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Paul Benzon

Associate Professor and Associate Chair

Phone: 518-580-5162
Email: pbenzon@skidmore.edu
Office: Palamountain Hall 311

Education:

• B.A., Williams College
• M.A. and Ph.D., Rutgers University, New Brunswick

Teaching and research interests:

• Contemporary Literature
• American Literature, 1865-present
• Media Studies and Media History
• Digital Culture
• Graphic Narratives
• Electronic Literature
• Literature and Theory of the Archive

Courses taught:

• EN 105: Digital Identity
• EN 110: Introduction to Literary Studies
• EN 211: Fiction
• EN 228: Graphic Narratives Comic Books
• EN 229: Literature in the Digital Age
• EN 363: American Realism
• EN 364: Remixes, Memes, and Mash-ups
• EN 375: Senior Seminar, Critical Digital Studies
• MF 101: Introduction to Media Studies

Research:

Professor Benzon is currently at work on a book titled Archival Fictions: Materiality, Form, and Media History in Contemporary Literature. Archival Fictions explores how contemporary literature traces a speculative history of media technology through the practice of formal experimentation. In Archival Fictions, he argues that a materially inflected attention to literary form offers new critical purchase on how we understand modern and contemporary media history. Considering charged moments of textual experimentation by authors including Andy Warhol, Kevin Young, Don DeLillo, and Hari Kunzru alongside material histories of technological phenomena ranging from protocinematic toys and mid-century typewriters to the circulatory mechanisms of the internet, Archival Fictions develops a methodology for reading contemporary print texts as media artifacts that self-consciously model a new history of media change defined by partiality, ephemerality, recursion, and uneven development.

Selected publications:

• “Boredom as Form: Work, Play, and the Banality of the Digital.” Humans at Work in the Digital Age: Forms of Digital Textual Labor. Eds. Shawna Ross and Andrew Pilsch. New York: Routledge, forthcoming 2019.
• “Weather Permitting: Shelley Jackson’s Snow and the Ecopoetics of the Digital.” College Literature 46.1, January 2019.
• “Hello Again: An Untimely Requiem for the Flip Phone.” Invited contribution to The Routledge Companion to Media Technology and Obsolescence. Ed. Mark Wolf. New York: Routledge, 2018.
• “Lost in the Clouds: A Media Theory of the Flight Recorder.” The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities. Ed. Jentery Sayers. New York: Routledge, forthcoming 2016.
• "On Unpublishing: Fugitive Materiality and the Future of the Anthropocene Book." Publishing as Artistic Practice. Eds. Annette Gilbert and Priscilla Posada. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016.
• “The Aesthetics of Erasure.” Introduction and Special Issue Guest Editor for Media-N, Journal of the New Media Caucus of the College Art Association 11.1, Spring 2015.
• “Bootleg Paratextuality and Digital Temporality: Towards an Alternate Present of the DVD.” Invited contribution to Narrative 21.1, January 2013. James Phelan Prize for the Best Contribution to Narrative, 2013.
• “Lost in Transcription: Postwar Typewriting Culture, Andy Warhol’s Bad Book, and the Standardization of Error.” PMLA 125.1, January 2010. William Riley Parker Prize for an Outstanding Article Published in PMLA, 2010.