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Professor David Ayers
(BA, PhD)
| Professor of Modernism and Critical Theory | |
|---|---|
| Phone: 01227 823454 | Office: NC 32 |
| Email: d.s.ayers@kent.ac.uk | on study leave 2010-11 |
Interests
My principal interests are in the fields of Modernism, American Literature and Critical Theory. I am the author of Wyndham Lewis and Western Man (Macmillan, 1992), English Literature of the 1920s (Edinburgh University Press, 1999) Modernism: A Short Introduction (Blackwell, 2004) and Literary Theory: A Reintroduction (Blackwell: 2008).
My current work, funded by a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship, is titled ‘Internationalism and the Idea of Europe’ and concerns the cultural impact in Britain of the Russian Revolution and the formation of the League of Nations, with an emphasis on the 1920s. Elements of this work include ‘The English Trotsky’, an analysis of the English language publications of Leon Trotsky and their reception, and ‘The Criterion and Communism’, an analysis of the treatment of Russian politics and culture in T. S. Eliot’s The Criterion.
My literary interests include all of the central figures of high modernism (especially Lewis, Pound, Eliot, Loy, Woolf, Lawrence, Ford and Joyce), modern American literature and culture, and the field of poetry in the modernist tradition up to the present day.
My interest in philosophy and theory extends from Kant and Hegel to Heidegger, Adorno and Benjamin, and includes French theorists and philosophers, especially Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Deleuze and Badiou.
Research Supervision
I am interested in supervising postgraduate work in each of these areas, and especially that work which seeks to synthesize literary, historical and theoretical topics. I have supervised graduate work on Nabokov, Lewis, Pynchon, Joyce, Derrida, David Jones, Beckett, Prynne, Burroughs, Bowles, Middleton Murry,
Professional Activities
Chair, European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernist Studies (EAM) 2010-2012
International Relations Chair, Modernist Studies Association (MSA) 2009-2013
Selected Publications
Books:
- Literary Theory: A Reintroduction
- Modernism: A Short Introduction
- English Literature of the 1920s
- Wyndham Lewis and Western Man
Some Recent Chapters and Articles:
Please click here to read 'Literary Criticism and Cultural Politics' [3], my contribution to the Cambridge History of Twentieth Century English Literature. (PDF file 102kb)
Other:
'What Calls for Poetry?' [4] is a speculative text which I presented as a guest of the International Conference of the Modern English Society of Korea in 2006, later published in Modern Studies in English Language and Literature (Korea) February 2007.