Octavio R. González

Octavio R. González is associate professor of English and creative writing at Wellesley College, where he teaches and broadcasts 2 Authors, 2 Books, a new podcast funded by a Mellon Foundation public-humanities grant awarded by the University of New Hampshire’s Center for the Humanities and administered by Wellesley’s Newhouse Center for the Humanities. González is the author of Misfit Modernism: Queer Forms of Double Exile in the Twentieth-Century Novel, which analyzes the work of four modernist authors in exploring the condition of being a modernist misfit, a structure of feeling keyed to cultural identity — or intersecting identities — in which both majority culture and home culture are seen as inhospitable, as sources of double exile. With authors as diverse as Jean Rhys, Wallace Thurman, Nella Larsen, and Christopher Isherwood, González demonstrates how the subjective feelings associated with intersectionality were addressed in formal narrative terms by modernist authors whose own biographies of double exile mirror the historical and cultural dimensions of the complex characters they invented, prefiguring the rise of identity politics in a narrative poetics of modernist alienation beyond the “universal existential everyman” of mainstream modernist invocation. Currently, having published Limerence, his first full-length poetry collection (Rebel Satori, 2023), González is at work on “The Cabaret Archive,” the intertextual mesh of novels, stories, musicals, films, memoirs, and critical commentary that together constitute the underexplored legacy of Isherwood’s original Berlin Stories.