Professor Andrew Gibson a.gibson@rhul.ac.uk

Current Positions

 

Andrew Gibson is Research Professor of Modern Literature and Theory. In 2008 he served as Carole and Gordon Segal Professor of Irish Literature at Northwestern University in Evanston, Chicago where, among others, Richard Ellmann taught from 1951 to 1968, establishing a tradition in the study of Irish literature. From 2003 to 2005, he was a Leverhulme Research Fellow. Gibson is a permanent advisory editor to the James Joyce Quarterly and a member of the editorial board of the new Anglo-French journal in Beckett scholarship set up at the Université de Paris VII to build bridges between French and Anglophone Beckett Studies, Limit(e) Beckett. He is also a member of the editorial board of Textuel (Université de Paris VII), Symbolism: An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics and Critical Zone and Miscelánea (University of Zaragoza).

Gibson is a former Trustee of the International James Joyce Foundation, Founder/Organizer of the London University Seminar for Research into Joyce's Ulysses, and co-Founder/co-Organizer of the London University Finnegans Wake Research Seminar. He was a member of and contributor to the Philosophie, Art et Littérature seminar at the Collège Internationale de Philosophie in Paris, to which he gave a paper in May, 2002 entitled '"Il faut construire une nouvelle scène": Stevens et "la poésie moderne"'. He is also a member of the Advisory Board of the British Network for Modern Textual Studies. He has been the recipient of three British Academy Small Research Grants.

In June 2001 and 2002, he was Visiting Professor at the Scandinavian Summer School of Literature and Theory. From July to October 2002, he was Visiting Professor at the University of Tokyo, Japan's premier university. In March 2003, he was Visiting Scholar at Texas (A&M) University. In 2010, he will serve as Visiting Professor at the Nordic Universities Summer School.

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Reviews

Click here for a list of extracts from reviews of some of Gibson’s publications on Joyce and Beckett.

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Upcoming Events (2009)

• 15 October 2009: ‘“His Journey Westward”: History, Modernity and Joyce’s “The Dead”’; the Sophie Kerr Annual Lecture, Washington College, Maryland, USA. A different version of this will be given on 22 October to the English Department Research seminar at Queen Mary, University of London, entitled ‘“His Journey Westward”: History, Modernity, the Great Famine and Joyce’s “The Dead”’.
• 16 November 2009: ‘Guy Lardreau, Art and the Limits of Philosophy’, University of Uppsala
• 21 November 2009: ‘Repenser la logique de l’intermittence: Badiou, Platon et Logiques des mondes’, conference on Badiou and Plato, University of Athens
• 4 March 2010: ‘The Philosophy of Guy Lardreau: Lacan, Kant, Aesthetics’, University of Cambridge, Theory Research Seminar
• 10 April 2010: ‘L’Innommable, de Gaulle and the Fourth Republic 1946-49’, the annual Samuel Beckett lecture, Trinity College Dublin
• 15 April 2010: ‘Joyce at the Turn of the Century: The Writings 1898-1903’, conference on Joyce and the Nineteenth Century, University of Durham

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Publications in Press

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Guest Lectures and Presentations 2005-9

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Publications

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Twentieth-Century Literature and Theory

The large bulk of Andrew Gibson's research has been on twentieth-century literature, often in philosophical and/or theoretical and/or historical and/or narratological contexts. His major work has been on James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, but the range of his interests and his writings is much wider than that, including, for instance, Pound, Stevens, Woolf, Lowry, Henry Green, Hemingway, Rhys, Robbe-Grillet, Morrison, Sebald and Coetzee. Students wishing to work on twentieth-century writers, particularly from new theoretical perspectives, are encouraged to get in touch.

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James Joyce

Professor Gibson is the author of the widely acclaimed Joyce's Revenge: History, Politics and Aesthetics in Ulysses' which was published by Oxford University Press on 16 June, 2002. This major, book-length account of Joyce's Ulysses took fifteen years to write. It is a complex and evolving treatment of what were – for Joyce – the most crucial issues in Irish history and contemporary Irish politics. The study is original in arguing that, in many of their most important aspects, the aesthetic practices that make up Ulysses are responses to the colonial history and condition of Ireland, the colonial politics of Irish culture and Anglo-Irish cultural politics, particularly in the years 1880-1920. The book pays particular attention to Joyce's treatment of a wide variety of historically specific English and Anglo-Irish discourses in his greatest novel, arguing that Ulysses is fuelled by a Parnellite hostility to the colonizer's culture yet, at the same time, both transforms and transcends the available range of nationalist responses to that culture.

