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Andrew Gibson is Professor of Modern Literature and Theory. He is a Trustee of the International James Joyce Foundation and the James Joyce Estate, and Founder/Organizer of the London University Seminar for Research into Joyce's Ulysses. He is currently a contributor to the Philosophie, Art et Littérature seminar at the Collège Internationale de Philosophie in Paris, to which he will give a paper in May, 2002 entitled `Il faut construire une nouvelle scène: Stevens et "la poésie moderne"'. In June 2001, he was Visiting Professor at the Scandinavian Summer School of Literature and Theory, to which he will be returning in 2002. From July to October 2002, he will be Visiting Professor at the University of Tokyo, Japan's premier university. He is Course Director of the departmental MA in Postmodernism, Literature and Contemporary Culture and Chair of the departmental research seminar. He is author of Reading Narrative Discourse: Studies in the Novel from Cervantes to Beckett (Macmillan, 1990), Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narrative (Edinburgh University Press, 1996) and Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel: from Leavis to Levinas (Routledge, 1999). He is editor of Pound in Multiple Perspective (Macmillan, 1993), Reading Joyce's "Circe" (European Joyce Studies Series, 1994) and Joyce's "Ithaca" (European Joyce Studies Series, 1996); and co-editor (with Warren Chernaik and Marilyn Deegan) of Beyond the Book: Theory, Culture and the Politics of Cyberspace (Oxford, 1996); and (with Robert Hampson) of Conrad and Theory (Rodopi, 1997) and (with his then research student David Rudrum) Volume 321 of the Annotated Bibliography for English Studies (on Narrative Theory [1997-99]).
Professor Gibson is also the author of the following articles that have recently appeared in collections of essays or are scheduled to appear: 'Sensibility and Suffering in Rhys and Nin', in Andrew Hadfield, Dominic Rainsford and Tim Woods (eds.), The Ethics in Literature (Macmillan, 1999); 'Crossing the Present: Narrative, Alterity and Gender in Postmodern Fiction', in Roger Luckhurst and Peter Marks (eds.), Literature and the Contemporary (Longman, 1999); 'Postmodern Ethics and Sense and Sensibility', in Anne Mellor and Maximilian Novak (eds.), Passionate Encounters in a Time of Sensibility (University of Delaware Press, 2000); `"And The Wind Wheezing Through That Organ Once In A While": Voice, Narrative, Film', in New Literary History (Special Edition on Voice and Human Experience, Summer 2001); `Badiou and Beckett', in Richard Lane (ed.), Beckett and Philosophy (Macmillan, 2002); `Serres at the Crossroads', in Niran Abbas and Steven Connor (eds.), Michel Serres (University of Michigan Press, 2002); `Narrative Subtraction', in Jorg Helbig (ed.), Erzähle und Erzähltheorie im 20. Jahrhundert: Festscrift für Wilhelm Füger (Universitätsverlag C.Winter, 2001); and `"Let All Malthusiasts Go Hang!": "Oxen of the Sun" and Political Economy', in Literature and History (Autumn 2001). His most recent conference papers have included `"An Irish Bull in an English Chinashop": "Oxen" and the Anthologies' (17th International James Joyce Symposium, Goldsmiths College, University of London, June 2000); `"Gentle Will is Being Roughly Handled": Shakespeare and Shakespeareans in "Scylla and Charybdis"' (17th International Joyce Symposium); and `Forget Baudrillard: Melancholy of the Year 2000' (Remembering the 1990s, Birkbeck College, September 2000; to be published in a forthcoming number of New Formations). He has recently given the keynote lecture at the one-day conference on Beckett's Three Dialogues, South Bank University, London and research papers at the Universities of Leeds and York. He will be giving papers in 2002 at The Instistute of English Studies, London, the University of Cardiff, the Eighteenth James Joyce Symposium in Trieste, and in Karlskrona and Tokyo.
Professor Gibson has just completed Joyce's Revenge: History, Politics and Aesthetics in `Ulysses', to be published by Oxford University Press in June, 2002. This book as a major, book-length account of Joyce's Ulysses as a complex and evolving treatment of what were - for Joyce - the most crucial issues in Irish history and contemporary Irish politics. The study is original in arguing that, in many of their most important aspects, the aesthetic practices that make up Ulysses are responses to the colonial history and condition of Ireland, the colonial politics of Irish culture and Anglo-Irish cultural politics, particularly in the years 1880-1920. Gibson pays particular attention to Joyce's treatment of a wide variety of historically specific English and Anglo-Irish discourses in his greatest novel, arguing that Ulysses is fuelled by a Parnellite hostility to the colonizer's culture yet, at the same time, both transforms and transcends the available range of nationalist responses to that culture.
