© University of Kent - Contact | Feedback | Legal | FOI | Cookies
About
BA, PhD, Oxon
Office: NC 11
I’m interested in literature of various periods and kinds, deconstruction, philosophy and psychoanalysis. In recent years I have actively turned my mind to climate change. I read English at Oxford and came to Kent in 2002 from a tutorial fellowship at Mansfield College. The creative-critical undergraduate module I convene and teach, The Unknown: Reading and Writing, was among the first of its kind.
I’m currently completing a psychoanalytic psychotherapy training and my research and teaching interests include:
- Deconstruction and other kinds of literary theory
- Creative or inventive critical writing
- Literature, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy
- Literature, theory and climate change
- Literature and philosophy
My first book, on the writing life of Robert Browning, focused on his conception and practice of writing poetry and on how he was read by Charles Macready, Carlyle, Ruskin, Henry James and other distinguished contemporaries. At Oxford in the early 90s I helped found the theoretical humanities journal Angelaki, and since 2008 I have also been an Editor of Oxford Literary Review. I have published a detailed study of Derrida’s 1967 collection Writing and Difference, and numerous essays about literature, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, philosophy and the arts. These include readings of Hélène Cixous, Shakespeare, Derrida, Freud, Milton, Husserl, Wallace Stevens, Browning, Louise Bourgeois, Kant, Paul de Man, Picasso, Raymond Carver, Plato, Elizabeth Bowen and Leo Bersani. I have edited a number of journal issues on various topics relating literature, deconstruction, psychoanalysis and philosophy: Experiences of Conversion 2015; ‘The Fiction of the World’ and Other Essays 2013;, Deconstruction and Poetry 2011; Writing and Immortality 2009; Hotel Psychoanalysis 2004; Home and Family 1995. Interests in reading, writing, music and visual art led to Blue Guitar, a creative-critical book co-authored with Jonathan Tiplady. My contribution ‘Anew Again’ appears in the anthology Creative Criticism (EUP, 2014). A monograph on reading, the university and climate change, Without Mastery: Reading and Other Forces, came out with Edinburgh University Press in 2014.
I’m Director of the Critical Theory MA and Director for Assistant and Associate Lecturers.
back to topPublications
Also view these in the Kent Academic Repository
Book
Wood, Sarah. 2014. Without Mastery: Reading And Other Forces. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. http://www.euppublishing.com/book/9780748669974.
Speaks to and helps us address where we are now, institutionally, environmentally and in thinking about reading
Without Mastery engages the pleasures and rigours of reading, invoking Shakespeare's Weird Sisters, Plato's Lady Necessity, Freud, Derrida, Cixous, animals, angels, ghosts and children to explore our desire for mastery - especially the omnipotence of thoughts. Masterful thinking has brought the planet into environmental crisis. The acquiescence of reading, Wood shows, allows us to make contact with the unthinkable.
Wood, Sarah. 2009. Derrida's "writing And Difference": A Reader's Guide. New York and London: Continuum.
"Writing and Difference" is widely perceived to be an excellent starting place for those new to Derrida and this "Reader's Guide" is the perfect accompaniment to the study of one of the most important philosophical works of the 20th Century."Writing and Difference" is one of Jacques Derrida's most widely read and studied books. In a collection of essays that engage with literature, history, poetry, dramaturgy, psychoanalysis, ethnology and structuralism, Derrida demonstrates how philosophy and literature might be read, and revolutionises our understanding of writing, difference and life itself.This introduction is the ideal companion to an unprecedented and influential group of texts. Sarah Wood reengages with the original French text and offers guidance on: philosophical and historical context; key themes; reading the text; reception and influence; and, further reading."Continuum Reader's Guides" are clear, concise and accessible introductions to key texts in literature and philosophy. Each book explores the themes, context, criticism and influence of key works, providing a practical introduction to close reading, guiding students towards a thorough understanding of the text. They provide an essential, up-to-date resource, ideal for undergraduate students.
