Goldsmiths - University of London

Dr Caroline Blinder

BA (Hons) English Literature, Tufts University, 1988, MA Northwestern University, 1990; PhD, Kings College, 1995; Lecturer, Southampton University, 1995-2003, appointed Goldsmiths College, 2003

Teaching

I am currently the convenor of The Emergence of Modern America: American Writing and Culture 1890-1945 and Modern American Fiction. I also convene an MA course: Documenting America: The American Photo-Text 1900-1959.

Areas of supervision

I have previously and am currently supervising a number of Ph.Ds on cinema and film theory, The Photographer Robert Frank, Faulkner, Deserts and Travel Writing and African American Literature. I am particularly interested in supervising work on the interplay of writing and photography; writing and visual culture from the 1900 and onwards; Beat writing; literature and politics in the 20th Century.

Research interests

My research interests include 19th and 20th Century American literature, in particular writing from the 1930s and the intersections between literature and politics, ideology and aesthetics. In particular, I have written on philosophical ideas and aesthetic currents in transcontinental literature, on the use of obscenity and the infusion of Surrealism into American writing. For a number of years, I have been working on photography; its use in documentary studies and how images interact with writing. My most recent project traces transcendental and aesthetic devices in a number of photo-textual collaborations between writers and photographers in the first half of the 20th Century.

Selected publications

• A Selfmade Surrealist - Ideology and Aesthetics in the Work of Henry Miller (North Carolina: Camden House, 2000).

• '"The Illusion of Embodiment": On the Problems of a Cinematic Aesthetic in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men' in Caroline Blinder (ed.), Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: New Critical Essays (Palgrave Macmillan, New York, August 2010), forthcoming.
• 'Alfred Stieglitz: Camera Work and 291' in Peter Brooker (ed.), The Oxford Modernist Magazine Critical Anthology, Vol. 3 (OUP, 2010).
  
• 'The Bachelor's Drawer: Art and Artefact in the Work of Wright Morris' in Mick Gidley (ed.), Writing with Light - Words and Photographs in American Texts (London: Peter Lang 2009), pp. 63-81.
• 'Not so Innocent: Vision and Culpability in Weegee's Photographs of Children' in Marlene Kadar, Jeanne Perreault and Linda Warley (eds.), Photographs, Histories and Meanings (New York: Palgave, 2009), pp. 9-25.
• 'Another kind of Patriotism: Robert Frank's The Americans' in Sas Mays (ed.), Photography and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2005).
• 'Love Under the Sky: On Robert Frank and Jack Kerouac' in Rui Carvalho Homen and Maria de Fatima Lambert (eds.), Writing and Seeing: Essays on Literature and the Visual Arts (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005).
• 'Looking for Love in all the Wrong Places: Brassaï's Photographs in André Breton's Mad Love', Photography and Surrealism, Vol. History of Photography, Aug. 2005.
• 'The Transparent Eyeball: Emerson and Walker Evans', Mosaic, a journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature, Vol. 37, No. 4, Dec. 2004.
• 'Between the Unimagined and the Imagined: Photographic Aesthetics and Literary Illumination in James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men' in Wim Tigges (ed.), Moments of Moment: Aspects of the Literary Epiphany (Amsterdam/Atlanta: DQR Studies in English Literature Series, 1999).
• 'La Révolte Enfantine: On Georges Bataille's "La Morale de Miller" and Jean-Paul Sartre's "Un Nouveau Mystique"', Critique (Heldref Publications, N.Y.), Vol. 40, Fall 1998.