More recently, Gibson has published a short biography of Joyce, Joyce: A Critical Life (Reaktion Books, 2006); and, with Len Platt, Joyce, Ireland and Britain, a collection of essays for the Florida Joyce Series, published by Florida University Press (2006). This ground-breaking collection of essays is in the vanguard of contemporary Joyce studies. It provides a theoretical account of the new historical materialism (sometimes known as ‘the London method’) in Joyce studies, situating it in relation to postcolonial and other forms of historical work on Joyce. The essays contained in the volume partly exemplify this method. The collection is the first substantially to address Joyce's work in the context of British and Irish history and politics together. Contributors include Richard Brown, Vincent Cheng and Anne Fogarty.

Gibson is now working on a study of Joyce’s early writings, The Strong Spirit: History, Politics and Aesthetics in the Writings of James Joyce 1898-1915. This will proceed according to the same historicizing methodology that he adopted in his earlier Joyce’s Revenge, and will ask how Joyce arrived at the extremely complex political and aesthetic positions that he argued are evident in Joyce’s masterpiece. Gibson is also steadily accumulating materials for historical studies of Finnegans Wake, but these are still some years in the future.

Gibson was co-founder of and continues to run the London University (Charles Peake) Seminar for Research into Joyce's Ulysses, and, with Len Platt and Wim van Mierlo, co-Founder and co-Organizer of the London University Finnegans Wake Research Seminar. These university seminars are now sponsored by the Irish Embassy and form part of seminar programme of the Institute of English Studies of London University. In the past, the Ulysses seminar has organized conferences and produced volumes of essays, and both it and the Wake seminar intend to do so again in the future.  Anyone interested in joining either seminar should email Professor Gibson.

There are many different aspects of Joyce's work that need to be explored from the kind of historical vantage point that Gibson adopted in Joyce's Revenge. Students interested in doing this kind of work at PhD or post-doctoral level are most warmly invited to contact him.

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Samuel Beckett

Andrew Gibson has also worked for many years and published extensively on Samuel Beckett. In particular, in recent years, he has been thinking about the relationship between Beckett’s work and that of contemporary philosopher Alain Badiou. He was awarded a two-year Leverhulme Research Fellowship specifically to write a book on this relationship. The book was published in 2006, by Oxford University Press, with the title Beckett and Badiou: The Pathos of Intermittency. Badiou has been an admirer of Beckett's work for more than forty years, and has written about him at some length. His thought about Beckett is precisely constructed in opposition to the traditions (of nihilist absurdism and existential humanism) that dominated Beckett criticism until the late 80s. Yet, at the same time, whilst having much in common with them, Badiou moves in a strikingly and significantly different direction to the post-theoretical and postmodern accounts of Beckett that emerged in the 90s.

Gibson's book argues that Badiou's reading does indeed make possible an important new departure in Beckett studies, but only if it is itself modified and to some extent transformed in the light of Beckett's work. For in certain respects, Beckett continues to raise certain questions, not only for Badiou's aesthetics, but for his philosophy as a whole. Gibson's book is an innovative comparative study that not only provides a fresh interpretation of Beckett but is also concerned with a specific set of problems within contemporary philosophy and aesthetics. He gave presentations related to this subject in 1999 at the Badiou Colloquium at the University of Bordeaux, at the Beckett Colloquium at the University of Rennes, and, in June 2000, at the Other Becketts conference at Birkbeck College, London. He gave a paper on Badiou and Francoise Proust at the conference on Badiou's Ethics and Subjectivity at London Metropolitan University in December 2004 and a paper on 'Badiou and Beckett' to the London Beckett Seminar in February, 2005. He wrote the Afterword - 'Badiou, Beckett and Contemporary Criticism' - to Badiou on Beckett, the English translation of Badiou's complete writings on Beckett (Clinamen, 2003). Students interested in working on Beckett, particularly from a contemporary (particularly a contemporary French) philosophical perspective, are encouraged to contact him.

