Bradley D. Clissold

 

Position

Full Professor

Education

  • BA (York University)
  • MA, PhD (McGill University)

Contact Information

Research Interests

Twentieth-Century Literature (Modernism and Postmodernism, esp. British and American); Literary and Cultural Theory; Cinema and Popular Culture Studies; Adaptation Practices and Reception Aesthetics; Materialist Close Readings of Objecthood (postcards, bowling, slumming, taboo drug cultures, phantom limb, parallax, ekphrasis);

Selected Publications

Books, Articles, and Book Chapters

  • Rereading Modernist Postcards: Critical Studies in Materialist Recovery. Routledge, (24 August 2023), 280 pages. (https://www.routledge.com/Rereading-Modernist-Postcards-Critical-Studies-in-Materialist-Recovery/Clissold/p/book/9781032457246)

  • “The Material Modernism of Evelyn Waugh’s Playful Public Postcards.” Evelyn Waugh Studies, 54.1 (Spring 2023), (12,152 words).

  • “Quotidian Signs Taken in Joycean Wonder: A Note on Appreciative Values.” James Joyce Literary Supplement, 36:1, 2023, pp.103-05.

  • “Trump’s Base! You Can Say that Again!!: An Optimistic Deconstruction of Base Politics.” Canadian Review of American Studies, 52.1, (Spring 2022), pp.1-15.

  • “Don DeLillo’s Anagogic Postcards: Thematic Inscriptions Writ Small.” Canadian Review of American Studies vol. 45, no. 3, Winter 2015, pp. 375-399.
  • “Loser Wins: The Rhetoric of High Modernism in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz.” Double-Takes: Intersections Between Canadian Literature and Film, edited by David Jarraway, Ottawa UP, 2013, pp. 199-218.
  • “No Two Ways About It: William Empson’s Enabling Modernist Ambiguities.” Re-Reading the New Criticism, edited by Miranda Hickman and John McIntyre, Ohio UP, 2012, pp. 109-133.
  • “SlightDepressShun: A Literary Bebop Jazz Improvisation (for Boyd Thistle).” Out Loud: Essays on Mental Illness, Stigma, and Recovery, Breakwater, 2010, pp, 107-113.
  • “Lacanian Shopaholics and Conspicuous Consumption in Madame Bovary: The Mirror (Stage), a Beaver Hat, and the Desire for Desire.” Co-authored with Lacey Decker. Postscript: A Journal of Graduate Criticism and Theory vol. 3, Fall 2009, pp. 8-22.
  • “‘Fuck it, let’s go bowling’: The Cultural Connotations of Bowling in The Big Lebowski.” The Year’s Work in Lebowski Studies, edited by Commentale and Aaron Jaffe, Indiana State UP, 2009, pp. 295-320.
  • “Heredity and Disinheritance in Joyce’s Portrait.” Troubled Legacies: Narrative and Inheritance, edited by Allan Hepburn, U of Toronto P, 2007, pp. 191-218.
  • “A Sense of Proportion: Mrs. Dalloway as an Allegory of Modernist Writing.” Illuminations: New Readings of Virginia Woolf, edited by Carol Merli, Macmillan, 2004, pp. 17-34.
  • “ Candid Camera and the Origins of Reality TV: Contextualising a Historical Precedent.” Understanding Reality TV, edited by Su Holmes and Deborah Jermyn, Routledge, 2004, pp. 33-53.
  • “Fingerpondering Shakespeare, Swinburne, Joyce, and the Concentration Camps.” The Shakespeare Newsletter vol. 47, no. 2/3, Summer/Fall 1997, pp. 46-48.

Conference Presentations and Lectures

  • “Trump’s Base!—You Can Say that Again!: An Optimistic Deconstruction of Base Politics.” Canadian Association of American Studies. Montreal. October 2019.

  • “Jazzing Noir: Rethinking Adjectival Modifiers as Derivative Creativity through the Example of Natsuo Kirino’s Out.” ACCUTE (special member panel for Canadian Association of American Studies). Vancouver. June 2019.

