Research Interests

• Contemporary American fiction
• Unfinished creative works
• Literature and film/popular music
• Ethnicity, migration and marginality

Education

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Hated Adversaries: Unfinished Works of Art in the American Novel of the 1990s  (Dissertation Project)

Dissertation in Literature

Mentoring team:
First supervisor: Prof. Dr. Ulla Haselstein
Second supervisor: Prof. Dr. Martin Klepper
Third supervisor: Prof. Dr. Frank Kelleter

“Unfinishedness” as an aesthetic principle is not a new issue in literature and art, nor something specific to the United States: on the contrary, unfinished creative works of all sorts have surfaced throughout the ages in every artistic field and all over the world, from Michelangelo’s non finito sculptures to the Romantic fragment poem. At the same time, the development of the American novel in the last few decades provides a particularly interesting and relatively unexplored setting for the study of the “Literary Unfinished” (Stewart 2016). Since the mid-1980s, at least, more and more US writers have dealt with incompleteness in art as part of their novels. More recently, there has also been a surge in the public's interest in unfinished creative works. Nevertheless, the recurrence of “unfinishedness” in contemporary America seems to have largely gone unnoticed by critics.

My research will have as its main focus the 1990s, a pivotal historical and cultural moment that coincided in the popular and scholarly imagination with a series of “conclusions” to which novels resisted in varying degrees—most notably, by exposing at the textual level the decade’s obsession with endings: the end of the Cold War and the end of the millennium, of course, but also the so-called “end of history”, the end of postmodernism, the “end of the book” as a medium, and the often-announced “death of the novel”. Within this framework, I will insist on a perceived shift away from the Aristotelian ideal of plot as well as from established forms of narrative closure. Rather than producing fictional works that are literally incomplete, contemporary authors have increasingly included within the plots of their finished novels a number of fictitious unfinished texts, or other unfinished works of art, as media of textual self-reflection. This particular literary form, which might perhaps be called “unfinished metafiction”, seems pretty much alive in the United States, if one considers the large corpus of contemporary novels including incomplete creative works: among them, I will focus on Don DeLillo’s Mao II (1991), Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys (1995), Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock (1993), and Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist (1999).

My argument is that the unfinished novel has not at all disappeared in contemporary America: it has survived by changing in nature and scope, in accordance with other transformations undergone by US literature, culture, and society. In this respect, unfinished metafiction has not been thoroughly investigated as a literary form of its own, just as the potentialities of a comparison with actual archive material, or with similar forms in other arts and media, have not been fully explored. Moreover, it has not been spelled out enough that literary works – not unlike in music, film, and the fine arts – can be potentially complete and perfect in their unfinished and imperfect shape, thus aiming at the revaluation of an apparently flawed artistic form about which there is still much left unsaid.