• • Ph.D., University of Washington
  • B.A., University of California at Los Angeles

Books

• The Limits of History. Co-editor with Tom Haddox. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. 2012
• Literary Aesthetics: An Anthology, with Alan Singer (London: Basil Blackwell, 2000) Co-editor, “The Future of the Harlem Renaissance,” special issue of Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 80.4 (Summer 1998).

Representative Articles

• In Search of the Great Community: John Dewey, Barack Obama, and the Possibility of a Pragmatist Politics.” The Ginko Tree Review. (Winter 2012-Spring 2013), 1-14.
• “The Precarious Integrity of the Postsecular,” boundary 2, 2 37:3 (Fall 2010): 91-98.
• The Devil in the Details: Modernism and the Dilemmas of Democratic Pluralism,”   Southern Humanities Review (Fall 2008), 340-359.
• “The Temptations of Metaphysics: Jeffrey Stout’s Accounts of the Limits of Moral Knowledge,” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 87.3-4 (Fall/Winter 2004), 301-314 (Charles Reynolds, Guest Editor)
• “What Has Beauty Got To Do With It? Why the Aesthetic Disappears,” Southern Humanities Review 36.2 (Spring 2002): 118-126
• “Matter Less Pure: Sensibility and the Laws of Character in The Remembrance of Things Past,” American Society for Aesthetics-Pacific Division-2001 Annual Meeting Proceedings:131-135
• “’Some Infernal Alloy in His Metal’: (Auto)biographical Explanations of Anomalous Behavior,” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 83.3-4 (Fall/Winter 2000): 669-677
• “Making the Hypocrites Pay: The Politics of Virtue,” The Annals of Scholarship 13.3 (Winter 1999): 229-233
• “The Justice of Jouissance: Slavoj Zizek’s Ethics of Separation,” The Annals of Scholarship 13.1/2 (1999), 83-102
• “The Limits of Particularism in the Ethical Criticism of the Novel,” American Society of Aesthetics—Pacific Division—1999 Annual Meeting Proceedings, 17-22
• “Who Needs a Sociology of the Aesthetic? Freedom and Value in Pierre Bourdieu’s Rules of Art,” Boundary 2 25.1 (Spring 1998), 87-110
• “Dialogue and Difference: Shaftesbury and the Politics of Conversation,” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 81.1-2 (Spring/Summer 1998) 121-136
• “Pathos in Postmodernity: Beckett, Sade, and the Performance of Suffering,” Southern Humanities Review (Fall 1996): 341-49
• “The Ethics of Mansfield Park: McIntyre, Said, and Social Context,” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 78.3-4 (Fall/Winter 1995), 483-500
• “The Mechanics of Transport: Sublimity and the Imagery of Abjection in Rochester, Swift, and Burke,” in Cutting Edges: Postmodern Critical Essays on Eighteenth-Century Satire, ed. James E. Gill (University of Tennessee Press, 1995), 94-109
• “A Tyranny of Justice: The Ethics of Lyotard’s Differend,” Boundary 2, 20.1 (Spring 1993), 192-220
• “What Causal Explanation Leaves Out: Davidson’s Causal Action Theory as a Tool for Practical Judgment,” in Literary Theory After Davidson, ed. Reed Way Dasenbrock (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,1993), 232-256
• “The Ethics of Sublimity: Pathos and the Critique of Bourgeois Morality,” The Arkansas Quarterly: A Journal of Criticism (Winter 1992): 11-31
• “Out of the Veil of Ignorance: Agency and the Mirror of Disillusionment,” Southern Humanities Review (Winter 1991): 1-21
• “The Man Who Needs Hardness: Irony and Solidarity in the Aesthetics of Theodor Adorno” in Germany and German Thought in American Literature and Cultural Criticism, edited by Peter Freese (Essen: Die Blaue Eule, 1990), 470-484
• “A Child Asleep in Its Own Life: Primary Narcissism as the Dream of Identity,” Literature and Psychology 36.3 (1990), 16-31
• “Williams’ Liberating Need, ” Journal of Modern Literature 16.1 (Summer 1989), 49-59
• “Tragedy and the Ethical Sublime in Martha Nussbaum’s The Fragility of Goodness,” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 72.4 (Winter 1989), 501-518
• “Forgetting to Remember Paul de Man: Theory as Mnemonic Technique in de Man’s Resistance to Theory and Derrida’s Mémoires,” Southern Humanities Review XXII:4 (Fall 1988), 355-385
• A Selection of the Year’s Most Noteworthy Studies of William Shakespeare’s Plays and Poetry, Vol. 13 (Gale Research Inc., 1991), 19-26
• “The Indian Boy’s Dream Wherein Every Mother’s Son Rehearses His Part: Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Shakespeare Studies XX (1988), 15-32, reprinted in Shakespearean Criticism: Yearbook 1989
• “The Passion of Obliquity: Review of R.M. Berry’s Plane Geometry and Other Affairs of the Heart,” Illinois Writers Review, 4 (Winter 1985), 7-9
• “A Theoretical Death Wish: Review of Yiannis Gabriel’s Freud and Society,” Literature and Psychology, 23 (1986), 57-60
• “Derrida at Work and Play: Morality and the American Appropriation of Deconstruction,” Boundary 2, 14 (Fall 1985/Winter 1986), 237-259.