Joel Black
Joel Black is a Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia. Black has written extensively on subfields of literature and film studies areas such as romanticism, postmodernism, philosophy and history of science, and cultural studies. He is the author of The Aesthetics of Murder: A Study in Romantic Literature and Contemporary Culture and The Reality Effect: Film Culture and the Graphic Imperative.
Career
Education and awards
In 1972, Black completed his B.A. at Columbia College of Columbia University, and then one year later he finished his M.A. in English Literature, also at Columbia University. In the 1976-77 school year, Black won a fellowship called the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienststipendium, and in 1979, he won a Fellowship at the School of Criticism and Theory at the University of California at Irvine). In 1979, Black completed his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Stanford University.In the 1982-83 school term, Black won an NEH Fellowship for Independent Study and Research, and in 1989, he won a Fulbright Travel Grant. In 1990, 1992, 1994–96, and 1998, Black won University of Georgia Faculty Research Grants, and in 1997, Black received the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library Fellowship.
Research and Teaching
In 1978-79, Black was an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Hamilton College in New York state. From 1979 to 1982, Black was an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. From 1983 to 1986, he was an Assistant Prof. of Comparative Literature at the University of Georgia.In 1986, Black was promoted to Associate Professor at the University of Georgia. In 1986 and 1989, Black was a UGA Exchange Professor at Universitaire, Instelling Antwerpen, Antwerp, in Belgium. In 1990, Black was a Visiting Professor at Emory University. In 2003, Black was promoted to Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Georgia.
Books
- The Aesthetics of Murder: A Study in Romantic Literature and Contemporary Culture
- The Reality Effect: Film Culture and the Graphic Imperative, iix + 286pp.
Chapters, Articles, and Essays
- "Scientific Models," in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, ed. Marshall Brown, pp. 115–137.
- "Literature as Secret History," in Literatur im Zeitalter der Globalisierung, eds. Manfred Schmeling, Monika Schmitz-Emans, and Kerst Walstra, pp. 83–97.
- "The Genealogy of Violence in African-American Literature: Non-Native Sources of Native Son," in The Conscience of Humankind: Literature and Traumatic Experience, ed. Elrud Ibsch, pp. 325–36.
- "Literature, Film and Virtuality: Technology's Cutting Edge," in Extreme Beauty: Aesthetics, Politics and Death, eds. James E. Swearingen and Joanne Cutting-Gray, pp. 78–88.
- "Real Horror: From Execution Videos to Snuff Films," in Underground USA: Filmmaking Beyond the Hollywood Canon, eds. Xavier Mendik and Steven Jay Schneider.
- "feats of Detection: The Spurious Key Text from Poe to Eco," in Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism, eds. P. Merivale and S. E. Sweeney., pp. 75–98.
- "Taking the Sex Out of Sexuality: Foucault's Failed History," in Rethinking Sexuality: Foucault and Classical Antiquity, eds. David Larmour, Paul Allen Miller, and Charles Platter, pp. 42–60.
- "Writing After Murder : The Confessions of Werther and Rivière," in Reading After Foucault: Institutions, Disciplines, and Technologies of the Self, 1750-1830, ed. Robert Leventhal, pp. 233–59.
- "The Hermeneutics of Extinction: Denial and Discovery in Scientific Literature," Comparative Criticism 13: Literature and Science, ed. E. S. Shaffer, pp. 147–69.
- "Mixed Signals in the Body Languages of Sexual, Commercial, and Extraterrestrial Discourse," in Mimesis, Semiosis, and Power, ed. R. Bogue, pp. 157–83.
- "Newtonian Mechanics and the Romantic Rebellion: Introduction," in Beyond the Two Cultures: Essays on Science, Technology, and Literature, ed. Joseph W. Slade and Judith Yaross Lee, pp. 131–39.
- "Confession, Digression, Gravitation: Thomas De Quincey's German Connection," in Thomas De Quincey: Bicentenary Studies, ed. Robert L. Snyder, pp. 308–37.
