Matt Tierney

My fields include literary and media theory, cultural studies, and the literature and film of the United States. My particular interest is in Twentieth-Century aesthetic interventions into the politics of race, gender, and technology.

My next book, Dismantlings: Words against Machines in the American Long Seventies, will be published by Cornell University Press in early 2020. Bringing speculative thought to bear on activist practices and experimental literature, Dismantlings theorizes ways to oppose technocentric and globalist thinking after midcentury. Here as elsewhere, I theorize writers who are rarely considered together, like Martin Luther King, Jr., Thomas Pynchon, Ursula K. Le Guin, Alice Mary Hilton, Paul Metcalf, Janice Mirikitani, W.S. Merwin, Toni Morrison, H. Bruce Franklin, Carter Revard, Joanna Russ, Huey P. Newton, Harry Mathews and Georges Perec, Shulamith Firestone, Walter Abish, Philip José Farmer, and John Mohawk. This fall, I was in residency at the Humanities Institute, pursuing a research project on presentism, Afrofuturism, and national criticism, with emphasis on writing by Pauline Hopkins, W.E.B. Du Bois, Samuel R. Delany, and Octavia Butler.

My first book, entitled What Lies Between: Void Aesthetics & Postwar Post-Politics (2015), explored formal experiments in literature and film that disrupt the myths of communication culture and consensus post-politics in the years following World War II. Reviewed in American Literature, the field's principal journal, the book was credited with "powerfully...rehistoricizing American studies to crack open the black box of technological mediation." I have also co-edited (with Mathias Nilges) an essay collection, entitled Medium and Mediation (2016), for the journal Postmodern Culture. My articles on literary and cultural politics appear in Configurations, Cultural Critique, Camera Obscura, Image and Narrative, and World Picture. Not long ago, I was interviewed on the topic of critical cyberculture for the Digital Culture and Media Initiative.

Up next are two more books: one, entitled Unfinished and Half in Ruin: Critical Americanism and Technology Critique, will read essays and fictions that criticize nationalist historicisms and technologisms without giving into post-national or post-technological fantasies; the other, a short book entitled Megrim: Migrainous Reading, will ask what textual theory of medium is appropriate to the way that physical and social bodies interface and interact, with particular attention to writing by Waldo Frank, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nathaniel Mackey, Catherine Malabou, and others. In both projects, I pursue a continuing interest in the convergence and non-convergence of continental philosophy with the activist literary imagination, especially of the United States.