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Comparative Literature
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Forest Pyle

Professor
Comics and Cartoon Studies, English
trespyle@uoregon.edu
Phone: 541-346-3928
Office: 270 PLC
Research Interests: 19th Century British Literary Studies, Comics and Cartoon Studies, Literary and Critical Theory, Poetry and Poetics, Postmodern and Contemporary Literary Studies, Visual Culture
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Statement

My work explores the problems and posibilities posed by aesthetic experience, particularly in the context of Romantic and post-Romantic literature. My first book examined the ideological workings and implications of the Romantic concept of the imagination from Wordsworth and Coleridge through George Eliot. I am presently completing a book manuscript on something I am calling a "radical aestheticism," the term that I believe best describes the nature of a recurring event in certain of the most powerful and resonant texts of the British Romantic literary tradition. I am interested in the various forms and effects of this aesthetic radicalization in a strain of Romanticism that extends from Percy Shelley and Keats through Dickinson, Hopkins, and Dante Rossetti through Wilde.

Publications

The Ideology of Imagination: Subject and Society in the Discourse of Romanticism (Stanford University Press, 1995)

"'The Power is There': Romanticism as Aesthetic Insistence" (2005)

"Kindling and Ash: Radical Aestheticism in Shelley and Keats" (2003)

"'Frail Spells': Shelley and the Ironies of Exile" (1999)

"Extravagance; Or, Salome's Kiss" (1998)

"'A mote in your eyes': or, the wounding of Caravaggio" (1996)

"Keats's Materialism" (1994)

"Making Humans, Making Cyborgs: Of Bladerunners and Terminators"  (1992)

Forthcoming: "From Which One Turns Away": A Radical Aestheticism in the Romantic Tradition

 

New Projects in Teaching and Research

My new research project is the result of teaching I have done over the past few years on the Romanticism of contemporary culture: pop music, film, and painting as well as literature. Tentatively entitled "A Dead Man and a Blanket of Ash: Constellations of a Contemporary Romanticism," the project explores the persistence and extensions of Romanticism in some of the more adventurous forms of contemporary culture, including the music of Cat Power, Nirvana, Nick Drake, and Radiohead, the painting of Cy Twombly, Gerhard Richter, and Francis Bacon, the films of Todd Haynes, Jim Jarmsuch, and Wong Kar-Wei, and the literature of Paul Bowles, Cormac McCarthy, Michael Palmer, and Jorie Graham.