaplan), those who arrived from elsewhere (Hoffman, Dorfman, Aciman, Abinader) and those who traveled at home (Agee, Rodriguez, Heat-Moon, Anzaldúa). (>)

Defacement (graduate; 2005)
Our theme for this semester will be autobiography as "defacement." Together we will reflect on the iconoclasm of writing and the ethics of publication. How do we violate objects, places, or persons by writing about them in genres that tell us they are "telling the truth"? Can this violation be avoided, or can we make restitution for it? How is the truth revealed, and how is it concealed, by the personal essay, by memoir, autobiography, and biography, and by journalistic writing? By travel writing and ethnography? By scholarship generally? By philosophical writing? You'll be asked to reflect on these aspects of your own work in any genre of nonfiction prose, which you'll present to us at length in at least one class session. We will emphasize both theory, in rigorous thinking, and practice, in daily reading and writing by quota toward the form of the book. Readings from Berger, Derrida, De Man, Djebar, Goytisolo, Howe, Lévi-Strauss, Giard, Sontag, Spivak, Stavans, Viscusi. (>)

Syllabi

    Penn State, 2005-

  1.  s10
  2.  s10
  3.  f09
  4.  s09
  5.  s08
  6.  s08
  7. Lennon, Brian. Course syllabus for "ENGL 200 Introduction to Critical Reading." Pennsylvania State University, Fall 2007. (>)
  8.  s07
  9.  s07
  10. Lennon, Brian. Course syllabus for "ENGL 515/ CMLIT 504 Writing Nonfiction/ Studies in Literary Genres: Essayism." Pennsylvania State University, Fall 2006. (>)
  11. Lennon, Brian. Course syllabus for "ENGL 200 Introduction to Critical Reading." Pennsylvania State University, Fall 2006. (>)
  12.  s06
  13. Lennon, Brian. Course syllabus for "ENGL 215 Introduction to Nonfiction Writing." Pennsylvania State University, Spring 2006. (>)
  14. Lennon, Brian. Course syllabus for "ENGL 439 American Nonfiction Prose." Pennsylvania State University, Fall 2005. (>)
  15. Lennon, Brian. Course syllabus for "ENGL 515 Writing Nonfiction: Defacement." Pennsylvania State University, Fall 2005. (>)

    Columbia University, 2004-2005

  16. Lennon, Brian. Course syllabus for "ENGL F1010.17: University Writing." Columbia University, Spring 2005. (>)
  17. Lennon, Brian. Course syllabus for "ENGL F1010.17: University Writing." Columbia University, Fall 2004. (>)

Handouts, worksheets, forms

    Reading worksheets

  1. Lennon, Brian. "Reading Worksheet: Ilan Stavans, On Borrowed Words: A Memoir of Language and 'My Love Affair with Spanglish'" (course handout). Pennsylvania State University, 2007. (>)
  2. Lennon, Brian. "Reading Worksheet: Nuala Ní Dhomnaill, 'Linguistic Ecology: Preventing a Great Loss,' Nancy Huston, 'The Mask and the Pen,' Shirley Geok-lin Lim, 'The Im/Possibility of Life-Writing in Two Languages,' Sylvia Molloy, 'Bilingualism, Writing, and the Feeling of Not Quite Being There,' Luc Sante, 'Dummy,' Julia Alvarez, 'My English,' Rosario Ferré, 'Bilingual in Puerto Rico'" (course handout). Pennsylvania State University, 2007. (>)
  3. Lennon, Brian. "Reading Worksheet: Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory; Esmeralda Santiago, 'Introduction to Cuando era puertorriqueña'" (course handout). Pennsylvania State University, 2007. (>)
  4. Lennon, Brian. "Reading Worksheet: Ondaatje, Collected Works of Billy the Kid" (course handout). Pennsylvania State University, 2007. (>)
  5. Lennon, Brian. "Reading Worksheet: Karen Ogulnick, Onna Rashiku: The Diary of a Language Learner in Japan; Yoko Tawada, 'Writing in the Web of Words'" (course handout). Pennsylvania State University, 2007. (>)
  6. Lennon, Brian. "Reading Worksheet: Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain." (course handout). Pennsylvania State University, 2007. (>)
  7. Lennon, Brian. "Reading Worksheet: H. L. Mencken, from The American Language; Eighty-First World Esperanto Congress, 'The Prague Manifesto'; Alice Kaplan, 'On Language Memoir'; Isabelle de Courtivron, 'Introduction' to Lives in Translation" (course handout). Pennsylvania State University, 2007. (>)
  8. Lennon, Brian. "Reading Worksheet: Alice Kaplan, French Lessons; Isabelle de Courtivron, 'Memoirs of a Bilingual Daughter'" (course handout). Pennsylvania State University, 2007. (>)
  9. Lennon, Brian. "Reading Worksheet: Jorie Graham, 'I Was Taught Three'; Cherríe Moraga, 'Querida Compañera'; Gustavo Pérez Firmat, 'Dedication'" (course handout). Pennsylvania State University, 2007. (>)
  10. Lennon, Brian. "Reading Worksheet: Dorfman, Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey" (course handout). Pennsylvania State University, 2007. (>)
  11. Lennon, Brian. "Reading Worksheet: Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land" (course handout). Pennsylvania State University, 2007. (>)
  12. Lennon, Brian. "Reading Worksheet: Berger, Pig Earth." (course handout). Pennsylvania State University, 2007. (>)
  13. Lennon, Brian. "Reading Worksheet: Kazin, A Walker in the City; Antin, 'Initiation'" (course handout). Pennsylvania State University, 2007. (>)
  14. Lennon, Brian. "Reading Worksheet: Toomer, Cane" (course handout). Pennsylvania State University, 2007. (>)
  15. Lennon, Brian. "Reading Worksheet: Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (#2)" (course handout). Pennsylvania State University, 2007. (>)
  16. Lennon, Brian. "Reading Worksheet: Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" (course handout). Pennsylvania State University, 2007. (>)

    Other worksheets

  17. Lennon, Brian. "Worksheet: Project Review" [#2] (course handout). Pennsylvania State University, 2007. (>)
  18. Lennon, Brian. "Worksheet: Project Review" (course handout). Pennsylvania State University, 2007. (>)
  19. Lennon, Brian. "Worksheet: Genre" (course handout). Pennsylvania State University, 2007. (>)
  20. Lennon, Brian. "Reading Worksheet" (course handout). Pennsylvania State University, 2007. (>)
  21. Lennon, Brian. "Writing Workshop Comments" (course handout). Columbia University, 2005. (>)
  22. Lennon, Brian. "The Summary" (course handout). Columbia University, 2004. (>)
  23. Lennon, Brian. "Grading Rubric for Critical Essays" (course handout). Columbia University, 2004. (>)