Prof. Dr. James Dorson
Juniorprofessor
Dahlem International Network Junior Research Group “American Literature and Managerialism, 1875-1925”
Raum 208
14195 Berlin
Sprechstunde
Mittwoch: 14:00-15:00 Uhr oder nach Vereinabrung (dorson@zedat.fu-berlin.de). Während der Semesterferien nur nach Vereinbarung.
An folgenden Terminen gibt es keine Sprechstunde:
30.10.2024
06.11.2024
13.11.2024
12.12.2024
22.01.2025
05.02.2025
Ausbildung und beruflicher Werdegang
Oktober 2014 – heute
Juniorprofessor für nordamerikanische Literatur, John F. Kennedy Institut
2014 - 2018: Projektleiter Dahlem International Network Junior Research Group "Fictions of Management: American Naturalism and Managerial Culture, 1875-1925," gefördert aus Mitteln der Exzellenzinitiative der Deutschen Forschungsgesellschaft
Oktober 2013 – Oktober 2014
Postdoc, John F. Kennedy Institut
August 2011 – Juni 2013
Postdoc, Freie Universität Berlin
2007 – 2011
Dr. phil., Graduate School of North American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin
Dissertation: “Counternarrative Possibilities: Virgin Land, Homeland, and Cormac McCarthy’s Negative Imagination.” (summa cum laude)
Betreuung: Prof. Dr. Ulla Haselstein, Prof. Dr. Winfried Fluck, and Prof. Dr. Heinz Ickstadt.
2004 – 2007
M.A. English, Copenhagen University
Abschlussarbeit: “Between Immanence and Transcendence: Resistance and Belief in Don DeLillo’s Post-Cold War Fiction.”
Betreuung: Prof. Martyn Bone.
2000 – 2003
B.A. English, Copenhagen University.
Stipendien, Fellowships und Drittmittelerfahrung
Oktober 2019 – March 2021
Forschungsstipendium, Feodor Lynen-Forschungsstipendium für erfahrene Wissenschaftler, Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung
Oktober 2018
Publikationsförderung, Ernst-Reuter-Gesellschaft
Februar 2018
Konferenzförderung, Deutsche Forschungsgesellschaft
Juli 2016
Publikationsförderung, Ernst-Reuter-Gesellschaft
Juli 2016
Konferenzförderung, Center for International Cooperation, Freie Universität Berlin
Oktober 2013 – Oktober 2014
Deutsche Forschungsgesellschaft “eigene Stelle” für das Projekt “Aesthetics of Mastery: American Literary Naturalism and the Cultural Foundations of Bureaucracy”
Januar – Juni 2013
Forschungsstipendium, Freie Universität Berlin
August – Dezember 2012
Postdoc-Fellowship, Center for Area Studies, Freie Universität Berlin
August 2011 – July 2012
Dahlem Research School Honorary Fellowship, Freie Universität Berlin
Oktober 2007 – July 2011
Doktorandenstipendium, Graduate School of North American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin
Konferenzen und Workshops
“Perspectives on Economic Criticism.” Workshop, John-F.-Kennedy-Institut, FU Berlin, 22-23 August, 2019.
“Exemplary Singularity: Fault Lines of the Anecdotal” (Koorganisatoren Florian Sedlmeier, MaryAnn Snyder Körber, und Birte Wege), John-F.-Kennedy-Institut, FU Berlin, 1.-3. Februar, 2018.
“The Ecstasy of Gold: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Money.” Ringvorlesung (mit Jonathan Fox), John-F.-Kennedy-Institut, FU Berlin, 10/2016-02/2017.
“Fictions of Management” (mit Research Group, “Fictions of Management: American Naturalism and Managerial Culture, 1875-1925,” Koorganisatoren Jasper Verlinden und Florian Gabriel), John-F.-Kennedy-Institut, FU Berlin, 8.-10. Dezember 2016.
“Crossroads and Transgressions: Cormac McCarthy Between Worlds,” (mit Julius Greve (University of Cologne) and Markus Wierschem (University of Paderborn), John-F.-Kennedy-Institut, FU Berlin, 7.-9. Juli 2016.
“Uncertainty/Risk/Management” (mit Sebastian Jobs), John-F.-Kennedy-Institut, FU Berlin, 26. Oktober 2015.
“Data Fiction: Naturalism, Narrative, Numbers,” John-F.-Kennedy-Institut, FU Berlin, 30. Januar 2015.
