Articles

“Beyond Humanity, Beyond Race in Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden,” in Hemingway and Posthumanism. Edinburgh UP 2025.

Through an examination of Ernest Hemingway’s posthumous novel The Garden of Eden, I argue that Judith Butler’s performativity theory applies not only to gender identity but to racial identity and even human identity, which, in Hemingway’s judgment, appears fixed only in light of its repetition over time. Following this train of thought to its logical end, I argue that human supremacy is the ontological basis of not only male supremacy but of white supremacy in that both depend, ideologically, on the hierarchy between humans and those regarded as less than human—in this case, women and racial minorities, respectively. The Garden of Eden has long been recognized by critics and Hemingway scholars for its daring portrayals of gender and race. Whether those portrayals should be understood as posthuman, however, is a matter of inquiry. I have chosen to pursue this question through the philosophical lens of Giorgio Agamben rather than a different scholar of posthumanism because, as I argued in Hemingway and Agamben, the philosopher’s work reveals tacit theological presuppositions in Hemingway’s fiction. Additionally, both authors name Hieronymus Bosch’s well-known triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights, as their inspiration, Hemingway in The Garden of Eden, Agamben in his 2020 publication The Kingdom and the Garden. Their shared interest in the biblical Garden of Eden provides a convenient entry point to discuss both authors’ treatment of Christian theology, mankind’s relation to the imago Dei, and the human/nonhuman hierarchy. 

“Reading ‘On the Quai at Smyrna’ and ‘A Natural History of the Dead’ in Consideration of Hemingway’s Anti-Humanism,” The Hemingway Review 42.2 (2023): 75-90.

When the second American edition of In Our Time was published by Scribner’s in 1930, “On the Quai at Smyrna,” then titled “Introduction by the Author,” replaced “Indian Camp” as the first story of the collection. Hemingway’s commentary on Spanish bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon, was published just two years later. At the end of chapter twelve—a detailed account of bull breeding reminiscent of Herman Melville’s cetology chapter in Moby Dick—Hemingway abruptly changes directions, leaving off his studied appraisal of the Spanish bullfight to satisfy the demands of a fictional reader, the Old lady, a parodic depiction of Gertrude Stein. The result is a short, stand-alone piece entitled “A Natural History of the Dead,” which would be republished one year later in Winner Take Nothing as a short story. This article proposes that readers consider “On the Quai at Smyrna” and “A Natural History of the Dead” as part of the same conceptual project, for both pieces issue a critique of humanism, with which Hemingway had become disillusioned, by blurring the distinctions between human and animal. In spite of religious and pseudo-religious narratives to the contrary, human life is not sacred, Hemingway discovers, for both human animals and nonhuman animals incur agonizing deaths that result in permanent annihilation.

“Francis Macomber, the Matador: Reading Hemingway’s ‘The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ with Death in the Afternoon” Studies in the American Short Story 3.1-2 (2022): 18-34.

This article argues that “The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” Hemingway’s 1936 short story, should be interpreted in light of Hemingway’s 1932 commentary on Spanish bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon, whose insights regarding both the faena—when the bull passes by the matador—and the moment of truth—when the matador kills the bull—help to illuminate the final hunting sequence of Hemingway’s short story. In this final sequence, Francis Macomber transforms into a matador figure who exercises the bullfighting techniques described by Hemingway in Death in the Afternoon. Reading these works together reveals Hemingway’s belief in human exceptionalism, or the pseudo-religious belief that human beings are inherently superior to animals. 

“The Failed Atheism of Jean-Paul Sartre,” The Heythrop Journal 63.1 (2022): 96-110.

This article argues that Sartre’s theological anthropology is based not only on God’s absence, as Jerome Gellman, John Gillespie, and Kate Kirkpatrick have argued, but on Sartre’s secularized theological belief that humanity bears the imago Dei, or sacred image of God. Sartre’s decisionist metaphysics—his belief that human choice is the ontological origin of morality—authorize an ethical paradigm that privileges human identity as ‘sacred,’ or as ontologically superior to the rest of nature. But this theological view of ethics is complicated by the fact that sacred human identity, in Sartre’s view, is not determined by God, who expressly does not exist, but by the moral decision maker himself, who has taken God’s place as the ontological origin of moral value. Morality is thus determined by the lawmaker who, after supplanting God as divine creator of mankind, carves out the relative boundaries of sacred human identity. The imago Dei, in Sartre’s secularized theological account, is in effect the image of God without God, the exceptional status afforded to human identity even after the divine creator of mankind has been removed from the picture.