In addition, with his former research student Steven Morrison, Professor Gibson has edited a collection of essays on the "Wandering Rocks" episode in Ulysses. Contributors include Richard Brown, Clive Hart, David Pierce, Len Platt and Fritz Senn. Professor Gibson's own contribution is entitled `Macropolitics and Micropolitics in "Wandering Rocks"'. This will be appearing shortly from Rodopi, with the European Joyce Studies series. Gibson's next major research project is a book on Beckett entitled Doing Without: Samuel Beckett's Tragic Ethics. This stems from a growing concern with the relationship between the work of Samuel Beckett and new developments in French thought 1985-2000. In particular, Gibson has been working on Jacques Rancière, and gave a paper on Rancière at the Scandinavian Summer School of Literature and Theory — Rancière and the "Limit" of Realism— which you can read here. But his principal concern is with the work of Alain Badiou. Badiou has been an admirer of Beckett's work for more than forty years, and has written extensively on him. His thought about Beckett is precisely constructed in opposition to the traditions (of nihilist absurdism and existential humanism) that dominated Beckett criticism until the late 80s. Yet, at the same time, whilst having much in common with them, Badiou moves in a strikingly and significantly different direction to the post-theoretical and postmodern accounts of Beckett that have emerged in the 90s. Professor Gibson gave presentations on this subject late in 1999 at the Badiou Colloque at the University of Bordeaux, where he talked on `Badiou, Beckett et le postmodernisme' (included in the forthcoming proceedings of the Colloque, Alain Badiou: la pensée forte, ed. Charles Ramond); and at the Beckett Colloque at the University of Rennes, where he talked on `Les economies de Murphy' (This has now been published in Matthijs Engleberts and Sjef Houppermans (eds.), L'Affect dans l'oeuvre beckettienne [Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000]). In June 2000, Professor Gibson also gave a paper at the Beckett conference at Birkbeck College, London entitled 'Badiou, Beckett, Watt and the Event' (to be published in a forthcoming number of the Journal of Beckett Studies, ed. Laura Salisbury, Daniela Casselli and Steven Connor). His `Badiou and Deconstruction: the Politics of Reading Beckett' will be published in Martin McQuillan (ed.), Deconstruction Reading Politics (Northwestern University Press, 2002). In the book he plans to write, Gibson will be seeking to show that the work of Badiou and Rancière offers a new way of thinking about that elusive subject, the ethical dimension of Beckett's art. In demonstrating that Beckett's work both corresponds to and challenges some of the philosophers' key concepts, Professor Gibson will produce a theory of what he calls tragic ethics appropriate to our current `post-political' condition.
Andrew Gibson's current research interests are in modernism (especially Joyce); postmodernism (especially postmodern aesthetics and ethics, and Beckett); literary and critical theory; and narrative theory and the novel. His research students most recently to have been awarded their doctorates include Mark Sutton ('"All Livia's Daughtersons": Death and the Dead in the Prose Fiction of James Joyce'); Shu-I Chen (`The Dialogicality of Interior Monologue in Ulysses'); Steven Morrison (`Heresy, Heretics and Heresiarchs in the Work of James Joyce'); Jamie Russell (`Bodies of Light: Masculinity, Homosexuality and Askesis in the Novels of William Burroughs'); David Rudrum (`Wittgenstein and the Theory of Narrative'); and Jennifer Bavidge (`Representations of Urban Space in the Postmodern Novel'). Other students working with Professor Gibson include Frank Duggan (`"Phrases of the Platform": Irish Political Oratory 1780-1922 in the Works of James Joyce'); John Deamer (`Samuel Beckett and the Theory of the Event'); Kersti Wagstaff (`Science and Theory after the Sokal Debate'); Ralph Strehle (`Postmodern Ethics and Reception Theory'); Stefania Cassar (`Representations of the Scientist in Contemporary British Fiction'); and Vana Avgerinou (British Short Fiction 1980-2000).
In addition, as a kind of doodle round the margins of his main areas of research, Andrew Gibson has been thinking about the problems and the possibilities of a properly materialist theory of film. The results of this have included three papers given at conferences which are not scheduled for publication but rough drafts of which are available here. They can be accessed by clicking on the three titles: The Impossible Reduction: Film and Film Theory; Excesses and Resistances: the Matter of Film; and Touch/Vision: Irigaray, Post-Cartesianism and Film Theory. All three are Copyright 2001 Andrew Gibson. Anyone interested in following up this work is welcome to contact him. He also has an emergent interest in the theory and politics of melancholy in contemporary culture, and recently gave a paper entitled `The Trace of Melancholy' in the Ethics and Aesthetics series at London University's Institute of English Studies in January 2001.
Professor Gibson is now extending his areas of teaching and research interest to include representations of contemporary London. In line with this, during 2000, he devised two new courses which he is now teaching: a course for undergraduates on Representing the Capital: London, Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture and a new option on the Postmodernism MA entitled Contemporary Londons. Clicking on either title will give you a precise course description and course outline and a full reading list. Both courses are taught on Fridays in the College building in central London (11, Bedford Square). With the architectural historian Joe Kerr, Andrew Gibson is now working on a book on London 1979-2000 (for Reaktion Books).
Students interested in any of Professor Gibson's areas of research expertise are warmly invited to contact him. In particular, anyone interested in working with him on aspects of the relationship between Joyce's work and English and Irish history, Beckett's work and contemporary French philosophy, the relationship between contemporary theory and contemporary fiction, and London and contemporary literature may wish to arrange a meeting and an interview.
Andrew Gibson has also written five novels and a collection of stories for children, published by Faber. By invitation, he gives creative workshops and talks on writing for children at schools. Please contact Bethan Roberts, Faber and Faber, 3 Queen Square, London WC1; or Gibson's agent, Rosemary Canter, Peters, Fraser and Dunlop, The Chambers, Chelsea Harbour, London, SW10 0XF.
Andrew Gibson's e-mail address is a.gibson@rhbnc.ac.uk.
Page revised 8 May 2001 by A Gibson