Year Started

2022

Education

MA and Ph.D. in English, Ohio State University
B.A. in English and Philosophy, West Virginia University

Teaching Interests

20^th-century literature
Ecology and Literature
Science and Literature
The Novel
Philosophy and Literature
Creative Writing
 

Research Interests

20^th and 21^st century literature
Postmodernism
Narrative theory
Systems theory
Global literature
Literary phenomenology
Rhythm

Biography

My scholarship revolves around different applications of systems thinking and phenomenology to 20th century literature, primarily post-45 American novels but extending to global literature, both Anglophone and in translation. Whether examining the nature of novelistic progression and the establishment of “voice”, or the way contemporary novels understand the globe, or how characters develop patterns of bodily self-relation, I like to use feedback loops and self-regulation as concepts that inform all dimensions of literature. More generally, I like to think at the intersection of phenomenology, systems, rhetoric, reading, and literary form; I'm also very interested in composition, manuscript genetics, and stylometry.

My specialty is in 20th century fiction, and theory of all kinds (e.g. narrative, poetic, critical), and my research interests include narrative theory, poetics, stylistics, systems theory, and environmental literature, as well as 20C philosophy and phenomenology, especially as they pertain to the experience of reading. As a synthesis of those fields, I am working on theorizing rhythm and on the idea of fictional rhetoric as an ecology (on rhythm: I also like to play the drums in my free time). I obtained my doctorate in 2019 from The Ohio State University with the project The Voices of David Foster Wallace: Comic, Encyclopedic, and Sincere. There, I track the variation in narrative voice through three periods of Wallace's career, revising theoretical models of narrative voice while identifying Wallace's changing purposes, values, and influences, placing him in a matrix of 20th century literature and culture.

My next book pursues a formal history and typology of maximalist narratives, tracing 5 different structural paradigms through a deep global history. I’m also (slowly) working on a theoretical application of systems theory to narratology, reconceptualizing narrative rhetoric in terms of complex systems. I have pieces recently published or forthcoming on boredom, rhythm in narrative, the history of first-person narration, William Gass’s baroque, William Gaddis’s globalism, and more: see my academia.edu at https://usmma.academia.edu/YoninaHoffman/ or my website at www.yoninahoffman.com.