“Gender Pronoun Use in the University Classroom: A Posthumanist Perspective.” Transformation in Higher Education 5 (2020)

Co-authored by Andrew Welch, this article explores the political impact of using gender neutral pronouns in the university classroom. The article discusses how the gender neutral pronoun ‘they’ denaturalizes essentialist models of gender identity, and follows ‘they’ toward a consideration of the gender neutral pronoun ‘it.’ ‘It’ advances – at the same time that it problematizes – the political project of non-binary communities by challenging an anthropocentric model of equal rights. In its place is offered a “negative egalitarianism” that eliminates the human/nonhuman hierarchy by lowering humans to the same status afforded to the nonhuman, including animals, vegetation, micro-organisms, and objects. The article concludes that ‘it’ might help to overcome the violent legacy of humanism by building a more inclusive classroom environment for gender-nonconforming students.

“Bibliographical Approaches to D.H. Lawrence’s ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’: Archive Fever for the Text-In-Process.” Textual Cultures 13.2 (2020)

This article engages with the theoretical concerns of contemporary textual criticism depicted by Jerome McGann, Peter Shillingsburg, and Paul Eggert through a case study of text-critical approaches to D.H. Lawrence’s short story, “Odour of Chrysanthemums.” It argues that text-critical readings of Lawrence’s tale lend themselves to a Derridean critique of archive fever, where the rigorous archivization of the historical text-document can be read as an unsuccessful attempt to unearth the ontological origins of the text-in-process, a univocal chronology of the author’s intentions over time. A Derridean critique of archive fever in Lawrence criticism poses productive questions to the distinctions contemporary textual criticism draws between, first, text and document, and, second, ideal text and the text-in-process. The article shows that a bibliographical study of the text-in-process—the close tracking of documentary changes over time—does not actually distance textual critics from the false but alluring notion that the document and the author’s intentions exist in a single state. The text-document exists in multiple states over the span of its composition history, but the textual critic performs such a rigorous mapping of its documentary changes that the text-document, in its very multiplicity, takes on a singular form as historical or bibliographical narrative, where singularity is based not on the author’s original or final intentions but on a univocal mapping of the author’s intentions over time.

“‘Her voice is full of money’: Mechanical Reproduction and a Metaphysics of Substance in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.” English Studies 99.8 (2018): 890-903

Much has been written on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, but critics have largely ignored how 1920s consumer culture contributes to the novel’s philosophical themes. Viewing the novel through Marxist literary critic Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” this article argues that 1920s consumer society—and the popularization of mechanically reproduced consumer goods—deconstructs the metaphysical underpinnings of upperclass privilege modeled by Tom and Daisy Buchanan. Gatsby strives to imitate an aristocratic identity but is eventually found out by Tom, who exposes Gatsby’s social performance as an inauthentic forgery. But, as Benjamin argues, mechanical reproduction results in a diminished aura, the originary ontology that authorizes a metaphysics of substance and, with it, a social order governed by the logic of authenticity. So, while the American aristocracy is successful in its condemnation of Gatsby’s inauthentic social performance, the novel deconstructs a metaphysics of substance and thereby critiques the ontological authority of the ruling class. Gatsby may have been born into the working class but his upper-class simulation, like all simulations, is no more or less authentic than those of the American aristocracy

“Existential Choice as Repressed Theism: Jean-Paul Sartre and Giorgio Agamben in Conversation.” Religions 9.4 (2018)

This article brings Sartre’s notion of existential authenticity, or sovereign decisionism, into conversation with the work of contemporary political philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who argues that sovereign decisionism is the repressed theological foundation of authoritarian governments. As such, the article seeks to accomplish two goals. The first is to show that Sartre’s depiction of sovereign decisionism directly parallels how modern democratic governments conduct themselves during a state of emergency. The second is to show that Sartre’s notion of existential authenticity models, what Agamben calls, secularized theism. Through an ontotheological critique of Sartre’s professed atheism, the article concludes that an existential belief in sovereign decision represses, rather than profanes, the divine origins of authoritarian law. I frame the argument with a reading of Sartre’s 1943 play The Flies, which models the repressed theological underpinnings of Sartre’s theory.