“Divided We Stand - United We Fall. Perspectives on Inclusion and Exclusion in America” (gemeinsam mit den Doktorand/innen des ersten Jahrgangs der Graduate School of North American Studies), John-F.-Kennedy-Institut, FU Berlin, 28.-29. Juni 2008.
Aktuelle Kurse
Sommer Semester 2024
- “Methods in Literary and Cultural Studies.” Summer 2024. Doctoral Seminar, Graduate School of North American Studies.
- “Sites of Labor: Factory, Plantation, Household, Office.” Summer 2024. Interdisciplinary M.A. Seminar with Markus Kienscherf, Sociology.
- “MA Colloquium in Literature and Culture.” Summer 2024. M.A. Seminar.
Wintersemester 2023/24
B.A.-Kurs, Understanding North America A, Fr: 10-12, 14-16, R340
M.A.-Kurs, Workplace Fiction, Do:10-12, R203
GSNAS-Kurs, Theory and Methods in Literary and Cultural Studies, Do: 12-14, R203
Betreute Arbeiten
Dissertationen
Heinrich-David Baumgart, “Evolving Collectives: Group Agency and Notions of Temporality in Discourses of Evolution, 1880 – 1920” (second supervisor)
Fabius Mayland. “Rewriting the Past, Imagining the Future: Science Fiction as a Self-Writing Genre Community” (second supervisor)
Fabian Eggers. "Aesthetics of Intimacy in Contemporary American Literature" (first supervisor)
Rabeb Ben Hania. "From Postmodernist to Post-postmodernist Aesthetics in Contemporary Women Writings" (second supervisor)
Anke Sharma. "Out of Many, One? Community, Consciousness, and the 'We' Narrative Voice in Contemporary US Fiction" (second supervisor)
Florian Gabriel. "African American Literature as Counter-Naturalism" (first supervisor)
MA theses supervised on the following topics: postmodernism, new sincerity, science fiction, trauma theory, cognitive poetics, the short story cycle, Black masculinity, economic criticism, identity and belonging, climate fiction, Native American Literature.
Vergangene Kurse
"Hardboiled Nation: Fiction for Hard Times". Summer 2023. B.A. seminar.
"Wright and Baldwin". Summer 2023. M.A. seminar.
"M.A. Colloquium Literature/Culture". M.A. seminar.
“The Post-Catastrophic Imagination in Recent Speculative Climate Fiction.” Winter 2021/22. M.A. seminar.
“Horrible Knowledge: What the Gothic Knows.” Winter 2021/22. B.A. seminar.
“BA Colloquium in Literature and Culture.” Winter 2021/22.
“The Other Half: Literatures of American Poverty.” Summer 2021. B.A. seminar.
“The Power of You? Self-Help Literature in America.” Summer 2021. M.A. seminar.
“MA Colloquium in Literature and Culture.” Summer 2021.
“Network Narratives: The Poetics of Interconnectivity.” Summer 2019. M.A. seminar.
“Posthumanism and the Novel: Brute, Cyborg, Zombie, Superhero.” Summer 2019. B.A. seminar.
“MA Colloquium in Literature and Culture.” Summer 2019.
“Writing the Early Republic: Nation-Building, Print Culture, and the Novel,” Summer 2018. B.A. seminar.
“Evolution and Literature,” Summer 2018. M.A. seminar.
“MA Colloquium in Literature and Culture,” Summer 2018.
“Methods in Literary and Cultural Studies,” Winter 2017/18. Doctoral seminar.
“The Slave Narrative,” Winter 2017/18. B.A. seminar.
“Literary Theory,” Summer 2017. Doctoral seminar.
“Introduction to Literary Theory II,” Summer 2017. B.A. seminar.
“Native American Literature,” Wi/Se 2016/17. B.A. seminar.
“American Fictions of Management,” Wi/Se 2016/17. M.A. seminar.
“The Ecstasy of Gold: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Money,” Wi/Se 2016/17. Lecture Series. Co-organized with Prof. Dr. Jonathan Fox.
“Addicted to Plot: Genre Fiction After the Literary/Genre Divide,” So/Se 2016. M.A. seminar.
“Literature and Economics in the Two Gilded Ages,” So/Se 2015. Interdisciplinary M.A. seminar.
“New Sincerity: American Literature After Postmodernism?,” So/Se 2015. B.A. seminar.
“Data Fiction: Narrative and Numbers in American Literary Naturalism,” Wi/Se 2014/15. M.A. seminar.
“The Sentimental Novel,” Wi/Se 2014/15. B.A. seminar.
