My research explores how writers understand their present by telling stories about the past. In more specific terms, I deploy formal poetic analysis alongside postcolonial and nation theory to reassess the political, philosophical, and theological complexities of modernism’s relationship to the past.
I am currently at work on two main projects:
- My first book, titled Chosen Homelands: Nostalgia and National Identity in the British and Irish Modernist Epic, explores how modernist writers (James Joyce, Mina Loy, T. S. Eliot, Lynette Roberts, David Jones, and Derek Walcott) use nostalgia to redefine their national identities. My central claim is that nostalgia functions as a flexible mode of identity formation, rather than just a sentimental or reactionary attitude towards the past. I’m currently putting finishing touches on the manuscript and pursuing publication. I am also developing a short paper exploring how nostalgia can contribute to political advocacy for environmental conservation.
- My second book, currently in its earliest stages, examines the ethics and poetics of global modernism’s depictions of violence. Representing violence in art is always a fraught proposition. There are dangers to both overly graphic and overly sanitized literary treatments of trauma and brutality. I am particularly interested in how modernist poets use allusion and parallelism to represent these experiences of violence. What do such literary devices conceal, and what sort of illumination might they facilitate?
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Sarah E. Coogan 