Wood, Sarah, and Jonathan Tiplady. 2007. The Blue Guitar. Artwords Press.
Book section
Wood, Sarah. 2015. "Domestic Disturbance". In Cobra-Res 1.9 Flash Fiction, Theo Price, 103-104. COBRA PRESS.
Sarah, Wood. 2014. "Squirrel-Tail Writing". In Folle De Leur Corps / Crazy About Their Bodies, Sharon Kivland, 21-22. CGP London in association with Ma Bibliothèque. http://lightsculpture.pagesperso-orange.fr/sharon/home.html.
Wood, Sarah. 2014. "Anew Again". In Creative Criticism An Anthology And Guide, Stephen Benson and Connors, Clare, 277-292. Edinburgh University Press. http://www.euppublishing.com/book/9780748674336.
Wood, Sarah. 2013. "Incident At The Window". In The Nabokov Project, Kate Briggs and Russo, Lucrezia, 54-57. Information as Material. http://www.informationasmaterial.org/portfolio/the-nabokov-paper/.
Wood, Sarah. 2013. "Swans Of Life (External Provocations And Autobiographical Flights That Teach Us How To Read)". In The Animal Question In Deconstruction, Lynn Turner. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Wood, Sarah. 2011. "[Untitled]". In Transmission Annual: Hospitality, Sharon Kivland, Corris, Michael, and Joseph-Lester, Jaspar. Artwords Press. https://www.antennebooks.com/books/transmission-annual-hospitality.
Wood, Sarah. 2011. "Good Writing / The Constitution Of Good And Bad Objects / The Point D'eau". In Reading Derrida's Of Grammatology, Sean Gaston and Maclachlan, Ian, 31-32. Bloomsbury. http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/reading-derridas-of-grammatology-9781441152756/.
Wood, Sarah. 2007. "Beyond Me Nowhere But This World: Clio Barnard’s Dark Glass". In Clio Barnard, 1-15. University College for the Creative Arts, Canterbury.
Article
Wood, Sarah. 2015. "An Inexperience". Oxford Literary Review. EUP. doi:10.3366/olr.2015.0167.
Abstract | View in KAR | View Full Text
'This experience of conversion' is a phrase of Derrida's. It struck me as something that couldn't be imagined: 'not an as if.' Nor a fantasy, nor a pretence. Not mediated. A magic word. That is what I managed to imagine. I had no idea (that is, no image) how to bring an experience of conversion aboutnot for myself, still less for you. But, I told myself, a word can be read, and read out. And I told myself: the point, with a word like this, is to speak it, or speak to it
Wood, Sarah. 2014. "Literature Ahead Of Memory (Full Speed A-Home!)". Litterae Mentis: A Journal Of Literary Studies. School of English, University of Kent. https://www.kent.ac.uk/english/postgraduate/LitteraeMentis/index.html?tab=volume-1-memory.
Wood, Sarah. 2013. "A Huge Thing". Oxford Literary Review. EUP. doi:10.3366/olr.2013.0058.
Abstract | View in KAR | View Full Text
The fiction of the world is a huge thing because it is in Derrida's words 'the only thing that can make it possible that I can live and have or let you live, enjoy or have or let you enjoy, to carry you for a few minutes without anything happening,' in a movement of farewell without beginning, without mourning, with the irresistible force of a whirlpool, or a maelstrom: what Poe calls 'the immense sweeps and swelters of the whirl.' The maelstrom sweeps, it is an immense sweep, a sweeping away, it is 'going going away, leaving no trace.' Throw away your watch; let go the iron ring.
Wood, Sarah. 2012. "Some Thing, Some One, Some Ghost (About Fires Of Writing)". Derrida Today. Edinburgh University Press. doi:10.3366/drt.2012.0038.
