Biography

I received an Honours BA and an MA at Dalhousie University. My PhD was completed at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, and was followed by a research fellowship at Queens' College, Cambridge. I started teaching at Sussex in October 2007, and since that time, have directed the Centre for Modernist Studies with Pam Thurschwell.

Role

Senior Lecturer, School of English

Director, Centre for Modernist Studies

Coordinator, Modernist Studies Association Annual Conference

CONFERENCE VENUE: University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton, UK (co-hosted by Sussex & Queen Mary, London)

CONFERENCE DATES: August 29th - September 1st 2013

CONFERENCE TITLE: MSA 15 "Everydayness and the Event"

CONFERENCE EMAIL ADDRESS: msabrighton@gmail.com

My central work addresses the intersections between high modernist writers--James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett--and philosophical thought. In this regard, I have written on everyday emotions, the relationship between subjectivity and otherness, and about the recasting or reconsideration of human desire so that it is not confined to the much-discussed spheres of sexuality or power.

I explore banal states of longing such as the desire to laugh, or risibility, and boredom--the desire for any desire at all. Philosophers I've written about in relation to these themes include Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bataille, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and Levinas.

Further research interests include: affect, avant-garde poetry and fiction, the quotidian (viscerality, taste, abjection), the modernist "tradition", Dada, and rhetoric. I am the editor of a new volume of Mina Loy's previously unpublished prose, and have recently spoken and/or written about modernist writers Hugo Ball, Kurt Schwitters, Radclyffe Hall, Richard Aldington, and Wyndham Lewis. Of late, my work has also engaged with contemporary avant-garde poets, among them, Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Chris Goode, Barry MacSweeney, and Anna Mendelssohn (better known as Grace Lake).

Books

Stories and Essays of Mina Loy. Ed. Sara Crangle. Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 2011.

http://edelweiss-assets.abovethetreeline.com/NO/pdfs/Dalkey%20Spr11%20FINAL%20pass%209.17.10.pdf

Prosaic Desires: Modernist Knowledge, Boredom, Laughter, and Anticipation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010.

On Bathos: Literature, Art, Music. Ed. Sara Crangle & Peter Nicholls. London: Continuum, 2010.

http://www.continuumbooks.com/books/detail.aspx?BookId=133894&SubjectId=1020&Subject2Id=876

Selected Publications

"Phenomenology and Affect." Handbook of Modernism Studies. Ed. Jean-Michel Rabate. Oxford: Blackwell (chapter nineteen; forthcoming).

"Dada's Tender-Hearted OnIons." Modernist Cultures (7:2):2012, 231-253.

"Woolf's Cesspoolage: On Waste and Resignation" Cambridge Quarterly (40:1): 2011, 1-20.

"Desires Dissolvent: How Mina Loy Exceeds Georges Bataille" Journal of Philosophy (6:13): 2010, 41-53.

"Introduction" (co-authored with Peter Nicholls). On Bathos: Literature, Art, Music. Ed. Sara Crangle and Peter Nicholls. London: Continuum Press, 2010, 1-6.

"Dada Is Bathos! Or, of the Hobbyhorse Endlessly Rocking." On Bathos: Literature, Art, Music. Ed. Sara Crangle & Peter Nicholls. London: Continuum Press, 2010, 27-48.

"Curved Lines: Forrest-Thomson, Klee, and the Smile." Kenyon Review 2009 (http://www.kenyonreview.org/kro/vft/kro_vft_index.php)

"Stephen's Handles." James Joyce Quarterly (47.1): 2009, 115-133.

"The Time Being: On Woolf and Boredom." Modern Fiction Studies (2): 2008, 209-232.

"Body Bathetic: The Art of Exhalation in Chris Goode." Complicities: British Poetry 1945-2007. Ed. Robin Purves and Sam Ladkin. Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2007. 201-221.

