Eric Keenaghan
Assistant Professor
Affiliate Faculty with Women’s Studies
Ph.D. Temple University
Literatures of the Americas, Modernist Studies, Queer and Gender Theory, Pragmatism/Democratic Theory
Humanities 343
442-4088
ekeenaghan@albany.edu
Ph.D. in English: Temple University, 2003. Primary Fields: Queer Theory and Modernist Poetry of the Americas.
M.A. in English: Temple University, 1997.
B.A. in English: Amherst College, 1994. Majors: English, Sociology.
Book Project (in Process)The R.D. Book: Robert Duncan's Belated Modernist Poetics of Life, War, and Love
Robert Duncan was a belated writer in two senses: poetically he identified with modernists of the previous generation, and politically he continued to associate himself with anarchistic thought even long after its heyday. Duncan's anarchism and poetic anachronism are of a piece, for one constant links them: they both grow out of his concern about the fate of the individual in late modern American culture. As he saw it, the poet is charged with the responsibility of helping safeguard the individual's political freedom; it is only experiences of said freedom that guarantee anyone's authentic connection with life. He imagined modernist language practices as the best guarantor of anarchistic freedom in the Vietnam War-era United States. That time, as I argue following Michel Foucault's own archaeology on governmentality, is when what we experience today as biopolitics initially developed. When Duncan writes of life, then, he is doing more than appealing to a vague or empty romantic conceit. Indeed, he is addressing a political phenomenon, the birth of liberalism and the state's repression of individualism through the management of life. The vision of love that he offers is similarly something more than a formal romantic conceit. It does not lack content: indeed, as Duncan imagines it, love, desire, and passion are the chief means by which poetry can resist succumbing to a biopolitical fate. The R.D. Book historically and biographically contextualizes this important literary figure's dual belatedness as a resistant poetic project, one that continues to speak to our own moment. I do so by reconstituting Duncan's thinking via a combination of methodological approaches: literary analyses, archival and bibliographic research, historical contextualizations of his composition, and theoretic reflection. The cornerstone of the book, though, is how it resituates Duncan's self-described "derivative poetics" in light of his readings of key antecedents who wrote on life and individualism: H.D., Laura Riding, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Charles Darwin, William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Buckminster Fuller, Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Prince Kropotkin, and others. These forays in reading Duncan's reading deepen our understanding of three concepts central to both his poetics and my metanarrative about contemporary biopolitics: life, war, and (their resolution) love. Recent and Forthcoming PublicationsQueering Cold War Poetry: Ethics of Vulnerability in Cuba and the United States (Ohio State UP, 2009).
Critical Essays"Intimacy and Injury: The Queer Transfiguration of Racialized Exclusion in Langston Hughes' Translations of Nicolás Guillén." Translation Studies. Forthcoming July 2009.
“Vulnerable Households: Cold War Containment and Robert Duncan’s Queered Nation.” Journal of Modern Literature, Special Issue: Poetry, Politics, and Social Discourses. Ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis. 28.4 (Summer 2005): 57 – 90.
“A Virile Poet in the Borderlands: Wallace Stevens’ Reimagining of Race and Masculinity.” Modernism/Modernity 9.3 (September 2002): 439 – 462.
“Wallace Stevens’ Influence on the Construction of Gay Masculinity by the Cuban Orígenes Group.” The Wallace Stevens Journal, Special Issue: The Influence of Wallace Stevens on Late Twentieth-Century Culture. Ed. Angus Cleghorn. 24.2 (Fall 2000): 187 – 207.
“Jack Spicer’s Pricks and Cocksuckers: Translating Homosexuality into Visibility.” The Translator, Special Issue: Translation and Minority. Ed. Lawrence Venuti. 4.2 (1998): 273 – 294.
Book Chapters“Reading Emerson in Other Times: On a Politics of Solitude and an Ethics of Risk.” The Other Emerson. Eds. Branka Arsic and Cary Wolfe. Minneaopolis: U of Minnesota P, forthcoming.
“World-Building and Gay Identity: Ronald Johnson’s Singularly Queer Foundations.” Ronald Johnson: Life and Works. Eds. Eric Murphy Selinger and Joel Bettridge. Orono: National Poetry Foundation, forthcoming.
Review Essays"Performance and Politics in Contemporary Poetics: Three Recent Titles from Atelos Press." Postmodern Culture 17 (May 2007).
"Newly Discrepant Engagements: A Review of Three Recent Critical Works in Modernist Postcolonial Studies." Journal of Modern Literature 29.3 (Winter 2006): 176-190.
Other Projects, in Process"Pro-Life, Yet Pro-War: Robert Duncan and the Queerness of Poetic Action during Vietnam." (essay)
"Queer Deep Songs: American Cold War Poets' Disinterment of Federico García Lorca." (essay)
“Robert Duncan’s Radical Humanism; or, On the Crises of Reading and Falling in Love.” (essay)
“Do Good Things Come to Those Who Wait?: Hedwig’s Philosophy Lesson on Love, Politics, and Democratic Possibility." (essay)
Recent and Upcoming Conference Presentations and Invited Lectures"Vulnerability and Liberalism: Biopolitics, Queer Life, and Homeland Security." Out to Lunch Lecture Series, the Rainbow Center, University of Connecticut, Hartford, CT. April 2, 2008.
"The Orígenes of a New World Order: The Case History of a Cuban Vanguardist Small Press in a Global Marketplace." Panel presentation, Modern Language Association Conference. Chicago, IL. December 27 - 30, 2007.
