Dominic Rainsford

Professor i Engelsksproget Litteratur, ph.d.

Afdeling for Engelsk
Institut for Sprog, Litteratur og Kultur
Aarhus Universitet
Jens Chr. Skous Vej 7, Bygning 1463
8000 Århus C 

 

Kontakt:

Telefon 8942 1111
Direkte telefon 8942 6533
Fax 8942 6540
E-mail: dominic.rainsford@hum.au.dk

 

Kontor:

Bygning 1463 (Jens Chr. Skous Vej 7)
Lokale 630

 

 

In English 

Personalia

Træffetid

Forskningsområde

Igangværende arbejder

Udvalgte publikationer

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
Hovedredaktør, The Dolphin [bogserie], Aarhus Universitetsforlag, No. 30–32 (1999–2001)
Institutleder, Engelsk Institut, University of Aarhus, 2001–04
Institutleder, Institut for Sprog, Litteratur og Kultur, University of Aarhus, 2004–06
Lektor, Afdeling for Engelsk (formerly Engelsk Institut), University of Aarhus, 1998–2008
Carlsberg Fellow, Churchill College, University of Cambridge, 2006–07 (supported by Carlsbergfondet)

Træffetid

Forårssemester 2009: torsdag 14–13 eller efter aftale.

Forskningsområde

Litteratur og filosofi.

Igangværende arbejder

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.).

Udvalgte publikationer

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.
   

 

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, European Journal of English Studies, Victorian Review.

‘Ethics and Literature (including Levinas).’ The Annotated Bibliography for English Studies. Ed. Robert Clark. (45 reviews.)