This essay addresses the relation between ghosts and the fires of writing. It allows itself to dream of purely burning, of consuming and leaving behind all objects, topics and occasions in an absolutely concrete, singular, sensational experience of reading. It is written to and for ghoststhe only ones who can survive in the blazing building that writing can become. The ghosts live in burning house scenes, in poems about dream rooms and erotic hauntings, and in the intellectual tension of literary and non-literary texts. They have something to do with the fires of sexuality, and the intensities of sublimation. It is all about love and death.
Wood, Sarah. 2011. "Editorial: 'it Will Have Blood'". Oxford Literary Review. EUP. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/olr.2011.0013.
Wood, Sarah. 2011. "Nightshift". Mosaic. Project Muse. doi:10.1353/mos.2011.0046.
This essay retains some characteristics of a talk and addresses the sensitivity and depth of Freud and Derrida's
thinking. It explores these qualities thematically: in storytelling, in literature, in Derrida's reading of Freud, and
in Freud. It also investigates the tensions and rhythms of academic writing life, attempting to communicate
them to the reader as directly as possible.
Wood, Sarah. 2009. "Some Scraps On Beauty‐in‐the‐ghost". Parallax. Taylor & Francis (Routledge). doi:10.1080/13534640802604422.
Wood, Sarah. 2009. "Centre-Piece". Theory And Event. Johns Hopkins (Project MUSE). doi:10.1353/tae.0.0049.
Wood, Sarah. 2009. "Foreveries". Oxford Literary Review. Edinburgh University Press. doi:10.3366/E030514980900042X.
Wood, Sarah. 2008. "Dream-Hole". Journal Of European Studies. Sage. doi:10.1177/0047244108097530.
Abstract | View in KAR | View Full Text
I draw on Derrida's limitless extension of the concept of writing to read Freud on dreams, and to explore relations between words, phenomenal or sensory experience, and life itself. I agree with Wordsworth, Freud, Derrida and Cixous that words are also things and argue that what linguistics recognizes as the sign can be marked, as a sculpted piece of stone might be, by the shaping violence of a force other than language. That opening remains traceable in the text. Dream writing names a lived experience of force: magical in its power, unlocatable in psychic terms, moving between languages, dependent on belief.
Wood, Sarah. 2007. "All The Way To Writing (Jacques Derrida)". Angelaki: Journal Of The Theoretical Humanities. Routledge. doi:10.1080/09697250701755118 .
Wood, Sarah. 2006. "‘beauty And Admiration In Learning: Louise Bourgeois And Paul De Man'". Parallax. Taylor & Francis (Routledge). doi:10.1080/13534640600771910.
Wood, Sarah. 2006. "‘edit’". Mosaic. Project Muse.
Continuity can exist in what Derrida called a "stretch of destroyed surface." To edit is to be touched by the contractions, displacements, and passages disparus of reading and writing as well as to oversee the scholarly reproduction of a text's signifying structure. This essay sets out from one word: "Meditango," in the "Envois" section of The Post Card.
Wood, Sarah. 2004. "Optic Nerve". Oxford Literary Review.
Edited journal
Wood, Sarah, ed. 2015. "Experiences Of Conversion". EUP. doi:10.3366/olr.2015.0162.
Wood, Sarah, Timothy Clark, Geoffrey Bennington, Peggy Kamuf, Michael Naas, and Nicholas Royle, eds. 2013. "‘the Fiction Of The World’ And Other Essays". EUP. doi:10.3366/olr.2013.0053.
Wood, Sarah, ed. 2011. "Deconstruction And Poetry". EUP. doi:10.3366/olr.2011.0013.
Wood, Sarah, ed. 2009. "Writing And Immortality". EUP. doi:10.3366/E0305149809000376.
Wood, Sarah, Geoffrey Bennington, Timothy Clark, Peggy Kamuf, Michael Naas, and Nicholas Royle, eds. 2008. "Starts". EUP. doi:10.3366/E0305149808000205.
Wood, Sarah, ed. 2004. "Hotel Psychoanalysis". Taylor and Francis. doi:10.1080/0969725042000232342.
