Marta Figlerowicz
Interests
Twentieth- and twenty-first century American, British, and French literature; critical theory and art practice in post-socialist countries; eighteenth-century British and French literature; contemporary cinema; the novel; philosophy; theories of new media.
Bio
At Yale, I have taught or hope to teach courses on modernism, literary and critical theory, and contemporary cinema. I am also a co-organizer of Utopia after Utopia, a research initiative on contemporary post-socialist critical theory and art practice. My first book, Flat Protagonists: A Theory of Novel Character (Oxford UP, forthcoming fall 2016), discusses an odd group of characters–found across the long history of the French and British novel–that simplify in the course of a narrative, instead of deepening and expanding. My second book, entitled Spaces of Feeling (Cornell UP, forthcoming in 2017) studies representations of intersubjective affective awareness and unawareness in early- to mid-twentieth-century American, British, and French fiction and poetry. I am currently at work on a new project on the phenomenology of contemporary media culture. In addition to my academic work, I write literary and cultural criticism for publications such as n+1, Jacobin, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Post45 (Contemporaries), MAKE Literary Magazine, and Boston Review. I am a member of the Harvard Society of Fellows, which I joined as a Junior Fellow in 2013.
Publication Highlights
Special Issues
- The Object Emotions Dossier, symplokē 24.1 (2016), co-edited with Padma Maitland and Christopher P. Miller, forthcoming.
- The Affect Theory Dossier (ed.), Qui Parle 20.2 (2012): 1-182. [Project Muse]
Essays and Articles
- “The Novel and the Cloud,” Poetics Today 38.4 (2017), forthcoming.
- “The Novel and Character,” The Cambridge Companion to the Novel, ed. Eric Bulson (New York, NY: Cambridge UP, 2016), forthcoming.
- “GeoGuessr’s Digital Pilgrimages,” Room One Thousand 3 (2015): 117-121. [eScholarship]
- “Novel,” Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly, 2 revised edition (New York, NY: Oxford UP, 2014).
- “Comedy of Abandon: Lars von Trier’s Melancholia,” Film Quarterly 65.4 (2012): 21-26. [JSTOR]
- “Bounding the Self: Ethics, Anxiety, and Personhood in Samuel Beckett’s Fiction,” Journal of Modern Literature 34.2 (2011): 76-96. [Project Muse]
- “‘Frightful Spectacles of a Mangled King’: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko and Narration Through Theater,” New Literary History 39.2 (2008): 321-334. [Project Muse]
Undergraduate courses
James Joyce and Marcel Proust, Introduction to Narrative, Feminist and Queer Theory, Selfhood, Race, Class, and Gender, Tragedy, World Cinema
Education
Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley, 2013
M.A. University of California, Berkeley, 2011
B.A. Harvard University, 2009