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.

I have just completed a new book, entitled Dismantlings: Cyberculture and Luddism in U.S. Literary Politics of the Long Seventies. 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, Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Ursula K. Le Guin, Alice Mary Hilton, Paul Metcalf, Janice Mirikitani, Joanna Russ, Harry Matthews and Georges Perec, Joseph McElroy, Nathaniel Mackey, Shulamith Firestone, Walter Abish, Philip José Farmer, and John Mohawk. This fall, I will be in residency at the Humanities Institute, pursuing a research project on presentism, Afrofuturism, and national criticism, with emphasis on Pauline Hopkins, 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. I have articles on literary and cultural politics, new or forthcoming, in Configurations, Camera Obscura, and Cultural Critique, and I have reviewed books about film for Film Criticism. Last year, 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: Americanism, Formalism, Technocritique, will read essays and fictions that criticize national and technological forms without giving into post-national or post-technological fantasies; the other, entitled Obliteratures: Figuration, Opposition, Medium, will ask what new theory of medium, and which oppositional poetic figures (obsequy, an affective stance that can, in Ralph Ellison's terms, "agree them to death and destruction"; obscurity, supposedly an error of expression but in fact a kind of training in epistemological difficulty; obstinacy, mere stubborness; and obliquy, Shakespeare's neologism for a speech act that is both slanderous and slantwise) can make noise in a time of political quietism. In both projects, I pursue a continuing interest in the convergence and non-convergence of continental philosophy with the activist imagination, especially of the United States.