“The Tormented Soul: Conversion, Confession, and Self-Fashioning in Puritan New England,” So/Se 2014. B.A. seminar.
“Cormac McCarthy in Context,” So/Se 2013. M.A. seminar.
“Novel Feelings: Representing Emotion at the Turn of the Twentieth Century”, Wi/Se 2012/2013. M.A. seminar.
“Telling vs. Showing: Narrative Authority in American Fiction”, Wi/Se 2012/2013. M.A. seminar.
“American Myths and Literary Counternarratives”, Wi/Se 2009/2010. B.A. seminar.
Research Areas
U.S. Literatures and American Studies, Literary Theory, Economic Criticism, Environmental Humanities, Theories of Subjectivity.
At the center of my research in North American literature and culture is the relationship between aesthetic forms and social structures. My books and essays have inquired into the cultural work of literary genres, the politics of aesthetics, the relationship between nation and narration, aesthetic mediations of knowledge, and changing forms of selfhood in literary and cultural history, among other things. Identifying the social functions and relevance of literature has long been the aim of my research: from the focus in my first book on literary counternarratives and the interrogation of organizational aesthetics in my current book project to recent essays on poverty knowledge in Suzan-Lori Parks’s plays and modeling the green energy transition in climate fiction, my work has consistently demonstrated the significance of literary form for reflexively mediating urgent social issues.
Principle Coordinator of the DFG Research Network "Model Aesthetics: Between Literary and Economic Knowledge" (2021-2024): https://model-aesthetics.com
Member of the DFG Research Network "The Failure of Knowledge/The Knowledges of Failure" (2020-2023): https://knowledge-failure.org
Former member of the DFG Research Network “Narrative Liminality and/in the Formation of American Modernities” (2018-2020)
Current Research Project
The Aesthetics of Organization in American Literary Naturalism
This is my second book and Habilitation project in preparation. The project is at an advanced stage with several articles from it already published and will be submitted in the fall of 2024. The project examines the imagination in American literary naturalism of competing forms of organization in response to the perceived disorganization of society at the turn of the twentieth century. As the first literary movement to consciously grapple with the formal and political significance of different organizational visions in the transition from a free market system to corporate capitalism, naturalism played a key role in shaping cultural perceptions of organization. Combining literary formalism with economic criticism and the history of the life sciences, the project investigates the relationship between hierarchal and network forms (“trees” and “webs”) as they are negotiated in the organization of naturalist texts and their trademark exploration of biological and economic themes. By showing how the tension between these two organizing principles shapes a distinctly American naturalist aesthetic, the project offers a new account of naturalist fiction that departs from prevailing explanations of it as the reflection of one or another totalizing form of power. In light of the turn back to networks as the privileged form of socioeconomic organization since the 1970s, an examination of how naturalism responds to the promises and problems of corporate organization at its inception provides a timely insight into the cultural dynamics of organizational change.
Books
Reviewed in The Cormac McCarthy Journal
Reviewed in Studies of American Naturalism
Reviewed in Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik: https://www.degruyter.com/view/journals/zaa/66/1/article-p121.xml
Edited Volumes
Ed. with Jasper Verlinden. Fictions of Management: Efficiency and Control in American Literature and Culture. Heidelberg: Winter, 2019. 301 pp.
Ed. with MaryAnn Snyder Körber, Florian Sedlmeier, and Birte Wege. Anecdotal Modernity: The Making and Unmaking of History. De Gruyter, 2020. 306 pp.
Articles
"Reading for the Project: Work and Narrative in the Business Romance.” Forthcoming in the volume To Be Continued: The Novel and Narrative Forms of Continuation (Publisher TBD), eds. Ulla Haselstein and Florian Sedlmeier.
“Black Tragedy in the Age of Welfare Reform: Restaging Poverty Knowledge in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Red Letter Plays.” Forthcoming in The Failure of Knowledge – Knowledges of Failure (Publisher TBD), eds. Katharina Motyl and Regina Schober.
“Genre.” Forthcoming in The Aesthetics of Collective Agency in Twenty-First Century Culture (Transcript), eds. Stefanie Mueller and Simone Knewitz.
“Pedagogies of Abstraction: Calumet ‘K’, the Business Romance, and the Literary Life of Economic Man.” Forthcoming in the 2022 GAAS/DGfA Conference Proceedings (WINTER).
“Literary Modeling of/for Resilience in Juliana Spahr’s The Transformation and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future.” Forthcoming in The Modelling of Energy Transition. Cultures – Visions – Narratives (eds. Matthias Erdbeer, Klaus Stierstorfer, and Eric Achermann).