“‘What has Christ got to do with it?’: Adaptation Theory, Søren Kierkegaard, and Waiting for God(ot).” Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance 11.1 (2018)

Scholarship in the field of adaptation theory is divided over the issue of authorial intent. Comparing Søren Kierkegaard’s reading of Genesis 22 to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, this article argues that the structural and thematic similarities that mark the two stories as distinctive position Waiting for Godot as a parodic retelling of Genesis 22. The audience’s adaptive experience is therefore given priority over the announced intentions of Beckett, who never wanted for the play to be read as an adaptation and even warned against readings that present Godot as an analogue for God. This article offers a reader-response view of adaptation theory, arguing that certain works will be read as adaptations under the right interpretive conditions, regardless of their authors’ intentions. What matters is the adaptive experience, the interpreter’s recognition that plot similarities and differences creatively re-envision the original work of art.

“Ecocriticism and Moral Responsibility: The Question of Agency in Karen Barad’s Performativity Theory.” JMMLA 49.1 (2016)

In their 2014 book, Material Ecocriticism, Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann argue that as ecocriticism reformulates under the dual influence of posthumanist and new materialist paradigms it must account for “the complex interrelations between discourse and matter . . . to shed light on the way bodily natures and discursive forces express their interaction whether in representations or in their concrete reality.” While earlier forms of ecocriticism privileged the ontological primacy of the natural world, material ecocriticism seeks to overcome the longstanding theoretical divisions between nature and culture, matter and discourse, human and non-human agencies that, in decades past, structured and informed our dominant academic paradigms. Material ecocriticism is indebted to the work of quantum physicist and feminist theorist, Karen Barad, whose theory of agential realism is central to new materialist and posthumanist theories of agency. According to Barad, physical matter and social reality are co-constituting, interdependent phenomena. Nature’s ecological systems and humanity’s anthropocentric constructions of cultural reality cannot be viewed separately, she asserts, because both play an agentic role in the other’s phenomenal, ongoing becoming. Barad bases her theory of agential realism in large part on Judith Butler’s performativity theory, but, in the process of re-articulating Butler’s performativity theory under a quantum mechanical framework, Barad inherits Butler’s theoretical missteps. This article explores the implications of those missteps as they pertain to questions of free will and moral responsibility.

“Dr. King and the Image of God: A Theology of Voting Rights in Ava DuVernay’s Selma.” Journal of Religion and Film 20.2 (2016)

This article argues that Ava DuVernay’s 2014 film Selma develops a theology of voting rights by staging a conflict between President Lyndon B. Johnson and political activist Martin Luther King, Jr. Though many reviewers fault the film for its besmirching portrayal of LBJ, DuVernay’s (mis)representations of Johnson establish a link between the Voting Rights Act of 1964 and King’s theological anthropology. In King’s view, mankind was created in the image of God, endowed with free will and the capacity to reason. The denial of Black voting rights, while literally depriving African Americans of their political agency, also represented the disavowal of God’s image, for King. DuVernay shows how King defers moral responsibility from himself to Johnson, who, equipped with the image of God, can make the rational free choice to pass legislation on Black voting rights and thereby restore Black political agency and, with it, the image of God.

“Unwriting the Body: Sexuality and Nature in Lars von Trier’s Nymph()maniac and Toni Morrison’s Sula.” CineAction 96 (2015)

This article explores how representations of the body in Lars von Trier’s Nymph()maniac and Toni Morrison’s Sula correspond with, confront, and disrupt discursive power structures. Ironically, what motivates the deconstruction and destabilization of traditional gender hierarchies is the belief that phallocentric power is unjust, a socially constructed concept that is itself equally subject to deconstruction. In this light, one can see how the political project of feminist film criticism, as well as the premises founding von Trier’s misogynist reputation are based on ambivalent claims: the constructedness and instability of gender hierarchies should be exposed in order to restore women’s essential, a priori rights. What von Trier’s Nymph()maniac and Morrison’s Sula propose in place of these contradictory claims are female protagonists who anchor their identities in nature and, specifically, their embodied, sensory experiences, proudly embracing their roles as social pariah while rejecting normative society’s devaluation of their bodies. An indefatigable provocateur, von Trier entertains an essentialist model of gender identity in anticipation of feminist critiques, but Nymph()maniac fails to yield evidence of von Trier’s alleged misogyny, featuring a female protagonist who, like Morrison’s Sula, embraces her essential, biological qualities in order to establish her worth. Joe takes pride in her nymphomania because it brings her pleasure—a truth she can confidently level against discursive, phallocentric hegemony.