Gibson is now increasingly concerned with historical approaches to Beckett. He wrote the Afterword to the forthcoming Cambridge University Press volume on Beckett and Ireland, edited by Sean Kennedy.  Here he seeks to ground certain aspects of Beckett and Badiou in historical and empirical factuality, Irish, but also French. In Samuel Beckett: A Critical Life, to be published by Reaktion Books in 2009, he seeks further to place his own reading of Beckett’s life and work in relation to the various socio-historical worlds that the author successively inhabited. His work now everywhere stresses the need to connect the established tradition of philosophical work on Beckett with the more recent, experimental and ground-breaking turn to historical research. By the same token, he is particularly interested in ways of building bridges between the French and Anglophone traditions in Beckett criticism, and is a member of the editorial board of the new online Beckett journal Limit(e) Beckett, which itself aims to build such bridges. His own position is that the philosophical and historical approaches most notably engage with and complement each other through a certain application of Badiou’s thought; but also, that, at the current point in time, it is the historical work that most urgently needs to be done. His remaining work on Beckett will be of this kind.

Again, prospective research students interested in pursuing this line of enquiry with Professor Gibson should make contact.

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Contemporary French Philosophy (and Aesthetics/English Literature)

Professor Gibson has more than thirty years’ experience of reading continental European philosophy and literary and critical theory, particularly French philosophy and theory. In the nineties, much of Professor Gibson's work involved the use of this material. This was particularly the case with his work on postmodernism. As what was once the radical challenge of postmodernism subsided into an often rather vapid and conservative orthodoxy, so Gibson's philosophical and theoretical interests specifically focussed on new developments in French thought. Apart from Alain Badiou, he is also extremely well versed in the work of the contemporary French philosophers Jacques Rancière, Françoise Proust, Christian Jambet and Guy Lardreau. He also has a substantial interest in the work of Clément Rosset.

Gibson has lectured and given papers on both Proust and Rancière, and addressed a paper entitled 'Why Not Melancholy?' to Rancière himself at the conference on Rancière's work at the Institute of Romance Studies at the University of London in March, 2003. In March 2005, he gave a paper to the Graduate Seminar at the University of Sussex entitled 'History in Countertime: Françoise Proust on Walter Benjamin'. In May 2006, he gave a paper on 'Françoise Proust, Walter Benjamin et l'intempestif' to the research seminar at the Université de Paris VII, and in March 2007, a paper entitled 'The Unfinished Song(ii): Intermittency and Melancholy in Rancière’’, the Humanities and Arts Research Centre, Royal Holloway. He will be giving two presentations on Badiou and Rancière to the HARC Graduate Seminar in March, 2009.

He is currently working on Logics of Intermittency: The Anti-Schematics of Historical Reason in Contemporary French Philosophy, which develops a 'melancholic-ecstatic' conception of historical time through a set of detailed engagements the philosophers in question. The book will be published by Edinburgh University Press. In October and November 2007, with the help of a Small Research Grant from the British Academy, Gibson researched this project in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Any students interested in working at PhD level on the philosophers named above, or the aesthetics in contemporary French philosophy, or the relationship between it and English literature, are warmly invited to contact him.

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Contemporary London and Its Literature

With the architectural historian Joe Kerr, in 2003, Andrew Gibson published London from Punk to Blair (Reaktion Books). This substantial collection of new essays and photographs taken over the past twenty-five years is an important work of contemporary social and cultural history. It was partly funded by a British Academy grant awarded to Professor Gibson. Gibson contributed an essay entitled ‘Altering Images', on London literature 1980-2003; and, with his former research student Jennifer Bavidge, an essay entitled 'The Metropolitan Playground: London's Children' (also published in abridged form in the Times Higher Educational Supplement, 4 December, 2003). Together with the Royal College of Art, the Museum of London and Reaktion Books, on behalf of the department, he also organized a major conference on contemporary London at the Museum of London (November 2003), to mark the launch of the book. His own research interest in the field is ongoing and students who share it are encouraged to contact him.

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Other Recent Presentations

Andrew Gibson's presentations and conference papers since 2000 include two lectures on Rancière at the Scandinavian Summer School of Literature and Theory, ‘Rancière and the "Limit" of Realism’, and 'Rancière's Aesthetics'; a lecture on ‘Badiou and The Inaesthetic', at the Scandinavian Summer School; '"An Irish Bull in an English Chinashop": "Oxen" and the Anthologies' (17th International James Joyce Symposium, Goldsmiths College, University of London, June 2000); '"Gentle Will is Being Roughly Handled": Shakespeare and Shakespeareans in "Scylla and Charybdis"' (17th International Joyce Symposium, 2002); 'Forget Baudrillard: Melancholy of the Year 2000' (Remembering the 1990s, Birkbeck College, September 2000); 'Three Dialogues andBeckett's Tragic Ethics', the keynote lecture at the one-day conference on Beckett's Three Dialogues at South Bank University (London, 2001); a paper entitled 'The Trace of Melancholy' in the Ethics and Aesthetics series at London University's Institute of English Studies (January 2001); 'Ethics of Particularism', at the Eighteenth International James Joyce Symposium in Trieste (2002); and research papers at the Universities of Leeds, York and Cardiff and The Institute of English Studies, University of London.

