Kevin Bell
Associate Professor
Ph.D., New York University, 2000
British and American literary modernisms, 20th- and 21st-century African American literature and film, Continental philosophy
Humanities 338
(518) 442-4073
kbell@albany.edu
Kevin Bell works in British and American literary modernisms, 20th- and 21st-century African American literature and film, and Continental philosophy with emphases upon aesthetic figurality and post-identitarian materialism. His publications include Ashes Taken for Fire: Aesthetic Modernism and the Critique of Identity (University of Minnesota Press, 2007); and his essays have appeared in journals such as boundary 2, Postmodern Culture, and Modern Fiction Studies. He is now composing a book on black experimental writing and cinema entitled Drift Velocities: Black Fragments in Explorative Literature, Film and Theory.
Published Articles (Selected)
“A Radiance of Ruin: Image as Rend in Experimental Black Cinema,” forthcoming in Postmodern Culture, special issue: “The Use-Value of the Avant-Garde” (Spring 2008).
“Assuming the Position: Fugitivity and Futurity in the Work of Chester Himes,” Modern Fiction Studies, 51.4, special issue: “Paris, Capital of the Black Atlantic” (Winter 2005): 846-72.
“The Embrace of Entropy: Ralph Ellison and the Freedom Principle of Jazz Invisible,” boundary 2, 30.2, special issue: “Ralph Ellison: The Next Fifty Years” (Summer 2003): 21-45.
Classes Taught (Selected)“Spectacle and Critique: Experimental Tactics in Post-Marxist Art and Theory,” Graduate Seminar, Comparative Literary Studies
“The Aporetic Ideal: Silence and Abyss in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory,” Graduate Seminar, Comparative Literary Studies
“Dialogues With the Void: Spectres of Self and Other in Modern British Literature,” Advanced Undergraduate Seminar, English
“Destination…Out: Aesthetic Freedom and the Literature of Collective Improvisation,” Advanced Undergraduate Seminar in 20th-century African American literature, English
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