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Dominic RainsfordProfessor of Literatures in English, Ph.D. Department of English |
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Phone +45 8942 1111 |
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Office: |
Building 1463 (Jens Chr. Skous Vej 7) |
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Personalia
B.A., English
language and literature, Department of
English Language and Literature, University
College London, 1987
Ph.D., English literature, Department
of English Language and Literature, University
College London, 1994
Tutor,
Department of English Language and
Literature, University College London,
1990–92
Temporary lecturer in Modern Literature and Drama, Imperial College of Science, Technology and
Medicine, London, 1991–92
Senior lecturer, Instytut Anglistyki,
University of Warsaw, 1992–93
Lecturer, Department of English,
Loyola University of Chicago, 1994–95
Post-doctoral Research Fellow, Department
of English, University of Wales,
Aberystwyth, 1995–97
General Editor, The Dolphin
[book series], Aarhus University Press, 30–32
(1999–2001)
Head of Institute, English Institute, University
of Aarhus, 2001–04
Head of Institute, Institut
of Language, Literature and Culture, University
of Aarhus, 2004–06
Associate Professor, Department of
English (formerly English Institute), University
of Aarhus, 1998– 2008
Carlsberg Fellow, Churchill College, University of Cambridge, 2006–07
(supported by The Carlsberg Fund)
Office hours
Spring Semester
2009: Thursday 14–15, and by appointment.
Area
of research
Literature and
philosophy.
Work in progress
1. Literature,
ethics and quantification. This project examines questions such as
whether two instances of extreme suffering are worse than one, and if so, why.
It examines the wildly inconsistent (sometimes ideological, sometimes
apparently random) distribution of humanitarian concern that we see all around
us, all of the time (and are bound to echo in ourselves), and tries to connect
this with examples of the ethics in literature, where there is almost always a
problematical coming together of the collective and the singular, involving
both the construction of individualistic and biased moral perspectives and some
form of address to an indefinite human context and an unlimited potential
readership. (See my essay in Discourse 25.1–2.)
2. Ethics,
perception and the inanimate. This project will address various ways
in which metaphysical positions, involving commitments to the existence of
material objects and the substantiality of things, may underpin concepts of
responsibility and value. It will include many readings of literary and
theoretical texts in which ethics and the inanimate (including everything from
dust to oceans) are intimately related to one another, and where constructions
of what the human is and should be are consequently grounded on ideas of what
the substance of the non-human comprises, and how, if at all, it can be
grasped. (See my essay in European Journal of
English Studies 7.2.)
3. Shakespeare’s representations of the
relationship between human and non-human animals. The aim is to
construct a bridge between mainstream Shakespeare studies and the recent turn
to the animal in the work of radical philosophers, and to take advantage of
Shakespeare’s ubiquitous and over-determined status within the cultures
of the world’s most powerful and invasive language to make a case for the
necessity of unpacking spectacular intersections and confusions of the animal
and the human in current world affairs (Iraq, Guantánamo, etc.).
Selected publications
BOOKS:
Literature, Identity and the
English Channel: Narrow Seas Expanded. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave,
2002.
Ed., with Andrew Hadfield and Tim
Woods. The Ethics in Literature. Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St
Martin’s - now Palgrave,
1999.
Ed., with Tim Woods. Critical
Ethics: Text, Theory and Responsibility. Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York:
St Martin’s - now Palgrave,
1999.
Authorship, Ethics and the
Reader: Blake, Dickens, Joyce. Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St Martin’s - now Palgrave, 1997.
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SELECTED ARTICLES IN JOURNALS AND
COLLECTIONS:
‘The Bright Light of
Science and the Dim Truth of Art.” European
Journal of English Studies 11.3 (2007):
285–300
‘Tarkovsky and
Levinas: Cuts, Mirrors, Triangulations”. Film–Philosophy
11.2 (2007): 122–43.
‘Literary Language and the
Scientific Description of Consciousness.’ In Search of a Language for
the Mind-Brain. Ed. Anjum Saleemi and Ocke-Schwen Bohn. The Dolphin 33.
Århus: Aarhus University Press, 2005.
361–73. (Previously published in The Ukrainian Society for the Study
of English Messenger 1 (2000): 72-79.)
‘Numbering Pain: Testimony,
Quantification, and Need.’ Discourse. 25.1–2 (2003): 19–35.
[Full text available via Project MUSE.]
‘Solitary
Walkers,Encountering Blocks: Epistemology and Ethics in Romanticism and Land
Art.’ European
Journal of English Studies 7.2 (2003): 177–92. [Full text
available via EBSCO.]
‘The Comedy of Sadness in Dombey
and Son.’ Dickens: The Craft of Fiction and the Challenges of
Reading. Ed. Rossana Bonadei and others. Milan: Unicopli, 2000.
185–92. [Full text.]
‘Crossing the Channel with
Dickens.’ Dickens, Europe and the New Worlds. Ed. Anny Sadrin.
Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St Martin’s - now Palgrave, 1999. 3-13.
‘Difficult Writing and
Obstructive Form in Blake and Derrida.’ Imprimatur 2.1 (1996):
118-24.
‘Pity in Joyce: The
Function of the Blind Stripling.’ English Language Notes 34
(1996): 47-55. [Full text available via EBSCO.]
‘Flatness and Ethical
Responsibility in Little Dorrit.’ Victorian Newsletter 88
(1995): 11-17. Reprinted in Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism, Vol.
113 (2002). [Full text available in Gale
Literature Resource Center.]
ARTICLES IN REFERENCE BOOKS:
‘Bleak House’,
‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’, ‘Tom Jones’,
‘Ulysses’. Encyclopedia of the Novel. Ed. Paul E. Schellinger.
Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1999.
[Full text available in Literature
Online.]
REVIEWS:
Dickens
Quarterly, Dickensian,
English, European Journal of
English Studies, Victorian Review.
‘Ethics and Literature
(including Levinas).’ The
Annotated Bibliography for English Studies. Ed. Robert Clark. (45
reviews.)