About Me
Hello! I am a professor, literary critic, and writer of fiction and creative nonfiction. My work has appeared or is forthcoming in Salon, Guernica, Post45, the Los Angeles Review of Books, ASAP/Journal, and American Literary History, among other publications. Working as an outdoor educator after college, I found myself sneaking in Wallace Stevens and Jorge Luis Borges, which was a good hint that I ought to pursue a job in the professoriate. I currently teach at the College of Wooster and have previously taught at Grinnell College, Cornell University, and Auburn Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in upstate New York.
My book manuscript, Neoliberal Apocalypse: American Literature and the Long Downturn, 1965-2016, argues that the economic crisis of the 1970s and the rise of neoliberalism established the conditions for a contemporary American literary form: the neoliberal apocalypse. Apocalyptic writing appears when groups perceive themselves as existentially threatened and hope seems foreclosed. At the point that change feels unimaginable, writers adopt apocalypse as a rhetorical form that remakes history and experience according to a trajectory that leads toward imminent cataclysm. Focusing on James Baldwin, William Luther Pierce, Cormac McCarthy, Leslie Marmon Silko, and David Foster Wallace, an unlikely group of US writers, Neoliberal Apocalypse reveals how contemporary American cultural and literary narratives have been shaped by the widespread tendency to figure our present as apocalyptic.
I have extended my research into economics and literature with an article on the literature of microfinance, forthcoming in Genre, and a digital humanities project (with Richard Jean So and David Thieme) that reveals disparities in the use of economic discourse in the US novel according to the gender and race of the author between 1950 and 2000. I am at work on a second book--The Conglomerate Era: A Computational History of Literature in The Age of the Agent--that maps the transition from smaller, editor-run publishers to the Big Six conglomerates with their many imprints.
My book manuscript, Neoliberal Apocalypse: American Literature and the Long Downturn, 1965-2016, argues that the economic crisis of the 1970s and the rise of neoliberalism established the conditions for a contemporary American literary form: the neoliberal apocalypse. Apocalyptic writing appears when groups perceive themselves as existentially threatened and hope seems foreclosed. At the point that change feels unimaginable, writers adopt apocalypse as a rhetorical form that remakes history and experience according to a trajectory that leads toward imminent cataclysm. Focusing on James Baldwin, William Luther Pierce, Cormac McCarthy, Leslie Marmon Silko, and David Foster Wallace, an unlikely group of US writers, Neoliberal Apocalypse reveals how contemporary American cultural and literary narratives have been shaped by the widespread tendency to figure our present as apocalyptic.
I have extended my research into economics and literature with an article on the literature of microfinance, forthcoming in Genre, and a digital humanities project (with Richard Jean So and David Thieme) that reveals disparities in the use of economic discourse in the US novel according to the gender and race of the author between 1950 and 2000. I am at work on a second book--The Conglomerate Era: A Computational History of Literature in The Age of the Agent--that maps the transition from smaller, editor-run publishers to the Big Six conglomerates with their many imprints.
Dan Sinykin
Department of English
University of Notre Dame
South Bend, IN 46556
Department of English
University of Notre Dame
South Bend, IN 46556