"Pro-Life: Queer Nationalism and Poetic Action." Alumnus lecture for the Department of English, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA. November 8, 2007.
"Some Queer, Deep Songs about the End of Empire: Life Lessons from the Cold War Poetic Disinterment of Federico García Lorca during the Cold War." Panel presentation, Queer Exoticism: The Second LGBT Symposium. Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY. October 11 - 12, 2007.
“Queer Nationalism and the Security State.” Four-part lecture series, in Seminars in the City, a public series sponsored and organized by CLAGS (Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, CUNY Graduate Center) and hosted at the Gay and Lesbian Community Center. New York, NY. February 8 2007; March 8, 2007; April 12, 2007; and May 10, 2007.
“The Conflict of the Poetic Faculties: On Social Pedagogy and Undated Grammars of Self.” Panel presentation, Modern Language Association Conference. Philadelphia, PA. December 27 – 30, 2006.
“Anti-Liberalist Politics and Radical Humanism in Queer Poetics.” Presentation for a roundtable by the Queer Theory and American Literatures Working Group (“Sexual Topographies: Queer Reading, Ameican Contexts”), Conference of the American Literature Association. San Francisco, CA. May 26 – 29, 2006.
“On Love, War, and Radical Humanism: Rethinking Queer and Democratic Theories through Robert Duncan’s Ground Work.” Panel presentation, (RE:) Working the Ground: A Conference on the Late Writings of Robert Duncan. University at Buffalo, SUNY. April 20 – 22, 2006.
“A ‘Cullud’ Queer ‘Don’t Know No English’: Langston Hughes and the Hopeful Impossibility of Racial Translation.” Panel presentation, MSA7: Conference of the Modernist Studies Association. Chicago, IL. November 3 – 6, 2005.
“High Risk: Queerness as the Unsettling of the Homeland and Its Securities.” Invited lecture in SUNY English Faculty Exchange Series, Department of English, Binghamton University, SUNY. September 28, 2005.
“Read in Black: Dehumanization in Queer Theory and Faulkner’s Racialized Storytelling.” Panel presentation, Narrative: Conference of the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature. Louisville, KY. April 7 – 10, 2005.
“Quiere Nation: Coming Communities, or Communities that Come?” Panel presentation, Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society. New York City, NY. October 15 – 17, 2004.
“Un-Becoming or Un-American?: The Quandary of Democratic Individualism and Racial Performance in Seemingly ‘Queer’ Narratives by Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin.” Panel presentation, Narrative: Conference of the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature. Burlington, VT. April 22 – 25, 2004.
“Unexceptional and Unboundaried, Too: New Americanism, Transnationalism, and that Queer Thing Called Art.” Lecture, The Open Forum Colloquium, sponsored by the Department of English of the University at Albany. Albany, NY. March 4, 2004.
“Queerness and Containment: Male Homosexuality in American Poetry during the Cold War.” Panel presentation, American Literature Association symposium (“Reading the American Queer”). Cancún, Mexico. December 4 – 7, 2003.
“A Paradisiacal Passivity: José Lezama Lima and Counterrevolutionary Passion in the Cuban Modernist Novel.” Panel presentation, Narrative: Conference of the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature. Berkeley, CA. March 27 – 29, 2003.
“Imagination versus Image-Nation: Placelessness and William Carlos Williams’ Nuevo Mundo.” Panel presentation, Modern Language Association Conference. New York, NY. December 27 – 30, 2002.
Courses Taught at the University at Albany, SUNYEnglish 641: Critical Methods (Testing the Limits) (Spring 2008: focused as "Modernism and Pragmatism: Reimagining Democracy, the Subject, the Nation")
English 358: Studies in Poetry: Modernism, 1914 - 1945 (Spring 2008: focused as "Modernism, 1914-1945")
English 416 / Women's Studies 416: Topics in Gender, Sexuality, Class, and Race (Fall 2007: focused as "Queer Nationalism, Cold War-present"
English 720: Textual Studies II (Spring 2007: focused as "The Anti-Humanities?," on antihumanist thought and late modernist lyric's redefinition of humanism, the subject, and agency)
English 310: Reading and Interpretation in English Studies (Spring 2007, Fall 2007: focused as "Literature, Truth, and Freedom")
English 580: Models of History in Literary Criticism (Spring 2006: focused as “Modernist Lyric and Theories of the Subject”)
English 305Z: Studies in Writing about Texts (Spring 2006: focused as “Borderlines and Boundaries”)
English 498: The Honors Seminar I (Fall 2004: focused as “Thinking Critically about the War on Terror”; Fall 2005)
English 416 / Women’s Studies 416: Topics in Gender, Sexuality, Race, and Class (Fall 2005: focused as “Queer in Theory, Queer in Practice”)
English 770: Teaching Literature and Writing (Spring 2005: focused as “Pragmatist Ethics and Free Thought in the Literature Classroom”)
English 435: American Literature, 1920 – present (Fall 2003: focused as “Emergent Identity and American Literature”; Fall 2004: focused as “Minor Literature and National Publics and Citizenry in 20th Century American Fiction”)
English 353: Study of an American Author: Walt Whitman (Fall 2004)
English 240: Growing Up in America (Fall 2003, Summer 2004)
English 353: Study of an American Author: Wallace Stevens (Spring 2004)
English 447 / English 580 / Women’s Studies 498 / Spanish 444: The Historical Imagination (Spring 2004: focused as “Gender, Sexuality, Race, and Nation in 20th Century Cuban and U.S. Literatures”)
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