He lectured on Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man at Trinity College, Dublin in January 2003 and gave a research paper on 'Joyce's Telemachiad' at the University of Gothenburg in February 2003. He gave a paper on Joyce's Portrait to the Modernism Seminar at Oxford University in May, 2003 and a lecture on Portrait at the International James Joyce Summer School in Trieste. Together with Len Platt of Goldsmiths' College, Professor Gibson organised a conference on 'Joyce, Ireland and Britain' at the Institute of English Studies (November 2002). His own paper was on 'Portrait and Colonial Bildung: Chapter 1'. He gave a paper entitled 'Joyce, Agamben, Améry and the Ethics of Resentment' and a presentation on 'The British Presence in "Cyclops"' at the 19th International James Joyce Symposium in Dublin in 2004, and a paper entitled 'Actual Infinity, Event, Remainder' at the conference on Contemporary Writing Environments at Brunel University (2004). In July 2005, he gave a paper entitled '"All Propagated With the Best Intentions": Greene, the U.S. and Indochina 1952-55' to the conference on Literature and the Cold War at London's Institute of English Studies. In June 2006, he gave a paper entitled 'Joyce and the Fowlers: “Eumaeus”, The King’s English and Modern English Usage, at the 20th International Joyce Symposium in Budapest, 20

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Research Students

Andrew Gibson's research students most recently to have been awarded their doctorates include:

• Mark Sutton ('"All Livia's Daughtersons": Death and the Dead in the Prose Fiction of James Joyce')
• Shu-I Chen ('The Dialogicality of Interior Monologue in Ulysses')
• Steven Morrison ('Heresy, Heretics and Heresiarchs in the Work of James Joyce')
• Jamie Russell ('Bodies of Light: Masculinity, Homosexuality and Askesis in the Novels of William Burroughs')
• David Rudrum ('Wittgenstein and the Theory of Narrative')
• Jennifer Bavidge ('Representations of Urban Space in the Postmodern Novel')
• Ralph Strehle ('Postmodern Ethics and Reception Theory')
• John Deamer ('Samuel Beckett and the Theory of the Event')
• Stefania Cassar ('Representations of Science and Scientists in Contemporary British Fiction')
• David Addyman ('The Lie of the Land: Beckett and Place')
• Eva Aldea ('A New Theory of Magic Realism')

Other students working with Professor Gibson include:

• Frank Duggan ('"Phrases of the Platform": Irish Political Oratory 1780-1922 in the Works of James Joyce')
• Wei-Min Seetoh ('Writing the Postcolonial City: London and Singapore')
• Karen Langhelle ('The Conversation Novel: Henry Green, Ivy Compton-Burnett and Nathalie Sarraute')
• Sean Miller ('The Cultural Currency of String Theory')
• Christine Lees ('"Shake Eternity and Lick Creation": Writing the Daughter in Finnegans Wake')
• Peter Johnston (`Coetzee and Mathematics’)
• Brian Fox (`”Land of Breach of Promise”: James Joyce and America’)
• Douglas Chandler (`Nabokov’s Epistemologies: The English Fiction and Non-Fiction’)

Anyone interested in working with Professor Gibson on aspects of the relationship between Joyce's work and English and Irish history, Beckett's work and contemporary French philosophy, contemporary French philosophy and aesthetics and English Literature, contemporary theory and its relation to contemporary fiction, and London and contemporary literature may wish to arrange a meeting and an interview.

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Children's Fiction

Andrew Gibson has also written five novels and a collection of stories for children, published by Faber. By invitation, he gives creative workshops and talks on writing for children at schools. Please contact Faber and Faber, 3 Queen Square, London WC1; or Gibson's agent: Rosemary Canter, Peters, Fraser and Dunlop, The Chambers, Chelsea Harbour, London, SW10 0XF.

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