- "Paper Empires of the New World: Pynchon, Gaddis, Fuentes," Proceedings of the Tenth Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association, vol. 3, pp. 68–75.
- "The Paper Empires and Empirical Fictions of William Gaddis," reprinted in In Recognition of William Gaddis, eds. John Kuehl and Steven Moore, pp. 162– 73.
- "Idolology: The Model in Artistic Practice and Critical Theory," in Mimesis in Contemporary Theory, Vol. 1: The Literary and Philosophical Debate, pp. 172–200.
- "Aesthetics of Gender: Winckelmann, Friedrich Schlegel, and the Hermaphroditic Ideal," ch. 14 in Fragments: Incompletion & Discontinuity, ed. L. Kritzman, pp. 189–209.
Articles in Journals
- "Freud, Moses, and the Death of Rabin," Mortality 7, no. 1, pp. 83–95.
- "Psyche's Progress: Soul- and Self-making from Keats to Wilde," Intertexts 5, no.1, pp. 7–22.
- "Grisham's Demons," College Literature 25.1, pp. 35–40.
- "'You Must Remember This': The Intimate and the Obscene in Filmic Narrative," Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, 40, pp. 83–89.
- "The Scientific Essay and Encyclopedic Science," Stanford Literature Review, 1:1, pp. 119–48.
- "Pynchon's Eve of De-struction," Pynchon Notes 14, pp. 23–38.
- "The Paper Empires and Empirical Fictions of William Gaddis," The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 2, pp. 22–31.
- "Levana: Levitation in Jean Paul and Thomas De Quincey," Comparative Literature, 32, pp. 42–62.
- "Probing a Post-Romantic Paleontology: Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow," Boundary 2, 8:2, pp. 229–54.
Review Articles
- "Murder: The State of the Art," American Literary History 12, no. 4, pp. 780–93.
- Review of The Changes of Cain by Ricardo J. Quinones, The Comparatist, 17, pp. 141–45.
- "Romanticism and the Sciences,", Studies in Romanticism, 31, pp. 394–401.
- "Postmodernist Fictions", Pynchon Notes, 18-19, pp. 96–109.
- "The Literature of Play and the Literature of Power", Poetics Today, 4:4, pp. 773–82.
- "Allegory Unveiled", Poetics Today, 4:1, pp. 109–26.
- "Rhetorical Questions and Critical Riddles", Poetics Today, 1:4, pp. 189–201.
Reviews
- Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek and Milan V. Dimić, eds., Comparative Literature Now: Theories and Practice, in Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 27:1-2, pp. 307–11.
- Ben Stoltzfus, Lacan and Literature: Purloined Pretexts, in The Comparatist, vol. 22, pp. 194–96..
- Michael Felske, Zukünftige Vergangenheit: Thomas De Quinceys Suspiria de Profundis als natalteleologische Autobiographie, European Romantic Review 8, no. 2, pp. 209–13.
- Sarah Webster Goodwin and Elisabeth Bronfen, eds. Death and Representation, in Victorian Studies, 39:1, pp. 77–79.
- George Levine, ed., Realism and Representation: Essays on the Problem of Realism in Relation to Science, Literature, and Culture, in Philosophy and Literature, 18:1, pp. 187– 89.
- Eduardo González, The Monstered Self: Narratives of Death and Performance in Latin American Fiction, MLN, 107:5.
- Herbert Lindenberger, The History in Literature: On Value, Genre, Institutions, in The Wordsworth Circle 22: 4, 228-30.
- John Johnston's Carnival of Repetition: Gaddis's The Recognitions and Postmodern Theory, in MLN, 105:5, pp. 1120–24.
- Virgil Nemoianu, The Taming of Romanticism: European Literature and the Age of Biedermeier, in Philosophy and Literature, 10:1, pp. 133–35.
- Renate Jurzik, Der Stoff des Lachens: Studien über Komik, in Revue Belge de Philologie et d'Histoire, 64:3, pp. 595–97.
- Frederick Garber, The Autonomy of the Self from Richardson to Huysmans, in Comparative Literature Studies, 20: 4, pp. 450–53.