Ali Chetwynd

Associate Professor, English Department Chair
Department of English
  • Ph.D. University of Michigan
    M.A. University of Michigan
    B.A. Balliol College, University of Oxford
  • Email: [email protected]
  • Office: B-F2-04

Profile

Ali Chetwynd joined AUIS in 2016 after getting his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. He previously taught language and literature at high-schools in Bulgaria, and before that got his undergraduate degree from Oxford University in Britain, where he is originally from.

Ali researches anti-mimetic fiction’s philosophical and argumentative capacities. Existing accounts of how fiction influences real-world beliefs tend to presume an immersive-realist model of fiction, and accounts of anti-mimetic fiction tend to presume that its philosophical commitments are negative and deconstructive: Ali repudiates both tendencies. His research along these lines has so far focused on early U.S. postmodernism: articles and reviews on Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, and the philosophical concerns of that era’s fiction have appeared in English Studies, College Literature, Twentieth Century Literature and other venues. He is currently co-editing a collection of essays on sex and gender in Pynchon’s work, while his ongoing monograph project addresses how the anti-realist formal experiments of early U.S. postmodern novels serve constructive arguments about how we can live and act deliberatively in a world that takes the absence of philosophical absolutes for granted.

He also works very slowly on creative writing (in particular a book of short stories for children), and enjoys arctic weather, the company of dogs, playing football non-competitively, and Indian buffet lunches.

Google Scholar Profile Academia.edu Profile
 


 

Publications

  • (with Joanna Freer and Georgios Maragos) Thomas Pynchon, Sex, and Gender. University of Georgia Press, 2018
  • “More Metaphysician than Politician: Pynchon, TINA, and the Rhetorical Economy of ‘The World—This One.’” Textual Practice 33.3 (April 2019),special issue on “Pynchonomics”: 451-71
  • “Inherent Obligation: The Distinctive Difficulties in and of Recent Pynchon.” English Studies 95.8 (Nov 2014): 923-48
  • “‘He that lends you pity is not wise': Rereading Sejanus for Pity and Terror.” Ben Jonson Journal: Literary Contexts in the Age of Elizabeth, James and Charles14.1 (May 2007): 43-60
  • “Pynchon after Paranoia,” in The New Pynchon Studies: Twenty-First Century Critical Revisions, ed. Joanna Freer. Cambridge University Press, 2019: 33-52
  • (with Georgios Maragos)“Sex and Gender,” in Thomas Pynchon in Context, ed. Inger Dalsgaard. Cambridge University Press, 2019: 122-128
  • (with Joanna Freer and Georgios Maragos) “Introduction,” in Thomas Pynchon, Sex, and Gender, eds. Ali Chetwynd, Joanna Freer, and Georgios Maragos. University of Georgia Press, 2018: ix-xxxii
  • “Imperfect Circles: Asymmetrical Orbital Motion from the Centre to the Rim in Gravity's Rainbow,” in Against the Grain: Reading Pynchon's Counternarratives, ed. Sascha Pöhlmann. Rodopi, 2010: 113-132
  • Review Essay: “Theories of Late Pynchon: A Review of Diana Benea, The Political Imagination of Thomas Pynchon’s Later Novelsand Sean Carswell, Occupy Pynchon.” Forthcoming in ABC: American, British, and Canadian Studies
  • Reference: “Carlene Hatcher Polite” and “Fran Ross.” In Encyclopedia of the Black Arts Movement, eds Verner Mitchell and Cynthia Davis. Rowman and Littlefield, 2019: 244-253 and 268-274
  • Review: “Women’s Experimental Writing: Negative Aesthetics and Feminist Critique, by Ellen E. Berry.” Modern Philology 116.4 (May 2019): E288-91
  • Review: “Fictions of Fact and Value: The Erasure of Logical Positivism in American Literature 1945-75, by Michael LeMahieu.” Twentieth Century Literature 60.1 (Spring 2014): 128-136
  • Review: “The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon.” College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies 39.4 (Fall 2012): 142-145
  • Review: “Sejanus His Fall, Royal Shakespeare Company.” Ben Jonson Journal: Literary Contexts in the Age of Elizabeth, James and Charles14. 1 (May 2007): 97-100
  • “The Love Boat.” Bird’s Thumb 2.1 (Feb 2015)