Perspective Matters

VERY brief biographical information (in case you're interested):

I'm an Assistant Professor of English in the Department of Literature and Languages at Texas A&M University-Commerce. I received my B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and both my M.A. and Ph.D. from Purdue University.  In terms of my scholarly focus, I am primarily an Americanist.  My major areas of reading and research include twentieth-century and contemporary American literature; American multi-ethnic literature, particularly Jewish American literature; late nineteenth-century American literature; narrative and theories of narrative.

Right now I am in the middle of several larger projects.  The first is a book manuscript (almost completed) on narrative and identity in the later fiction of Philip Roth--basically, from The Counterlife to his most recent novel, The Plot Against America.  Another is an updated annotated bibliography on Roth and the criticism surrounding his work (to be published by Scarecrow Press), more or less picking up from the outstanding bibliography compiled by Bernard Rodgers, Jr., and which ends with 1984.  I am also working on an edited collection of essays devoted to the more recent generation of Jewish American writers (e.g., Thane Rosenbaum, Allegra Goodman, Steve Stern, Melvin Jules Bukiet, Michael Chabon, Rebecca Goldstein, Robert Cohen, S. L. Wisenberg).  This book springs from an issue of Shofar that I guest edited in 2004.  Still another project involves a collection of essays on Roth's recent narratives and his representation of America, based on the 2004 special issue of Studies in American Jewish Literature that I guest edited.  In 2006 I plan to begin work on a brand new manuscript investigating the uses of the short-story cycle form of narrative in recent Jewish American fiction.

I'm also in the process right now of guest editing two issues of two different journals: a special issue of Post Script devoted to Woody Allen films after 1990, and an issue of MELUS concerning multi-ethnic American graphic narrative.  Click here to check out the call for papers for the MELUS issue.

Other current projects of mine (either finished or in progress) include essays on Saul Bellow's comic retelling of James's "The Beast in the Jungle" in The Actual, the place of Jewish American literature in contemporary American ethnic studies, transgressing boundaries of ethnic representation in John Updike's Bech stories, and the uses of the golem in Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.

I am also the founder and the President of the Philip Roth Society, an organization devoted to the study and appreciation of Roth's fiction, and Executive Editor of its journal, Philip Roth Studies. 

My motto: Ambiguity is sacred.  As Pierce Inverarity tells Oedipa Maas, "that's all the secret, keep it bouncing." 

'Nuf said....or is it?