Review
Wood, Sarah. 2015. "Rats Releasing Other Rats". Paragraph: A Journal Of Modern Critical Theory. Edinburgh University Press. doi:10.3366/para.2015.0175.
Wood, Sarah. 2013. "Another Type Of Light". Oxford Literary Review. Edinburgh University Press. doi:10.3366/olr.2013.0074.
Wood, Sarah. 2013. "Foreign Correspondent". Oxford Literary Review. Edinburgh University Press. doi:10.3366/olr.2013.0075.
Wood, Sarah. 2012. "Review Of". French Studies: A Quarterly Review. Oxford University Press.
Internet publication
Wood, Sarah. 2015. "Saturday 19Th March 2015, Night". Text. Jonathan Tiplady. http://www.confuseyourhunger.com/.
Research supervision
I currently enjoy supervising a number of PhDs in literature, literary theory and creative-critical writing:
- Victoria Bennett, Provisionality in the Work of Hilary Mantel
- Mylene Gamache, Reading Things in Contemporary Women’s Writing
- Jonathan Herapath, Philosophical and Psychological Approaches to the Work of Francis Lyte
- Michelle Wood, Spiritual Paths: Reading, Writing, Meditation and Love
I am open to supervising theoretically-informed PhDs on a range of modern and contemporary literature and theory, including interdisciplinary work, and especially topics involving:
- Derrida and deconstruction
- Hélène Cixous
- Psychoanalysis and literature
- Creative-critical writing
- Continental philosophy
- Climate change and the environment
- Animal studies
- Writing and architecture
- Nineteenth-century literature, particularly Robert Browning
Professional activities
- I helped found Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities and remain active on the journal’s executive board.
- I am an Editor of Oxford Literary Review, Britain’s longest-published journal of literary theory.
- I am on the editorial boards of Postgraduate English and the English-language Polish e-journal Explorations.
- I am a member of the Institute for Creative Reading and of Kent’s Centres for Modern Poetry and Victorian Literature and Culture.
- I sit on the Training Development Committee for the CHASE postgraduate funding consortium.
- I have acted as an MA external examiner at the Universities of Cork and East Anglia, and in 2016 will take up the role of external on the Creative Critical Writing MA at Sussex.
In my time at Kent I have organized
- two colloquia on Literature and the Humanities
- with Dr. Kaori Nagai, a two-day international conference on the theory and practice of Dream Writing
- a day conference on Reading as a Contemporary Art at the ICA
- a pop-up reading event on Derrida: ‘Aphorism Countertime’ in Real Time
Recent talks include:
- ‘eight aphorisms’ at Macbeth After Time: the Oxford Literary Review Seminar, Centre for Creative and Critical Thought, University of Sussex 2015
- ‘Choral Rings,’ at JD15: Derrida and Architecture, Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, 2015
- ‘An Inexperience,’ at Imagining Derrida: A Creative-Critical Symposium, English Faculty, University of Cambridge, 2015
- ‘Too Late to Begin?’ Keynote at Fear and Loathing: Phobia in Literature and Culture, University of Kent, 2014
- ‘Who Do You Work For?’ at Reading as Art: Turning the Pages of Victorian Psychology, Senate House Library and the Bloomsbury Festival, London, 2013
- ‘The First Reader: A Dictation,’ at Reading as a Contemporary Art, ICA London, 2013
- ‘Swans of Life’ at The News From Poems, Kent, 2012
- ‘Writing General All Over,’ at JD11: Dissemination, University of Sussex, 2011
- ‘The Unstoppable University,’ at Resistances: Whose University? Goldsmiths, 2011
- ‘Nightshift,’ keynote at Freud after Derrida, 3rd International Mosaic Conference, University of Manitoba, Canada, 2010
- ‘Contemporary Music and Contemporary Art,’ Deal Festival 2010
- ‘Some Thing, Some One, Some Ghost: About the Fires of Writing,’ keynote at JD09: Where Ghosts Live, University College, Cork, Ireland, 2009.