“Caveman, Genius, Artist, Entrepreneur: Success and Selfhood from Literary Naturalism to Self-Discovery Literature.” Submitted 10.07.2020 for a special issue of Subjectivity titled “Uplift & Self-Help: Mediating Subject Formations in Interwar Mass Cultures,” guest edited by Kristina Graaf and Martin Klepper.
“The Data of Life and the Life of Data: Epistemological and Aesthetic Liminality at the Fin-de-Siècle.” Submitted 18.03.2020 for the essay collection Narrative Liminality edited by Sebastian M. Herrmann, Katja Kanzler, and Stefan Schubert.
“Technovitalism and Work in the Posthuman Economy.” Submitted 06.11.2019 for the essay collection Posthuman Economies edited by Elisabeth Reichel.
“Cormac McCarthy and the Judeo-Christian Tradition.” In Cormac McCarthy in Context. Ed. Steven Frye. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 121-131.
“Unformed Forms: Genre Theory and the Trouble with Caroline Levine’s Forms.” In The Genres of Genre: Form, Formats, and Cultural Formations. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 38. Eds. Cécile Heim, Boris Vejdovsky and Benjamin Pickford. Tübingen: Narr, 2019. 23-41.
“Introduction: Management, Culture, Society.” With Jasper Verlinden. In Fictions of Management: Efficiency and Control in American Literature and Culture. Eds. James Dorson and Jasper Verlinden. Heidelberg: Winter (2019). 7-30.
“Flow Management: Jack London and Efficient Living in the Progressive Era.” In Fictions of Management: Efficiency and Control in American Literature and Culture. Eds. James Dorson and Jasper Verlinden. Heidelberg: Winter, 2019. 163-188.
“The Rise of the Small Businessman in Progressive Era Culture.” American Studies Journal 65 (2018).
“Industrial Transcendence: Jack London and the Spirits of Capitalism.” In Revisionist Approaches to American Realism and Naturalism. Eds. Jutta Ernst, Sabina Matter-Seibel, and Klaus H. Schmidt. Heidelberg: Winter, 2018. 73-96.
“Naturalism and the Aesthetics of Failure.” In The Failed Individual—Amid Exclusion, Resistance and the Pleasures of Non-Conformity. Eds. Regina Schober and Katharina Motyl. Frankfurt-on-Main: Campus Verlag, 2017. 287-303.
“Seeing Double: Reading Naturalism After the New Historicism.” In Projecting American Studies: Essays on Theory, Method, and Practice. Eds. Frank Kelleter and Alexander Starre. Heidelberg: Winter, 2018. 25-38.
“How (Not) to Be Liked: David Foster Wallace’s Anti-Popular Aesthetic.” In Unpopular Culture. Eds. Martin Lüthe and Sascha Pöhlmann. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016: 61-80.
“Critical Posthumanism in the Posthuman Economy: The Case of ‘Mister Squishy.’” In America After Nature: Democracy, Culture, Environment. Eds. Catrin Gersdorf and Juliane Braun. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2016: 423-39.
“The Neoliberal Machine in the Bureaucratic Garden: Pastoral States of Mind in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King.” In Rereading the Machine in the Garden: Nature and Technology in American Culture. Eds. Eric Erbacher, Nicole Maruo-Schröder, and Florian Sedlmeier. Frankfurt-on-Main: Campus Verlag, 2014: 211-30.
“’9/11’ and the Rhetoric of Rupture”. REAL – Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 27 (2011), eds. Winfried Fluck, Katharina Motyl, Donald E. Pease, and Christoph Raetzsch. 369-85.
Selected Talks
“A Tale of Two Models: Modeling Resilience in Juliana Spahr’s The Transformation and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future.” At the International Literary Modeling and Energy Transition Conference “The Modelling of Energy Transition,” University of Münster, October 4-6, 2021.
“What does the ‘Brute’ Know?” At the workshop “Embodied Knowledges and the Failures of Neoliberal Work Culture,” organized by the DFG Scientific Network “The Failure of Knowledge/The Knowledges of Failure,” Mannheim University/Bern University (virtual), June 10-11, 2021.
“A Response to Caroline Levine’s Keynote Lecture ‘Endings and Sustainability.’” At the conference “Beyond Narrative: Literature, Culture, and the Borderlands of Narrativity,” Leipzig University, October 10-12, 2019.
“The Complexity Effect: Evolutionary Narrative, Naturalist Fiction, and the Data Sublime” (poster presentation). At the conference “Beyond Narrative: Literature, Culture, and the Borderlands of Narrativity,” Leipzig University, October 10-12, 2019.