  • “Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree and the Textual Politics of Literary Slumming.” Canadian Association of American Studies. October 2014, Kitchener, Canada.
  • “Leonard Cohen’s Dirty Postcards.” Association for Canadian and Québecois Literature. May 2013, Victoria, Canada.
  • “Don DeLillo’s Anagogic Postcards: Thematic Inscriptions Writ Small.” Canadian Association of American Studies, October 2012, Toronto, Canada.
  • “Modernism and the Popularizing of Vernacular Cognitive Theory.” Modernist Studies Association (MSA 11). November 2009, Montreal, Canada.
  • “The Functional Rhetoric of High Modernism in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz.” Double-Takes: Intersections between Canadian Literature and Film. May 2009, University of Ottawa, Canada.
  • “The Postcard Always Rings Twice: The Rhetoric of Ring Lardner’s Negative Postcard Aesthetics.” Canadian Association of American Studies, August 2008, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada.
  • “Stimulus-Response Behaviorism: Modernism’s Ideological Unconscious.” Modernist Studies Association (MSA 8), October 2006, Tulsa, USA..
  • “‘Ah, fuck it, let’s go bowling’: The Antecedent Cultural Connotations of Bowling in The Big Lebowski.” The Lebowski Cult: An Academic Symposium, September 2006,.Louisville, USA.
  • “The Modernist Response to Behaviorism: An Aesthetic Exploitation of Conditioning.” Twentieth-Century Literature Conference, February 2006, Louisville, USA.
  • “Home-made Modernism: Everyday Postcard PoiÄ“sis.” Modernist Studies Association (MSA 7), November 2005, Chicago, USA.
  • “The ‘U.P.:up’ Postcard: Why It Continues to Matter.” Bloomsday 100: International James Joyce Symposium, June 2004, Dublin, Ireland.
  • “Surviving Modernist Dissonance with the Archival Body.” Archiving Modernism, July 2003. University of Alberta, Canada.
  • “Interpretation Is a Survival Skill.” ACCUTE. Learned Congress, May 200, Halifax, Canada.
  • “Canada: A Natural Resource of Literary Modernism.” The Canadian Modernists Meet: A Symposium, May 2003, University of Ottawa, Canada.
  • “Postcards from the Edges of Modernism.” Material Modernisms, July 2001, University of British Columbia, Canada.
  • “The ‘Great Shapesphere’: Impressions of a Literary Modernist, or Godzilla vs. Shakespeare.”  Plenary Speaker. Shakespeare and Theatrical Modernism. Montreal. October 1997.
  • “Joyce’s Echoing Sirens: Cuckoldry, Tapping, and a Pincushion.” Hysterical/Historical Joyce: International James Joyce Symposium, June 1997, University of Toronto, Canada.
  • “James Joyce and Canadian Historical Con/Texts.” Miami J’yce, February 1996, University of Miami, USA.
  • “Developing the Photograph in Margaret Atwood’s ‘This Is a Photograph of Me.’” Midwest MLA, November 1995, St. Louis, USA.
  • “Shibboleths of the Public Sphere: Framing and Unframing Motivated Graffiti.” Convergences and Transformations, April 1995, Montreal, Canada.

Honours and Graduate Supervision

Ph.D. Dissertation Supervisor

  • “Cold War Confessions: Autobiographic Poetry in the Age of Anxiety.” (2008).
  • “Portraits of Family Commitment in Postmodern American Fiction: Acker, Gaddis, and Coover.” (2006).

M.A. Thesis / M.A. 6999 Supervisor

  • “Shock! Full Stop and Period Play: The Horror of Menstrual Liminality in Carrie.” (Winter 2010).

  • “But then the Allusion Is Lost: Interpretive Anxiety and the Joycean Allusion.” (2013).

  • “An Anatomy of Celebrity: Representations of Celebrity in Late Twentieth-Century Fiction.” (2008).
  • “Wholes and Parts (All Puns Intended): The Mereological Vision of Richard Outram’s Poetic Sequences.” (2007) [M.A. Thesis Award, Northeastern Assoc. of Grad. Schools].

Honours Essay Supervisor

  • “A Marginal Type of Love: How Gender Ambiguity Creates Liminal Spaces in Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body, Lighthousekeeping, and Frankissstein” (Winter 2020).

  • “Paris, Capital of the Artist: Movement, the Construction of Place, and Artistic Production in the Modern City.” (Winter 2018).

  • “An Allusion’s Worth a Thousand Words: The Imagined Sense of Canada in Tragically Hip Song Lyrics.” (2017).
  • “Sustaining Authenticity: Written Forms of Textual Authority as Anchors for Constructed Identities in Julian Barnes’ England, England.” (2016).
  • “Frequencies of Consciousness: Televisual Media and Textual Mediation in Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho.” (2015).
  • “Equality and Independence: The Defense of the Natural World in D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow.” (2015).
  • “Reexamining Liminality as Identity: Murakami Haruki’s Kafka on the Shore as Contemporary Bildungsroman.” (2013).
  • “Red Tights and Red Tape: Satirical Misreadings of C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters.” (2010).
  • “In the Midst of Death, We Are in Life: Issues of Closure and Self-Interest in the ‘Hades’ Chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses.” (2010).
  • “From B-Flat to Bloomsday: Joyce’s Experiment with Musics-Literary Adaptation in ‘Sirens’ and How It Unites the Formal and the Thematic.” (2009).
  • “Death from Above: Trauma and Distance in Greene’s The Third Man, Heller’s Catch-22, and Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.” (2009).
  • “Ideological Encounters with Zombies: Shifting Epistemologies of Gender, Race, and Technology.” (2009).
  • “‘Who’s that Girl?’: An Analysis of Literary Ambiguity and the Female Character in Early Twentieth-Century Fiction.” (2009).
  • “Reader – Writer – Author: Authorship as Motivated Interpretation in J. M. Coetzee’s Foe, Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, and Ian McEwan’s Black Dogs.” (2007).
  • “Spring Is a Deeper Season: E.E. Cummings and Seasonal Archetypes.” (2007).
  • “‘All Things in Excess’: The Theme of Excess in Anglo-American Modern Fiction.” (2006).
  • “ Jamais Vu: Existential and Marxist Alienation in Chuck Palahnuik’s Choke, Survivor, and Diary.” (2006).
  • “The Sense of ‘the Other’ in Gertrude Stein’s Melanctha and Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood.” (2005).
  • “You Can Turn a Murder into Art: Fact, Fiction, and Representation in Contemporary Serial Killer Narratives.” (2005).
  • “Sympathy for the Devil: A Study of Vampires in Film.” (2005).
  • “Vestiges of a Dream: The Ghosts of Hollywood in Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, and Mulholland Dr.” (2004).
  • “Masters of Reality: An Examination of the Conventions of Reality TV and The Osbournes.” (2004).