Tim Wientzen
Associate Professor & chair
B.A., Boston College
Ph.D., Duke University
Office: Palamountain 313
Phone: (518) 580-8397
Email: twientzen@skidmore.edu
Teaching and Research Interests:
- Literary modernism in British and global contexts
- The science and politics of modernist literature
- Early science fiction
- Environmental humanities
- The history and theory of the novel
- Contemporary Anglophone fiction
- Metafiction
Research:
My research is driven by questions about the relationship between science and politics in early twentieth-century literature. I am particularly interested the ways that life in the early twentieth century anticipated the political and ecological problems of the twenty-first century. Reading modernist encounters with the incipient forces of modernity, I believe, offers valuable insights life at our present moment.
My interests range from early science fiction writers (especially Aldous Huxley, Olaf Stapledon, and HG Wells), to the modernisms of writers like Rebecca West, Wyndham Lewis, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf.
I am the author of a book entitled, Automatic: Literary Modernism and the Politics of Reflex ( Johns Hopkins UP 2021). This book examines the relationship between modernist formal experimentation and twentieth-century scientific thinking about reflex behaviors. Looking at the work of British writers, Automatic situates modernist literary form in relation to contemporary discourses of reflex, including fields like public relations, physiology, vitalism, sociology, behaviorism, and propaganda. I am currently working on a critical edition of Aldous Huxley's seminal dystopian novel, Brave New World, which will be published with Broadview.
Selected Publications:
- Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Broadview Press. (Under contract)
- Automatic: Literary Modernism and the Politics of Reflex. Johns Hopkins University Press (2021)
- “The Modernist Cosmos: Olaf Stapledon, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and the Crisis of Species." In Modernism and the Anthropocene: Material Ecologies of Twentieth-Century Literature (2021).
- “Strong Ecology, Weak Theory.” Modernism/Modernity Print Plus 4.1 (2019)
- “Not a Globe but a Planet: Modernism and the Epoch of Modernity.” Modernism/Modernity Print Plus 2.4 (2017).
- An Epic of Atmosphere: Rebecca West, Black Lamb, and Reflex. The Journal of Modern Literature 38.4 (2015).
- The Aesthetics of Hunger: Knut Hamsun, Modernism, and Starvation’s Global Frame.² Novel: A Forum on Fiction (2015).
- Automatic Modernism: D. H. Lawrence, Vitalism, and the Political Body.² Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 46.1 (2013).
Courses Taught:
- SSP 100: Shocked: World War I, Literature, and Modern Culture
- EN 105: Meltdown: Literature, Culture, and the Climate Crisis
- EN 110: Introduction to Literary Studies
- EN 211: Fiction
- EN 228: Science Fiction
- EN 312R: Modern British Novel
- EN 328R: James Joyce, Ulysses, and the Nightmare of History
- EN 363R: England After Empire
- EN 375: Senior Seminar: What Was Postmodernism?