"Compton-Burnett and Risibility." British Fiction After Modernism: The Novel at Mid-Century. Ed. Lyndsey Stonebridge and Marina MacKay. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 99-120.

"Silence and Noise: Understanding Christine Brooke-Rose's Such." Anglistik und Englischunterricht (69): 2007, 175-92.

"Epistolarity, Audience, Selfhood: The Letters of Dorothy Osborne to William Temple." Women's Writing (12:3): 2005, 175-92.

"'Regularly Irregular...Dashing Waters': Navigating the Stream of Consciousness in Dorothy Wordsworth's The Grasmere Journals." Journal of Narrative Theory (34:2): 2004, 146-72.

Poetry -

"gimme your hands." Crater (18): 2012.

"To Wit Nothing." Cambridge Literary Review (1.2): 2010, 75-82.

Six Poems. Crater (O): 2009.

Wild Ascending Lisp. Providence: Critical Documents, 2008.

Six Poems. Axolotl. (1): 2008.

Two Poems. Skald (24): 2007.

Selected Reviews of Published Books

Stories & Essays of Mina Loy –    

Parmar, Sandeep, “Modern Woman.” PN Review (38:3) 2012.

Carr, Helen. “The First Lady of Futurism.” The Wall Street Journal (10/1/11).

Lenarduzzi, Thea, “None of that everything else.” Times Literary Supplement (9/23/11).

“Just Out: Mina Loy.” Poetry Foundation News (8/5/2011).

Crispin, Jessa. “The Unsung Work of Loy.” Kirkus Reviews (8/30/11).

“Fiction Review” Publishers Weekly (8/7/2011).

Prosaic Desires: Modernist Knowledge, Boredom, Laughter, and Anticipation –         

Finch, Laura. "High Modernism, Lowly Desires." Journal of Modern Languages (36:1): 2012, 191-195. (http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_modern_literature/v036/36.1.finch.html)

Sayeau, Michael, Textual Practice (26:1): 2012.

Brown, Richard, Journal of Philosophy (6:13) 2010, and Joyce Broadsheet (90): 2011.

Avery, Todd, Virginia Woolf Bulletin (36): 2011.

On Bathos: Literature, Art, Music –                 

Patterson, Ian, Textual Practice (26:2): 2012.

Jones, Tom, Forum for Modern Language Studies (48:3): 2012.

Altieri, Charles, European Journal of English Studies (15:3): 2011.

Constable, John, The Use of English (62.3): 2011.

Selected Awards & Distinctions

2009 - Margaret Church Memorial Prize, best essay 2008, Modern Fiction Studies

2007 - Weil Fund, Queens' College, Cambridge

2005 - Research Fellowship, Queens' College, Cambridge (3 years)

2004 - Commonwealth Scholarship and Fellowship Plan

2004 - Fellow, Cambridge Commonwealth Trust

2002 - Doctoral Fellowship, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (4 years)

2002 - Overseas Research Scheme Award (3 years)

2002 - English Medal, Department of English, Dalhousie University

I teach, or have taught, courses on modernist and contemporary literature, short fiction, creative writing, criticism and theory, and the Woolf special author course. I am interested in supervising MA and doctoral candidates keen to study canonical modernists like Joyce, Stein, or Beckett, or lesser-known modernists including Mina Loy, Kurt Schwitters, Ivy Compton-Burnett and/or Henry Green. Affectivity, abjection, and everydayness are key research areas in my own work; I'd also welcome students interested in contemporary poetry and/or poetics, avant-garde theory and movements such as Dada, rhetoric, or the relationship between philosophy and literature.

At present, I am supervising doctoral candidates studying depictions of space in 1930s literature, monstrous female bodies in post-WWII fiction, and contemporary poetry.

Student Consultation

PLEASE NOTE: I am on leave in spring term 2013, so will not have office hours or regular consultation times.

Crangle, Sara (2013) Phenomenology and affect: modernist sulking. In: A handbook of modernism studies. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 327-346. ISBN 0470658738