Michael Trask
Ph.D. The Johns Hopkins University (1998)
B.A. Wesleyan University (1990)
I work at the intersection of social theory and traditional literary criticism. Although I mainly teach and write on 20th-century American Literature, I also teach courses on 19th-century British literature (Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde, the Victorian Triple-Decker). I earned my Ph.D. in English from Johns Hopkins in 1998 and my B.A. from Wesleyan University in 1990. My most recent book, Ideal Minds: Raising Consciousness in the Antisocial Seventies (Cornell UP, 2020), considers a variety of post-1970 social and intellectual trends and their literary resonances, including the ethical turn in political theory, animal liberation, deep ecology, and libertarianism. I am currently working on a book of close readings of 21st-century novelists (Tao Lin, Ben Lerner, Alex Kleeman, Ben Fountain, Sheila Heti, Rachel Cusk, Colson Whitehead). Some day I hope to write a short book on the long novels of Anthony Trollope, refracted through a Kantian prism.
Areas of Specialty:
- Social Theory
- History of Sexuality
- Modernism
- 20th-Century American Literature
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Ideal Minds: Raising Consciousness in the Antisocial Seventies, Cornell UP, October 2020
https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501752438/ideal-minds/#bo…
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Camp Sites: Sex, Politics, and Academic Style in Postwar Culture, Stanford UP, May 2013
http://sup.org/book.cgi?id=22511
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"The Ethical Animal: from Peter Singer to Patricia Highsmith," post45 (fall 2012)
http://post45.research.yale.edu/2012/11/the-ethical-animal-from-peter-s…
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"Patricia Highsmith's Method," ALH 22.3 (2010): 584-614
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"Class and Sex in American Fiction: From Casual Laborers to Accidental Desires," A Companion to the Modern American Novel 1900-1950, ed. John Matthews (Blackwell 2009)
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"In the Bathroom with Mary McCarthy," Criticism 49.1 (2007): 7-33
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Cruising Modernism: Class and Sexuality in American Literature and Social Thought, Cornell UP, 2003
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Other articles in Novel, Differences, American Literature