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.
Octavio R. González
Contributions
Today, Tavi talks with Joseph Cermatori and Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen. Joseph is an associate professor of English at Skidmore College, where he focuses on performance studies, with an eye towards drama, opera, and musical theater. He studies how queer theory and the theories of aesthetics intersect with this area of performance. He'll be discussing his 2021 book, Baroque Modernity: An Aesthetics of Theater. Our other guest, Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen, is the associate director of the Williams Graduate Program in the History of Art at the Clark Art Institute. Emmelyn specializes in modern art, especially focusing on how histories of art, biology, and psychology intersect, and, particularly, how those studies combine with the history of sexuality. She will be talking about her 2021 book, Modern Art and the Remaking of Human Disposition. Both Joseph and Emmelyn were finalists for the Modernist Studies Association First Book Prize.
In our inaugural episode, Tavi talks with Philip Tsang, assistant professor at Colorado State University, where he teaches Victorian, modernist, and postcolonial literature. Philip is the author of The Obsolete Empire: Untimely Belonging in 20th Century British Literature, published in 2021 by the Johns Hopkins University Press. The work focuses on Henry James, James Joyce, Doris Lessing, and V.S. Naipaul, and explores how literary reading can help us to understand the frustrated interplay of attachment, intimacy, and exclusion under empire.