“Posthuman Humanism? The Progressive Era, Humanistic Management, and the Rise of the Network Self” (keynote address). At the conference “Posthuman Economies: Literary and Cultural Imaginations of the Postindustrial Human,“ University of Basel, April 13-14, 2019.
“Form vs. Genre.” At the Swiss Association for North American Studies conference “The Genre of Genres,” University of Lausanne, November 1-3, 2018.
“Narrating Complex Causality.” At the meeting of the research network “Narrative Liminality and/in the Formation of American Modernities,” Leipzig University, October 25-27, 2018.
“’These bourgeois cities will kill you:’ Anti-Urbanism, Populism, and California Naturalism” (invited talk). In the lecture series “Capitalism and the City,” John F. Kennedy Institute,FU Berlin, February 7, 2018.
“Big Data/Big Fiction: Reading Frank Norris in the Petabyte Age” (invited talk), presented in the workshop “Digital Modernities: America and American Studies in an Algorithmic Age” at the DGfA conference in Hannover, June 8-10, 2017.
“The Triumph of Conservatism? On Machines, Property, and Bigness in Naturalism” (invited talk), presented at the conference “Cultures of American Conservatism,” Göttingen University, February 9-12, 2017.
“The Business of Life: Efficiency and Entrepreneurship in Jack London’s The Valley of the Moon,” presented at the conference “Fictions of Management,” John F. Kennedy Institute, December 8-10, 2016.
“Jack London in the Age of Measurement” (invited talk), presented at the symposium “Cultural Perspectives on Quantification,” Mannheim University, November 25, 2016.
“Beyond the Program: Cormac McCarthy and Genre Fiction,” presented at the International Symposium on Cormac McCarthy, John F. Kennedy Institute, July 7-9, 2016.
“Modernizing Intrusions: American Literary Naturalism and the Technology of Style,” presented as the International Conference on Narrative, Chicago, March 5-8, 2015.
“Neoliberalism and the Bureaucratic Pastoral in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King,” presented as the conference “Neoliberalism and American Literature,” at the University College Dublin Clinton Institute, 20-21 February, 2015.
“The Art of Mastery (and Drift): American Literary Naturalism and Managerialism,” presented at the conference “Looking Forward, 2014: Current Projects in American Studies,” at the John F. Kennedy Institute, November 13-15, 2014.
“Critical Posthumanism in the Posthuman Economy: The Case of ‘Mister Squishy,’” presented in the workshop, “Nature, Technology, and the Body: Posthumanist Interfaces of the Networked Self” at the DGfA conference, “America After Nature: Democracy, Culture, Environment,” June 12-15, 2014.
“’Institutional stupidity in all its manifold forms and names’: (Un)popularity and (Im)personality in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King”, presented at the conference “Unpopular Culture”, held at the Amerika Haus Munich, October 31 – November 3, 2013.
“Aesthetic Transmission: From Ernest Hemingway to Cormac McCarthy to David Foster Wallace”, presented at the American Literature Association Symposium, “Cormac McCarthy, Ernest Hemingway and Their Traditions”, held in New Orleans, LA, October 4-6, 2012.
“The American Romance as Tragedy in the Border Trilogy”, presented at the New England American Studies Association Conference, “American Mythologies: Creating, Re-creating, and Resisting National Narratives,” held in Plymouth, MA, November 4-5, 2011.
“’9/11’ and the Rhetoric of Rupture”, presented at the International Graduate Conference, “States of Emergency: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Dynamics of Crisis”, held at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, June 11-12, 2010.
“’The Key to Heaven’: Finding Solid Ground in Cormac McCarthy’s Westerns”, presented at a research seminar held by the English Department of Copenhagen University, November 27, 2009.
“Seeds of Nihilism: Negation, Affirmation, and the Possibility of Literary Counternarratives”, presented at the 24th Annual Conference of the International Society for the Study of Narrative hosted by the Department of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Birmingham, June 4-6, 2009.
“’Agony in the Garden’: American Studies and the Subversion of the Virgin Land Myth in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian”, presented at the Nordic Association of American Studies Conference, “Cosmopolitan America: The United States in Transition”, hosted by the English Department of Copenhagen University, May 28-30, 2009.
“’Some Apparition Out of the Vanished Past’: Counternostalgia in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy”, presented the International Graduate Conference, “Divided We Stand – United We Fall. Perspectives on Inclusion and Exclusion in America”, held at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, June 28, 2008.